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

The plan backfired. In early 1500 Curzon had arrived at an imperial court awash with talk of the recent executions of Warbeck and Warwick. His own dormant allegiances had perhaps been stirred, for he regaled Maximilian with stories of Henry’s ‘murders and tyrannies’. He then put forward ‘the proposal of my lord of Suffolk against king Henry to recover his right’.

Maximilian had listened, a gleam in his eye. After Warbeck, here was a fresh opportunity to turn England to his advantage, a handle in his own foreign adventures. If, Maximilian told Curzon, he ‘might have one of king Edward’s blood in his hands, he would help him to recover the crown of England and be revenged upon Henry’. He knew perfectly well what effect Yorkist pretenders had on the English king, and on his kingdom.

In summer 1501, as soon as Henry had got wind of Suffolk’s destination, he dispatched two diplomatic veterans of the Warbeck crisis to open negotiations with the emperor’s representatives. William Warham, one of Henry’s brightest civil lawyers, and his head of security, the vice-chamberlain Sir Charles Somerset, were instructed to persuade Maximilian to expel Suffolk from his territories – and to do whatever it took.

As Maximilian’s protracted support of Warbeck had petered out, Henry had, he thought, finally worked out how to deal with him. The stick of economic sanctions and trade embargoes had failed to make the emperor see sense, but the promise of financial aid – hilfsgelder – which Henry waved in front of Maximilian concentrated his mind wonderfully. Constantly impecunious, he had ‘long time desired’ from Henry a loan of £10,000 towards his ‘crusades against the Turks’ – or rather, his expensive wars against the French and his ambitions in Italy, not to mention his long-planned journey to Rome to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor, which he had been unable to afford. In 1499, in place of a loan for his crusade, Henry had sent him Curzon. And now Maximilian had a new bargaining chip in Suffolk. 13

At first, Warham and Somerset’s embassy seemed to go well, with the emperor of ‘resolute mind’. But as the negotiations went on and on, Maximilian kept shifting the goalposts. A weary tone crept into the ambassadors’ dispatches. They had no idea what Maximilian was minded to do, and ‘marvelled’ at his inconstancy. He also had a habit of muttering asides to the counsellors around him that prompted sycophantic gales of laughter, in front of the English diplomats who stood uncomprehending and stony-faced. In private, Maximilian’s advisers sympathized with the situation Warham and Somerset found themselves in – they too had ‘to change their minds’ when the emperor changed his, which was often. Instead of agreeing to the terms laid down by Henry for Suffolk’s banishment, Maximilian now proposed that they should apply only to his hereditary Habsburg lands – ‘far countries to the which your subjects seldom or never have any resort’, Warham and Somerset told Henry. Maximilian was terribly sorry, but he could not give any such guarantees to Henry regarding the free imperial cities, the autonomous entities dotted throughout the imperial lands, for the electors would never commit to such an agreement. Maximilian probably anticipated Henry’s request, for he had sent Suffolk to just one such city: Aachen. And he took Henry’s £10,000. 14

Calais’s fortifications were strengthened, with a ‘great substance of timber’ shipped over, and England’s coastal defences checked, from the south-eastern ports to Berwick on the Scottish border, whose captain, Sir Thomas Darcy, was ordered to employ a team of masons and labourers ‘continually in occupation for the reparations’ there.

In Kent, Sussex and the Channel ports, Sir Richard Guildford’s men sifted loyalties; so too did those of Sir Reynold Bray. Information and tip-offs flooded in of suspicious behaviour, stolen ships and people slipping out of the country. In October 1501, as Catherine’s flotilla fought its way through the Atlantic storms, a plot was uncovered at Beaulieu Abbey on the south coast, where Perkin Warbeck had once sought sanctuary. The abbot’s porter, one Baskerville, and ten of the sanctuary men in his custody, tried to commandeer a ship to join Suffolk and were intercepted in the act, ‘even at the point of going’. Under torture, Baskerville confessed and ‘cursed much’ two other men who, in a related plot, had stolen a ship full of Cornish tin, which they had intended to steer across the Channel. The insecurities of Warbeck had, it seemed, reignited. Each and every disturbance seemed to be construed as part of Suffolk’s plot. 15

As he moved to prevent events spinning out of control, and to assess and monitor the extent of Suffolk’s support, Henry turned to the bonds and financial sureties that he and his administrators entered meticulously in his various books of accounts. In fact, his reliance on this system was intensifying markedly. Towards the end of 1499, after Suffolk’s first flight, he had ordered officials in chancery to enrol – formally record – all names of both ‘subjects and strangers’, Englishmen and foreigners, who had been involved in cases of treason and of misprision – failing to report, or actively concealing, suspects – and who had been bound for sums of money. Armed with these lists and books of names, offences and fines, Henry and his counsellors had started to trawl through all cases of people who had been issued with bonds of various kinds – for debts owed, or for allegiance, ‘good abearing’ – whether recent or way back in the past, whether they had in fact committed an offence or not. In the wake of Suffolk’s second flight, they started to use bonds systematically, not just to punish offences, but to guarantee loyalty: or, to put it another way, as a method of pre-emption. 16

That summer, the king’s administrators took an unprecedented series of bonds: in the standing garrison of Berwick, where Darcy was bound for £4,000 for the security of the town and castle, along with a number of the king’s household knights, and across the country in Carlisle. In October, the preparations for Arthur and Catherine’s wedding were being finalized, royal officials moved into East Anglia, armed with lists of the ‘names of such persons as were servants of our rebel’. In his fortress of Headingham on the Essex–Suffolk border, Henry’s point-man in the region, the earl of Oxford, took bond after bond from those associated with Suffolk: tenants and clients, yeomen, esquires, knights and lawyers. Anybody who failed to appear was deemed guilty and, when found, would be committed to prison ‘till they find security’. 17

Henry continued to spin his web. He played the long game, waiting and waiting, steadily assembling information as if nothing were untoward. Contemporaries all said the same thing. He would, said one, proceed ‘circumspectly and with convenient diligence’; another, that he would ‘always grope further’, always with ‘good await and espial’ to those under surveillance. Almost invariably, few – even his closest servants – could tell anything from the king’s outward appearance. Henry’s method was to proceed with ‘ suaviter ac saeviter in modo ’, a calm demeanour masking a savage intensity. Soncino, the Milanese ambassador, put it well. ‘As the English say’, he wrote to his boss Ludovico Sforza, describing Henry’s pursuit of Warbeck, ‘ “Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” ’ 18

Sometime in early 1502 a confidential discussion between two men took place in the Tower of London. One, William Hussey, was the younger brother of Sir John, one of Henry’s financial administrators. The previous year, William had become caught up in some unspecified trouble, and had been forced to sign over his lands to leading royal officers – among them Sir Reynold Bray, Sir Thomas Lovell and his own brother – to be administered on behalf of the crown. Somehow, he had ended up in the Tower. And he was obviously rumoured to have connections to the earl of Suffolk, because he had got friendly with somebody – a fellow inmate, perhaps – who had asked his advice about the best way to defect. Hussey’s friend never gave his name. His report of the conversation, though, ended up on the desk of one of Henry’s spymasters. 19