Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (48 page)

Henry pursued every possible diplomatic avenue, marshalling his own ambassador to the Spanish court and lobbying influential opinion-formers such as Ferdinand’s close adviser, the fiercely intellectual Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros. As ever, he leaned on the obliging de Puebla, whose dispatches to Ferdinand described a similarly rose-tinted view of the prospective marriage, while adding a few choice details of his own. Henry, de Puebla told Ferdinand, had an ‘incredible love’ for Juana, and was desperate to marry her even if she were indeed a stranger to reason. Frankly, he added, Henry would want the match ‘even if worse things were said of the daughter of your Highness’. He would be a much better husband to her than Philip had ever been, and in his loving company she would quickly recover her sanity – besides which, any mental derangement would hardly affect Juana’s ability to procreate. Catherine, too, added to the barrage of correspondence.
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Writing to her father – in cipher, of course – Catherine described proudly how she had suddenly become useful to the English. She told Ferdinand how she ‘baited’ Henry with apparently ingenuous talk of her sister, all the while maintaining her demure, innocent façade. Henry and his counsellors, she said, ‘fancy I have no more in me than appears outwardly’. But as much as Catherine tried to play this new, dissimulating role, it was one that she found impossible to sustain. The tone of her correspondence veered wildly from desperate self-assertion to panic about her own situation, which she begged her father to resolve, ‘since it is in [your] power to alter the state of things’, stating that she would ‘rather die in England’ than give up her marriage to the prince.
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Catherine saw her future inextricably linked to England’s and, she probably felt, her fate now hinged on the king’s marriage with Juana. If she could help cement it, her own wedding to Prince Henry would surely follow.

Catherine’s new-found boldness with her father masked that she was, in fact, prepared to do whatever Henry asked of her. Not only did the letters she wrote separately to Juana that autumn urge her to marry Henry, their phrasing seemed to come straight out of the English diplomatic handbook. Henry was, she told her sister, ‘a very passionate king’, ‘very wise’ and ‘endowed with the greatest virtues’. The phrasing was such that Henry might as well have been standing over her, dictating while she wrote.
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Ferdinand replied to Catherine and to Henry in much the same way. He was not sure if Juana could be persuaded to remarry – Philip’s death had left her horribly bereaved – but, if so, Henry would of course be first in the queue. In truth, Ferdinand, now undisputed regent of Castile, had no intention whatsoever of relinquishing Juana: the prospect of Henry inheriting the kingdom of Castile in her name, and of Juana giving birth to a brood of Anglo-Spanish heirs, was unthinkable. It was just as well, he gave out, that he had gone to Castile when he did, for he had arrived to find a country in a mess, ‘in great upheaval and scandal before my return’. Although Juana was ‘serene’, she was, he implied, plainly incapable of governing in her own right. Soon, stories emanated from Spain of how, insane with grief for her late husband, she rebuffed all attempts to persuade her to bury him; instead, she careened around the country with his coffined corpse in her baggage train. Highly resentful of Ferdinand’s duplicity over the years, Henry suspected that he was now playing up his daughter’s madness in order to hold on to her throne. It only added fuel to the fire.
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Meanwhile, de Puebla was doing his best to push forward Catherine’s own prospects. As Henry embarked on his intensive round of Juana-related diplomacy, so the ambassador sensed that Ferdinand might, finally, be prepared to pay Catherine’s marriage portion. Trying to smooth the path, de Puebla wrote with advice on financial practicalities, proposing suitable merchant-banking firms in Spain who could draw up bills of exchange ‘for the whole sum of the marriage portion to be accepted in London’. Among the most suitable brokers, he opined, were the Genoese Grimaldi, whose London agent John Baptist ‘enjoys great credit’ and was ‘well known to the King of England’.
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For de Puebla, a great player of the long game, Catherine’s marriage had become his life’s work, a project he had progressed inch by inch, patiently rebuilding it after each collapse. But Catherine, panicky and miserable – hers was ‘always the worst part’, she wrote to her father – had had enough. As ever, she took it out on de Puebla. For years she had been asking Ferdinand to recall him; now, she rehearsed all the old arguments again. Low-born, deceitful and wheedling, he did no honour to Spain, nor to her. The English, she said, found him contemptible, saying that he only came to court to take advantage of the free meals, and he had become a laughing-stock – even Henry found the jokes funny. He had gone native, and was in Henry’s pay; he had done more than anybody else to block her marriage; and he was, besides, old, ill, and ‘nearer death than life’.
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Catherine wanted somebody else: somebody who was fine, upstanding, aristocratic, trustworthy and – not to put too fine a point on it – a good Christian. She was to regret not having been more careful about what she wished for.

Late in September, as the hunting season drew to a close, the royal household moved back down the Thames valley towards London, in slow stages. It stopped at the spacious brick-built manor house at Ewelme, which Henry had confiscated from the earl of Suffolk, at Reading Abbey, and at Woking, a spacious house set in orchards and parkland that had formerly been owned by his mother – much to Lady Margaret’s chagrin, he had forced her to swap it for the rather less agreeable manor of Hunsdon in Hertfordshire.
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Towards the end of October, Henry arrived at the most recent addition to his property portfolio.

He had chosen Hanworth with studied care. Within easy riding distance of Richmond, a few miles to the east, it was a bolt-hole from court – much like Wanstead on the other side of London, whose keeper was Hugh Denys, Henry’s groom of the stool and head of his secret chamber. It was an appointment that spoke volumes for how Henry regarded the secluded manors at which he increasingly spent much of his time. Denys, the man who oversaw Henry’s private world, was perfectly placed to make security and domestic arrangements when the king was ill, or when the privy apartments were not enough of a refuge. When at Richmond, Richard Fox recollected, Henry would leave the court behind and ride the few miles south, crossing the Thames to the bishop of Winchester’s palace at Esher, where Fox – the bishop in question – would provide him with an atmosphere of monastic calm. Esher had been, Fox said, Henry’s ‘cell to Richmond’.
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Now, in Hanworth, equidistant from both Richmond and Esher and sited conveniently near the Benedictine monastery of Chertsey, which Henry favoured, the king had found his own ‘cell’ where, heavily guarded by his yeomen and secret servants, he could be alone with his thoughts – and with his accounts.

On acquiring Hanworth – another compulsory purchase, this time from his administrator Sir John Hussey – Henry had immediately set about transforming it. By the time he arrived that October, a hunting park had been enclosed and the grounds emptied of detritus. Now, with typical attention to detail, he planned a pleasure garden, with sunken beds, a hunting lodge and an aviary.
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Henry’s studied distance, exacerbated by conspiracy and illness, had become acute. Increasingly, and even when in the best of health, he seemed not to want to be seen: during his energetic progress that summer, even though his itinerary had been detailed in the published ‘gests’, he had been impossible to pin down. He paid lip-service to the rhythms and rituals of court, but this was a king whose will operated through his counsellors. The contrast with the vital son whom he pushed into the ceremonial limelight on every occasion was there for all to see. So, too, was the confined, powerless life that the prince led.

Through the late summer and autumn of 1507, the carts and carriages of the royal household rumbled slowly along the Thames valley from house to house, the sixteen-year-old prince and his servants trailing along in their wake. He shadowed his father’s progress, a swift gallop away in the event of any emergency, or a recurrence of Henry’s ill-health – or in case of anything untoward in his own retinue. On occasions when space for both households was lacking, the prince might lodge at a separate house – while the king was at Woking on 11 October he spent the night at Easthampstead, from where his brother had set out eagerly to meet Catherine six years before. But ultimately, where Henry went, the prince went too. At his side, through the whole progress, ‘
per totum itinerum
’, were Lord Mountjoy and the man who appears to have been the prince’s head of security, Sir John Rainsford.
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Rainsford was one of the king’s household knights. A link in the crown’s chain of command in his native Essex, where he had ties with the earl of Oxford, he had got his job with the prince through his chamberlain Sir Henry Marney, a neighbour and in-law. Rainsford seems to have been a security chief of the shoot-first-and-ask-afterwards variety. He passed his violent disposition on to his son, John junior, ‘a very dangerous man of his hands and one that delighteth much in beating, mayheming and evil entreating the king’s subjects’. Such violence, of course, came in handy when maintaining a ring of steel around the prince – if properly controlled.
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The sixteen-year-old Henry seemed a model prince: magnificent in ceremonial, chivalrous in the tiltyard, and pious in prayer. But even if the impulse took him, he knew that any aberrant behaviour would be likely to get back to his father through Sir Henry Marney, or one or other of the servants who doubled as members of the royal household. On progress, there seemed little opportunity for the kind of teenaged rampaging up and down the Thames valley that his ancestor Edward I had indulged in when barely a year older: waylaying passers-by, assaulting them and making off with their horses, carts and provisions.

Within this closely controlled environment, however, there were already hints of the extravagant carelessness to come. That August, hunting at Langley, the prince had contrived to lose a number of jewels, among them a ruby ring given him years before by his mother, and a red-and-black enamelled diamond ring, a present from Edmund Dudley. The sloppiness was catching: the keeper of the prince’s jewels, Ralph Pudsey, mislaid a delicate gold chain of the prince’s – ‘and’, wrote the king’s jewel-house keeper Sir Henry Wyatt grimly, ‘the king knoweth of it’.
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The prince had men around him who, like all good servants, were keen to bend themselves to his will, to have ‘good wait to come to him if he do call them, or make any countenance to them, to do him service or message’. Servants rode up and down the Thames valley, to London and back ‘
pro negociis suis
’, on his business or on shopping trips for necessaries and luxuries – musical instruments, perhaps, to add to the prince’s growing collection, or books of ‘ballets’ such as the voguish ballad ‘A Gest of Robin Hood’, in which the outlaw roamed through the countryside, bow at the ready, looking for random targets or ‘rovers’ to fire at. The prince particularly liked to think of himself as Robin, and he was, of course, a crack shot. Maybe he danced late into the evening with his companions and select female company, ‘in his shirt and without shoes’, as he would do in his first years as king: ‘he does wonders and leaps like a stag’, said the Milanese ambassador admiringly.
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One servant to whom the prince was becoming particularly attached was William Compton. Now in his mid-twenties, Compton’s life had been defined and shaped by the royal household in which he had made his way since the age of eleven. Performing his domestic duties, he watched how men gained power and wealth: the swagger of Empson and Dudley; the discreet, submissive confidence with which privy servants like Denys, William Smith and Richard Weston moved in the king’s presence. Slowly, Compton was making himself similarly indispensable to the prince, becoming his confidant and fixer, prized for his ‘wisdom and fidelity’ and wordlessly anticipating his every desire: shortly after Henry VIII became king, Compton would be arranging his sexual liaisons.
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A servant-companion of a different calibre was Henry Guildford, son of Sir Richard, who had been a constant presence at the prince’s side for almost a decade. Stocky, a head shorter and two years older than him, Guildford was an imaginative, exuberant influence who had inherited his father’s love of court entertainments. An enthusiastic master of the revels under Henry VIII, he would dress up as one of the merry men to the king’s Robin. Together with his half-brother Sir Edward, Henry Guildford was a fully paid-up member of the jousting set.

Both Compton and Guildford, in their different ways, were vital conduits to the world from which the prince was, by and large, insulated, bringing the news and gossip he craved. The talk of the town, more often than not, was Charles Brandon.

Brandon’s behaviour had gone from bad to worse. Having jettisoned the pregnant Anne Browne to marry her aunt Dame Margaret Mortimer, Brandon, flush with the proceeds from the sale of Dame Margaret’s lands, had annulled his marriage on grounds of consanguinity and transferred his attentions back to the more fragrant Anne. As the inevitable court case ensued, late in 1507 he rode into Essex, where Anne was living in traumatized seclusion, and whisked her away. The witnesses to their shotgun marriage in Stepney church early the following year included Brandon’s partners-in-crime, Sir Edward Guildford and the earl of Surrey’s belligerent second son, Sir Edward Howard.
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