Great Tales from English History, Book 2 (9 page)

This pretender’s six-year odyssey came to grief in the autumn of 1497, after a failed attempt to raise the West Country against
Henry. Captured at Beaulieu in Hampshire, he finally admitted his humble origins. But having heard his confession, Henry again
took a conciliatory line, inviting Warbeck and his charming Scottish wife to join his court. It was as if the King was enjoying
the fairytale himself. Even when Warbeck tried to escape the following summer, Henry was content merely to put him in the
stocks and have him repeat his confession. It was not until Warbeck tried to escape yet again that the King lost patience.
On 23 November 1499 the false claimant was hanged, and a few days later the true claimant, the hapless Earl of Warwick, was
beheaded on Tower Hill.

Henry gave Warbeck’s noble widow a pension and made her lady-in-waiting to the Queen. Lady Katherine Gordon became quite a
figure at the Tudor court, marrying no fewer than three more husbands and surviving until 1537. But the King’s sharp dose
of reality in 1499 had the desired effect — no more pretenders.

In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue

And found this land, land of the Free, beloved by you, beloved by me.

F
OURTEEN NINETY-TWO IS THE FAMOUS DATE
when Christopher Columbus is credited by history with the‘discovery’ of America. But
modern archaeologists have shown that the Vikings must have crossed the Atlantic long before him. The remains of Viking homes,
cooking pits and metal ornaments on the island of Newfoundland have been dated to around the year 1000, And there is every
reason to believe that Columbus was also preceded to the Americas by several shiploads of weather-beaten Englishmen.

The men had set sail from Bristol, heading out from the prosperous port on the River Avon in the west of England, first towards
Ireland, then further westwards into the Atlantic. They were fishermen, searching for cod that they could salt and trade for
wine, and they brought back tales of remote islands that they called‘The Isle of the Seven Cities’ and‘The Isle of Brasil’.
Late in the 1490s an English merchant called John Day reported their discoveries to the‘Grand Admiral’ of Spain — the
Almirante Major
— who may have been Columbus himself. In a letter that was misfiled for centuries in the National Archives at Simancas, Day
pointed out that the New World across the Atlantic had, in fact, already been‘found and discovered in other times by the men
of Bristol… as your Lordship knows’.

The problem with this English claim to transatlantic discovery is that these West Country fishermen had kept their find to
themselves, as cagey fishermen tend to do. Harbour records make clear that in the 1480s, if not earlier, ships from Bristol
had located the fabulously fecund Grand Banks fishing grounds that lie off New England and Newfoundland. But they did not
wish to attract competitors or poachers. Their only interest in terra firma of any sort was as a landmark to guide them to
the fishing waters. So Christopher Columbus has retained the glory for 1492 — and in any case,‘discovery’ now seems the wrong
word for landing on a continent that was already occupied by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of indigenous American
Indians.

When a contingent of Bristolians did finally set foot in America in a properly documented fashion, they did so under
royal patronage. Around 1494 an Italian navigator, Zuan Caboto, arrived at the court of King Henry VII. Like Columbus, Caboto
came from Genoa and he was a skilled propagandist for the exploding world of discovery. Brandishing charts and an impressive
globe, he persuaded Henry to grant him a charter to‘seeke out, discover and finde what soever isles, countries, regions or
provinces of heathens and infidels… which before this time have been unknown to all Christians’.

The prudent king was not about to invest any of his own money in the project. On the contrary, royal approval carried a price
tag — 20 per cent of the profits. But Zuan, now John Cabot, was granted permanent tax exemption on whatever he might bring
back from the New World for himself. So he went down to Bristol in search of investors. There he was able to fit out a small
wooden sailing ship, the
Matthew,
with a crew of eighteen, most of them’hearty Bristol sailors’.

It might seem surprising that the clannish West-Countrymen should team up with an Italian, an outsider, but there was a fraternity
among those who risked their lives on the mysterious western ocean. Cabot was skilled in the latest navigational techniques
using the stars, and he needed a crew who would not lose their nerve when out of sight of land for four weeks or more.

In the event, the journey took five. On 24 June 1497, thirty-five days after leaving England, the
Matthew
sighted land and dropped anchor somewhere off the coast of modern Newfoundland, Labrador or Nova Scotia. Cautiously,
Cabot and his landing party rowed ashore, where they found the remains of a fire, some snares set for game, a needle for making
nets and a trail that headed inland. Obviously, there were humans around; but Cabot was not keen to meet them.’Since he was
with just a few people,’John Day later explained in his letter to the Spanish Grand Admiral,‘he did not dare advance inland
beyond the shooting distance of a crossbow.’

The landing party planted four banners: the arms of St George, on behalf of King Henry VII; a papal banner on behalf of the
Pope; the flag of Venice, since Cabot had taken Venetian citizenship; and a cross intended for the local’heathens and infidels’.
Then the English mariners set off down the coast in pursuit of their great passion — the waters were‘swarming with fish’,
Cabot later boasted to the Milanese Ambassador, and there was no need of a net to catch them: they could just lean over the
ship’s rail and‘let down baskets with a stone’.

Heading for home around the middle of July, captain and crew used the same method that had got them there — the so-called‘dead
reckoning’. This involved fixing on one particular angle to the stars and preserving that angle as they sailed, effectively
staying on one line of latitude as they moved around the curve of the globe. Contrary to received wisdom, fifteenth-century
sailors did not believe the world was flat. Indeed, its roundness was the basis of their adventurous navigation techniques.

By 23 August, Cabot was back in London, reporting on his finds to the King who, never careless with his money,
doled out an immediate ten pounds — about four times the average annual wage at the time. Henry also granted the mariner an
annual pension of twenty pounds for life, to be paid by the port of Bristol out of its customs receipts. But John Cabot did
not live to claim it. The next year he set out on another expedition westwards where, as the Tudor historian Polydore Vergil
heartlessly put it, the‘newe founde lande’ he discovered was‘nowhere but on the very bottom of the ocean. Cabot and his ship
vanished without trace.

But his death did not discourage other adventurers. In 1501 Henry VII commissioned six more Bristolians to head westwards,
and they returned with Arctic hunting falcons — perhaps the King gave them to Lambert Simnel to train — along with a few of
the native inhabitants that Cabot had been careful to avoid encountering four years earlier:‘They were clothed in beasts’
skins and ate raw flesh,’ recorded one awestruck chronicler,‘and spake such speech that no man could understand them… In
their demeanour [they were] like… brute beasts.’

Falcons, fish and Eskimos — as the Inuit people came to be called at the end of the sixteenth century — were interesting enough,
but they bore no comparison to the gold, jewels and, above all, silver that Spain would soon be carrying home in heaving galleon-loads
from the southerly lands discovered by Columbus. It would be more than seventy years before England made a determined effort
to settle the northern parts of the continent that, after 1507, would be described on the maps as‘America’.

But the Eskimos settled in nicely, thank you. They evidently found themselves a tailor, for just two years after they
had first appeared at Henry’s court in their animal skins, England’s first New World immigrants were spotted by a chronicler
strolling around the Palace of Westminster,‘apparelled after the manner of Englishmen’. They were no longer‘brute beasts’,
he admitted —‘I could not discern [them] from Englishmen.’

F
OR MORE THAN HALF HIS REIGN
,
HENRY
VII’s chief minister was Cardinal John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and one of the great church statesmen who shaped
England’s story during the Middle Ages. Often of lowly birth, these clever individuals rose through the meritocratic system
of ecclesiastical education to make their names — in Morton’s case, via the challenging task of national fund-raising.

When collecting money for the King, Morton’s commissioners are said to have confronted their targets with a truly undodgeable
means test. If a likely customer appeared prosperous, he obviously had surplus funds to contribute to the
Kings coffers. If, on the other hand, he lived modestly, he must have been stashing his wealth away. Either way the victim
was compelled to pay — impaled, as it were, upon one or other of the twin prongs of a pitchfork.

Like many of history’s chestnuts, the facts behind what came to be known as‘Morton’s Fork’ are not quite as neat as the story.
It was more than 130 years later that the statesman-philosopher Francis Bacon coined the phrase, and the documents of the
time make clear that Morton did not wield the pitchfork personally. But the cardinal certainly did work hard to satisfy the
appetite of a money-hungry monarch. As well as helping Henry to tighten up parliamentary taxation, he presided over the collection
of‘benevolences’ —‘voluntary’ wealth taxes that invited subjects to show their goodwill towards the King. Not surprisingly,
these forced loans soon became known as‘malevolences’, and Henry himself developed a reputation as a miser.‘In his later days,’
wrote the normally loyal Polydore Vergil,‘all [his] virtues were obscured by avarice.’

Henry VII’s account ledgers would seem to bear this out. At the foot of page after page are the royal initials, scratched
by the careful bookkeeper monarch as he ran his finger down the columns. But Henry could spend lavishly when he wanted to,
particularly when it came to making his kingship visibly magnificent. In November 1501 he spent £14,000 (over £8 million today)
on jewels alone for the wedding in St Paul’s Cathedral of his eldest son Arthur to Katherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand
and Isabella of Spain. Ten days of tournaments were staged at Westminster and the feasting went on night after night beneath
the hammer
beam roof of the Great Hall, the walls hung with the costliest cloth of Arras.

Two years later Henry splashed out again when he sent his daughter Margaret north to marry King James IV of Scotland, with
an escort of two thousand horsemen, a train of magnificently clad noblemen and £16,000 (another £9 million or so) in jewels.
Henry VII’s marriage-broking proved portentous. It was Margaret’s marriage that would one day bring the Stuart dynasty to
England, while Katherine of Aragon, following the death of Arthur in 1502, would be passed on as wife to his younger brother
Henry, with equally historic consequences.

Henry VII had done well by England when he died, aged fifty-two, in April 1509. You can see his death mask in Westminster
Abbey, his face lean and intelligent, his eyes sharp and his mouth shut, concealing the teeth which, according to contemporary
description, were‘few, poor and black-stained’. He lies in splendour in the magnificent chapel that he built at the south
end of the abbey — another notable item of dynastic extravagance. Beside him lies his wife Elizabeth of York, and not far
away, his mother Lady Margaret Beaufort, who had schemed so hard and faithfully to bring her Tudor son to power.