Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  Rainsford was one of the king’s household knights. A link in the crown’s chain of command in his native Essex, where he had ties with the earl of Oxford, he had got his job with the prince through his chamberlain Sir Henry Marney, a neighbour and in-law. Rainsford seems to have been a security chief of the shoot-first-and-ask-afterwards variety. He passed his violent disposition on to his son, John junior, ‘a very dangerous man of his hands and one that delighteth much in beating, mayheming and evil entreating the king’s subjects’. Such violence, of course, came in handy when maintaining a ring of steel around the prince – if properly controlled.2

  The sixteen-year-old Henry seemed a model prince: magnificent in ceremonial, chivalrous in the tiltyard, and pious in prayer. But even if the impulse took him, he knew that any aberrant behaviour would be likely to get back to his father through Sir Henry Marney, or one or other of the servants who doubled as members of the royal household. On progress, there seemed little opportunity for the kind of teenaged rampaging up and down the Thames valley that his ancestor Edward I had indulged in when barely a year older: waylaying passers-by, assaulting them and making off with their horses, carts and provisions.

  Within this closely controlled environment, however, there were already hints of the extravagant carelessness to come. That August, hunting at Langley, the prince had contrived to lose a number of jewels, among them a ruby ring given him years before by his mother, and a red-and-black enamelled diamond ring, a present from Edmund Dudley. The sloppiness was catching: the keeper of the prince’s jewels, Ralph Pudsey, mislaid a delicate gold chain of the prince’s – ‘and’, wrote the king’s jewel-house keeper Sir Henry Wyatt grimly, ‘the king knoweth of it’.3 The prince had men around him who, like all good servants, were keen to bend themselves to his will, to have ‘good wait to come to him if he do call them, or make any countenance to them, to do him service or message’. Servants rode up and down the Thames valley, to London and back ‘pro negociis suis’, on his business or on shopping trips for necessaries and luxuries – musical instruments, perhaps, to add to the prince’s growing collection, or books of ‘ballets’ such as the voguish ballad ‘A Gest of Robin Hood’, in which the outlaw roamed through the countryside, bow at the ready, looking for random targets or ‘rovers’ to fire at. The prince particularly liked to think of himself as Robin, and he was, of course, a crack shot. Maybe he danced late into the evening with his companions and select female company, ‘in his shirt and without shoes’, as he would do in his first years as king: ‘he does wonders and leaps like a stag’, said the Milanese ambassador admiringly.4

  One servant to whom the prince was becoming particularly attached was William Compton. Now in his mid-twenties, Compton’s life had been defined and shaped by the royal household in which he had made his way since the age of eleven. Performing his domestic duties, he watched how men gained power and wealth: the swagger of Empson and Dudley; the discreet, submissive confidence with which privy servants like Denys, William Smith and Richard Weston moved in the king’s presence. Slowly, Compton was making himself similarly indispensable to the prince, becoming his confidant and fixer, prized for his ‘wisdom and fidelity’ and wordlessly anticipating his every desire: shortly after Henry VIII became king, Compton would be arranging his sexual liaisons.5 A servant-companion of a different calibre was Henry Guildford, son of Sir Richard, who had been a constant presence at the prince’s side for almost a decade. Stocky, a head shorter and two years older than him, Guildford was an imaginative, exuberant influence who had inherited his father’s love of court entertainments. An enthusiastic master of the revels under Henry VIII, he would dress up as one of the merry men to the king’s Robin. Together with his half-brother Sir Edward, Henry Guildford was a fully paid-up member of the jousting set.

  Both Compton and Guildford, in their different ways, were vital conduits to the world from which the prince was, by and large, insulated, bringing the news and gossip he craved. The talk of the town, more often than not, was Charles Brandon.

  Brandon’s behaviour had gone from bad to worse. Having jettisoned the pregnant Anne Browne to marry her aunt Dame Margaret Mortimer, Brandon, flush with the proceeds from the sale of Dame Margaret’s lands, had annulled his marriage on grounds of consanguinity and transferred his attentions back to the more fragrant Anne. As the inevitable court case ensued, late in 1507 he rode into Essex, where Anne was living in traumatized seclusion, and whisked her away. The witnesses to their shotgun marriage in Stepney church early the following year included Brandon’s partners-in-crime, Sir Edward Guildford and the earl of Surrey’s belligerent second son, Sir Edward Howard.6

  With his limited freedom, the prince probably viewed the dashing Brandon’s liaisons with something like a scandalized and envious admiration. But there was – and always would be – a strong romantic idealism in him. Brandon’s grubby, exploitative behaviour may well have acquired a chivalric lustre in the retelling, an adventure story in which he swooped to carry off his damsel-in-distress, heedless of the consequences. This, after all, was the way that the prince’s own parents’ love-story had been portrayed in verse, with the dashing Henry Tudor, ‘banished full bare … in Brittany behind the sea’, coming to rescue his golden-haired bride from her lecherous uncle Richard III – a story Lady Margaret had bought into with her commission from Caxton of the romance of Blanchardin and Eglantine, the exiled knight returning to claim his amour. Either way, the prince clearly hankered after the life of chivalrous passion and adventure that his jousting friends were already pursuing. Some two decades later, his own love-match would have cataclysmic repercussions.7

  The prince, moreover, had his own damsel-in-distress at hand. Although he and Catherine spent little time in each other’s company, she seems to have exercised a strong hold on his imagination. During the gift-giving on New Year’s Day 1508 at Richmond, the prince bestowed presents on those closest to him, including Lord Mountjoy and Sir Henry Marney. To Catherine he gave a ‘fair rose of rubies set in a rose white and green’. As a token of his esteem, its significance was unmistakeable: it was a gift that symbolized himself, a jewelled Tudor rose.

  There was another connection, too. During Philip of Burgundy’s enforced stay in England, Mountjoy – who evidently had some knowledge of Spanish customs – had been deputed to look after Juana and her household after they had been abandoned by her husband and his entourage. After that, he had become a regular presence in Durham House; soon, he was wooing one of Catherine’s gentlewomen, Inez de Venegas. Mountjoy, then, was perfectly placed to advise the prince on the courtship of the princess that he still believed to be his betrothed, and to act as a line of communication between them. When the mood took him, the prince was more than capable of well-turned expressions of courtly love in his excellent French, as he had already proved. As he would later show in his passionate correspondence with another woman, Anne Boleyn, he tended to express himself most eloquently when the object of his desire was long distant or unattainable. And Catherine, at the time, was most certainly out of reach.

  In December 1507, Richard Fox returned from Calais bearing the new treaty of ‘perpetual peace’ with the Emperor Maximilian. Ratifying the Anglo-Habsburg mutual defence pact signed at Windsor almost two years previously, the treaty had at its heart the marriage contract between Maximilian’s grandson Charles of Castile, now nine years old, and Princess Mary, whose proxy marriage was now slated to take place the following Easter. Up to his neck in debt, Maximilian could not process the paperwork fast enough. As he admitted to his daughter Margaret of Savoy, in whose care he had placed his grandson – and who he was still trying to persuade to accept Henry’s own offer of marriage – the main reason that he had agreed to betroth Charles to Mary was to get a ‘good sum of money’ from Henry, his prospective in-law. Maximilian’s investment would soon start to yield returns. In mid-January 1508, Henry transferred to him another huge sum of money, £38,000, probably via della Fava and the Frescobaldi bank, ‘upon a
loan’ – which, as both kings knew from long experience, was non-returnable.8 Years before, Henry had castigated Maximilian for his unreliability; now, it seemed, they were the best of friends, the futures of their dynasties intertwined.

  At Richmond that Christmas, Henry’s ‘high contentment’ infused the festivities. In towns as far away as Dover and Shrewsbury, bells were rung and bonfires lit in celebration; in London, Henry ordered an official celebration – at the city’s expense, naturally. Nine large bonfires were constructed in the streets, and hogsheads of wine laid on, ‘free for all men to fetch and drink of, while it lasted’, the better to make ‘evidently known what gladness and rejoicing is generally taken and made’ by the announcement of the betrothal, as Henry explained in a letter to London’s officials. With the new treaty, he boasted, he had built a ‘wall of brass’ around his kingdom. Invoking God’s words to Jeremiah following the unpopular prophet’s persecution, Henry may have intended them to have a similar resonance: his subjects may not have liked him, but he had made the country safe. At Guildhall, the king’s letter probably prompted thin smiles among the city’s merchant-politicians – after all, it was their brass Henry was using.

  Henry’s aims were, as usual, far more ambitious and complex than mere defence. As his colossal payments to Philip of Burgundy had been, this most recent loan was for a specific purpose: Maximilian’s ‘business towards Rome at his voyage’, as the chamber treasurer John Heron noted neatly in his account book. The ‘business’ in question was Maximilian’s coronation as Holy Roman Emperor, a title which, although emperor-elect since 1493, he had been unable to use for the last fifteen years because he couldn’t foot the bill for a trip to Rome to be crowned by the pope. Now, Europe’s biggest summit meeting could finally take place – thanks to the financial backing of Henry, the most solvent king in Christendom. With it, he evidently hoped, would come not only influence with Maximilian, but a more direct line to papal policy.9

  This was Henry the diplomatic puppet-master, as he saw himself, able to pull the strings of international affairs, of ambassadors and princes through huge transfers of capital. As a foreign policy, however, it had assumed a baroque complexity – and its outcomes were often unpredictable. In spring 1508, Maximilian would go to Italy. But he would do so at the head of a large army, across the Alps and down into the plains of the Veneto. On the pretext of picking up his imperial crown, Maximilian would invade Venice’s territories, with Pope Julius’s blessing – and with an army funded by the extortions of Henry’s counsellors.

  In London, the information-gathering and persecution, the arrests and financial penalties continued unabated. As Polydore Vergil noted grimly, daily, in the halls of Empson and Dudley’s houses, you could see ‘a host of convicted persons awaiting sentence’. In response to their requests for a fair trial, defendants were given ‘wretchedly evasive replies’ by the counsellors and their colleagues. People were, he reported, so intimidated, so ‘exhausted by the duration of their anxiety’, that they voluntarily gave up their money. ‘For many preferred to do this, rather than remain longer in that sort of agony.’10

  Vergil would have seen the queues himself, people summoned by privy seal or letter, or waiting to pay instalments of their fines, as he went down past Candlewick Street towards the Thames from his house in St Paul’s Churchyard, to catch a boat towards one of the royal palaces; or as he rode out over the Fleet bridge towards Westminster, past Empson’s ‘Le Parsonage’ and the duchy of Lancaster’s offices. The cases were legion: Thomas Baynard, a king’s commissioner, imprisoned on unspecified charges before ‘agreeing with the king’s grace’ for £120; the London mercer Christopher Hawes, who died of ‘an unkind thought’ – stress, perhaps, or a heart attack – brought on by prolonged harassment from Dudley’s promoters; another, Sir George Talboys, paid £500 to avoid being declared a certified lunatic and having his lands confiscated as a ward of the crown. No stone went unturned. As the London chronicler put it, ‘By one mean and other almost no-one that anything had was without trouble in these days.’11

  While England’s merchants went in fear and trembling, Candlewick Street grew grander. In September 1507, Dudley had written a suave letter to London’s council, asking for permission to run a private ‘current of water’ off the Standard, the conduit in Cheapside, to his own house – permission which the council had of course readily granted. Emulating the Italian palazzi he so admired, with their hot-and-cold running water, Dudley had decided to install a mains supply himself, off one of the city’s public water supplies. That autumn, workmen dug up city streets, piles of lead piping lying by, turning his house into the lap of continental luxury. He and his fellow financial counsellors, it seemed, could do what they liked.12

  In October 1507 de Puebla had written to Ferdinand with his latest thoughts on how to establish some sort of line of influence to Henry. Ten years previously, diplomats had identified a small cluster of people – Morton, Bray, Lovell, Fox – who had the king’s ear. Now, according to de Puebla, the king had ‘no confidential advisers’ at all, nobody whose opinion he trusted or who was privy to his innermost thoughts.

  Henry, of course, still had people about him, the small clusters of counsellors through whom he ran things. But it was the nature of Henry’s relationship with his advisers, de Puebla was saying, that had changed. A decade before, ambassadors had noted how Henry had wanted to ‘throw off’ his council: now, it seems, he had done so. Implicit in de Puebla’s observation was the sense that counsellors no longer performed their traditional roles: even those few men formerly intimate with the king, to whom he had occasionally opened his mind, were shut out. Francis Bacon, Henry’s first biographer, summed it up: nobody, he wrote, was permitted ‘any near or full approach, either to his power or to his secrets.’13

  Even the king’s relationship with his oldest and closest supporters was measured not in trust but money. Richard Fox paid £2,000 for a pardon for retaining offences; Archbishop William Warham appeared in Dudley’s book, bound for £1,600 for prisoners escaped from episcopal gaols; so too did the king’s mother herself, paying her son 700 marks for an abbey and benefice.14 The sense of bewildered, aggrieved alienation was summed up by Giles lord Daubeney, Henry’s chamberlain, over whom a cloud had hung for the past two years. When, in May 1508, Daubeney died at his manor of Hampton Court, he made extensive provision in his will for the paying-off of his debts to the king. Even though it had ‘pleased the king’s highness’ to charge him a recognisance of £2,000 and to confiscate his French pension he had, he protested, been the king’s true servant ‘these xxvi years and above’.15

  In the chill damp of the new year, Henry’s tuberculosis returned. His public appearances, always infrequent, were now fleeting. For most of February, he was holed up in the privy apartments at Richmond, where access to him was even more constrained than usual. Reports of his physical condition leaked out. He was breathing with difficulty, unable to eat, and had again grown weak and emaciated. An arthritic condition left his hip joints swollen and inflamed. At Candlemas, on the anniversary of Elizabeth’s death, unable to move, he dispatched Daubeney to attend her memorial service at Westminster Abbey, and to make the customary offerings.

  For many, Henry seemed a name only, a cipher for the activities of his agents. Rarely visible, he seemed not to want to be seen. For people who caught a glimpse of him, hollow-cheeked, blue eyes burning fiercely, he seemed more dead than alive. Illness seemed to provoke even further his fierce obsession with control and obedience: in between fits of choking and arthritic pain, with his army of physicians on hand, he continued to pursue his subjects with an intensity even more savage than before, almost as if he was afraid that he might lose people’s loyalty. In the midst of all this, he tipped lavishly – as he had always done – small acts of service and kindness, such as the twenty shillings given to the sergeant-at-arms who brought a bottle of mead for his ravaged throat. There were days, too, when he could haul himself to his feet and give unfor
tunate petitioners a dressing-down.16 But, more often that not, he was incapacitated. The annotated names in John Heron’s chamber accounts reveal the identity of the men in charge, making payments and sending an incessant stream of privy seals and letters on the king’s behalf: the master of the wards Sir John Hussey, Empson’s, Dudley’s and Denys’s associate Roger Lupton, and Dudley himself.17

  In a sure sign of the gravity of the situation, Lady Margaret Beaufort had again descended on Richmond. With lodgings constructed for her household servants, she settled in for the duration with her retinue and chief advisers, including her confessor, John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, and fired off a volley of letters and commissions, ordering – a typical maternal reaction to the quality of her son’s furniture – new beds, and dispatching a servant upriver to London for a barrel of muscadel.18

  Towards the end of February, a new ambassador from Aragon arrived, and with him, renewed hope for Catherine. Finally giving in to his daughter’s carping about de Puebla, Ferdinand had sent a man who was the very antithesis of the subtle, low-born, disabled Jew: Don Gutierre Gómez de Fuensalida.19 A stiff-necked aristocrat and ex-military man, Fuensalida may have ticked the right social boxes but his diplomacy had all the subtlety of a sergeant-major on parade. He had won his ambassadorial spurs at the Burgundian court, where he developed an idiosyncratic approach to tricky negotiations. As he told Ferdinand in one dispatch, there was only one way to deal with scheming foreigners, and that was to show them who was boss – ‘they’re only humble when they’re badly treated’ – a strategy which inevitably failed with both the Burgundians and his diplomatic colleagues. Why Ferdinand thought Fuensalida was the man to improve Anglo-Spanish relations is a mystery. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t.