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

This is a gripping and largely untold story. The late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were a volatile time of change and possibility and, as with periods of flux, its energy and vitality are seductive. The medieval worlds of chivalry and intense piety mingle with new political ideas, spread by the printing press and enforced by gunpowder. Dynasties and states struggle to be born in a war-torn Christendom that is still – in theory – unified by an unswerving obedience to the pope. Fleets of merchant ships, their trade routes to the East blocked by the Ottoman Empire encroaching on Europe’s south-eastern frontier, sail west across the Atlantic and discover a new continent.

It is a story which stretches from the remote regions of England to the courts and chancelleries of Venice and Rome. It is traced through merchant banks and accountants’ ledgers, courts of law, the pageantry and brutality of court and tiltyard, diplomats’ dispatches and the reports of spies and informers. It concerns high ideals and family loyalties; honour, realpolitik and grubby self-interest; deep-rooted traditions and beliefs; and new ways of understanding the roles of princes and governments. All these elements come together and are transformed in the febrile world of Henry VII’s household and court.

The last, claustrophobic decade of Henry VII’s reign, with an ageing, paranoid king and his dynamic young son at its heart, forms the focus of this book. It is one of the strangest episodes in English history. An atmosphere of fear and suspicion radiated from the royal court into the streets and townhouses of London and throughout England’s far-flung estates and provinces. Established forms of rule and government were bent out of shape, distorted in ways that people found both disorientating and terrifying.

But these are also the dawning years of a dynasty. They see the coming of age of Catherine of Aragon, the young Spanish princess who would become Henry VIII’s first wife, and of Henry VIII himself – or rather, Prince Henry, as he is here. To explore these precarious years, and to gain a sense of how and why Henry VII behaved and ruled in the way he did, is to reveal much about the house of Tudor, the family that would, over the course of the sixteenth century, dominate and transform England.

Prologue

Red Rose, Avenger of the White

On the afternoon of Sunday 7 August 1485, off the westernmost tip of Wales, seven ships appeared from the south. Heading for the great natural harbour of Milford Haven, they nosed around the headland’s sheer, sandstone cliffs and, just before sunset, dropped anchor. Smaller boats came shuttling back and forth, quickly and purposefully, bringing horses ashore, heaving munitions, armour and cannon onto the beach. Many languages and accents could be heard: Scots, Welsh, Breton mixing with French, and English of various dialects. When they swarmed up the hillsides to the small castle commanding the bay, the soldiers found it abandoned, its garrison long gone. Nobody, it seemed, was expecting them – not at that remote place, anyway. 1

From one boat, a knot of nobles disembarked and waded through the surf. One of them, a wiry man in his late twenties, sank to his knees and clasped his hands in prayer. ‘ Judica me, Deus ’, he began, muttering Psalm 43, ‘Judge me, O Lord and favour my cause’. He kissed the Pembrokeshire sand and made the sign of the cross. 2Exiled first in Brittany, then in northern France, since the age of fourteen, Henry earl of Richmond – or, as the reigning king of England, Richard III, referred to him bitterly, the ‘bastard Tudor’ – had returned after another fourteen years at the head of a motley band of two thousand political dissidents and mercenaries. With rapidly dwindling support from his French backers, his invasion was furtive and anxious. That he was there at all was an extraordinary circumstance, the latest convulsion in the series of dynastic feuds and turf wars that had torn England apart over the previous half-century, and which would later become known as the Wars of the Roses: the red rose of Lancaster against the white rose of York. This man, who had crossed the Channel to claim the throne of England and who would father its greatest dynasty, was never meant to be king.

Henry earl of Richmond was born on 28 January 1457 in the fortress of Pembroke Castle, a few miles away from his eventual landing-place. He entered the world during a traumatic time. Sporadic clashes between the armed factions of Lancaster and York were threatening to boil over into civil war. The plague that had ravaged southern Wales late the previous year had carried off his father, Edmund Tudor, imprisoned in a Yorkist dungeon; his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, had just turned fourteen. The birth left her damaged. She would have no more children.

England in the 1460s was a mutant, double-headed kingdom. In a raging blizzard on 29 March 1461, Palm Sunday, the two sides had clashed outside the Yorkshire village of Towton: involving some fifty thousand men, it was the biggest battle ever fought on English soil, and one of the bloodiest. Yorkist forces routed the armies of the passive and mentally unstable Lancastrian king, Henry VI, slaughtering nine thousand of them. Three months later, Edward IV, a charismatic giant of an eighteen-year-old, was crowned the first king of the house of York. 3Both families, Lancaster and York, traced their line back to the great Edward III – but the Yorkists claimed to bear his name of Plantagenet.

For the powerful Lancastrian clans of Beaufort and Tudor, the defeat at Towton was a disaster. The child in whom their families met, the four-year-old Henry earl of Richmond, was now a wealthy prize. Torn away from his mother, his lands parcelled out among the victors, he was presented by Edward IV to a prominent Yorkist, Sir William Herbert, and brought up among the Herbert children at the castle of Raglan in south Wales.

On both sides of his family, the young Henry’s lineage was entwined with the house of Lancaster. As half-blood relatives of the Lancastrian kings, the Beauforts shared with them a magnificent forebear, the house’s founder John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster – but their descent was through Gaunt’s mistress and they were bastards. The Beauforts were subsequently legitimized – but, as their detractors were quick to point out, they had been barred, by Act of Parliament no less, from ever claiming the English throne. Nevertheless, the Beauforts had gloried in the reign of Henry V, France’s reconqueror and the victor of Agincourt, before his son Henry VI had squandered everything. The Tudors had also attached themselves to the house of Lancaster and, despite their tenuous hold, were rising fast: during the troubled 1450s Edmund Tudor, half-brother to Henry VI, had been high in royal favour. The mother they had in common was Henry V’s young wife, Catherine of Valois, daughter of the French king. But Edmund’s father had been a charming, fast-talking Welsh chamber servant of Catherine’s: the pair had fallen in love after Henry V’s death and had married secretly. Royal blood, then, ran in the veins of the young Henry earl of Richmond, but it was irretrievably tainted.

Despite the overwhelming victory of Towton, Yorkist rule struggled to take root. With the deposed Henry VI still alive, it was a time of queasy uncertainty, in which self-interested manoeuvring, internecine feuding and struggles for power and land could all be justified by invoking the claim of whichever king best suited people’s circumstances. First and foremost, Edward IV had to establish his dynasty, and the great men who had brought him to power now sought to arrange his marriage to a foreign princess, of Burgundy, perhaps, or Castile. But, ‘greatly given to fleshly wantonness’, Edward wanted a cold, lynx-eyed beauty called Elizabeth Woodville. When she refused to sleep with him, he married her clandestinely and made her his queen. It was unwise. The widow of a Lancastrian knight, Elizabeth was a commoner; her large clan rushed to court, scrabbling for royal favour, titles, land and rich marriages. Pushed to one side, the Yorkist nobles whose ambitions Edward had wrecked through his impulsive marriage watched the arriviste Woodvilles basking in his affections. 4Gradually, the nobles’ discontent and jealousy turned to betrayal, and they joined forces with exiled Lancastrians. In October 1470, Edward IV was forced to flee to the continent, to the Burgundian Netherlands, and the helpless Henry VI was brought out of his place of incarceration in the Tower of London.