Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (37 page)

So much of the incidental detail in the indictment seems preposterous – the hiding under the bedclothes, the grabbing of shoes – but it was on such split-second decisions that the kingdom’s future hinged; in 1485 William Stanley had taken the gamble at Bosworth that had won Henry a kingdom.

Henry’s habit of sitting on information and persistently ‘groping further’ to find out as much as he could suggests that he had known about these accusations for some time but that, with the problems in Kent, and with the earl of Suffolk at large, he had continued to wait, concerned about the wider instability that any move against Bergavenny might provoke. That the indictment was lodged barely a month after his interrogation of Suffolk suggests either that Henry now felt more confident – or that Suffolk had confirmed what he already knew about Bergavenny.

Arrested, Bergavenny was brought to London and locked in the Tower.
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So were two others alleged to have dined with Suffolk in the days before his flight in August 1501: Thomas Grey, marquis of Dorset and Sir Thomas Green. Despite his assiduous attendance at court and prominence in the tiltyard, Dorset had never shaken off the cloud that hung over him – his Yorkist blood, his father’s flaky loyalties – and Henry’s eyes continued to slide inquiringly over him even as he heaped honours on him. In the Tower, Green and Dorset joined William de la Pole, Suffolk’s youngest brother, and William Courtenay, both of whom had already been there for four years. Bergavenny, shaken and subdued, was released after a few months after the allegations went unproven; Green, already sick when he was arrested, died in the Tower on 5 November. Dorset and Courtenay stayed. There would be no trial. The following autumn, they would be transferred to Calais Castle where, people believed, they had been sent to die.
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Then there was the matter of Calais. With John Flamank’s report in hand, Henry had waited, gathering and sifting intelligence passed to him by the likes of Sir John Wilshere, the double-agent Sir Robert Curzon – a regular presence in the town – and by Sir Thomas Lovell, who brought information back along with the revenues that he collected and paid into Henry’s coffers. In July 1506 Henry moved against the conversationalists, ordering the dismissal of ‘Sir Richard Nanfan, Sir Hugh Conway and Sir Sampson Norton, knights, of such authorities and rooms as they had in our town’. Conway was soon reinstated; Norton, though, was dismissed and Nanfan, worn out and under a cloud, retired to England. The following year Lady Lucy Browne, whose manoeuvrings among the Calais garrison had caused Conway such anxiety, was fined a hundred marks on behalf of her husband, now dead, for having paid soldiers in his retinue who ‘were not sworn’ under oath.
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The biggest fish of all, however, was Giles lord Daubeney, Henry’s lord chamberlain, the man whose power and influence in the Calais garrison and the royal household had been wondered at, and whose loyalty in the face of the rampant Cornishmen in 1497 had, Nanfan believed, been suspect. Towards the end of 1506, when Daubeney was alleged to have embezzled the Calais garrison’s wages, Henry threw the book at him. That December, Daubeney entered into bonds for £2,100, payable in annual instalments of £100, for a pardon for his financial improprieties. The men who took the bonds on the king’s behalf were Daubeney’s colleagues, familiar faces in the king’s inner circle: Sir Thomas Lovell, Sir Henry Wyatt, Richard Empson, Edmund Dudley. He was also forced to make over to the king his annual French pension of 2,000 crowns, gained back in 1492 after Henry’s invading army had been bought off. These fines were wholly disproportionate to Daubeney’s alleged crime. What lay unspoken were Henry’s suspicions of his lord chamberlain’s allegiance. Daubeney, the fines intimated, was being watched. In the recent past, chamberlains had a habit of being executed for their disloyalty. He would have to tread very carefully indeed.

The stakes were being raised. In summer 1506, Henry went after his Stanley step-family with renewed vigour. Two years previously, Lady Margaret’s estranged husband the earl of Derby – who, as Lord Stanley, had placed the crown on Henry’s head at Bosworth twenty-one years previously – had died, and his young, ingenuous son and heir was played ruthlessly, forced to enter into a series of bonds, and to purchase the obligatory ‘pardon’; by the time Henry had finished, he was in debt to the tune of £10,000. In a carefully staged trial at Lancaster, Sir James Stanley was fined an exorbitant £145,000 for retaining offences, saddling much of the family and their leading men with huge debts. Something similar happened to Bergavenny. Found guilty in the court of King’s Bench for illegal retaining between 1504 and 1506, he was fined £70,650 for the illegal retaining of 471 men. After some horse-trading, Henry settled for a suspended fine secured by the guarantees of twenty-six of Bergavenny’s friends. Then, Bergavenny was banished from the lands in which he had been rampant, forbidden from setting foot in Kent, Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire without the king’s license, on pain of another fine of 5,000 marks.
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These were sums that the guilty parties could never hope to pay off. And that, in a way, was the point. The schedule of payments was such that the slate would never be wiped clean: these nobles would be bound in perpetual debt to the crown, a debt that they would pass on to their children, and their children’s children, until such time as the crown, at its pleasure, decided to cancel it. The suspended fines, or ‘recognizances’, meanwhile, were like being on permanent bail. If triggered, their victims would be ruined – and, as they knew, Henry was watching their every move. This was what Dudley had meant by the king keeping people ‘in danger at his pleasure’. As well as generating astonishing amounts of income, these debts splintered traditional loyalties, binding them instead to the crown. Anybody who broke the conditions of their bonds risked not just their own financial ruin, but the ruin of those who stood surety for them – who, afraid for their own financial well-being, now looked far more closely at the behaviour of those whose debts they were forced to guarantee. It made the idea of disloyalty and rebellion not only unthinkable, but unaffordable.

All this was caught in Dudley’s burgeoning account book. In it mingled the records of Daubeney’s fines and bonds, his French pension (itemized by Dudley as a ‘grant’ to the king, as though the chamberlain had made it out of his own volition); of Bergavenny’s condemnation, for which Dudley had the indictments ‘having received them from the king’, and fines for ‘true allegiance’; of Lucy Browne’s fine, and the fines for pardons issued to Nanfan and the earl of Northumberland. These entries nestled among countless others, the fruits of Henry’s increasingly implacable application of the law. What was remarkable about the book was its scope, and its reach. It confirmed what by 1506 – and, in particular, following Suffolk’s extradition – was becoming glaringly evident. By this point Henry’s financial and legal counsellors were not only, or not even primarily, after recalcitrant nobles. They were after anybody and everybody they could get.
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In autumn 1504 Desiderius Erasmus was in Paris; as usual, he was broke. News reached him from England, where his friend John Colet, the ascetic mentor of Thomas More, had been appointed to the lucrative and influential post of dean of St Paul’s Cathedral. Erasmus sensed an opportunity. Overcoming his terror of the ‘ill-famed’ cliffs of Dover, on which he had been ‘wrecked’ – the exactions of Henry’s customs officers lingered in his mind, four years after they had confiscated the hard currency that he had tried to take out of the country – he decided to try his luck in England again. For Erasmus felt he had something new to offer.

His previous visit to England had jolted Erasmus out of his intellectual comfort zone. In the intervening years, his scholarship had started to blossom into maturity, his writings exhibiting the deceptively easy, colloquial eloquence that would become his trademark. He had also mastered Greek, which had opened up to him the writings of the early Church fathers, and the original language of the New Testament. Study of the classics, Erasmus had begun to believe, could reinterpret the world anew. It could reform society, strip away ingrained customs and traditions that blinded people to the evils of the world – like chivalric culture, which conferred a veneer of legitimacy and glory on the war and conquest of the military classes, and the outward rituals and observances, the indulgences and graven images that were the expressions of a church riddled with corruption. Knowledge, Erasmus believed, should be liberated from the clutches of the scholastics, with their arcane, hair-splitting debates, and, through the new technology of print, be brought out into the full light of the world and put to the service of humanity. He was, in short, becoming the complete humanist.

Nonetheless, he also remained a pragmatist. He knew how power politics worked and was perfectly happy to tailor his thinking to it. If princes were to be the true rulers of society, they should abandon their militaristic tendencies, embrace the
studia humanitatis
and rule not through the abuse of power but through wisdom. Yet as with many humanists, it was impossible to tell where his reforming zeal stopped and his self-interest began. Behind every good prince was a good educator. Erasmus needed a patron. That December, from a wintry Paris, he wrote to Colet.

His letter, he knew, had to be finely judged. Insulated by his family’s phenomenal mercantile wealth and connections, Colet viewed with fastidious distaste the desperate scrabbling-after-favour of the less privileged, of networking academics and clergymen who ran, panting, after ‘fat benefices and high promotions’ – even when it involved his friends. Erasmus pressed all the right buttons. Heaping fulsome praise on Colet’s scholarship, he said how desperate he was for someone to help him realize his ‘burning zeal for sacred studies’, and enclosed a copy of his new book, the
Enchiridion
, of which he knew Colet would approve: an all-purpose spiritual guide to everyday life based on a pure piety and ‘true goodness’ rather than relics, images, cults and convoluted ceremonial and liturgy.
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But Erasmus also had some awkward explaining to do. The previous year, he had written a poem in praise of Philip of Burgundy, a syrupy panegyric dripping with wheedling flattery of the worst kind. He had been reluctant to write it, he told Colet; in fact, he could not remember ever having done anything ‘more unwillingly’. However, he continued, his panegyric was not just sycophancy. It was, in fact, a ‘novel stratagem’, something more subtle: a way of educating princes, of speaking truth to power without seeming to do so.

In telling Philip how wonderful he was, Erasmus was in fact telling him how he ought to behave. What better way to reproach a wicked ruler ‘more safely, yet more severely’, than by proclaiming his mildness, or ‘for his greed, violence and lust, than by celebrating his generosity, self-control and chastity?’ This ‘pattern for goodness’ became a way to ‘reform bad rulers, improve the good, educate the boorish’. In Erasmus’s hands, flattery had become advice, praise a policy document. A new twist to the kind of ‘advice to princes’ literature that had been peddled hopefully to princes for centuries, it also subtly repositioned the relationship between the intellectual and his patron. It showed that scholars were not a frivolous luxury, but essential to princes: they educated them, and they made them glorious too.
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Although in his letter to Colet Erasmus seemed to deprecate his panegyric to Philip, he shrewdly guessed that the picture it depicted of a glorious, learned prince was likely to prove as effective a calling-card as anything else he had written. For it was not Colet that he had in his sights, but his former pupil Lord Mountjoy – and through Mountjoy, his student Prince Henry, now heir to the English throne. Would Colet, Erasmus asked delicately, put in a discreet word on his behalf with Mountjoy? It would make sense, given their previous association – but he was terrible at petitioning for favour and could not possibly approach Mountjoy himself.
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Erasmus’s letter worked a treat. By autumn 1505 he was back in London, boasting how Mountjoy had ‘pressingly invited me to come back to England’. Settling into the comfort of Mountjoy’s townhouse in Knightrider Street, he looked up old friends, Colet, Grocyn, Linacre, and Thomas More, now immersed in his legal career and in city life. Erasmus basked in their attention: ‘without flattering myself’, he purred, ‘I do believe there is not one of them who does not pay high tribute to my talents and learning’. Fuelled by his friends’ admiration, and Mountjoy’s expansive predictions of rewards forthcoming from Henry VII, Erasmus was convinced that a torrent of royal favour would soon be flowing in his direction. Previous experience should have warned him not to take Mountjoy’s words at face value.
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Erasmus was entirely ignorant of the transformation that had taken place since his last visit: that Mountjoy’s conditions of office, hedged about with bonds and financial sureties, had left him rushed off his feet, constantly looking over his shoulder for royal informers eager to make money reporting alleged infractions of service; and that Prince Henry was now incubated in his father’s household. As Erasmus would find, the king and his advisers had a hard-edged attitude to scholarship that was worlds away from the enquiring dilettantism of Eltham.

In seeking favour from Henry, Erasmus was treading a path already well worn by the footsteps of countless humanists who, from France, Italy and the Low Countries, had come to England flourishing presentation manuscripts of fashionable Latin and Greek texts, which they hoped would be passports to royal favour. As his sons’ tuition had shown, Henry knew the value of a cutting-edge classical education, and he loved employing foreigners. But for him intellectual brilliance was only half the equation. When he admired the erudition of foreign men-of-letters, he did so wondering how they could serve him, how they could add value and authority to his rule and his dynasty, how they could provide the access that he craved to the courts and chancelleries, trading centres and financial and commodity markets of Europe.