The meeting between Henry VII and the Archduke Philip provided the perfect opportunity to launch the event. At the head of Philip’s train was Antoine, the grand bâtard (‘great bastard’) of Burgundy (1421–1502). He had been the Burgundian champion in the last great Anglo–Burgundian tournament held in 1467, and the intervening decades had only reinforced his authority as an arbiter of chivalry. Jousters were equally prominent in Henry VII’s entourage, which included, as well as Suffolk, the duke of Buckingham, the earl of Essex, Lord Harrington, Lord William Courtenay and Sir John Peche.
While the king and the archduke discussed politics, it seems pretty safe to assume that their courtiers talked about the finer points of the tilt. The results of their deliberations were incorporated into the challenge for the wedding joust, which was issued in Calais and widely distributed. A copy in French was sent to the king of France. The Spanish ambassador got sight of this, copied it and sent it to Spain. Versions in English were also sent to the king of Scots and given to the archduke. The challenge was issued in the name of Suffolk, as the chief challenger, and five others: Essex, Harrington, Courtenay, Peche and Sir Guillaume de la Riviere, all six of whom were present in person.
Those answering the challenge were to write their name on specially prepared lists; they were also to supply a shield of their arms to be hung on a tree of arms at Westminster. In keeping with the international tone of the event, special arrangements were made to facilitate the participation of ‘gentlemen strangers of whatever nation it be’.
All of this looked back to the high noon of Anglo– Burgundian chivalry under Edward IV: the tree of arms was taken from the spectacular tournament, known as the Golden Tree, which the grand bastard had organized in 1468 for the wedding of Margaret of York and Charles the Bold, while the rules of combat were copied from the regulations for tournaments drawn up by the earl of Worcester, constable to Edward IV.
* * *
But the splendour of the revival of Yorkist chivalry was suddenly dimmed by the reality of Yorkist politics. For in August 1501, just over a year after his return from the Calais meeting, Suffolk fled abroad once more with his second brother, Richard, to seek refuge with Maximilian, Philip’s father and king of the Romans, in the Tyrol.4
Suffolk’s mind had been made up by the report he had received from Sir Robert Curzon, Suffolk’s fellow challenger in the joust for Henry’s creation in 1494. Curzon had been licensed by Henry VII to join Maximilian’s service to fight the Turks. But it turned out that his enemy was as much Henry Tudor as the Infidel. He told Maximilian of Henry’s ‘murders and tyrannies’ on the one hand, and Suffolk’s ‘propos’ to recover his rights on the other. Maximilian answered sympathetically: if he might have ‘one of King Edward’s blood in his hands he would help him to recover the crown of England and be revenged’ on Henry.
Throughout Curzon’s report, Henry VII is referred to as ‘H’. It is the language of the spy throughout the ages. Later on, Curzon was ‘turned’ and became a double agent. Or he might have been one all along.
The timing of Suffolk’s flight, with Catherine of Aragon already on her way to England, caused exquisite embarrassment and forced a hasty rejigging of the personnel of the marriage joust. It also threatened to bring about the final Götterdämmerung of the house of York; even, perhaps, to transform Henry’s own destiny in life from that of a royal duke into a prince of the church.
For Suffolk was at the centre of a close-knit web of family connexions. This was brought uncomfortably into the limelight by his movements in the days before his flight. He ‘banquetted privily’ in London with Lord Harrington (soon to succeed his father as marquess of Dorset), the earl of Essex and Lord William Courtenay. A ‘banquet’ was an entertainment at which sweetmeats, fruits and wines were served. It was elegant, fashionable and light: the perfect background for innocent conversation, or, equally, the quick, whispered words of conspiracy. Heavier fare would have been on offer when Suffolk dined with the earl of Devon, Lord William’s father, in his house in Warwick Lane, which ran between Paternoster Row and Newgate Street, just to the north-west of St Paul’s. Devon had come to the ‘outer gate’ to receive him – a gesture of unusual politeness which had set tongues wagging.
All this might mean something – or nothing. Suffolk himself hotly denied that any of his table companions had been forewarned of his flight. Others certainly knew of it, however. William Hussey was consulted by someone who was considering joining Suffolk. He advised him to see an astrologer to determine Suffolk’s chance of success. William Hussey also belonged to the smart set at court: he was son of Sir John Hussey, the brother-in-law of the earl of Kent, who in turn was half-brother to the earl of Essex through their mother, Anne Woodville.5
* * *
This, as far as Henry VII was concerned, was the problem: Suffolk’s circle of intimates looked like a Yorkist family convention: Dorset was Queen Elizabeth of York’s nephew, Essex was her first cousin and William Courtenay her brother-in-law. They banqueted and dined together. They fought together in the tournament.
Would they also fight together against the upstart Tudors?
In these circumstances the king as usual struck first, and most of the surviving males of the house of York were rounded up and charged with participating in Suffolk’s treason. William Courtenay and William de la Pole, Suffolk’s youngest brother, were arrested in February 1502 and sent to the Tower. De la Pole was to die there almost forty years later, and it looked as though Courtenay’s fate would be the same – or worse. His wife and children were taken into the queen’s protection (if indeed she had not been looking after them before), and Courtenay himself was attainted in 1504.6
For the time being Thomas Grey, marquess of Dorset, the biggest fish apart from Suffolk himself to fall under suspicion, kept his freedom and his dignities. He acted as the king’s lieutenant (or deputy) at the Garter feast at Windsor, and preened himself, magnificently dressed and mounted, in the reception of foreign visitors. But these were the flowers strewing the abyss, and in 1506 he too was sent to the Tower. The following year Dorset and his fellow Yorkist prisoner, Courtenay, were despatched under escort across the Channel and re-imprisoned in the castle of Calais on 18 October 1507. There, according to the chronicler of Calais, ‘they were kept prisoners … as long as King Henry the Seventh lived, and should have been put to death, if he had lived longer’.7
Where did all this leave Henry? Dorset and Courtenay were indeed ‘both of kin to … Queen Elizabeth and of her blood’, as the chronicler of Calais described them. So, and most of all, was Henry. He even bore the title of duke of York.
I am not suggesting that Henry VII’s suspicions about Yorkist conspiracy, even at their darkest and most universal, extended to his second son. But it may be that this last spasm of Yorkist sentiment does help explain his father’s apparently contradictory intentions for the boy.
What was Henry to be when his elder brother Arthur succeeded as king? Duke of York and the premier noble of England? Or, as one authority claims, archbishop of Canterbury and prince of the church?
At first sight, there seems little doubt: his father had not only created Henry duke of York, but had also given him a substantial landed endowment as such. And he was adding to this as late as 21 July 1501, when the king finally reached agreement with Lord Grey’s executors for the purchase of Codnor Castle. Six months earlier, Lady Margaret Beaufort – who was privy to the king her son’s inmost thoughts – showed herself similarly confident about Henry’s long-term future as a great landed magnate. Her tenants in the north west, she suggested to the king, should all be made ‘retainers’ – that is, sworn followers in peace and war – to ‘my lord of York, your fair sweet son’.
‘The which,’ she added, ‘shall not after be long undone.’8
But did the coincidence of Suffolk’s flight and Arthur’s marriage force Henry VII to rethink, perhaps even to change his mind? Was it really wise, he may have wondered, to saddle the future King
Arthur with Henry, duke of York? After all, the duke would be rich in land and men; Yorkist blood flowed in his veins; he bore the magic name; he even, as was already clear, looked Yorkist. Why, Henry VII may have concluded, spend twenty bitter years suppressing the ancient enmity of Lancaster and York only to sow the seeds of its revival in the next generation by his own voluntary act?
All this is possible – though there is not a scrap of direct contemporary evidence that Henry VII harboured any such doubts. But there is the otherwise strange assertion of Henry VIII’s first, seventeenth-century biographer, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, that Henry was ‘destined to the archbishopric of Canterbury, during the life of his elder brother Prince Arthur’. Their father, Henry VII’s supposed intention was twofold: to save money and to get control of the church for the crown, on the one hand, and on the other to leave his second son scope to carve out a great career for himself in a sphere where he would complement, rather than rival, his elder brother.9
Herbert’s statement has been repeated, more or less respectfully, by almost all subsequent writers. But what is the evidence for it? Herbert himself describes his source as ‘a credible author’, whom he cites in the first edition of 1649 by a heavily abbreviated marginal note: ‘Concil. Trid. I i’. This, it turns out, is a reference to Paolo Sarpi’s sensational, anti-papalist Historia del Concilio Tridentino (History of the Council of Trent), which was first published in 1619 in London and dedicated to James I and VI. An English translation appeared the following year, in which the relevant passage, in Volume 1 Chapter 1, was rendered as follows:
Amongst the most famous contradictors, which the doctrine of Luther found, was Henry VIII, king of England, who not being born the king’s eldest son, had been destinated by his father to be archbishop of Canterbury, and therefore in his youth was made to study.10
Herbert, it is clear, has merely glossed and elaborated Sarpi. But where did Sarpi, an Italian who was born five years after Henry’s death and never left Italy, get his information from? As he cites no reference, we cannot be sure. But we can guess.
The link, I suspect, was a fellow Italian. His name was anglicised as William Parron, and for many years he acted as Henry VII’s semi-official astrologer.
Parron operated both at court and in the marketplace. Every 24 December (to catch the Christmas market) he published a cheaply printed ‘prognostication’ or almanack for the forthcoming year; and on the ensuing 1 January he presented the king with a more esoteric manuscript treatise as a New Year’s Day gift for his personal enlightenment.11
One of these royal gifts was entitled Liber de optimo fato Henrici Eboraci ducis (‘Book of the good fortune of Henry, duke of York’). In the form that it has come down to us, it was compiled between April 1502 and February 1503. But it incorporates material which seems to have been written earlier, probably in late 1501.
This reused material, it has been pointed out, places ‘frequent emphasis on the religious qualities of … Henry’s future career’. One remark in particular stands out. ‘Indubitanter,’ Parron claims, ‘devotus erit et bonus ecclesiasticus.’ ‘Undoubtedly [Henry] will be devout and a good cleric [ecclesiasticus].’ There is, it is true, a slight ambiguity in ecclesiasticus, since it could, at a pinch, mean ‘churchman’ in the sense of ‘a supporter of the church’.12 But ‘cleric’ is by far the most common usage.
What did Parron know that others, including Henry’s own grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, did not? Here it should be noted that Parron had form. Back in 1499 he had composed an earlier treatise for presentation to Henry VII, De astrorum vi fatali (‘Of the fatal power of the stars’). This was finished on 15 October. But it contains a transparent justification for the executions of Warbeck and Warwick, which did not take place till five and six weeks later, at the end of November:
It is expedient that one man should die for the people and the whole nation perish not. For an insurrection cannot occur in any state without the death of a great part of the people and the destruction of many great families with their property.13
Was Parron similarly jumping the gun in 1501 with fears about Henry, duke of York’s role as a potential incendiary? And was he proposing his consecration as a churchman as a way out of the problem?
Even, curiously, the succession to Canterbury was a topical hot potato at the time. Cardinal-archbishop Morton, Henry VII’s long-serving minister and Thomas More’s patron, had died in September 1500. His nominated successor was Thomas Langton. But Langton too died within three weeks of being translated from Winchester in January 1501. Finally Henry Deane, bishop of Salisbury, was promoted to the archbishopric, and took up office in the summer of 1501.
All this meant that there had been three archbishops in six months. And was Deane, Henry VII’s ‘faithful councillor’, intended only to keep the throne of St Augustine warm until Henry had reached the canonical age for consecration?14
It is possible. But Parron’s scheme – and Parron himself – was overtaken by events.
Notes - CHAPTER 9: THE LAST PRETENDER
1. See above, p. 140.
2. LP Hen. VII I, 397, 400–1.
3. Vergil B, 123.
4. GEC XII i, 451–54; LP Hen. VII I, 132, mentions ‘the favour he [Guildford] beareth him [Suffolk]’; CSP Sp. I, 231, 233.
5. LP Hen. VII I, 134, 225–6.
6. GEC XII i, appendix I; RP VI, 544–9.
7. Anstis, Register I, 244; Gairdner, Paston Letters VI, 172–3. The Chronicle of Calais, 6. This says that Dorset and Courtenay were brought to Calais Castle on ‘the xviij. of October the xxiij. [year] of Henry the Seventh’. This is 1507, not 1508 as the editor renders it. 1507 is also the date given by André (Memorials, 100).
8. See above, p. 101; Catalogue of Ancient Deeds in the Public Record Office, 6 vols (1890–1915) V, no. A. 13484; Pollard, Reign of Henry VII I, 219.
9. Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, The Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth (1649), 2.
10. P. Sarpi, The Historie of the Councel of Trent, trans. Nathanael Brent (1620), 16.
11. C. A. J. Armstrong, ‘An Italian Astrologer at the Court of Henry VII’ in E. F. Jacob, ed., Italian Renaissance Studies (1960), 433–54, 434–5.
12. Ibid., 451–3.
13. Ibid., 437–42.
14. OxfordDNB, ‘Deane’.
10
FUNERALS
AFTER THE DEPARTURE OF HIS BROTHER and sister-in-law for Ludlow, Henry remained at court to spend Christmas with his parents at Richmond. The king was in an expansive mood: he had married his eldest son and inaugurated his new palace. Nothing was too good for his second son either, and he gave Henry £3.6s.8d with which ‘to play at dice’.1
This was a huge sum (at least £1,000 in today’s money). No doubt Henry enjoyed himself, rolling the dice, calling the numbers and counting out his winnings and losses.
But he was to pay the price by developing a taste for heavy gambling.
Three weeks later, Henry was an important guest at another wedding. This was the marriage by proxy (that is, in the groom’s absence) of his elder sister Margaret to James IV of Scotland. Relations between England and Scotland had come a long way since James IV’s enthusiastic support for Warbeck. The Spanish, who were allies of both countries, worked hard at reconciliation; James, mercurial as ever, had lost interest in border raiding, while Henry VII was also dreaming dreams of a greater Britain. The treaties of marriage and alliance were agreed on 24 January 1502; the following day the proxy wedding was celebrated with much ceremony at Richmond.
First there was mass in the splendid new chapel royal of the palace, after which a ‘notable sermon’ was preached by Richard Fitzjames, bishop of Rochester, in the presence of ‘the king and queen with their noble children, except the prince’. The party then processed to the queen’s great chamber for the proxy wedding, with Henry ‘duke of York, the king’s second son’ heading the list of the distinguished company.
Immediately after the ceremony Queen Eliza
beth took her daughter ‘by the hand’. It was a gesture of motherly affection; it was also a recognition of the fact that Margaret, as queen of Scots, was now her equal in status. The two dined at the same table, eating from the same dishes and both having covered cups as a mark of their sovereign status.2
But there was as yet no question of sending Margaret to Scotland. She was deemed to be too young – and too underdeveloped for her age – for the reality of marriage with a bridegroom who was more than double her age, and notoriously fond of the ladies. Instead the treaties provided for a year-and-a-half delay, specifying that she should be handed over to her husband-to-be no later than 1 September 1503.3
Meanwhile Henry’s brother and new sister-in-law had arrived at the great marcher castle of Ludlow. There they were intended to gain experience in the business of government and in the equally serious business of living with each other and getting a family. Arthur apparently took to his marital duties with gusto. One of his most intimate body servants, William Thomas, later testified: ‘[I] made the said prince ready to bed and with other conducted him clad in his night-gown unto the princess’s bed-chamber door often and sundry times whereinto he entered and there continued all night.’
Indeed, Arthur’s enthusiasm for sex alarmed some of his household. Maurice St John told an unknown informant that ‘Arthur, after he had lain with the Lady Catherine, at Shrove-tide after his marriage, began to decay … which St John said was because he lay with the Lady Catherine’.4
Shrove (Pancake) Tuesday fell on 8 February in 1502; on Saturday, 2 April, Arthur was dead.
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