Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (44 page)

Sometime in late 1507 or early the following year, More left England for a period of study leave at the universities of Paris and Louvain. Perhaps the timing was a coincidence – or perhaps, as people often did at such times, he had thought it best to remove himself from the tense atmosphere of city and court, to let things cool down a bit. At that stage in his life, he may have thought discretion the better part of valour.
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Even as Henry’s other counsellors worked with Empson and Dudley at the task of enforcing bonds, collecting fines, imprisoning and asset-stripping their victims, they looked askance at the two men whose pre-eminence had been emphatically asserted during the recent crisis of the king’s illness, as they and their friends clustered around his bedside. Henry, increasingly, seemed to go directly to them, over the heads of other members of his inner circle. In a series of memos on a variety of matters to the chancellor, Archbishop Warham, the king told him simply to take Dudley’s advice and follow his instructions; one such command told Warham to get Richard Fox to draw up writs preventing people from leaving the kingdom, ‘after [such] manner, form and effect as our trusty councillor Edmund Dudley shall show unto you.’ To veteran advisers like Fox and Warham, being lectured by the king’s keen new protégé must have been deeply irritating. So, too, it seems, were Dudley’s views on religion.

On the face of it, Dudley’s disapproving attitude towards the church – a vast, wealthy corporation that was answerable in the final analysis to Rome rather than the king of England – was no more than the robust orthodoxy of the time. In the eyes of many, the church was simply too political, too worldly, too powerful. Ecclesiastical abuses were endemic: absenteeism and pluralism – being away from one’s flock and holding more than one holy office – went hand in hand with simony, paying for holy office: ‘temporalities’, the lands and incomes that came with church livings, were often highly attractive. All this was frowned upon. The role of priests and bishops was to provide a moral and spiritual example to the realm, not to sully themselves in the world of politics. And above all, privileges like sanctuary and benefit of clergy – where clerics were allowed to opt for favourable trials in church courts, rather than submitting themselves to the king’s justice – allowed people to get away, literally, with murder. Appealing legal cases to Rome, effectively in contempt of the king’s law, was even worse.
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Plenty of people, men like Fox and John Colet – a friend of Dudley’s, as it happened – believed to some degree or other, and for differing reasons, that the church’s practices, or abuses, or organization, needed sorting out. Neither did they see their own devotion to the church as remotely inconsistent with pursuing the regime’s vested interests and their own: Lady Margaret Beaufort, with her intense piety and vigorous deployment of her son’s lawyers – Empson and Dudley included – in pursuit of her various business and legal matters being a case in point. But Dudley, Empson and the other common lawyers among Henry’s counsellors had a particularly aggressive attitude towards the church. They were, after all, the self-styled ‘high priests’ of the common law, and it was their job, and in their interests, to tighten the king’s hold over the church, to close the legal loopholes – and, in the process, bleed the ecclesiastical cash cow for as much money as they could get, on the king’s behalf. Inevitably, their assault on the church became another focus for resentment. Among the spirituality, religious concerns mingled with corporate solidarity: churchmen stuck together. In the likes of Lady Margaret, Fox and Warham, this fused with a feeling that they had, somehow, been displaced from the king’s side.
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All this came together in the person of Christopher Urswick, Henry’s former almoner. Urswick had been friendly with Bray and Archbishop Morton; he was close to Fox and Lady Margaret, whose confessor he had been, and with the intensely spiritual John Fisher, the cleric who Henry had appointed bishop of Rochester as a salve to his conscience. He was, too, a friend of Erasmus and More. Way back in 1484 it was Urswick whose decisive, perilous journey from Flanders to Brittany, to warn Henry that he was about to be extradited, had saved his skin. Now, the otherwise mild-mannered Urswick – who, it seems, had gradually been sidelined for his conservative religious views – bristled against Henry’s lawyers, ‘opponents of ecclesiastical liberty’, and the ‘detestable rapacity, nay rather sacrilege’ that they exhibited. His friend and colleague Richard Nykke was so enraged that he denounced Henry’s attorney-general James Hobart as ‘an enemy of God and his church’.
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Occasionally, these resentments reached Henry’s ears. As concerned as the next man about the state of his soul, he even listened occasionally. In July 1507, the ungodly Hobart was forcibly retired, and fined £500 into the bargain. As it turned out, however, the action was little more than a sop to both the church and to Henry’s spiritual conscience. Hobart’s replacement as attorney-general was John Ernley, an unexceptional lawyer who had one thing in his favour: he was a friend and business partner of Edmund Dudley, and he took up with renewed vigour where Hobart had left off.
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Even as Henry’s counsellors tightened the financial screws, the more seasoned among them were undeniably aware of the burgeoning resentments: from the church, the nobles, the merchants. Both Fox and Thomas Lovell, honorary members respectively of London’s mercers’ and grocers’ guilds, could not help but notice the atmosphere of sullen anxiety that had settled on the city, the preachers shouting fire and brimstone against the king’s counsellors at St Paul’s Cross, stories of the many ‘murmerous and grudging’ reactions to the king’s commissioners throughout the country reaching their ears.
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As Lovell enforced the duke of Buckingham’s latest set of fines, he would have detected the simmering rancour of a nobleman who, he knew, detested him. In Henry’s secret chamber, Fox and Lovell’s man, Richard Weston, passed them information even as he smilingly offered to stand surety for the earl of Northumberland’s debts. As loyal servants to the king, these old-established counsellors, architects of the regime from which they derived their power, were hardly about to express even the slightest murmur against Henry’s promotion of Empson and Dudley, the two men who had carried his policies to a new level. But experience told them that there would, eventually, be a reckoning – and when it came, they had to be ready.

There was a story that did the rounds at court, about the king’s pet monkey. Goaded by one of Henry’s privy chamber servants, it snatched up an account book that Henry had left lying around, and ripped it ‘all to pieces’, a tale that apparently spread through the court like wildfire, to the amusement of those that ‘liked not those pensive accounts’. It was a brief moment of levity in an intensifying sequence of prosecutions, fines and imprisonment. But it also showed how contingent was the whole system that Henry had built: reliant on the mass of data kept and maintained privately by his financial administrators, and, ultimately, on his own personal authority.
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With Suffolk out of the picture, and with the likes of Buckingham under close scrutiny, any overt threat to the regime had been stifled and suppressed. Bound and divided, people were sullen and resentful – but they were also scared. There were, as Buckingham later said, many nobles resentful at having been ‘so unkindly handled’, and they could have ‘done something’ if they had dared talk to each other, ‘but they were afraid to speak’.
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As people had been for years, they were waiting for Henry to die for normal service to be resumed, for the return of the status quo, the redressing of wrongs and the reassertion of vested interests. It was something that Empson, Dudley and their colleagues had perhaps sensed as they had moved around what they had thought was the king’s deathbed in March 1507, as close as possible to the source of power. The ground was shifting. Opposition to Henry and his counsellors now was not so much about the struggle for the dynasty – though that lurked, ever-present, under the surface. It was about the struggle for its soul.

Despite his increasing, carefully controlled, public appearances, Prince Henry continued to live in his father’s pocket, incubated within the royal household. The king liked to talk about himself and the prince in the same breath, as being of one mind – ‘my son and I’ – and funded projects in both their names, like the completion of the fan-vaulted ceiling of St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle. If the king’s aim was to mould his son in his own image, he seemed to be succeeding: foreign ambassadors reported that the prince was ‘prudent’, like his father. The pair walked together, Henry talking in his precise way about politics and government, the prince listening quietly. Late one summer evening in July 1506, around 11 o’clock, they were pacing one of the newly built private galleries at Richmond when, suddenly, the floor caved in, almost – but not quite – beneath their feet. It was a narrow escape. But to those who believed in portents, it perhaps said something else. The king could keep his son as close as he liked, but dangers still lurked, right under his nose.
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In the balmy early spring of 1507, a jousts royal was proclaimed. The May jousts were a longstanding tradition, but that year there seemed a particular energy and purpose about their organization. Henry may have been disinclined to take England into war, but he remained constantly suspicious of France’s expansionist ambitions and, with the belligerent Pope Julius II attempting to unite Europe’s warring dynasties – Habsburg, Valois, Trastamara – in a coalition to crusade against the Turks, was keen to show that he, too, remained a major player on the European stage. A glittering display of chivalric martial arts was a perfect and risk-free way to show off England’s military readiness.

Another impulse underlay the jousts, too. They would showcase the new generation of courtiers in a display of carefully choreographed loyalty to the emerging dynasty: to Princess Mary, Henry’s poised younger daughter, and to the prince, who would turn sixteen that June.

Unusually for a king who pored obsessively over every minute detail of court ceremonial, Henry had almost nothing to do with the jousts’ organization. Still weak and recovering from the illness that had almost killed him, he waved through the plans, perfectly happy to delegate them to the prince and his friends, who were all too keen to oversee the preparations – which was very probably why things turned out the way they did.

Two miles south of London Bridge, the royal manor of Kennington had seen better times. Henry VII barely, if ever, visited it, preferring the Thamesside houses that he had had rebuilt at great expense, and between which he shuttled in the royal barge. But Kennington, down at heel and dilapidated, nevertheless had a historic lustre of its own, as well as a longstanding association with the prince of Wales. In the mid-fourteenth century, it had been rebuilt by the Black Prince, the son of Edward III who had defeated the French in the great battles of the Hundred Years War, at Crécy and Poitiers. A short ride from London and Westminster, equidistant from Greenwich and Richmond, it was the perfect base for the prince and his friends, and for their endless, obsessive practice of martial arts.

By spring 1507, the prince seemed to have undergone a transformation. There had been hints of his emergence at court in the various heralds’ reports and diplomatic dispatches written during Philip of Burgundy’s stay: his astonishingly accurate marksmanship in the hunt, his barbed comments to the French ambassador. There had, though, been few comments on his appearance. But, as he approached his sixteenth birthday, the prince’s physical development was glaringly obvious. Ruddy-cheeked, and with a sensual cupid’s-bow mouth, he had, admirers noted, a soft, feminine complexion – all of which served to make his massive, athletic frame all the more astonishing. Later that year, de Puebla would report to Ferdinand in awestruck tones that there was ‘no finer a youth in the world’. He was impressively, intimidatingly ‘gigantic’. Standing next to his ill, consumptive father, the prince dwarfed him.
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Now, the prince had the power and physique to go with his undoubted martial skills. In the tiltyard, his companions felt the juddering impact of his sword-blows and saw the muscled precision of his archery and his tilting at the quintain. The prince, it was clear, wanted to hit harder, shoot and joust better than anyone else.

The tournament’s organization had its roots in Philip’s enforced stay in England the previous year. The impact of Philip and his knights of the Golden Fleece had been plain to see in a tournament put on at Greenwich in the spring of 1506, only a matter of weeks after he had finally left for Spain. Held in the tiltyard that ran behind and at right angles to the main apartments that fronted onto the river, these games reflected a court still bathing in the lustrous afterglow of Philip’s visit. Following the latest Burgundian fashions, they had been framed by a dramatic tableau, the first of its kind in England. Introducing the tournament, Lady May, the servant of Dame Summer, breathlessly recounted how she had heard tell of a recent joust honouring her ‘great enemy’ Lady Winter and her servant Dame February – a direct reference to the tournament at Richmond put on in Philip’s honour three months previously.
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This, then, was more about keeping up with chivalric fashions; or, rather, it showed how they mixed with international power-politics, underscoring the new special relationship between England and the Habsburgs that had been concluded during Philip’s stay: Henry’s own projected marriage to Philip’s sister, Margaret of Savoy, and that of Princess Mary to Philip and Juana’s young son Charles, heir to the Habsburg lands – including Castile. The focal point of these jousts, too, had been the eleven-year-old Mary herself. As the games opened, Lady May, curtseying deeply, petitioned her to ‘licence my poor servants’ to defend her honour ‘in exercise of chivalry’. The jousts seemed to go down very well indeed.