by Thomas Penn
Prince Arthur’s marriage to Catherine, younger daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile – the pious, re-conquering ‘Catholic monarchs’, as the pope had entitled them – was the culmination of all Henry VII’s ambitions. First brokered back in the spring of 1489, it had survived the violent fluctuations of European dynastic politics and a convoluted dance of negotiation between Henry and Ferdinand, two equally suspicious monarchs: pulled one way by Henry’s abortive invasion of France and the tension-filled years of Warbeck’s conspiracy, and another by France’s own expansionist tendencies, which Henry’s right-hand man John Morton, archbishop of Canterbury, had described as its ‘unbridled rage for domination’ and which filled both monarchs with alarm.3 Twelve years and numerous subsequent treaties, proxy marriages and ratifications later, the day was finally at hand.
A fortnight long, the planned celebrations were of an unparalleled splendour and complexity. Following Catherine’s reception and marriage, the festivities would move west along the curve of the Thames, past the large bishops’ palaces whose gardens lined the water’s edge, and the cloistered inns of court which churned out the country’s finest legal minds, to Westminster. Finally, they would culminate at Henry VII’s new palace of Richmond, rushed to completion in time for Catherine’s arrival.
Two years in the making, the ceremonies would, so the king was determined, break new ground. Henry and his planners had delved into the archives, scouring precedents from previous royal celebrations. They cherry-picked the most dramatic features from the all-conquering triumphs of Henry V, and the glamorous tournaments of Edward IV, whose close links to that epicentre of chivalric sophistication, the ducal court of Burgundy, were an inspiration; and they cast a thoughtful and creative eye over the most spectacular European court celebrations of recent times. The result would be a supreme cultural articulation of sovereignty, spelling out a very clear message. Henry VII and his descendants, and they alone, were the rightful monarchs of England: all-powerful, a dynasty that presided over the ‘common wealth’ of the state with a benevolent and omnipotent hand.
All of which could hardly mask the fact that the wedding plans had their roots in division, discord and blood. For it had been on 19 November 1499, the same day that the earl of Warwick, bewildered, backward and harmless, had made his forced confession in front of a tribunal of Henry’s counsellors in London’s Guildhall, that the city corporation had met in the same building to start planning Catherine’s lavish civic reception.4
Over the centuries, London’s relationship with the crown had settled into an uneasy symbiosis, their interests increasingly intertwined. In return for massive corporate loans from the city, the unofficial royal bank, a perennially cash-strapped monarchy ceded to it privileges of self-government and trade protection. And as the royal household grew more unwieldy and less mobile, it settled into its houses strung out along the banks of the Thames, within easy reach of Westminster, the centre of law, government and administration, and London, its most reliable source of funds. Royal servants became part of the fabric of city life, renting and acquiring property, accumulating business interests, mingling with the mercantile elites, who were themselves familiar figures at court. Under Henry, the relationship had, more or less, continued to prosper.5
There was, though, an undertow of friction between a city that jealously guarded its own political and economic liberties and a crown which sought to control and manipulate them. Cracking down on the habitual sharp practices indulged in by the city’s merchants and financiers, Henry had made examples of prominent Londoners with a series of punitive fines, while he and his counsellors constantly played off the city guilds against each other, favouring one, then another, in a process of divide and rule. During the height of the Perkin Warbeck conspiracy, Henry’s embargo on trade with the Low Countries had wrecked London’s economy, with merchants unable to export goods to the great commercial centres of Bruges and Antwerp, a ban reinforced by sporadic harassment and intimidation by royal officials. To the consternation of the city guilds, when trade officially restarted in 1496 Henry himself chose the new governor of the English merchant adventurers in Bruges, a privilege previously reserved to the city. Conspiracy had continued to linger: merchants’ trade routes were arteries for information and espionage, and London’s citizens had been among those caught up in the Warbeck plot. Highly suspicious of the city’s independent-mindedness and covetous of its wealth, Henry was always looking for opportunities to tighten his grip.6
But in general, Henry and his counsellors were alert to London’s importance in raising funds and maintaining order, and cosy relationships developed between city leaders and members of the king’s inner circle of counsellors. London was the chief sponsor and organizer of royal triumphs and receptions, the dramatized public processions which communicated the crown’s magnificence and power to the crowds who flocked to such occasions from far-flung corners of the country and from abroad.7 Kings tended to leave the arrangements in the hands of the city. After all, it was paying. But in November 1499 Henry informed the city corporation of a change to the customary plans. The mayor was ordered to appoint an eight-person committee to communicate with ‘diverse of the king’s council’ about Catherine’s reception into London. The planning and creative input would come personally from Henry and his counsellors, down to the last detail. They would tell the city what to do, and when. London was in effect being treated as a sub-department of the royal household – and it would be required to foot a huge bill for the privilege.8
The pageants that the king and his advisers had in mind would, following usual custom, be strategically placed at prominent sites along the route to St Paul’s, constructed on multi-storey wooden stages over the crenellated stone conduits that, supplying London’s fresh water, stood solidly in its main thoroughfares. Weaving together history, myth and prophecy, a series of dramatic tableaux would depict the dynasty’s rule as inexorable, inevitable; no accident of history, nor the chance product of deaths, tenuous bloodlines and last-gasp victories, it was, rather, written in the stars. Such a royal extravaganza in England’s capital was doubly significant in light of the security operation that had, the previous summer, forced out the deep-rooted network of Yorkist recidivists from its dense warren of back streets. London, the ‘steadfast, sure chamber of England’, the country’s window to the world, had been thoroughly cleansed. So confident were the king and his counsellors that, with an eye to maximum visibility, the forthcoming wedding would be held not in the customary venue of Westminster Abbey, but in St Paul’s, one of the greatest cathedrals in Europe, and London’s largest public space and commercial centre to boot.9
To co-ordinate this vision Henry turned to a man who knew his mind better than most. Having assumed a leading role in the hard-fought negotiations over Arthur and Catherine’s wedding, Richard Fox, now in his early fifties, took control of its preparations. He drew up summaries of the duties of all those who were to participate, a close-knit circle of Henry’s leading counsellors and household officers, from the lord chamberlain Giles Daubeney to the comptroller Sir Richard Guildford, an able engineer and an aficionado of jousts and tournaments.10
The reception and wedding would highlight Henry’s chief source of political capital: his sons. In the world of dynastic politics, charismatic royal children, as one contemporary observer had once remarked of Edward IV’s ill-fated boys, ‘surpassed all else’ at court festivities.11 In Prince Arthur, the groom-to-be, and his younger brother Henry duke of York, Henry VII had two highly contrasting focal points. Taking after his father, Arthur seemed to come into his own in the more restricted spaces of court and household, where his classical education and grooming for kingship manifested themselves in a slightly distant graciousness.12 His brother, on the other hand, was proving a master of the defining public gesture, with a natural feel for the big occasion – at the age of three, after all, he had ridden through London’s crowds on horseback, behaviour that both his father and mot
her seemed to delight in. But Prince Henry’s charisma was not the only or even the main reason for the most prominent of roles assigned him at Catherine’s side. With both Warbeck and Warwick dead, his presence alongside the young Spanish princess would be a reminder to London and the world that York, and the house of Plantagenet, embodied in this young, chivalrous prince, had been successfully assimilated into the new dynasty. Prince Henry’s appetite for the limelight would play to the London crowds and help set Catherine at ease. Arthur, meanwhile, would be presented in the role to which he was becoming accustomed: Henry VII’s heir, made in his own image, regal and detached.
By the spring the preparations were well under way. On Fox’s direction the Fleet Street printer Richard Pynson produced a commemorative pamphlet of the orders for Catherine’s reception, which circulated throughout the city and the courts of Europe.13 That June, Henry’s summit meeting with the twenty-one-year-old Archduke Philip of Burgundy, the glamorous heir to the Habsburg Empire, in the English enclave of Calais, served further to ramp up expectations. Making the short journey across the Dover Straits, the English court met Philip and his posse of young knights in a glittering reception amid tight security in the church of St Peter’s outside the town – Philip would not, he insisted, set foot in the town itself – ‘richly hanged with arras’ for the occasion.14 Philip, whose family had once extended such support to Warbeck, seemed to prove rather more tractable than either his father, Maximilian, or the dowager Duchess Margaret of Burgundy. He acclaimed Henry as his ‘patron, father and protector’ and, during the course of a ‘rich banquet’, the two chatted about a possible Anglo-Habsburg marriage alliance between Prince Henry and Eleanor, Philip’s infant daughter.15
At Calais the archduke and his entourage were neatly co-opted into the unveiling of another stage in the wedding festivities: a succession of jousts, to take place at Westminster in the week following the ceremony. The tournament challenge was proclaimed resoundingly in the name of Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk. Brash, hot-tempered and ‘readily roused to anger’, Suffolk was a member of the Order of the Garter and one of the most accomplished jousters at Henry’s court. What was more, he was a full-blooded Yorkist – son of Elizabeth Plantagenet, sister to Edward IV and Richard III, and a younger brother of John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln, the man who had masterminded the abortive Lambert Simnel rebellion thirteen years previously. In mid-1499, Suffolk had left the country without royal licence, heading first to Calais and then east into the archduke’s territory, before finally being persuaded to return to England that October. Now, Henry was using the tournament challenge to tell the world – and especially Philip – that Suffolk was well and truly under his thumb.16
Sixteen at the time of his brother’s death at the battle of Stoke, Edmund de la Pole was next in line to inherit the family title of duke of Suffolk. The problem was that a chunk of the Suffolk estates had already been in Lincoln’s possession and, forfeited by his treason, they were now in the hands of the king. Title and income went hand in hand. You had to be able to maintain a standard of living appropriate to your rank – and Edmund de la Pole, as Henry pointed out to him, didn’t now have sufficient estates to support a dukedom. Henry then agreed to grant his inheritance and the lower title of earl, but on typically onerous terms: a fine of £5,000. The king, as Suffolk knew, was deliberately degrading him, and making him pay for the privilege.17
Suffolk seemed to realize what was demanded of him. He took a conspicuous role in Henry’s invasion of France, fought the Cornish rebels at Blackheath in 1497 and jousted with distinction in court tournaments. But none of it got him very far; perhaps, in part, because Henry held a low opinion of his abilities, but, increasingly, during the tension-filled 1490s, because of who he was.18
In autumn 1498, Suffolk and a group of courtiers had been involved in an argument outside Aldgate, on London’s eastern edge, which spilled over into a mass brawl in which three men were killed. Suffolk, who had already failed to turn up to one legal hearing earlier in the year on unrelated charges, was hauled before the judges of King’s Bench, the royal criminal court in Westminster Hall, and indicted for murder. On the face of it, this seemed a display of the efficiency and impartiality of royal justice but, even setting aside Suffolk’s outrage at being charged for the killing of a commoner, there were several curious things about the case. First was the involvement of one of Henry’s closest counsellors, Sir Reynold Bray, who had personally delivered the indictment against Suffolk. Then came the detailed coroner’s inquest, which made no mention of Suffolk having struck a fatal blow. And finally, courtiers of far lesser rank, favoured jousters such as Roland de Veleville and Matthew Baker, regularly got away – quite literally – with murder. Meanwhile, Henry was forcing Suffolk to beg for pardon.19
Highly sensitive to this perceived slight on his honour, Suffolk refused to do so. Instead, he left England. His timing could not have been worse. With the Warbeck endgame being played out amid reports of unrest in East Anglia, and with John de Vere, earl of Oxford, Henry’s chief man in the region, uncovering a similar plot to groom a pretender in Cambridge, Suffolk’s flight to the Habsburg-controlled Low Countries must have looked suspiciously like a re-run of Lincoln’s own plot twelve years previously.
Henry took it very seriously indeed. His response was to threaten a repeat of the economic sanctions that had so destabilized the Netherlands during the 1490s, and which Philip of Burgundy badly wanted to avoid. With Suffolk himself, Henry’s approach was delicate: he could not risk the earl’s departure turning into outright rebellion. He afforded Suffolk the honour of a diplomatic visit headed by Sir Richard Guildford, complete with an official communiqué to be shown to the recalcitrant earl. In the customary private briefing issued to Guildford, Henry instructed him to talk to the earl as it were off the record, as if ‘without the king’s knowledge’. Seeming to speak with Suffolk’s own well-being at heart, Guildford was to persuade him to see sense. Henry wanted Suffolk to return, not as his captive, but of his own free will, as Henry’s loyal subject, which would best stand with the king’s ‘great honour, both within his realm and without’. If he did so, then he could ‘in time’ regain favour and ‘enjoy that [which] he had when he departed’. If not, well, ‘he may never look to recover nor come to again’. Any further disloyalty could only bring about his ‘utter clear destruction’. Suffolk came back.20
So when, at the Calais summit meeting, Garter king-of-arms John Writhe threw down the gauntlet on Suffolk’s behalf in an impeccably turned expression of fealty to Henry VII, Philip, who had welcomed Suffolk as a fugitive the previous year, would not have missed the point. Neither would the ambassadors assembled from the courts of Europe, nor the people of Calais, a town of unpredictable allegiances. For Henry, the conventional protestations of service and loyalty to the crown took on a particularly satisfying resonance. Suffolk, proclaimed Writhe, ‘humbly begged’ Henry to let him and a select team of companions joust in honour of the king and the forthcoming marriage ‘and’, he stressed, ‘for no other cause or intention’.21 For good measure, copies of Suffolk’s challenge, in French, were given to Archduke Philip, to the French herald for Charles VIII of France, and dispatched to James IV of Scotland, another erstwhile sponsor of Warbeck; in addition, the Spanish ambassador sent a copy to Ferdinand and Isabella. Henry had, it seemed, successfully corralled Suffolk into his dynastic plans.
Underneath the pomp and ceremony of the English court’s progress to Calais there had been a pervasive sense of panic. An epidemic of plague was sweeping London and the southeast, and mortality rates were staggeringly high. The London chronicler Robert Fabyan, an influential draper and city alderman, put the total deaths at twenty thousand – between a third and a half of the city’s entire population. It may have been the plague that carried off the infant Prince Edmund, Henry and Elizabeth’s youngest child and third son, who died on 19 June and was buried in state three days later at Westminster Abbey.22 Another victim may have been
Henry’s chancellor, John Morton, who died that September at the age of eighty. Almost to the end, this supreme architect of Henry’s reign, with his ‘deep insight in politic worldly drifts’, had remained an ever-observant presence at the king’s side. For Henry, the loss was immense. Lawyer, politician, administrator, archbishop and cardinal, Morton had navigated the dynastic changes of the past half-century with a considered daring, his adaptability matched by his resolute belief in strong, forceful kingship. Of all Henry’s small group of close advisers, his chancellor, a generation older than the rest, had perhaps been the most influential, his mild appearance belying a precise ruthlessness. Henry had learned much from him.23
These losses were tempered by the coming wedding. Late in 1500, another proxy marriage was enacted now that Arthur had reached the legitimate marriageable age of fourteen, the Spanish ambassador de Puebla again acting the part of the absent bride with great gusto. The pair exchanged vows, the contract per verba de praesenti required by canon law. The marriage was now legally indissoluble and the wedding itself confirmed for the following September. After much wrangling, the conditions and method of payment for Catherine’s marriage portion, or dowry, were finalized, and the list of Catherine’s Spanish servants who would remain with her as part of her new, English, household agreed upon. As he described the tortuous conclusion to the negotiations, de Puebla’s customary optimism acquired a brittle edge. That December, Henry had summoned him to his privy chamber with ‘all sweetness’; then, his mood clouding over, had turned on the harassed ambassador, blaming him for having held up the marriage through his ‘shifts and evasions’. Dealing with the calculating English king over Catherine’s dowry had, de Puebla sighed to Ferdinand and Isabella, been a ‘nightmare’.24