by Thomas Penn
By night, the focus shifted to Westminster Hall, its walls hung with tapestries and at its western end a cupboard, seven shelves high, on which quantities of gold plate winked and glittered in the torchlight. In front of this display, on a raised dais, Henry and Elizabeth sat enthroned under their cloth of estate. Surrounded by the newlyweds, the royal family and the assembled court and household, they watched, enrapt, as William Cornish’s disguisings unfolded before them. One night, a succession of wheeled pageant cars, some eighteen feet high, swayed and creaked out of the gloom of the hall’s eastern end and ground to a halt before the royal company.62 In one scene, actors played out an allegory of Arthur’s wooing of Catherine, in which two English ambassadors descended from a ship, fully rigged and crewed, to pay court to ladies peering from the windows of a Spanish castle. After the performers had come together in a sequence of intricately choreographed dances, the assembled company looked on as the bride and groom danced in succession. Then, last of all, Prince Henry descended from the dais with his fourteen-year-old sister Margaret. They performed two slow bass dances, as the others had done. But the heavy formality of it all chafed at the ten-year-old prince who, feeling weighed down by his clothes, ‘suddenly cast off his gown and danced in his jacket’. In one stroke, he had shattered the gravitas. And everybody loved it, including the king and queen, to whom it gave ‘right great and singular pleasure’. He had stolen the show.63
After the week-long revelry at Westminster, Friday 26 November was, as the official chronicler put it, a day of business and pleasure. The royal household packed itself up with practised efficiency as it prepared to move some eight miles upriver to Henry VII’s house at Richmond for the final stage in the festivities. Tapestries were rolled up, plate and furnishings were loaded into myriad ‘great and huge standards, coffers, chests, cloth sacks, with all other vessels of conveyance’, then heaved onto carts and wagons, boats and wherries. After lunch, the wedding party emerged from Westminster Palace and crossed the palace yard to Westminster Bridge, the broad landing stage that extended far out into the river. There, the Thames was thick with some sixty boats waiting to transport the dignitaries, festooned with pennants, flags and tapestries, many ‘rowing and skimming’ as they waited their turn to dock. The wedding party boarded the barges that were the royal family’s usual method of transport through London and the flotilla moved off upstream, in its midst the king’s barge with its red dragon prow, accompanied by the ‘most goodly and pleasant mirth of trumpets, clarions, shawms, tabors, recorders, and other diverse instruments, to whose noise upon the water hath not been heard the like’. Landing several hours later at the small village of Mortlake, the party transferred to horseback and, ‘very late, in the silence of the evening’, rode into Richmond, their way lit by the yeomen of the guard carrying flaming brands.64
If the ‘Rich Mount’ in front of St Paul’s had figured forth the dynasty’s magnificence, Richmond was the real thing. Rising sheer from the Thames, the red-brick palace, with its onion-shaped domes, glass-filled bay windows, covered galleries and pleasure gardens, was an overwhelming testament to the new dynasty. Everything was light, clean and airy, designed after ‘the most new invention and craft’. Observers wondered at the plumbing, with its running water and taps ‘that at the will of the drawers of water openeth and is closed again’. Henry had scoured northern Europe for the finest in interior design. The hall was hung with tapestries of great battles; at intervals stood statues of the renowned English kings of history, in which, naturally, Henry’s likeness also appeared – though set somewhat higher than the others. The chapel royal dripped with plate, saints’ relics, jewels and cloth-of-gold. And everything, from the great cistern in the palace’s courtyard to the roof timbers, was scattered with red roses. A ‘paradise’, the ‘beauteous exemplar of all proper lodgings’, Richmond was an apotheosis.65
The party drifted through Richmond as if in a dream. The sculpted gardens contained topiaried mythical beasts and trees laden with exotic fruit. Everywhere was entertainment: chess, backgammon, cards, dice, billiards and a purpose-built sports complex – ‘bowling alleys, butts for archers and goodly tennis plays’ and ‘other goodly and pleasant disports for every person as they would choose and desire’. A Spanish acrobat performed on a tightrope forty feet in the air, juggling with iron chains and engaging in imaginary single combat with a sword and shield. Late on the final evening, as the customary ‘void’ – spiced wine and sweetmeats – was served, more elaborate disguisings in the great hall culminated in the release of a flock of white doves.
Finally, on Monday 29 November, the party was over. Catherine had, as negotiated, been allowed to keep some of her Spanish retinue; the rest, laden with gifts, left to begin the long journey home. The young princess felt their departure keenly, ‘annoyed and pensive of their said miss and absence’. The reaction of her new father-in-law displayed genuine sensitivity – empathy, even. Henry took Catherine and her ladies on a tour of the library with which he had equipped Richmond, showing her ‘many goodly pleasant books of works full delightful, sage, merry, and also right cunning’. Catherine would hardly have noticed, in the bulky, intricately illuminated manuscripts, the inherited Yorkist volumes overpainted with sprays of blooming red-and-white roses and emblems. Then Henry produced his trump card: a collection of rings made specifically for the occasion, ‘desiring her to oversee them and behold them well, and after that to choose of them one such as she liked best.’66
In recent times, Henry had rarely seemed so relaxed, so attentive. To his new daughter-in-law he had indeed shown the ‘love’ that Catherine’s mother had so earnestly desired. The festivities had gone as smoothly as could possibly have been hoped, and the new princess of Wales, becoming accustomed ‘unto the manner, guise and usages of England’, would with her ‘most dear and loving husband’ set the reign on a new dynastic footing. Arthur, for his part, wrote to his new in-laws that he had ‘never felt so much joy in his life as when he beheld the sweet face of his bride’. Some days later the couple left for Arthur’s distant seat of Ludlow, in the Welsh Marches. Abandoning his initial plans to keep Arthur and Catherine with him at court during the first year of their marriage, the king had been enthusiastic, and adamant in the face of protests from Catherine’s parents, that the couple should go.67 It was a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
He Seeks in All Places to Destroy Me
Late in the evening of Monday 4 April 1502, a boat docked at the landing stage at Greenwich, where Henry, Elizabeth and the royal household were in residence. It carried a messenger with urgent dispatches from Ludlow, under the seal of Prince Arthur’s chamberlain, Richard Pole. Henry had retired for the night and the house was quiet; close counsellors opened the letters. The news was devastating. The prince of Wales had died forty-eight hours previously, in his chamber at Ludlow Castle. He had been taken ill nearly two months before, at Shrovetide, but his decline, when it came, had been swift and brutal. The likely cause, a ‘pitiful disease’ that ‘with so sore and great violence had battled and driven, in the singular part of him inward’ was the sweating sickness, the lethal flu-like virus whose symptoms included a raging temperature, convulsing intestinal pain, asphyxiation and acute kidney failure.1 The counsellors summoned Henry VII’s confessor, one of the severe, grey-habited friars at the adjoining convent of Franciscan Observants. The following morning, ‘somewhat before the time accustomed’, he knocked discreetly on the door of Henry’s privy chamber. Entering, he told all the servants present to leave, then turned to the king and broke the news: his dearest son was departed to God.2
Henry’s first instinct was to send for Elizabeth who, seeing her husband in ‘natural and painful sorrow’, comforted him. Her response was reassuring and rational. Henry should, she said, remember that he still had a ‘fair and goodly’ prince, and two fair princesses. Besides which, he still had her, and they could have more children: ‘we are both young enough’. Finally calming, Henry thanked
his wife, who returned with her ladies to her own apartments, where she broke down. The scene was replayed in reverse: now, it was Henry who came to console Elizabeth in ‘good haste’, out of ‘true, gentle and faithful love’, and who reminded her of the advice she had just given him.3
Prince Arthur’s death was as unexpected as it was shattering. Life was precarious, and death close, but familiarity did not desensitize. In an exercise book written a few months before Arthur’s death, an Oxford schoolboy described how for a long time after the death of his brother, ‘my mother was wont to sit weeping every day’. There was, the boy added, ‘nobody which would not be sorry if he had seen her weeping’. Henry and Elizabeth’s reaction to the loss of their beloved son was deeply human. But there was no mistaking, too, the disastrous political impact of Arthur’s death.4
Over the last decade and a half, England had gradually grown accustomed to the idea of Henry and Elizabeth’s first-born son as heir to the throne, something spectacularly consolidated by his marriage the previous November. Aged fifteen, on the threshold of adulthood and moulded in his father’s image, Arthur had embodied the fragile confidence of the dynasty’s future. As Elizabeth had said, they did have another son. But Prince Henry was only ten years old. Meanwhile, away in the Low Countries, there was another pretender: Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk.
During the previous eight months, Henry’s agents had been unpicking the knot of Suffolk’s conspiracy. Through the late summer and autumn of 1501, behind the preparations for Arthur and Catherine’s wedding, they had moved fast to counter this new threat to the dynasty. What they discovered bore disturbing parallels with the Warbeck plot of the 1490s. Although Suffolk had fled with a mere handful of co-conspirators, he had powerful continental backing, and a network of support that extended deep into the royal household.
Suffolk, it transpired, had fled England with a plan. From the port of London, his ship had taken him down the Thames estuary and across the North Sea to one of the ports on the Dutch coast, from where he rode east and south, towards Austria and the court of Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor. What was more, he had been invited.
Aquiline, with the pronounced jawline for which the Habsburg dynasty was already renowned, Maximilian was a man of capricious brilliance, a builder of prodigious – and half-finished – castles in the sky. Machiavelli, echoing the common view, thought him impossibly fickle, rarely taking counsel before deciding on a plan of action, then, when doubts were aired, dropping it and moving on to something else. Henry thought much the same. ‘How I wish,’ he once said through gritted teeth, ‘that the emperor would not undertake any enterprise except through mature consideration.’5 The hare-brained scheme of Maximilian’s that had almost brought Henry’s regime to its knees was his backing of Warbeck, in conjunction with Margaret of Burgundy. And now, apparently, he was at it again.
That September, at St Johann in the Austrian Alps, Maximilian listened with sympathy to Suffolk’s indignant description of Henry’s crimes, and how he ‘intended to have murdered him and his brother’, before regretting that he could not aid Suffolk openly, given the treaties in place between his son Philip of Burgundy and Henry. But he gave the earl license to stay, safe passage throughout the imperial territories and a guarantee of military backing, and packed him off to the city of Aachen. There, Suffolk started to plan.6
The small group of supporters with Suffolk included his younger brother Richard, a mixture of his household servants – including his indefatigable steward Thomas Killingworth – and Yorkist backsliders such as Sir George Neville, a face all too familiar to Henry’s agents. Feelingly referred to in official dispatches as ‘the bastard’, Neville was an illegitimate member of one of the most powerful of England’s noble families. A body servant to Richard III, he had become reconciled to Henry after Bosworth, before fleeing England in the 1490s to become a member of Perkin Warbeck’s small court-in-exile. In Scotland, one of James IV’s chief advisers had seen Neville for the political butterfly he was: declaring for Warbeck one minute, hoping to make up with Henry the next, his loyalties seemed to tie themselves in knots. Although, finally, he had drifted away from the pretender and, pardoned by Henry, returned to court, his loyalties remained skin-deep, and Suffolk’s plot had proved too good an opportunity to resist.7
Others came from Suffolk’s stamping ground of East Anglia: men with long-held ties of affinity to the de la Poles, like the Norfolk knight Sir John Wyndham and his son Thomas, whose Yorkist loyalties had been reignited by their own personal resentments and quarrels. When, following Suffolk’s first flight, Henry had kept a beady eye on the loyalties of his supporters, Thomas Wyndham had failed to answer a summons to London to report to the king and his council, and had been bound for £200 as a result. Another local family who fell under suspicion were the Tyrells of Gipping in Suffolk. The Tyrells provided a link in the chain of conspiracy which led south, across the Dover Straits, to the English colony of Calais.8
A low-lying, marshy enclave stretching eighteen miles along the coast and pushing some eight to ten miles inland, the Pale of Calais nestled between French Picardy to the west and, to the east, the imperial-dominated territories of Flanders. Inland, its borderlands were policed by the hulking fortresses of Guisnes and Hammes. On the coast, facing England across the Dover Straits, sat Calais’s heavily fortified port town, its capacious harbour guarded by the Rysbank Tower and by Calais Castle. Calais was a constant drain on crown resources. It maintained one of only two standing royal armies – the other being at Berwick, on the Scottish border – of around five hundred men; its defences, meanwhile, required constant upkeep and renovation, as the sea seeped into the walls and foundations of town and castle, rotting timber and eroding stone. But it was worth it, for Calais was one of the ‘principal treasures’ of the crown, of both strategic and economic importance. It was home to the staple, the crown-controlled marketplace for England’s lucrative textile trade, whose substantial customs and tax revenues flooded into Henry’s coffers. During the civil wars, Calais had acted as a base for rebel invasions. When in 1484 the captain of Hammes Castle, Sir James Blount, defected to Henry with his garrison and his Lancastrian political prisoner John de Vere, earl of Oxford, it was a significant boost to Henry’s cause. Conversely, the following year, as Henry ascended the throne, some two hundred pro-Yorkist troops had deserted to Maximilian. On a constant state of alert, the town’s walls were silhouetted with sentries and guards, while its narrow streets swarmed with troops, merchants, diplomats and ambassadors. And it fully upheld its reputation as a hotbed of disaffection and espionage.9
Early in his reign, Henry had given Calais’s chief military command to one of his most trusted officers, Giles lord Daubeney. He also needed men experienced in the unique vagaries of Calais’s government, and that had meant reappointing people like Sir James Tyrell, captain of Guisnes Castle and formerly one of Richard III’s lieutenants. After Bosworth, Henry had imprisoned Tyrell but then, reassured perhaps by his family connections – he was Daubeney’s brother-in-law – had restored him to his post. Tyrell had remained loyal to Henry during the 1490s, when the town was riddled with sedition and when members of his own family had become entangled in Warbeck’s conspiracy. Then, in the summer of 1499, after his first flight abroad, Suffolk had travelled through Calais on his way back to England, and had dropped in at Guisnes, where he stayed as Tyrell’s guest.10
On the face of it, there was no reason why he should not have put Suffolk up. Following his chat with Henry’s emissary Sir Richard Guildford, Suffolk was returning to England of his own free will and, with his East Anglian connections, Tyrell was an obvious port of call. Neither did the episode provoke any immediate response from Henry. Tyrell ostensibly continued in favour and some months later was co-opted on to one of the planning sub-committees for Arthur and Catherine’s wedding. But in the autumn of 1499, at around the same time that Henry started to put the screws on Suffolk and his retainers, he issued Tyrell with a financia
l bond for allegiance of £300, then confiscated one of his lucrative royal estates, leasing it instead to a group of local farmers for an inflated rent. Henry never missed a chance for a quick profit – but, characteristically, it was also a warning shot. Tyrell’s consorting with Suffolk had been noted.
By the summer of 1501 Tyrell was simmering with resentment. If, previously, his welcoming of Suffolk had been innocent, his long-dormant Yorkist loyalties had been provoked: Guisnes declared for Suffolk. And there was more bad news from Calais. Sir Robert Curzon, captain of the neighbouring fortress of Hammes, had gone over to Suffolk as well. Not only that, but it was, apparently, Curzon who had brokered Suffolk’s flight to Maximilian.11
Part of the jousting set at court, Curzon, like Tyrell, was one of Henry’s household knights, another ex-Ricardian whom Henry had grown to like – they played tennis together, Henry tended to lose – and, in 1498, he had appointed Curzon captain of Hammes. The following summer, around the time Suffolk turned up in Calais, Curzon applied to Henry for a licence to leave his post and go on crusade against the Ottoman Turkish army which, cutting a swathe through the Balkans, was currently encroaching on the south-eastern border of the Holy Roman Empire. Curzon, in other words, was going to fight for Maximilian. To Henry, it seemed like a good idea. He and the emperor were in their period of post-Warbeck détente and, at a time when Maximilian was badgering him for large financial loans, it was a cost-effective way of showing his friendship – as well as gaining a reliable line of information at his erstwhile enemy’s court.12