Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (40 page)

As Erasmus made his way to Italy in the summer of 1506, Pope Julius II was on the warpath. Agitating for a new Holy League, a grand coalition to confront the Turkish armies rampant in southeast Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, he announced the latest in a long line of papal calls for a crusade. But whether or not the Ottoman Empire was his ultimate end in view, his immediate aim was Venice: to reconquer the papal states it had annexed and, ultimately, to bring the republic to its knees. To fund his military adventures, Julius knew he had to protect his revenues. On 17 May, he launched his most forceful and wide-ranging papal proclamation to date against the illegal alum trade. The first of its kind to be printed, it was addressed to ‘all persons secular or ecclesiastical, of whatever state or condition they might be’. It inveighed against iniquitous dealers and brokers involved in the trade, and forbade, under pain of anathema, all Christian princes and their subjects to have anything to do with any other alum than that which came from the Tolfa mines, whose alum was ‘reserved and consecrated to the preparations for a great crusade against the Sultan of Constantinople’.

Throughout the financial centres of northern Europe, from the Low Countries to London, papal representatives marched into banking houses and served the bull on merchants, together with covering letters stating that dealings with certain alum speculators, who were ‘the source of a pernicious contagion to the souls of the faithful’, were certain to be harmful to the spiritual health of those faithful to Christ. In Bruges, the papal commissioner’s letter included a list of the dealers to be avoided. Among the seven principal names were ‘Nicolas Vuaringh’, or Nicholas Waring, the skipper of Henry’s ship the
Sovereign
; the head of the Frescobaldi company Jerome, or Girolamo, da Frescobaldi; and Louis – or Lodovico – della Fava, Henry’s own broker.
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In the Low Countries, publication of the bull provoked enough consternation to make Margaret of Savoy, Henry’s hoped-for bride, summon her council for an urgent discussion of the situation. But in London, the pronouncement appeared to have no effect at all. Julius had dispatched a new commissioner, Pietro Griffo, to remind Henry of his responsibilities and to persuade him to join the crusade.
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Henry was unmoved. Having previously contributed funds both to the pope and to the knights of St John of Jerusalem – earlier that year, he had received the rare title of ‘protector’ to the knights’ garrison at Rhodes – he was perfectly enthusiastic for the idea of a crusade; just not Julius’s war against Venice.

That autumn, at the head of an army of Swiss mercenaries and French soldiers, Julius cut an all-conquering swathe through the Romagna, the Venetian armies in headlong retreat. As he entered Bologna in triumph on 11 November, away in Richmond Lodovico della Fava came to Henry with a new business proposition. He offered the king the opportunity to invest in a consignment of 7,000 hundredweight of alum worth £10,000 – a huge deal, by any standards. Henry would pay in two tranches, 60 per cent up front. As usual, as well as this cheap consignment of high-grade alum, he would receive from della Fava and the Frescobaldi company customs duties payable on the imports, and a large fee for the lease of the vessel in which the consignment would be shipped. Edmund Dudley, who helped broker the deal, was also present, itemizing everything in his account book, which was signed, as ever, by the king. The combined sum owing to Henry on customs duties and lease of his 4-masted, 600-ton, 225-cannon carrack
Regent
– the perfect way to transport such a precious cargo – was £5,100. And on 18 December, the chamber treasurer John Heron signed off the first instalment of £6,000 to della Fava, who drew up bills of exchange to send to the Frescobaldi branch in Florence.
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Henry had effectively ripped up Julius’s papal bull and thrown it in his face.

Livid, Julius recalled Pietro Griffo, ordering him to fix copies of the papal censure to every English church door he passed on his way to Dover. Little did Julius know, but during his stay at the English court Griffo had succumbed to temptation. Whatever his conversation with Henry had been, the outcome was glaringly evident in an entry in Dudley’s account book: ‘Pope’s orator Peter de Griffo for licence and custom of 1,300 kintals [hundredweight] of alum to come in by assent of Lodovico della Fava £433 6s 8d by obligation.’ Sent by Julius to persuade Henry to give up his illegal alum racket, Griffo had come in on it instead. Even for the pope’s own commissioner, the lure of alum had proved too great to resist.
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Money, of course, was not the only motivating factor. Julius’s efforts to form an anti-Venetian coalition in the form of a Holy League were bearing fruit, and with it, a growing threat to Henry. If Julius really could reconcile the French king Louis XII, Maximilian and Ferdinand, it would throw a spanner in the fine mechanism of Henry’s balance-of-power diplomacy, and might well destroy his vision for an Anglo-Habsburg-dominated Europe into the bargain. In fact, Henry had pursued his own, apparently genuine initiatives to broker a crusade coalition involving England, Castile and Portugal. The following year, he wrote with apparent ingenuousness to Julius, to urge peace between Christian princes in order to co-ordinate a crusade against the Turks, with the implication that the pope should lay off Venice. Henry had the welfare of Christendom at heart – but he saw no reason why he should not make a tidy profit at the same time.
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Lodovico della Fava’s contact at the Italian end of the alum deal, Giovanni Cavalcanti, was from a prestigious Florentine family. Leaving the city following the fall of the Medici in 1494, he had gone into business, working as a broker in the Frescobaldi’s Rome offices.
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Coupling a sharp business mind with a sophisticated taste in antiquities, in early 1506 he had been in Rome during one of the defining discoveries of the Renaissance, the unearthing of the 1,500-year-old statue of the Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons being strangled by sea serpents: Cavalcanti wrote of the ‘miracle’ that had kept intact the sculpture’s tortured, writhing complexity. But he was also an enthusiastic patron of contemporary arts. Among the artists he favoured were Michelangelo Buonarroti, the pre-eminent Florentine sculptor of the age, and Michelangelo’s childhood friend and rival, Pietro Torrigiano. Torrigiano was a sculptor of great talent; he was also a liability.

Glowering and hot-headed, Torrigiano revelled in the chaos of early sixteenth-century Italy, filling in between jobs as a mercenary in the ravening army of Cesare Borgia. And he fell out spectacularly with Michelangelo, whose success had put him firmly in the shade, and who had a habit of getting under his skin. Once, when Michelangelo had been winding him up, Torrigiano smashed his nose in. ‘I felt bone and cartilage go down like biscuit beneath my knuckles’, he recalled proudly, adding that his friend would carry that mark ‘to the grave’ – as indeed he did.
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It was very probably the man involved in Henry’s alum deal, Cavalcanti, who suggested to the frustrated sculptor that he try his luck in England. There, he would be free of Michelangelo’s oppressive shadow and besides, the English king’s keen interest in sculpture was well known. In their dusty studios Florentine artists chiselled busily away at portrait busts of ‘Enrico VII’, orders brought back from England by merchants doing business with Henry. The dispatch of Torrigiano, a Florentine artist of the first order, was the perfect way to flatter Henry, to add a dash of fashionable Tuscan glamour to his court – and to cement the Frescobaldi company’s ever-closer ties with it.
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Indeed, Henry’s thoughts of his legacy were increasingly Italian-inflected. Years before, the Florentine merchant Francesco Portinari had, at his request, sent him the statutes for Florence’s hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, Europe’s pre-eminent medical institution. Poring over them, Henry set his sights on a foundation to rival it. He fixed on a site on the south side of London’s Strand, sloping down to the Thames: his ancestor John of Gaunt’s palace of the Savoy. Sacked over a century previously by Kentish commoners marauding through London in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, it had since stood derelict. In 1505, as Erasmus arrived in England, Henry set the wheels in motion for a major new charitable project. Just as Richmond had rivalled the great palaces of Burgundy, the Savoy Hospital would aim to outdo Florence’s ‘first hospital among Christians’. Founded on Portinari’s plans, and taking almost a decade to build, it would be the first great architectural expression of the Italian Renaissance in England – rendered in English Gothic.
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Meanwhile, the outline of Henry’s new chapel at Westminster Abbey was beginning to emerge from under its forest of scaffolding. It would be his family’s mausoleum, housing Queen Elizabeth’s tomb and, alongside it, his own. Henry had been thinking about the tomb for some time, procuring an estimate and design by the Modenese sculptor Guido Mazzoni. Mazzoni, who had previously carved out a glittering career at the French court, had been in England for almost a decade, during which time his work had included the finely observed bust of the laughing boy now widely assumed to be Prince Henry. In 1507, however, he had returned to France. Whether he had been dismissed from the project, or whether he had left voluntarily, is unclear – but it left an opportunity for someone else.
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Around the same time, Pietro Torrigiano arrived in London. Lodging with della Fava at the opulent Frescobaldi company mansion on Botolph Lane, south of the Italian enclave of Lombard Street and Austin Friars, he set out to find work. With della Fava to take up his cause, Torrigiano had what the likes of Erasmus and Ammonio lacked, a passport to Henry VII’s court, through the people that mattered: his financiers. Henry’s Italian business contacts had brought him the Savoy hospital, the first architectural flowering of the English Renaissance; now, his alum deals would bring him its sculpture in the form of Torrigiano. Soon, Giovanni Cavalcanti himself would arrive in London and take over the reins from della Fava at the Frescobaldi company offices, where he would be one of Torrigiano’s chief sponsors. Torrigiano, meanwhile, would take over the work for Henry VII’s tomb. His impact on English art would be spectacular.
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By November 1506 a disillusioned Erasmus was finding that Italy was not all it was cracked up to be. He beat a hasty retreat to Florence from a newly ‘liberated’ Bologna, having been horrified by the spectacle of a warlike Pope Julius, at the head of his conquering army of mercenaries and French troops, marching into the city. There, news reached him of the death of Philip of Burgundy. Recalling the seemingly interminable months of feasting and entertainment that had accompanied Philip’s arrival in England earlier that year, Erasmus’s mind turned to the young English prince, some 1,500 miles away, and he put pen to paper. Nobody in Bologna, he wrote to Prince Henry in a letter of extravagant regret, could believe the sad reports of Philip’s demise, but they were ‘too persistent to appear altogether unfounded’. Whatever contact Erasmus had had with the prince during his recent stay in England, he had evidently been all too aware of his infatuation with Philip. Two months later, the prince wrote back.
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Composed in elegant Ciceronian Latin, Prince Henry’s letter was a small masterpiece in epistolary form. In it, he spoke of his ‘great unhappiness’ at the death of Philip, his ‘deeply, deeply regretted brother’ – indeed, he continued, he had not had such terrible news since the death of his beloved mother, four years previously: ‘I was’, he wrote, ‘less enchanted with this part of your letter than its marvellous elegance deserved, for it seemed to re-open a wound which time had healed.’ Effusive in his praise of Erasmus’s eloquence, the prince urged him to continue the correspondence, and asked for updates on Italian affairs.
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Heartfelt the letter may have been, but it was, too, a typical humanist schoolroom exercise, laboriously composed by a fifteen-year-old boy with his teacher standing over him. Erasmus was impressed. Years later, he wrote how he had tackled Mountjoy on the letter, asking him whether he had written it himself, for the prince to copy out. No, Mountjoy replied, producing drafts of the letter in the prince’s hand, complete with crossings-out and corrections, it had all been his pupil’s own work. There were, of course, subtexts to all this. In recounting the episode, Erasmus wanted to show off his own connections with nobility and royalty, all the while flattering Mountjoy’s teaching skills – despite Mountjoy’s protests to the contrary, it was as much his letter as the prince’s.
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The letter also said something else: here was a young prince who knew the value of a humanist education, for whom intellectual culture was not simply a by-product of international diplomacy, trade or the currency markets, but something that was intrinsic, fundamental to the way he saw the world. Or, to put it another way, the letter showed Erasmus that Prince Henry, as king, would be a ruler who understood the importance of scholars – and who would reward them accordingly. Prince Henry may have been brought up to resemble the perfect knight, but to intellectuals like Erasmus, Ammonio and More he was beginning to look like the perfect, disinterested patron of learning, who would recognize the true talents of those excluded from favour under his father. At least, that was what they hoped.

The man who, more than anyone else, had brought together these two worlds was Lord Mountjoy, who, as Erasmus put it with his characteristically elegant flattery, was ‘the most noble of scholars, most scholarly of noblemen, and in both classes the best’. There was, as Erasmus had acknowledged, a fundamental tension between the aims and ambitions of humanists, and those of noble ruling elites, a circle that he had tried to square in his
Panegyric.
It was a tension that Mountjoy himself embodied. When, some years later, Andrea Ammonio was about to send a new book of his verses to the printing press, he planned to include a fulsome dedication to Mountjoy that combined sycophantic praise with a scathing attack on the boorish ignorance of the nobility in general. Mountjoy, alarmed, had a quiet word with Erasmus, who wrote to his friend to tone it down. Mountjoy, he wrote, feared ‘opprobrium’ if the dedication were published: it would look as if he ‘were glad to have men of his rank censured.’
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In the final analysis, the classically educated, intellectually curious Mountjoy identified himself first and foremost with the ranks of the king’s ‘natural counsellors’, and with the traditions and values of the ranks from which he came. But as the reign reached its final terrifying stages, these brittle, divisive contradictions were submerged beneath a shared fear and loathing of Henry VII, and of those occupying positions of power around the increasingly remote king.