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

Four days after the commissions were appointed, Edmund Dudley was hauled out of the Tower and brought before a panel of judges at London’s Guildhall. Richard Empson was indicted soon after, and taken into his native Northamptonshire to be tried. Notably, there was no mention of any financial and legal offences committed under Henry VII; this, after all, was territory that the new regime wanted to avoid. Instead, scraps of circumstantial evidence were distorted into highly speculative charges of treason. As Henry VII lay dying, the charge sheets read, Empson and Dudley had conspired ‘with a great force of men and armed power’ to manipulate the succession to their own ends. Here, the letters Dudley had written ordering knights and their retinues to London were flourished, and the whispered pledges of allegiance between Empson’s retainers cited: ‘Will you be the same men that you were?’ ‘We will keep our promise …’ This, it was now claimed, was evidence of the most heinous crime of all. The pair had plotted to take control of the young king, to deprive him of his liberty and to rule through him. Should the king and his rightful counsellors – his nobles and knights – have put up any resistance, Empson and Dudley would simply have destroyed them. 36

Under the gaze of Buckingham, Northumberland and former colleagues like Lovell and Sir John Hussey, rapidly restored to grace after having been left out of Henry VIII’s first pardon, Dudley pleaded not guilty; so too did Empson. Each man tried to argue his case on different grounds, attempting to excuse and justify his conduct under the late king. But nobody really wanted to listen, and given that this was a treason trial, it was a pointless defence. There was an air of inevitability about the whole thing. Both were found guilty, sentenced to the traitors’ death of hanging, drawing and quartering, and taken back to the Tower. 37

As he awaited his fate in the weeks that followed, Dudley was permitted access to his account books. Poring through them, he took a small, blank sixteen-page pamphlet and began to write, drawing up a list of victims – ranging from ‘poor men’ and merchants to lords ‘spiritual and temporal’ – who had been dealt with ‘much more sorer than the causes required’. These were people who had been ‘evilly’ or ‘sore treated’, had been ‘long in prison’ and who had paid ‘great sums’ in debt on ‘small causes’, ‘light’ or ‘lewd surmises’, ‘untrue matters’, ‘malicious grounds’, without any ‘due proof’. Dudley also wrote separately to some of the victims he had listed. One of them was the London haberdasher Thomas Sunnyff. ‘Sunnyff, I cry you and your wife mercy’, he stated simply. If, he continued, Sunnyff failed to gain recompense from the king’s executors, then ‘for truth’ Dudley would reimburse him – if, that was, ‘I have anything left at my liberty’ – ‘for there is no matter I have more remorse in.’ 38

While Dudley may still have had lingering hopes of pardon, he outlined his situation plainly in the letter or ‘petition’ accompanying his list. He was, he knew, ‘a dead man by the king’s laws’ and, ‘abiding life or death at the high pleasure of my sovereign lord’, his life hung in the balance. Dudley may have felt that he was writing for his life – but he was also writing to ease Henry VII’s path through purgatory and to ensure, as had been the late king’s dying wish, ‘that restitution be made to all persons by his grace wronged contrary to the order of his laws’. And Dudley was still trying to explain himself.

He had, he said emphatically, never committed treason or anything like it against the new king. As for his work for Henry VII, he had merely been doing what was asked of him. If people had been wronged, it was at the ‘pleasure and mind of the king’s grace’, and not on his own initiative. He had bound countless people in debt on the king’s behalf – so, he added meaningfully, had others – but it was the king ‘that would have them so made’. It was, though, against both reason and good conscience to interpret these bonds as genuine debts. Indeed, he was sure that the king had never intended to call them in. They had, rather, been tools of political control.

Dudley addressed his petition to two of the late king’s executors, men who would have known precisely what he was talking about. They were, he wrote, people in whom Henry VII had had ‘as much confidence and trust as any living man’, and they were bound to see justice done, for the health of the late king’s soul. They were Richard Fox – ‘my lord of Winchester’ – and ‘Mr Lovell’.

Buried within Dudley’s petition, then, was a veiled ‘ j’accuse ’. Fox and Lovell had had just as much to do with the late king’s system of bonds and informers as he had; clearly, too, he felt that they had framed him, and abandoned him to his fate. As lieutenant of the Tower, Lovell was now Dudley’s gaoler, and had been among the commissioners who had issued the writ for his indictment. Fox’s behaviour, if anything, was even worse. If anybody could put things right with the new king, Fox could, and Dudley had been desperately trying to make contact with him since his arrest, about ‘the matters contained in these books’. He never got a reply. 39

If Dudley had expected to jog the counsellors’ consciences, it was a vain hope. Fox and Lovell were happy to have his list of victims, which they made use of – indeed, Dudley, who had drawn it up ‘that it may please them’, had perhaps done it at their request – but less so the explanatory petition. It was copied, then filed away securely and kept secret, remaining undiscovered for the best part of five hundred years. Details of the workings of the late king’s reign coming to light would, after all, do nobody any good. 40

On 17 August, as Dudley was writing his petition, a team of royal officials led by the veteran household knight Sir John Digby – himself a victim of Henry VII’s administrators – entered his Candlewick Street house on the king’s command, in order to strip it, inventory the goods, and hand them over to Sir Henry Marney for the king’s use. Moving through the warren of galleries and chambers, the officials worked with a thoroughness of which Dudley himself would have been proud. Everything was noted, from the detritus of a domestic life interrupted – a toasting fork and fire rake, wooden bowls, an old nightgown furred with fox – to the luxuries: the exotic furniture, silverware and glassware, gold cutlery and cups, and flagons chased with Dudley’s coat-of-arms, fine tapestry and carpets, upholstery and bed-linen and quilts of crimson velvet. They noted Dudley’s clothes, his fur-lined gowns of crimson and black damask, black satin doublets and velvet jackets; the fine fabrics – silk, sarsenet, camlet – folded and stored in neat piles. And then they found the writings.

At first, they started to note down the names on the slips of paper they found: a little bag with three bills and £8 in gold; an old purse containing a written obligation. Then they realized the futility of it. In wardrobes and closets they found trunks packed with ‘diverse obligations concerning the king’ as well as a coffer crammed with ‘bills and writings’. Outside, in the gallery adjoining the garden, they lifted the lids of chests and coffers to find more of the same: ‘bills and other writings’ and, wearily, ‘evidences, as they say’.

Also there was a cartload of old lead – left over, perhaps, from the water conduit Dudley had had installed the year before – and signs of Dudley’s own business interests: stacked broadcloths, white cloths and cotton, twenty-one bags of pepper and, finally, forty-six bags of alum.

The same month, Empson’s well-appointed manor of Le Parsonage, with its fine Thamesside orchards, was appropriated in much the same way. It was regranted to one of the new faces of the regime, a man now basking in the favour of Richard Fox and the young king: Thomas Wolsey. 41