Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (39 page)

One of the men in possession of such favour was Castellesi’s deputy, Polydore Vergil. Arriving in England in 1502, when his boss was still in high favour with Henry, he recalled how the king was ‘gracious and kind’, ‘attentive to visitors’; Vergil, indeed, is probably the first and only courtier to go on record as saying that Henry was ‘easy of access’. Whereas the doors to royal favour remained shut fast to most, to Vergil they swung magically open.

To those in residence at the Old Barge, Vergil inspired envy and fury in equal measure. Erasmus loathed him, labouring under the mistaken belief that Vergil had stolen the idea for his
Adages
, the collection of classical proverbs and epigrams that he had published in Paris on his return from England in 1500, and which became his first international bestseller. Vergil’s admittedly very similar book had in fact been published before his own, something he would later acknowledge. But Erasmus’s grudge was fuelled not only by envy of Vergil’s success and wealth but also by his friend Ammonio, whose resentment of Vergil took on a political edge: Vergil and Ammonio eyeballed each other with mutual suspicion, Castellesi’s man against Gigli’s.
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There was, however, another Italian at court who attracted the ire of everybody in Erasmus’s circle: Henry’s Latin secretary, Pietro Carmeliano. Not only was Carmeliano close to the king, at the nerve centre of his foreign policy, and very rich to boot, he was also a Venetian agent.

A native of the Lombard city of Brescia in Venetian territory, Carmeliano had been an unobtrusive presence at Henry’s side since the start of the reign, when he had transferred his loyalties easily and effortlessly from Richard III. His literary skills attracted scorn from Erasmus and his friends – but as a tireless, well-connected diplomat and spy he had proved himself exceptional. As a royal chaplain, Carmeliano was a familiar face in the king’s private apartments, where he and Henry discussed confidential foreign affairs. He was inconspicuous, a man who stayed in the shadows, going largely unnoticed by English courtiers. Foreigners and diplomatic staff, however, watched his movements like hawks. When he disappeared from public view, they reasoned, it generally meant that something was up: back in 1500, when last-minute doubts surfaced over Prince Arthur’s marriage to Catherine, de Puebla had got particularly jumpy at the Italian’s absence, thinking that he was involved in negotiations to marry Arthur off to somebody else. Close to Henry, Carmeliano had quietly accumulated massive wealth. One year, his New Year’s gift to Henry of £50 trumped that of Sir Thomas Lovell, one of Henry’s richest counsellors, by a cool £30.

Somehow, Carmeliano had maintained loyalties to both Henry and to Venice for two decades. His influence reached behind the marble façade of the Doge’s palace, to the heart of its government, the Signoria, to whom he was known simply as ‘the friend’. As he stood demurely at the king’s side, writing and performing diplomatic orations, penning official letters, and tiptoeing about the privy apartments, Carmeliano was also a go-between, Venice’s man in the king’s secret chamber. And, as papal sabre-rattling against the republic grew ever louder, so his role as Henry’s foreign-policy adviser became increasingly significant. From his privileged vantage point, Carmeliano eyed the manoeuvrings of Julius’s favourite Silvestro Gigli, watched him circling ever closer to the king’s counsellors.
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He would have been perturbed when Henry appointed Gigli to the small coterie of royal chaplains that doubled as high-level diplomats, papal intriguer and Venetian agent sizing each other up as they discussed international affairs with the king. And neither was he particularly well disposed to Gigli’s protégé Ammonio, who, he rightly suspected, was after his job.

By the end of 1505, Erasmus had finished the first of his dialogues. He aimed high. On 1 January 1506, he sent a presentation manuscript to Richard Fox, prefaced by a typically arch, self-abasing dedication that begged him to accept the ‘trivial’ New Year’s gift, and hoped that he would continue to ‘cherish, succour and help Erasmus, as you have done for so long’. In fact, there was no indication that Fox had ever helped Erasmus. Nor was he about to.
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Erasmus’s timing could not have been worse. At the turn of that year, Henry’s counsellors were working frantically to prise the earl of Suffolk from Philip of Burgundy’s stronghold of Namur; barely two weeks after Erasmus’s manuscript landed on Fox’s desk Philip was shipwrecked on the Dorset coast. Fox, the arch-diplomat, was at the forefront of the reception committee and the ensuing negotiations for Suffolk’s extradition. He was up to his ears in work, and petitioners of all kinds were getting short shrift: the archdeacon of Wells found Fox, as he delicately put it, ‘somewhat rough’ at a meeting, though he had recovered his silky demeanour the following day. Worse still, with Henry mobilizing all available resources in his extended charm offensive, Lord Mountjoy was also co-opted, dancing attendance on the volatile Queen Juana. Erasmus’s impeccably turned phrases fell on deaf ears.
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He tried other avenues. On the 24th he and William Grocyn wandered down the teeming Thamesside streets to the river, where they took a boat west to the archbishop of Canterbury’s palace at Lambeth. There, William Warham received Erasmus’s literary gift with enthusiasm but, as Erasmus acidly pointed out to his friend as they were rowed back to London, bestowed only a meagre tip by way of reward. With a twinkle in his eye, Grocyn replied that the archbishop suspected Erasmus got full value from his works by dedicating them to a number of different patrons at once.
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Erasmus, characteristically, bridled. Grocyn, however, had hit the nail on the head: if Erasmus was to attain substantial favour, he would have to make real demonstrations of his commitment and loyalty.

Months passed. In the first days of April Erasmus wrote exasperatedly and with typical self-absorption that Philip of Burgundy, who was still in England, had distracted Henry from delivering on the benefice that – Mountjoy had assured Erasmus – he had promised, and that his English stay was now costing him ‘a pretty penny’. But through all Erasmus’s correspondence at this time, the name notable by its absence was that of the prince.

If Erasmus managed to catch any glimpse of Prince Henry during this time, it seems to have been fleeting. A crashing name-dropper, he would have been sure to mention any prolonged meeting with the prince in his letters. Not only was access to the prince restricted but Erasmus’s avenue to him, Lord Mountjoy, had his hands full, running around at court after Philip and Juana – and ‘at his own expense’, Erasmus reported, no doubt echoing Mountjoy’s own grumbles – not to mention his responsibilities at Hammes. The prince, meanwhile, was fully absorbed with Philip and his knights, revelling in the warlike chivalric culture by which Erasmus was so appalled. But though Erasmus may have been out of sight, he was not wholly out of mind. Later, commenting on Henry VIII’s letter-writing, he would remark that it was ‘no wonder the prince had a pleasing style’ since Mountjoy, Erasmus’s own protégé, had encouraged him to read Erasmus’s works.
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As spring drew on, Erasmus was fast running out of cash, patience and literary gifts. He sent another dialogue to Richard Whitford, the Cambridge academic who had accompanied Mountjoy on his study trip to France years before, and who was now chaplain to Richard Fox; yet another went to the powerful, highly influential secretary to Henry himself, Fox’s associate Thomas Ruthall. In his dedications to both men, Erasmus featured Thomas More’s name prominently, reminding Whitford how he used to describe Erasmus and More as two peas in a pod, so similar in outlook that ‘no pair of twins on earth could be more alike’, and telling Ruthall that he had written to him on More’s advice. Not only did More’s name carry weight, it was clear that he was the guiding spirit behind Erasmus’s programme of dedications.

Later, when the Lucianic dialogues were printed – they became bestsellers, running through at least fourteen editions – More dedicated his own part in the dialogues solely to Ruthall, and compared to Erasmus’s, More’s letter was altogether more focused. He highlighted Lucian’s scourging of ecclesiastical privilege, something that would have pressed the right buttons with a man who knew how noxious Henry found the church’s ability to override the king’s law. Praising Ruthall’s learning, his skill in diplomacy and loyalty – ‘without complete confidence in these qualities of yours our wise monarch would never have chosen you as his secretary’ – More offered the dialogues as a token of ‘my willingness to serve you’. Unlike Erasmus, More sensed instinctively how to go about seeking favour.

Erasmus’s dedications in the first months of 1506 failed to secure him any meaningful recognition. Swallowing his pride, he approached Henry’s historiographer, Bernard André, for help, but the instincts of the blind Augustinian canon remained sharp. Erasmus thought André a ‘backbiter’ for having turned the king against his friend Thomas Linacre years earlier; now, it seemed, André led Erasmus a similarly merry dance. Erasmus recollected how he had followed a ‘blind guide … And so, being blind myself and having chosen a blind man to lead me, the result was that we both fell into the ditch.’

He had better results with Carmeliano who, in return for a gift of money, received the loose change of Erasmus’s flattery: Carmeliano, he wrote, was the ‘high prince of elegance’, a ‘prince of letters’. In fact, Erasmus thought him nothing of the sort. Back at the Old Barge, he, More and Ammonio bitched about the Latin secretary’s uninspired and ungrammatical Latin. As Erasmus later wrote to Richard Whitford, there were plenty at the English court who claimed to be steeped in the most eloquent authors – which was surprising, given there were ‘so few who do not seem totally inarticulate’ when called upon to deliver an official speech.
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All this, of course, was born out of feelings of resentment and insecurity, as much as intellectual superiority. And to the chagrin of Erasmus and Ammonio, somebody else was getting ahead at court, someone whose scholarly credentials could not be impugned: Polydore Vergil.

As Philip of Burgundy finally left that April, Henry, with the ink still wet on the new Anglo-Habsburg treaty, and with his conversations with Philip fresh in his mind, was thinking of new ways to cement his legacy. As Erasmus had noted, Henry ‘especially regarded’ the study of history. Now, he wanted a new history of England, one which underscored his family and its achievements, and written in fashionable humanist Latin for international consumption.

Vergil was perfectly placed to write it. Since his arrival in England four years previously, he had immersed himself in his adopted country’s history, keeping a journal in which he jotted down his thoughts and ideas. While he delighted in some native historians – the muscular Latin of the sixth-century Gildas, and the worldly erudition of the twelfth-century monk William of Malmesbury – he could barely disguise his contempt for the most popular chronicle of them all: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s bestselling
History of the Kings of England
, which had given new impetus and credibility to the founding myth of King Arthur in British history. Monmouth’s twelfth-century work, in Vergil’s eyes, was barely history at all. It was ‘fable’, he spat; he could barely mention it without ‘extreme distaste’.

Vergil could learn about the traumatic events of England’s recent past from those who had been intimately involved in it. A number of those people were his diplomatic colleagues, sources ‘worthy of credit’ like Richard Fox. It was very probably Fox – who Vergil would write prominently into his account as a man of ‘excellent wit’ – that suggested Vergil’s name to Henry. Summoned to the king’s presence, Vergil was commissioned to write an official history of England, which would encompass, as Henry put it, ‘the deeds of his people … from early times to the present day’ – with his family as the latest and most glorious instalment.
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The result, Vergil’s
Anglica Historia
, would be years in the writing, and Henry would not live to see the result. First completed in 1513, it was finally printed in 1534 in a form substantially revised to suit the convulsive politics of those years. From prehistory to Vergil’s present, it would be England’s first modern history: a continuous narrative structured around the lives of kings, and containing analysis – ‘digressions’, Vergil called them – on everything from his source material to the country’s political development.
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And while Vergil’s account, with its sustained assault on the Arthurian ‘British history’ tradition, was vilified in some quarters, it was astonishingly influential. In his
Chronicle
of 1548 the lawyer Edmund Hall paid it the ultimate compliment, translating it and passing copious undigested chunks of it off as his own work. By the end of the sixteenth century, the
Anglica Historia
had become the accepted national story, as Shakespeare recognized: the plots of his history plays,
Richard II
, the two parts of
Henry IV
,
Henry V
and
Richard III
, are pure Vergil.
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The Italian, in fact, might be said to be one of the most influential English historians of them all – and Fox, one of the architects of Henry’s reign, was the man who spotted his potential.

In mid-1506 Erasmus finally got his break. It came in the unexpected form of Giovanni Battista Boerio, a member of London’s affluent Genoese community and, as one of Henry VII’s physicians and diplomats, a man with regular access to the king. Boerio asked Erasmus to accompany his two sons to Italy and supervise their education; Erasmus, who had been dreaming of a trip to Italy for decades, leaped at the chance. By the start of June, he was en route with his two young charges. After an appalling, four-day-long Channel crossing, he recovered for some days with Mountjoy in Hammes Castle, from where he dispatched the last of his Lucianic dialogues and a series of valedictory letters to his friends in England: More, and Ammonio, for whom things at court had failed to improve, and whose mood was darkened still further by the departure of his intellectual mentor. Far from home, disillusioned and short of cash, Ammonio was appalled by London’s noise and grime – ‘the dirt of these people is altogether hateful to me’, he sniffed fastidiously in a letter to Erasmus. His only refuge, it seemed, was the Old Barge, where he spent an increasing amount of time.
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