Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  The other members of the Holy League were not to be put off so easily. Together with a stream of other European diplomats beating a petitioning path to the English king’s door were Sforza’s secretary, Raimondo da Soncino, and the Venetian envoy Andrea Trevisano.2 They had other business, too. As one of England’s biggest trading partners, Venice sent galleys packed with wines, spices, silks and other commodities, carrying away English wool and cloth for processing and selling in its vast textile industry in return. It was keen to cement economic and political relations with this English king who, it was rumoured, was enormously rich. He was also, they had heard, in trouble. As all Europe knew, Henry had had his problems. In recent years, his reign had been menaced by a pretender to the throne, a ghost of the English civil wars, who was still at large.

  On 22 July, Soncino and Trevisano reached the Flemish city of Bruges. There, amid its canals, markets and counting-houses, they stopped and waited.3

  The onward journey looked precarious. Their road west to the English enclave of Calais lay through the militarized borderlands of Flanders, over which France and Burgundy had struggled for decades. As it periodically tended to be, the road was closed and reports flooded in of roaming gangs of Frenchmen, plundering and looting.

  The ambassadors had also been receiving regular updates from England, dispatches sent via the letter-bags couriered from the London branches of Italian merchant-banks back to their continental headquarters. In these dispatches, rumour and counter-rumour mingled. That June, there had been an uprising against Henry VII. Twenty thousand men had marched the length of the country – from the north, perhaps, or the far southwest – on London, demanding the surrender of the king and his close counsellors, and the king had been beaten and had fled. Then again, a great battle had been fought outside the city, and the king had won. Meanwhile, there was war in the north. The king of Scotland had invaded England – or perhaps it was Henry doing the invading, his armies advancing in the other direction. Throughout the dispatches, one name was mentioned over and over again: that of Richard duke of York, the ‘White Rose’ who, many claimed, was the younger of the two princes in the Tower, the sons of the Yorkist king Edward IV, otherwise missing, presumed dead. ‘Some say’, one dispatch hedged, that the duke of York was in England, ‘but no one knew for sure’. One thing alone was certain, it continued. Catastrophe would soon befall England.4

  By early August Soncino and Trevisano had made it to Calais, accompanied by a detachment of English soldiers. There they waited for the unseasonal storms to abate and for the commander of Calais to check the coast was clear of pirates, before making the short journey across the English Channel. At Dover, a royal reception awaited them: progressing through Kent, they entered London accompanied by two senior officials sent by King Henry himself, and a troop of two hundred horsemen. Days later, summoned by the king, they journeyed to Oxford, where they overnighted in the students’ colleges; then, the following morning, they made the short journey to the royal manor of Woodstock, where the king’s household was in residence for the summer.5

  Approaching the house across rolling parkland well stocked with game, the ambassadors were escorted through gatehouses freshly painted with red roses, portcullises, greyhounds and rougedragons, the heraldic devices of Henry VII’s dynasty. Dismounting, they were led deep into the house, through a succession of galleries and richly decorated apartments, to a ‘small chamber’. At the far end of this room, hung with exquisite tapestry, were a cluster of advisers in their robes of estate – silks and satins of crimson and purple, trimmed with fur and ermine – among them leading members of the nobility, including six bishops, ‘lords spiritual’. In their midst stood the king.

  What the ambassadors noted first was his stillness, standing, fingertips resting lightly on the gilt chair beside him. As they approached, bowing and scraping, the details came into focus. Spare, high-cheekboned, with dark hair faintly greying around the temples, Henry VII was dressed in a long violet, gold-lined cloak and, around his neck, a collar comprising four rows of ‘great pearls’ and many other jewels. On his head he wore a black felt cap studded with a pear-shaped pearl which, said Soncino fascinatedly, ‘seemed to me something most rich’. As the ambassadors delivered their diplomatic orations, carefully turned in the most fashionable Ciceronian Latin, the king’s eyes, small, blue and penetrating, remained fixed on them.6

  Only when they had finished did Henry stir. Turning aside to a small group of counsellors, he conferred with them intently. A man then stepped forward to give a Latin speech in reply: the king’s wizened éminence grise, instantly recognizable in his scarlet robes – the chancellor and archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal John Morton. Also by the king’s side was Prince Arthur, his first-born son and heir. Soncino studied him keenly: this was the boy in whom the future of the English dynasty lay and who was due to marry Catherine, daughter of the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella – a sweetener, they hoped, which would induce Henry to ally with them in war against France. The betrothal ceremony, the heart of a new Anglo-Spanish treaty, had been performed only the previous month. With Catherine, aged twelve, still in Spain, the corpulent Spanish ambassador Rodrigo de Puebla had stood in for her. Prince Arthur himself was a year younger but, thought Soncino, tall for his age and of ‘singular beauty and grace’. While his father spoke little, the prince was eloquent, ‘very ready’ in speaking Latin in front of the assembled dignitaries – ‘a distinguished son-in-law’ for the Catholic monarchs, Soncino opined.7

  Following the exchange of orations and diplomatic compliments, the ambassadors kissed the hands of Henry and the prince. After dining in state – with ‘four lords’, said Trevisano, impressed – they were led further into the house, to a smaller, more private room for a confidential chat with the king, servants hovering discreetly in the background. The king talked with deliberation in clear, fluent French, fully in control. As the conversation progressed, the ambassadors, who had come to brief him on Italian affairs, were astonished. He seemed to know all the news even before they had told him: indeed, Soncino reported to his master Sforza that Henry spoke about him as if with the knowledge of an old, familiar friend – except that the two had never met. The ambassadors concurred that the king was wise, ‘gracious’ and ‘grave’ with a ‘wonderful presence’, everything a king should be. ‘He evidently has’, Soncino concluded, ‘a most quiet spirit.’

  Before their departure, the ambassadors had time to pay their respects to the queen, Elizabeth. They found her in a small hall, surrounded by ladies and gentlewomen, dressed in cloth-of-gold that offset her mass of strawberry-blonde hair – ‘a handsome woman’, Trevisano remarked. At her side were the king’s mother Lady Margaret Beaufort, a diminutive, sharp-eyed presence, and a six-year-old boy. That Henry and Elizabeth’s second son merited barely a footnote in the ambassadors’ dispatches was hardly surprising. After all, they could hardly have foreseen the events that would eventually lead him to the English throne.

  The Italians were whisked away back to Oxford, where they were ‘lavishly entertained’ at the king’s personal command, and then to London, to await the court’s return later that autumn. The whole visit had gone smoothly, and the ambassadors had been flattered, charmed and impressed. The only sign that anything was untoward was the uncharacteristic brevity of their visit to Woodstock.

  In fact, the rumours heard by the ambassadors had been true. Fourteen ninety-seven was proving a terrible year for Henry VII. Two months before, thousands of Cornishmen, in protest against swingeing taxation and corrupt officialdom, had swarmed through southern England and had almost reached London’s gates, before being defeated at Blackheath. Now, Henry was preparing for what he hoped would be the endgame to another, far more protracted episode. Massing in the grounds at Woodstock, out of sight of the ambassadors’ diplomatic visit, were thousands of troops, men and materiel. Throughout his summer hunting and hawking, Henry had been waiting for this spectre to make his rumoured appearance, and indeed,
a week after the ambassadors had returned to London, news arrived from the far southwest. A ship bearing the youth who claimed to be Richard duke of York had landed in Cornwall, and he was now marching towards Henry to claim his throne. It was twelve years, almost to the day, since Henry had won his kingdom, and he had barely had a moment’s peace.8

  At Westminster in autumn 1485, the new regime was moving in. An army of craftsmen set about carving and painting its badges and arms on walls and roofs, moulding them on ceilings and glazing scutcheons in windows. In London, Lady Margaret renovated the sprawling Thamesside house of Coldharbour, which her son had presented to her. In it, she installed the eighteen-year-old Elizabeth of York, the daughter of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, whose impending marriage to Henry lay at the heart of England’s new political settlement. As Henry courted his future wife – chaperoned by her future mother-in-law – he set about creating his government.9

  Henry was determined to do things by the book. He would follow rigidly the ‘due course and order of his laws’, which would allow him to impose his authority swiftly and decisively, to snuff out potential trouble before it could snowball into civil conflict; and also to define and gather the ‘rights and revenues’ due him, in order to avoid the disaster of having to levy taxes in peacetime. He would reach for the symbols of his royal authority, from proclamations, statutes and newly minted coinage, to the pope’s sanction and blessing of his reign, and the papal anathemas that rained down on his enemies. And he would maintain a magnificent household.

  The royal household was the regime in microcosm, its beating heart. Below stairs it functioned unseen, a well-oiled machine. Above stairs, awe-inspiring in its spectacular, minutely ordered opulence, was its public face: the hall, and the chamber, with its procession of lobbies, antechambers, closets and galleries. The members of the household were the king’s men, their loyalties to him overriding any knotty affinities to noblemen. That, at least, was the theory. During Henry VI’s disastrous reign, people had seen in his dysfunctional, spendthrift, faction-riven household all that was rotten about his rule. But the Yorkists had put their house in order and Henry was determined to do the same, while adding some touches of his own. One of his first acts was to create a new French-style security force, three hundred strong: the yeomen of the guard.

  At the core of his government, Henry installed his small band of loyalists, those who had proved themselves in exile, from lawyer-clergymen like the experienced Morton and the narrow-eyed Richard Fox – a visiting scholar at the University of Paris when he met Henry, who instantly saw something in him – to the veteran Lancastrian military commander John de Vere, earl of Oxford. But Henry could not rely solely on partisan political loyalties: that way disaster lay, as Richard III’s rule had shown. Henry’s ‘new foundation’ had to accommodate everybody: his Stanley relations, whose last-minute arrival at Bosworth had been crucial; those of Richard’s men prepared to accept pardons; and the Woodville Yorkists. These last presented a particular problem for Henry. As their support for him rested on their loyalties to his wife-to-be – who, as Edward IV’s daughter, had her own claim to the throne – their backing contained a potential threat. If Henry’s claim depended on that of his wife, he could effectively be held to ransom. And he had no intention of letting that happen.

  That November at Westminster, Henry’s first parliament held all these strands in delicate balance. He had extended pardons to all prepared to acknowledge his rule and, at his coronation the previous month, had sworn the usual oaths to be a just king. Now, in parliament, Henry backdated his reign to the day before Bosworth. At a stroke, he had rewritten history: when the battle was fought, Henry was the king and Richard III the usurper; all those who had backed Richard were by definition traitors. If this sent a palpable tremor of unease through the commons, so too did Henry’s assertion of his own claim to the throne – in which he sidestepped the delicate issues of blood and lineage and made no mention of the right of his future wife. Woodville supporters found the whole thing overcooked. Rather than citing ‘many titles’ in support of his claim, wrote one, surely Henry could simply find whatever ‘appeared to be missing’ – rather a lot, was the implication – in the person of Elizabeth of York, whom the commons petitioned him to marry.10 Having confirmed the illegitimacy of Richard’s reign, however unconvincingly, Henry married Elizabeth the following January. Days after the wedding, ‘great enjoyment filled the queen’. She had fallen pregnant.11

  Henry, it seems, always knew the child would be a son. Invoking the mythical British king from whom both Lancaster and York had liked to trace their descent – the prophet Merlin, no less, had described King Arthur as the fruit of the union of a red king and a white queen – Henry would call his son Arthur, and he would be born in Winchester, the legendary seat of Camelot.12 In Winchester Castle, at 1 a.m. on 20 September 1486, a squally, windswept night, Elizabeth gave birth. Her son was a month premature – but he was healthy. A Te Deum was sung, bonfires were lit in the streets, and yeomen of the crown galloped hard into the provinces with printed proclamations to be read aloud and affixed to church doors up and down the country.

  The baby Arthur was the new dynasty incorporated. ‘Joyed may we be’, minstrels sang, ‘Our prince to see, and roses three’: red for Lancaster, white for York, and a new rose in which the two colours were intermingled, a rose both red and white.13

  As the dynasty took its first, uncertain steps, conspiracy had already seeded itself. The signs of instability had come soon after Henry’s arrival in London. That September, the sweating sickness, a strange and virulent disease causing ‘pain as never was suffered before’ – and brought, it was widely believed, by the new king’s army – had decimated the city’s population. Rumour and ill portents were rife. As one correspondent, writing to his master from court in the wake of Henry’s first parliament, noted anxiously, there was ‘much running among the lords, but no-one knows what it is. It is said that all is not well among them.’14 In spring 1486, news came from the heartlands of the old king’s support in the north – ‘whence all evil spreads’, noted a Woodvillite chronicler with a southerner’s mixture of contempt and fear – and of noble retinues assembling and arming. But as the caravan of the royal household progressed north, the rebels melted away in the face of overwhelming royal force. It was to be in the following year that Richard III’s loyalists found their figurehead.15

  John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln, was a Plantagenet. His mother was sister to both Edward IV and Richard III, and Richard had apparently named him his heir – and then Bosworth happened. Lincoln remained unreconciled to the new regime. Early in 1487, he fled to the Low Countries, to the Flemish town of Malines and the court of his aunt, Margaret of York, duchess of Burgundy. A focus for disaffected Ricardians, Margaret hated Henry and she detested the new political settlement. The house of York, she felt, could only be restored through a ‘male remnant’.

  While Lincoln’s own claim to the throne was reasonable, he and Margaret knew that the claim of another living Yorkist was better still. In the weeks after Bosworth, Henry’s agents had arrested another nephew of Edward IV and immured him in the Tower of London. The last surviving Plantagenet prince descended in the male line, Edward earl of Warwick was a touchstone for Yorkist affections – people still provocatively wore his badge of the bear and ragged staff – and Lincoln understood the galvanizing effect of Warwick’s presence at the head of any uprising. Warwick, however, was twelve years old, simple-minded, and inaccessible. Unable to get his hands on him, Lincoln conjured up another Warwick, grooming another young boy to impersonate him.16

  With an army of German mercenaries, Lincoln sailed to Ireland, which remained a hotbed of Yorkist support, to raise more aid. There, the boy was paraded as the earl of Warwick, newly escaped from the Tower; on 24 May, Whit Sunday, he was crowned king of England in Dublin Cathedral. The following month, Lincoln’s invasion force crossed the Irish Sea and landed on the Cumbrian coast, advancing south into
the midlands, the child at its head. As England baked under a hot sun, Henry’s disciplined, battle-hardened retinues confronted the rebels outside the Nottinghamshire village of East Stoke. Outnumbered and disordered, Lincoln’s troops were massacred and Lincoln himself killed, to Henry’s frustration. With Lincoln alive, Henry felt, he would have been able to get ‘the bottom of his danger’, the root of the conspiracy.17 The young boy, though, was found. He was no earl of Warwick, said Henry’s agents, but a fake: the son of an Oxford joiner who went by the name of Lambert Simnel. After the battle, Henry set him to work in an occupation befitting his menial status, as a spit-turner in the royal kitchens.

  The battle of Stoke marked an end, of sorts. With the death of Lincoln, a genuine Yorkist contender for the throne, and a decisive victory for Henry, it seemed to draw a line under the resistance of Richard III’s supporters. But old loyalties simmered, and the aftershocks of rebellion rippled on.

  In late 1491, a Breton merchant-ship had docked at the southern Irish port of Cork. Among the crew that spilled onto the quayside was a handsome, blond, sixteen-year-old boy dressed, rather incongruously for a ship’s hand, in rich silks. It was here, so his confession later had it, that Perkin Warbeck, son of a boatman from the Flemish city of Tournai, was stopped by a group of renegade Yorkists who had returned to southern Ireland to try to revive the plot around the earl of Warwick. They were backed by the French king Charles VIII, who was desperate for a lever to use against an increasingly aggressive Henry – just as some six years previously he had made a show of backing Henry against Richard III. But in Warbeck, who they discovered swanning through the streets of Cork in his borrowed finery, the conspirators found something else altogether. Accosting him, they flattered him and promised to make him a Yorkist prince.

  Warbeck later described how the men had tried out a number of identities on him: the earl of Warwick – Lambert Simnel, all over again – and then an illegitimate son of Richard III. Discarding both ideas, they then struck gold. They would groom him to become another kind of Yorkist: Richard duke of York, the second son of Edward IV, the younger of the princes whose disappearance into the Tower had transformed Henry’s own prospects from that of fugitive into claimant to the throne.18