Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (23 page)

In 1504, ‘about the last day of September’, five men gathered in a small, private room at the house of Sir Richard Nanfan, acting head of Calais during the prolonged absences of the enclave’s overall commander Lord Daubeney, whose duties as chamberlain of the royal household and as one of the king’s inner circle kept him at court. The meeting included the master porter and military expert Sir Sampson Norton and Sir Hugh Conway, the new treasurer of Calais. All three were longstanding members of the king’s household: experienced, loyal political veterans. With them were two younger men, Nanfan’s son William, and John Flamank, his son-in-law and a member of the Calais garrison, both of whom were there to be seen rather than heard.
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The atmosphere was fraught. As the men settled, Nanfan, clearly on edge, turned to his son and to Flamank and, producing a Bible, swore them to confidentiality, not to repeat anything ‘that is now here spoken’. The three senior men then discussed the perennial problem of Calais’s security, Nanfan a moderating voice between Conway’s agitated concern and Norton’s blunt, straight-talking scepticism. It was Conway, scared and insistent, who led the conversation.

On disembarking at Calais three months previously to take up his new appointment, Conway had immediately smelt disloyalty in the air. Sniffing around, he picked up hints of a plot to murder Nanfan, and a sense that of the six-hundred-strong Calais garrison, the ‘greater part’ that had been recruited by Lord Daubeney could not be relied upon: they ‘will never love none of us’, Conway said, gesturing at his colleagues. What was more, he added, this factionalism stretched all the way into the royal household where, in his role as lord chamberlain, Daubeney was responsible for vetting and appointing its chamber servants. The household, Conway said, was crawling with Daubeney’s men – you just had to look at the king’s security force, the yeomen of the guard, the ‘most part’ of whom were drawn from his own retinues. Daubeney, Conway insinuated, was manoeuvring for position, right under the king’s nose.
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In the event of Henry’s death, both Calais and the royal household would be packed with men whose primary loyalties would be not to the young prince, but to Daubeney himself.

This was, on the face of it, a staggering claim. Daubeney’s relationship with Henry had been forged in exile and in battle. He was one of the king’s trusted right-hand men, a member of his inner circle, one of the very few who had traction with him. His disloyalty was inconceivable – and, indeed, everybody in the room hastily agreed that nobody was casting aspersions on his trustworthiness. But then Nanfan interjected. Thinking about it, he ruminated, back in the summer of 1497 the chamberlain had been ‘very slack’ in redeploying his forces, which had been en route to the Scottish border to fight James IV, against the Cornish rebels swarming towards London. If he had followed orders with more alacrity, the insurgents would have been destroyed long before they were in sight of the city. Henry, Nanfan said, had been ‘discontent’. Daubeney’s commitment to the regime, he implied, was distinctly shaky.
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As everybody knew, Conway continued, the king was ‘a weak man and a sickly, not likely to be a long-lived man’. Henry’s increasingly frequent illnesses could hardly be kept secret for long: his chamber accounts betrayed how, on progress around his hunting lodges, the court would come to a halt in one place for weeks on end, a sure sign that he had relapsed. Conway recounted how on one such occasion, when Henry lay ill at his manor of Wanstead in Essex, he happened to be in the company of ‘many great personages’ who were discussing how things would play out on the king’s death. Some had thought the duke of Buckingham would make a ‘royal ruler’; Suffolk’s name had also come up. ‘None of them’, though, ‘spoke of my lord prince.’ And, as Conway said meaningfully, ‘it hath been seen in times past that change of worlds hath caused change of mind’. In other words, even though people remained loyal to Henry VII while he lived, there was no guarantee that they would transfer those loyalties easily to his young and vulnerable son.

Troubled by this talk, Conway had resorted to prophecy. Poring over a book of astrological prognostication to determine what the future held, he found that the stars were ill-omened indeed. The king would shortly die: ‘my book’, he told his colleagues, ‘shall declare the same to you plainly to be as I have said and spoken’.

Unimpressed, the sergeant-majorly Norton told Conway to pull himself together, and to burn his book for good measure. But Conway’s talk continued to circle the events of the recent past, scratching a persistent itch. It was impossible to know what people were really thinking – and therefore imperative that he and his colleagues looked after themselves first: ‘see to our own security’. After all, it was what everybody else was doing. Conway recounted recent chats with two of Calais’s other senior military officials, Sir Nicholas Vaux, lieutenant of Guisnes and Sir Anthony Browne, lieutenant of Calais Castle. Both men had waved his anxieties away with the smug certainty of those who knew they had ‘good holds to resort to’ in the event of instability: they would be fine, ‘how so ever the world turn’.

Responses like these only increased Conway’s growing sense of unease. But the real problem in his view was not Browne, but his wife, Lady Lucy, who ‘loveth not the king’s grace’. Lady Lucy was yet another member of the extended Neville clan, another of Suffolk’s cousins. And she had her eye on the main chance. At the first sign of instability she would open up the castle gates to Suffolk and his men, and would give him all the help that she could. In such a scenario, with the garrison and town riddled with subversive elements who ‘never loved the king’s grace nor never will do’, Conway feared that he and his loyalist friends would all be murdered in their beds. And once the rebels had Calais, he said, England would be open before them. Just across the Channel was that hotbed of instability, Kent: ‘remember what alliance they be of there’.

Conway then ran through a number of names in Kent whose loyalty could not be counted on. All were men with strong connections to key Calais figures. Astonishingly, these included Sir Richard Guildford himself and Sir Edward Poynings, a knight of the Garter and one of Henry’s chief military men who, like Guildford, was a paragon of loyalty. But Conway’s point, again, was not about their loyalty to the king – it was about what might happen should he die while the prince was still young. For Poynings, who had previously been one of Daubeney’s deputies, was cousin to Sir Anthony Browne; Vaux, meanwhile, was Guildford’s brother-in-law. If, on Henry’s death, loyalties to his son unravelled fast, a return to the turbulent family feuding of the civil wars was, Conway felt, entirely possible.
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The conversation in Nanfan’s house summed up the mentality, anxious and restive, that permeated the country in the months and years following the deaths of Prince Arthur and Queen Elizabeth: from Northumberland to Calais, Lancashire to East Anglia and Kent. And the threat of political instability was exacerbated by the insecurity that rippled out from the wellspring of power, the royal household. To experienced hands like Conway, well used to watching for the faintest, barely detectable signs of conspiracy – the whispered conversation, the note passed from hand to hand – the source of this insecurity was, without a shadow of a doubt, the king himself. What was more, it was quite deliberately done.

Norton, forthright, had told Conway to put up or shut up. He should take his concerns about the Calais garrison straight to the top, to the king. But Conway’s response was equally emphatic. He would do nothing of the sort, ‘nor never would do’. Henry would never believe him, but would immediately suspect that he was talking out of ‘envy, ill-will and malice’; he would have only ‘blame, and no thank, for his truth and good mind’.

Conway knew what he was talking about, he said, because he had been in a similar situation years before, soon after Henry had ascended the throne. Then, he had gone to the king’s right-hand man Sir Reynold Bray with information that Yorkist rebellion had been stirring. Bray had passed it on to the king, who summoned Conway to explain himself. Ushered into the king’s presence he knelt and repeated his story, which he swore was true. No, Henry told him, it couldn’t be, then methodically pulled the story apart, piece by piece – ‘always to the contrary of my sayings’, Conway recalled – and, after he had laid bare its inconsistencies, demanded Conway’s source. When he pleadingly refused, trying to explain that he had sworn not to reveal his informant’s identity even if he were ‘drawn with wild horses’, Henry’s anger had been terrifying. Having gone to the king through his own ‘goodwill’, Conway had ended up with the finger of suspicion pointing directly at him. There was no way he would ever go through an experience like that again, as long as he lived.

To Nanfan, the story had a horrible familiarity about it. A while back, both he and Norton had gone to the king and council with their concerns that James Tyrell was intriguing with the earl of Suffolk. The reaction had been the same: scepticism shot through with suspicion – of them. Certain royal counsellors had even put it about that Nanfan, ‘for malice’, had been deliberately trying to ruin Tyrell’s reputation. Another time, he had written to Henry about the machinations of Perkin Warbeck’s right-hand man, Sir Robert Clifford, in Calais, only to receive ‘sharp writing’ from the king, demanding proof. Luckily for Nanfan, he had managed to get Clifford to repeat his treasonable words in front of a witness, ‘otherwise I had likely to be put to a great plunge for my truth’. Nanfan was, presumably, exaggerating about being hanged by way of punishment for rumour-mongering – but like Conway, he decided not to go to the king with any further allegations. Just in case.

As it turned out, all the information that the king was so unwilling to believe – about the rebellion of 1486, about Clifford’s disloyalty, and Tyrell’s – had been proved correct. And, as they swapped stories of their uneasy encounters with the king, it was Norton who summed things up best. ‘It was a pity’, he mused, ‘that the king did not trust his true knights better.’ Henry really should give his loyal servants ‘credence in such things as they should show for his security’. This lack of trust on the king’s part, he concluded, had the potential to produce ‘great hurt’.

This, of course, went to the heart of the problem. As household knights, placed in positions of trust and responsibility and expected to be the crown’s eyes and ears – men ‘by whom it may be known the disposition of the countries’ – Nanfan, Conway and Norton were all simply trying to do their jobs, along preconceived ideas of service. But since the mid-1490s, when Henry’s chief household officers, his chamberlain Sir William Stanley and steward Lord Fitzwalter, had been found wanting, so, in their various ways, had a number of other household knights – Clifford, Curzon, Tyrell, to name but a few. Each time, Henry had been reluctant to believe ill of them, and had been profoundly shaken when they had proved disloyal. Slowly but surely, however, trust had evaporated.

In his reforming treatise on the laws of England, written in the queasy 1460s, the common-law judge John Fortescue had stressed that ‘the beginning of all service is to know the will of the lord whom you serve’.
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What was glaringly obvious in the conversation among the Calais knights, who genuinely wanted to serve the king, was that they didn’t know Henry’s will at all – or rather, the only thing they could rely upon was the unpredictability with which he reacted. In the process, as Norton’s comment revealed, normal relationships of service and trust were being undermined. Something else was taking their place.

Some time after the Calais meeting, Nanfan sent his son-in-law and servant John Flamank to Sir Hugh Conway with a letter from the cocksure lieutenant of Guisnes, Sir Nicholas Vaux. It evidently contained up-to-the-minute intelligence from the royal household, for Conway read it thoughtfully, then, in a gesture of confidentiality, took Flamank by the arm.

‘Now you may see,’ he said, flourishing the letter, ‘that other men’ – he meant the likes of Vaux and Browne – ‘can have knowledge daily of every thing or great matter that is done in England, and we can have no knowledge of nothing, but by them. This,’ he continued, ‘is not good, neither no sure way for us.’ What Conway and his colleagues needed, as he told Flamank, was a reliable, direct source of intelligence at court, a ‘sure and wise man’ who they would pay – ‘at our cost and charges’ – and who ‘may all times send us how the world goeth’.
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Feeling horribly out of the loop, about to be overtaken by events, unable to trust traditional chains of command, or to have a frank dialogue with the king and his counsellors, the Calais officials had resorted to the method that everybody else was using to gain information: they employed a spy and sent him into the royal household.

Conway, as it turned out, had confided in the wrong man. The only reason we know about these anxious, clandestine discussions in Calais is because, some months later, Flamank wrote an ‘information’, an informer’s report, to the king, in which he detailed the conversations – including his own confidential chat with Conway – and in the manner typical of spies at the time, itemized its key points in a list for good measure.

Flamank’s own motives for betraying these confidences were unhealthy. They were coloured by a recent spat with his father-in-law Nanfan, his own unpopularity among his colleagues in the Calais garrison and a self-seeking ambition. His report was, in other words, precisely the kind of rumour-mongering that Henry might have been expected to dismiss, as having been made out of ‘envy, ill-will and malice’. For Henry, however, the problem was the uncertainty, the ambiguities and fence-sitting that pervaded everything and everybody: from the evasive testimony of Alexander Symson in the Tower and the turf wars of Kent, to Northumberland and Buckingham’s sullen acquiescence, to the loyalties of Daubeney’s men in the household, the arrangements made by Vaux and Browne, and Conway’s desperate attempts to find out the truth through espionage. Flamank’s report provided not answers, but yet more questions about allegiance: known unknowns.