Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  That afternoon, the cortège resumed its journey, down Fleet Street, past Charing Cross to Westminster. Henry’s body was borne into the abbey and placed in its hearse, a multi-storeyed stage hung with banners, standards and lit with ‘the most costly and curious light possibly to be made by man’s hand’.43

  It was already light when, at six the following morning, 11 May, nobles, clergy and heralds reassembled in the abbey to bury Henry VII. After three masses had been sung, the last of them a requiem led by Archbishop Warham, the earl of Surrey’s second son Sir Edward, dressed in the late king’s plate armour and bearing his shield and poleaxe, rode a warhorse through the west doors of the abbey and up to the altar. Dismounting, he was stripped of the weapons and armour, which were offered up ‘with great reverence’ by the duke of Buckingham and the earl of Northumberland. Then, Henry VII’s corpse was lowered into the vault, buried, as his will stipulated, alongside ‘our dearest late wife the queen’, whose body awaited his.44

  After Warham had cast earth into the open tomb, the old king’s household officers broke their staves of office and threw them in. The heralds, taking off their emblazoned coats, shouted in French, ‘The noble king Henry the Seventh is dead.’ As the words’ echo dissolved in the silence of the abbey, they put their coats of arms back on and cried ‘Vive le noble Roy Henry le VIIIth’ – which as the herald’s account of the funeral helpfully explained, ‘is to say in English tongue, “God send the noble king Henry the eight long life.” ’

  These shouts of acclamation – ‘long live the king’ – were familiar enough. But for Henry VII’s funeral, his counsellors had made two crucial changes. The cries ‘the king is dead; long live the king’ were run together in a way that was new in England, though it had been done before in France, after the death of Charles VIII in 1498. And, for the first time, the names of the king and his heir were included. Kingship was perpetual: the king himself may have died, but the institution, the ‘dignity’, had not, because it was automatically transferred to his heir. Now, Henry VII’s counsellors, the men who had transferred their loyalties seamlessly to the new king, had given full expression to this crucial concept – and in doing so, they confirmed the association of one family’s name with the crown of England. The Tudor dynasty had begun.45

  15

  Rich, Ferocious, Thirsting for Glory

  In mid-May 1509, after his father’s funeral, the seventeen-year-old king and his court left the Tower for the riverside tranquillity of Greenwich. Here, in his mother’s favourite house and the place of his birth, the new reign began to unfurl. Even those who knew him seemed taken aback by the transformation of a teenager who had been so subdued in his father’s company. ‘However dutiful he was before’, Thomas More observed, the new king has ‘a character which deserves to rule.’ Henry VIII was magnificent, liberal and bullish. As the Venetian ambassador delightedly reported back to the Signoria, the new king had announced that the first thing he planned to do, as soon as he was crowned, was make war on France. And, as everybody was aware, his father had left him a fortune – which he fully intended to spend. Machiavelli, whose pithy character sketches were rarely wide of the mark, got the new king in a nutshell: ‘ricco, feroce, cupido di gloria’.1

  The old king’s opaque accounting methods meant that nobody, not even his closest advisers, knew quite how much he had salted away in money, jewels and gold and silver plate, in the Tower, Westminster, Calais, and other ‘secret places’ under his own personal control. This, however, only fuelled the myth. The Venetian ambassador’s estimate reflected the kind of conversations and calculations that were taking place at court and in the city: Henry VII, he wrote, had ‘accumulated so much gold that he is supposed to have more than well nigh all the other kings in Christendom’.2 This, coupled with the fact that the new king seemed eager to dispel the dark last years of his father’s reign, seemed to make up for everything that people had endured. Nobles like Buckingham and Northumberland felt they would now regain their rightful place as the king’s natural counsellors, with their confiscated lands restored to them; churchmen and merchants alike anticipated the rolling-back of aggressive royal legislation against their privileges and liberties. And everybody whose names had found their way into the account books of the old king and his counsellors fully expected them to be erased.3 Henry VIII, in other words, would be all things to all men – and an easy touch into the bargain.

  In the warm sun of the new king’s favour, the scramble for lucrative grants of office and land began. All his father’s counsellors, from the earl of Oxford, to Sir Thomas Lovell, to the jewel-house keeper Sir Henry Wyatt, were rewarded; Lady Margaret Beaufort, meanwhile, was quick to reclaim the palace of Woking, which her son had annexed from her six years previously. Fittingly, Richard Weston was awarded the keepership of Hanworth, whose muted corridors he had patrolled in the last weeks of Henry VII’s reign. Also recognized were the new king’s tiltyard friends: the likes of Sir Edward Howard, Thomas Knyvet and, of course, Charles Brandon. These were men whose stylish aggression he admired – and who could now egg on his desire for warlike glory and his easy way with money without fear of censure.4

  One of those who rose fastest and furthest was Sir Henry Marney. Mirroring the role he had played in the prince’s household, he was appointed captain of the guard – head of security – and vice-chamberlain, two posts which tended to come together. Among a raft of other offices given him was the chancellorship of the duchy of Lancaster, previously held by the disgraced Empson. Marney’s pre-eminence was evident in the new reign’s first meeting of the Order of the Garter, which the young king called with alacrity for 18 May – and for which occasion he had bought himself a Lancastrian collar of esses, in emulation of his hero Henry V. Put forward for election to the order, Marney was unanimously voted in.5

  In its way, William Compton’s advancement was no less meteoric. In the first days of the reign, the man who had been the prince’s closest servant had emerged as first among equals in the new king’s privy chamber; soon, he would be groom of the stool. Like Hugh Denys before him, Compton looked after the king’s goods and personal affairs, which would be rather different from those of his father. He would handle industrial quantities of money on Henry VIII’s behalf: in the first year of the reign, Compton received some £2,328 to spend; four years later, it would rise to £17,517. One of the first to recognize the importance of his intimacy with the king was, predictably enough, Richard Fox.6

  On 27 May, Lord Mountjoy, intoxicated by the air of the new reign, signed a breathless letter to Erasmus.7 Still in Italy, Erasmus’s woes had deepened. He had failed to gain regular funding and he was, as he had emphasized in a stream of unanswered letters to England, sick and depressed. Now, Mountjoy apologized for being a terrible correspondent: ‘many distractions’ had prevented him from writing, including – he hinted darkly at the events surrounding the old king’s death – ‘certain reasons which I did not venture to set down on paper’. Then, with his customary breeziness, he told Erasmus to cheer up, for his former pupil had ascended the throne and ‘all were congratulating themselves on their prince’s greatness’.

  The new reign, Mountjoy said, was the Promised Land. ‘Heaven smiles, earth rejoices; all is milk and honey and nectar’ – and if only Erasmus could see the scenes, he would weep for joy. The young king could not be more different from his father: ‘Tight-fistedness is well and truly banished. Generosity scatters wealth with unstinting hand.’ This was a monarch for whom gold and jewels were nothing compared with virtue and eternal renown. Why, only days before, the king had told Mountjoy how he longed to be a better scholar. Thinking quickly, Mountjoy had assured him that nobody expected him to be an intellectual – but he was expected to ‘foster and encourage’ men of learning. ‘Of course,’ replied the king, ‘for without them we should scarcely exist.’ Henry VIII, the implication went, had learned his lessons well.

  Then, Mountjoy got to the point. He had ‘never pressed’ Erasmus to go
to Italy in the first place. Everybody in England was reading the new, expanded edition of his Adages with admiration – Archbishop Warham, no less, was ‘praising it to the skies’. Erasmus must come back to England. As if to settle the matter, Mountjoy enclosed a bill of exchange for ten pounds: five from him and five from Warham. This was not, he added, a gift – there would be plenty of gifts forthcoming when he arrived – but to cover his travel expenses, ‘to speed your journey to us’. Moreover, he added, Warham promised Erasmus a benefice if he came back.

  If Mountjoy laid the flattery on thick, it was hardly surprising. Erasmus had fallen for the blasé optimism of his former pupil before – twice before, in fact – and both times, expansive promises of rewards and benefices had added up to precisely nothing. It was all very well for Mountjoy to say he had never told Erasmus to go to Italy, but given the complete lack of opportunity in England back in 1506, he had had little choice. Which was why, while Mountjoy’s letter was fulsome, it was artful too. After reminding Erasmus pointedly of his destitute conditions in Italy – he was sorry to hear Erasmus was sick, but then, he supposed, one had to suffer for one’s art, fame being ‘worth the price of hunger, poverty and illness, even death itself’ – Mountjoy offered hard cash. If Erasmus wanted creature comforts along with fame, England could now provide him with both.

  Behind all this was an ulterior motive, one that struck at the heart of Erasmus’s principles of intellectual independence. The new England wanted a monopoly on Europe’s finest mind. It wanted him as its mouthpiece, amplifying its virtues to the world: where once he had written verses extolling the superhuman qualities of the king’s boyhood hero Philip of Burgundy, he could now do the same for Henry VIII. The new regime, with its glorious young monarch, didn’t want second-rate poets like Pietro Carmeliano or Bernard André – but it did want Erasmus to demonstrate his loyalty, to be ex toto Anglicus.

  All of which was evident in a letter from Warham, which was probably enclosed with Mountjoy’s. Warham had a high regard for Erasmus’s abilities, but thoroughly disapproved of his flightiness. Now he offered Erasmus a deal, an exclusive contract with the English crown. As soon as Erasmus arrived in England, Warham promised, he would receive a golden handshake of 150 nobles ‘from me’, and a job for life. The condition was simple: that ‘you agree to spend the rest of your life in England’ – though he would be allowed trips to the Netherlands to see family and friends, ‘on suitable occasions’.8

  It was this, undoubtedly, that gave Erasmus pause for thought. His dilemma was voiced by an Italian friend, Jacobo Piso, who wrote congratulating him on his ‘offer from England’, before warning him to beware of the dangers of such jobs: ‘Look into your heart’, he wrote, ‘but do not lose your head. It is certainly pleasant to be rich, but still more pleasant to be free.’ Erasmus, too, knew that another hand lay behind the skilled rhetoric of Mountjoy’s letter: that of his new secretary, Erasmus’s Lucchese friend Andrea Ammonio, who after years spent in the shadow of the old king’s Italian favourites, now found himself in a new world of opportunity. Indeed, the name of ‘Andreas Ammonius’ was written at the top of the letter. Erasmus, who always liked to feel he had friends in high places, crossed it out and wrote ‘Guilhelmus Montioius’ instead. As he knew perfectly well, though, this first, glowing picture of Henry VIII’s reign, one that would become the blueprint for similar images to follow, was written not by Mountjoy but by a jobbing Italian humanist with an axe to grind.9

  Nevertheless, Mountjoy/Ammonio’s letter hit its mark. Being free, hungry, poor and ill in war-torn Italy for the sake of one’s principles was ghastly. By July, Erasmus was on his way back to England. A decade later he would still be vainly invoking Philip of Burgundy’s name in the hope of something more substantial than fair words.10

  The most extraordinary transformation in fortunes came for Catherine. Fuensalida’s first dispatch of the new reign had been couched in his now-accustomed gloom. Francesco Grimaldi, he wrote, had already transferred fifty thousand crowns of Catherine’s dowry back out of England to Bruges, and it was just as well. On 24 April, as news of Henry VII’s death was proclaimed, Fuensalida had learned from his sources that the dying king had repeated the same old mantra to his son: he was free to marry whoever he wanted. That bride, Fuensalida was further informed, would not be Catherine, for it was known that the new king would find it a burden to his conscience to marry his brother’s widow.11

  Days later, Fuensalida was summoned to Greenwich by the new king’s advisers – who, consisting of Fox and his colleagues, looked much like the old. Accordingly, the ambassador launched into a long-winded defence of his actions and of the non-payment of the dowry. Then a side door opened, and secretary Thomas Ruthall swept in from an adjoining chamber, where he had been locked in private discussions with Henry VIII. Cutting through the ambassador’s speech, he accepted all Fuensalida’s assurances. The king, he said briskly, was utterly unconcerned about all the red tape; he was sure the dowry would be paid, and just wanted to get on with his marriage, as soon as possible. What was more, it was about time England and Spain joined forces against France: together, the two countries would be at the heart of a pan-European coalition against their common enemy.

  Fox then spelled it out in black and white to Fuensalida who, for once, was dumbstruck. ‘You must remember now, the king is king, and not prince’, he said. ‘One must speak in a different way in this matter than when he was prince. Until now, things were discussed with his father, and now one must treat with him who is king.’

  With his customary elegance Fox had got to the heart of the matter. People needed to adapt, and fast, to the new king’s ambitions and ways of doing things. It meant, suddenly, having to fulfil the desires of a monarch who would far rather spend his time and money in the quest for ‘virtue, glory and immortality’ than micro-managing government. What the king really wanted to do, apart from invade France, was to marry Catherine, as quickly as possible. His counsellors, who had spent the last years thinking up new ways of preventing precisely this turn of events, thoroughly approved.12

  It was hardly surprising that Fuensalida was struggling to keep up. Now, Henry VIII was telling the world that his father’s dying wish had been that he should marry Catherine, a wish which he was bound to respect. But as he wrote to Margaret of Savoy that July, even if he had been free to choose, it was Catherine who he would have chosen for his bride ‘before all other’. Quite what provoked this sea change remains unclear, but there seems little doubt that Henry VIII liked the idea of Catherine, and – with his parents’ example at the back of his mind – he liked the idea of marriage. And now he was king, he could do what he liked. Having endured endless tales of the exploits of Charles Brandon and his friends, and followed Lord Mountjoy’s wooing of Inez de Venegas, he wanted to make up for lost time. Besides which, Spain would prove an invaluable ally in the military adventures he was planning.13

  Talking in confidence to Fuensalida, Fox said he would urge the new king to marry quickly, before other people started trying to persuade him against the match. He suggested that the ambassador advise Ferdinand to take advantage of this window of opportunity while the king’s council was favourably disposed to help push things forward.

  For his part, Ferdinand was frantic to secure the marriage. Although, as he wrote to Fuensalida, Henry VII had been ‘a bad friend and ally’, Catherine’s father had high hopes of the new king – particularly of his desire to fight the French. This was a marriage of ‘great political importance’, he stressed. He knew perfectly well that time was key, since – echoing Fox’s words – ‘the French, as well as others’ would do everything they could to prevent it happening. Fuensalida, he instructed, was to pull out all the stops to make sure it went ahead, ‘without delay’. There should be no obstacles: the marriage was perfectly lawful, as the pope had provided a dispensation for it; Ferdinand would pay the dowry punctually; and he was even prepared to acknowledge Princess Mary’s betrothal to his grandson, Charle
s of Castile, into the bargain. In what was presumably an unconscious revealing of his real motives, he intended, he said, to look after the interests of the new king of England ‘as though they were his own’.

  Ferdinand’s letters to Catherine, meanwhile, were fulsome. More than anything else on earth, he had her welfare and her marriage at heart. He apologized for Fuensalida, he wrote, who had been sent to England with the best of intentions and who had evidently ‘acted from ignorance’. But, he insisted, Catherine had to be nice to the ambassador, and also to Francesco Grimaldi: after all, he was ‘to pay her dower’.14

  Fox had been given a straightforward hand to play, but he did so consummately. By mid-May, the negotiations had been wrapped up, and a guarantee extracted from Ferdinand that the dowry would be paid ‘at once’ – which it duly was. Fox’s manoeuvrings would prove a high-water mark in the management of the king’s marital affairs: his successors, Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, would lose their heads trying to achieve similar success. What was more, Fox’s playing hard-to-get with Fuensalida evidently had its material benefits. Should the ambassador think it expedient ‘to corrupt some of the most influential counsellors of the king’, Ferdinand told him, he was to ‘offer them money’.15

  Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine took place with astonishing speed. On 11 June, three days after he had rushed through the marriage licence, Archbishop Warham wed the pair in a private ceremony in the queen’s closet in Greenwich. There was nothing deliberately furtive about it. The king wanted a wife, her dowry, and her father’s support against France. Unlike his own father’s marriage, delayed until after he had been crowned king in his own right, for Henry VIII there were no such concerns.