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

Hussey had spoken like somebody who knew what he was talking about. He urged the man to be upfront: to go direct to Suffolk and offer him ‘true and faithful service’. His interlocutor agreed wholeheartedly, saying that this was what he had planned to do. The conversation was larded with the usual conspiratorial talk about astrological portents, while Hussey gave the man tokens that Suffolk would recognize as his, and that would accordingly lend credence to the defector.

But the exchange was not quite what it seemed. Access to many areas of the sprawling complex of the Tower – part royal palace, part armoury, part open prison – was for the most part relatively straightforward. Only the privy lodgings and the maximum security quarters in its bowels, into which people disappeared and rarely came out again, were difficult to get to. In 1499, the plotters trying to release Warwick and Warbeck had found it easy enough to contact them. And in the murky world of counter-espionage, this arrangement could work both ways. Then, there had been much to suggest that a number of the plotters were royal agents provocateurs, egging the two reluctant Yorkist captives on to their deaths. The constable of the Tower Sir Simon Digby, and his deputy Sir Thomas Lovell, one of Henry’s most intimate counsellors, had watched everything, waited, and then pounced.

As old allegiances stirred again, the same tactic was, it seems, being used. The man seeking William Hussey’s advice was a plant – a royal spy posing as an adherent of Suffolk’s, trying to inveigle himself into the exiled earl’s household in order to find out the extent to which the conspiracy had taken root in England, and what was being planned. As he reported, Hussey clearly knew exactly what had gone on when Suffolk had absconded the previous summer. Hussey named times, places – and, above all, he named names.

Less than a week before Suffolk fled, according to Hussey, the earl had ‘privily’ hosted a dinner for a small group of close friends in London. The guests were high profile indeed. They included the young marquis of Dorset Thomas Grey, Henry Bourchier, earl of Essex, and Lord William Courtenay, heir of the earl of Devon. Essex and Courtenay were close companions of Suffolk. Essex had fought alongside him at Blackheath, while Courtenay had been caught up in the affray that had led to Suffolk’s indictment for murder. All three had been named in Suffolk’s team in the tournaments for the forthcoming wedding. 20

Then, around the time of his flight, Suffolk had invited Courtenay’s father, the earl of Devon, and an East Anglian gentleman, Sir Thomas Green, a friend of the Tyrell family, to dinner in a house in Warwick Lane, just around the corner from St Paul’s. An onlooker – a servant in Suffolk’s own household, maybe – reported how the earl himself came to the house’s outer gate, to welcome his guest ‘with great reverence’, a sign perhaps that the earl of Devon knew all about Suffolk’s impending flight. All this, Hussey said to the spy, had already ‘come to the king’s knowledge’. 21

If this was the case, Henry had reacted to the news of potential conspiracy and betrayal with no outward change of demeanour. Throughout the wedding celebrations, as observers noted, he remained unruffled, the picture of poised majesty. The festivities, indeed, were the perfect opportunity to watch the behaviour of those whose loyalties had been called into question. This was precisely what Henry had done back in the autumn of 1494 when, amid the banqueting and tournaments for Prince Henry’s creation as duke of York, he had scrutinized his rogue lord chamberlain Sir William Stanley and his associates until he was ready to move against them fast. In 1501, at the Westminster jousts, the moment when he rewarded Dorset’s performance with a red-and-white rose of rubies and diamonds may have been a question, as much as a confirmation, of the young marquis’s loyalty.

The spy’s report of his conversation with Hussey had a sequel. In it, the spy recounted how he had made his way to Aachen and had succeeded in talking with Suffolk himself. Telling Suffolk how much the king already knew about the circumstances of his flight, the spy tried tentatively to draw the earl out on the allegiances of his fellow diners: ‘in many men’s minds’, he said, the fact that they had been seen just before the flight made them suspect. Also, he said, it was widely rumoured that the earl of Devon was ‘agreeable’ to Suffolk’s plans to flee and, when Suffolk returned to England with his invasion force, for him to land on the south Devon coast. Was this true?

Suffolk was hot-headed, proud and in many respects obtuse. But his reply was canny, deliberately preying on the king’s doubts over his subjects’ loyalties. He shrugged off the significance of the diners. He, Dorset, Essex and Courtenay were ‘often times in such company together’, he said, stressing that his guests knew nothing of his plans to flee. It was plausible enough. All were companions-in-arms, men of the same generation who had bonded at court and in the tiltyard. It was perfectly normal that they should dine together. When the spy persisted, Suffolk said simply that ‘there is many pretty castings of eyes made to any countenance that was showed me’ – people were bound to look askance at anybody associated with him before he fled. But, he continued, ‘no force’: it was not his problem. Henry’s spies, counsellors, and the king himself, could ‘judge by outward countenance what they will’ – they could construe whatever they wanted from such behaviour. Suffolk, in other words, confirmed nothing, and denied nothing. His reply left a broader, unspoken, question hanging in the air. Was the king chasing shadows – or was he chasing a genuine, dynasty-threatening conspiracy? It was, went Suffolk’s equivocal reply, up to Henry to find out. 22

Henry and his counsellors worked hard to disentangle rumour from evidence. The king continued to block off potential European bolt-holes for Suffolk, negotiating extradition treaties – all backed up with hefty financial inducements – with the countries bordering Maximilian’s territories, from the kingdom of Hungary to the prince-bishopric of Liège, the small city-state bordering Suffolk’s refuge of Aachen.

Across the Channel, in Calais, the situation remained tense. In October 1501, as Henry reinforced the security of his major fortresses, he had ordered a senior Calais official, its porter Sir Sampson Norton, to occupy Tyrell’s stronghold of Guisnes. Norton failed to do so, and Tyrell and his garrison remained holed up. The overall commander of Calais, Henry’s lord chamberlain Giles lord Daubeney, and Henry’s master diplomat Richard Fox became involved in protracted correspondence with Tyrell, sending ‘fair words’ requesting him to come to England and explain his conduct before the king’s council. If he did so, they promised, all would be forgiven. Tyrell, however, was an old hand. He stayed put.

Then, sometime in February 1502, the black-clad figure of Sir Thomas Lovell materialized in Calais. In his capacity as one of the king’s chief financial officers, Lovell made regular trips over to the Pale, supervising the collection of the annual pension due to Henry in danger money from the French crown, and the substantial customs revenues from Calais’s wool trade, paid directly into the treasure chests of the king’s chamber. But Lovell was up to something else, too.

Strange things tended to happen when Lovell was around. Some years earlier, he had been in Calais when Henry’s former household steward, Lord Fitzwalter, who had been imprisoned in Calais Castle for his part in the Warbeck plot, was caught trying to escape – a put-up job, so rumour had it – and unceremoniously beheaded. And Lovell had, of course, been lurking in the background when Warwick and Warbeck were caught up in the plot to break them out of the Tower in 1499. Now, Lovell made his way out to Guisnes Castle for a friendly chat with Tyrell. Whatever he said was convincing. Leaving his son Thomas in charge of Guisnes, Tyrell made his way with Lovell back to Calais harbour to take ship for England. 23