by Thomas Penn
Amid rumours of an imperial-backed invasion by Suffolk, and as the earl and his right-hand man Sir Robert Curzon were anathematized by bell, book and candle at St Paul’s Cross, the country remained on a state of high alert. In March, a detachment of Sir Reynold Bray’s men swooped on Portchester Castle, whose strategic position on the Hampshire coast made it a crucial link in England’s defences, and whose garrison had, apparently, been infiltrated by Suffolk sympathizers. The suspects were arrested, taken to nearby Winchester and, on 19 March, amid a city preparing for the Palm Sunday festivities, summarily beheaded. One of the ringleaders, the castle’s constable, Charles Rippon, had history. Years before, he had been caught up in the Stanley conspiracy and, as Henry’s net closed, he had been arrested, then pardoned. He had subsequently fought for Henry against the Cornish rebels at Blackheath in 1497 – but that, it seemed, was hardly a guarantee of loyalty: so too had Suffolk. As Henry trawled through his lists of suspects, Rippon, like so many, had again fallen under suspicion.26 Then, in April, came the catastrophic news of Arthur’s death. After that, things started to snowball.
On 18 April Venetian dispatches from England reported that the king was ‘in trouble’ and ‘had ordered the arrest of one of his chamber attendants’, a yeoman usher called Matthew Jones.27 Although Jones’s role in the conspiracy was obscure, his arrest indicated a horribly familiar phenomenon: disloyalty deep within the king’s household. Around the same time, another far more prominent attendant was seized by Henry’s guardsmen as he did his ‘daily diligence to the king’ and carried away to the Tower: Lord William Courtenay, son of the earl of Devon and Queen Elizabeth’s brother-in-law, and one of those who had ‘banqueted privily’ with Suffolk in the days before he fled. With him was Suffolk’s youngest brother, William de la Pole, who as a Plantagenet could not be allowed to remain at liberty any longer. News of the pre-emptive detentions, ‘for favour which they bore unto Sir Edmund de la Pole, as the fame then went’, swirled around London.28 The capital was tense. On 30 April, two unnamed men, one old and one young, imprisoned for ‘certain slanderous words spoken by them of the king and his council’, were taken to the Tun at Cornhill, the barrel-shaped stone conduit over which the third pageant of Catherine’s reception had been constructed the previous November, and locked in the pillory on top of it. After standing there for an hour being pelted with rubbish and stones, their ears were hacked off. They were then sent back to prison.
The following Monday, 2 May, London’s Guildhall was the scene of a high-profile show trial. After some two months in the Tower, Sir James Tyrell, his servant Robert Wellesbourne, Sir John Wyndham and a shipman were hauled before a judicial commission. The same day, they were convicted of treason and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Four days later, their sentences commuted to a quicker, less agonizing death, Tyrell and Wyndham were beheaded away from public view in the seclusion of Tower Hill. From his walk-on part in Suffolk’s conspiracy, Tyrell’s role was to assume greater dimensions beyond the grave. Not long after his execution, it was being said that he had confessed to murdering Edward IV’s sons, the princes in the Tower. A decade on, Thomas More had transformed Tyrell into the archetype of the over-ambitious courtier, a man whose heart ‘sore longed upward’, who organized the princes’ deaths at Richard III’s behest. By the end of the sixteenth century, following More, Shakespeare immortalized Tyrell as the perpetrator of ‘the most arch deed of piteous massacre/ That ever yet this land was guilty of.’29
Tyrell’s servant, Robert Wellesbourne, ‘remained in prison abiding the king’s grace and pardon’. It soon became clear why. The following Saturday, in the White Hall of Westminster Palace, Tyrell’s son Thomas, Matthew Jones and Sir Robert Curzon’s pursuivant, or courier, were paraded in a carefully staged indictment: the key witness was their co-conspirator Wellesbourne. Jones and the courier were sentenced to death and shipped back across the Channel to Guisnes, where they were executed as an example to Tyrell’s recalcitrant garrison.30
Wellesbourne’s testimony had been crucial. Jones had probably been arrested on his evidence, so too Rippon and his colleagues at Portchester, all events that had occurred after Wellesbourne’s arrival in England. Whether he had been a double-agent all along – Wellesbourne’s family had strong connections with Tyrell, but also with Sir Thomas Lovell – or had been turned by Henry’s agents is debatable, but it was probably the latter. The king had long had a reputation for being able to intimidate, flatter and turn conspirators into useful lines of royal intelligence – Warbeck had denounced, in rather prim tones, the ‘importunate labour’ of Henry and his agents to ‘certain of our servants about our person, some of them to murder our person, and other to forsake and leave our righteous quarrel.’31 Wellesbourne, ‘alias Hodgekinson’, was only the latest in a long and dishonourable line. Towards the end of May, he received a royal pardon for services rendered, and was retained by the king on the comfortable half-year’s salary of 60s 10d. The following month, he seems to have been back in the Low Countries, where he managed to get access to the earl of Suffolk’s confidential correspondence, copying letters and sending them back to Henry. These would not be the last of his services.32
Over this rash of punishment and execution loomed the shadow of Prince Arthur’s death. His coffined body, disembowelled, embalmed, spiced and wrapped in waxed cloth, was placed in his chamber at Ludlow Castle, until 23 April, St George’s Day, by which time the royal mourning party had arrived from London with orders for the funeral ceremonies. As custom dictated, the royal family was absent. The entourage, which included Garter king-at-arms John Writhe and a number of prominent nobles, was headed by Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey. Surrey’s appointment as principal mourner was significant. Having completed his political rehabilitation, this former supporter of Richard III had been chosen over a more obvious candidate: the duke of Buckingham, higher in rank than Surrey and the greatest landowner in the Welsh Marches after the crown. Buckingham, though, had royal blood. His presence in the funeral entourage risked connecting him with the succession, particularly now that the Tudor dynasty hung by a thread. The choice of burial place was significant, too. Arthur’s body would not be buried in Westminster Abbey, but in Worcester Cathedral.
It was a practical choice. Lying in the region subject to the council in the Marches, Worcester was associated with Prince Arthur; that it was the site of another royal tomb – that of King John – also counted in its favour. Besides which, the spring storms that year made the roads practically impassable. When, after a funeral ceremony in Ludlow parish church, the cortège set off on 25 April, it was in driving rain and violent winds: ‘foul’, grumbled John Writhe, and the road ‘the worst way that I have seen’; the carriage bearing Arthur’s coffin was repeatedly stuck in mud, and oxen were brought to haul it. But there was, perhaps, another reason for Arthur’s burial in the English midlands, away from London and the glare of domestic and international attention. The disaster of Arthur’s death was something Henry wanted to play down, rather than play up.33
For all this, the funeral rites were on a scale befitting the size of the tragedy, involving some 550 people and costing the best part of £900. Nearly 2,400 yards of black mourning cloth were allocated to the mourners, varying in quality, quantity and cut according to the wearer’s status; over 6,000 pounds of candle wax were burned. Over the coffin, draped in black cloth-of-gold embroidered with a white cross, through the wind and rain, was carried a canopy of purple damask sprinkled with golden flowers. Inside Worcester Cathedral, the coffin was transferred to its hearse, a vast, storeyed, wooden structure, painted black and adorned with heraldic escutcheons, badged pennants or ‘pencels’, silk standards of St George, banners of the royal arms of England and Spain, and of Arthur’s various titles, from Wales to Ponthieu in Normandy. Over it hung a cloth of estate, with a woven picture of Christ and the four evangelists, trimmed with valences decorated with the ostrich feathers of Wales and Arthur’s motto. In the gloom of the cathedr
al, all this glittered in the light of over a thousand candles. It was, said Writhe, the best funeral he had ever seen.34
Following a night-long vigil, the ceremonies approached their climax. As a requiem mass was sung in the cathedral, through the west door and the crowds of mourners came a man on horseback. Wearing Arthur’s own plate armour and gripping a poleaxe, blade downwards, the man-at-arms rode an armoured, black-caparisoned courser up the nave and into the choir; there, in front of the bishops, abbots and officers-of-arms, he dismounted and presented the horse to the gospel reader. After Arthur’s coat-of-arms, shield, sword and helmet, the symbols of his earthly roles, had been offered up by the attendant nobility along with palls of cloth-of-gold, his coffin was lowered into the open grave. William Smith, bishop of Lincoln and head of Arthur’s council, ‘sore weeping’, cast holy water and earth onto the coffin. Then, as custom dictated, the prince’s household servants broke their staves and rods of office in two, and threw them into the grave; among them was Arthur’s herald, Wallingford pursuivant Thomas Writhe, the eldest son of Garter king-of-arms. Arthur’s household was now disbanded, the dead prince’s servants bereft, masterless: ‘to have seen the weepings when the offering was done’, commented the funeral account, ‘he had a hard heart that wept not.’35
Kicking his heels in Aachen, Suffolk was not slow to grasp the significance of the situation. When news reached him of Arthur’s death, he fired off an urgent dispatch to Maximilian. The emperor, he wrote, should know of the danger that his friends in England were in – Suffolk was evidently unaware of the recent slew of executions – a danger that increased daily as the king’s security forces closed in on them. With the regime reeling and newly vulnerable, now was his chance to return to England and to confront the king, but it was, he stressed urgently, a race against time: ‘I have been warned in no uncertain terms, that King Henry is seeking in all places, and through all kinds of people that he can buy off with gold and silver, to destroy me; and moreover’, he added, ‘the longer I stay out of England, the stronger King Henry will become, and the worse it will be for me.’36
Over the past months, the emperor had proved evasive and inconsistent, and Suffolk had a hunch that something was up. As he grumbled to his steward Thomas Killingworth, who was representing Suffolk’s interests at the imperial court, he was fed up with the way he was forced to ‘dissimulate’ to Maximilian in order to earn his goodwill and a meagre supply of credit. Suffolk, though rarely quick on the uptake, suspected – correctly – that one of the people taking Henry’s gold and silver was Maximilian himself.
Henry was indeed spending inordinate amounts of money on bribes and intelligence. Throughout the civil wars of the fifteenth century, espionage had been a constant drain on the crown’s resources: in one year alone, Edward IV had spent well over £2,000 on ‘certain secret matters’ concerning the kingdom and, as Warbeck had noted, Henry was willing to stretch his budget to an almost infinite degree, by offering ‘large sums of money’ to ‘corrupt the princes in every land and country and that we have been retained with’. Already, Henry’s pursuit of Suffolk was involving financial transactions on a massive scale – and as it turned out, this was only the beginning.
Soon after Arthur’s death, Henry continued his reshuffle of Calais officials, with the appointment of Sir John Wilshere as comptroller, or chief financial officer, of the enclave. A London merchant-turned-household-official, Wilshere had been one of the gentleman-ushers of Henry’s chamber. Loyal, watchful and experienced, he also had a head for figures, knowledge of international markets and a raft of contacts in the city and the commercial centres of the Low Countries. He was, in short, Henry’s kind of servant. In keeping watch on Calais’s finances, Wilshere acted as another line of information, ordered to keep his account books separately from the Calais treasurer so that Henry could check both, compare – and contrast – for corruption and peculation. But the new comptroller had other roles, too, for which he was perfectly suited.37
Wilshere, a confidential brief stipulated, was to be one of the chief nodes of Henry’s espionage network, a control in touch with all the existing agents and ‘enterprisers’ working out of Calais against Suffolk and his circle. He was to employ more spies, as many as he saw fit, on the crown’s behalf, and he was to keep them motivated and loyal. He was also instructed to try and turn Suffolk’s men, promising them royal pardons on the understanding that they named names and provided other credible intelligence on the earl and his conspiracy. Wilshere would report to a ‘Messire Charles’. This, almost certainly, was Sir Charles Somerset. A member of Lady Margaret’s Beaufort clan, he was cousin to the king and one of his inner circle, a powerful presence in the royal household where he was captain of the guard and vice-chamberlain, one of the people Wilshere would have answered to in his previous role as gentleman-usher. Somerset, too, wore another hat: that of high-level diplomat, entrusted with the most delicate of negotiations, and spymaster. Along with the likes of Lovell, Fox, Bray and Guildford, he lurked behind the activities of Henry’s ‘flies and familiars’.38
Wilshere’s role as intelligencer merged seamlessly with the world of high finance. He was to be kept fully briefed on the vast bribes that Henry was paying to Maximilian, transferred to the emperor through the London branches of international merchant banks, in order that he could co-ordinate activities on the ground. As soon as Wilshere heard the relevant instalments had been processed, he was to ensure that Maximilian – who had, finally, added his signature to the new extradition treaty – stuck to his side of the bargain. Wilshere’s men were to monitor the proclamation banishing Suffolk and his men from imperial territories, checking that it was correctly announced and published in all towns and cities ‘where the king’s said rebels might be’, in exactly the wording specified ‘in French and Latin by the king’s council’, together with a comprehensive list of the ‘names and surnames of the king’s rebels that they may be banished’. For good measure, Wilshere was to send a German translation of the proclamation to the emperor.39 Henry was determined to get full value for his £10,000. All this activity, however, only served to confirm what Henry and Maximilian both knew: that with Arthur’s death, Suffolk’s value – and the emperor’s bargaining power – had increased exponentially.
Suffolk knew it too. In a separate note to Killingworth, he instructed the steward to impress upon the emperor the enormity of the new situation. The only figure that now remained between Suffolk and his claim was King Henry’s second son – and if he should ‘happen to die’, there would be ‘no doubt’ whatsoever of Suffolk’s title.
Nor could there be any doubting the significance of Suffolk’s words – or what he meant when he talked of his ‘title’. In the event of Prince Henry’s death, Suffolk, as a Plantagenet, was well placed to inherit the English throne. Even alive, the eleven-year-old prince barely seemed an obstacle. Prince Henry, he sneered, ‘will pose no kind of a threat’.40
Back in Ludlow, Catherine had not accompanied the funeral cortège to Worcester. Grieving, she was herself dangerously ill. She was carried slowly back to London, still weak, in a litter of black velvet sent by a solicitous Queen Elizabeth. By early May, she was convalescing at Lady Margaret Beaufort’s Thamesside palace of Croydon, west of Richmond, where she received a stream of messengers from Henry and Elizabeth, and wrote to her parents, reassuring them that she was herself well out of danger, and removed from the ‘unhealthy situation’ at Ludlow.
Apart from a natural concern for the young widow, there was another reason for the solicitous attention shown her: the possibility that she might be carrying her dead husband’s child. If she were, and if she had a boy, that child would be heir to the English throne; Catherine, as his mother, would continue to occupy the honoured place within the new dynasty that her wedding reception had signified. Catherine, however, was not pregnant – and therefore, she was no longer part of her dead husband’s family. Prince Henry was heir to the throne.41
Ferdinand and I
sabella, meanwhile, sent a stream of urgent dispatches to Rodrigo de Puebla, varying wildly in tone from the assertive to the querulous. They ‘confidently’ expected that Henry would ‘fulfil his obligations’ to their daughter, which included giving Catherine her dower lands – the estates due to her as a widow – so that she could pay her household expenses. They were sure that the king of England would not break his word ‘at any time, and much less at present whilst the Princess is overwhelmed with grief’. This rather overemphatic confidence in Henry’s probity betrayed that they fully expected him not to keep his promise.
In fact, they had been alarmed to hear that people in England were already advising Catherine to borrow money against the gold, jewels and silver that she had brought with her as part of her marriage portion, because Henry was hardly going to provide for her. De Puebla was to instruct Juan de Cuero, Catherine’s wardrober, to keep the treasure secure, in case she started selling or pawning it. And Catherine herself, Ferdinand and Isabella commanded, should be sent straight home to Spain on the next available ship: ‘We cannot endure that a daughter whom we love should be so far from us when she is in affliction.’42
But as Ferdinand and Isabella wept crocodile tears, they were also playing a game of double bluff. Catherine remained a highly valuable commodity in the world of international politics, and now she was evidently not pregnant, she was free to marry again. Far from wanting their daughter shipped back, her parents were very keen indeed that she should wed the ‘Prince of Wales that now is’ – ‘without delay’.43
The Spanish monarchs, in fact, were more desperate than ever to have England onside. Back in 1499 the new French king, Louis XII, had picked up where his predecessor had left off. Re-invading and re-occupying swathes of northern Italy, his armies were once again on the warpath against Spanish-ruled Naples. Fearing complete French domination of the peninsula, Ferdinand and Isabella were now trying to hustle Henry into a new marriage alliance that would, again, force him to commit to war against France – or, at the very least, put quantities of his fabled wealth towards it. If, as they wrote to de Puebla that August, the new betrothal and its accompanying treaty could be arranged, ‘all our anxiety would cease, and we shall be able to seek the aid of England against France’.44