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

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. 7Kings 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. 8

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. 9

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. 10

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. 11In 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. 12His 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.

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. 13That 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. 14Philip, 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. 15

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. 16

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. 17

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. 18