Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England
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The plan backfired. In early 1500 Curzon had arrived at an imperial court awash with talk of the recent executions of Warbeck and Warwick. His own dormant allegiances had perhaps been stirred, for he regaled Maximilian with stories of Henry’s ‘murders and tyrannies’. He then put forward ‘the proposal of my lord of Suffolk against king Henry to recover his right’.
Maximilian had listened, a gleam in his eye. After Warbeck, here was a fresh opportunity to turn England to his advantage, a handle in his own foreign adventures. If, Maximilian told Curzon, he ‘might have one of king Edward’s blood in his hands, he would help him to recover the crown of England and be revenged upon Henry’. He knew perfectly well what effect Yorkist pretenders had on the English king, and on his kingdom.
In summer 1501, as soon as Henry had got wind of Suffolk’s destination, he dispatched two diplomatic veterans of the Warbeck crisis to open negotiations with the emperor’s representatives. William Warham, one of Henry’s brightest civil lawyers, and his head of security, the vice-chamberlain Sir Charles Somerset, were instructed to persuade Maximilian to expel Suffolk from his territories – and to do whatever it took.
As Maximilian’s protracted support of Warbeck had petered out, Henry had, he thought, finally worked out how to deal with him. The stick of economic sanctions and trade embargoes had failed to make the emperor see sense, but the promise of financial aid – hilfsgelder – which Henry waved in front of Maximilian concentrated his mind wonderfully. Constantly impecunious, he had ‘long time desired’ from Henry a loan of £10,000 towards his ‘crusades against the Turks’ – or rather, his expensive wars against the French and his ambitions in Italy, not to mention his long-planned journey to Rome to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor, which he had been unable to afford. In 1499, in place of a loan for his crusade, Henry had sent him Curzon. And now Maximilian had a new bargaining chip in Suffolk.13
At first, Warham and Somerset’s embassy seemed to go well, with the emperor of ‘resolute mind’. But as the negotiations went on and on, Maximilian kept shifting the goalposts. A weary tone crept into the ambassadors’ dispatches. They had no idea what Maximilian was minded to do, and ‘marvelled’ at his inconstancy. He also had a habit of muttering asides to the counsellors around him that prompted sycophantic gales of laughter, in front of the English diplomats who stood uncomprehending and stony-faced. In private, Maximilian’s advisers sympathized with the situation Warham and Somerset found themselves in – they too had ‘to change their minds’ when the emperor changed his, which was often. Instead of agreeing to the terms laid down by Henry for Suffolk’s banishment, Maximilian now proposed that they should apply only to his hereditary Habsburg lands – ‘far countries to the which your subjects seldom or never have any resort’, Warham and Somerset told Henry. Maximilian was terribly sorry, but he could not give any such guarantees to Henry regarding the free imperial cities, the autonomous entities dotted throughout the imperial lands, for the electors would never commit to such an agreement. Maximilian probably anticipated Henry’s request, for he had sent Suffolk to just one such city: Aachen. And he took Henry’s £10,000.14
Calais’s fortifications were strengthened, with a ‘great substance of timber’ shipped over, and England’s coastal defences checked, from the south-eastern ports to Berwick on the Scottish border, whose captain, Sir Thomas Darcy, was ordered to employ a team of masons and labourers ‘continually in occupation for the reparations’ there.
In Kent, Sussex and the Channel ports, Sir Richard Guildford’s men sifted loyalties; so too did those of Sir Reynold Bray. Information and tip-offs flooded in of suspicious behaviour, stolen ships and people slipping out of the country. In October 1501, as Catherine’s flotilla fought its way through the Atlantic storms, a plot was uncovered at Beaulieu Abbey on the south coast, where Perkin Warbeck had once sought sanctuary. The abbot’s porter, one Baskerville, and ten of the sanctuary men in his custody, tried to commandeer a ship to join Suffolk and were intercepted in the act, ‘even at the point of going’. Under torture, Baskerville confessed and ‘cursed much’ two other men who, in a related plot, had stolen a ship full of Cornish tin, which they had intended to steer across the Channel. The insecurities of Warbeck had, it seemed, reignited. Each and every disturbance seemed to be construed as part of Suffolk’s plot.15
As he moved to prevent events spinning out of control, and to assess and monitor the extent of Suffolk’s support, Henry turned to the bonds and financial sureties that he and his administrators entered meticulously in his various books of accounts. In fact, his reliance on this system was intensifying markedly. Towards the end of 1499, after Suffolk’s first flight, he had ordered officials in chancery to enrol – formally record – all names of both ‘subjects and strangers’, Englishmen and foreigners, who had been involved in cases of treason and of misprision – failing to report, or actively concealing, suspects – and who had been bound for sums of money. Armed with these lists and books of names, offences and fines, Henry and his counsellors had started to trawl through all cases of people who had been issued with bonds of various kinds – for debts owed, or for allegiance, ‘good abearing’ – whether recent or way back in the past, whether they had in fact committed an offence or not. In the wake of Suffolk’s second flight, they started to use bonds systematically, not just to punish offences, but to guarantee loyalty: or, to put it another way, as a method of pre-emption.16
That summer, the king’s administrators took an unprecedented series of bonds: in the standing garrison of Berwick, where Darcy was bound for £4,000 for the security of the town and castle, along with a number of the king’s household knights, and across the country in Carlisle. In October, the preparations for Arthur and Catherine’s wedding were being finalized, royal officials moved into East Anglia, armed with lists of the ‘names of such persons as were servants of our rebel’. In his fortress of Headingham on the Essex–Suffolk border, Henry’s point-man in the region, the earl of Oxford, took bond after bond from those associated with Suffolk: tenants and clients, yeomen, esquires, knights and lawyers. Anybody who failed to appear was deemed guilty and, when found, would be committed to prison ‘till they find security’.17
Henry continued to spin his web. He played the long game, waiting and waiting, steadily assembling information as if nothing were untoward. Contemporaries all said the same thing. He would, said one, proceed ‘circumspectly and with convenient diligence’; another, that he would ‘always grope further’, always with ‘good await and espial’ to those under surveillance. Almost invariably, few – even his closest servants – could tell anything from the king’s outward appearance. Henry’s method was to proceed with ‘suaviter ac saeviter in modo’, a calm demeanour masking a savage intensity. Soncino, the Milanese ambassador, put it well. ‘As the English say’, he wrote to his boss Ludovico Sforza, describing Henry’s pursuit of Warbeck, ‘ “Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” ’18
Sometime in early 1502 a confidential discussion between two men took place in the Tower of London. One, William Hussey, was the younger brother of Sir John, one of Henry’s financial administrators. The previous year, William had become caught up in some unspecified trouble, and had been forced to sign over his lands to leading royal officers – among them Sir Reynold Bray, Sir Thomas Lovell and his own brother – to be administered on behalf of the crown. Somehow, he had ended up in the Tower. And he was obviously rumoured to have connections to the earl of Suffolk, because he had got friendly with somebody – a fellow inmate, perhaps – who had asked his advice about the best way to defect. Hussey’s friend never gave his name. His report of the conversation, though, ended up on the desk of one of Henry’s spymasters.19
Hussey had spoken like somebody who knew what he was talking about. He urged the man to be upfront: to go direct to Suffolk and offer him ‘true and faithful service’. His interlocutor agreed wholeheartedly, saying that this was what he had planned to do. The conversation was l
arded with the usual conspiratorial talk about astrological portents, while Hussey gave the man tokens that Suffolk would recognize as his, and that would accordingly lend credence to the defector.
But the exchange was not quite what it seemed. Access to many areas of the sprawling complex of the Tower – part royal palace, part armoury, part open prison – was for the most part relatively straightforward. Only the privy lodgings and the maximum security quarters in its bowels, into which people disappeared and rarely came out again, were difficult to get to. In 1499, the plotters trying to release Warwick and Warbeck had found it easy enough to contact them. And in the murky world of counter-espionage, this arrangement could work both ways. Then, there had been much to suggest that a number of the plotters were royal agents provocateurs, egging the two reluctant Yorkist captives on to their deaths. The constable of the Tower Sir Simon Digby, and his deputy Sir Thomas Lovell, one of Henry’s most intimate counsellors, had watched everything, waited, and then pounced.
As old allegiances stirred again, the same tactic was, it seems, being used. The man seeking William Hussey’s advice was a plant – a royal spy posing as an adherent of Suffolk’s, trying to inveigle himself into the exiled earl’s household in order to find out the extent to which the conspiracy had taken root in England, and what was being planned. As he reported, Hussey clearly knew exactly what had gone on when Suffolk had absconded the previous summer. Hussey named times, places – and, above all, he named names.
Less than a week before Suffolk fled, according to Hussey, the earl had ‘privily’ hosted a dinner for a small group of close friends in London. The guests were high profile indeed. They included the young marquis of Dorset Thomas Grey, Henry Bourchier, earl of Essex, and Lord William Courtenay, heir of the earl of Devon. Essex and Courtenay were close companions of Suffolk. Essex had fought alongside him at Blackheath, while Courtenay had been caught up in the affray that had led to Suffolk’s indictment for murder. All three had been named in Suffolk’s team in the tournaments for the forthcoming wedding.20
Then, around the time of his flight, Suffolk had invited Courtenay’s father, the earl of Devon, and an East Anglian gentleman, Sir Thomas Green, a friend of the Tyrell family, to dinner in a house in Warwick Lane, just around the corner from St Paul’s. An onlooker – a servant in Suffolk’s own household, maybe – reported how the earl himself came to the house’s outer gate, to welcome his guest ‘with great reverence’, a sign perhaps that the earl of Devon knew all about Suffolk’s impending flight. All this, Hussey said to the spy, had already ‘come to the king’s knowledge’.21
If this was the case, Henry had reacted to the news of potential conspiracy and betrayal with no outward change of demeanour. Throughout the wedding celebrations, as observers noted, he remained unruffled, the picture of poised majesty. The festivities, indeed, were the perfect opportunity to watch the behaviour of those whose loyalties had been called into question. This was precisely what Henry had done back in the autumn of 1494 when, amid the banqueting and tournaments for Prince Henry’s creation as duke of York, he had scrutinized his rogue lord chamberlain Sir William Stanley and his associates until he was ready to move against them fast. In 1501, at the Westminster jousts, the moment when he rewarded Dorset’s performance with a red-and-white rose of rubies and diamonds may have been a question, as much as a confirmation, of the young marquis’s loyalty.
The spy’s report of his conversation with Hussey had a sequel. In it, the spy recounted how he had made his way to Aachen and had succeeded in talking with Suffolk himself. Telling Suffolk how much the king already knew about the circumstances of his flight, the spy tried tentatively to draw the earl out on the allegiances of his fellow diners: ‘in many men’s minds’, he said, the fact that they had been seen just before the flight made them suspect. Also, he said, it was widely rumoured that the earl of Devon was ‘agreeable’ to Suffolk’s plans to flee and, when Suffolk returned to England with his invasion force, for him to land on the south Devon coast. Was this true?
Suffolk was hot-headed, proud and in many respects obtuse. But his reply was canny, deliberately preying on the king’s doubts over his subjects’ loyalties. He shrugged off the significance of the diners. He, Dorset, Essex and Courtenay were ‘often times in such company together’, he said, stressing that his guests knew nothing of his plans to flee. It was plausible enough. All were companions-in-arms, men of the same generation who had bonded at court and in the tiltyard. It was perfectly normal that they should dine together. When the spy persisted, Suffolk said simply that ‘there is many pretty castings of eyes made to any countenance that was showed me’ – people were bound to look askance at anybody associated with him before he fled. But, he continued, ‘no force’: it was not his problem. Henry’s spies, counsellors, and the king himself, could ‘judge by outward countenance what they will’ – they could construe whatever they wanted from such behaviour. Suffolk, in other words, confirmed nothing, and denied nothing. His reply left a broader, unspoken, question hanging in the air. Was the king chasing shadows – or was he chasing a genuine, dynasty-threatening conspiracy? It was, went Suffolk’s equivocal reply, up to Henry to find out.22
Henry and his counsellors worked hard to disentangle rumour from evidence. The king continued to block off potential European bolt-holes for Suffolk, negotiating extradition treaties – all backed up with hefty financial inducements – with the countries bordering Maximilian’s territories, from the kingdom of Hungary to the prince-bishopric of Liège, the small city-state bordering Suffolk’s refuge of Aachen.
Across the Channel, in Calais, the situation remained tense. In October 1501, as Henry reinforced the security of his major fortresses, he had ordered a senior Calais official, its porter Sir Sampson Norton, to occupy Tyrell’s stronghold of Guisnes. Norton failed to do so, and Tyrell and his garrison remained holed up. The overall commander of Calais, Henry’s lord chamberlain Giles lord Daubeney, and Henry’s master diplomat Richard Fox became involved in protracted correspondence with Tyrell, sending ‘fair words’ requesting him to come to England and explain his conduct before the king’s council. If he did so, they promised, all would be forgiven. Tyrell, however, was an old hand. He stayed put.
Then, sometime in February 1502, the black-clad figure of Sir Thomas Lovell materialized in Calais. In his capacity as one of the king’s chief financial officers, Lovell made regular trips over to the Pale, supervising the collection of the annual pension due to Henry in danger money from the French crown, and the substantial customs revenues from Calais’s wool trade, paid directly into the treasure chests of the king’s chamber. But Lovell was up to something else, too.
Strange things tended to happen when Lovell was around. Some years earlier, he had been in Calais when Henry’s former household steward, Lord Fitzwalter, who had been imprisoned in Calais Castle for his part in the Warbeck plot, was caught trying to escape – a put-up job, so rumour had it – and unceremoniously beheaded. And Lovell had, of course, been lurking in the background when Warwick and Warbeck were caught up in the plot to break them out of the Tower in 1499. Now, Lovell made his way out to Guisnes Castle for a friendly chat with Tyrell. Whatever he said was convincing. Leaving his son Thomas in charge of Guisnes, Tyrell made his way with Lovell back to Calais harbour to take ship for England.23
As they sailed into the open waters of the Channel, Lovell’s pleasant demeanour changed. Seizing Tyrell, he threatened to throw him overboard unless he sent word to his son to surrender Guisnes to the king’s officers. There was nothing Tyrell could do. Together with two other suspects, Sir John Wyndham and a servant of Tyrell’s called Robert Wellesbourne, Tyrell and his son were brought back to London and thrown in the Tower, where they were visited by members of the king’s council, to whom treason cases were entrusted. Henry, very probably, took a hand in the questioning too.24
It was normal for kings to interrogate suspects, and Henry was no exception. Payments for ‘bringing up of prisoners’
litter his chamber accounts, and after Warbeck’s failed invasion at Deal in 1495, he cross-examined many of his captured supporters under threat of death. Henry’s method of questioning is well documented, from his probing of Warbeck in the Tower, to his cross-examining of the many people that brought him information. As with his way of assembling intelligence, it was gentle, meticulous and logical: perfectly clear, so that people could understand what was being asked of them, leaving no room for evasion. If they then started twisting and turning, he then snapped, ‘suaviter ac saeviter’ as Soncino had said. It was the kind of interrogation technique that left people trembling in apprehension, wondering when the storm would break.
Whether or not Henry himself had people tortured is unrecorded, though if not, he would be unique among monarchs of the age. The characteristic secrecy with which he operated is a more ready explanation. His officials, in the usual way, resorted to torture – ‘straight handling’, or ‘some pain’ – at the drop of a hat, as soon as a suspect showed signs of resistance or ‘stomach’ or was overly ‘crafty in making his answers’. Methods of applying pain were many and ingenious, in particular the ways of twisting, stretching and manipulating the body out of shape, normally falling under the catch-all term of the rack, or the brakes. Often, these machines were customized and named according to the twisted imaginations of their practitioners: in the Tower in the 1450s, there was a brake called ‘the duke of Exeter’s daughter’.25 Whatever happened to Tyrell and his associates in the Tower that March, somebody talked.