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

Over this rash of punishment and execution loomed the shadow of Prince Arthur’s death. His coffined body, disembowelled, embalmed, spiced and wrapped in waxed cloth, was placed in his chamber at Ludlow Castle, until 23 April, St George’s Day, by which time the royal mourning party had arrived from London with orders for the funeral ceremonies. As custom dictated, the royal family was absent. The entourage, which included Garter king-at-arms John Writhe and a number of prominent nobles, was headed by Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey. Surrey’s appointment as principal mourner was significant. Having completed his political rehabilitation, this former supporter of Richard III had been chosen over a more obvious candidate: the duke of Buckingham, higher in rank than Surrey and the greatest landowner in the Welsh Marches after the crown. Buckingham, though, had royal blood. His presence in the funeral entourage risked connecting him with the succession, particularly now that the Tudor dynasty hung by a thread. The choice of burial place was significant, too. Arthur’s body would not be buried in Westminster Abbey, but in Worcester Cathedral.

It was a practical choice. Lying in the region subject to the council in the Marches, Worcester was associated with Prince Arthur; that it was the site of another royal tomb – that of King John – also counted in its favour. Besides which, the spring storms that year made the roads practically impassable. When, after a funeral ceremony in Ludlow parish church, the cortège set off on 25 April, it was in driving rain and violent winds: ‘foul’, grumbled John Writhe, and the road ‘the worst way that I have seen’; the carriage bearing Arthur’s coffin was repeatedly stuck in mud, and oxen were brought to haul it. But there was, perhaps, another reason for Arthur’s burial in the English midlands, away from London and the glare of domestic and international attention. The disaster of Arthur’s death was something Henry wanted to play down, rather than play up. 33

For all this, the funeral rites were on a scale befitting the size of the tragedy, involving some 550 people and costing the best part of £900. Nearly 2,400 yards of black mourning cloth were allocated to the mourners, varying in quality, quantity and cut according to the wearer’s status; over 6,000 pounds of candle wax were burned. Over the coffin, draped in black cloth-of-gold embroidered with a white cross, through the wind and rain, was carried a canopy of purple damask sprinkled with golden flowers. Inside Worcester Cathedral, the coffin was transferred to its hearse, a vast, storeyed, wooden structure, painted black and adorned with heraldic escutcheons, badged pennants or ‘pencels’, silk standards of St George, banners of the royal arms of England and Spain, and of Arthur’s various titles, from Wales to Ponthieu in Normandy. Over it hung a cloth of estate, with a woven picture of Christ and the four evangelists, trimmed with valences decorated with the ostrich feathers of Wales and Arthur’s motto. In the gloom of the cathedral, all this glittered in the light of over a thousand candles. It was, said Writhe, the best funeral he had ever seen. 34

Following a night-long vigil, the ceremonies approached their climax. As a requiem mass was sung in the cathedral, through the west door and the crowds of mourners came a man on horseback. Wearing Arthur’s own plate armour and gripping a poleaxe, blade downwards, the man-at-arms rode an armoured, black-caparisoned courser up the nave and into the choir; there, in front of the bishops, abbots and officers-of-arms, he dismounted and presented the horse to the gospel reader. After Arthur’s coat-of-arms, shield, sword and helmet, the symbols of his earthly roles, had been offered up by the attendant nobility along with palls of cloth-of-gold, his coffin was lowered into the open grave. William Smith, bishop of Lincoln and head of Arthur’s council, ‘sore weeping’, cast holy water and earth onto the coffin. Then, as custom dictated, the prince’s household servants broke their staves and rods of office in two, and threw them into the grave; among them was Arthur’s herald, Wallingford pursuivant Thomas Writhe, the eldest son of Garter king-of-arms. Arthur’s household was now disbanded, the dead prince’s servants bereft, masterless: ‘to have seen the weepings when the offering was done’, commented the funeral account, ‘he had a hard heart that wept not.’ 35

Kicking his heels in Aachen, Suffolk was not slow to grasp the significance of the situation. When news reached him of Arthur’s death, he fired off an urgent dispatch to Maximilian. The emperor, he wrote, should know of the danger that his friends in England were in – Suffolk was evidently unaware of the recent slew of executions – a danger that increased daily as the king’s security forces closed in on them. With the regime reeling and newly vulnerable, now was his chance to return to England and to confront the king, but it was, he stressed urgently, a race against time: ‘I have been warned in no uncertain terms, that King Henry is seeking in all places, and through all kinds of people that he can buy off with gold and silver, to destroy me; and moreover’, he added, ‘the longer I stay out of England, the stronger King Henry will become, and the worse it will be for me.’ 36

Over the past months, the emperor had proved evasive and inconsistent, and Suffolk had a hunch that something was up. As he grumbled to his steward Thomas Killingworth, who was representing Suffolk’s interests at the imperial court, he was fed up with the way he was forced to ‘dissimulate’ to Maximilian in order to earn his goodwill and a meagre supply of credit. Suffolk, though rarely quick on the uptake, suspected – correctly – that one of the people taking Henry’s gold and silver was Maximilian himself.

Henry was indeed spending inordinate amounts of money on bribes and intelligence. Throughout the civil wars of the fifteenth century, espionage had been a constant drain on the crown’s resources: in one year alone, Edward IV had spent well over £2,000 on ‘certain secret matters’ concerning the kingdom and, as Warbeck had noted, Henry was willing to stretch his budget to an almost infinite degree, by offering ‘large sums of money’ to ‘corrupt the princes in every land and country and that we have been retained with’. Already, Henry’s pursuit of Suffolk was involving financial transactions on a massive scale – and as it turned out, this was only the beginning.

Soon after Arthur’s death, Henry continued his reshuffle of Calais officials, with the appointment of Sir John Wilshere as comptroller, or chief financial officer, of the enclave. A London merchant-turned-household-official, Wilshere had been one of the gentleman-ushers of Henry’s chamber. Loyal, watchful and experienced, he also had a head for figures, knowledge of international markets and a raft of contacts in the city and the commercial centres of the Low Countries. He was, in short, Henry’s kind of servant. In keeping watch on Calais’s finances, Wilshere acted as another line of information, ordered to keep his account books separately from the Calais treasurer so that Henry could check both, compare – and contrast – for corruption and peculation. But the new comptroller had other roles, too, for which he was perfectly suited. 37

Wilshere, a confidential brief stipulated, was to be one of the chief nodes of Henry’s espionage network, a control in touch with all the existing agents and ‘enterprisers’ working out of Calais against Suffolk and his circle. He was to employ more spies, as many as he saw fit, on the crown’s behalf, and he was to keep them motivated and loyal. He was also instructed to try and turn Suffolk’s men, promising them royal pardons on the understanding that they named names and provided other credible intelligence on the earl and his conspiracy. Wilshere would report to a ‘Messire Charles’. This, almost certainly, was Sir Charles Somerset. A member of Lady Margaret’s Beaufort clan, he was cousin to the king and one of his inner circle, a powerful presence in the royal household where he was captain of the guard and vice-chamberlain, one of the people Wilshere would have answered to in his previous role as gentleman-usher. Somerset, too, wore another hat: that of high-level diplomat, entrusted with the most delicate of negotiations, and spymaster. Along with the likes of Lovell, Fox, Bray and Guildford, he lurked behind the activities of Henry’s ‘flies and familiars’. 38