Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  At 4 p.m. on Saturday, 23 June, the eve of the coronation, the royal procession set out on the familiar route from the Tower, through London’s densely packed streets and lanes, to Westminster. With his parliament robe of crimson velvet draped over a cloth-of-gold jacket encrusted with jewels, the king rode under a canopy borne by four high-ranking officers. Catherine, of course, had been this way before. She sat dressed entirely in white, in a canopied litter of cloth-of-gold, her auburn hair let down, on her head a gold circlet set with pearls. As the procession went down Cornhill, its houses draped with brightly coloured cloths and tapestries, and up Cheapside, storm clouds gathered ominously. The procession had just passed the Cardinal’s Hat tavern when the heavens opened. The flimsy canopies were little protection: soaked through, Catherine had to take refuge in a nearby draper’s stall. People sought to make light of it, though the London chronicler’s grumblings about the ‘no little damage’ done to the expensive textiles by the ‘foresaid shower’ suggested otherwise – ‘as little while it endured’, he added hastily.16

  Among the onlookers, as he had been back in 1501, was Thomas More, who later recorded the scenes in a poem celebrating the coronation, part of a deluge of verse written in praise of the new regime. Henry VIII’s coming, he wrote, represented ‘the limit of our slavery, the beginning of our freedom, the end of sadness, the source of joy’. More’s poem praised the king’s physicality, his strength, brilliance and bravery in arms, his pre-eminence among his war-band of nobles. It waxed lyrical about the sensitive, feminine beauty of his face, which, radiating the excellence of his mind, shone with virtue and wisdom. His justice, meanwhile, could be seen in the faces of his happy subjects. Already, More said, the young king had achieved an astonishing amount. He had restored the rule of law – which, all but suspended in the previous reign, had now regained its ‘proper authority’ – and the natural order, the ‘ancient rights’ of the nobility; he had also repealed taxes and dues on merchants, who could now trade freely again. The shadow of repression and terror had vanished: ‘Now, it is a delight to ignore informers. Only ex-informers fear informers now.’ People could emerge into the sunlight of the king’s goodness: ‘Hence it is that, while other kings have been feared by their subjects, this king is loved.’17

  More, of course, was speaking from first-hand experience of the last years of Henry VII’s reign. But he was also deliberately reflecting the general tone, lifting phrases directly from the new king’s pardon and echoing the sentiments of Mountjoy and Ammonio’s letter to Erasmus. And, he also borrowed directly from Erasmus himself, the man who was a master at this kind of rhetoric, of advice and admonition dressed up as flattery. In fact, More was praising the new king in exactly the same way that, years before, Erasmus had praised Philip of Burgundy – a panegyric which he had sent to England in the hope that it might get him a job. In endowing Henry VIII with all these attributes, More was telling the king everything he should and would be able to achieve because of the marvellous liberal education he had received.18 Nowhere, of course, did this apply more than the favour shown by the discerning monarch to ‘learned men’, who ‘by a happy reversal of circumstances’, now received the privileges that ‘ignoramuses carried off in the past’. Indeed, contributions from the ‘ignoramuses’ – Carmeliano, André and their friends – were noticeably absent. They probably wrote verses to the young king; equally probably, they were ignored.

  When he heard of his former pupil’s accession, John Skelton rushed to London from his Norfolk parish of Diss. He wrote a coronation poem for the festivities, to be painted out on boards or copied onto parchment, framed and hung on display. The poem evidently made it as far as the planning stage: a wardrobe official folded up Skelton’s original draft and left it in a book of accounts for jousts and revels. The unfortunate Stephen Hawes tried to write his way back into royal favour with a ‘Joyful Meditation to all England’, printed as a souvenir edition by Wynkyn de Worde. Andrea Ammonio’s elegy for Henry VII ‘et felice successione Henrici Octavi’, meanwhile, killed two birds with one stone.19

  All the poems stressed the evils of the old reign, and the restoring of the natural order. Hawes, understandably the most cautious, hedged his bets, though even he wrote of people’s opinion that Henry VII was inclined to avarice. Skelton talked of the wolves and bears ‘That wrought have much care/ And brought England in woe’; no longer would people be scared of their extortion and treachery. And all the poets, in their various ways, used the Platonic idea of the Golden Age, which writers through the ages had used to celebrate the birth of a new regime. History, More explained, repeated itself. ‘As spring is banished and returns’, and in the same way that ‘winter at regular intervals returns as it was before’, so after ‘many revolutions’ all things will come again. For there to be a time of rebirth, moreover, there had to be a dark age, an ‘age of iron’, before it. Back in 1485, the likes of Carmeliano and André had drawn on precisely the same images in praising Henry VII – but then, they had been celebrating England’s deliverance from the rule of a usurper, Richard III. Twenty-four years later, the new king’s poets were using the same idea to commemorate a peaceful dynastic succession, albeit one in which a son was delivering the country from his own father’s tyranny. The alacrity with which they did so suggests that the new king and his counsellors thoroughly approved.

  Henry VII had worked tirelessly to disassociate his reign from the civil wars out of which it had emerged. Now, it was shoved together with them into a century of upheaval and instability: a ‘hundred years’, Skelton wrote, in which ‘a man could not espy/ That right dwelt us among’. In the hands of Henry VIII’s court poets, the age of rebirth started not in 1485, but in 1509.20

  ‘The rose both white and red/ In one rose now doth grow’, declaimed Skelton. Thomas More said the same. A white rose, he wrote, had grown near a red one, and each had tried to crowd out the other. But now, both had combined to become a single flower, a rose with the qualities of both; and so, ‘the contest ends the only way it can’. If, wrote More, ‘anyone loved either one of these roses, let him love this one in which is found whatever he loved’. Henry VIII’s coronation, in other words, was the end of a particular history: the wars of the roses were over.21

  The coronation took place on Sunday 24 June, Midsummer’s Day, exactly five years after Prince Henry had left Eltham for his father’s court. At 8 a.m., the procession, headed by twenty-eight bishops, set off from Westminster Hall down a carpet of blue cloth that stretched across the palace yard and through King Street gate, past the shell of Henry VII’s near-complete chapel and along the lane that bounded the abbey sanctuary. As the royal party disappeared into the abbey, the crowd descended on the cloth, hacking and ripping up the costly fabric for souvenirs and relics.22

  Enthroned alongside his queen on a high stage, Henry VIII took the traditional oaths to defend the laws of the land, and ‘especially of the laws, customs and liberties’ of the church. But the ceremonies also underscored an idea that his father had drawn on to bolster his power and authority, that of imperial kingship – which trumped royal power, because it claimed sovereignty over all other authorities in its lands, including the church. Henry VII had favoured the arched, closed imperial crown, which had also appeared on the gold coins to which he had given the name ‘sovereigns’, and he had found the idea a useful prop to his lawyers’ aggressive and highly lucrative attacks on church liberties and jurisdictions. At his coronation, Henry VIII wore vestments like a bishop’s, stressing his sacred as well as his temporal power; in the celebratory jousts that followed, a ‘great crown imperial’ topped the royal pavilion. As the likes of Erasmus and More had shown, ideas of a supreme Christian king devoted to justice and the common good were much in vogue – but then, that midsummer morning, as the new king vowed to uphold and protect the church and its rights, few could have foreseen Henry VIII’s later obsession with his God-given supremacy, which alone could give him what Rome would deny him: a divorce.23

/>   The coronation was celebrated with an extravagant feast in Westminster Hall, presided over by the chief steward, the duke of Buckingham, pacing the length of the hall on a horse. It was all too much for Lady Margaret Beaufort.24 Earlier that day, she had had ‘full great joy’ at her grandson’s coronation – though, in her devout way, she took care to remind everyone that ‘some adversity would follow’. It did, and rather quicker than even she might have anticipated. Though still ordering various ‘waters and powders’ for the illnesses that had laid her low, the tempting delicacies on offer tested even her legendary abstemiousness. Banqueting rather too well – it was, apparently, ‘eating a cygnet’ that did it – she was taken back to her suite of rooms above the gatehouse to the abbey cloisters, where she declined rapidly. On 29 June, barely two months after her son’s death, she too passed away. The young king had lost the two controlling influences on his life in rapid succession. As Lady Margaret lay dying she might have heard, carried on the air, the faint sounds of chaos from the tiltyard nearby.25

  Back in November 1501, Catherine’s first wedding tournament had taken place under leaden skies and the penetrating gaze of the old king, and against the uncertain backdrop of the earl of Suffolk’s defection; squalls of freezing rain had had everybody running for cover. Now, the sun blazed in a midsummer sky. The ‘fresh young gallants’ of the new regime, the tiltyard companions whom the king had grown up with – Charles Brandon, Sir Edward Howard, Thomas Knyvet and the rest – slipped the leash. Under Henry VII, their behaviour in the tiltyard had seemed a threat, a challenge to the regime. Now, they would revel in the young king’s favour.

  As the two teams of combatants made their bombastic entrances into the tiltyard, the newly crowned couple looked on from a gallery constructed to resemble a battlemented castle, panelled with green-and-white bricks, in each of which was painted a rose, Catherine’s pomegranate emblem, or the happy couple’s entwined initials. Rolling out of Westminster Hall came the challengers’ pageant: a mountain, pulled by a lion made of ‘glittering gold’. Grinding to a halt, its sides swung open and out thundered two horsebacked, plate-armoured knights. Through the gate on the other side of the yard appeared the defenders’ pageant, a castle topped by a pomegranate tree – Castile and Aragon combined – drawn by a ‘lioness’. Then, in the form that the prince’s companions had been perfecting in the last years of the old reign, the games were placed in the context of a dramatic narrative. Both teams lined up and eyeballed each other, the jousters in enamelled plate armour: Tudor green-and-white, black paled with gold, all red, all green. Charles Brandon’s armour was gold, from helmet to spurs. Then, the jousts’ scenario was acted out, and the trouble started.26

  The defenders, the Scholars, would joust on behalf of the goddess of wisdom, Dame Pallas; the challengers, for Love of Ladies.27 The challengers’ representative, a bellicose horsebacked Cupid clothed in a jacket of blue velvet and clutching his golden dart of love, sneeringly suggested to Dame Pallas that her scholars clearly didn’t know whether they were there to give a lesson in jousting, or to be taught one – the implication being the latter.

  The rivalry between the teams simmered all through the first day of the jousts, and exploded on the second. On 28 June, Henry VIII’s eighteenth birthday, a huge, stylized arcadia – an enclosed forest on wheels, with fretworked trees, bushes and ferns – was wheeled into the palace yard. Its doors were pulled open and live deer released, pursued and savaged to death by mastiffs: the bloodied corpses were presented to Catherine. In the ensuing jousts, sparks flew – ‘the fire sprang out of their helmets’ – to such an extent that the king brought the combatants to a halt, perceiving some ‘grudge and displeasure’ between them. He then imposed rules restricting each side to a certain number of sword strokes; rules which, in the melee that followed, were completely ignored. In the pandemonium, with the tournament marshals unable to exert any control, the king ‘cried out to his guard’, who waded in, but even the robust yeomen were unable to separate the teams without ‘great pain’. The rest of the games were called off: ‘and so these jousts broke up’, as one observer lamely put it.28

  Thomas More’s epigram on the occasion was up to his recent artful standards. ‘All the tournaments kings have held until now’, he wrote, gesturing expansively towards history, ‘have been marked by some sad mishap or by disaster.’ Knights had been mortally wounded; commoners had been skewered by stray lances or trampled by maddened horses; sometimes, stands had collapsed under the weight of cheering spectators jumping up and down. But not this time: ‘this tournament of yours, sire, the most beautiful we have ever seen, is disfigured by no misfortune.’

  In concluding that the coronation games had been ‘conspicuous for such freedom from trouble as is appropriate to your character’, either More was becoming as blind or as supine as Bernard André, the poet on whom both he and Erasmus had poured scorn, or he was daring to suggest something rather different: that the violence of the prematurely abandoned games reflected something in the nature of the king himself. Or, in More’s typical fashion, perhaps he was saying both.

  Over the following months, the late king’s financial grip over a number of prominent nobles was relaxed. A series of bonds was cancelled, including those of Buckingham, Northumberland, Bergavenny and Mountjoy. Squashed onto the bottom of a page of accounts, almost as an afterthought, was a payment of £1,000 for Catherine’s longstanding debts. Henry VII’s political prisoners, too, were released: in Calais, Thomas Grey marquis of Dorset was freed by a smiling Sir Thomas Lovell; William Courtenay, in prison for some seven years, followed soon after. The new king, after all, was the rose both red and white. Unlike his father, he seemed perfectly comfortable with having his Yorkist relatives at large – and, as everybody was telling him, he was magnanimous to boot. But even for him, the line had to be drawn at some point. The earl of Suffolk remained in the Tower. And others found that the milk, honey and nectar flowed rather less freely than they had anticipated.29

  During the coronation preparations, Buckingham had been restored to the post of constable of England, a title that he, like his father, believed was his by hereditary right. Henry VIII had, accordingly, restored it to him – but for a single day: ‘the 23rd June only, viz., the day preceding the coronation’.30 Buckingham’s brother-in-law, the earl of Northumberland, was similarly irritated. Many of the estates and offices in the northeast that he regarded as rightfully his had, following his minority, never been returned to him, but had been held on behalf of the king by Thomas lord Darcy, one of Henry VII’s household men; now, Darcy had all his posts confirmed, and received more, for good measure.31 To Buckingham and Northumberland it could only mean one thing: that the king was being got at, by his father’s old counsellors.

  That August, Darcy wrote to Richard Fox from Yorkshire with news of local talk that had been circulating since Henry VIII’s coronation. Northumberland’s servants were bragging that England would be carved up between their master and the duke of Buckingham, who had his eye on the protectorship of England. Northumberland, meanwhile, aimed for what he regarded as his hereditary overlordship of all England north of the River Trent, the traditional boundary between the north and south of the country. If the king failed to grant them these offices, all ‘should not long be well’.

  There was more, Darcy added. As usual, merchants coming north from London brought gossip, and Richard Fox’s ambitions were, apparently, the talk of the town. He had, it was said, failed to dominate the new king, and in the process to exclude from royal favour a tight-knit group of counsellors including the earl of Surrey, Sir Henry Marney and Thomas Ruthall. Now, ‘it was the saying of every market man from London’ that Fox was trying a different approach: to create a clique with Buckingham and Northumberland, and to rule the king that way.

  ‘My lord’, Darcy urged Fox, ‘good it is to have a good eye, though much be but sayings.’ Darcy concluded by saying that he would keep his ear to the ground, and would continue to supply Fox
, Ruthall and Marney with information. Meanwhile, he would try to round up the rumour-mongers.32

  All this may have been ‘sayings’, but it indicated something else about the new climate. Nobody ever talked about people ‘ruling’ Henry VII. In fact, people rarely talked openly at all – and when they did, out of turn, they soon learned not to. In the expansive glory of the new young king, however, people felt they detected a distinct susceptibility to influence. Where his father had kept even his closest counsellors at a distance, and by the end of the reign had given the impression of having no confidential advisers at all, this kind of talk indicated that people thought quite the opposite about Henry VIII.33

  On 8 July, the king appointed a number of high-profile commissions, because, as he said, it had come to his attention that his laws had been subverted, along with the good governance of his realm. These panels of nobles, judges and counsellors were empowered to determine and punish the full spectrum of criminal offences, from trespass to treason. In particular, they were to look into all possible violations of ‘the Statute of Magna Carta, concerning the liberties of England’, the compact between the king and his noble subjects that, people believed, had been torn up by Henry VII and his administrators. This slate-cleaning exercise had, however, been stipulated in his will, which had instructed his executors to carry out such investigations within three months of his death. Now, the old king’s counsellors were instrumental in setting up a commission empowered to investigate the abuses in which they themselves had been involved.34

  Inevitably, any detailed inquest into grievances concerning the abuses of the old regime would raise uncomfortable questions about who had been responsible for them – not only the counsellors, but Henry VII himself. The vague remit of the commission, though, neatly precluded any genuine inquiry.35 Besides which, there were two scapegoats conveniently to hand. The problem facing the commissioners concerning Empson’s and Dudley’s indictments was how to make the mud stick without incriminating anybody else. They soon found a solution.