Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (34 page)

That winter of 1505, talk at the archduke’s court described the earl as a ‘great thorn’ in Henry’s eye, how ‘the people of England love and long for him’, and the considerable damage he could do Henry.
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Philip knew how much the king feared the spectre of Suffolk backed by a well-equipped Burgundian army. Having banked £138,000 in danger money from Henry in that year alone, Philip was hardly about to yield up his Yorkist cash cow, whatever Suffolk wanted. In the meantime, he was focused on his impending voyage to Castile, now finally coming to fruition with the aid of Henry’s funds.
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In his pre-Christmas dispatch to the Signoria, the Venetian ambassador to Flanders reported on Philip’s preparations. It was a high-risk journey. Philip may have got Henry over a barrel as far as Suffolk was concerned, but he needed more than the English king’s neutrality. An overland trip to Spain, which would have involved negotiating French territory, was impossible. Habsburg–French relations were at a new low – as the Venetian ambassador drily remarked, the mere mention of Louis XII’s name caused words of a ‘very evil nature to escape the king of Castile’s lips’. The only alternative route, west along the English Channel between a hostile French coastline and England, and through the Bay of Biscay, was treacherous, particularly in winter; should ‘fortune cast him on the shore of England’, Philip wanted to make sure that Henry would not hinder his onward journey. With this in mind, he was willing to concede all Henry’s swingeing trade demands; he was even, it seems, happy to facilitate some contact with Suffolk. That December, the earl was jubilant to receive a series of visits from an English contact who he referred to as ‘father’ – but who, unknown to him, was almost certainly one of Henry’s double-agents. But still Philip was in no hurry to give the earl up, and, to add insult to injury, he made the trouble-making Don Manuel a knight of the prestigious Order of the Golden Fleece. Then, as winter deepened, where four long years of cat-and-mouse over Suffolk had failed to yield Henry any result, fortune intervened.
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On the evening of 15 January 1506, icy storms raged across southern England. Funnelling up the English Channel from the Atlantic, gales hit London with such force that trees were uprooted, ‘weak houses’ collapsed and roofs were ripped off. Torrential rain swamped the city and surrounding countryside ‘to the great hurt of sundry cattle and especially of sheep’. The bronze eagle that topped the steeple of St Paul’s was ripped off its perch and flung the length of the churchyard, crashing into a nearby bookshop at the sign of the black eagle. That night, out at sea, off England’s southern coast, the tempest was about to bring Henry VII an extraordinary stroke of luck.
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Two days later, as the winds began to abate, a man dismounted at the gates of Richmond Palace, grimy and breathless from hard riding, bringing ‘word of the landing of strangers in the west country’. Shown into the king’s presence, he told his news under Henry’s fixed gaze, and was rewarded with a lavish tip of ten shillings. Other dispatches followed, from the south coast ports of Winchelsea and Weymouth, the abbeys of Cerne Abbas and Melton, confirming the man’s story. Philip of Burgundy had been shipwrecked off the Dorset coast on his way to Spain. The earl of Suffolk’s protector, the heir to the Habsburg throne in which Henry had invested so much time and money – indeed, whose very journey he had financed – had fallen into his hands. Summoning his counsellors, giving orders for relay riders to be deployed at staging-posts between Richmond and the southwest to feed him with a regular supply of intelligence, and sending a message to his mother, then in residence at her nearby palace of Croydon, Henry began to plan how he could best use this unexpected gift from God.
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Five days before, Philip and his wife Juana, together with a large retinue of Burgundian nobles and two thousand German mercenaries, had set sail from the Dutch port of Arnemuiden on their long-delayed journey to lay claim to the kingdom of Castile. The couple were barely on speaking terms. When Philip’s early passion for her had faded to apathy, and he began to resume his bachelor lifestyle of jousting and womanizing, Juana’s love turned to a neurotic jealousy, lashing out at his servants for conniving in his amorous exploits. According to the Venetian ambassador to the Burgundian court, she could barely countenance her husband ‘except on those nights when he sleeps with her’.
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When, on Isabella’s death, Juana refused to sign her Castilian inheritance away to her estranged husband, things deteriorated further. Philip forged her signature and exacted a horrible revenge. He destroyed her credibility as queen, withholding her household expenses and closeting her away, all the while insisting it was for her own good. His wife, he said, was insane. By 1506, Juana’s life at the Burgundian court had become a living hell. If Catherine felt that she had it bad as a prisoner in England, the situation of her older sister, manipulated, abandoned and deeply depressed, was immeasurably worse.

The twenty-eight-year-old Philip, however, had the world at his feet. A chivalric icon, archduke of Burgundy and heir to the Habsburg Empire, he was now about to lay claim to Castile. Unfortunately for him, his wife, as queen of Castile, had to come with him.

Philip had been itching to get going. After last-minute delays due to bad weather, the fleet of some forty ships weighed anchor on the morning of 10 January. The weather was fine, and that night, as the fleet passed Calais on its port side, there was a party atmosphere on board, the ships lit up with torches, trumpets blaring, cannons firing. In the following two days, they made fast progress, strong easterly winds driving them west down the Channel to where it opened out into the Atlantic; there, they were briefly becalmed. Then, the southwest hurricane roared in. The fleet was scattered and forced back towards the English coast. In pitch darkness, Philip and Juana’s ship was chaos. The guns were thrown overboard; the mainsail, which collapsed, dragged the ship half underwater before it was cut free; three times, fires broke out. Towards the end of the night, the winds finally abated, and as dawn broke through a dense, freezing fog, the ship dropped anchor off the little port of Melcombe Regis on the Dorset coast.

Looking around them, they could see only two other vessels looming out of the mist, similarly wrecked. Detached from his main fleet, which had limped into the Cornish port of Falmouth some hundred miles west, and mentally and physically shattered, Philip went ashore to recuperate. He was met by a knot of curious locals and, pushing his way through the crowd, the local dignitary Sir Thomas Trenchard, who offered the archduke hospitality at his nearby home.

As the Burgundians made themselves comfortable, Trenchard sent men to secure their landing craft, and messengers with hastily scribbled notes to the king, before gently but firmly relocating Philip further inland to a place which, he said, could better accommodate him in the manner to which he was accustomed. Resigning himself to the inevitable, the archduke dispatched his own secretary to Henry who, summoned into his presence at Richmond, bowed low, and communicated his master’s respects and his request that the reception be ‘as brief and simple as possible’. Beneath the diplomatic language, both kings understood the situation perfectly well. Philip would be the most honoured of guests – but he was also a prisoner. He would stay in England until Henry had Suffolk firmly in his grasp; and, Henry was determined, a lot more besides. In the meantime, Henry would overwhelm the self-styled king of Castile with hospitality, and he chose the location for Philip’s reception with typical care. Perched on a chalk cliff above the Thames valley, its crenellated drum keep dominating the surrounding countryside, Windsor Castle was resonant with chivalric overtones, the spiritual home of the Order of the Garter: a perfect venue, in other words, to welcome Europe’s most glamorous knight.
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As they progressed through the wintry countryside, Philip and his weatherbeaten nobles were greeted by an advance party led by the earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Brandon, and smothered with attention, including menus prepared by the king’s clerk of the kitchen, and hawks for Philip to hunt with as he rode. At Winchester, they were received with luxuries and fine wines at the castle by its bishop, Richard Fox. The choice of Winchester, widely believed to be King Arthur’s Camelot and which resonated with chivalric romance, was deliberate. Some two decades earlier, Queen Elizabeth had given birth to Prince Arthur there, and Henry had milked the association up until his son’s untimely death. Now, it would be resurrected.
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Supervised by Fox, Winchester would be the scene for a new chivalric encounter between England and Habsburg Burgundy. It would, too, provide a perfect setting for Prince Henry’s international debut. To welcome his guest and to accompany him on the last stage of his journey to Windsor, Henry VII had sent his son.

The point at which the prince starts to emerge from his chrysalis, no longer the small carrot-haired boy but the young man whose presence and physicality would astound Europe, is difficult to pinpoint. The transformation, though, had surely begun to occur by January 1506, midway through his fifteenth year. Henry remained a master of stage-management: he would only have sent his son to a meeting of such significance if he had thought the prince could carry it off.

If he was awestruck on meeting Philip and his nobles, the flower of sophisticated Burgundian chivalry, Prince Henry hid it well. Clattering into the courtyard at the head of a glittering company, wearing a riding gown of black velvet, a cloth-of-gold doublet and scarlet hose, he dismounted and made straight for the archduke; the pair greeted each other, one of Philip’s entourage noted, like old friends, or blood brothers.
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As they dined, the prince, chatting away fluently in French, undoubtedly drew his guest’s attention to the painted Round Table, which hung in the castle, inscribed with the glorious deeds of its knights. For all the prince’s insouciance, Philip would make a deep impression on him.
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On 31 January, at around 3 p.m., the two kings met at Clewer Green, outside Windsor. Philip pushed his horse slowly forward towards Henry, down an avenue formed by horsebacked members of the king’s spears, dressed in their coats of green and white cloth-of-gold. The king himself was surrounded by a thicket of nobles, all of whom had dressed to impress. Most conspicuous among Henry’s attendants were the two twentysomethings on whom he had bestowed the Order of the Garter a year previously, and whom he kept close to him at court: the duke of Buckingham’s younger brother Lord Henry Stafford, whose hat of ‘goldsmith’s work’ was encrusted with diamonds and rubies, and Richard Grey, the slack-jawed earl of Kent, dressed in a coat of cloth-of-gold and crimson velvet, together with the latter’s cousin Thomas Grey, marquis of Dorset, on a horse with a large white feather fixed to its crupper. Set off against his gaudy retinue, the king was swathed in his robes of estate, a gown and hood of deep velvet; around his neck he wore the Garter collar of linked gold esses, from which suspended a figure of St George, made entirely of diamonds. Underneath a hood of purple velvet and his customary black felt hat, his face was split by a smile of welcome. For his part, Philip’s party numbered barely a dozen men. Dressed almost entirely in black, their apparel, one observer noted, was markedly ‘sad’.
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The kings embraced. Henry, it was clear, was in an exceptionally good mood. His guest was, he said, as dear to him as his own son, and he had never been so happy since the day he was crowned; he then dismissed his unaccustomed expansiveness with a brisk ‘anyway, this isn’t the time for a long sermon’. As the short winter afternoon faded the party processed to the nearby castle, Philip sandwiched between Prince Henry, on his left, and the king. Brass fanfares sounded as the party rode through Windsor’s great gate, past the chapel of St George and the keep.
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An elaborate game of precedence began as they climbed the stairs to the royal lodgings: Henry, it was clear, was determined to prove to his guest that English courtliness could outdo that of the sophisticated Burgundians themselves.

Inside, he had put on a spectacular show. Before them unfolded the royal apartments, a succession of four chambers, richly decorated according to Henry’s own exacting directions, lined with arras and hung in cloth-of-gold, sideboards filled with gleaming plate. The centrepiece of each room was a ceremonial royal bed, its frame intricately carved and painted, richly upholstered with matching drapery: a sure statement of wealth, given that such beds were the most valuable pieces of furniture kings owned. Guiding his guest through the rooms, each filled with courtiers of greater rank than the last, Henry announced that his own newly built lodgings would be at Philip’s disposal. He himself would stay in the queen’s apartments, interconnected with those of his guest by a series of galleries and closets.
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It was Candlemas, the time of year when Henry’s memories of his wife were particularly keen. But that Candlemas, he seemed momentarily transformed. His procession to the chapel to hear mass was a far cry from the usual heavily guarded remoteness, the uniformed yeomen, halberds in hand, who pushed back the crowds and made sure that no man was ‘so hardy to sue, nor to put bill, nor to approach nigh to him during the said procession’. Instead, he lingered, milking his triumph. It was ‘long time’ before the royal entourage managed to weave its way through the crowded apartments and galleries.
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Among the press of people loitered men like William Makefyrr, scribbling down details of Philip’s reception for his friends the Pastons, down in London from Norfolk and staying at the fashionable George Inn on Lombard Street; Robert Plumpton’s servant George Emerson, and Conway’s spy, pairs of eyes and ears hired to ‘lie about the court’ and inform their employers ‘how the world goeth’. One of Lady Margaret’s men sent frequent dispatches via a rider to her at Croydon, where she waited for updates. The whole spectacle, he wrote to her, could not be conveyed in words: the messenger bearing his note ‘can show your grace better than I can write it.’
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