Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  The scale of the marriage plans had produced a contradictory reaction in the pious Queen Isabella. Professing herself delighted at the magnificence of the preparations and the consequent honour done to her daughter, her fastidious asceticism nevertheless baulked at their luxury. Perhaps finding Henry and Elizabeth’s ambitions for wedding glamour a touch vulgar – they had implored Isabella that the Spanish ladies accompanying Catherine to England should be beautiful, or at the very least that ‘none of them should be ugly’ – she begged Henry to ‘moderate the expenses’. There was nothing wrong with rejoicings, she wrote, but the ‘substantial part of the festival should be his love … the princess should be treated by him and by the Queen as their true daughter’.25

  As the time for Catherine’s departure grew near, misgivings may well have crept into Isabella’s mind. Of her six children, her eldest daughter and two sons had died, and two of her remaining three daughters had already been married off. Catherine’s eldest sister, the beautiful but fragile Juana, was beginning to show signs of mental deterioration following her high-profile wedding to Archduke Philip of Burgundy five years previously. Catherine, cloistered but with a natural resourcefulness, was made of sterner stuff. But Isabella knew well the brutal realities of such marriage negotiations, and she wanted her daughter to be more than a political trophy: to be treated humanely and with kindness by her new family.

  Spring 1501 brought further delays. Uprisings continued to flare in newly reconquered southern Spain, and Ferdinand had his hands full in quelling Moorish resistance in the Andalucian hill-town of Ronda. After shaking off a stubborn fever, Catherine finally departed from Granada in May, her party crossing the high plateaux of central Spain en route to the northern port of Laredo.26

  By July, with the household on its summer progress, Henry had moved downstream to Greenwich. Here, in the seclusion of his wife’s favourite residence, he finally caught up on some correspondence, including a reply to a number of letters from his mother Lady Margaret Beaufort. His own letter mainly concerned business, but in a postscript riddled with apologies he allowed himself a rare lapse into a more intimate tone, one that betrayed fatigue and illness. Promising his mother that he would ‘hereafter, at better leisure’, devote more time to her affairs, he apologized for burdening her with such a long letter – though given how seldom he wrote, he added, it was necessary. And again he asked her pardon, ‘for verily Madame my sight is nothing so perfect as it has been, and I know well it will impair daily’. He hoped that Margaret would not be put out if he ‘wrote not so often with mine own hand, for on my faith’, he concluded, ‘I have been three days ere I could make an end of this letter.’27 The Olympian distance he so carefully cultivated was shot through with genuine exhaustion. Workaholic and overburdened with affairs of state, he had evidently written the letter in snatched moments between other matters. More alarming was the physical effort it had cost him to write a note whose contents fitted comfortably on two sides of paper. Still, for all his weariness, Henry was hoping that quieter and more stable times lay ahead. In fact, matters were about to take a drastic turn for the worse.

  That August, as Catherine prepared to embark on the long sea journey to England, a ship slipped unobserved out of the port of London and down the Thames estuary towards the North Sea. It was carrying Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk and a small band of supporters. The Yorkist who Henry believed he had successfully co-opted into the high-profile celebrations at Calais had fled a second time. In his softly-softly approach, Henry had been too clever by half; in Suffolk’s case the white rose would not graft so easily onto the red after all.

  If, almost two years before, Suffolk had returned to court in the expectation of regaining his dead father’s title and lands, he should have known better. Henry was happy to wheel him out on great occasions of state, when his flamboyant chivalry added lustre to the court, but Suffolk, quite clearly, remained under a cloud. Monitoring the activities of the earl and his associates closely, Henry began to attack Suffolk’s authority and standing in his East Anglian backyard, forcing his retainers into financial bonds for good behaviour and intervening in his legal proceedings. The backdrop to Suffolk’s starring role in Calais was another lawsuit brought against him in the court of King’s Bench at Westminster where, only a month previously, royal justices had ruled in favour of his opponent.28

  Things were, Suffolk felt, getting worse. His decline in East Anglia was exacerbated by the rise of Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey. On the losing side at Bosworth, Howard had worked tirelessly to prove his loyalty to the new regime; now, back from his successful campaigns in the north of England against the Scots and in great favour with Henry, he was looking to recover his own family’s inheritance, encroaching on Suffolk’s sphere of influence in the region. Perhaps the final straw was the emergence at court of Edward Stafford, the young duke of Buckingham, who cut an aggressively fashionable figure, keeping a lavish household and a sensational wardrobe. Commentators reached breathlessly for superlatives to describe his clothes and style. Buckingham and Suffolk were almost invariably paired together, and Suffolk, the lower-ranked earl, invariably came second.29 All of which served to trigger a tangle of more deep-rooted resentments.

  As his membership of the Order of the Garter and his noble title brought home to him, Suffolk owed loyalty and service to the crown. But in the recent past, there had been plenty of accusations and instances of Henry’s oppressive misrule, of which the execution of the earl of Warwick, Suffolk’s cousin, was the most recent and emphatic example. Suffolk was only too aware of his own family’s sense of entitlement. Back in the 1450s, his Yorkist forebears had challenged the ruling house of Lancaster in the interests of reform, justice, and the public good – and, of course, a belief in their own superior royal lineage. Similar thoughts, it was clear, fuelled the de la Poles’ attitude to the Tudors.

  For any noble or knight, the ownership of genealogical rolls describing, confirming – and, sometimes, inventing – their family’s glorious ancestry was de rigueur. The earl of Lincoln had one which, after his death, may have passed to Suffolk. Unfurled, the long sheet of sewn strips of parchment reveals brightly illuminated images of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, who turn, gesturing, to the lineage and royal claim of Richard duke of York and the de la Poles, whose line concludes in a coloured medallion of the earl of Lincoln and his descendants. It was the kind of document that could have been produced after Richard III’s own son had died, when he had apparently nominated Lincoln his heir. But some time after the battle of Bosworth, there had been an addition. Squashed in the right-hand margin, the name of Henry VII has been added, and above it, back through the roll, a thick black line has been crudely drawn, tracing his descent from, derisively, ‘Owen Tudor, a chamber servant’. The meaning was all too clear: the Tudors, the brash upstarts, were a diversion from the natural order of things in which the de la Poles, nobles of the blood, were destined to be kings. Lincoln, of course, had acted on this, and the impulse lingered in his brother’s mind. Whether he wanted the throne or simply wanted his dukedom back and his pre-eminent place at court confirmed, whether he was scared that, with his brother dead and cousin murdered, he would be next, or whether life had become intolerable or a mixture of all of these things, it was time, he felt, for a ‘revolution’.30

  After Suffolk’s first indiscretion, Henry’s counsellors had warned him that the earl was being worked on by the king’s enemies. Pre-emption was the key: Henry should act with ‘rigorous severity’ in making an example of him. Otherwise, Suffolk, seeing Henry’s forgiveness and restoration of favour as weakness, would become even more wilful and uncontrollable: ‘he would again’, they said, ‘engineer some dangerous assault against the state.’ They were proved right. With the chutzpah of Warbeck and the lineage of Warwick, Suffolk was Henry’s worst nightmare, the spectres of the past rolled into one loose Yorkist cannon, roaming the courts of northern Europe seeking political and military support for an invasion of Engla
nd. As the enormity of the situation bore home, Henry could not believe that he had spared Suffolk, and ‘began to fear fresh upheavals’.31 To the king’s advisers, Suffolk’s flight came as no surprise at all. And as they had intimated, he was not acting alone. Henry’s intelligence network scrambled to discover the extent of the conspiracy. What it found was that rebellion was once more being fuelled by a combination of foreign powers and enemies within.

  Preoccupied with renewed concerns about security, Henry turned to the forthcoming wedding ceremonies with redoubled obsession. Suffolk’s disappearance had ratcheted up the significance of the festivities; more than ever, they were needed to drive home the message of dynastic magnificence, power and permanence.

  Through the late summer of 1501, the plans were worked over exhaustively. In practical terms, Suffolk’s absence had to be accommodated. As announced in Calais, he had been due to captain one of the two teams participating in the forthcoming tournament. Now, casting around for another appropriate noble to lead these stylized expressions of chivalric loyalty to the crown, the king promoted a member of Suffolk’s original team – the twenty-four-year-old Thomas Grey, marquis of Dorset, extrovert grandson of Elizabeth Woodville and cousin to Queen Elizabeth. Dorset’s father, whom Henry had always mistrusted after his vacillating support in exile, died on 1 September. It was the perfect opportunity for Henry to throw a paternal arm around the young marquis in a gesture of familial inclusiveness, creating him a knight of the Garter to boot. Dorset’s team would include the foremost of the young generation of nobles who adorned the court: Henry Bourchier, earl of Essex and William Courtenay, heir to the earldom of Devon. All three were close friends and companions-in-arms, a tight-knit group.32 And all were advertisements for the stability of the reign. Dorset and Essex were Woodvillite Yorkists while Courtenay, from a staunch Lancastrian family, was married to one, the queen’s sister Katherine. Together, they had become leading lights of Henry’s court. Essex and Courtenay, moreover, had played key roles in crushing Warbeck’s army in 1497.

  In a characteristic fit of micro-management, Henry overhauled arrangements for the reception – one of a stream of organizers trooping down to Richmond to confirm plans was Garter herald John Writhe, who took a boat from London in order to ‘have the king’s mind’ on the colour of Prince Arthur’s trumpets – and the after-dinner entertainments. The two men initially entrusted with looking after these revels ‘in the best manner they can’ were deemed inadequate to requirements. In their place, Henry summoned one of the household’s outstanding talents. William Cornish, master of the children of the Chapel Royal, had burst on to the court’s consciousness during the twelfth night celebrations of 1494, when around midnight, dressed as St George, he had led into Westminster Hall a pageant consisting of a ‘terrible and huge red dragon, the which in sundry places of the hall as he passed spit fire’, then recited courtly verses of his own making before breaking into song, backed by a bravura performance by his well-drilled choir.33 The extrovert Cornish, Henry had decided, was the man capable of sprinkling stardust over the wedding entertainments. In place of the original, vague instructions, Cornish was closely briefed to produce a sequence of ‘disguisings’, dramatic tableaux and dances that would incorporate the latest European cultural fashions in an emphatic message of Anglo-Spanish political unity. Over the next months, he would visit the king, outline his plans, and draw substantial sums from the chamber treasurer, John Heron, for his services.34

  Henry and his counsellors decided that something more was needed in the wake of Suffolk’s flight. Sir Reynold Bray, one of the king’s inner circle and a familiar and unwelcome face in London’s corridors of power, strode into the Guildhall to demand a major change to the plans. The customary wine fountain, positioned outside St Paul’s on the wedding day to keep the crowds in good voice, should be transformed into another pageant, the most spectacular of them all. An artificial mountain studded with jewels and covered with red roses, wine gushing forth ceaselessly from its depths, this ‘Rich Mount’, a play on Henry’s family name of Richmond, would be an emphatic statement – and the city, Bray stated, would foot the bill. Outraged, the city leaders pointed out that they had paid for all the other pageants and a lavish present of gold plate for the Spanish infanta, and refused point-blank, unmoved even by Bray’s uncompromising bluntness. The king’s household grudgingly covered the cost.

  Finally, as October drew to a close, Henry received word of Catherine’s delayed arrival in England. Her first attempt to make the trip had met with ‘great hugeness of storm’ so severe that it ripped the ships’ masts out of their sockets, and she had been forced to turn back. When she set out again, the long journey through the Bay of Biscay and up the Atlantic coast had been a miserable one. Landing at last in Plymouth, ‘far in the country of the west’, Catherine made stately progress through southern England, welcomed on the borders of every county by regional notables under the co-ordination of the king’s lord steward, Lord Willoughby de Broke. The king had waited a long time for this moment. Now it was in view, he could contain himself no longer. On 4 November, in the late afternoon, he rode out from Richmond Palace to meet Catherine, lodging that night with Prince Arthur at his manor of Easthampstead.

  Two days later, they encountered Catherine’s representatives outside the village of Dogmersfield on the Hampshire plains, where the princess’s party was lodging in the sprawling house owned by the bishop of Bath and Wells, the king’s former secretary Oliver King. Leaving Arthur behind, Henry reached the house by mid-afternoon. The princess’s servants fussed around; she was, they protested, in siesta. Henry brushed the excuses aside. He had, he said, come to meet his daughter-in-law, and was not to be denied, even if she were in bed. In the middle of her flustered attendants, Catherine was poised and correct. She and Henry met with ‘great joy and gladness’. Barely an hour later, Arthur arrived and was introduced to his future bride. The teenagers faced each other, exchanging courtesies in mutually comprehensible Latin: Arthur elegant, formal and deprecating; Catherine petite, auburn hair tightly framing a snub-nosed, doll-like face.

  Through persistent autumn rain, the Spanish retinue continued its slow journey towards London. As they descended the Surrey hills towards the village of Kingston-upon-Thames, they were confronted by a mass of uniformed men, four hundred strong. Detaching themselves from this ‘great company’, a cluster of richly dressed riders advanced towards the princess, led by the duke of Buckingham, florid and blue-eyed, who recited Latin verses in welcome. He and his private army, all dressed in the Buckingham black and red, would accompany her on the last stage of her progress. It was a magnificent assertion of noble power – or rather, as a royal herald travelling with the party preferred to put it, an example of the quality of the ‘assistants of the realm of England’ that Henry could call upon. Swollen with Buckingham’s retainers, the retinue moved on to the archbishop of Canterbury’s palace at Lambeth, where Catherine would spend the night before her reception into London.35

  On the morning of Friday 12 November, Catherine set out from Lambeth through the suburban meadows and market gardens of the Thames’s south bank to St George’s Fields. Awaiting her was the horsebacked group of English lords, ‘spiritual and temporal’, who would parade with her through London, Buckingham pre-eminent. With him was Henry’s military mastermind, Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey, thin-lipped and beak-nosed; the mitred and croziered archbishop of York; and an array of younger nobles and their hangers-on, slickly groomed in coloured silks and plumed headdresses, and heavy with ornaments and jewelled chains, exchanging cool glances with the ladies of the queen’s household. At the head of the party, in a cloak of crimson cloth-of-gold and attended by a hundred retainers in gowns of tawny and blue, was Henry duke of York. As they met for the first time, Catherine would have been struck by the marked difference between the brothers, physically and temperamentally. In contrast to Arthur’s constrained politesse, Henry, half a decade younger, ruddy-cheeked and blue-eyed, w
as a bundle of barely suppressed energy. Their horses stamping and steaming in the November cold, the English party paired up with their Spanish equivalents and set off through Southwark and the Borough to London Bridge.36

  Greeted by the mayor in his robes of scarlet satin, and the twenty-four aldermen in scarlet velvet, the party moved slowly onto the bridge, clattering across its lowered drawbridge and into the tunnel of houses whose gabled upper storeys met overhead. They then emerged into the bridge’s open square, with its chapel of St Thomas of Canterbury jutting out into the Thames, and into a profusion of dynastic symbolism. Two great gold-painted wooden posts, adorned with the king’s escutcheons, badges and emblems, bracketed a two-storeyed wooden tabernacle. Covered with canvas painted to resemble stonework, it was hung with coloured cloth and images of the Order of the Garter inset with the red rose. On each floor of this tableau sat a costumed figure, portraying saints Katherine and Ursula respectively.37 Each in turn stepped forward to address Catherine.

  Previewing the young princess’s imminent journey through the London streets, they figured forth an allegorical world of epic scale, in which reality and myth merged inseparably, with Catherine and Arthur at its heart. The pageants to come would, they said, lead her on a quest for worldly honour and immortal glory, which would culminate in her marriage. Honour, St Ursula expounded, was only obtainable through a combination of virtue and nobility. Over the course of the six pageants this narrative would, as St Ursula described it, be woven into a cosmology in which Catherine’s husband-to-be was both the second coming of King Arthur, the unifying king of legend, and the embodiment of Arcturus, an astrological constellation which, according to the Commentaries of Gregory the Great, signified the epitome of the Christian life of virtue. The verse speeches proclaimed by the two saints were so bafflingly complex that their elaborations sailed over the heads of even the most learned observers. Catherine probably had to rely on the condensed summaries, in Latin, painted on boards hanging from the side of each pageant. The general gist, though, was crashingly obvious: Catherine, the pageants said, was about to become part of something very special indeed.