Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  Having placed considerable faith in the ‘loving’ advice of the pair, Kent had been lured into a false sense of security over his repayment deadlines. The counsellors had seemed perfectly relaxed, telling him that the paperwork ‘should not require so great haste’, and assuring him that he ‘should incur no indemnity for non-payment thereof at the said time appointed’. The day after the deadline passed, they swung into action, hitting Kent with a royal summons demanding immediate payment on the king’s behalf – and, because he had defaulted, payment in full. Kent had fallen for the cheapest of confidence tricks. As people at court sniggered behind their hands, it had finally begun to dawn on the earl that he was being played.

  Bewildered, angry and utterly unable to protest, he had nowhere to turn. By the time of the June jousts, weeks later, he was still simmering with a pent-up sense of injustice. Having been systematically asset-stripped by the king’s counsellors, and by extension by Henry himself, Kent had come to realize that, politically marginalized and with no way out of his financial entanglements, he would not get any change out of the current regime. He was not alone. The jousts of June seemed to mark a change in the atmosphere, a palpable shift of focus. Although the king, now fully recovered from illness, was attending the spectacle, there was little doubt who the participants wanted to impress the most. The same anonymous author that had written the account of the May jousts picked up on it, too: ‘Every man of them was the more ready/ Perceiving that our Prince Henry should it behold.’18

  That June, instead of a refined demonstration of chivalric loyalty, the protagonists tore up the rule book and lashed out. Pieces of body armour were sheared off; swords splintered and broke as the combatants hacked away at each other. Most of the contestants were injured to some extent or other – ‘none of the lusty sort/ Escaped free’ – and one of them, not mentioned by name, was ‘hurt in deed’ and had to retire. Maybe the combatants were simply bad technicians, but this seems improbable: the likes of Brandon, Kent and Sir Edward Howard had years of experience jousting in the spotlight of royal tournaments, while Knyvet was by all accounts a shimmering talent. Rather, for one reason or another, it seems as though they were deliberately pushing the sport to its boundaries in a thrilling, violent spectacle.

  For Henry and his counsellors it was all highly troubling. There was something brash and warlike about it, something uncontainable. There was, of course, a prominent strand of intellectual opinion about the king that disliked chivalric culture and the way it gave precedence to the military classes – who were bad enough as it was – and the warmongering it led to. Men like Richard Fox had spent decades masterminding Henry’s diplomacy, an approach designed to avoid war at all costs and – in Dudley’s words – they saw war as pointless and a ‘great consumer of treasure and riches’. In fact, this went for the majority of Henry’s lawyer-counsellors, who, of course, were echoing the king’s own mind.19

  Now, profligate, louche and belligerent men like Brandon, Kent and Sir Edward Howard – ‘by whose wanton means’, it was later noted disapprovingly, the young Henry VIII ‘spendeth much money, and is more disposed to war than to peace’ – had put on a display that was ‘fondly’, or foolishly, undertaken. In fact, some seemed to suggest, the jousts’ violence was no accident, but deliberately subversive, a mailed fist in the face of Henry VII’s kingship. People connected with the tournament were, it was insinuated, ‘most busy’ spreading ‘evil’, ‘false tongues’ were ‘slandering’ Henry and his counsellors. Certain people around the king clearly felt threatened – not least, because the prince loved it.20

  So unlike his father in other respects, the prince had nevertheless inherited his singleminded focus – though the objects of his desires would prove rather different. In years to come, his obsessiveness would manifest itself most obviously in his pursuit of love. ‘So ardent was he when he had begun to form an attachment’, said one observer, ‘that he could give himself no rest.’ Martial arts, though, always competed with women for his affections and, that June, his all-consuming absorption in the tournament was evident.21

  Ruddy with excitement, the prince sat massively alongside his father, fidgeting with passion. Caught up in each splintering of lances, and each grinding clash of the heavy double-handed swords that plate-armoured knights wielded at the barriers, he seemed to forget everything – including himself – in the process. People noticed that he was so hungry to ‘speak of arms and other defence’ that he eagerly welcomed ‘gentlemen of low degree’ into his presence, talking animatedly about the technical aspects of the martial arts he saw enacted before him.22 In sharp contrast to his father’s carefully cultivated role as a remote, detached arbiter of tournaments, Prince Henry’s artlessness resembled that of his Plantagenet relatives: his mother, whose effortless openness had been so carefully monitored by Lady Margaret, and his ingenuous uncle Arthur. And for those old enough to remember, there was another, more significant comparison to hand.

  With his burgeoning physicality and relaxed informality, the prince was his maternal grandfather reincarnate. Edward IV had been a man ‘easy of access to his friends and to others, even the least notable’, frequently summoning ‘complete strangers’ to his presence. This apparent spontaneity and bonhomie, of course, had its own art. But Edward went so far out of his way to present himself as a king with the popular touch that his counsellors had become deeply concerned. Such familiarity, they said, was dangerous. It risked demeaning ‘the honour of his majesty’ – the authority of the crown and of the king himself – and laid him open to all kinds of influence. Now, the prince was behaving not like his remote, distant father, but like his grandfather. To the king and his counsellors, none of this seemed particularly prudent. The prince clearly had appetites that had to be ‘repressed’.23

  The jousts’ organizers evidently realized that they had overstepped the mark very badly indeed. An account of the tournament by the same author, the ‘Jousts of the month of June’, was little more than a glorified damage-limitation exercise, one evidently written with the jousters’ backing – or in expectation of their approval. Stressing how the jousters had been practising for months to put on a good show for the king, it gave the tiltyard mayhem a romantic gloss. This, it said, was the very stuff of King Arthur and his knights of the round table – those who sneered at it were the kind of critics who would find fault even with that perfect jouster, Lancelot of the Lake. The point was, the account continued, that everybody had liked it, especially the prince. In fact, it was the prince who had given the jousters ‘courage to be bold’, and whose support for them was ‘comfort manifold’. The jousters would rather have his backing than ‘all the treasure and gold of the world’. Like the prince whose favour they sought, they valued honour and glory above riches – unlike, it did not say but which readers could hardly help inferring, the king and his counsellors.

  But, as the author went on to protest, these jousts royal had been done in the name of the king and the regime. The challengers had deliberately worn the colour of fidelity: emerging from their pavilions in gleaming, blue-enamelled plate armour, they rode horses caparisoned in blue sarcenet. Violent it may have been, but the action was hardly the stuff of subversion or treason. People could whisper and spread rumour, but no overt accusations of disloyalty could be laid against the jousters. Henry and his counsellors may have been alarmed, but they could only wait, and watch.24

  One of the ‘gentlemen of low degree’ who hung around the royal children was the chamber servant and poet Stephen Hawes. By 1507 he had been in royal service for four years or more, and his star was rising. Wynkyn de Worde continued to publish him enthusiastically, and people loved his Pastime of Pleasure, whose allegorical storyline – the quest of a chivalric hero, Grande Amour, for his love, La Belle Pucelle – was larded with hackneyed platitudes on the importance of education, in particular rhetoric, ‘The noble science which, after poverty,/ May bring a man again to dignity.’ On Twelfth Night 1506, days before Philip of Burgundy’
s unscheduled arrival in England, Hawes had his biggest break to date, performing a ‘ballet’, a heavily ornamented song of courtly love, in front of Henry VII himself, receiving a ten-shilling tip from the king by way of reward.25

  But Hawes, it seems, spent much more of his time in the company of the prince and his friends, and Mary and her gentlewomen. Reflecting the renewed atmosphere of courtly love and violence, his verses praised the prince’s emboldening effect on combatants, ‘encouraging your hearts with courage chivalrous’. He proved, too, an incurable romantic, ‘sighing full oft’: in his dealings with Mary, if his poems are anything to go by, the line between formulaic courtly love and overt eroticism wore very thin indeed. Like the accounts of the 1507 jousts, his poems’ thinly veiled allegory depicted the young princess, who seems to have possessed the qualities of a Lolita, as an alluring, unattainable maiden. He cast himself as the chivalric lead.

  On closer inspection, moreover, the verses of the jousts, with their robust defence of the combatants’ behaviour, bear uncanny echoes of Hawes’ poems, punning on their titles and incorporating phrases from them. If Hawes wasn’t their author, he certainly shared their sentiments.26 Naïve, giddy with success and the exalted company he was keeping, and in contravention of the terms of his employment, which required him to steer clear of any faction, ‘bands, quarrels and debates’, Hawes, it seems, allowed his writings to become the mouthpiece for certain political elements at court – very probably, the group of up-and-coming young courtiers around the prince.

  As he later recounted in a poem, The Comfort of Lovers, in which his personal experiences at court ruptured what was otherwise a straightforwardly allegorical love-story, the climate in the royal household was one of febrile uncertainty, in which courtiers ‘full privily’ tried to outmanoeuvre each other ‘by craft and subtleness’. Somehow, Hawes had become privy to a conversation in which he was shaken to discover that the speakers ‘did little love’ Henry VII. As a chamber servant, he was of course required immediately to report ‘any treason or thing prejudicial compassed, accounted, or imagined’ against the king or his family. Hawes did so, repeating the ‘truth’ he had discovered in no uncertain terms: ‘I did dispraise to know [tell of] their cruelty.’ In other words, he denounced them publicly – probably in verses that he circulated around court. If all this had echoes of William Cornish’s brush with Empson, so did what followed.

  Hawes’ allegations, whatever they were, were dismissed as the work of a troublemaker seeking favour. Shortly after, he was set upon and beaten so badly that his life was ‘near spent’, a traumatic experience that left him constantly ‘in fear of death’, looking over his shoulder for would-be assailants. As he put it, simply but arrestingly, ‘from my brows for fear the drops down did sweat’. While Cornish, well-connected, had been able to pull strings, Hawes was less influential: people, he found, fell away from him and avoided his company. Caught up by those who aimed to, as he put it, ‘sweep the house clean’ of awkward, dissenting voices, he was thrown out of the royal household, never to return.

  With Hawes’ abrupt departure, the literature of court, the satirical songs and ballads that served as a pressure-valve for frustrations and tensions, seemed to dry up. People had seen what happened to poets whose work cut too close to the bone, or into which subversion could be read. Skelton had been politely retired – or jumped before he was pushed; a chastened Cornish survived by toeing the line; Hawes was beaten to within an inch of his life. Others, jobbing rhymers like the yeoman usher and sometime lord of misrule William Ryngeley, and Henry Glasebury, the marshal of the king’s minstrels, probably kept within the strict limits of what was permissible. Or perhaps they followed Hawes’ subsequent efforts at self-preservation. ‘Three years ago’, Hawes wrote in 1510, in a vain attempt to get noticed by the new young king, ‘my right hand I did bind.’ He simply stopped writing.27

  In June, as usual, the ‘gests’ for the summer progress were published at court. For six weeks from the second half of July, Henry’s route would take him northeast of London into East Anglia, before turning west, aiming for the Thames Valley and his Oxfordshire manor of Woodstock. It was an ambitious schedule, but by now the king had recovered his health, and with it his energy. On the way, he would stay at the usual assortment of houses best able to accommodate the riding household: sprawling monasteries, bishops’ palaces and courtiers’ residences. It may have been a rare privilege to put up the royal household but it was, too, an onerous expense and a logistical nightmare – for which reason, such stays tended to be short. Five days in one house tended to be the upper limit, for those courtiers who were in special favour, and who could afford it.28

  Leaving Greenwich on 16 July, Henry’s riding household, together with that of the prince and Lady Margaret, travelled north, to Sir Thomas Lovell’s Middlesex manor of Elsings. Henry liked staying there. With its fine interior décor peppered with red roses and Garter badges, its library of French romances, and its auditor’s chamber and counting-house, it must have felt like a home from home: Lovell, always an excellent entertainer, had had a suite of six rooms especially constructed for the king.29 From there, they progressed into East Anglia, stopping off at Cambridge, where they were treated to a number of orations praising the munificence of Henry, and in particular his mother, towards the university. While there, Henry took note of the half-completed shell of King’s College Chapel, which ‘resteth as yet unperfected and unfinished, little or nothing wrought or done thereupon’ since the death of his uncle Henry VI a half-century previously.30

  The household then turned southwest, towards the earl of Kent’s Bedfordshire manor of Ampthill, which it reached by 15 August. ‘Standing stately upon an hill’, Ampthill’s generously proportioned inner court contained ‘4 or 5 fair towers of stone’; outside its large gatehouse, a sprawling courtyard was formed from a range of lodgings and stabling. With its well-stocked wooded parkland and noted ‘cleanness of air’, Ampthill was the ideal hunting place for the tubercular king.31

  Henry, in fact, seemed in better health than he had been for years – indeed, he had ‘grown fat’. In marked contrast with the painful progresses of recent years, where he had lingered, bedridden, in the same house for weeks on end, he was now constantly in motion, ‘going from one hunting place to another’ with a vigorous, almost manic energy. Not only were messengers and ambassadors, shuttling to and from the itinerant household, left trailing in his wake, they couldn’t find him half the time. His evasiveness, indeed, seemed almost deliberate. Catherine, marooned in London at Durham House, complained that he stayed nowhere long enough to get down to business – by which she meant dealing with the matter of her dowry.32

  But between the incessant hawking and hunting, Henry was, as usual, constantly involved in business. Surrounded by his coterie of administrators and counsellors, he continued to read correspondence, receive diplomats, sign accounts and hear lawsuits. Among the matters he tied up at Ampthill was that of the earl of Kent.33

  Earlier that summer, Henry had summoned to him all those who had been involved in real-estate dealings with the hapless earl, and told them to detail their transactions in full. Then, ‘in discharge of their conscience’, he presented them with two options. Either the estates they had purchased would be confiscated by the crown – or they could pay the king large sums of money to keep them. Sir John Hussey, who had obviously driven a sensational bargain with Kent, opted for the latter, paying the king £66 13s 4d for permission to hold on to his newly acquired lands in Northamptonshire.

  Henry had had his cake and eaten it. He had allowed his counsellors free rein to exploit the earl; then, when they had done so, he moved in and did the same to them. At the same time, he had assumed the moral high ground. Kent was obviously incapable of looking after his own property, so Henry, ‘perceiving and knowing the danger that would be the confusion and utter undoing of the said earl of Kent’, acted as custodian. Income from Kent’s lands would flood into the royal coffers, and lucr
ative estate-manager jobs would be sold to the highest bidders. There would be no chance of the impecunious earl buying them back. As ever, the king’s sense of timing was vicious. On 14 August, the day before he arrived at Ampthill, he ordered Kent to sign indentures making it over to the crown.

  For Kent, insult followed injury. Five days later, Henry imposed on him a number of draconian conditions, including a personal control order that stipulated that he had to ‘be seen daily once in the day within the king’s house’, and was not to leave court without written authorization. Kent was effectively gated. To encourage him to keep his word, Henry made him sign a bond for £10,000.34

  By 22 August, the royal household had moved on to Easton Neston in Northamptonshire. This was Empson’s manor: he had been born and brought up in the nearby market town of Towcester, on Watling Street, the Roman road that ran arrow-straight between London and the east midlands. In 1499, Empson had obtained a licence from Henry to create a park around his house. He enclosed four hundred acres, including all the former common lands of the adjacent village; the village itself was destroyed and its inhabitants turfed out. His aspirations did not end there. He transformed Easton Neston into a lordly mansion, with a crenellated gatehouse (built across a public right-of-way), twenty-two chambers, two kitchens and a profusion of up-to-the-minute architectural features, glazed windows and tiled floors.35 The result was a house and park fit for a king.

  Henry’s stay at Easton Neston that summer – his first visit there – was another benchmark in Empson’s rise. With Lovell, the king had stayed three days: with Empson, it was five. As the royal hunting party moved through Empson’s cultivated parkland, shooting its way through flocks and herds of game, which Henry distributed to local notables, the counsellor’s smooth easiness in the king’s presence – at the king’s side, no less – was noted. Typically, though, Henry missed no opportunity to take him down a peg or two. When, the following month, Empson petitioned him for a grant of ‘certain manors’, Henry paused, crossed out the clause that read ‘for term of life’, and scribbled in the margin, ‘at pleasure’. It was a reminder to Empson, if he needed it, that what the king gave he could also take away.36