Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England Read online

  The reappearance, or re-creation, of Richard duke of York was a masterstroke. The bodies of the princes had never been found. While Henry could take the earl of Warwick out of the Tower and parade him through the streets of London – the same reason that he kept Simnel to hand in the royal kitchens – he could hardly do the same with Edward IV’s young sons. Provided he looked and behaved like him, Richard duke of York’s second coming could hardly be denied. Turning the political clock back to April 1483, to a time before Richard III’s usurpation, it took a wrecking ball to the political settlement that Henry and Elizabeth’s marriage represented.

  Not only would Richard duke of York be indisputably heir to the throne, but he would also have an undeniable claim on the loyalty of all those who had subsequently transferred their allegiance to his oldest sister Elizabeth and had accepted Henry’s rule. Now, they would look again at their genealogical charts and their pedigree rolls, and their loyalties would be torn. The entwined red-and-white roses would be ripped apart. The phantom duke of York’s existence, the simple ‘what if?’, attacked the foundations of everything that Henry was trying to build.

  But the full impact of Warbeck, who after his grooming in Ireland had been carried off to the French court, took some time to emerge. In mid-1492, French intelligence officials, quizzing merchants from England on the impact of the ‘White Rose’, were disappointed at English indifference. Then, that autumn, Henry invaded France.

  As he looked outward to Europe, and to the fluctuating dynastic power politics in which as an exile he had once been helplessly thrown about, Henry had followed with concern France’s mounting aggression in the constant struggles for domination of the northern European coast. He had been unable to prevent it from swallowing up his former ally, the duchy of Brittany. But he had slowly built an understanding with France’s perennial enemy on its eastern border, the tricksy Habsburg king, Maximilian.19

  War was something the nobility expected of monarchs, and war with France was a rite of passage for English kings who were expected to lay claim to the kingdom they felt was theirs by right.20 But Henry’s abortive expedition of 1492 was a strange episode. The biggest invasion force of the century, involving fifteen thousand troops and seven hundred ships, was assembled, its mobilization had taken much of the year. By the time his armies had crossed the English Channel, however, the campaigning season was all but over. Citing all manner of excuses, from fickle allies – which, given Maximilian’s track record, was hardly unreasonable – to their surprise at Boulogne’s bristling fortifications, Henry and his counsellors quickly sealed a peace treaty with Charles VIII, who agreed to pay a massive annual pension of 50,000 French crowns. But if Henry felt he had won the peace, he was deceiving himself.

  To the English soldiers that trudged back home with barely a shot fired, and then sat grumbling in taverns throughout the country, and to the commons, who continued to pay extortionate taxes for a non-existent campaign, the settlement did not feel remotely honourable. Maximilian, who had been cut out of the Anglo-French treaty and was ‘left sitting between two chairs’, as one of his commanders put it, was apoplectic with humiliated rage. Little did Henry realize, but Maximilian’s means of revenge – and, he hoped, the possibility of placing a rather more compliant English king on the throne – was already at hand.21

  In the new Anglo-French détente, Warbeck, fearing extradition to England, had fled to Malines in a curious mirror-image of Henry’s own flight from Brittany to France. He had been well groomed in his role – well enough, at any rate, for the childless Margaret of Burgundy, desperate for revenge against Henry VII, to accept it wholeheartedly: ‘I believed it immediately’, she wrote to Isabella of Castile. Maximilian, who was close to the dowager-duchess, was equally enthusiastic. Early in 1493, news of the Yorkist pretender was carried ‘blazing and thundering’ into England by the merchant ships that coasted around the entrepôts of the Low Countries, and spread like a cancer.

  Henry scrambled to make sense of the threat. It was, he stated, beyond all logic, ‘completely absurd’, ‘the height of madness’ that people should believe that this ‘feigned lad’ was who he said he was. Diplomatic efforts with Burgundy and Maximilian were stepped up in order to secure the pretender’s extradition, but without success. Relations between England and the Low Countries deteriorated. Henry imposed economic sanctions, refusing to let English merchants trade with Flanders; Maximilian retaliated in kind. In Bruges, the headquarters of the English ‘nation’ of resident merchants was boarded up; in London, warehouses were piled high with wool and cloth ready for export, gathering dust. Riots broke out; enclaves of foreign merchants, their ships not subject to the embargo, were attacked. Political and economic discontent mingled, and rumour abounded.

  Warbeck, it was widely believed, was about to invade. Cells of his supporters were scattered throughout the country. On the road, those who had good reason to travel – merchants of all kinds, pedlars, friars, musicians and performers journeying from town to town and house to house – were suspected of linking up with them, ‘artfully and subtly’. There were reported plots to assassinate Henry and his family, including a plan to daub the doorframes and handles of the royal household with a lethal poison. Flybills detailing ‘seditions and treacheries and uprisings’ were passed from hand to hand. In London, there were co-ordinated flypostings urging the city to revolt; overnight, placards would appear fixed to church doors, including those of St Paul’s itself.22

  Meanwhile, Warbeck’s profile continued to grow. In the summer of 1494, Maximilian’s father, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick, died. At his funeral in Vienna Cathedral, in front of the representatives of Europe’s foremost dynasties, Warbeck was paraded as the king of England and then brought back through the cities of the Low Countries on a triumphal progress alongside Maximilian’s teenage son and heir, Archduke Philip of Burgundy. Henry desperately needed another focus for English loyalties, one which would allow him to take back the title of duke of York and enfold the dangerous Yorkist sentiments within the narrative of his own emerging dynasty. He found this figure in his three-year-old second son, to whom he had given the name of the great kings of Lancaster and his own.

  Prince Henry was born on 28 June 1491 at Queen Elizabeth’s favourite house of Greenwich, which dominated the expanse of the Thames as it opened out towards the estuary. The family had been fortunate in a succession of healthy births and Henry was their third child, after his sister Margaret. Custom dictated that while the heir was brought up in his father’s world, groomed for kingship, the remaining royal children – male and female – were entrusted to the care of their mother. At Greenwich, Elizabeth’s household servants organized Prince Henry’s baptism in the nearby church of the Friars Observant. Her wardrobers furnished the tapestries that swathed the walls and floors, built a tiered wooden stage, hung it with fine textiles – cloth-of-gold, damask, cypress linens – and placed on it the solid silver font brought from Canterbury Cathedral for the occasion. In front of an audience of dignitaries crammed into the church, the lord privy seal Richard Fox, now bishop of Exeter, immersed the baby boy three times then, as trumpets blared out and torchbearers lit their tapers, swathed him in a mantle of ermine-trimmed cloth-of-gold.23 With his cluster of wet-nurses and cradle-rockers, the infant prince was moved into the nearby manor house of Eltham. There he spent his childhood with his sister Margaret and the younger siblings, Mary and the short-lived Elizabeth, who would join them soon after.

  But by autumn 1494, the three-year-old prince had a new role to play: that of a real, palpable duke of York, in the face of Warbeck’s nebulous threat. On 29 October, he rode – unaided, to the astonishment of onlookers – through London’s teeming streets to Westminster. The following day, in Westminster Hall, his father dubbed him knight, then lifted him up proudly and ‘set him upon the table’, in full view of the assembled court. On All Hallows’ Day, 1 November, Prince Henry was created duke of York. The heavy formality of his investiture with his s
ymbols of office, cap, sword, rod and coronet, was followed by a celebratory mass in the adjoining chapel of St Stephen’s, taken by Archbishop Morton surrounded by eight mitred bishops, to the soaring accompaniment of the Chapel Royal choir. Next came the procession in state in the wavering torchlight, a profusion of purple and crimson silks, jewelled collars, cloth-of-gold. Henry VII, in his robes of estate, was imperious; his small son, tired, had to be carried for much of the time. On the first day of the celebratory jousts that followed, combatants wore the regime’s green and white; on the second, they wore blue and tawny, for the young new duke of York.24

  Amid the feasting and tourneying, Henry had been closing in on Warbeck’s English support. His tireless monitoring of networks of retainers – embedding spies in suspects’ households, interviewing their servants and the chaplains and confessors to whom they opened their souls – had led him, to his horror, back into the heart of the royal household itself. At the centre of the conspiracy were his two most powerful household officials, the head of the ‘below stairs’, his lord steward Lord Fitzwalter, and, most disturbingly of all, his lord chamberlain, the man who controlled access to the chamber, the public and private apartments, Sir William Stanley.25

  Brother to Lady Margaret Beaufort’s husband Lord Stanley, Sir William and his men had turned the tide for Henry at Bosworth. But he was a former loyalist of Edward IV and for him, as for so many, questions of allegiance and self-interest mingled. Moreover, despite the recognition he had received under Henry, Sir William had never felt entirely settled in his favour. For his own part, Henry was all too aware of the Stanleys’ history of changing sides, while their family retinues, who provided his military backbone, tended to arrive late to the party – as indeed they had done at Bosworth and Stoke. When Sir William was arrested and brought before the king in the first days of 1495, Henry’s display of wounded astonishment masked the fact that, as both men knew, he had been watching Stanley’s retainers for well over a year. Stanley was tried and beheaded. When Henry’s men arrived to take possession of his castle of Holt, among the stuff they inventoried was a Yorkist livery collar studded with white roses and sunbursts, and £10,000 in cash: enough to bankroll an army.26

  As the Stanley plot unfolded, the royal household became more rigorously controlled. Officials carrying lists of servants receiving ‘bouge of court’ – wages and board – carried out identity checks; at night, heavily armed yeomen paced the household’s galleries and chambers with extra vigilance. The king, hedged about by security, became more distant, more remote. People were increasingly afraid to talk openly, looking over their shoulders, lowering their voices. Henry’s relationship with his leading subjects began to change.

  Warbeck was still at large. The next years saw him flitting around England’s borders, moth-like, never settling. In June 1495, his invasion force, backed by Maximilian, finally materialized off the coast of east Kent. Henry’s men were waiting, hidden in the sand dunes of Deal Beach, and an advance party of Warbeck’s soldiers, lured ashore, were massacred in the shallows. But the pretender himself stayed on board ship and Henry’s grasp closed around thin air.27

  For several months his trail went cold. Neither his sponsors nor Henry, whose ships ceaselessly patrolled the western reaches of the Channel and the Irish Sea, knew of his whereabouts. Then, late in the year, he resurfaced at the court of James IV of Scotland. At twenty-two, a year older than Warbeck, James was ambitious and adventurous, desperate to impose himself and his nation on the European stage – and he had plans for the pretender. Lavishing on him attention, gifts and a wife – Katherine Gordon, the beautiful young daughter of a Scottish nobleman, whom Warbeck married with all the splendour of a royal wedding – James set him up as the king of England and, in September 1496, the men moved southwards at the head of an army, crossing the border together. But the incursion into England was neither the triumphal progress of a returning Yorkist prince nor a Scottish invasion – though to English eyes, the burning, plundering and pillaging made it look suspiciously like the latter. Encountering resolute resistance, it petered out after six days. Henry, however, was on the warpath. His prolonged and excessive response would result in the biggest crisis of his reign to date.

  The following month, his council started drawing up meticulous plans for a military offensive and authorized a loan of £120,000, to be repaid by general taxation, a decision ratified by an anxious parliament.28 Meanwhile, border garrisons were bolstered and martial law declared, arms dumps overhauled and, in the fertile recruiting grounds of Flanders, Henry’s agents indentured battalions of Swiss and German mercenaries. Out at the firing ranges of Mile End, east of London, expert Dutch gunners put the latest European artillery and handguns through their paces. In the late spring of 1497 columns of men, horses, carts and munitions streamed north towards the Scottish border. All the while, Henry’s tax collectors continued to work zealously, in the face of widespread resentment, and nowhere more so than in the deep southwest of England in the small Cornish parish of St Keverne, where Michael Joseph – known locally as An Gof, the Blacksmith – rounded on one of the king’s tax collectors, accusing him of corruption and refusing to pay.

  Headed by An Gof and Thomas Flamank, a local lawyer, rebellion exploded out of Cornwall, just as retinues loyal to Henry were heading north. Thousands strong, the insurgents moved through southern England with frightening speed. London, terrified by reports of the ravaging Cornishmen, bolstered its defences; Queen Elizabeth, Lady Margaret and the royal children were moved into the Tower. Skirting the city to the southeast, the rebels made their camp at Blackheath, the time-honoured ground of popular rebellion, and prepared for a final assault. The whole kingdom was in chaos, reported one ambassador: if the king had lost, he would have been ‘finished off and beheaded’.29

  But London clung on. Royal troops frantically recalled from their northern deployment arrived. Torn between confrontation and negotiation the rebels hesitated, and their cause was lost. An Gof and Flamank were hanged, drawn and quartered. Their heads, boiled and tarred, were jammed on spikes on London Bridge; their body parts were dismembered, some nailed to the city gates, others sent southwest to be displayed in towns of dubious loyalty.30

  That summer, James and Warbeck planned another assault. This time, Warbeck would sail from Scotland to the southwest of England to capitalize on inflamed Cornish resentments; James, meanwhile, would co-ordinate his attack with another cross-border invasion. But James’s military campaign, menaced by an English army sent north to confront him, hit the buffers. As Soncino and Trevisano arrived at Woodstock, the Scots and English diplomats were seated round the negotiating table. Warbeck was on his own.

  In the end, it was no contest. Although sympathies still lingered and Warbeck, amassing Cornish support, swept out of the peninsula, Henry’s vastly superior forces were prepared. Outside Taunton, the pretender’s army scattered, and he fled to sanctuary at Beaulieu on the south coast, from where he was extracted. Finally, Henry had the ‘feigned lad’ in his hands. But while Warbeck had failed to bring down the dynasty, he had, inadvertently, succeeded in transforming its nature.

  That autumn, the Italian ambassadors settled into a comfortable life in London. In a stream of confidential dispatches, they painted a picture of a kingdom that was calm and tranquil. Henry, Soncino wrote, had been extraordinarily merciful. His dealings with Warbeck bespoke a regal confidence. Rather than lock him up, Henry put the pretender on display at court, a curio, a plaything for people to marvel and point at, and make fun of: levissimus, the least of men.31

  Further acquaintance with the king and his court only impressed the visitors more. He was surrounded by finely dressed nobles and intellectual, politically sophisticated advisers whose knowledge of foreign affairs was so impressive that, Soncino wrote, ‘I fancy myself in Rome’. Henry cultivated Italian merchant-bankers – the Florentines, in particular, ‘never stop giving the king advices’ – and loved to employ foreigners, from high-ranking Italian
diplomats and Dutch craftsmen to the French and Breton servants who hovered around him, much to the ‘diabolical’ envy of the English.32 Then there was the other talking-point that autumn, besides Warbeck. Sailing west into uncharted seas with a group of Bristol merchants, the Venetian fugitive-adventurer Zoane Caboto, John Cabot, had returned to England with reports of a New Found Land, a discovery that, as Henry hoped – and as the Spanish feared, writing agitated dispatches to Columbus himself about the arrival in London of ‘uno como Colon’ – would rival recent Spanish discoveries of a New World. At court, Cabot rustled about in silks, armed with rolls of maps, followed by a trail of admirers who ‘run after him like mad’. Henry had plans for Cabot. He would fund a fleet of ships and pack them with ‘all the malefactors’ in English prisons. Then, they would cross the Atlantic and form a colony.33

  Money seemed no object to Henry. His Thamesside houses, renovated in the latest Burgundian fashions, were visions in red brick, imported glazing and gleaming cupolas; inside, their chambers and galleries were well ordered and opulent. He knew how to entertain ‘magnificently’, and Soncino took full advantage: ‘I put in three hours at table twice a day for the love of your excellency’, he wrote to Sforza. But as he grew acquainted with the English court, his view of the king began to change: still ‘most wise’, but ‘suspicious of everything’. Yes, he was rich, but he had built up an ‘immense treasure’ because ‘he has no one he can trust, except his paid men at arms’. Beneath the poised regality was not the ‘quiet spirit’ that Soncino had originally divined.34 To those foreign observers who bothered to raise their heads from the loaded plates in front of them and look behind the ostentatious wealth and the carefully ordered ceremonial, there seemed something distinctly odd in the state of Henry VII’s England.