Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  His arrival had been deliberately planned. Turning thirteen on 28 June, he was on the threshold of adolescentia, the age when boyhood merged into adulthood. Since his mother’s death over a year previously, through the rumours, alerts, arrests and executions, he had remained with his sisters out at the backwater of Eltham, apart from the occasional visit to court. Now, however, things were changing. He was moving into the royal household, where he would live with the father he hardly knew.2

  Henry’s reasons for leaving his son at Eltham had been pragmatic. The repeated crises of the past years had left him with his hands full, at a time when he was battling constantly with illness. And, very probably, he was in a quandary about precisely how to bring the boy up.

  By the age of seven, Prince Arthur had had his own independent household and council in the Welsh Marches, and was already gaining the hands-on experience deemed so necessary for kingship. From afar, the king had kept in constant touch with the prince’s council, who reported on his progress and on anything untoward, including any ‘unprincely demeaning’ on Arthur’s part – and on the behaviour of members of his household. Since Elizabeth’s death, he had been doing the same for Prince Henry, gradually reshaping his son’s household from the establishment of his infancy into one fit for an adolescent heir to the throne. He did so in conjunction with that stickler for organization, his mother, and the prince’s grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort.3

  In the intervening years, the prince’s household had taken on a new tone. His footmen and personal servants were now dressed, not in the blue and tawny of the duke of York, but in tawny and black: royal colours.4 The female-dominated atmosphere of his early years had changed, too. His lady mistress Elizabeth Denton, the woman who had been like a second mother to him, had had her wages paid up and left the prince’s service to become a gentlewoman in Lady Margaret’s household. Several new, male, servants joined him. Many of them, in their late teens and early twenties, had spent the greater part of their lives in royal service, like the devout Welshman William Thomas, previously one of Prince Arthur’s close attendants, and Ralph Pudsey, a groom of Henry VII’s chamber who became the prince’s waiter and keeper of his jewellery. Among them was a man called William Compton. A ward of court from the age of eleven following the death of his father, a minor Warwickshire landowner, Compton had been brought up among the menial servants of the royal household, learning how to serve. It was an education that, now aged twenty-two, he had fully absorbed, knowing when to speak and when to keep quiet and still, to blend into the background.5

  Presiding over the prince’s household was his chamberlain, Sir Henry Marney. Now in his late forties, from an old Essex family, Marney had become a royal counsellor early in the reign. He was cut from the same cloth as many of Henry’s closest advisers: a hard-nosed, ambitious administrator who could back up his words with judicious force, he had fought at Stoke and against the Cornish rebels at Blackheath. Marney had been a familiar face around the prince’s household as early as 1494, when he was knighted at the prince’s creation as duke of York, while his son Thomas and daughter Grace were among the prince’s servants at Eltham. As the king and Lady Margaret cast around for somebody to head the prince’s household, Sir Richard Pole, previously Arthur’s chamberlain and a member of the Beaufort family might have been an obvious choice. But Pole was, very probably, already sickening with the illness that would kill him in October 1504. More to the point, Marney was familiar. The king trusted him and so too did Lady Margaret: she would make him one of the executors to her will, alongside Fox, Lovell and the saintly bishop of Rochester, John Fisher.

  In early 1504, nearly two years after his brother’s death, Prince Henry was formally created Prince of Wales. After Parliament had stripped him of his title and lands of the duchy of York – whose management and lucrative revenues duly reverted to the crown – and invested him with those of Prince of Wales, his creation was performed on 23 February.6 His period of stasis at Eltham was coming to a close: finally, his father had decided on a plan. While the prince was still duke of York, while his brother was still alive, the king had contemplated setting him up independently; he had even acquired a home for him, Castle Codnor in Derbyshire, and planned for the expansion of his household. But now, after what had happened to Arthur in Ludlow, and after the repeated shocks of the previous years, he had changed his mind.

  Henry would keep his son close, the prince’s household and council absorbed within his own. The likes of Sir Richard Empson, prominent about the king, would sit on Prince Henry’s council, while Richard Fox, the man who had christened and baptized the prince, could also keep a close eye on him. That summer, as the prince and his retinue arrived at court, Sir Henry Marney received a present of a hundred marks from the king, a ‘golden hello’. And, at the top of the king’s wage bill, drawing the handsome quarterly salary of £6 13s 4d, appeared the name of ‘Master Arthur’. Henry’s incorporation of the prince’s beloved uncle, Arthur Plantagenet, into his own staff spoke volumes. Henry clearly valued his wife’s affable, trustworthy half-brother, who had been a reassuring presence following Elizabeth’s death, and wanted him around. Besides which, this Yorkist offshoot had – for Henry – the inestimable advantage of bastardy, with no difficult issues of lineage to complicate things. The king, it seemed, was determined to play a full role in his son’s future development – and that included sharing his servants.7

  The prince was not entirely wet behind the ears. He had, after all, been on display from the moment of his birth, born into the rhythms and rituals of court life. His natural presence and his appetite for the big occasion had been evident from an early age, and the hiatus of the last years had undoubtedly left him itching to take his place on the biggest stage of all. Court, of course, was a stage. Thomas More talked about power politics as ‘kings’ games, as it were stage plays, and for the most part played upon scaffolds’. More being More, the pun on scaffold as both stage and gallows was fully intended.8 But, as Henry VII was fully aware, there was an audience ready and waiting to watch and scrutinize the young prince: his appearance, his behaviour, who he called to his side, whose company he preferred, who he spoke to kindly, and who he ignored. In short, people would be considering what kind of heir he might make, when the time came – and what they could get out of him.

  Moreover, although the prince had a certain precociousness, he was sheltered, dutiful and pious, immersed in the rich, complex patterns of traditional religion by which people understood and ordered their lives. In this, he followed his mother and, of course, that model of devotion, his grandmother Lady Margaret Beaufort, with her relics, books of hours and patronage of fashionable religious cults such as the Holy Name of Jesus and the Five Wounds of Christ.9 All of which is evident from a ‘bede roll’ – a portable aid to prayer – that he carried around with him.

  Five inches wide and eleven feet long, the parchment roll unfurls to reveal delicate, richly coloured illuminations: the red-and-white rose and other royal emblems giving way to the Blessed Trinity, a crowned God the Father flanked on his right by the Holy Ghost and on his left by Jesus; then a Christ crucified, his sacred blood spurting from his five wounds onto a mortuary sheet held by two hovering angels. More images follow: the three nails of the passion, hammered into Jesus’ feet and hands; the Virgin and child; and six saints, including St George and Henry VII’s favoured St Armel. Punctuating the images, Latin prayers and rubrics instruct on its use. The repetitious, incantatory exercises – kneeling, making the sign of the cross, concentrating fixedly on the images while reciting endless Pater Nosters, Ave Marias and Credos – could bring the reciter impressive spiritual benefits: one particular daily exercise alone yielded 52,712 years and 40 days off time in purgatory. Another, if performed correctly and daily, guaranteed seven gifts. The reciter would not die a ‘sudden death’, nor would he be ‘slain with sword or knife’ or poisoned; neither would his enemies overcome him. He would have sufficient wealth all his life and would not die
without receiving the sacraments. Meanwhile, he would be defended from ‘all evil spirits, pestilence, fevers, and all other infirmities on land and on water’. All this had a magical quality; indeed, the roll itself was a charm, an amulet. The very act of carrying it would ward off evil.

  Who gave Prince Henry the bede roll, and when, is unclear. He might have inherited it from his brother, as he inherited everything else: the roll contains both the prince of Wales’s ostrich feathers and Catherine’s crown of Castile. Later, he would give it to his servant William Thomas – his prayer companion, perhaps, the two genuflecting, crossing and half-whispering half-muttering the mantras over and over – writing on it laboriously: ‘William Thomas, I pray you, pray for me, your loving master Prince Henry.’ That he believed fervently in its power, its ability to protect, is undeniable – which was just as well, because he needed all the help he could get.10

  In coming to court, the prince was entering his father’s world. At Eltham, he had been more or less insulated from the instability of recent years – another reason, perhaps, why the king had kept him secluded for so long. But now, he would be exposed to the tensions and politicking of the royal household, where the uncertainties of the time were distilled into faction, and for which he was, increasingly, the focus: from the anxieties, voiced by the Calais servants, that he would not be able to compel loyalty on his father’s death, to nobles like Buckingham, for whom the young figure of the prince only served to reinforce their own sense of superiority and entitlement. Even among his own circle of companions there were those who looked at him with resentment. A year younger than the prince, Henry Pole was the eldest son of Sir Richard Pole, formerly Arthur’s chamberlain. But his mother, Margaret Pole, was a full-blooded Plantagenet, older sister of the earl of Warwick, executed on trumped-up charges by Henry VII. In the decades to come, as members of his family became Henry VIII’s most bitter enemies, Pole would state how he had ‘never loved’ him ‘from childhood’.

  Henry had planned the timing of his son’s arrival at court for another reason, too. For the first time, the prince would join him on the summer progress, the extended hunting holiday that doubled as a political tour of the regions. By the end of July, the court had moved down to Greenwich, from where the ‘riding’ household, scaled down to around half the size of the standing household of around 1,500 servants, prepared to depart.11

  Contrary to recent years, when the travelling household had shuttled between the royal houses along the banks of the Thames, that summer’s progress seemed a throwback to the early years of the reign, when Henry had travelled widely to assert royal power in the far-flung regions of his new, highly insecure kingdom. Published, as was customary, in June, the ‘gests’ or itinerary mapped out a route southeast, deep into Kent, where political instability, local feuding, rumours of the king’s impending death and challenges to his son’s succession had come together in a combustible mix, and where the king’s presence was urgently needed. The household would stop off at the manors of all the region’s big men – John Broke, Lord Cobham at Dartford, Lord Bergavenny at Birling, Sir Richard Guildford at Maidstone and Sir Edward Poynings at Westenhanger. Being chosen to accommodate and entertain the king in this way was a great honour, but such signs of favour were rarely entirely straightforward. It was a chance for Henry to take the political temperature, to assess the atmosphere in the houses he stayed in, and to impress his subjects. It was, then, highly significant that he should take his son with him. The prince was, it seems, beginning to develop into a reassuringly solid physical presence who could safely be shown off as heir to the throne.

  As well as getting a first-hand introduction to government in the restive provinces, this would be an extended holiday for the prince and his previously absentee father. On progress, the politics, lobbying and petitioning focused on the hunt – and hunting was a sport to which both Henry and the prince were addicted. That summer, too, they were constantly in each other’s company for the first time. It was a chance for the king to get to know his son and heir better, and to lavish very public attention on him.12

  The prince’s coming to court that summer coincided with a dispatch from Rome, where negotiations over the dispensation for Catherine’s remarriage had dragged on interminably. While Alexander VI, the Borgia pope, may have been a byword for nepotism, the new incumbent, the belligerent Julius II, was proving no slouch on that front himself, packing the curia with his relatives from the Tuscan city of Lucca. The head of the English ambassadorial team and former Borgia favourite, Adriano Castellesi, had been lobbying frantically to ingratiate himself with the new papal regime, and to stay in Henry’s good books. He was, he wrote to the king, ‘ex toto anglicus’, English to his core, and was ‘your creature and the work of your hands’. He stressed his loyalty and commitment by decorating his lavish new palace in Rome with England’s coat-of-arms and making it over to the king as an embassy – thereby cementing his own position – and by laying out a detailed programme for obtaining the dispensation. Castellesi’s plan largely involved showering the new pope’s Della Rovere clan with sweeteners in the form of cash, lucrative offices and honours, including conferring the Order of the Garter on Duke Guidobaldo of Urbino whose cultured court acted as a back-channel to the papal curia. All of which appeared to do the trick. When, on 20 May 1504, the English embassy arrived in Rome to profess obedience to the new pope, the deputation was headed by Castellesi. His uneasiness, however, would prove entirely justified.13

  On 6 July, Julius wrote to Henry VII protesting that he had never intended to withhold the dispensation, and that the delay was simply due to his desire to ‘consider the case more maturely’; he would, he stressed, take the affairs of England under his ‘special protection’. He was delighted, he added casually, that the king had chosen as his Cardinal Protector the pope’s nephew, Galeotto della Rovere, and he took the opportunity to drop in a few more names of those whose advancement might further Henry’s cause in Rome. Castellesi’s name was notable by its absence. But among them was another of the pope’s extended family, Silvestro Gigli, on whom Julius heaped praise for his efforts on Henry’s behalf.

  Intrigue ran in Gigli’s blood. His uncle Giovanni, born in the Netherlands of Lucchese parents, had moved to England decades previously, joining the London branch of the family merchant-banking firm. A cultured man of letters, he had become the first resident English ambassador at Rome and, on his death, had been succeeded by Castellesi. Silvestro, also a merchant-financier and a member of Henry’s diplomatic team, was given his uncle’s bishopric of Worcester. Silvestro, though, had his eye on Castellesi’s job. Now that Julius II was in power, he saw his opportunity. As the king’s two chief diplomats at Rome scrambled for his favour in their race to obtain the dispensation, their mutual antagonism would have unexpected side-effects. In the months and years to come, it would crystallize into faction between Henry’s counsellors and would ripple out into the houses of London’s intelligentsia and, ultimately, into the household of the prince himself.14

  In the last week of July, preceded by the harbingers who rode ahead, checking that accommodation was ample and correctly allocated according to rank – as well as for warning signs of disease and ‘perilous sickmen’ in the towns and villages through which the court passed – the household moved out of Greenwich and along the main London–Canterbury road, through apple orchards and fields of wheat and barley parched with lack of rain, horses straining at carts piled high with coffers and trunks. With his son at his side, and the brief for the marriage dispensation just arrived, Henry was in expansive and solicitous mood. On 4 August he dispatched one of his privy servants with a letter to Catherine, who had fallen seriously ill at Greenwich; her fever, racking cough and stomach problems were exacerbated by a hamfisted doctor whose laboured efforts to bleed her resulted in ‘no blood’. Rather than accompanying the court and her betrothed on progress, she had returned to Durham House with her household to convalesce. Henry promised her the best phy
sicians he could find. He loved her, he stressed, ‘as his own daughter’, and told her to ask him for anything she wanted.15

  But it was Henry’s demonstrative affection for his son that attracted most attention. Travelling with the court, the Spanish ambassador Ferdinand Duque – sent to bolster, and keep an eye on, the activities of the Anglophile Rodrigo de Puebla – remarked warmly of the king’s parenting skills in a letter to King Ferdinand. ‘It is quite wonderful’, he wrote, ‘how much the king likes the prince of Wales’ – and with good reason, for the prince ‘deserves all love.’ ‘Certainly’, he commented approvingly, ‘there could be no better school in the world than the society of such a father as Henry VII.’

  Ferdinand Duque had no reason to disbelieve the evidence of his own eyes, and indeed, Henry’s delight in the prince was entirely consistent with his behaviour on the rare occasions that the pair had previously been seen together. The king did love his son – who was, after all, the embodiment of everything he had fought for over the previous quarter century. Besides which, the boy probably reminded Henry of Elizabeth.