Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  Grimaldi, a broker, was head of the London branch of the eponymous Genoese banking house which his father, Lodovico, had opened decades previously. The Genoese were the largest of the Italian merchant ‘nations’ or communities that clustered around the traditional Italian quarter of Lombard Street, and the Grimaldi one of the foremost families, their names featuring prominently in the lists of licensed alien brokers approved by the Corporation of London. The Genoese were a byword for sharp practice and corruption – perhaps unsurprisingly, given that they were Europe’s finest financiers – and it was a stereotype to which John Baptist fully adhered. Even where illegalism was the norm, he stood out, his career littered with examples of extortion, bribery and intimidation. In 1488, he was imprisoned for racketeering, and it may well have been then that he agreed with the royal authorities to turn informer.15

  Suffering from an acute skin condition, erysipelas, Grimaldi stood out from the crowd with his swollen ‘blobby face’ and ‘cankered complexion’. He had the invaluable ability to engage people in conversation, to ‘feel and tempt’ them, make them speak out of turn and betray confidences. His rancour towards London’s notoriously xenophobic mercantile community only made him more driven. Styling himself a member of the royal household, Grimaldi shuttled around the city picking up gossip, sifting information and bringing cases to the attention of the king’s counsellors. He drifted into the exchequer offices at Westminster with impunity. Treating its staff with a casual familiarity, he had much ‘privileging’ there – though no formal royal position – riffling through official documents and peering over clerks’ shoulders as they enrolled debts. In his previous career as under-sheriff, Dudley would have known of Grimaldi’s activities, and would have crossed paths with him on many occasions; now, Grimaldi’s financial acumen, his knowledge of London’s demi-monde and his utter lack of scruple made him particularly useful.16

  For the city bourgeoisie, another alarming sign of Dudley’s dominance after 1504 was the rise to power of John Camby. A member of the grocers’ guild and a sheriff’s sergeant – a key position in city law-enforcement – Camby moved easily between London’s mercantile and political communities and the shadier world that he was supposed to police. Keeping a ‘stew’ or brothel in London’s Thamesside red-light district, Camby was heavily involved in the prostitution trade. This in itself was hardly unusual: after all, the biggest stews in the country, in Southwark, outside the city limits, were owned by the bishop of Winchester – none other than Henry’s close adviser Richard Fox. Nevertheless, in a city in which, as one Venetian merchant was at pains to point out, it was dangerous merely to step outdoors after dark, London’s prostitution trade had long been the focus for crime of all kinds, from robbery to homicide.17 It was a world in which Camby loomed large, and from which he had made a lot of money. According to his contemporaries, he lived a ‘wayward life’ and was associated with a litany of offences from bribery to gross bodily harm; somehow, though, he had escaped being dismissed from office. As well as a liberal way with bribes, Camby evidently had a way of getting out of tight corners, a gift of the gab. And he realized early on that Dudley was destined for great things.18

  Flattering Dudley and showering him with gifts, Camby quickly became one of his closest associates. In November 1505 Dudley appointed him to the highly profitable office of weigher of wools in the port of London’s custom house, whose stone bulk stood out among the mass of wharves just west of the Tower. Posts like these were often filled by members of the royal household – in particular, by servants in the wardrobe, who could bring to bear their expertise in textiles and accounting in sniffing out sharp practice. Camby brought other kinds of expertise: an intimate knowledge of London’s political and criminal worlds, his own network of informers, and an appetite for extortion with menaces.

  The city was dismayed at his appointment, but worse was to come. Camby was given the keepership of one of the two Counter prisons, in Poultry Yard off Cheapside, traditionally run by London’s sheriffs, where many convicted of offences in the city courts were held – in particular, of offences relating to the prostitution industry in which Camby had such a considerable stake. London’s politicians were aghast. Dudley’s preferment of Camby was the latest, and most egregious, example of the overturning of the natural order of things, of royal interference in the way London regulated itself. Given a free hand, Camby used it with gusto. Universally feared, he was ‘far in authority above any of the Sheriffs to whom of right he ought to have been subject and servant’.19

  That Henry knew much of what was going on is all too clear. It was he who agreed the fines with Dudley – as Dudley had pointed out to Clopton, it was the king who ‘bade me offer you fifty marks’ to take over his court case. Toft, meanwhile, was rewarded personally by the king; so too was Grimaldi, who Henry used in a variety of financial activities.20

  Through London’s teeming port and customs house, its warehouses, taverns, guildhalls and exchanges, everywhere where business was transacted, the promoters moved. Suspicion seeped through the city. Using the information they provided, Dudley and his colleagues on the council learned in the law prosecuted aggressively, arresting and detaining indefinitely without trial, the accused coerced into ‘agreeing’ with the king for whatever sums the counsellors, Dudley at the forefront, deemed suitable and, always, being forced into further financial bonds.

  In the council learned’s minute books, and in Dudley’s accounts, the names mounted up, a litany of victims: men like the mercer Richard Gittins, ‘long in prison and paid much money upon a light surmise’; to James Yarford, who paid a hundred marks for release from a false indictment for felony; to the London haberdasher Robert Hawkyns, convicted and imprisoned for murder on flaky testimony – ‘the surmise of a lewd fellow’ – who paid 100 marks and entered into a bond for the same amount for his future good behaviour.21 In one of the most egregious cases, Thomas Kneseworth, the former mayor, was pulled up for trading offences allegedly committed under his mayoralty, together with his two sheriffs, Shore and Grove. All three were imprisoned indefinitely in the Marshalsea until they agreed to exorbitant penalties for their release. Their pardons came to another £1,133 6s 8d, as much as possible paid cash down, the rest to be paid in instalments. They were, as Dudley later acknowledged, convicted on a ‘light cause’, a technicality.22 London’s citizens were terrorized. But if they felt things could get no worse, they were mistaken.

  In southern England, the winter of 1506–7 was unseasonably warm. Frost scarcely lingered on the ground, no snow fell and – unlike the previous winter, which had dealt Henry such an extraordinary stroke of luck with the shipwrecking of Philip of Burgundy – there were no storms. At the end of January, the royal household left Greenwich, its flotilla of barges moving up the Thames through London to Richmond, where Henry again fell ill with a recurrence of the quinsy that had prostrated him following Elizabeth’s death three years previously. Despite the mildness of the winter, it was always the time of year that he was most susceptible, when despite the fires banked high and the thick arras-lined walls, the damp still seeped into the riverine houses along the Thames and, at high tide, the river itself trickled into cellars, undercrofts and kitchens. At Candlemas, in mid-February, Henry was able to take barge to Westminster to observe the anniversary of Elizabeth’s death, but shortly after, he fell into a steep decline. By early March it was becoming clear that his illness – tuberculosis, complicated by asthma – was life-threatening. The moment of crisis, it seemed, had arrived. Its harbinger was Lady Margaret Beaufort, who that month descended on Richmond with her household and immediately took charge.23

  In recent years, Lady Margaret had stayed closer to her son, moving in 1505 from Collyweston to her Hertfordshire manor of Hatfield, a day’s ride from her London house of Coldharbour and the Thamesside royal palaces. That March, she organized with her customary zeal, taking over the supervision of Henry’s domestic servants, diet and physicians, and ordering a consignment of improv
ing tomes of spiritual consolation: the fashionable Shepherds’ Calendar, a mixture of medical advice, prognostication and religious consolation, and a copy of the German mystic Henry Suso’s Horologium Sapientiae, with a life of St Benedict bound ‘in the same book’.24 But Lady Margaret’s presence at Richmond was, as ever, about more than her son’s physical and spiritual well-being: it was to ensure Prince Henry’s smooth succession to the throne. As she made payments to the king’s privy servants – constantly about him as he lay prostrate, unable to swallow food or water, fighting for air – the king’s mother was, as ever, alert to the slightest changes in atmosphere, to anything out of place.25

  By mid-March, Henry was close to death. Lady Margaret directed operations, paying Garter herald Thomas Wriothesley twenty shillings for ‘making of a book of mourning clothes’, and a substantial quantity of ‘black material’ – £57 6s 8d-worth – was bought to manufacture them with. She sent riders to alert her confessor John Fisher, bishop of Rochester and, in his East Anglian estates, the earl of Oxford, whose role as constable of the Tower would be paramount in any crisis. As the king weakened, he found enough strength to command two of his chaplains to order 7,209 sung masses as intercessions for his soul, and another thousand masses from his favoured Friars Observant at Greenwich. One of the chaplains, hovering by Henry’s bedside, was a sleek cleric in his mid-thirties, a ‘Master Wolsey’.26

  After an academic career in theology at Oxford, Thomas Wolsey had gained a foothold in court circles as tutor to the marquis of Dorset’s children. He had transferred to the service of Henry Deane, the short-lived archbishop of Canterbury, standing at the archbishop’s graveside after his untimely death, a week after Queen Elizabeth’s, in February 1503. Then, amid the security alerts and household reshuffles, he headed for Calais as chaplain to its deputy governor Sir Richard Nanfan, a position of trust which would have undoubtedly seen him involved in the troubled conversations over the king’s illness and the succession. When, in late 1506, the ailing Nanfan returned to England and retired to his Buckinghamshire estates, he recommended Wolsey’s abilities and energy to the king in glowing terms. Henry took him on.

  Wolsey’s new position as royal chaplain gave him considerable personal access to the king’s privy chamber. Ministering to Henry’s private devotions, he was in constant attendance: in present sight of the king daily by reason he attended and said mass before his grace in his privy closet’.27 As the king’s spiritual needs intensified along with his physical decline, the attentive Wolsey was perfectly placed to observe the political manoeuvrings being played out.

  He was well aware of the value of his position. Never one to let the grass grow under his feet, he had started to ingratiate himself with his fellow chaplains, in particular Silvestro Gigli, and to cultivate the great men at court, making a beeline for Richard Fox and Thomas Lovell. Both counsellors quickly realized that Wolsey, sharp and energetic, would make a very useful apprentice indeed, a ‘meet and an apt person to be preferred to witty affairs’, affairs that might range from diplomatic missions to rather more informal requests, such as keeping a close eye on the goings-on around the ailing king’s bed. A discreet, watchful presence, Wolsey registered who controlled admission, who let people in and rebuffed others, who stayed longest. He saw, too, how the secret chamber, an arrangement designed by the king to control access, might have its weak points, how in certain conditions – when the king was in extreme ill-health, perhaps – it might seem as if those closest to Henry were controlling him, rather than the other way round.28

  Particularly notable were the number of servants with close connections to Empson and Dudley. William Smith, Henry’s groom of the wardrobe of robes and a financial enforcer for the council learned, was a close colleague of Empson’s; then there was the groom of the stool Hugh Denys, the man in charge of the running of the secret chamber. Responsible for the king’s everyday necessities, Denys was handling increasing quantities of cash, while fines for certain common-law offences were being siphoned off to him. He got on well with Dudley, with whom he shared business interests in finance and real estate. What was perhaps Denys’s most remarkable acquisition had come the previous year, when he and a syndicate of ‘feoffees’ or trustees had bought Edmund Dudley’s alma mater, Gray’s Inn: astonishingly, the owner of one of the four legal inns of court was now the king’s closest personal servant.

  That March, too, the sudden appearance in the king’s chamber accounts of one of Denys’s fellow Gray’s Inn trustees, a ‘Master Lupton’, seems to confirm what was happening. Roger Lupton, a canon lawyer and provost of Eton College, was another of the coterie of royal chaplains around the king’s bedside. But now, for the first time, Lupton was invested with considerable financial responsibility. Like Denys and William Smith, he made payments, arranging for alms to be distributed and money disbursed to redeem debtors from London’s prisons in the customary acts of contrition, a sure sign that the king was nearing his end. But there was a particular reason for Lupton’s rise to prominence: he was an associate of Dudley’s.29

  Men like Denys, Smith and Lupton were faithful, trusted servants of the king, people who could be relied upon in the most serious of crises. But they were also Empson and Dudley’s friends, and their preeminence around the dying king revealed which way the wind of royal favour was blowing.

  On 19 March, a clerk was paid forty shillings to draw up the king’s will, copying meticulously from an earlier draft and incorporating new provisions. Added to the list of the twelve key executors, Henry’s most intimate and trustworthy advisers that included Fox, Lovell and the vice-chamberlain Sir Charles Somerset, were two new names: Sir Richard Empson and, at the bottom, ‘Edmund Dudley, esquire’. Both men had proved themselves indispensable. Now, they were among those few brokers charged with arranging the transfer of power from Henry VII to his son, who would be responsible not just for the first proper dynastic succession for a hundred years, but who, guiding the new, young king, would help determine what kind of regime it would be.

  Downriver from Richmond, the London chronicler remarked on a renewed air of optimism. With a warm, early spring – in March, ‘buds were as far out this year as some year they be, by the latter end of April’ – came an atmosphere of détente. From Camby’s Counter prison in the Poultry to the Fleet prison, from the Marshalsea, the King’s Bench gaol run by Sir Thomas Brandon across the river in Southwark, to the fetid dungeon under Ludgate, cell doors swung open and debtors were released.30

  Henry’s act of contrition seemed to work. Towards the end of the month, he was out of danger. On 31 March, Wednesday of Holy Week, Rodrigo de Puebla was admitted to the king’s presence; sidling into the privy chamber, he found Henry convalescing and still, as he reported with a certain self-importance, not seeing many people. Asked to return the following week, de Puebla spent time locked in discussions with the king, counsellors occasionally flitting in and out.31 But as Henry recovered, so the brief thaw dissipated. Empson, Dudley and their men went about their work with renewed vigour.

  London’s prisons started to fill again. The city chronicler described a daily stream of men from all regions of England through the city gates, hauled before Henry’s learned counsellors and committed to the Tower or one or other of London’s prisons ‘where they remained to their displeasures long after’. Victims were subject to the now ubiquitous process: summary imprisonment until they agreed to pay large fines for their supposed crimes, more fines for pardons, and yet more fines for agreeing not to break the law in the future. Anybody who approached members of the judiciary for advice or representation was told with a shrug of the shoulders to ‘fall to agreement’. There was no way that any lawyer was about to represent a case against the king’s counsellors, while few people were brave or stupid enough to stand witness.32

  Following the crisis of spring 1507, Empson and Dudley had emerged even more prominent among the king’s inner circle; they seemed, too, to be working more closely together, their access to the
king more exclusive. Following his arrival at the king’s bedside, business now kept Empson increasingly in the environs of court. That summer, he took a lease on a large house next to the duchy offices at Bridewell, south of Fleet Street on the city’s western edge. ‘Le Parsonage’ was surrounded by orchards running down to the Thames, and was within easy reach of the inns of court and the London houses of the nobility, which extended around the curve of the river towards Westminster.33

  In April 1507, as Henry recovered, a man mingling among the crowds of petitioners and lawyers in Westminster Hall could be heard telling anybody who would listen an appalling story. It concerned the London haberdasher Thomas Sunnyff – a prosperous, respectable man – and his wife, Alice. They had murdered a newborn child, then dumped the tiny body in the Thames. Even by the standards of the myriad malicious ‘informations’ lodged with the king’s counsellors it was a truly horrible allegation. What made things even worse was the fact that it was entirely false. The rumour-monger was a servant of Dudley’s promoter, John Camby, who had fabricated the entire case in order to force Sunnyff into paying a fine of £500 that was apparently owing to the king.34

  The ‘fine’, though, was nothing of the sort. It was an old, run-of-the-mill bond to keep the peace – a bond whose conditions Sunnyff had now, according to Camby, broken in the most horrific way. Helpfully, Camby supplied evidence: the testimony of a prostitute, Alice Damston, whose child it seems to have been. Probably a prisoner of Camby’s, given that the Counter prisons were where those convicted of prostitution offences ended up, Damston had been forced to testify against the Sunnyffs. Undoubtedly, she had no choice in the matter. With his information lodged, and his evidence in hand, Camby arrested the bewildered haberdasher and frogmarched him to Empson’s house for a hearing. What happened next was a terrifying example of how Empson and Dudley’s roles increasingly interlocked in pursuit of the king’s rights, and of the impunity with which they and their promoters moved through London.