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

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. 26

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.’ 27The 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. 28

Things were, Suffolk felt, getting worse. His decline in East Anglia was exacerbated by the rise of Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey. On the losing side at Bosworth, Howard had worked tirelessly to prove his loyalty to the new regime; now, back from his successful campaigns in the north of England against the Scots and in great favour with Henry, he was looking to recover his own family’s inheritance, encroaching on Suffolk’s sphere of influence in the region. Perhaps the final straw was the emergence at court of Edward Stafford, the young duke of Buckingham, who cut an aggressively fashionable figure, keeping a lavish household and a sensational wardrobe. Commentators reached breathlessly for superlatives to describe his clothes and style. Buckingham and Suffolk were almost invariably paired together, and Suffolk, the lower-ranked earl, invariably came second. 29All of which served to trigger a tangle of more deep-rooted resentments.

As his membership of the Order of the Garter and his noble title brought home to him, Suffolk owed loyalty and service to the crown. But in the recent past, there had been plenty of accusations and instances of Henry’s oppressive misrule, of which the execution of the earl of Warwick, Suffolk’s cousin, was the most recent and emphatic example. Suffolk was only too aware of his own family’s sense of entitlement. Back in the 1450s, his Yorkist forebears had challenged the ruling house of Lancaster in the interests of reform, justice, and the public good – and, of course, a belief in their own superior royal lineage. Similar thoughts, it was clear, fuelled the de la Poles’ attitude to the Tudors.

For any noble or knight, the ownership of genealogical rolls describing, confirming – and, sometimes, inventing – their family’s glorious ancestry was de rigueur. The earl of Lincoln had one which, after his death, may have passed to Suffolk. Unfurled, the long sheet of sewn strips of parchment reveals brightly illuminated images of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, who turn, gesturing, to the lineage and royal claim of Richard duke of York and the de la Poles, whose line concludes in a coloured medallion of the earl of Lincoln and his descendants. It was the kind of document that could have been produced after Richard III’s own son had died, when he had apparently nominated Lincoln his heir. But some time after the battle of Bosworth, there had been an addition. Squashed in the right-hand margin, the name of Henry VII has been added, and above it, back through the roll, a thick black line has been crudely drawn, tracing his descent from, derisively, ‘Owen Tudor, a chamber servant’. The meaning was all too clear: the Tudors, the brash upstarts, were a diversion from the natural order of things in which the de la Poles, nobles of the blood, were destined to be kings. Lincoln, of course, had acted on this, and the impulse lingered in his brother’s mind. Whether he wanted the throne or simply wanted his dukedom back and his pre-eminent place at court confirmed, whether he was scared that, with his brother dead and cousin murdered, he would be next, or whether life had become intolerable or a mixture of all of these things, it was time, he felt, for a ‘revolution’. 30

After Suffolk’s first indiscretion, Henry’s counsellors had warned him that the earl was being worked on by the king’s enemies. Pre-emption was the key: Henry should act with ‘rigorous severity’ in making an example of him. Otherwise, Suffolk, seeing Henry’s forgiveness and restoration of favour as weakness, would become even more wilful and uncontrollable: ‘he would again’, they said, ‘engineer some dangerous assault against the state.’ They were proved right. With the chutzpah of Warbeck and the lineage of Warwick, Suffolk was Henry’s worst nightmare, the spectres of the past rolled into one loose Yorkist cannon, roaming the courts of northern Europe seeking political and military support for an invasion of England. As the enormity of the situation bore home, Henry could not believe that he had spared Suffolk, and ‘began to fear fresh upheavals’. 31To the king’s advisers, Suffolk’s flight came as no surprise at all. And as they had intimated, he was not acting alone. Henry’s intelligence network scrambled to discover the extent of the conspiracy. What it found was that rebellion was once more being fuelled by a combination of foreign powers and enemies within.

Preoccupied with renewed concerns about security, Henry turned to the forthcoming wedding ceremonies with redoubled obsession. Suffolk’s disappearance had ratcheted up the significance of the festivities; more than ever, they were needed to drive home the message of dynastic magnificence, power and permanence.