by Thomas Penn
Flamank’s own motives for betraying these confidences were unhealthy. They were coloured by a recent spat with his father-in-law Nanfan, his own unpopularity among his colleagues in the Calais garrison and a self-seeking ambition. His report was, in other words, precisely the kind of rumour-mongering that Henry might have been expected to dismiss, as having been made out of ‘envy, ill-will and malice’. For Henry, however, the problem was the uncertainty, the ambiguities and fence-sitting that pervaded everything and everybody: from the evasive testimony of Alexander Symson in the Tower and the turf wars of Kent, to Northumberland and Buckingham’s sullen acquiescence, to the loyalties of Daubeney’s men in the household, the arrangements made by Vaux and Browne, and Conway’s desperate attempts to find out the truth through espionage. Flamank’s report provided not answers, but yet more questions about allegiance: known unknowns.
It was as John Skelton’s protagonist Dread had described in his nightmarish vision of court, confronted by doubleness and inconstancy at every turn, people creeping just out of his eyeline, whispering in corners as they looked him up and down, unable to be sure of anything or anybody. A kind of terror had settled on the royal household. And it stemmed from the king himself.36
Writing less than a decade later, Machiavelli, inevitably, described it best. Discussing the knotty question of whether it was better for a prince to be loved or feared, he wrote that, in an ideal world, ‘one would like to be both one and the other’. But, Machiavelli continued, the world was not ideal. It was difficult to inspire both qualities, so if you had to choose one, it would be fear. The problem with love was that it was sustained by a ‘chain of obligation’, of service, which, ‘because men are a wretched lot, is broken on every occasion for their own self-interest’. Fear, though, was different. It was sustained by a constant dread of punishment, by a sense of the prince’s all-encompassing power.
Fear, Machiavelli concluded, worked better because ‘men love at their own pleasure, and fear at the pleasure of the prince.’ The wise prince should build his foundation on what belongs to him, not on what belongs to others. Faced with profound instability, that was exactly what Henry had done. Looking into the void of dynastic uncertainty, he was perfecting a system, idiosyncratic and terrifying, that would allow him unprecedented control over his subjects. He would describe this plan in terms that were an uncanny foreshadowing of Machiavelli’s own. It was designed, he said, to allow him to keep his subjects ‘in danger at his pleasure’.37
Council Learned
As the latest round of executions of de la Pole’s confederates took place in summer 1503, Henry VII and his older daughter Margaret, together with a ‘great multitude of lords and other noble persons’, set out from Richmond and progressed north on the first stages of her journey to Edinburgh, where she would marry the Scottish king James IV. By early July, the household had arrived at Collyweston, Lady Margaret Beaufort’s Northamptonshire palace and the centre of royal power in the east midlands. Set in rolling parkland, with water meadows, orchards, ponds and summer-houses, Collyweston had undergone months of improvements in preparation for the visit: the main gate had been newly crenellated and a new lodging built, with four large bay windows glazed with the Beaufort portcullis and clusters of daisies or ‘marguerites’. After two weeks of entertainments, Lady Margaret hosted a select gathering in the great hall – only those related by blood to the family were admitted – to bid farewell to the young girl, Henry pressing into her hand a book of hours and telling her to write. The forthcoming marriage may have been key to Scottish peace, but both the king and his mother appeared reluctant to let go of the fragile thirteen-year-old, whose departure seemed to compound the recent family losses. Margaret, too, was his oldest surviving child. Should anything happen to Prince Henry, she would be heir – and the English throne would on her death pass to the Stuart kings of Scotland. Exactly a century later, on the death of Henry VII’s granddaughter Queen Elizabeth, this was precisely what would happen, as Margaret’s great-grandson James VI of Scotland became James I of England.1
As Margaret’s party made its way with appropriate pomp towards Scotland, minstrels and trumpeters playing ‘in all the departings of the towns and in the entering of the same’, Henry and his household progressed as far as Nottingham, where news came of another hammer blow: Sir Reynold Bray, Henry’s chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster and the mastermind behind his financial policies, was dead. As the king’s household turned back, Henry took stock. Heading southwest, he reached the duchy of Lancaster estates at Tutbury by 31 August; a week later, he moved south to Merevale Abbey. There, he paid for the new stained-glass depiction of his favoured Breton saint, Armel, a belated commemoration of his victory at nearby Bosworth. Little would have remained of the battle site, ploughed over for the last eighteen years, but the time of year and the ripening cornfields, which his forces had once trampled down as they advanced steadily towards Richard III’s armies, perhaps prompted memories of his fugitive past and of the carnage that had yielded his God-given victory, and the sense that his dynastic ambitions were, now, just as uncertain as they had been then. The death of Bray, one of the chief architects of his reign, only added to the sense of insecurity.2
Of Henry’s small group of intimate advisers, Bray was the man of whom he had earliest memories. Aged eleven, growing up in Raglan Castle in the care of his Yorkist custodian Sir William Herbert, Henry had received a visit from the thickset, shaggy-haired son of a Worcestershire bone-setter and blood-letter who was then his mother’s indefatigable steward, and who had presented the young boy with a bow and a quiverful of arrows. During Henry’s exile, Bray had worked on behalf of Lady Margaret, supplying information to the insurgency and, crucially, raising finance for the invasion through his network of contacts in the city of London. In the first cash-strapped years of the reign, Bray’s financial acumen had been critical. Appointed chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, the crown lands that the king ran as his own private estates, his brutally efficient methods of management and revenue-collection were quickly extended throughout Henry’s government. He was trusted implicitly by the king and his mother, and remained a vital channel of communication between them.
Over the years, Bray had become pre-eminent among those in Henry’s inner circle. It was said that, in their long, private conversations in the privy chamber, the abrasive, straight-talking midlander even contradicted the king; that he could, as an observer succinctly put it, ‘do anything’ with Henry. On one occasion, the ever-impecunious Sir Richard Guildford, loitering around the privy chamber in the hope of waylaying Bray in order to borrow money from him, was summarily dismissed to entertain Catherine of Aragon until Bray and the king had finished talking business. Later, when Guildford returned, Bray, ‘so multifariously charged’ with the king’s affairs, had vanished.3
A snapshot of Bray’s omnicompetence comes in a memorandum that he drew up late in 1502, as the regime recovered from the shock of Prince Arthur’s death. This wide-ranging to-do list shows exactly how far his remit extended. In it, he reminded himself to fine gaolers for escaped prisoners; to process the sales of royal wardships and marriages; to investigate customs offences (a shipload of tin had been impounded at Southampton docks ‘to our behalf’; Venetian shippers owed import duties on a thousand butts of sweet wine, which as far as Bray could make out, London’s customs officers ‘must answer for’); and the inevitable actioning of financial bonds. At the head of this list he had itemized ‘three great matters in especial’: running the rule over details in the king’s will; conducting an audit into the household accounts and ‘setting some good order therein’; and carrying out a wide-ranging investigation into all the ‘revenues and receipts’ of the king’s lands that had not been properly accounted.
All of which confirms what everybody knew: all roads led to Bray. With no formal office, no formal appointment by letters patent, he sat at the top of the tree, the king’s chief executive. As the many ingratiating letters to him atte
sted, the highest nobles in the land trod the well-worn path to the door of their ‘loving friend’ Bray, knowing that a few words from him in the king’s ear could unlock the door to royal favour, plunge people into a lifetime of debt – or release them from it. For one petitioner, the son of Henry’s steward Lord Willoughby, Bray was behind only the king and Prince Henry in the pecking order of loyalties: ‘next to the king’s grace and my lord prince’, he wrote to Bray, he was bound ‘to owe you my service and [that of] all the friends I can make.’4
In his remorseless pursuit of the king’s interests, Bray had made himself enormously rich. The ways to profit from his position were legion, and he was good at all of them. He acquired plum crown offices, and, as the man who oversaw the king’s finances, knew best where the good deals were. He sold – on Henry’s behalf, naturally, although he took his cut – leases of crown lands, marriages to rich heiresses in the crown’s charge, and the custody of wards (the investment market in propertied minors, and widows for that matter, was booming). He received pensions, or financial retainers for access to royal favour, from several noblemen, and, indeed, the king of France. Then there was the sale of justice, in the form of fines and pardons for offences, or bonds whose conditions had, he and his colleagues had found, been broken. He bought up a vast portfolio of estates, which arced through eastern and southern England, much of it compulsorily purchased. He played the administrator’s trick of trapping people in debt to the crown, then setting fines so high that people were unable to pay them; he took over their debts in exchange for their land, sold to him at knockdown prices. He built houses and palaces, employed thousands of staff, and kept a fine wardrobe. His most prized possession was ‘a gown of crimson with the hood lined with white sarcenet of the order of Saint George’, his robe of the Order of the Garter, into which he had been elected along with the likes of Sir Thomas Lovell; Bray’s coat of arms still scatter the ceiling of the Garter’s spiritual home, St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle, into which he ploughed funds. Not only was Bray more powerful than most nobles; he looked like one too. The crucial difference was that he owed everything he had to the king. Bray, in short, did what all Henry’s counsellors and servants were doing – only he did it best.5
Bray had played an instrumental role in the development of Henry’s peculiar system of government. Over the years, his influence, and that of his duchy of Lancaster staff, had spread inexorably into the flexible, protean committees, offshoots of the king’s council, which hunted down and exploited the king’s prerogative rights, which sliced through the intractable meanderings of the common law courts like a hot knife through butter – and which helped generate the revenues that flooded into Henry’s chamber treasury, bypassing the grindingly slow process of the exchequer. By 1500, Bray’s name had become synonymous with one such tribunal, which enforced the king’s rights with a zealous rigour and which would become the most infamous expression of Henry’s rule.6
The tribunal’s name, in a sense, said it all. The phrase by which it referred to itself, and by which it came to be known by its victims, the ‘council learned in the law’ – or ‘council learned’ for short – was a generic term used to refer to a body of lawyers retained by a nobleman to arbitrate on cases within their private jurisdiction, or by a rich merchant to provide legal advice. The council headed by Bray, therefore, didn’t really have a name. It didn’t have a fixed membership either: consisting generally of a small quorum of between six and nine of the king’s counsellors, specialists in law or administration, its composition constantly mutated. And it was never legally constituted.
The council learned’s presence, unsurprisingly, was elusive. Its minute books rarely recorded the dates of its sessions, or names of attendees.7 Sometimes it met in the warren of government offices housing the exchequer and chancery that led off Westminster Hall; sometimes in the duchy of Lancaster’s rooms at St Bride’s on the western edge of the city, between Fleet Street and the Thames, and conveniently near the duchy’s favoured place of incarceration a few minutes’ frogmarch away from its offices, the Fleet prison. More often than not, it met simply where a few of its members happened to be gathered – at Greenwich or Richmond, or wherever the king was in residence. Given that its clerk, William Heydon, didn’t even know where the council learned was convening half the time, it was unsurprising that defendants hauled before it didn’t, either: one man who had travelled down from Nottingham in answer to a summons protested to the council that he had been in London for a week and ‘could not have knowledge where he should appear’.
The methods by which it worked were equally opaque. It was fed by a constant stream of information supplied by a well-entrenched network of retainers, agents and informers. Its subpoenas – consisting of a summons stamped with the privy seal, or a ‘sharp letter’ from the king or one of his counsellors – could be delivered by anyone, even an anonymous messenger. These writs rarely, if ever, stated a precise charge – simply a demand that the defendant should turn up in response to some unspecified accusation: ‘to answer to such things as shall be objected against him’.8 And because the council learned was not a recognized court of law, and its writs were not formally enrolled when they were issued, the defendant had to appear clutching the subpoena that he had been served. A process that filled people with fear, frustration and rage, it bypassed and overrode the common law courts, plucking people out of the normal workings of the legal system and hauling them straight in front of a panel invested with the king’s ultimate judicial authority. Henry himself never attended the council’s hearings, but then he didn’t have to. It was the perfect expression of his will, and of his personal rule – with Bray at its head.9
In a royal household which, underneath the carefully calibrated magnificence, was suffused with uncertainty and watchfulness, Bray’s men were everywhere, eyes on the lookout, ears pricked for loose talk. Sir John Mordaunt, a grizzled Middle-Temple lawyer who had fought for Henry at Bosworth, was increasingly prominent. So too was the duchy receiver-general John Cutt, a man with a no-nonsense attitude to interrogation: suspecting one of his household servants of stealing, he had dragged him into a privy and put a knife to his throat, stating bluntly that if the servant didn’t produce the stolen goods there and then, he would kill him. Then there was the auditor Robert Southwell, one of the small group of men who helped Henry cross-check his accounts, and another assiduous supplier of intelligence reports on flaky loyalties.10
Bray also had friends among the king’s secret servants, including William Smith, a man who worked closely with Bray and the council learned as a revenue-collector and financial enforcer. Wearing his other hat, Smith was page of the king’s wardrobe of robes, the personal wardrobe in which the king’s clothes were stored in a carefully organized sequence of racks, shelves and presses, and which was connected with the king’s privy chamber via a back stair. In this capacity, he was constantly about the king: brushing, storing and preparing his clothes, dressing him, handling petty cash and buying necessaries.11 As one of Perkin Warbeck’s keepers, Smith had turned provocateur, enticing him into trying to escape and providing Henry with the excuse he needed to lock the pretender in the Tower and to disfigure and mutilate him so that he no longer resembled the Yorkist prince he claimed to be.
If, as the Calais treasurer Sir Hugh Conway had feared, Lord Daubeney’s men were ‘strong in the king’s court’, so too, in their different way, were Bray’s. As a landed noble, Daubeney brought into the king’s service retainers from his own regional estates, men whose loyalties, in the final analysis, lay with him. Bray’s men were among those who, in John Skelton’s words, stood in small groups in the corridors of power ‘in sad communication’, who ‘pointed and nodded’ meaningfully, who strolled through the galleries and chambers in constant motion so as not to be overheard, who ‘wandered aye and stood still in no stead’.12
One of the regular faces on the council learned was Bray’s right-hand man Richard Empson. A Middle-Temple-trained law
yer and career bureaucrat, Empson had been the duchy’s attorney-general under Edward IV, before being sacked by Richard III – possibly owing to his connection with Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, whom Richard had summarily executed in 1483. Bad associations under Richard III, however, tended to be good ones in the new regime, and Empson was reappointed the same day as his new boss, Bray. Like his mentor and colleagues, Empson combined tireless service to the crown with tireless self-advancement. A suave, able networker – ‘he maketh his friends’, as one observer put it – his political career burgeoned. In 1497, he gained the dubious distinction of being named by Warbeck as prominent among the king’s ‘low-born and evil counsellors’.13
In one of the long-running legal battles characteristic of the age, Empson had tried to disinherit the Yorkshire knight Sir Robert Plumpton in favour of his own daughter, aiming to land some prime pieces of real estate for himself in the process. No angel himself, Plumpton wilted in the face of Empson’s sustained campaign of intimidation and perversion of the course of justice, leading one of Plumpton’s relatives to condemn the counsellor’s ‘utter and malicious enmity, and false craft’. One of Empson’s associates, accompanied by a group of servants, assaulted a bailiff of Plumpton’s, battering him almost to death before making him sign a statement in their favour. At a hearing at the York assizes in 1502, Empson appeared with a powerful display of muscle. Among two hundred servants, all wearing the red rose badge, were a number of Henry’s household knights and members of the king’s own security forces, the yeomen of the guard, who showed Empson exaggerated respect, holding the counsellor’s stirrup as he swung himself down from his horse. Suitably cowed, the jury returned in Empson’s favour, plunging Plumpton deep into debt. With these liveried retinues, Empson was behaving more like a member of the high nobility than the government lawyer he was. His appearance, Plumpton bitterly recalled, would have been more fitting for a duke.14