Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (8 page)

That October, an Italian astrologer known by his anglicized name of William Parron presented to Henry his prognostication for the year ahead.
De Astrorum vi fatali
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The Fateful Meaning of the Stars
, concerned why it was that the innocent should die – indeed, why sometimes it was necessary for them to do so. If people were born under bad stars, natural law decreed that, even if they were utterly innocent of any crime, they were destined to die unnatural deaths of one kind or another: beheading, hanging, poverty or disease. Parron’s treatise went on to demonstrate how unlucky were the stars of two men and, although the pair were not named, the reference was clearly to Warbeck and Warwick. These ill-starred people infected the country and, until they died, they would continue to be a focus for revolt – but die they surely would, because they were ill-starred. It was a satisfyingly closed logic, and it satisfied Henry’s conscience.

Saturday 23 November 1499, St Clement’s Day, was the first day of winter. That year, autumn had blown itself out with gales and storms, but even the foulest weather could not prevent Londoners from turning out in numbers for an execution. Lining the badly paved streets, out through the suburbs of Holborn and west through the fields, they watched as the twenty-five-year-old Warbeck bumped along behind a horse, lashed to a wooden hurdle. At Tyburn, amid the crowds and assembled dignitaries, he was hauled up a ladder to the scaffold. There, with the noose round his neck, he confessed. He was not Edward IV’s second son – in fact, he had no Yorkist blood at all – but was just a ‘stranger’, a foreigner, the son of a boatman from Tournai. Begging absolution from the king and ‘all others he had offended’, he composed himself ‘meekly’. Then the ladder was whipped away and he jerked downwards, his body convulsing violently, then twitching, then limp.
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Five days later, on the other side of the city, the ambassadors were present at another execution, this one a private affair, as befitted a true nobleman. If Warbeck’s trial had been perfunctory, Warwick’s was a farce. At his hearing in London’s Guildhall, as utterly confused now as he had been by the plot to free him, the earl had to be ‘compelled to answer’. The records of his trial were locked away in a cupboard with three locks, the keys allocated separately to three unnamed royal officers. Under louring skies, lightning and thunder, with rain driving in off the Thames, Warwick was led out to his place of execution on Tower Green, and beheaded.

Henry VII had been on the throne for fifteen years and three months. Only now, with these two executions, did he feel safe.
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As the new century began, the Spanish ambassador Rodrigo de Puebla posted a dispatch from London to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. He expatiated on England’s tranquillity and obedience. There had, he wrote, ‘always been Pretenders to the crown’; more than that, there had been a number of contesting claims to the English throne, ‘and of such quality that the matter could be disputed between the two sides’. Now, however, ‘it has pleased God that all should be thoroughly and duly purged and cleansed’. There remained ‘not a drop of doubtful royal blood’. The only royal blood in the kingdom was the ‘true blood’ of Henry VII, his queen, Elizabeth, and ‘above all’ their first-born son Arthur, prince of Wales and heir to the throne. The civil wars, he said, were over.

De Puebla’s mood was skittish; he really should, he added breezily, stop harping on about the two executions, as he was aware that he had written ‘so often’ about them recently. The way was now paved for a spectacular royal wedding between England and Spain, one which would set the seal on Henry VII’s dynastic ambitions. It was a dispatch intended specifically to communicate a sense of closure to the Spanish monarchs, to show that England possessed a dynasty fit for an infanta of Spain. The wedding preparations could begin.
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In the early afternoon of Friday 12 November 1501, the sixteen-year-old Catherine of Aragon and her retinue, ‘in most sumptuous wise apparelled’, reined in their horses in front of London Bridge, on the Southwark side of the Thames. Awaiting her, on the north bank, the city dominated a sweeping arc of the river, fringed by the entanglement of wharves, quays, jetties and shipping through which flowed London’s immense mercantile wealth. From the foursquare royal Tower on the city’s eastern edge to the Dominican monastery of the Blackfriars in the west, its skyline a forest of spires and belltowers. Above them all soared the greatest spire, five hundred feet high, which topped the Gothic bulk of St Paul’s Cathedral, where Catherine and Prince Arthur were to be married two days later.
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Through its fortified stone gate, Catherine could see London Bridge itself, its twin-towered portcullis and drawbridge topped with the heads of traitors, its houses crammed precariously on either side, and in its midst a riot of colour: the first of the six extravagant pageants celebrating the Spanish princess’s arrival in and ceremonial progression through the city to St Paul’s.
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At her side was the slight, carrot-haired ten-year-old who had been assigned a crucial role in the festivities. Detailed to attend on the princess closely, to accompany her through the city and down the aisle, was the king’s second son, Henry duke of York.

Prince Arthur’s marriage to Catherine, younger daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile – the pious, re-conquering ‘Catholic monarchs’, as the pope had entitled them – was the culmination of all Henry VII’s ambitions. First brokered back in the spring of 1489, it had survived the violent fluctuations of European dynastic politics and a convoluted dance of negotiation between Henry and Ferdinand, two equally suspicious monarchs: pulled one way by Henry’s abortive invasion of France and the tension-filled years of Warbeck’s conspiracy, and another by France’s own expansionist tendencies, which Henry’s right-hand man John Morton, archbishop of Canterbury, had described as its ‘unbridled rage for domination’ and which filled both monarchs with alarm.
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Twelve years and numerous subsequent treaties, proxy marriages and ratifications later, the day was finally at hand.

A fortnight long, the planned celebrations were of an unparalleled splendour and complexity. Following Catherine’s reception and marriage, the festivities would move west along the curve of the Thames, past the large bishops’ palaces whose gardens lined the water’s edge, and the cloistered inns of court which churned out the country’s finest legal minds, to Westminster. Finally, they would culminate at Henry VII’s new palace of Richmond, rushed to completion in time for Catherine’s arrival.

Two years in the making, the ceremonies would, so the king was determined, break new ground. Henry and his planners had delved into the archives, scouring precedents from previous royal celebrations. They cherry-picked the most dramatic features from the all-conquering triumphs of Henry V, and the glamorous tournaments of Edward IV, whose close links to that epicentre of chivalric sophistication, the ducal court of Burgundy, were an inspiration; and they cast a thoughtful and creative eye over the most spectacular European court celebrations of recent times. The result would be a supreme cultural articulation of sovereignty, spelling out a very clear message. Henry VII and his descendants, and they alone, were the rightful monarchs of England: all-powerful, a dynasty that presided over the ‘common wealth’ of the state with a benevolent and omnipotent hand.

All of which could hardly mask the fact that the wedding plans had their roots in division, discord and blood. For it had been on 19 November 1499, the same day that the earl of Warwick, bewildered, backward and harmless, had made his forced confession in front of a tribunal of Henry’s counsellors in London’s Guildhall, that the city corporation had met in the same building to start planning Catherine’s lavish civic reception.
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Over the centuries, London’s relationship with the crown had settled into an uneasy symbiosis, their interests increasingly intertwined. In return for massive corporate loans from the city, the unofficial royal bank, a perennially cash-strapped monarchy ceded to it privileges of self-government and trade protection. And as the royal household grew more unwieldy and less mobile, it settled into its houses strung out along the banks of the Thames, within easy reach of Westminster, the centre of law, government and administration, and London, its most reliable source of funds. Royal servants became part of the fabric of city life, renting and acquiring property, accumulating business interests, mingling with the mercantile elites, who were themselves familiar figures at court. Under Henry, the relationship had, more or less, continued to prosper.
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There was, though, an undertow of friction between a city that jealously guarded its own political and economic liberties and a crown which sought to control and manipulate them. Cracking down on the habitual sharp practices indulged in by the city’s merchants and financiers, Henry had made examples of prominent Londoners with a series of punitive fines, while he and his counsellors constantly played off the city guilds against each other, favouring one, then another, in a process of divide and rule. During the height of the Perkin Warbeck conspiracy, Henry’s embargo on trade with the Low Countries had wrecked London’s economy, with merchants unable to export goods to the great commercial centres of Bruges and Antwerp, a ban reinforced by sporadic harassment and intimidation by royal officials. To the consternation of the city guilds, when trade officially restarted in 1496 Henry himself chose the new governor of the English merchant adventurers in Bruges, a privilege previously reserved to the city. Conspiracy had continued to linger: merchants’ trade routes were arteries for information and espionage, and London’s citizens had been among those caught up in the Warbeck plot. Highly suspicious of the city’s independent-mindedness and covetous of its wealth, Henry was always looking for opportunities to tighten his grip.
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But in general, Henry and his counsellors were alert to London’s importance in raising funds and maintaining order, and cosy relationships developed between city leaders and members of the king’s inner circle of counsellors. London was the chief sponsor and organizer of royal triumphs and receptions, the dramatized public processions which communicated the crown’s magnificence and power to the crowds who flocked to such occasions from far-flung corners of the country and from abroad.
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Kings tended to leave the arrangements in the hands of the city. After all, it was paying. But in November 1499 Henry informed the city corporation of a change to the customary plans. The mayor was ordered to appoint an eight-person committee to communicate with ‘diverse of the king’s council’ about Catherine’s reception into London. The planning and creative input would come personally from Henry and his counsellors, down to the last detail. They would tell the city what to do, and when. London was in effect being treated as a sub-department of the royal household – and it would be required to foot a huge bill for the privilege.
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The pageants that the king and his advisers had in mind would, following usual custom, be strategically placed at prominent sites along the route to St Paul’s, constructed on multi-storey wooden stages over the crenellated stone conduits that, supplying London’s fresh water, stood solidly in its main thoroughfares. Weaving together history, myth and prophecy, a series of dramatic tableaux would depict the dynasty’s rule as inexorable, inevitable; no accident of history, nor the chance product of deaths, tenuous bloodlines and last-gasp victories, it was, rather, written in the stars. Such a royal extravaganza in England’s capital was doubly significant in light of the security operation that had, the previous summer, forced out the deep-rooted network of Yorkist recidivists from its dense warren of back streets. London, the ‘steadfast, sure chamber of England’, the country’s window to the world, had been thoroughly cleansed. So confident were the king and his counsellors that, with an eye to maximum visibility, the forthcoming wedding would be held not in the customary venue of Westminster Abbey, but in St Paul’s, one of the greatest cathedrals in Europe, and London’s largest public space and commercial centre to boot.
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To co-ordinate this vision Henry turned to a man who knew his mind better than most. Having assumed a leading role in the hard-fought negotiations over Arthur and Catherine’s wedding, Richard Fox, now in his early fifties, took control of its preparations. He drew up summaries of the duties of all those who were to participate, a close-knit circle of Henry’s leading counsellors and household officers, from the lord chamberlain Giles Daubeney to the comptroller Sir Richard Guildford, an able engineer and an aficionado of jousts and tournaments.
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The reception and wedding would highlight Henry’s chief source of political capital: his sons. In the world of dynastic politics, charismatic royal children, as one contemporary observer had once remarked of Edward IV’s ill-fated boys, ‘surpassed all else’ at court festivities.
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In Prince Arthur, the groom-to-be, and his younger brother Henry duke of York, Henry VII had two highly contrasting focal points. Taking after his father, Arthur seemed to come into his own in the more restricted spaces of court and household, where his classical education and grooming for kingship manifested themselves in a slightly distant graciousness.
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His brother, on the other hand, was proving a master of the defining public gesture, with a natural feel for the big occasion – at the age of three, after all, he had ridden through London’s crowds on horseback, behaviour that both his father and mother seemed to delight in. But Prince Henry’s charisma was not the only or even the main reason for the most prominent of roles assigned him at Catherine’s side. With both Warbeck and Warwick dead, his presence alongside the young Spanish princess would be a reminder to London and the world that York, and the house of Plantagenet, embodied in this young, chivalrous prince, had been successfully assimilated into the new dynasty. Prince Henry’s appetite for the limelight would play to the London crowds and help set Catherine at ease. Arthur, meanwhile, would be presented in the role to which he was becoming accustomed: Henry VII’s heir, made in his own image, regal and detached.