Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (31 page)

Towards the end of summer 1504 the dean of St Paul’s, Robert Sherborne, arrived in London from Rome. The man nominated by Julius II to bring to England the papal dispensation for Prince Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon had made the long journey over the Alps, down the Rhine, through the Netherlands and across the English Channel in terrible health. And he had come empty-handed.
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On 28 November, the king fired off a letter whose courteous formalities could not mask his distinctly irritable tone. Despite the pope’s promises – and Henry’s lavish palm-greasing, which included a £4,000 donation to the ‘crusade’, or papal slush fund – it appeared that ‘nothing at all has been done in Rome in this matter’. Actually, Henry was wrong. Julius had finally been persuaded to dispatch the bull – but to Spain, which, as one of the major players in Italy, was, after all, rather more important than England. He had sent it, ‘under seal of secrecy’, as a ‘consolation’ to Queen Isabella, who was seriously ill. What Isabella read did not improve her health. Contrary to what she had heard from Catherine’s duenna, Doña Elvira, the bull clearly stated that her daughter’s previous marriage had been consummated. Catherine, it proclaimed loud and clear, was no virgin.

Behind Isabella’s spluttering moral indignation lay a more calculated financial objection. A payment of 100,000 scudos to Henry VII hung on the question of Catherine’s virginity, and on this wording the money was his. When the final draft of the bull was prepared, there was a small but highly significant alteration, presumably to silence the mutterings emanating from Medina del Campo. Inserted into the opening sentence of the document, which stated that Catherine had contracted a marriage with Arthur ‘and that this marriage had been consummated’, was the word
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: ‘perhaps’. Julius had contrived a phrasing that would suit the interpretation of both England and Spain, and washed his hands of the affair. In the event, it was a formula that satisfied neither Henry VII nor Ferdinand. Some quarter-century later, its ambiguity would be bitterly contested as Henry VIII sought to detach himself from his wife and from the Church of Rome.
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Meanwhile, at a wintry Richmond, Catherine was miserable. On 26 November, she had written two letters in quick succession to her parents, and had given them to de Puebla to include in his diplomatic bag. The letters speak volumes for Catherine’s sense of isolation amid the stream of dispatches flowing between England, Rome and Spain. She had, she wrote, hardly any news from them – indeed, she had not received a single message from Ferdinand ‘for a whole year’ – but rumours were circulating at Richmond that her mother was very ill indeed. For once, the rumours were no exaggeration. That day, the bedridden Isabella had died at Medina del Campo. Her death would change the face of Europe. It would also turn Catherine’s world upside-down.
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With Isabella’s death, the question of the Spanish succession suddenly came into sharp focus. Queen of Castile, her marriage to Ferdinand had created a united Spain; now, her demise threatened to pull it apart, and to wreck Catherine’s prospects in the process. The heir to Castile was Catherine’s older sister Juana, wife to the Habsburg ruler of the Low Countries, Emperor Maximilian’s son Archduke Philip of Burgundy. The fruit of Philip and Juana’s tempestuous marriage, their infant son Charles of Ghent, stood to inherit a sprawling empire that spanned much of eastern and central Europe, the Low Countries, Castile, and – unless Ferdinand could remarry and produce a male heir – the rest of Spain and Spanish Italy. Hearing the news of Isabella’s death, Archduke Philip was determined to lay claim to Castile on his wife’s behalf.
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A marriage alliance with Aragon, rather than with a united Spain, was a very different and far less attractive proposition. Ferdinand knew it. On the very day of Isabella’s death, he sent a letter informing Henry of the ‘greatest affliction’ that had befallen him and emphasizing that Isabella’s dying wish was that he, Ferdinand, should rule Castile on their daughter Juana’s behalf. On this view, Philip of Burgundy’s ambitions were on ice. But as Ferdinand probably knew, it was asking a lot to expect Henry to accept this version of events. Henry knew exactly what it was like to lose a wife on whose inheritance his dynasty and his kingdom depended, and the precariousness which resulted.
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Moreover, he had other irons in the fire. The Habsburg family, which, with its imperial pretensions, its financial and mercantile powerhouse of the Netherlands and its potential for European expansion through its Spanish claims, looked an increasingly attractive proposition for a dynastic alliance. Besides which, the Habsburgs still controlled the earl of Suffolk.

Even before Isabella’s death, animosity between the Castilian and Aragonese factions had always simmered. Earlier that year, the tensions had manifested themselves among Spanish diplomats at the Burgundian court over Suffolk, still kicking his heels in Aachen and waiting for Maximilian and Philip to provide him with funds and men. Ferdinand and Isabella had been trying to get hold of him – ostensibly to help Henry; in reality to get hold of a bargaining chip in their negotiations with England – and in February 1504, they had come within a hair’s breadth of getting him extradited to Spanish-controlled territories in Naples. Suffolk, however, had been tipped off.

Leaving behind his younger brother Richard as surety for the debts he had piled up with the city’s merchants, Suffolk fled to the nearby principality of Guelders, whose duke, ringed by hostile Habsburg-Burgundian territory, was an ally of France. Suffolk’s informant, it transpired, had been none other than the Spanish ambassador resident at the court of Philip of Burgundy. Don Juan Manuel was an outstanding diplomat. He was also, if reports are to be believed, a Castilian loyalist whose allegiances stood as much with Philip – and with his wife Juana of Castile and their infant son Charles, Castile’s heir – as with Ferdinand and Isabella. And Don Manuel’s sister was Doña Elvira, who ran Catherine’s household at Durham House on the Strand.

The effects of Catherine’s cloistered upbringing had been exacerbated by her increasingly uncertain isolation in England. She remained ingenuous and her English was poor; beneath a fragile self-confidence, she remained desperate for affection. This, as de Puebla had delicately remarked to Ferdinand and Isabella, was a recipe for disaster in Catherine’s disordered household. She was, he wrote, impressionable, and a soft touch, ‘very liberal’ with her wealth. There were plenty of people hanging around Durham House who were looking for every opportunity to ‘strip her of her gold and silver’. Henry, too, was concerned. As her prospective father-in-law, he paid Catherine a monthly stipend of £100, a generous sum designed to keep her and her household in a manner befitting a future queen of England; she could, he said, keep whatever was left over after having paid her expenses. But it proved nowhere near enough. Her wardrobe keeper, Juan de Cuero, who watched over the collection of jewels and plate that formed part of her contested dowry, complained that pieces would mysteriously go missing, pawned to pay for Catherine’s lavish lifestyle, or given away as gifts.

With its runaway expenditure and its servants involved in open infighting, Catherine’s household was out of control – something to which the young princess seemed oblivious or was unable to do anything about. Henry wrote to her that he was sorry that the few servants she had ‘cannot live in peace with one another’, and urged her to put her house in order with help from her parents. Because Catherine’s servants were all Spanish, he was careful to add, the problem was out of his jurisdiction. But in confusion, Henry had, as ever, seen opportunity.

Confronted with a stream of reports detailing the breakdown of order in Catherine’s household, Isabella had decided a firm hand on the tiller was needed. Following Catherine’s betrothal to Prince Henry, the influence of her duenna Doña Elvira had slackened. But by October 1504 Doña Elvira was back in charge and Catherine was once more on a short leash. What was more, when Catherine and her servants rejoined the royal household at Westminster that Christmas, she was kept in the ‘same rule, seclusion and observance as in her own house’. Even de Puebla, who detested Doña Elvira and her latent Castilian tendencies, agreed that this increased discipline was a good idea – and Henry, he wrote, particularly approved. But the king had done more than approve the new arrangements. Behind the scenes, he had evidently been lobbying hard for Doña Elvira’s reappointment. He insisted to de Puebla both that Catherine should not find out about his involvement and that the changes in the running of her household remain concealed. To reinforce the princess’s public image and authority, Henry sent her a magnificent gold headdress – but there was no doubt who was pulling the strings. After Isabella’s death that winter, Doña Elvira’s ascendancy brought Henry further benefits. Her close ties to her brother, Don Manuel, meant that Durham House was now a useful diplomatic back-channel to the Burgundian court – and hence to Castile.
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Throughout the first half of 1505, Henry kept up appearances with Ferdinand. Apart from anything else, he was preoccupied with his own remarriage, and Catherine’s parents had proposed a bride for him. That May, he dispatched two of his privy servants, Hugh Denys’s sidekick James Braybroke and the diminutive Breton Francis Marzen, to the Aragonese court at Valencia, to look into the state of the twenty-seven-year-old Giovanna, queen of Naples. They took with them a questionnaire drawn up by the king himself, who was determined not to accept her ‘if she were ugly, and not beautiful’. This meticulously compiled document covered everything from Giovanna’s finances to her personal attributes: her figure, her face – including eye colour, complexion and breath – to neck, breasts and facial hair. Marzen and Braybroke studied her carefully and compiled the answers minutely. The young queen wore a mantle, concealing much of her body. She was short and plump, making her appear ‘somewhat round’, but vivacious and attractive, with grey-brown eyes, clear, fair skin, and ‘great, full’ breasts – though they could not approach close enough to find out whether she had bad breath. But if all this appealed to Henry, her financial assets were less enticing.
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Having sent their dispatch, Marzen and Braybroke moved on to the second part of their mission. Travelling on to Ferdinand’s court, then at Segovia, ostensibly to cement the Anglo-Aragonese entente, they were to find out as much as possible about the newly precarious situation in Spain, and about the likely reception that Philip and Juana would meet with when they arrived to claim the crown of Castile.
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Unbeknown to Ferdinand, Henry had already started making new overtures to the Habsburgs. And he was using Catherine and her fractured household to do so.

Some months before Marzen and Braybroke set off, Henry had reopened negotiations with the Habsburgs over a marriage contract between his younger daughter Mary, and Philip and Juana’s infant son Charles of Ghent; and for himself, with Philip’s sister, the wealthy, recently widowed Margaret of Savoy. It was a match that both Philip and Maximilian, with an eye on Henry’s overflowing coffers, were quick to encourage – though the prospective bride was said to be less than keen. Later that year Henry sat for a portrait, to be sent to Margaret of Savoy.

The finished painting, which was to become Henry’s most celebrated portrait, provides a snapshot of the king as he approached his fiftieth year. He wears a gown of rich crimson velvet cloth-of-gold trimmed with white fur, and – a nod to the Anglo-Habsburg entente cordiale – his collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece, Burgundy’s answer to the Garter. The ubiquitous black felt cap and dark shoulder-length hair flecked with grey frame a face whose sharply defined, hollowed cheekbones suggest the illnesses he had suffered, but whose firm chin and set mouth express firmness of purpose. His long, fine hands rest lightly on the border of the painting itself: the right clasping a small bouquet of red roses, the tips of the fingers of his left perching on it, anticipatory. Rather than looking detachedly off-camera, his characteristic sidelong glance causes him to look directly out of the frame; his uneven, heavy-lidded eyes glinting, the interrogatory stare with its arched left eyebrow. This was the public Henry, regal, coolly appraising, the reader of the viewer’s inmost thoughts. The reality, though, was rather different.
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Henry’s prolonged intelligence operation against the earl of Suffolk had had its successes. Some time in 1504 Sir Robert Curzon had resurfaced in Calais. Henry’s agents had worked away on the precarious loyalties of the man whose conversations with Emperor Maximilian had prepared the ground for Suffolk’s flight. Having succumbed to the king’s ‘importunate labour’ – bribery and the offer of a royal pardon – the rogue captain of Hammes had once again switched sides.
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Curzon was now doing very well indeed out of his treachery. Drawing a handsome annual salary of £400 from the king’s chamber, he was also renting the lands of Suffolk’s unfortunate steward, Thomas Killingworth, which the king had annexed.
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And, in Calais, he was liaising with the man who had in all probability turned him, the spymaster Sir John Wilshere. Both men continued to receive substantial quantities of cash for their intelligence operation against Suffolk. One of the men through whom they received funds was a banker from Bologna, Lodovico della Fava.

Of the cluster of Italian merchant-bankers at court who ‘never stopped giving the king advices’, della Fava had emerged as the king’s favoured broker. For years, he had been head of the London branch of the Medici bank, following which he led the English operation of one of the firms that had filled the vacuum left by the Medici’s collapse, the Florentine bank of Frescobaldi. Della Fava was involved in the usual trade in fine Italian imports – gold, silks, satins and damasks. But he had gained Henry’s affections through finance: offering the king business opportunities, investing large sums of money on the international currency markets on his behalf, taking delivery of iron coffers full of coin, and preparing bankers’ drafts, to be cashed at other Frescobaldi offices across Europe. In 1502 Girolamo Frescobaldi, della Fava’s boss in the bank’s Bruges headquarters, had overseen Henry’s £10,000 payment to Maximilian; indeed, he had been the only banker willing or able to arrange the transfer of ‘so great a sum’. The Frescobaldi proved particularly Anglophile. The following year, the head of its Florentine branch, Francisco, welcomed an eighteen-year-old English boy into his household, training him as a clerk. His name was Thomas Cromwell.
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