Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (9 page)

By the spring the preparations were well under way. On Fox’s direction the Fleet Street printer Richard Pynson produced a commemorative pamphlet of the orders for Catherine’s reception, which circulated throughout the city and the courts of Europe.
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That June, Henry’s summit meeting with the twenty-one-year-old Archduke Philip of Burgundy, the glamorous heir to the Habsburg Empire, in the English enclave of Calais, served further to ramp up expectations. Making the short journey across the Dover Straits, the English court met Philip and his posse of young knights in a glittering reception amid tight security in the church of St Peter’s outside the town – Philip would not, he insisted, set foot in the town itself – ‘richly hanged with arras’ for the occasion.
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Philip, whose family had once extended such support to Warbeck, seemed to prove rather more tractable than either his father, Maximilian, or the dowager Duchess Margaret of Burgundy. He acclaimed Henry as his ‘patron, father and protector’ and, during the course of a ‘rich banquet’, the two chatted about a possible Anglo-Habsburg marriage alliance between Prince Henry and Eleanor, Philip’s infant daughter.
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At Calais the archduke and his entourage were neatly co-opted into the unveiling of another stage in the wedding festivities: a succession of jousts, to take place at Westminster in the week following the ceremony. The tournament challenge was proclaimed resoundingly in the name of Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk. Brash, hot-tempered and ‘readily roused to anger’, Suffolk was a member of the Order of the Garter and one of the most accomplished jousters at Henry’s court. What was more, he was a full-blooded Yorkist – son of Elizabeth Plantagenet, sister to Edward IV and Richard III, and a younger brother of John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln, the man who had masterminded the abortive Lambert Simnel rebellion thirteen years previously. In mid-1499, Suffolk had left the country without royal licence, heading first to Calais and then east into the archduke’s territory, before finally being persuaded to return to England that October. Now, Henry was using the tournament challenge to tell the world – and especially Philip – that Suffolk was well and truly under his thumb.
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Sixteen at the time of his brother’s death at the battle of Stoke, Edmund de la Pole was next in line to inherit the family title of duke of Suffolk. The problem was that a chunk of the Suffolk estates had already been in Lincoln’s possession and, forfeited by his treason, they were now in the hands of the king. Title and income went hand in hand. You had to be able to maintain a standard of living appropriate to your rank – and Edmund de la Pole, as Henry pointed out to him, didn’t now have sufficient estates to support a dukedom. Henry then agreed to grant his inheritance and the lower title of earl, but on typically onerous terms: a fine of £5,000. The king, as Suffolk knew, was deliberately degrading him, and making him pay for the privilege.
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Suffolk seemed to realize what was demanded of him. He took a conspicuous role in Henry’s invasion of France, fought the Cornish rebels at Blackheath in 1497 and jousted with distinction in court tournaments. But none of it got him very far; perhaps, in part, because Henry held a low opinion of his abilities, but, increasingly, during the tension-filled 1490s, because of who he was.
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In autumn 1498, Suffolk and a group of courtiers had been involved in an argument outside Aldgate, on London’s eastern edge, which spilled over into a mass brawl in which three men were killed. Suffolk, who had already failed to turn up to one legal hearing earlier in the year on unrelated charges, was hauled before the judges of King’s Bench, the royal criminal court in Westminster Hall, and indicted for murder. On the face of it, this seemed a display of the efficiency and impartiality of royal justice but, even setting aside Suffolk’s outrage at being charged for the killing of a commoner, there were several curious things about the case. First was the involvement of one of Henry’s closest counsellors, Sir Reynold Bray, who had personally delivered the indictment against Suffolk. Then came the detailed coroner’s inquest, which made no mention of Suffolk having struck a fatal blow. And finally, courtiers of far lesser rank, favoured jousters such as Roland de Veleville and Matthew Baker, regularly got away – quite literally – with murder. Meanwhile, Henry was forcing Suffolk to beg for pardon.
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Highly sensitive to this perceived slight on his honour, Suffolk refused to do so. Instead, he left England. His timing could not have been worse. With the Warbeck endgame being played out amid reports of unrest in East Anglia, and with John de Vere, earl of Oxford, Henry’s chief man in the region, uncovering a similar plot to groom a pretender in Cambridge, Suffolk’s flight to the Habsburg-controlled Low Countries must have looked suspiciously like a re-run of Lincoln’s own plot twelve years previously.

Henry took it very seriously indeed. His response was to threaten a repeat of the economic sanctions that had so destabilized the Netherlands during the 1490s, and which Philip of Burgundy badly wanted to avoid. With Suffolk himself, Henry’s approach was delicate: he could not risk the earl’s departure turning into outright rebellion. He afforded Suffolk the honour of a diplomatic visit headed by Sir Richard Guildford, complete with an official communiqué to be shown to the recalcitrant earl. In the customary private briefing issued to Guildford, Henry instructed him to talk to the earl as it were off the record, as if ‘without the king’s knowledge’. Seeming to speak with Suffolk’s own well-being at heart, Guildford was to persuade him to see sense. Henry wanted Suffolk to return, not as his captive, but of his own free will, as Henry’s loyal subject, which would best stand with the king’s ‘great honour, both within his realm and without’. If he did so, then he could ‘in time’ regain favour and ‘enjoy that [which] he had when he departed’. If not, well, ‘he may never look to recover nor come to again’. Any further disloyalty could only bring about his ‘utter clear destruction’. Suffolk came back.
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So when, at the Calais summit meeting, Garter king-of-arms John Writhe threw down the gauntlet on Suffolk’s behalf in an impeccably turned expression of fealty to Henry VII, Philip, who had welcomed Suffolk as a fugitive the previous year, would not have missed the point. Neither would the ambassadors assembled from the courts of Europe, nor the people of Calais, a town of unpredictable allegiances. For Henry, the conventional protestations of service and loyalty to the crown took on a particularly satisfying resonance. Suffolk, proclaimed Writhe, ‘humbly begged’ Henry to let him and a select team of companions joust in honour of the king and the forthcoming marriage ‘and’, he stressed, ‘for no other cause or intention’.
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For good measure, copies of Suffolk’s challenge, in French, were given to Archduke Philip, to the French herald for Charles VIII of France, and dispatched to James IV of Scotland, another erstwhile sponsor of Warbeck; in addition, the Spanish ambassador sent a copy to Ferdinand and Isabella. Henry had, it seemed, successfully corralled Suffolk into his dynastic plans.

Underneath the pomp and ceremony of the English court’s progress to Calais there had been a pervasive sense of panic. An epidemic of plague was sweeping London and the southeast, and mortality rates were staggeringly high. The London chronicler Robert Fabyan, an influential draper and city alderman, put the total deaths at twenty thousand – between a third and a half of the city’s entire population. It may have been the plague that carried off the infant Prince Edmund, Henry and Elizabeth’s youngest child and third son, who died on 19 June and was buried in state three days later at Westminster Abbey.
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Another victim may have been Henry’s chancellor, John Morton, who died that September at the age of eighty. Almost to the end, this supreme architect of Henry’s reign, with his ‘deep insight in politic worldly drifts’, had remained an ever-observant presence at the king’s side. For Henry, the loss was immense. Lawyer, politician, administrator, archbishop and cardinal, Morton had navigated the dynastic changes of the past half-century with a considered daring, his adaptability matched by his resolute belief in strong, forceful kingship. Of all Henry’s small group of close advisers, his chancellor, a generation older than the rest, had perhaps been the most influential, his mild appearance belying a precise ruthlessness. Henry had learned much from him.
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These losses were tempered by the coming wedding. Late in 1500, another proxy marriage was enacted now that Arthur had reached the legitimate marriageable age of fourteen, the Spanish ambassador de Puebla again acting the part of the absent bride with great gusto. The pair exchanged vows, the contract
per verba de praesenti
required by canon law. The marriage was now legally indissoluble and the wedding itself confirmed for the following September. After much wrangling, the conditions and method of payment for Catherine’s marriage portion, or dowry, were finalized, and the list of Catherine’s Spanish servants who would remain with her as part of her new, English, household agreed upon. As he described the tortuous conclusion to the negotiations, de Puebla’s customary optimism acquired a brittle edge. That December, Henry had summoned him to his privy chamber with ‘all sweetness’; then, his mood clouding over, had turned on the harassed ambassador, blaming him for having held up the marriage through his ‘shifts and evasions’. Dealing with the calculating English king over Catherine’s dowry had, de Puebla sighed to Ferdinand and Isabella, been a ‘nightmare’.
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The scale of the marriage plans had produced a contradictory reaction in the pious Queen Isabella. Professing herself delighted at the magnificence of the preparations and the consequent honour done to her daughter, her fastidious asceticism nevertheless baulked at their luxury. Perhaps finding Henry and Elizabeth’s ambitions for wedding glamour a touch vulgar – they had implored Isabella that the Spanish ladies accompanying Catherine to England should be beautiful, or at the very least that ‘none of them should be ugly’ – she begged Henry to ‘moderate the expenses’. There was nothing wrong with rejoicings, she wrote, but the ‘substantial part of the festival should be his love … the princess should be treated by him and by the Queen as their true daughter’.
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As the time for Catherine’s departure grew near, misgivings may well have crept into Isabella’s mind. Of her six children, her eldest daughter and two sons had died, and two of her remaining three daughters had already been married off. Catherine’s eldest sister, the beautiful but fragile Juana, was beginning to show signs of mental deterioration following her high-profile wedding to Archduke Philip of Burgundy five years previously. Catherine, cloistered but with a natural resourcefulness, was made of sterner stuff. But Isabella knew well the brutal realities of such marriage negotiations, and she wanted her daughter to be more than a political trophy: to be treated humanely and with kindness by her new family.

Spring 1501 brought further delays. Uprisings continued to flare in newly reconquered southern Spain, and Ferdinand had his hands full in quelling Moorish resistance in the Andalucian hill-town of Ronda. After shaking off a stubborn fever, Catherine finally departed from Granada in May, her party crossing the high plateaux of central Spain en route to the northern port of Laredo.
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By July, with the household on its summer progress, Henry had moved downstream to Greenwich. Here, in the seclusion of his wife’s favourite residence, he finally caught up on some correspondence, including a reply to a number of letters from his mother Lady Margaret Beaufort. His own letter mainly concerned business, but in a postscript riddled with apologies he allowed himself a rare lapse into a more intimate tone, one that betrayed fatigue and illness. Promising his mother that he would ‘hereafter, at better leisure’, devote more time to her affairs, he apologized for burdening her with such a long letter – though given how seldom he wrote, he added, it was necessary. And again he asked her pardon, ‘for verily Madame my sight is nothing so perfect as it has been, and I know well it will impair daily’. He hoped that Margaret would not be put out if he ‘wrote not so often with mine own hand, for on my faith’, he concluded, ‘I have been three days ere I could make an end of this letter.’
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The Olympian distance he so carefully cultivated was shot through with genuine exhaustion. Workaholic and overburdened with affairs of state, he had evidently written the letter in snatched moments between other matters. More alarming was the physical effort it had cost him to write a note whose contents fitted comfortably on two sides of paper. Still, for all his weariness, Henry was hoping that quieter and more stable times lay ahead. In fact, matters were about to take a drastic turn for the worse.

That August, as Catherine prepared to embark on the long sea journey to England, a ship slipped unobserved out of the port of London and down the Thames estuary towards the North Sea. It was carrying Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk and a small band of supporters. The Yorkist who Henry believed he had successfully co-opted into the high-profile celebrations at Calais had fled a second time. In his softly-softly approach, Henry had been too clever by half; in Suffolk’s case the white rose would not graft so easily onto the red after all.

If, almost two years before, Suffolk had returned to court in the expectation of regaining his dead father’s title and lands, he should have known better. Henry was happy to wheel him out on great occasions of state, when his flamboyant chivalry added lustre to the court, but Suffolk, quite clearly, remained under a cloud. Monitoring the activities of the earl and his associates closely, Henry began to attack Suffolk’s authority and standing in his East Anglian backyard, forcing his retainers into financial bonds for good behaviour and intervening in his legal proceedings. The backdrop to Suffolk’s starring role in Calais was another lawsuit brought against him in the court of King’s Bench at Westminster where, only a month previously, royal justices had ruled in favour of his opponent.
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