by Robert Lacey
’King Richard IV’ — by this account, Henry’s brother-in-law — would later confess that he was, in fact, one Pierquin Wesbecque (Perkin Warbeck) from Tournai in the Netherlands, the son of a boatman. But it suited all manner of people to believe he was indeed the nephew of Richard III, and he did the rounds of Henry’s enemies and neighbours, being treated to banquets and hunting excursions and given money to buy troops. King James IV of Scotland even found him an attractive wife, his own cousin Lady Katherine Gordon.
This pretender’s six-year odyssey came to grief in the autumn of 1497, after a failed attempt to raise the West Country against Henry. Captured at Beaulieu in Hampshire, he finally admitted his humble origins. But having heard his confession, Henry again took a conciliatory line, inviting Warbeck and his charming Scottish wife to join his court. It was as if the King was enjoying the fairytale himself. Even when Warbeck tried to escape the following summer, Henry was content merely to put him in the stocks and have him repeat his confession. It was not until Warbeck tried to escape yet again that the King lost patience. On 23 November 1499 the false claimant was hanged, and a few days later the true claimant, the hapless Earl of Warwick, was beheaded on Tower Hill.
Henry gave Warbeck’s noble widow a pension and made her lady-in-waiting to the Queen. Lady Katherine Gordon became quite a figure at the Tudor court, marrying no fewer than three more husbands and surviving until 1537. But the King’s sharp dose of reality in 1499 had the desired effect — no more pretenders.
FISH N’ SHIPS
1497
In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue
And found this land, land of the Free, beloved by you, beloved by me.
FOURTEEN NINETY-TWO IS THE FAMOUS DATE when Christopher Columbus is credited by history with the‘discovery’ of America. But modern archaeologists have shown that the Vikings must have crossed the Atlantic long before him. The remains of Viking homes, cooking pits and metal ornaments on the island of Newfoundland have been dated to around the year 1000, And there is every reason to believe that Columbus was also preceded to the Americas by several shiploads of weather-beaten Englishmen.
The men had set sail from Bristol, heading out from the prosperous port on the River Avon in the west of England, first towards Ireland, then further westwards into the Atlantic. They were fishermen, searching for cod that they could salt and trade for wine, and they brought back tales of remote islands that they called‘The Isle of the Seven Cities’ and‘The Isle of Brasil’. Late in the 1490s an English merchant called John Day reported their discoveries to the‘Grand Admiral’ of Spain — the Almirante Major — who may have been Columbus himself. In a letter that was misfiled for centuries in the National Archives at Simancas, Day pointed out that the New World across the Atlantic had, in fact, already been‘found and discovered in other times by the men of Bristol… as your Lordship knows’.
The problem with this English claim to transatlantic discovery is that these West Country fishermen had kept their find to themselves, as cagey fishermen tend to do. Harbour records make clear that in the 1480s, if not earlier, ships from Bristol had located the fabulously fecund Grand Banks fishing grounds that lie off New England and Newfoundland. But they did not wish to attract competitors or poachers. Their only interest in terra firma of any sort was as a landmark to guide them to the fishing waters. So Christopher Columbus has retained the glory for 1492 — and in any case,‘discovery’ now seems the wrong word for landing on a continent that was already occupied by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of indigenous American Indians.
When a contingent of Bristolians did finally set foot in America in a properly documented fashion, they did so under royal patronage. Around 1494 an Italian navigator, Zuan Caboto, arrived at the court of King Henry VII. Like Columbus, Caboto came from Genoa and he was a skilled propagandist for the exploding world of discovery. Brandishing charts and an impressive globe, he persuaded Henry to grant him a charter to‘seeke out, discover and finde what soever isles, countries, regions or provinces of heathens and infidels… which before this time have been unknown to all Christians’.
The prudent king was not about to invest any of his own money in the project. On the contrary, royal approval carried a price tag — 20 per cent of the profits. But Zuan, now John Cabot, was granted permanent tax exemption on whatever he might bring back from the New World for himself. So he went down to Bristol in search of investors. There he was able to fit out a small wooden sailing ship, the Matthew, with a crew of eighteen, most of them’hearty Bristol sailors’.
It might seem surprising that the clannish West-Countrymen should team up with an Italian, an outsider, but there was a fraternity among those who risked their lives on the mysterious western ocean. Cabot was skilled in the latest navigational techniques using the stars, and he needed a crew who would not lose their nerve when out of sight of land for four weeks or more.
In the event, the journey took five. On 24 June 1497, thirty-five days after leaving England, the Matthew sighted land and dropped anchor somewhere off the coast of modern Newfoundland, Labrador or Nova Scotia. Cautiously, Cabot and his landing party rowed ashore, where they found the remains of a fire, some snares set for game, a needle for making nets and a trail that headed inland. Obviously, there were humans around; but Cabot was not keen to meet them.’Since he was with just a few people,’John Day later explained in his letter to the Spanish Grand Admiral,‘he did not dare advance inland beyond the shooting distance of a crossbow.’
The landing party planted four banners: the arms of St George, on behalf of King Henry VII; a papal banner on behalf of the Pope; the flag of Venice, since Cabot had taken Venetian citizenship; and a cross intended for the local’heathens and infidels’. Then the English mariners set off down the coast in pursuit of their great passion — the waters were‘swarming with fish’, Cabot later boasted to the Milanese Ambassador, and there was no need of a net to catch them: they could just lean over the ship’s rail and‘let down baskets with a stone’.
Heading for home around the middle of July, captain and crew used the same method that had got them there — the so-called‘dead reckoning’. This involved fixing on one particular angle to the stars and preserving that angle as they sailed, effectively staying on one line of latitude as they moved around the curve of the globe. Contrary to received wisdom, fifteenth-century sailors did not believe the world was flat. Indeed, its roundness was the basis of their adventurous navigation techniques.
By 23 August, Cabot was back in London, reporting on his finds to the King who, never careless with his money, doled out an immediate ten pounds — about four times the average annual wage at the time. Henry also granted the mariner an annual pension of twenty pounds for life, to be paid by the port of Bristol out of its customs receipts. But John Cabot did not live to claim it. The next year he set out on another expedition westwards where, as the Tudor historian Polydore Vergil heartlessly put it, the‘newe founde lande’ he discovered was‘nowhere but on the very bottom of the ocean. Cabot and his ship vanished without trace.
But his death did not discourage other adventurers. In 1501 Henry VII commissioned six more Bristolians to head westwards, and they returned with Arctic hunting falcons — perhaps the King gave them to Lambert Simnel to train — along with a few of the native inhabitants that Cabot had been careful to avoid encountering four years earlier:‘They were clothed in beasts’ skins and ate raw flesh,’ recorded one awestruck chronicler,‘and spake such speech that no man could understand them… In their demeanour [they were] like… brute beasts.’
Falcons, fish and Eskimos — as the Inuit people came to be called at the end of the sixteenth century — were interesting enough, but they bore no comparison to the gold, jewels and, above all, silver that Spain would soon be carrying home in heaving galleon-loads from the southerly lands discovered by Columbus. It would be more than seventy years before England made a determined effort to settle the northern parts o
f the continent that, after 1507, would be described on the maps as‘America’.
But the Eskimos settled in nicely, thank you. They evidently found themselves a tailor, for just two years after they had first appeared at Henry’s court in their animal skins, England’s first New World immigrants were spotted by a chronicler strolling around the Palace of Westminster,‘apparelled after the manner of Englishmen’. They were no longer‘brute beasts’, he admitted —‘I could not discern [them] from Englishmen.’
FORK IN, FORK OUT
1500
FOR MORE THAN HALF HIS REIGN, HENRY VII’s chief minister was Cardinal John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and one of the great church statesmen who shaped England’s story during the Middle Ages. Often of lowly birth, these clever individuals rose through the meritocratic system of ecclesiastical education to make their names — in Morton’s case, via the challenging task of national fund-raising.
When collecting money for the King, Morton’s commissioners are said to have confronted their targets with a truly undodgeable means test. If a likely customer appeared prosperous, he obviously had surplus funds to contribute to the Kings coffers. If, on the other hand, he lived modestly, he must have been stashing his wealth away. Either way the victim was compelled to pay — impaled, as it were, upon one or other of the twin prongs of a pitchfork.
Like many of history’s chestnuts, the facts behind what came to be known as‘Morton’s Fork’ are not quite as neat as the story. It was more than 130 years later that the statesman-philosopher Francis Bacon coined the phrase, and the documents of the time make clear that Morton did not wield the pitchfork personally. But the cardinal certainly did work hard to satisfy the appetite of a money-hungry monarch. As well as helping Henry to tighten up parliamentary taxation, he presided over the collection of‘benevolences’ —‘voluntary’ wealth taxes that invited subjects to show their goodwill towards the King. Not surprisingly, these forced loans soon became known as‘malevolences’, and Henry himself developed a reputation as a miser.‘In his later days,’ wrote the normally loyal Polydore Vergil,‘all [his] virtues were obscured by avarice.’
Henry VII’s account ledgers would seem to bear this out. At the foot of page after page are the royal initials, scratched by the careful bookkeeper monarch as he ran his finger down the columns. But Henry could spend lavishly when he wanted to, particularly when it came to making his kingship visibly magnificent. In November 1501 he spent £14,000 (over £8 million today) on jewels alone for the wedding in St Paul’s Cathedral of his eldest son Arthur to Katherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Ten days of tournaments were staged at Westminster and the feasting went on night after night beneath the hammer beam roof of the Great Hall, the walls hung with the costliest cloth of Arras.
Two years later Henry splashed out again when he sent his daughter Margaret north to marry King James IV of Scotland, with an escort of two thousand horsemen, a train of magnificently clad noblemen and £16,000 (another £9 million or so) in jewels. Henry VII’s marriage-broking proved portentous. It was Margaret’s marriage that would one day bring the Stuart dynasty to England, while Katherine of Aragon, following the death of Arthur in 1502, would be passed on as wife to his younger brother Henry, with equally historic consequences.
Henry VII had done well by England when he died, aged fifty-two, in April 1509. You can see his death mask in Westminster Abbey, his face lean and intelligent, his eyes sharp and his mouth shut, concealing the teeth which, according to contemporary description, were‘few, poor and black-stained’. He lies in splendour in the magnificent chapel that he built at the south end of the abbey — another notable item of dynastic extravagance. Beside him lies his wife Elizabeth of York, and not far away, his mother Lady Margaret Beaufort, who had schemed so hard and faithfully to bring her Tudor son to power.
The soaring stone pillars of the chapel are decorated with the Beaufort portcullis and with the double rose that would become the symbol of the Tudors, giving graphic shape to the healing, but oversimplified, myth that the warring flowers had been melded into a flourishing new hybrid. One of the chapel’s stained-glass windows shows a crown wreathed in a thorn bush, and later legend relates how Henry actually plucked his crown from such a bush at Bosworth. In fact, contemporary accounts of the battle made no mention of bushes — they describe the crown as simply being picked up off the ground. But it is fair enough to think of Henry as the King who redeemed England from a thorny situation.
KING HENRY VIII’S GREAT MATTER’
1509-33
AFTER THE PENNY-PINCHING WAYS OF Henry VII, the profligate glamour of his red-blooded, redheaded son, the new King Henry VIII, exploded over England like a sunburst. Just seventeen years old, the athletic young monarch was the nation’s sporting hero.
’It is the prettiest thing in the world to see him play,’ purred an admirer of Henry’s exertions at tennis,‘his fair skin glowing through a shirt of the finest texture.’ When the young King, tall and energetic, joined the royal bowmen for target practice, his arrow‘cleft the mark in the middle and surpassed them all’. He was a superlative horseman, a champion in the jousts, an all-round wrestler — and when the music started, he could pluck a mean string on the lute. Recent research has revealed that Henry may even have played football, a game usually considered too rough and common for the well born. In February 2004 a fresh look at the inventory of his Great Wardrobe discovered that alongside forty-five pairs of velvet shoes the King kept a pair of purpose-made football boots.
The other side of bluff King Hal was evident within three days of his accession. With the vicious eye for a scapegoat that was to characterise his ruling style, the King authorised the show trials of Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, two of his father’s most effective and unpopular money-raisers. The pair had done nothing worse than carry out royal orders and line their own pockets. But Henry had both men executed — then promptly embarked on a spending spree with his father’s carefully hoarded treasure. He had an insatiable capacity for enjoying himself. Masques, mummeries, jousts, pageants — the festivities went on for days when Henry was crowned in June 1509 alongside his fetching and prestigious new Spanish wife Katherine of Aragon.
Four years older than Henry, Katherine was embarking on her second marriage. Having married Henry’s brother Arthur in November 1501, she had found herself widowed before that winter was out. Young Henry had stepped forward to take Arthur’s place both as Prince of Wales and as Katherine’s betrothed, and when he came to the throne he made their marriage his first order of personal business. The couple exchanged vows and rings in a private ceremony at Greenwich on II June 1509, and set about the happy process of procreation. When, after one miscarriage, a son was born on New Years Day 1511, Henry’s joy knew no bounds. As bonfires were lit and salutes cannonaded from the Tower, the proud father staged a vast tournament, mingling with the crowds and delightedly allowing them to tear off as souvenirs the splendid gold letters‘H’ and‘K’ that adorned his clothes.
But the baby boy, who had been christened Henry, died within two months, and disappointment would prove the pattern of Katherine’s childbearing. One daughter, Mary, born in 1516, was the only healthy survivor of a succession of ill-fated pregnancies, births and stillbirths, and after ten years of marriage without a male heir, Henry came to ponder on the reasons for God’s displeasure.
He thought he found his answer in the Bible.‘Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother’s wife,’ read chapter 18 of the Old Testament Book of Leviticus — and two chapters later, the consequences were set out clearly: If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing… they shall be childless.’ This apparently firm prohibition had been overruled at the time of Henry and Katherine’s betrothal in 1504 by special licence from the Pope, who based his action on the contradictory instruction in the Book of Deuteronomy that it was a man’s duty to take his brother’s widow‘and raise up seed for his brother’. Katherine, for
her part, firmly maintained that she was free to marry Henry because her five-month marriage to the fifteen-year-old Arthur had never been consummated.
But as Katherine remained childless through the 1520s, her discontented husband started to lend a ready ear to those who suggested that his wife could easily have been lying, ’Bring me a cup of ale,’ brother Arthur was said to have cried out contentedly on the first morning of his married life,‘I have been this night in the midst of Spain!’
To Henry the solution seemed simple. Since a pope had fixed his improper, heirless marriage to Katherine, a pope should now unfix it, freeing the English King to take the fertile young wife his dynastic duty required — and by the spring of 1527 the thirty-six-year-old Henry knew exactly who that wife should be. He had fallen in love with Anne Boleyn, a self-assured beauty ten years or so his junior, notable for a pair of mesmeric dark eyes and a steely sense of purpose.
But as Henry set his mind to making a new marriage, events in Italy made it highly unlikely that the Pope would give him any help. In May that year Rome was captured and sacked by the troops of Charles V, the powerful Habsburg ruler who was also Katherine’s nephew. Charles controlled Spain, the Netherlands, much of Germany and Italy — and now the Pope. There was no way he would allow his aunt to be humiliatingly cast aside by the King of England.
Until now Henry had been content to leave the handling of his divorce to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the talented church statesman who ran the country for him, as Cardinal Morton had taken care of business for his father. But the normally competent cardinal was left helpless after the shift of power in Rome — and he had made the mistake of offending the now powerful Anne Boleyn. He called her the‘night crow’. After fourteen years of effectively running England, Wolsey was disgraced. Charged with treason, he died from the shock. Henry took over Hampton Court, the magnificent palace the portly cardinal had built for himself down the Thames from Richmond — and started lending an ear to advisers who were considerably more Popo-sceptic.