Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (22 page)

As minors, Buckingham and Northumberland both became royal wards: Buckingham was raised in Lady Margaret Beaufort’s household, Northumberland in the king’s. Their sweeping family lands – Buckingham’s estates in the Welsh Marches and Gloucestershire made him the greatest landowner in the country – were given into the custody of royal officials, and the revenues from them flooded into Henry’s coffers. During the Warbeck years the young nobles were paraded at court as magnificent but obedient subjects, and their fortunes became increasingly entwined. They became brothers-in-law after Henry, always unable to resist a sale, had arranged Buckingham’s marriage to Northumberland’s sister for £4,000, and they were both admitted to the Order of the Garter in the same year. But if Henry hoped that their upbringing at the heart of the regime would have instilled in them a sense of their proper place in it, and their loyalty to it, he was to be sorely disappointed.

While they grew up, Henry’s administrators had been busily eating away, termite-like, at their estates and their authority. As they approached their majorities, both men looked for signs that they would gain the pre-eminence and responsibility as the king’s ‘natural’ counsellors that their rank, and their fathers’ sacrifices on the regime’s behalf, demanded – as well, of course, as the lucrative crown offices and titles that they believed were theirs by hereditary right. Northumberland was broodingly conscious of his family’s role as great lords in the traditionally unstable northeast; Buckingham, meanwhile, hankered after the office of Constable of England, a title that Richard III had withheld from his father – one of the factors that had tipped him into rebellion.
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All of which left Henry singularly unimpressed. As a contemporary commentator put it, for the king to confer high office and political power on noblemen ‘of his free disposition’ was ‘laudable’ – but, he warned, lords should ‘not presume to take it of their own authority, for then it will surely choke them’.
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It was for nobles to display good service and loyalty, and for the king to reward it, not the other way round. As Henry watched the young nobles parading themselves at court – Buckingham, in particular, was turning out to be a ‘high-minded man’ with a reputation for quick-tempered vindictiveness, who spoke ‘as in a rage’ – he probably convinced himself that these were not men who were suitable for political responsibility. Running under this, however, was his awareness that both nobles were due to inherit vast independent lordships; and, too, the perpetual question of allegiance – particularly as far as Buckingham was concerned. For, as everybody knew, he had a royal claim of his own.
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All of which lent a certain inevitability to what followed. Both lords had to go through the process of reclaiming their lands from the crown, and ‘suing livery’, as it was termed, rarely came cheap. As he had done with the youthful Suffolk, Henry took every opportunity to ratchet up the charges. Exploiting legal technicalities and irregularities in Buckingham’s paperwork, Henry managed to squeeze a total of £6,600 out of the young duke in fines and bonds. While Buckingham was still a minor, Henry made him pay £2,000 on his mother’s behalf for remarrying without the king’s licence – which, Buckingham grumbled, was ‘against right and good conscience’ – and pocketed his wife’s dowry for good measure. Financially harassed, and borrowing huge sums off Italian bankers to meet his repayments – and to sustain the lavish lifestyle which his rank demanded – Buckingham was already simmering with resentment by the time he regained his estates.
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Very little by way of royal favour was forthcoming. At court, Henry treated both men as courtly clothes-horses. But even here, Buckingham presented a threat, parading himself with a glamour and arrogance that was troubling even as it added lustre to Henry’s court. On horseback, admirers noted, he resembled a ‘Paris or Hector of Troy’, while the spectacular outfits that had attracted such admiration at Prince Arthur and Catherine’s wedding trod a fine line along the careful distinctions of rank and fabric made by contemporary sumptuary laws. In sheer cloth-of-gold tissue, purple and sable, Buckingham maintained his exalted status as the greatest noble in the land. He dressed in semi-regal fashion – almost as though he felt, as his father had done, that in the event of a contested succession he might make a good king himself. It was hardly surprising that, after Prince Arthur died, he was not invited to the funeral.
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Though Buckingham had the good sense to keep his mouth shut, he detested Henry and his administrators. And, away at his Gloucestershire seat of Thornbury, he steadily recruited men from his sweeping estates in the west country and the Welsh Marches into what was already a huge affinity. Capitalizing on a loophole in Henry’s retaining laws, he invented non-existent jobs, ‘much studying to make many particular offices in his lands, to the intent that he might retain as many men by the said offices as he could.’ Or, in other words, to build up an army. As people started to whisper quietly, he was beginning to look like a king-in-waiting.
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In the decade that Northumberland had spent growing up at court, the political landscape of his own region had changed dramatically: north of the River Trent, the traditional domain of the Percy family, England was crawling with royal officials. As lieutenant of the North during the 1490s, parachuted in from his native East Anglia, Thomas Howard earl of Surrey had made his mark; so too had administrators like Sir Reynold Bray’s man William Sever, the bishop of Carlisle. Now, there was a royal council in the North, headed by the archbishop of York, Thomas Savage, and many of the plum jobs that Northumberland had expected to fall into his hands, in order to distribute to his own men, had been hoovered up by royal servants – many, indeed, were held in Prince Henry’s name, in his capacity of duke of York.
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When, during that summer of 1503, Northumberland had accompanied Princess Margaret on the last stage of her journey north to Edinburgh, he met her party outside York at the head of a glittering retinue, seated on a horse draped in crimson velvet scattered with his coat of arms, wearing a gown of the same crimson, his cuffs and collars encrusted with precious stones, gold spurs on his feet.
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Beneath the ostensibly loyal splendour, he, too, was recruiting – and not so quietly. And as far away as the southeast of England, in increasingly unstable Kent, stories of his independent-minded petulance were doing the rounds. People gleefully related the insolent excuse that he had given the king for failing to appear at court: he couldn’t, he said truculently, find a farrier to shoe his horses.

In towns across Yorkshire, including York itself, in place of the ‘red roses of silver’ distributed by the king’s representatives, men wore the Percy blue-and-yellow livery and its crescent badge, and walked the streets looking for trouble. Royal officials reported intimidation and beatings; those who refused to recognize Northumberland’s pre-eminence were subject to ‘sundry misdemeanours, enormities, injuries and wrongs’. It had to be said, however, that the men encroaching on what Northumberland saw as his personal jurisdiction were no angels, either. Many of the household officers whom Henry employed in the regions tended to use the royal authority with which they were invested to advance their own interests, pursue personal grudges and settle scores. In the northeast, the household knights Sir John Hotham and Sir Robert Constable were bywords for violence and corruption: both had run-ins with Northumberland. Hotham tried to drag him into a dispute over land, a quarrel behind which – as in so many cases – was the hidden hand of the king, testing, probing, controlling and undermining the authority of his greatest subjects. Constable, meanwhile, was described simply as ‘dangerous’ by one court of law.
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Northumberland’s real bête noire was Constable’s boss: the head of Henry’s council in the north, Thomas Savage, archbishop of York. An Italian-trained civil lawyer who had helped broker the original marriage treaty between Arthur and Catherine back in 1489, Savage wore his title of king’s commissioner like a badge of nobility. He was also a flamboyant, worldly sophisticate, a keen hunter and a keeper of peacocks, with an unholy penchant for taking the Lord’s name in vain.
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His corruption, too, had a distinctly Italian flavour. A nepotist of the highest order, he exploited his position to the full, twisting the law in favour of friends and family. Underscoring all this was a deep-seated inferiority complex, born out of the fact, as he later stressed to Henry, that he was ‘of little substance, but a poor gentleman and a younger brother’, who owed not only his living but his very existence to the king – it was as though ‘his highness had made him out of clay’. Northumberland and Savage, the wilful hereditary peer and the new man moulded by Henry, were like chalk and cheese. With every clash between the earl’s men and royal retainers, tensions mounted. Finally, on 23 May 1504, they boiled over.

In late afternoon, Northumberland left the town of Fulford, outside York, accompanied by a small escort of thirteen riders. Not long before, Archbishop Savage had passed the same way with eighty armed men on horseback, having been at a boozy reception with York’s mayor and corporation. Throughout the day, the two parties had crossed each other’s paths; on each occasion, there had been provocation. Now, on the road out of Fulford, Northumberland encountered about a dozen of the archbishop’s men, who had hung back, two of whom rode deliberately between the earl and his servants; Northumberland’s horse stumbled and fell to its knees. ‘Is there no way, sirs, but over me?’ he snarled, grabbed one of the horsemen and punched him in the face. As swords were drawn and blows exchanged, the main body of the archbishop’s force charged back and surrounded them, crossbows levelled, shouting abuse at the earl: ‘traitor’and ‘whoreson’. One of Savage’s men aimed his bow at Northumberland; another, thinking quickly, cut the bowstring before he could fire. As the earl, dishevelled, clothes ripped, struggled in the grip of the archbishop’s men, Savage asked him, blandly, ‘What needs this work, my lord of Northumberland? I know well you are a gentleman, and I am another.’ Northumberland’s noncommittal reply riled the archbishop, who again prompted: ‘Yea, I say am I, and that as good a gentleman as you.’ Northumberland stared at his feet: ‘Nay, not so.’
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When tempers cooled, both men were genuinely apprehensive about the king’s reaction. They and their retainers were ordered down to London later that year and hauled in front of a panel of counsellors at Westminster. Despite Savage’s insistence that Northumberland had started everything, the king punished both with equal severity, forcing them to enter into bonds for £2,000 to keep the peace.
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Henry was livid about the fracas – and about Savage’s role in it as much as Northumberland’s. Back in 1489 Northumberland’s own father had been murdered during a popular uprising behind which, Henry feared, Yorkist conspiracy lurked. At a time when the shock of Warwick’s extrajudicial murder continued to linger, Northumberland’s killing in suspicious circumstances, by a royal servant, would have been incendiary, setting a match to local rivalries and tensions, and sending shockwaves through an already volatile country. Besides which, Henry always welcomed the opportunity to impose his authority – and to make a profit into the bargain.

The career of Savage, formerly so energetic both on the king’s behalf and his own, entered a gentle downward path, ending in his death three years later. But for Northumberland, the incident was only the beginning. Fuelled by a lifetime of perceived slights and thwarted entitlement, and hungry for the restoration of his family’s authority north of the River Trent, he embarked on a career of criminality and riot, almost as if he were trying to see how far he could push the king. Henry would crack down hard.
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In June 1503, as Prince Henry and Catherine were betrothed and Alexander Symson made his clandestine way to Aachen, the king continued to overhaul security at Calais. Alongside Sir John Wilshere, who doubled as comptroller and spymaster co-ordinating Calais’s operation against the earl of Suffolk, another new face was Prince Henry’s mentor Lord Mountjoy, who the king appointed as captain of the border fortress of Hammes, previously the stamping-ground of Suffolk’s right-hand man Sir Robert Curzon.

After the debacle of Suffolk, Tyrell and Curzon, Henry badly needed loyal men with strong local connections in Calais – and, given his family’s long association with the Pale, Mountjoy was a logical choice. His own reaction to the appointment, though, was probably mixed. Exchanging his unhurried but influential role at Eltham – a role which had acquired far greater significance since Prince Henry had become heir to the throne – for the remote boredom of the frontier garrison was, on the face of it, hardly an ideal career move. But his presence would not be required all the time – a deputy could do much of the donkey work – and besides, jobs at Calais were often stepping stones on a career path leading to great office. There were, too, opportunities to dabble in the lucrative textile trade on the side. What shocked Mountjoy, however, were his terms of employment.
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Of all the financial bonds that Henry imposed during his reign, Mountjoy’s were among the most complex and extensive. His conditions of office – keeping the castle secure, reporting to the king and council on reasonable written notice – were enforced by a pledge of £10,000, backed up by guarantors providing securities for the same sum. Although Mountjoy was well connected, it was hardly a surprise that his friends could, between them, only scrape together pledges for a little over half the amount.
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While indentures of office regularly included financial pledges for doing the job properly, the size and scale of those attached to Mountjoy’s new role were unprecedented. What lay at the root of these conditions of office was Henry’s increasing obsession, verging on paranoia, with allegiance to the regime – even in the case of people like Mountjoy, who had proved themselves time and again. After all, even household men like Tyrell and Curzon, whose loyalties had been thought secure, had been fallible. By binding Mountjoy and his guarantors so closely to the regime, Henry aimed to remove any similar temptation, should it arise. Soon after Mountjoy’s arrival, an incident at Calais would illuminate how precarious and strained the allegiances of even the most loyal of Henry’s servants were becoming.