Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  Fox, a key architect of Henry’s regime, the man who had been privy to his inmost anxieties in exile, who had fought for him, who had masterminded his foreign affairs and conducted espionage on his behalf, whose palace had been the king’s refuge, and who had watched as, in recent years, Dudley and Empson had moved closer and closer to the king, was at the heart of what followed. This time, the two lawyers were nowhere near Henry’s bedside, but away in London. The only people who knew of his death were those present in the privy chamber. Fox and his fellow-counsellors now had a brief window of opportunity to order the succession to their advantage, to position themselves around the new, young king. It was what Henry VII would have wanted – and it would ensure their own survival.

  There would be no announcement of the king’s death, no general summons to court. Rather, the news would be, as Wriothesley put it, ‘secretly kept’. For, as it turned out, the timing of Henry’s death was almost perfect: in two days’ time, one of the ceremonies of the ritual year would bring to court ‘the substance of the lords’, among them the great men of the regime.22

  St George’s Day, 23 April, was the feast of the Order of the Garter. Among the order’s members were many of Henry’s named executors: Fox himself, as the Garter’s prelate, and his close colleague Sir Thomas Lovell; the two chief military commanders, the earls of Oxford and Surrey, and the chamberlain Charles Somerset, Lord Herbert. Those hoping for election included Thomas lord Darcy, and the prince’s chamberlain, Sir Henry Marney. Also present, and a member of the order, was Lady Margaret Beaufort, who numbered the likes of Fox, Lovell, Herbert and Marney among her own executors. Just as significant, however, would be the absentees. Buckingham and Northumberland were both Garter knights, but both, perhaps in fits of independent-minded petulance, had made their excuses and stayed away. Dudley and Empson, meanwhile, had nothing to do with the Garter at all.23

  In the last weeks of Henry’s life, the workload of both men had intensified as his faculties diminished. Their eyes and ears at court kept them in touch with developments at the king’s bedside – but unknown to them, the information that continued to flow through their usual channels in the privy chamber was being filtered. They were, though, sharply aware of the mounting tensions in London that, simmering for years, were coming to the surface as rumours spread of the king’s impending death; foreign merchants scurried for cover, securing their valuable goods in safe storage.24 It was, very probably, this potential for widespread disorder – or worse – that had kept Empson and Dudley in the city. If anybody could be trusted to ferret out information on planned riots and conspiracies against the regime, it was the two counsellors and their network of informers.

  Around the time the general pardon was proclaimed on 16 April, unusual movements of men and materiel had been noticed around Le Parsonage, Empson’s house on the city’s western edge, and in Dudley’s parish of St Swithin. Clearly anticipating trouble, both men were assembling armed retinues. Empson sent dispatches into his home county of Northamptonshire, mustering ‘as many persons … whom he could firmly and secretly retain, to be ready in defence’. By mid-April, several had slipped through the city gates; others were making their way ‘by separate companies’.25 On the 22nd, as the king’s body grew cold and rumours of his death filtered into Candlewick Street, Dudley scribbled separate orders to his sidekick Richard Page to take to nine men, including the household knight and jouster Sir Edward Darrell. The notes required them urgently to muster groups of armed retainers ‘arrayed in manner of war’, and to join Dudley in the city, where they were to await his further command. Meanwhile, he checked the well-stocked armoury in his house: quantities of plate armour and mail; sixty spiked, bladed bills; over a hundred and fifty bows – longbows and crossbows; thirty-five sheaves of arrows.26

  Watchful, tense, both counsellors were acting on behalf of the regime’s security. But there was, perhaps, more to it than that. In marshalling these private armies, Empson and Dudley were also positioning themselves for a potential struggle for influence over the young king. But, so accustomed to wielding power and to the king’s confidence, both men evidently felt secure in the friendships of influential fellow-counsellors such as Fox, Lovell, Herbert and Oxford, and of Lady Margaret, who had recently sent the two lawyers a gift of fresh fish in reward for a lawsuit of hers they were prosecuting, as she passed through the city to Richmond. Empson and Dudley had failed to understand how resented and isolated their rapidly acquired power now made them, and how exposed they now were. Consequently, they failed to watch their backs.27

  On the morning of St George’s Day, the presence chamber at Richmond was packed. Garter herald Wriothesley presided over the ceremonies with a punctilious eye. By this point, he too had very probably been told the truth: he had the heralds cry Henry VII’s largesse quite deliberately, in order that all those at court ‘should have less suspicion of his death’. At noon, the assembled lords dined in the presence chamber, headed by Prince Henry, who was ‘named and served as prince and not as king’. Surveying proceedings, pacing up and down the chamber with their staves of office, were the four gentleman ushers, three of whom – Sharp, Tyler and William Fitzwilliam – had been present at the dead king’s bedside some thirty-six hours previously.28 Then, after dinner, a slight movement fixed everybody’s attention: the oak door leading to the privy apartments was opened from the inside.

  Emerging with a ‘smiling countenance’, Richard Weston walked unhurriedly over to Archbishop Warham and told him and ‘certain other lords’ – almost certainly the likes of Oxford, Surrey and Herbert – that the king, Henry VII, wished them to attend on him. Following Weston back through the door, the small group of nobles stayed in the privy apartments ‘a good pause’ before emerging unconcernedly, ‘with good countenance … as though the king had not been dead, showing no great manner of mourning that men might perceive’.29

  But Warham and the most senior of Henry VII’s counsellors now knew that the king was dead. The timing of their summons, moreover, had been deliberate. Shortly after, the prince – in place of the king – would progress with the assembled company to evensong in the Chapel Royal: it would provide the perfect cover for the counsellors to brief him on what was to be done. As was customary, the prince would hear mass in the holyday closet – sumptuously furnished with cushions, carpets, relics and its own altar – on the first floor of the ante-chapel. From there, when occasion demanded, he could descend via a private staircase to the main body of the chapel, to take part in the focal points of the service. But most of the time, the privacy of the closet allowed its occupants to catch up on business and discuss confidential matters undisturbed while the mass proceeded. This, very probably, was precisely what happened during that St George’s Day evensong.30

  Towering above the pack of counsellors and nobles clustering around him, Prince Henry, swathed in his hood and cloak of the Garter, passed through the crowded galleries leading to the Chapel Royal, his way lined on both sides by the guard in quartered white-and-green, halberds gleaming. He and a select few counsellors were ushered into the holyday closet, and the doors were shut on the jostling petitioners and courtiers outside. As the voices of the choristers and the sonorous notes of the chapel organ drifted up from the main body of the chapel below, Archbishop Warham and the ‘other lords’ that had emerged from the privy chamber hours earlier briefed the prince on what they believed should happen.31

  After evensong, the prince returned to the presence chamber for the ceremonial Garter supper, ‘all which time he was served and named as prince and not as king’. Finally, after supper, Henry VII’s death was announced.

  At this point, Wriothesley’s account of proceedings gives no sense of any triumphant acclamation of Henry VIII. In fact, he fails to mention the seventeen-year-old king at all. The sense, rather, is of a small group of counsellors taking control, ‘over seen by the mother of the said late king’. Far into the night, this coterie, headed by Lady Margaret and Archbishop Warham, and
including Richard Fox, John Fisher, Thomas Howard earl of Surrey and the chamberlain Lord Herbert, discussed what was to be done. In all this, Henry VIII was deferred to: he, after all, was king. But he was, too, young and remarkably inexperienced – and he was now dealing directly with the powerful inner circle of his father’s counsellors, men who were now suggesting to him in their thoughtful, measured way a certain course of action that was entirely necessary for the regime’s security and his own. The impressionable seventeen-year-old, now finally the focus of a fast-moving, unstable and undeniably exciting sequence of events, and made to feel as though he was very much in charge, undoubtedly agreed to everything that was proposed.32

  The following day, the ‘prince called king’ would be transferred to the Tower, now in the control of Henry VII’s seasoned military commander the earl of Oxford, ‘for the surety of his person’. Accompanied by members of his own household – the likes of Marney, Mountjoy, Compton, and the brutish Rainsford – he would stay there while the situation was monitored and until his father was buried. Henry VII’s executors, Lady Margaret and Warham chief among them, would stay upriver at Richmond to implement the terms of his will. But first, they had to send out an emphatic statement that the new regime would not be like the old.

  Polydore Vergil, in attendance on Lady Margaret at Richmond during these uncertain days, later summed it up. Empson and Dudley were, he wrote, singled out by a ‘politic mean’. In the sun of Henry VII’s favour they had risen far and fast, but now he was dead – and they were intimately associated with the repressive activities of his regime. For the old king’s veteran counsellors, it was a chance to get rid of two men who might, potentially, build a close relationship with the new king, and to offer them up as scapegoats in the process. Empson and Dudley had to go.33

  Early on 24 April, the round-ups started. At court the duke of Buckingham’s brother and the marquis of Dorset’s stepfather, Henry Stafford, identified as a potential troublemaker, was arrested. Meanwhile Dudley’s associate Richard Page had been intercepted, and the letters he was carrying ripped open. As dawn rose over the city, bodies of armed guards – ferried downriver from Richmond, or let in through the city gates – slipped through the empty streets and quietly surrounded Empson’s and Dudley’s slumbering houses. Then came the hammering on doors, with bleary-eyed household servants sliding back bolts and lifting latches. Whatever moves the counsellors might have made were nipped in the bud. They were taken away to the Tower.34

  In London later that morning, Henry VII’s death was announced and the succession proclaimed. In the afternoon, the ‘prince called king’ rode through a city crawling with royal soldiers, to the Tower. On the following day, the 25th, Henry VIII set his signature, a painstaking ‘Henry R’, to his first piece of legislation: a new general pardon, superseding the one issued just over a week before in his father’s name. Probably drawn up following the intensive discussions on that evening of the 23rd, it was carefully, deliberately worded, its expansive tone indicating what people could expect in the new dispensation – and in doing so, distinguishing it emphatically from the old.

  Exhorting the king’s subjects to peace, the pardon stressed that normal judicial service had been resumed, ‘according to the old true course of his letters’. Justice would henceforth be ‘freely, righteously and indifferently’ applied – and the king would be as subject to the law as anybody: his judges would see to it that there would be no privileging of any kind. What was more, all merchants, ‘clothiers, artificers and folks in all manner of mysteries and occupations’ could now work and trade ‘freely, quietly and peaceably’, with no fear of ‘untrue informations’. There would be no more informers or prying royal agents, no ‘persons calling themselves promoters’. The new king would provide ‘reformation of the rigour wherewith they [his subjects] have been vexed’. Neither was there to be any violent settling of scores: nobody, of whatever rank, was to take the opportunity to revenge his or anybody else’s quarrel ‘by way of fight’. The crown, it was implied, would take care of that.35

  A copy of the pardon was dispatched to the king’s printer Richard Pynson at his print-shop by Temple Bar on Fleet Street. He and his assistants set to work with concentrated precision and speed, the compositors setting and securing the type in place, then passing it to the printers, who inked it up, swung the frame of taut paper over it, slid the whole into the press and forced the press-plate down, removed the freshly printed sheet and began the process of inking again: a copy every twenty seconds.36 By the morning of the 26th, thousands of copies were in circulation, to be posted on church doors from St Paul’s to the remotest parish in the land, and proclaimed aloud at crosses and marketplaces, ‘that every man thereof might have knowledge’.

  In the city, a mood of retribution was in the air. Among the flood of prisoners emerging from the Tower and cells across London were the three former mayors, Kneseworth, Aylmer and Capel, all bent on revenge. When, days later, the pardon roll marking the start of the new reign was published, a number of names had been excluded.37 John Camby was arrested, along with the financier Henry Toft and several who had sat on Empson’s and Dudley’s carefully packed juries. Forcibly entering Camby’s home to recover the fruits of his ‘vice and polling’, city officials expressed astonishment at the quantity of fine textiles stashed neatly away in a room that was ‘more like a mercer or draper’s shop than a man’s chamber’. But the man they particularly wanted, the counsellors’ ‘worst disciple’, had disappeared into thin air. Like his bosses, John Baptist Grimaldi had sensed the changing mood as Henry lay dying; unlike them, he had found an escape route. Securing his possessions out of reach of the crown’s officers, he had fled beyond the reach of royal justice to the precincts of Westminster Abbey, where he claimed sanctuary.38

  By 27 April, Fuensalida was writing in dispatches of the gaoling of the two most prominent of the old king’s ‘ministers of the briberies and tyrannies which used to be’. Empson and Dudley were, he stressed, the ‘two principal men … who gathered all the riches’. It was a story that all the others involved in the ‘briberies and tyrannies’ were only too happy to run with. Fuelling the atmosphere of moral indignation were a slew of hastily composed ‘opprobrious and shameful rhymes and tales’: scrawled down, printed, passed from hand to hand, sniggered and frowned over, pinned up and read out in public places. Pouring out all the pent-up frustration of the previous years, they documented in lurid terms the abuses of the disgraced counsellors and their promoters.39

  The London chronicler, who had heard and seen an assortment of these ‘opprobrious rhymes’ sung in taverns and posted on walls and doors, faithfully copied down two of them for posterity. One of the poems was a ‘detestable legend’ of John Baptist Grimaldi – so ‘vile’ a subject, the anonymous rhymester declared, that one could hardly expect poets of the calibre of John Skelton, Thomas More or William Cornish to sully themselves by writing about him. The other poem written out by the chronicler, a ‘Ballad of Empson’, consisted of a litany of the wrongs perpetrated under Henry VII, blame for which was placed squarely at the door of the gaoled counsellor. This, however, was very probably composed by Cornish, who had suffered abuse at Empson’s hands. What was more, it had been commissioned or ‘caused’ by Richard earl of Kent, desperate for Empson’s comeuppance. The new regime’s efforts to ‘shift the noise’ on to Empson and Dudley, ‘for to satisfy and appease the people’, was bearing fruit. Meanwhile, in the Tower, one of Henry VIII’s first actions was to command the head of the clerk of works to construct a tilt: as the young king waited, he jousted.40

  At Richmond, as the dead king’s body, washed, anointed and embalmed, lay in state, a ‘right sumptuous household’ was kept.41 But beneath the enforced jollity, there was a palpable anxiety among those implicated with the old regime and with the two counsellors. Men kept their heads down, or tried to make themselves indispensable, or both. The head of the great wardrobe Sir Andrew Windsor, Dudley’s brother-in-law, and Sir John
Cutt busied themselves with the funeral arrangements. For them, the danger passed. Others were not so lucky. Dudley’s fellow-counsellor Sir John Hussey was omitted from the accession pardon and arrested; so too was William Smith, groom of Henry VII’s personal wardrobe and sometime factotum of Empson’s, who was stripped of office and carted off to the Tower.

  On 9 May, late in the afternoon, Henry VII’s funeral cortège reached the southern entrance to London Bridge, and processed through the city’s streets, following the time-honoured route to St Paul’s. Amid the heralds, the chanting monks and friars, the black-clad household servants, the nobles, prelates, knights and officials, rolled a carriage containing the king’s coffin, drawn by five coursers draped in black velvet and decorated with heraldic banners and flags depicting Henry’s titles and dominions. On top of the coffin, reposing on cloth-of-gold cushions, was a life-size effigy, its head worked uncannily after the king’s death mask, dressed – as perceptive observers might have noted with some irony – in the parliament robes he had barely had occasion to wear in the last twelve years, its right hand gripping his sceptre and its left an orb of gold. At the cathedral’s west door, twelve yeomen of the guard carried the coffin and effigy to the high altar, staggering under its weight. There the placebo, the office for the dead, was sung, and a vigil kept throughout the night. The following morning, after mass, John Fisher climbed the pulpit stairs, placed his skull in front of him, and preached a funeral sermon.

  Ranging over the achievements of Henry’s reign, Fisher described the king’s last days: his illness and piety, his exemplary death, his promises for reform. Henry, he said, had had ‘full little pleasure’ from this ‘wretched world’, but ‘much displeasure and sorrow’. As Fisher urged his listeners to mourn and pray for the dead king, he seemed to interrupt himself in full flow. ‘Ah king Henry, king Henry’, he declaimed ruefully, ‘if thou were alive again, many a one that is here present now would pretend a full great pity and tenderness upon thee.’42 The enforcers of Henry VII’s regime, bent on preserving a system of power and their place in it, had already succeeded in disassociating themselves from their late master, who had died just a fortnight before.