Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (35 page)

Philip, however, took some time to thaw out. Following his arrival, he had spent as much time as possible closeted away, as he came to terms with Henry’s enforced hospitality. After mass, the king progressed to his guest’s apartments for a lengthy fireside chat, pouring on the charm, followed by an elaborate public leave-taking. Finally, Philip said with pointed politesse: ‘I see right well that I must needs do your commandment, and to obey as reason will.’ He had got the message. If he was ever going to leave this gilded prison, it would be on Henry’s terms. And that meant, first and foremost, the surrender of Suffolk.
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Later that afternoon, Henry managed to entice Philip out of his apartments for an afternoon’s entertainment, hosted by Catherine – his sister-in-law – and Henry’s youngest daughter, Mary. Taking Philip by the arm, Henry led him through a succession of galleries and rooms to a ‘dancing chamber’, where the princesses and their gentlewomen were waiting. The presence of Catherine, an uncomfortable reminder to Philip of his own wife – who he had brusquely left behind in Hampshire – and her family, was like a red rag to a bull. Irked by her eager efforts to get him to dance, he refused repeatedly and with growing irritation, finally bursting out with a curt rejection before turning back to Henry. Mortified, Catherine retreated. But the focus of the entertainments, it was clear, was not Catherine but Mary. At the centre of a new Anglo-Habsburg treaty, Henry planned, would be Mary’s betrothal to Philip’s son Charles, the infant Habsburg heir.

The afternoon, which Catherine’s miserable anxiety and Philip’s petulance had threatened to ruin, was salvaged by Mary who, it was clear, had inherited her mother’s empathic gregariousness. Even at the age of eleven, Mary had a self-possession about her, an awareness of the power of her looks – alabaster skin, grey eyes and golden hair inclining to auburn – coupled with the effortless charisma she shared with her brother. That afternoon, nobody could take their eyes off Henry VII’s poised daughter, first dancing, then sitting in quiet solidarity with Catherine, before playing the lute and clavichord with dexterity. Given centre stage, Mary had grasped the opportunity with both hands. She was ‘of all folks there greatly praised’, one of the onlookers later recorded. In everything she did ‘she behaved herself so very well’.
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In the next days, Henry and Philip rode out into the forested royal parkland that stretched away south of the castle. Duly impressed by the five thousand acres of well-stocked game reserves – he hadn’t, he said, really known ‘what deer meant’ before his arrival in England – Philip set to work, shooting some ten or twelve deer. Henry himself was still the keenest of huntsmen, but his ever-worsening sight made him a liability with a crossbow – on one occasion, his servants had to compensate an outraged farmer whose cockerel the king had shot, mistaking it for game. No match for Philip, instead he took the opportunity to lay on a display of military prowess, thirty green-and-white uniformed yeomen of the guard dazzling the king’s guests with a co-ordinated display of archery.
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By the middle of the week, foul weather made further hunting impossible. The party was kept indoors, heightening the sense of intense diplomatic activity. As rain lashed at the windows, Henry was closeted away with his counsellors in a working party headed by his chief negotiators, Richard Fox and Nicholas West. The constant scurrying to and fro, the whispered lobbying and horse trading, could not disguise the fact that Henry would dictate the terms of the forthcoming treaty.
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In the intervening days, as the weather cleared, the outdoor entertainments resumed. On Saturday afternoon, after watching a horse being baited by dogs, Henry and Philip strolled over to the tennis courts opposite the royal lodgings, where Thomas marquis of Dorset was partnering Thomas lord Howard, eldest son and heir to the earl of Surrey, in a game of doubles. Henry, who followed the game compulsively, had installed tennis courts at all his houses, playing, betting – and usually losing – with gusto. But since his first major illness six years previously he had been content to watch and lay bets, which he continued to lose. Philip, though, grew restless. Removing his cloak, hat and jacket, he asked Dorset for a game; the short, wiry Howard retired, thin-lipped. The pair played until the light started to go. Henry, meanwhile, stayed in the tapestry-lined gallery, lounging on cloth-of-gold cushions, his eyes flickering over the participants.
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Monday 9 February came, and with it the day for Philip to pay his bill for Henry’s lavish hospitality. That morning, Henry, the prince and the Garter knights assembled in the presence chamber, dressed in the order’s ermine-fringed, crimson velvet gowns, where they were joined by Philip and his knights.
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Riding the short distance to St George’s Chapel, the party dismounted, progressing through the church to the choir where Philip was to be invested with the Garter. One of Philip’s attendants was overwhelmed; he had, he wrote, never seen anything like it. Burning tapers illuminated a vision of gold: gold plate, gold chains, relics in their gilt reliquaries including, at the king’s elbow, a piece of the True Cross on a cushion of cloth-of-gold; uniformed heralds-of-arms everywhere. In his capacity as master of ceremonies, Thomas Wriothesley had excelled himself. The rather overcooked opulence – ‘excessive’, thought the Burgundian writer – positively exuded tradition and timelessness. In fact, he added, it was the kind of thing you might have seen in a king’s palace a hundred years previously. It was precisely the kind of permanence that Henry liked to convey.
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Following the kissing of relics and swearing of chivalric oaths, Philip was invested with the order’s accoutrements, a kneeling Prince Henry buckling the garter eagerly round the archduke’s leg, the king placing the heavy gold collar around his neck, murmuring ‘my son’ as he did so. Then came the prince’s turn. Invested with the Order of the Golden Fleece, its golden gown billowing out on the floor behind him, he pronounced the oath excitedly in resounding and fluent French, and was kissed by Philip ‘in sign of fraternal love’.

Sandwiched between the two investitures was the meat of the ceremonial: Henry’s treaty. In his capacity as the Garter’s prelate, Richard Fox, hovering at Philip’s elbow, indicated wordlessly where he should sign. This mutual defence pact – which included, of course, the extradition of each other’s rebels – paved the way for further agreements: Henry’s betrothal to Margaret of Savoy, and a new trade agreement whose main feature was to allow English merchants to import cloth duty- and tax-free into the Low Countries, with few concessions in return. Unsurprisingly, it quickly became known in the Netherlands as the
intercursus malus
: the wicked treaty.

The treaty, however, underscored everything that Henry was now working for. With it, he turned decisively away from Ferdinand and from Aragon, and aligned England’s future with the Habsburgs. Its secrecy, however – it went unmentioned in eyewitness reports heavy on the ceremonial detail – meant that the only people who knew about its terms were the negotiators themselves, although Ferdinand and the French, who had recently signed a similar treaty of their own, probably had their suspicions. Days later, Philip turned to Henry in a moment of choreographed spontaneity and, ‘unasked’, offered to hand over the earl of Suffolk – or, as the official chronicler dismissively called him, ‘Ed. Rebel’. Henry, keeping up the charade, graciously accepted.
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With business concluded, Henry, Philip and the prince retreated to a ‘little chamber’ within Philip’s apartments to dine. Flushed with success, the king was in loquacious mood. Over dinner, he expatiated on the new treaty, seeing it as the latest in a line of glorious deeds stretching back to King Arthur – whose table, he reminded Philip, he had seen hanging in the hall at Winchester. Warming to his theme, Henry said that his achievements and those of his son would be documented alongside those on the table; then, whenever people saw it, they would think of this ‘true and perpetual friendship between the empire of Rome, the kingdom of Castile, Flanders, Brabant, and the kingdom of England.’ Turning to his son, Henry then embarked on a fatherly lecture of the ‘watch and learn’ variety.

Why, he asked the prince rhetorically, did he think he had lavished such expense on Philip? It was, he continued, solely because he wanted to recognize Philip’s honour and his virtuousness – and ‘absolutely not’, he insisted, because he was ‘looking for something from him in return’. Henry also gave voice to the thought that had been revolving incessantly in his mind since the death of Prince Arthur nearly four years before: ‘My son of Wales’, he told the prince, ‘you see that I am old. Soon you will need your good friends.’

Prince Henry, though, needed no invitation from his father. He revelled in the thought of Philip as his ‘good friend’. When the French ambassador, newly arrived at court, greeted him, the prince, noted one of Philip’s retinue delightedly, barely favoured him with a glance. Struggling to come to terms with the new entente between England and Castile, the ambassador tried to make up ground; during a hunting expedition, Prince Henry brought down a buck with a clinical shot, eliciting gushing compliments from him. ‘It would have been good for a Frenchman’, came the whip-smart retort. As one of Philip’s party was at pains to point out, the ambassador chose to misinterpret the prince: rather than complimenting French archery, he was saying that he would have preferred to be shooting Frenchmen rather than deer. The prince’s barbs, it was clear, were as effortless as his shots.
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Queen Juana’s arrival the following day could hardly have been more different from that of her husband. Philip had tried to keep Juana as far away from the English court as possible. On his arrival at Windsor he claimed that ‘a small incident’ had kept her from accompanying him – even his close attendants claimed not to know where she was staying – and he was keen to avoid her being accorded a reception befitting her status as Queen of Castile in her own right.
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At his insistence Juana and her entourage entered Windsor unobtrusively, via a side gate. But Henry, his interest undoubtedly piqued by the reports of Juana’s celebrated beauty, ignored Philip’s repeated requests for him not to give Juana an official welcome and waited for her, together with Catherine and Princess Mary. His appraising gaze took in Juana’s jet-black hair and feline eyes, and he embraced her in welcome, perhaps a little too long.
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For both sisters, meanwhile, the reunion was heartfelt, though all too brief. Philip immediately whisked Juana off to his apartments and left her there. As far as he was concerned, Juana was at Windsor solely to add her signature to the new trade agreement. He would pack her off again the next day, when the ink was barely dry.

In marked contrast to the activity of the previous days, Henry kept to his chamber on the 11th, the anniversary of Elizabeth’s death. While he contemplated his own wife, Philip could not wait to get away from his, and asked Henry if they could have dinner together in his privy chamber. As if all this were not evidence enough of Philip and Juana’s estrangement, the king of Castile’s attendants were at pains to emphasize quite how mad his wife was. During the storm that had shipwrecked them, they described how she had been a liability, sobbing at her husband’s feet, her arms locked fast round his legs. Later, the Venetian ambassador travelling with Philip’s party put it rather differently: she had, he wrote, ‘evinced intrepidity throughout’. Henry concurred with the Venetian. Reports of Juana’s insanity were, he later concluded, groundless. ‘She seemed very well to me’, he recalled. ‘And although her husband and those who came with him depicted her as crazy, I did not see her as other than sane.’
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As a well-armed detachment, headed by the veteran diplomat Sir Henry Wyatt, left Richmond for the Low Countries to take Suffolk into custody, Henry prolonged his guest’s stay with a further programme of entertainments, as he awaited news that Suffolk was safely under lock and key. Hunting parties were punctuated by a trip down the Thames to London, whose highlight included a ‘wonderful peal of guns [shot] out of the Tower’. Would Philip, Henry asked, like a guided tour inside the Tower? His guest hastily declined.

The party, including Prince Henry and Princess Mary, also rode over to the nearby palace of Croydon, to pay a call on the king’s mother. There, gifts were exchanged – Lady Margaret was presented with a commemorative account of ‘the coming of the king of Castile’ – and Philip’s minstrels performed in front of the king’s mother who sat, appreciative, her customary glass of malvesey to hand. Then, there was a surprise for the prince from his doting grandmother: a new horse, and with it a custom-made saddle finished with tuffets of Venetian cloth-of-gold, gold buckles and pendants, and a harness fringed with flowers of black velvet and gold. It was a well-judged gift. As Lady Margaret was well aware, the culmination of Philip’s visit would be a tournament, at Richmond: Henry’s jousters against Philip and his men. Probably mindful of the spectacular display of Burgundian chivalry at Calais six years before, the king was determined to show his guest that the English could compete. Prince Henry would not take part in combat – but he could show off his skills and horsemanship, anyway, on his new horse.
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For the king’s spears, it was a rare chance to pit themselves against the best jousters in Europe, men like Philip’s favourite, the cool, cultivated Henri, lord of Nassau-Breda: a member of the Golden Fleece who would joust alongside Philip then host lavish banquets and after-parties that lasted ‘well nigh the whole night’, and which involved dancing ‘and other amusements’. During these soirées, Nassau-Breda would fold open the panels of a triptych recently commissioned from his favourite artist Hieronymus Bosch, to reveal the world of supercharged erotic anarchism contained in
The Garden of Earthly Delights
.
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For even the most talented of the English jousters – and Henry had augmented the spears with men like the louche, athletic twenty-two-year-old Charles Brandon, nephew of his master of horse Sir Thomas – simply being in the lists against these dazzling Burgundians was an experience that they would never forget. It was a tournament that would leave an indelible impression on all who saw it, in particular the fourteen-year-old prince, watching starstruck from the stands. Henry, too, was delighted, rewarding his jousters £6 13s 8d each.
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