Henry

by Starkey, David

  Henry, as princes of Wales tend to be, was fussy about such things. Compton was gaining valuable experience in what his master wanted and how to deliver it.

  He would have plenty of opportunity to use it when Henry became king.

  For then his rise was meteoric. By the time of the coronation on 24 June Compton was already, along with Thomas, the leading member of the new king’s privy or secret chamber. He is not formally described as groom of the stool till almost a year later, in April 1510, but almost certainly he had stepped into Hugh Denys’s shoes within weeks or even days of Henry’s accession. And soon he was handling much greater sums of money than his predecessor ever had.6

  Denys had dealt in the dribs and drabs wrung out of Henry VII’s subjects by the surveyor of the king’s prerogative; Compton, by contrast, found himself the recipient of the riches which, paradoxically, descended on the new king as a result of his own generosity. Henry (in so far as he had been allowed to) had dealt out largesse with an open hand – whether as straightforward patronage, cancelled bonds and recognizances, or his ‘much more ample, gracious and beneficial’ general pardon. But all needed royal letters patent to put them into effect. And letters patent, as we have seen, needed to be paid for.

  The resulting cash windfall was collected in the first instance by the financial officer of the chancery, known as the clerk of the hanaper. In the first twelve weeks of the reign, the money – some £2,000 – was handed over directly to the king. Thereafter, as was to become the practice in so many instances, great and small, Compton acted on Henry’s behalf and received the money instead: £1,040 on 1 December (which no doubt came in handy for Christmas), £607 on 1 March 1510, £400 in both June and July, and £340 in November. Nor was this all. At the same time, Compton received other large sums from the king’s consolidated land revenues: £2,328 in 1509–10, £1,406 in 1510–11, and £812 in 1511–12.7

  In all of this Compton was simply a proxy for Henry: he was receiving large sums because Henry wished to spend large sums on his personal pleasures and amusements and his everyday living. For Henry’s attitude to money was both like and very unlike his father’s. Both were fond of money and both needed lots of it. But there the resemblance ended. Henry’s father, at least towards the end of his reign, came to see the accumulation of money as an end in itself, which is why he left so much of it. For Henry, on the other hand, money was only a means to an end, be it honour, glory, immortality – or simply having a good time.

  In a nutshell, the father was a saver; the son, a spender.

  Which is why, having spent several fortunes in the course of his reign, Henry died almost as heavily in debt as his father had been in credit.

  Compton’s financial role at the beginning of the reign was the perfect epitome of this: the privy purse, as his account became known, was a purely spending agency. And it was the only one in which Henry showed any direct interest or involvement.

  Compton would have been at the king’s side throughout the Christmas and New Year festivities. But it was also his job to be the king’s eyes and ears. And it was no doubt through Compton that Henry heard ‘secretly’ that ‘diverse gentlemen’ had organized a joust at Richmond for 12 January 1510.

  This was both a challenge and an opportunity. Henry, to his mounting frustration, had been held to his father’s veto on participation in tournaments: ‘the king ran never openly before’, as the chronicler Edward Hall observes in his account of the affair.

  But, Henry quickly decided, this tournament, relatively low-key and well away from the glare of publicity in London, might provide just the opportunity he had been waiting for to challenge – or at least evade – the ban on his taking part in jousting. And he turned to Compton to find the means. For Compton had yet another job. It was the same as other confidential servants’ throughout the ages, in literature as in life: Sancho Panza for his master, Don Quixote; Figaro for his, Count Almaviva; Jeeves for his, the ineffable Bertie Wooster. So it was for Compton and Henry. Master and man were a team, a pantomime horse, in which Compton – like his fictional counterparts – had, simultaneously, to play the rear legs and be the brains of the enterprise.

  Between the two of them, it was decided that Henry should take part in the joust. But he would do so incognito, ‘unknown to all persons and unlooked for’. This more or less squared the circle. Henry would have his fun, without openly defying the ban on his taking part. Compton would ride as Henry’s aide or assistant, just like Sancho Panza with Don Quixote, and he would sort out the practical details.

  This he did with his accustomed efficiency. Arms, armour and horses were prepared and the two of them were ‘secretly armed in the little park of Richmond’.

  Then they entered the lists. ‘Stranger’ knights, with visors closed and without identifying coats of arms, were stock figures of chivalric fiction. Henry was now taking part in one of the knightly romances that were a staple of his teenage reading. And, as with most parts, he played it well. So did Compton. ‘There were broken many staves’, Hall reports, ‘and great praise [was] given to the two strangers.’

  But then near disaster struck and wrecked the scheme. Compton’s next opponent was Sir Edward Neville. Neville, the younger brother of Lord Abergavenny, was one of the original ‘spears’ appointed under Henry’s father. As such, he was a more-or-less professional jouster. He also shared Henry’s own height and physique; indeed, when they were masked in a court revel, it was easy to mix them up. This combination was too much for Compton: Neville ‘hurt him sore, and [Compton] was likely to die’.

  The play was now in danger of turning into a tragedy. It was time to bring down the curtain. ‘One person there was that knew the king, and cried “God save the king!”’ But that only made matters worse. Was the badly injured stranger-knight the king? Was it accident or treason? ‘With that’, Hall reports, ‘all the people were astonished.’

  It was left to Henry to save the day, which he did in a single dramatic gesture. ‘Then the king disclosed himself, to the great comfort of all the people.’8

  Henry, as was to become a habit, got away with it. Compton, too, made a good recovery from his accident and soon resumed his place as the king’s right-hand man.

  Henry had broken the ban on participation, but not flagrantly. And he continued to tread warily. There was of course no question of going back to his seat in the royal box. Instead, he decided that his next outing would be in a running at the ring. For who could object at that? Even his father had allowed him to do it and had actually watched him perform.

  Now there was no father, but there were his father-in-law Ferdinand’s ambassadors to impress and patronize. They ‘had never seen the king in harness [armour]’ and were eager to do so. Henry was only too happy to oblige. The competition was set for 17 March and Henry captained one of the two teams. Over their armour, both he and his horse were magnificently attired in purple velvet, cut in letter shapes and backed in cloth-of-gold, so that it looked as though it had been embroidered with various mottoes. There was also a thick scattering of hundreds of sheaves of arrows (for Aragon) and castles (for Castile). These were made of pure gold and came from the stores of treasure that Compton had already begun to accumulate.

  Then came the contest. Everybody ran twelve courses. Henry, who carried the ring off five times and touched it thrice, did best and was awarded the prize. The ambassadors crowded round to congratulate him. Could they have some of the badges?, they asked. Grandly, Henry agreed and they helped themselves. Hall xenophobically suggests that they ‘took all or the more part’. The accounts of Richard Gibson, the master of the revels, tell a different story. ‘Given by the king’, they note, ‘to the lords of Spain that beheld the king’s running at the ring: 10 pieces.’

  After the show was over, the outfits of the king and his horse were handed back over to Henry, who promptly passed them on to ‘Mr Compton’.9

  * * *

  Next time, Henry and Compton decided, Henry’s public was ready for
him to take part in a real joust. Or at least some of them were. For, according to Hall, there was a clear division of opinion between young and old. ‘All young persons highly praised’ Henry’s decision to ride in the lists, he writes, ‘but the ancient fathers much doubted’. Then he elaborates: the latter ‘consider [ed] the tender youth of the king, and divers chances of horse and armour: in so much that it was openly spoken, that steel was not so strong, but that it might be broken, nor no horse could be so sure of foot, but he may fall’.

  Henry had had enough of fathers, ancient or otherwise, and he carried on regardless: ‘yet, for all these doubts, the lusty prince proceeded to his challenge’. And to the next. And the next.10

  There was no stopping him now.

  Compton’s rise quickly attracted attention. ‘I have written to you … the credit that one named Compton has with the king of England,’ the French ambassador informed his government back home. ‘It is he of this kingdom who has the most [credit] for the moment and to whom [Henry] speaks the most about his affair [s].’11 Others were less sure. Indeed, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, a seventeenth-century scholar-nobleman and Henry’s first biographer, saw him as rising without trace. Compton, he notes, was next in the king’s favour to the two giants of the council, Foxe and Surrey. But, he claims, he could be discounted since he was ‘more attentive to his profit than public affairs’. That is not quite, however, what Herbert’s source, Polydore Vergil, says:

  And admitted to the same wrestling-school [of politics], the third man [after Foxe and Surrey] was William Compton, the first minister of the royal bedchamber, but since he concerned himself more with things of an intimate nature rather than matters of state [or ‘power’], he gave no cause for suspicion.12

  Vergil, as usual, gets it about right. But, in a personal monarchy, ‘things of an intimate nature’ are not unimportant. Compton’s role, as Jeeves to Henry’s Wooster, helped the boy to begin to find himself as a man and a king. Most important was their incognito appearance in the Richmond tournament. It might look like a schoolboy prank, but it was also Henry’s first challenge to the near paternal authority of his council. And it would not have happened without Compton.

  Moreover, once tasted, Henry found that getting his own way became addictive. And there would be others – more forceful and ambitious than Compton – who realized this and determined to give him what he wanted.

  They were not, of course, altruistic. For giving Henry his head would also give them what they wanted: power.

  Notes - CHAPTER 23: BREAKING FREE: WILLIAM COMPTON

  1. TNA: OBS 1419; LP I i, 118, 289/39, 40, 41, 42.

  2. LP II ii, p. 1444; N. Sander, The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism, ed. and trans. D. Lewis (1877), 161.

  3. M. A. E. Wood, ed., Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladies, 3 vols (1846) I, 158 (LP I i, 127).

  4. CIPM: Henry VII, 3 vols (1898–1956) I, 882.

  5. BL Add. MS 28,623, fos. 15–15v.

  6. LP I i, 20 (p. 13), 82 (p. 42), 447/18.

  7. LP I i, 109; TNA: E 101/220/1 (LP I i, 579/1); LP I ii, 2766.

  8. The Chronicle, 513.

  9. Ibid., 514; LP II ii, 1492/ii.

  10. The Chronicle, 520.

  11. TNA: PRO 31/3/1 (LP I i, 734). My translation.

  12. Herbert, Life … of King Henry VIII, 8; Vergil B, 153: untranslated Latin text of the 1555 printed edition. I am grateful to Justine Taylor for her translation.

  24

  MARRIED LIFE

  ‘CHOOSE A WIFE FOR YOURSELF and always love her only,’ Skelton had advised his young charge eight years previously in the Speculum principis which he had presented to Henry at Eltham in 1501. Eight years are a long time in the life of a young man – long enough, indeed, to forget not only the advice but its giver. And that, evidently, is what Skelton feared had happened. He had written and despatched a set of congratulatory verses on Henry’s accession, entitled ‘A laud and praise made for our sovereign lord the king’:

  The rose both white and red

  In one rose now doth grow;

  …

  Grace the seed did sow.

  England now gather flowers,

  Exclude now all dolours.1

  But no messenger had arrived to summon him back to court from his fenny exile in Diss. So he tried again. This time he sought to revive youthful memories of those days at Eltham by sending Henry a second copy of his Speculum, topped and tailed by other occasional verses and ending with a passionate complaint about the way Henry was neglecting his old tutor:

  Shall I blame this notable failure of withdrawn generosity on so great and so munificent a king? May God avert it! … Farewell, my prince [he ends], easily prince of all princes. Know that you are the king: that you rule, and are not ruled. Hear Samuel; read Daniel: remove Ishmael, remove him, remove him!2

  For the time being, however, Henry remained impervious to his pleas.

  But if Henry had apparently forgotten Skelton, he had taken his advice to heart. For Henry really does seem to have chosen Catherine for himself. And he was – or at least he persuaded himself that he was – seriously in love with her. ‘As for that entire love which we bear to [Catherine]’, he wrote to her father, Ferdinand of Aragon, it is such that ‘even if we were still free, it is she … we would choose for our wife before all other’. That was in July 1509, a month after their wedding and in the first flush marital happiness.3

  But would he love her ‘always’ as Skelton enjoined? Would he even love her very long?

  Such thoughts were far from everyone’s mind when another Anglo–Spanish marriage took place, between Henry’s old mentor, Lord Mountjoy, and Ines de Veñegas, one of Catherine’s Spanish ladies. This was the second Spanish marriage in the Mountjoy family. A century previously, one of Mountjoy’s ancestors had married a lady-in-waiting of Constance of Castile, second wife to John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, and Mountjoy bore in his arms the two wolves sable of the house of Ayala to prove it. This second marriage, in strikingly similar circumstances to the first, had Henry’s enthusiastic backing. ‘[He] thinks’, he wrote to his father-in-law, Ferdinand of Aragon, ‘it very desirable that Spanish and English families should be united by family ties.’ Henry warmly endorsed Mountjoy himself as ‘one of his barons, whom he holds in high esteem’, and he sought Ferdinand’s support for the new Lady Mountjoy’s attempts to recover money she was owed in Spain.

  And Henry did all this in a letter, written in Latin and in his own hand – which, as he hated the business of writing, was always a sign of real commitment.4

  * * *

  A day or two after writing the letter on 30 July, Henry and Catherine set out on their first summer progress. It took the form of a complete circuit round London, through the parks and pleasure grounds that then ringed the capital. Many were familiar to Henry from his childhood and youth: Woking, which death had redelivered him from the grasping hands of his grandmother; Farnham, where his deceased brother Arthur had spent the first months of his short life; and Hanworth and Wanstead, his father’s maisons de retraite, where Henry had lived in enforced proximity to the old king in the last years of his reign. En route, Henry diverted himself, as he informed Ferdinand, with ‘birding, hunting, and other innocent and honest pastimes, also in visiting different parts of his kingdom’. He ‘does not’, Henry added hastily, ‘on that account neglect affairs of state’.5

  Perhaps. But, then as now, there was rarely much going on in the summer months. Instead, Henry and Catherine were free to begin to discover England – and each other. It is clear they liked what they found.

  The progress ended in late October at Greenwich. This was Henry’s own birthplace, Henry and Catherine had been married there, and, they decided, it would be where their first child was born as well.

  For Catherine was pregnant. Henry informed Ferdinand of the news at the beginning of November. ‘Your daughter’, he wrote, ‘with the favour of heaven has conceived in her womb a living child, and is right heavy here
with, which we signify to your majesty for the great joy thereof that we take and the exultation of our whole realm.’6

  By then, if the later calculations about the date of the delivery are to be believed, Catherine was about five months pregnant. The fact cast Henry’s behaviour over Christmas in a darker light. With his wife ‘right heavy’, the schoolboy antics of riding incognito in the joust on 12 January now look like wilful self-indulgence. And worse was to come. On 18 January, ‘suddenly in a morning’, Henry and twelve companions burst into the queen’s chamber, all dressed in Kendal Green like Robin Hood and his Merry Men, and complete with a woman got up as Maid Marian.7

  It was supposed to be done ‘for a gladness to the queen’s grace’. In fact it seems to have given her a nasty surprise: ‘the queen’, Hall reports, ‘the ladies and all other there were abashed, as well for the strange sight, as also for their sudden coming’. A few perfunctory steps were danced, then Henry and his fellow revellers withdrew – perhaps a little abashed in their turn.

  Was Henry’s boisterous adolescent behaviour starting to become a strain for Catherine? Or was it all part of the charm?

  Whatever Catherine’s feelings about her husband, all at least seemed to be going well with her pregnancy. The couple paid a brief visit to Greenwich in mid-January to get the preparations for her lying-in under way. The court then returned to Westminster for Henry’s first parliament.