Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (30 page)

It was hardly a blinding insight of Hawes to predict that tales of chivalric derring-do would be a good way to teach Prince Henry how to behave. Hawes had seen what everybody at court had also noticed: the prince was absorbed by chivalry, and by his own place in it. Indeed, it would have been stranger if he hadn’t been, given that he was surrounded by reminders: from the histories and romances in which he immersed himself, to the tapestries, statues and paintings of kings from Arthur to his own father, ‘visaged and appearing like bold and valiant knights’, that adorned the royal houses. At every turn, the prince was encouraged to place himself in this world of history and myth, to think of his life as that of a hero on a quest, or as a new Alexander the Great or his glorious Lancastrian forebear, Henry V. But it was not only the history that the prince was interested in. He was proving remarkably good at the practice as well.

With adolescence came a heightened emphasis on the young noble’s military training. Theorists recommended a varied regime, from running and swimming to weightlifting, hawking and hunting – ‘a plain recording of [training for] war’, as one educationalist approvingly put it. Pre-eminent among these sports were the chivalric martial arts: fighting with axes – Prince Henry had his own ‘master at axes’ – swordplay and, the most glamorous discipline of all, jousting on horseback. If the prince could not earn his spurs as a war leader, if he could not maintain his own independent household, then he did have one outlet for self-assertion. The king, who knew the political value of his son’s chivalric education, thoroughly approved.
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Around his older son, Henry VII had encouraged the building up of a loyalty-inducing Arthurian cult, one that had had to be unceremoniously ditched after his untimely death. He had done something similar with Prince Henry’s creation as duke of York, which was explicitly intended to head off Perkin Warbeck’s claim to that title. Now, with his son shadowing him at court, the king would create a renewal of chivalric activity, centred on the prince. In doing so, Henry would kill several birds with one stone. He himself had always been disinclined to joust, a result, perhaps, of lack of opportunity during his refugee’s upbringing in Brittany, or because of the exceptional danger of this ultimate contact sport – or simply on account of his poor eyesight. As one jousting practitioner put it, self-evidently, ‘I cannot think that anyone who cannot see can joust well.’

Henry had turned his lack of participation into a virtue: the remote, regal Solomon who judged tournaments from a lofty distance. Now, increasingly ill, he was aware that his ability to fulfil this visibly magnificent role was diminishing rapidly. The prince’s palpable enthusiasm for chivalry reinforced his status as an heir the political nation could believe in, somebody who embodied the traditional qualities of military leadership and prowess expected in a king. In providing his son with the company of ‘sons of nobles, lords and gentlemen’, Henry forced the younger generation of nobles to attend court, where he could see them. And, with the prince surrounded by the king’s own counsellors, and in his own household, he could curb any ‘unprincely demeaning’ or potential independent-mindedness on the part of his son.
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On 21 July 1504, less than a week before Prince Henry’s inaugural progress with his father, four young men were added to the household’s payroll. They were called, simply, ‘spears’, and their military function was evident from the basic fighting unit that each brought with them: a ‘costrel’ or attendant, a page, and two archers. Like all household servants these king’s spears, as they became known, had to swear, on oath, not to be retained by anybody except the king, and to be constantly alert to suspicious – particularly, treasonable – activity. Henry VII already had his three-hundred-strong yeomen of the guard. But while the spears evidently provided another layer of personal security, they had another role, very different from that of the yeomen. Moreover, the timing of their formation makes it clear that they were designed expressly with the prince in mind.

Unlike the yeomen, the spears were richly dressed men of good birth. They were not simply menial servants but courtiers and jousters, and, as well as adding a dash of youthful glamour to the prince’s first appearance on progress, they would form part of a renewed chivalrous culture at court. The prince had his study-mates; now, he would also have his companions-in-arms.

In selecting them, Henry turned to the source of many of his most trusted servants, his mother’s household. Lady Margaret was a particularly energetic supporter of chivalry and all that it represented. She knew as well as anybody its binding force, the loyalty it engendered, and its combination – at least, in theory – of valour and piety; she had, too, a fiercely crusading mentality. Book of hours to hand, this small, energetic, wimpled lady persistently egged on her son to respond to the papacy’s increasingly urgent calls for a crusade against the Ottoman Turkish Empire that was rapidly expanding through south-eastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. She repeated to anybody who would listen that she would go with the crusaders and ‘wash their clothes, for the love of Jesus’, if only she could. Henry himself shared her inclinations – though, as it turned out, he had a rather more worldly idea of the realpolitik that lay behind the heightened aims and ambitions of papal crusades. Meanwhile, Lady Margaret participated in all things chivalric. A member of the Order of the Garter – its last female member until Queen Victoria – she attended tournaments and encouraged the more courtly members of her household to do the same, paying their expenses. She was, too, a proud, doting grandmother with a sentimental side – two years previously, just before Prince Arthur’s death, she had presented both her grandsons with garters of damascene gold. Delighting in Prince Henry’s evident enthusiasm for and ability in martial arts, she would prove a formative influence on his transformation into one of the chivalric icons of the age.
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Two of the four spears came directly from Lady Margaret’s staff. One was her great-nephew Maurice St John, who had been an intimate attendant of Prince Arthur, one of the select group that had seen him on the morning after his wedding night as he emerged with teenaged bravado demanding ale. In June 1504, Lady Margaret had waved him off with a handsome tip of ten marks ‘towards his costs and charges in preparing of himself as a man of arms in the king’s service’. Although St John was formally joining the royal household, it was the prince, just as much as Henry VII, whose service he was entering.

Henry’s plans for this revival of chivalry, with his son at its centre, were plainly evident in the most exclusive club of all, the Order of the Garter. Membership of the twenty-four-strong Garter was a rare honour, one coveted by nobles and kings across Europe: recent members included the king of Naples and Emperor Maximilian. With its rituals and sacred oaths to the king, it was a potent weapon of royal control – and Henry, unsurprisingly, had a healthy respect for it. Knights of the order included members of Henry’s inner circle: his chamberlain Giles lord Daubeney, and aspirational counsellors like Bray and Lovell; the Garter’s prelate was another architect of his regime, Richard Fox. They rubbed shoulders with glamorous noble jousters of more uncertain loyalty: Buckingham, Northumberland, Suffolk – who had been unceremoniously turfed out of the order following his flight – and Henry Bourchier, earl of Essex, whose involvement in Suffolk’s conspiracy had been suspected, but never proved. In the year that Prince Henry came to court, changes in the Garter’s membership were quite clearly made with him in mind.

In April 1504 the longstanding Garter king-of-arms John Writhe died. Garter was the senior, most prestigious heraldic office and Writhe, who had held it under Edward IV, had fulfilled it to perfection – not least, as far as Henry was concerned, in resigning from his post under Richard III. Writhe had combined the herald’s pedantic obsession with protocol and genealogy with an appetite for that other key heraldic function, diplomacy. Ten years before, on a mission to Margaret of Burgundy’s court at Malines at the height of the Warbeck affair, he had stood outside her palace bellowing out a denunciation of the pretender’s claim to all who cared to listen. Following Writhe’s death, Henry was minded to confer the post on another highly experienced herald, Roger Machado, a Portuguese who had joined Henry in exile, and whose public role as Clarenceux king-at-arms merged with the twilit world of misinformation and espionage.
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But when the ageing Machado declined, probably feeling that Garter herald was a younger man’s job, Henry settled on Writhe’s son Thomas. As Wallingford pursuivant, Thomas Writhe had been principal messenger to Prince Arthur, and then to Prince Henry. But the rank of pursuivant was below that of the most junior herald. The following January, Thomas Writhe was parachuted into the office of Garter king-of-arms. His promotion, which undoubtedly put noses out of joint among the heraldic community, had evidently involved some kind of arrangement with Machado, who pocketed a large slice of his salary.
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Henry, though, knew exactly what he was getting in Thomas Writhe. He was a chip off the old block, a meticulous compiler and documenter of pedigrees and precedents. He was, too, a keen draughtsman, and developed a burgeoning workshop of artists and painters, based in the family home in Cripplegate, in the north of the city. Over the next decades, his studio would churn out the paraphernalia of heraldry that formalized the Tudor regime, from brilliantly illuminated pedigrees and tournament rolls to the armorial decorations of the great royal ceremonies at court.

Thomas Writhe was, too, perfectly attuned to Henry VII’s upwardly mobile regime. He seemed to have a particularly sophisticated sense of his role, not just in codifying traditions and creating new ones, but in creatively manipulating them, manufacturing the convincing family pedigree that transformed a thrusting arriviste into a permanent, highly respected member of the political elite. One of the first people he made over in this way was himself. Once installed in his new post he changed his surname, because he ‘disliked the shortness of it’. After a few experiments, he settled on Wriothesley, a name that seemed to him to have the appropriate gravitas, and which his contemporaries found as entertaining as it was unpronounceable. He then retrospectively conferred it on his forebears, for whom he contrived a new lineage, knighting his deceased father for good measure. Wriothesley, in other words, was a herald for the emerging generation, the perfect candidate to create and document the chivalric revival around the prince.
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Henry’s efforts to bolster his son’s profile were evident, too, in his wardrobe accounts. On 1 February 1505, he ordered a new set of clothes for the prince: an arming doublet of black satin, with fashionable detachable sleeves, and with it an arming partlet or under-collar, pairs of arming spurs and arming shoes, and two dozen silk points or laces. Henry was fitting out his son for the tiltyard and for the jousts in which, the prince hoped, he would soon take an active part. There was more to it than that, though. Arming doublets, heavily padded jackets stuffed with horsehair, were worn tightly laced under plate armour as a first layer of protection. But they were, too, worn on their own – and, increasingly, as a courtly fashion statement. This was how the prince’s black satin doublet was intended to be seen. Henry VII was not just indulging his son’s passion for sport; he was making him look like a chivalrous leader, at the centre of a group of loyal knights. With the doublet and its accessories came an order for a matching saddle and harness in black velvet, with gilt buckles and pendants, in the latest ‘Almain’ – German – fashion. It was the kind of thing Henry would never have been seen in, but that he was all too happy to buy for his son.
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The prince’s arrival did indeed seem to bring a new vigour to court. When, in April 1505, Henry selected two new Garter knights from the nominees put forward, he chose young noblemen in their mid-twenties, cousins to the prince: Lord Henry Stafford, the duke of Buckingham’s impecunious younger brother, and Richard Grey, the delinquent young earl of Kent, whose very name provoked rueful head-shaking and rolling of eyes among the king’s administrators. Henry, typically, had little use for both men in government, but as enthusiastic jousters they could add to the lustre of his court and learn loyalty to his son – more to the point, he could keep an eye on them. That same month, the celebrations of the feast of St George, the patron saint of the Order of the Garter, were particularly emphatic. The king processed through London to St Paul’s. Before him, the bishop of Chester bore a relic of considerable status: the leg of St George himself, encased in parcel gilt, a recent gift from the Emperor Maximilian. Following behind in their heavy, ermine-bordered robes of crimson velvet came the assembled members of the order, at their head ‘my lord prince’. But perhaps the most significant change came in the tiltyard itself.

In the years following Arthur’s death, the summer jousts seemed to have been performed with a certain listlessness. They were, at least, unremarkable enough to go unmentioned in the chronicles that documented every event at court in meticulous detail; neither was there any sign that the king attended them at all. But by the summer of 1505, the mood had changed. Infused with new blood, the jousting set at court went about its work with renewed vigour, and at the jousts held at Richmond that July Henry was back in his accustomed role as arbiter, distributing gold rings to the combatants. For the jousters, in particular the king’s spears and new Garter knights, there was somebody new to impress: the prince who, dressed in his arming clothes, ate, drank and slept chivalry.
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As Prince Henry settled into life in the royal household, he appeared the very model of a young prince. Charismatic, gifted, devout, he stuck dutifully to his educational programme: studying with William Hone; sitting in on meetings of his council in the rooms above the exchequer of receipt in Westminster Palace; listening deferentially to his father’s disquisitions on government and statecraft. He was being moulded in his father’s own image. But for a rapidly growing boy, emerging into the world and settling into his new role, it was a restricted, confined environment, one in which his movements were constantly monitored, in which he was gently but firmly told what he could not do. Conscious of all that he needed to be and, increasingly, of what he had not yet achieved, he would come to challenge his father’s way of doing things. What was more, he would find the means to do so in the apparently controlled, secure world that had been built around him: that of schoolroom and tiltyard. A gap was opening up between what his father wanted him to be, and what he would become.
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