Thomas Penn: Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

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. 34To 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.

One such was Pedro de Ayala. Previously the Spanish envoy to Scotland, he had arrived at the English court in late 1497, as Anglo-Scottish relations had begun to thaw. Henry, he wrote, liked to give the impression of being very rich, but he was not as rich as he said he was. He liked to be much spoken of, ‘highly appreciated by the whole world’, and to be thought of as a ‘great man’ – although in de Ayala’s opinion he wasn’t, because his love of money was ‘too great’. People didn’t love him, either: they feared him. Henry’s government, too, appeared strange. It was neither one thing nor the other, a kind of halfway house. He was ‘subject to his council’, but he had ‘already shaken off some, and got rid of some part of this subjection’. His rule was, de Ayala thought, remarkably hands-on. When not in public, indulging his passions of hunting and hawking or in discussions with his counsellors, he was closeted away, ‘writing the accounts of his expenses with his own hand’. Searching for a way to sum up what he found, he wrote that Henry wanted to govern ‘in the French fashion’ – but that he could not. De Ayala had expressed it imperfectly, but he was right. Henry was not playing by the rules people expected; or, rather, he was trying to change them to suit himself. 35

Increasingly private and distant, Henry’s rule was taking on his own character. At the centre of the glittering carapace of the royal household lay an institutional black hole: a complex of private apartments known as the ‘secret’ or privy chamber, which was separated from the presence chamber, where the king’s throne stood under its cloth of estate, by a heavily guarded door. Earlier in the decade, when Henry discovered that conspiracy had penetrated to the core of the household, the privy chamber’s functioning had changed. Previously, its workings had been laid out as part of the meticulous ‘ordinances’ or protocols that ordered the wider household, and its servants had shuttled easily between the public and private worlds. But from 1494, all reference to the privy chamber was eradicated from official directives. Written rules no longer governed it. Its servants were specified simply as men who would ‘best content the king’. Serving his meals, bathing him, strewing fresh rushes on the floor, making the royal bed and rolling on it to check there was ‘none untruth therein’, these most select of personal servants, answerable directly and only to the king, handled his personal expenses and undertook confidential missions. They were also Henry’s first line of security, discreet, watchful, ever present. 36Their relationship with the king was encapsulated by the secret chamber’s head, an imperturbable west-countryman named Hugh Denys. As ‘groom of the stool’, Denys looked after the king’s commode, presiding over him while he sat. As close to the king as he could possibly be, his position gave him an unparalleled, intimate perspective on the realities of power. 37

From his privy chamber, Henry presided over another change, one that was entirely characteristic of the way he had started to govern. Traditionally, the chamber treasury controlled the king’s private wealth – which was, more or less, income from his lands. But Henry was obsessed with having quantities of ready cash to bolster the regime’s security and authority. During the emergencies of the 1490s, the chamber treasury’s remit had started to creep inexorably into the realm of public finance and the exchequer offices, channelling and rerouting public income – taxation and customs – into the king’s own coffers. All of this was facilitated by a coterie of servants and counsellors that, as Perkin Warbeck had pointed out in a proclamation that accompanied his invasion, were not noblemen but ‘caitiffs and villains of simple birth’, and who, as de Ayala said, had a ‘wonderful dexterity in getting other people’s money’. 38

Accusations of low-born, venal administrators clustering round the king were as old as the hills; besides which, Warbeck had particular reasons for fuelling nobles’ grudges and resentments against the king. Henry certainly needed noblemen and their retinues, and he counted them among his trusted advisers: men like the earl of Oxford, Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey, and his new chamberlain Giles lord Daubeney. But Warbeck did have a point. Traditionally, the ‘might of the land’ rested in the ‘great lords’, and then the king’s officers. But Henry’s natural suspicion of great lords, intensified by the events of the 1490s, had changed all this. In his regime, as people were discovering to their bewilderment, power and status were not the same thing at all.

As everybody from Soncino to Warbeck discerned, Henry was surrounded by a small circle of men: the likes of Cardinal-chancellor Morton and Richard Fox, now bishop of Durham; the king’s bruising chief financial administrator Sir Reynold Bray, and Sir Thomas Lovell, the square-jawed treasurer of the king’s household. 39These were men whose wealth and power derived entirely from their service and loyalty to Henry. So too did their identity: some, like Lovell and the king’s jewel-house keeper Sir Henry Wyatt, even dressed like him, in sober but costly black. They formed the small, informal councils in which Henry liked to do business, and they were at the centre of a practice that he was increasingly using to define his relationship with the country: the rigorous enforcement of his prerogative rights and powers through a system of suspended financial penalties or bonds. Such bonds were part of the fabric of life, used to guarantee business deals, to acknowledge debts owed and to ensure good behaviour. But during the upheavals of Warbeck, Henry and his agents had started to reach for them instinctively, at the first sign of disorder.

It was in the king’s account books – the same accounts that de Ayala had spotted him spending so much time with, closeted away in his secret chamber – that everything came together. They listed income and expenditure, but they also listed bonds and debts, painstakingly entered by the king’s accountants under the practised eye of his chamber treasurer, John Heron, and countersigned with the king’s spindly monogram. The chamber accounts were turning into a tool of surveillance, of political control: as Henry totted up his books, he was mapping and monitoring the offences, and the loyalties, of his subjects. After the near-disaster of the Cornish uprising, Soncino had remarked on the king’s ‘clement’ response to the rebels. If he had seen Henry’s account books, he might have thought otherwise. In one of them was neatly listed the dedicated network of spies that Henry had deployed in the region, gathering intelligence on potential troublemakers and providing a flow of information on which his law-enforcers could act. 40