Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  On 27 June 1505, the day before his fourteenth birthday, in a room on the ground floor on the eastern side of Richmond Palace, Prince Henry gathered with a small group of counsellors. In front of the king’s diplomatic mastermind, Richard Fox, bishop of Winchester, he read from a short statement that his marriage to Catherine had been contracted before he was of age. Now, as he was ‘near the age of puberty’, he was taking matters into his own hands. The timing was significant. Canon law considered marriages made after the age of puberty – twelve for girls, fourteen for boys – indissoluble, because they could be consummated. Child marriages, on the other hand, might be dissolved, and regularly were. Of his own free will, the prince declared, he would not ratify the marriage contract; it was, he stated, ‘null and void’. He then signed the statement, followed by the other witnesses. They included the king’s chamberlain and vice-chamberlain, Lord Daubeney and Sir Charles Somerset, the king’s secretary Thomas Ruthal and Fox’s protégé Nicholas West; also there was the prince’s own chamberlain, Sir Henry Marney. With a day to spare, Prince Henry had cancelled his long-projected marriage to Catherine.27

  It was quite clear, however, that this act of adolescent self-assertion was nothing of the sort. Rather, his renunciation was a put-up job, carefully co-ordinated by the king and a select group of counsellors headed by Fox, who as a trained canon lawyer and one of those most closely associated with the prince since his christening, was perfectly placed to advise on the matter.

  Some quarter-century later, Fox, blind and seventy-nine years old, was quizzed by Henry VIII’s lawyers during the tortuous preliminaries to the king’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Casting his mind back, he could not recollect precisely the young prince’s opinion of the marriage when the papal bull was obtained but, he thought, he wanted it because he loved Catherine. His memories of the prince’s protest were, he regretted, similarly hazy. He remembered being in a room at Durham House when the statement was later read out in front of the anguished princess; and believed that it was made ‘at the command of Henry VII’, the reason being that Henry was livid at Ferdinand’s refusal – or inability – to pay Catherine’s marriage portion. The renunciation was never publicized; neither, Fox added, did the king object to his son ‘showing signs of love’ to Catherine thereafter. But the fact remained that, whatever his assertions, and whether of age or not, the prince had little say in the matter – in fact, he had about as much as Catherine herself.

  As far as Henry was concerned, the secret declaration was insurance against Ferdinand’s foot-dragging over the dowry. But it was, ultimately, about control. Some four years previously, the French king Louis XII, trying to prevent his wife, Anne of Brittany, from marrying off their only daughter to Philip and Juana’s son, the infant Charles of Ghent, had signed a similarly clandestine document to be flourished should political circumstances change and need arise. With one eye on the changing European situation, Henry was very keen indeed to keep in reserve the hand of his eligible young son, heir to some of the deepest coffers in Christendom. For good measure, however, he sent a letter to Ferdinand days before, saying that the marriage was still on. If circumstances changed, the prince’s renunciation could be flourished, and the whole thing blamed on the independent-mindedness of youth.28

  One Friday not long after, the Spanish ambassador de Puebla was summoned to Richmond. Admitted to the privy chamber, he found it quiet: ‘nobody there but the king’, his secret servants hovering unobtrusively in the background. Henry exploded with rage. Breaking bilateral trade agreements contained in the Anglo-Spanish marriage treaty, Ferdinand had forbidden English ships to export goods from Spain, leaving eight hundred sailors to make their way, destitute, back to England from Seville. And still Ferdinand was promising much and delivering nothing. Where was the outstanding payment of 100,000 scudos of Catherine’s marriage portion? And what about the jewels and treasure that Catherine was busy frittering away? And all the ‘other things, which he had already forgotten’?

  In the face of this torrent of obsessive abuse, de Puebla stood silent until the king had exhausted himself. That weekend, a messenger arrived at the ambassador’s house bearing a freshly slaughtered deer, a gift from the king. The following Monday, when he returned to Richmond to thank Henry, he found him ‘perfectly calm’. They conversed about affairs of state as though Friday’s meeting had never occurred. In light of the prince’s renunciation – an episode about which de Puebla knew nothing – there was, perhaps, something calculated, stage-managed about Henry’s anger, almost as though he were preparing the ground for a decisive rupture with Ferdinand, Aragon and Catherine.29

  As summer drifted on, the household set off on progress, down through Surrey and Sussex, into Hampshire and the New Forest. In the suburbs west of the city, the law courts were deserted; so too the riverine palaces along the Strand, occupied only by their desultory skeleton staff. But at Durham House, Catherine and her household, left behind, were still in residence. One day in early August, de Puebla walked over from his lodgings in Austin Friars to see her and, on his way in, bumped into one of her chamber attendants. Gesturing inside, the servant told him that an ambassador from Philip of Burgundy, en route to the king, had stopped off to pay his respects to the princess, and was waiting to see her. Taken aback, de Puebla went into Catherine’s apartment and told her the news; she cheerfully asked him to show the ambassador in. Kneeling at Catherine’s feet, the diplomat placed the services of Philip, Maximilian and Margaret of Savoy at her disposal. Then, in front of the horrified de Puebla, he and the princess launched into a full and frank conversation about diplomatic affairs, taking in the latest news about Suffolk and Henry’s prospective marriage plans. The ambassador had, he said, brought portraits of Margaret of Savoy with him for Henry’s inspection. Catherine, apparently oblivious to her father’s plans for Henry’s marriage to his niece, Queen Giovanna of Naples, asked to see them and, when they were brought in and uncovered, enthusiastically critiqued them. Not bad, she said, though in her view Michel Sittow – the Dutch master who had painted her and whose workshop had done Henry’s portrait – would have done a better job.30

  Catherine seemed transformed from the nervous, ill girl of the preceding months. The reason was clear: suddenly, she was wanted. Doña Elvira, it transpired, had been grooming the princess for a key role in Anglo-Castilian affairs, encouraging a steady stream of Habsburg diplomatic staff to Durham House, and advising Catherine to part with more expensive gifts from her dowry. To the princess, it seemed that her household had become a hub of European diplomacy, and that her role was to bring about a new political entente: an ever-closer union between her own adoptive country and the most fashionable dynasty in Europe. Under the direction of her brother, Don Manuel, Doña Elvira had proposed that Catherine herself could engineer a summit meeting between Philip, Henry and Margaret of Savoy, at Calais – and, too, she would have her own reunion with her sister Juana.31

  Shortly after the troubling episode with the Flanders ambassador, de Puebla was summoned back to Durham House. He entered Catherine’s chamber to find her sat at her desk, radiant, surrounded by paper, quills and ink. She picked up two letters and flourished them at the ambassador. One was from Philip – written in his own hand, no less – the other from Don Manuel: both agreed to the summit. Another letter, folded and sealed, was from her to Henry, summarizing what she had done and begging him to agree. Outside Durham House, a horsebacked courier was waiting to leave for the king.

  Aghast at this Castilian stitch-up, de Puebla proposed that Catherine hand over the letters to him, as Ferdinand’s accredited ambassador, to deliver to Henry; Catherine, rightly suspecting that the letters would never be seen again, refused. De Puebla then hurried off to confront Doña Elvira. He knew exactly what was going on, he told her, and made her promise that the letters would not be dispatched. No sooner had he got back home and sat down to dinner than an attendant, who he had left watching the house, ran in: the courier had galloped off. Hurr
ying back to Durham House, de Puebla burst into Catherine’s chamber in a state of high emotion; tears streaming down his cheeks, he swore the princess to secrecy before spelling out the situation. She had, he told her, been duped by Doña Elvira and Don Manuel into furthering Anglo-Habsburg diplomatic ties that would leave both her father and sister highly vulnerable. Under de Puebla’s direction, Catherine scribbled another note to Henry disavowing the previous one and beseeching him to put her father’s interests first. De Puebla’s messenger rode off in a cloud of dust, the gouty ambassador following behind as fast as his mule could carry him, to explain everything in full.

  Before he left, de Puebla told Catherine that she must pretend that nothing at all had changed – not to alter her behaviour at all. She was too open, he said; she had to learn to keep secrets. ‘Dissimulation’, he stressed, was the key. It was a lesson Catherine would learn well.

  When Henry received the news of Catherine’s amateurish backdoor diplomacy he was, reportedly, ‘astonished’.32 It seems highly unlikely, though, that he was genuinely surprised. After all, he had been calculatedly involved in Doña Elvira’s reinstatement at the heart of Catherine’s household – what was more, he would himself soon be using Catherine as a go-between in much the same way. More probably, he was taken aback by a situation that had got out of control. Doña Elvira, it was clear, was working not for English interests, but for those of Castile. Catherine, meanwhile, with her loyalties veering wildly between Castile and her sister, and Aragon and her father, was proving a loose cannon – and Henry, whatever his aims, was concerned to keep them secret. It would not do for him to be openly implicated in any plot against Ferdinand. Moreover, Henry already knew what Ferdinand was now telling him: that Doña Elvira’s brother, Don Manuel, had been instrumental in convincing Philip to keep hold of the earl of Suffolk at all costs. Perhaps Henry’s questions to his agent Anthony Savage had been spot on, and that Suffolk’s custodian the duke of Guelders, far from being Philip’s enemy, was in cahoots with him. That summer, rumours reached court that 6,000 armed men were massing in Guelders to help Suffolk invade England.

  Whatever the case, Doña Elvira, now known to be openly intriguing against Ferdinand, could hardly remain at Durham House as the head of Catherine’s household. After a vicious struggle behind the scenes – a ‘horrible hour’, one of Catherine’s servants recalled – Doña Elvira left to join her brother in the Netherlands. She would not return.33

  Throughout the summer of 1505 fighting in Flanders continued to flare spasmodically. In July the duchy of Guelders was captured by Philip’s men, and with it the castle of Hattem, where Suffolk was held prisoner. In Antwerp, talk filled the Burgundian court of how Philip was planning to ‘bridle’ the king of England. Henry, meanwhile, continued to throw money at the problem. That September, in four large iron coffers bought for the purpose, the Flanders ambassadors carried away another huge non-returnable loan from the royal coffers: £30,000, lent by Henry to Philip, now ‘King of Castile’, for his impending voyage to claim his throne. Honour- and treaty-bound to hand Suffolk over, Philip resorted to a stratagem worthy of his father, Maximilian. Returning Suffolk to Guelderland, and having taken the money, he blandly told Henry that there was nothing he could do: Suffolk was out of his hands, and his territory. Given that Philip was now openly styling himself duke of Guelders, this was a bit rich.34

  As 1505 drew to a close, Catherine wrote to her father from Richmond in a state of nervous anxiety. She had, she wrote, hardly a penny since her arrival in England, except for food, and she could barely keep her servants decently clothed. On the face of it, the complaint seems curious: Catherine was not – yet – financially embarrassed, and Henry continued to pay her monthly expenses. What had changed, however, was the organization of her household.

  On Doña Elvira’s departure, Catherine had begged de Puebla to ask the king for a new mistress of her household, somebody harmless, like an ‘old English lady’. Henry, though, had other ideas. The Doña Elvira experiment having failed, he dismantled the princess’s household, sacked a number of her male servants, and absorbed Catherine and her remaining staff into his own. It was a move that looked uncannily like the arrangements he had made for his own son.35

  Unable to blame her father, or Henry, for the limbo in which she found herself, Catherine directed her ire at the one person who remained in the firing line: the ambassador Rodrigo de Puebla. With his suspiciously comprehensive knowledge of English affairs and his subtle behaviour, the corpulent, deformed lawyer was an obvious target. What was more, his daughter’s recent arrest by the Seville Inquisition – a Jewish converso like her father, she had probably failed to display the requisite enthusiasm for her new Christian religion – only confirmed to the Spanish everything that they had suspected about de Puebla’s general shiftiness and evasiveness. Despite his increasingly frantic dispatches beseeching that his daughter not be treated ‘with too great rigour’ – the danger she was in, he wrote pleadingly, ‘deprives me of my tranquillity, my energy of mind, and my health’ – no strings were pulled on his behalf. It was de Puebla, Catherine wrote to her father, who had wrecked everything, who was the cause of all her troubles. Ferdinand, she said, should send a new ambassador, somebody she could trust.36

  Meanwhile, Henry’s agents continued to circle around Suffolk, whose circumstances were dire. A virtual prisoner in Philip’s fortress of Namur, in southern Flanders, he was kept on a meagre allowance in a lodging with barred windows and six guards who doubled as attendants. His dwindling band of followers were scattered through towns in the region, some – including his brother Richard, still in Aachen – detained for non-payment of Suffolk’s mounting debts. Always prone to flights of self-delusion, the earl had become manic, veering from fevered panic to flashes of grandiose optimism, still believing that he could dictate his own terms for his voluntary return to England – a belief that Henry did much to encourage.37 Although Suffolk’s conviction of his own importance was not entirely misplaced, his future remained Philip’s to decide and to manipulate.

  That winter of 1505, talk at the archduke’s court described the earl as a ‘great thorn’ in Henry’s eye, how ‘the people of England love and long for him’, and the considerable damage he could do Henry.38 Philip knew how much the king feared the spectre of Suffolk backed by a well-equipped Burgundian army. Having banked £138,000 in danger money from Henry in that year alone, Philip was hardly about to yield up his Yorkist cash cow, whatever Suffolk wanted. In the meantime, he was focused on his impending voyage to Castile, now finally coming to fruition with the aid of Henry’s funds.39

  In his pre-Christmas dispatch to the Signoria, the Venetian ambassador to Flanders reported on Philip’s preparations. It was a high-risk journey. Philip may have got Henry over a barrel as far as Suffolk was concerned, but he needed more than the English king’s neutrality. An overland trip to Spain, which would have involved negotiating French territory, was impossible. Habsburg–French relations were at a new low – as the Venetian ambassador drily remarked, the mere mention of Louis XII’s name caused words of a ‘very evil nature to escape the king of Castile’s lips’. The only alternative route, west along the English Channel between a hostile French coastline and England, and through the Bay of Biscay, was treacherous, particularly in winter; should ‘fortune cast him on the shore of England’, Philip wanted to make sure that Henry would not hinder his onward journey. With this in mind, he was willing to concede all Henry’s swingeing trade demands; he was even, it seems, happy to facilitate some contact with Suffolk. That December, the earl was jubilant to receive a series of visits from an English contact who he referred to as ‘father’ – but who, unknown to him, was almost certainly one of Henry’s double-agents. But still Philip was in no hurry to give the earl up, and, to add insult to injury, he made the trouble-making Don Manuel a knight of the prestigious Order of the Golden Fleece. Then, as winter deepened, where four long years of cat-and-mouse over Suffolk had failed to yield Henry
any result, fortune intervened.40

  This Day Came de la Pole

  On the evening of 15 January 1506, icy storms raged across southern England. Funnelling up the English Channel from the Atlantic, gales hit London with such force that trees were uprooted, ‘weak houses’ collapsed and roofs were ripped off. Torrential rain swamped the city and surrounding countryside ‘to the great hurt of sundry cattle and especially of sheep’. The bronze eagle that topped the steeple of St Paul’s was ripped off its perch and flung the length of the churchyard, crashing into a nearby bookshop at the sign of the black eagle. That night, out at sea, off England’s southern coast, the tempest was about to bring Henry VII an extraordinary stroke of luck.1

  Two days later, as the winds began to abate, a man dismounted at the gates of Richmond Palace, grimy and breathless from hard riding, bringing ‘word of the landing of strangers in the west country’. Shown into the king’s presence, he told his news under Henry’s fixed gaze, and was rewarded with a lavish tip of ten shillings. Other dispatches followed, from the south coast ports of Winchelsea and Weymouth, the abbeys of Cerne Abbas and Melton, confirming the man’s story. Philip of Burgundy had been shipwrecked off the Dorset coast on his way to Spain. The earl of Suffolk’s protector, the heir to the Habsburg throne in which Henry had invested so much time and money – indeed, whose very journey he had financed – had fallen into his hands. Summoning his counsellors, giving orders for relay riders to be deployed at staging-posts between Richmond and the southwest to feed him with a regular supply of intelligence, and sending a message to his mother, then in residence at her nearby palace of Croydon, Henry began to plan how he could best use this unexpected gift from God.2