Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (43 page)

That March, too, the sudden appearance in the king’s chamber accounts of one of Denys’s fellow Gray’s Inn trustees, a ‘Master Lupton’, seems to confirm what was happening. Roger Lupton, a canon lawyer and provost of Eton College, was another of the coterie of royal chaplains around the king’s bedside. But now, for the first time, Lupton was invested with considerable financial responsibility. Like Denys and William Smith, he made payments, arranging for alms to be distributed and money disbursed to redeem debtors from London’s prisons in the customary acts of contrition, a sure sign that the king was nearing his end. But there was a particular reason for Lupton’s rise to prominence: he was an associate of Dudley’s.
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Men like Denys, Smith and Lupton were faithful, trusted servants of the king, people who could be relied upon in the most serious of crises. But they were also Empson and Dudley’s friends, and their preeminence around the dying king revealed which way the wind of royal favour was blowing.

On 19 March, a clerk was paid forty shillings to draw up the king’s will, copying meticulously from an earlier draft and incorporating new provisions. Added to the list of the twelve key executors, Henry’s most intimate and trustworthy advisers that included Fox, Lovell and the vice-chamberlain Sir Charles Somerset, were two new names: Sir Richard Empson and, at the bottom, ‘Edmund Dudley, esquire’. Both men had proved themselves indispensable. Now, they were among those few brokers charged with arranging the transfer of power from Henry VII to his son, who would be responsible not just for the first proper dynastic succession for a hundred years, but who, guiding the new, young king, would help determine what kind of regime it would be.

Downriver from Richmond, the London chronicler remarked on a renewed air of optimism. With a warm, early spring – in March, ‘buds were as far out this year as some year they be, by the latter end of April’ – came an atmosphere of détente. From Camby’s Counter prison in the Poultry to the Fleet prison, from the Marshalsea, the King’s Bench gaol run by Sir Thomas Brandon across the river in Southwark, to the fetid dungeon under Ludgate, cell doors swung open and debtors were released.
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Henry’s act of contrition seemed to work. Towards the end of the month, he was out of danger. On 31 March, Wednesday of Holy Week, Rodrigo de Puebla was admitted to the king’s presence; sidling into the privy chamber, he found Henry convalescing and still, as he reported with a certain self-importance, not seeing many people. Asked to return the following week, de Puebla spent time locked in discussions with the king, counsellors occasionally flitting in and out.
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But as Henry recovered, so the brief thaw dissipated. Empson, Dudley and their men went about their work with renewed vigour.

London’s prisons started to fill again. The city chronicler described a daily stream of men from all regions of England through the city gates, hauled before Henry’s learned counsellors and committed to the Tower or one or other of London’s prisons ‘where they remained to their displeasures long after’. Victims were subject to the now ubiquitous process: summary imprisonment until they agreed to pay large fines for their supposed crimes, more fines for pardons, and yet more fines for agreeing not to break the law in the future. Anybody who approached members of the judiciary for advice or representation was told with a shrug of the shoulders to ‘fall to agreement’. There was no way that any lawyer was about to represent a case against the king’s counsellors, while few people were brave or stupid enough to stand witness.
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Following the crisis of spring 1507, Empson and Dudley had emerged even more prominent among the king’s inner circle; they seemed, too, to be working more closely together, their access to the king more exclusive. Following his arrival at the king’s bedside, business now kept Empson increasingly in the environs of court. That summer, he took a lease on a large house next to the duchy offices at Bridewell, south of Fleet Street on the city’s western edge. ‘Le Parsonage’ was surrounded by orchards running down to the Thames, and was within easy reach of the inns of court and the London houses of the nobility, which extended around the curve of the river towards Westminster.
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In April 1507, as Henry recovered, a man mingling among the crowds of petitioners and lawyers in Westminster Hall could be heard telling anybody who would listen an appalling story. It concerned the London haberdasher Thomas Sunnyff – a prosperous, respectable man – and his wife, Alice. They had murdered a newborn child, then dumped the tiny body in the Thames. Even by the standards of the myriad malicious ‘informations’ lodged with the king’s counsellors it was a truly horrible allegation. What made things even worse was the fact that it was entirely false. The rumour-monger was a servant of Dudley’s promoter, John Camby, who had fabricated the entire case in order to force Sunnyff into paying a fine of £500 that was apparently owing to the king.
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The ‘fine’, though, was nothing of the sort. It was an old, run-of-the-mill bond to keep the peace – a bond whose conditions Sunnyff had now, according to Camby, broken in the most horrific way. Helpfully, Camby supplied evidence: the testimony of a prostitute, Alice Damston, whose child it seems to have been. Probably a prisoner of Camby’s, given that the Counter prisons were where those convicted of prostitution offences ended up, Damston had been forced to testify against the Sunnyffs. Undoubtedly, she had no choice in the matter. With his information lodged, and his evidence in hand, Camby arrested the bewildered haberdasher and frogmarched him to Empson’s house for a hearing. What happened next was a terrifying example of how Empson and Dudley’s roles increasingly interlocked in pursuit of the king’s rights, and of the impunity with which they and their promoters moved through London.

After Camby had repeated his trumped-up case, Empson ordered Sunnyff to settle his ‘fine’ of £500. When the haberdasher refused, he was carted off to the Fleet prison and locked up.
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Six weeks went by, and with Sunnyff still refusing to pay, Camby decided to try another avenue. Extracting his victim from the Fleet, the pair went downriver to Greenwich, where the king was in residence. Leaving the nervous Sunnyff under guard, Camby wandered off to find Dudley; after a while, the pair returned. Dudley said, shortly, ‘Sunnyff, agree with the king or else you must go to the Tower.’ When the draper refused to ‘agree’, Camby rowed him back to London, taking him not to the Tower but to his own prison, where he locked Sunnyff up and embarked on a campaign of psychological intimidation. The king, he said, wanted his £500 and what the king wanted, the king got. He gave Sunnyff an example. When Henry had coveted Wanstead manor, he had victimized its owner, Sir Ralph Hastings, until Hastings sold it to him. Hastings had died of the stress: the implication was that Sunnyff would, too. But again, the draper was resolute, demanding a proper trial. In an unconscious echo of William Cornish’s plea from the Fleet three years previously, he retorted: ‘if the king’s good grace knew the truth of my matter he would not take a penny from me’.

When Sunnyff’s case was, finally, brought in front of the court of King’s Bench in Westminster Hall, another of the king’s judicial cabal, the attorney-general James Hobart, told the judges not to grant him bail. Committing Sunnyff to the Marshalsea, the judges ruled that they had to obey the king’s commandment because Hobart said so: ‘in so much that Camby had brought with him the king’s attorney.’ With Sunnyff back in prison and still refusing to pay up, Dudley, Camby and Richard Page broke into his house in Bower Row, in the north of the city, on 26 June and helped themselves to goods worth the required amount – vastly undervaluing the goods as they did so.
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Having been moved between royal prisons, beyond the city’s jurisdiction, for over three months, subjected to a rigged trial, and with no prospect of release, Sunnyff broke. He agreed to the fine, fearing that he ‘should have died in prison’. On 21 July, Dudley entered in his account book Sunnyff’s £500 fine in exchange for a pardon ‘for the murdering of the child’. But still he was not released until well into November, when the fine had, unaccountably, increased by another £100, and Sunnyff had been forced to sign another bond for his future good behaviour – which might, in the hands of Camby and his cohorts, be triggered again.
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Whether or not Henry knew the truth of Sunnyff’s matter – or of the slew of other manipulated cases – he was unconcerned to find out. He approved Sunnyff’s fine and signed his pardon; all the money was paid into the hands of John Heron in the king’s chamber treasury.
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Sunnyff and his wife had spent six and a half months in separate prisons, on trumped-up charges, without trial, had their names dragged through the mud, their house ransacked and goods stolen, and had been mulcted of £600 into the bargain. Little did he know it, but Sunnyff’s Kafkaesque ordeal, even then, was still not over.

When Thomas More had written to his friend John Colet describing London as a city of sharp eyes, silver tongues and barely suppressed violence, his letter had not been mere literary conceit. This, after all, was a city that felt itself infiltrated, besieged by royal informers; where the knocks on the door, the arbitrary summons to court, were becoming ever more frequent; where merchants like Sunnyff were imprisoned at random, their houses broken into and their goods confiscated; and where people died of stress after months of harassment at the hands of the king’s promoters. The shadow of More’s near neighbour and fellow-lawyer Edmund Dudley, whose house lay a brief walk from the Old Barge, down Walbrook, also fell across his family and friends and, it seems, More himself.

One friend was Mountjoy who, as he never failed to remind everyone, was up to his ears in debt – not only his own, but the financial bonds of at least twenty-one others, for whom he stood surety. Mountjoy’s father-in-law, Sir William Say, a close friend of the More family, was also in desperate trouble. As well as being embroiled in a lawsuit with his son-in-law, he was in bond to the king for £1,666, as Dudley recorded in his account book. Another name that Dudley had written down was that of Thomas More’s father, Sir John.
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As a sergeant-at-law, Sir John More was a member of the elite group of common lawyers from whom the king chose his judges. Whatever he thought of the promoters’ excesses, Sir John was part of the establishment, a legal adviser who had been chosen to uphold the king’s law. He was hardly likely to start pleading against the king’s causes; rather, he would have been among those lawyers who, when approached by defendants desperately seeking legal advice, would say that the best counsel they could give was to ‘fall to agreement’ with the king. But even sergeants-at-law were not safe. One of Sir John’s colleagues, Sir William Cutler, had recently nipped in the bud a plot to forge a treasonous letter in his own hand, and ‘the same letter to have been cast into the king’s chamber’ – at which point, as his defence simply but eloquently put it, Cutler would have ‘stood at his own jeopardy’. According to Thomas More’s son-in-law William Roper, Sir John himself fell victim to the king’s promoters, imprisoned in the Tower until he stumped up a fine of £100.
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And then, according to Roper, Thomas More himself was targeted.

After More’s vocal part in the 1504 parliament, things seemed to go quiet. Then, one day, More had gone to see Richard Fox on a ‘suit’, possibly legal matters relating to the city. After official business was concluded Fox drew More aside and, ‘pretending great favour’, advised him to ‘confess his offence against the king’. Henry, Fox implied, was distinctly ill-disposed towards the young lawyer, and a full confession would immediately restore him to the king’s good books. More evidently said he would think about it. Coming away from the meeting, he fell into conversation with Richard Whitford, who was well placed to give an opinion: this close friend of Mountjoy, Erasmus and More was also Fox’s chaplain. Whitford’s advice was emphatic. ‘In no wise’, he said, should More confess to anything at all – particularly to Fox. What More had to understand, Whitford continued, was that Fox would do anything to serve the king; why, he would even sign his own father’s death warrant. According to custom, in which members of Parliament in formal session were allowed to oppose the king, provided they did so with the requisite deference, More had done nothing wrong. If he confessed to a crime, however, that was a different matter entirely. He would have been condemned out of his own mouth.
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In Roper’s hagiographical biography of Thomas More, these two episodes formed part of a systematic campaign of intimidation waged against More and his father by Henry VII, the result of More’s speaking truth to power in the 1504 parliament. As ever, Roper tried to claim particular privilege for the Mores’ suffering. Although the possibility remains that Henry harboured specific ill-feeling towards Thomas More, both father and son were more likely to have been victims not of special treatment, but quite the reverse: the indiscriminate and terrifying opportunism of Henry’s lawyer-counsellors. Sir John More was arrested on a ‘causeless quarrel’, probably a legal technicality of the kind Dudley’s promoters delighted in spotting; the £100 he paid for his release – while, very probably, entering into further financial bonds – was precisely the kind of ‘agreement’ with the king that so many were forced to make. Likewise, in implying that Thomas More had somehow incurred Henry VII’s wrath, Fox was trying the same tactic, intimidating him into admitting some unspecified offence – a confession that could only end in More and his family being snared in the king’s financial web.

From that time on, More viewed Fox with unease. Erasmus noted how, for More, Fox was the malign genius behind Henry’s novel methods of taxation commonly known as ‘Morton’s Fork’. Erasmus, too, talking to the garrulous Andrea Ammonio some years later, would warn him to be particularly careful about what he said in front of Fox – an opinion that seemed to come straight out of the Old Barge. Indeed, it was a view shared by the young Henry VIII himself: ‘Here in England’, he later informed the Spanish ambassador, ‘they think he is a fox – and such is his name.’
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