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

At Henry’s coronation in ‘triumph and glory’ at Westminster Abbey on 30 October 1485, Lady Margaret, reunited with the son she had not seen for fourteen years, ‘wept marvellously’. 21Her tears suggested not joy, but apprehension. With a precarious claim to the throne, no large family clan and little hereditary land of his own, virtually no experience of government and heavily reliant on the doubtful allegiances of a group of Yorkists whose loyalties lay with the princess he now courted, there was little to suggest that Henry’s reign would last long, or that civil conflict would not simply mutate again. But if Henry knew little of government, his formative years had brought experience of another kind. As he set about creating a new dynasty, Henry would be haunted by the spectres of civil war, real and imagined. They would stay with him all his life and they would define his reign.

PART ONE

Blood and Roses

‘Blessed be god, the king the queen and all our sweet children be in good health.’

Lady Margaret Beaufort, April 1497

‘If the King should propose to change any old established rule, it would seem to every Englishman as if his life were taken away from him – but I think that the present King Henry will do away with a great many, should he live ten years longer.’

Venetian ambassador, c. 1500

Not a Drop of Doubtful Royal Blood

In early September 1497, two Italian ambassadors left London and, accompanied by a group of English dignitaries and a heavily armed escort in the quartered white-and-green Tudor livery, headed west along the Thames Valley and into Oxfordshire. One was the secretary of the duke of Milan Ludovico Sforza, the other a special envoy from the republic of Venice. The previous June, both men had set out from Italy on the long journey north. Crossing the Alps into the lands of Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor, they made their ways along the broad expanse of the Rhine – the river’s toll-booths clotted with mercantile traffic and the roads, with their laden mule-trains, just as bad – through the rich trading centres of Speyer and Cologne and west, into the broad river delta of the Low Countries, northern Europe’s financial and commercial heart, the patchwork territories ruled over by Maximilian’s young, precocious son, Archduke Philip of Burgundy. 1Meeting in the teeming port-city of Antwerp, the ambassadors swapped notes.

Three years previously, the duke of Milan had allied himself with Charles VIII of France, hoping to harness the might of Europe’s most powerful country in the warring that had re-erupted between Italy’s city-states. As contemporaries put it, ‘he turned a lion loose in his house to catch a mouse’. Aiming to conquer the Spanish-ruled kingdom of Naples, the French army swept down the peninsula, igniting terror, pestilence – a ghastly new venereal disease called syphilis – and revolution. Desperate to halt France’s seemingly inexorable advance, Italian states and European powers had overcome their mutual antagonism to form a coalition, a Holy League brokered by the pope, Alexander VI. The English king Henry VII’s inclusion in the coalition was critical to its success, for with its own claims to the French crown, England could menace France’s exposed northern border from across the Channel. A dutiful son of the church, Henry had joined the League and France had indeed retreated. But in the face of exhortations to go further, Henry was resolute. He had invaded France once already, five years previously, and the consequences had been disastrous. He was not about to do so again.

The other members of the Holy League were not to be put off so easily. Together with a stream of other European diplomats beating a petitioning path to the English king’s door were Sforza’s secretary, Raimondo da Soncino, and the Venetian envoy Andrea Trevisano. 2They had other business, too. As one of England’s biggest trading partners, Venice sent galleys packed with wines, spices, silks and other commodities, carrying away English wool and cloth for processing and selling in its vast textile industry in return. It was keen to cement economic and political relations with this English king who, it was rumoured, was enormously rich. He was also, they had heard, in trouble. As all Europe knew, Henry had had his problems. In recent years, his reign had been menaced by a pretender to the throne, a ghost of the English civil wars, who was still at large.

On 22 July, Soncino and Trevisano reached the Flemish city of Bruges. There, amid its canals, markets and counting-houses, they stopped and waited. 3

The onward journey looked precarious. Their road west to the English enclave of Calais lay through the militarized borderlands of Flanders, over which France and Burgundy had struggled for decades. As it periodically tended to be, the road was closed and reports flooded in of roaming gangs of Frenchmen, plundering and looting.

The ambassadors had also been receiving regular updates from England, dispatches sent via the letter-bags couriered from the London branches of Italian merchant-banks back to their continental headquarters. In these dispatches, rumour and counter-rumour mingled. That June, there had been an uprising against Henry VII. Twenty thousand men had marched the length of the country – from the north, perhaps, or the far southwest – on London, demanding the surrender of the king and his close counsellors, and the king had been beaten and had fled. Then again, a great battle had been fought outside the city, and the king had won. Meanwhile, there was war in the north. The king of Scotland had invaded England – or perhaps it was Henry doing the invading, his armies advancing in the other direction. Throughout the dispatches, one name was mentioned over and over again: that of Richard duke of York, the ‘White Rose’ who, many claimed, was the younger of the two princes in the Tower, the sons of the Yorkist king Edward IV, otherwise missing, presumed dead. ‘Some say’, one dispatch hedged, that the duke of York was in England, ‘but no one knew for sure’. One thing alone was certain, it continued. Catastrophe would soon befall England. 4

By early August Soncino and Trevisano had made it to Calais, accompanied by a detachment of English soldiers. There they waited for the unseasonal storms to abate and for the commander of Calais to check the coast was clear of pirates, before making the short journey across the English Channel. At Dover, a royal reception awaited them: progressing through Kent, they entered London accompanied by two senior officials sent by King Henry himself, and a troop of two hundred horsemen. Days later, summoned by the king, they journeyed to Oxford, where they overnighted in the students’ colleges; then, the following morning, they made the short journey to the royal manor of Woodstock, where the king’s household was in residence for the summer. 5

Approaching the house across rolling parkland well stocked with game, the ambassadors were escorted through gatehouses freshly painted with red roses, portcullises, greyhounds and rougedragons, the heraldic devices of Henry VII’s dynasty. Dismounting, they were led deep into the house, through a succession of galleries and richly decorated apartments, to a ‘small chamber’. At the far end of this room, hung with exquisite tapestry, were a cluster of advisers in their robes of estate – silks and satins of crimson and purple, trimmed with fur and ermine – among them leading members of the nobility, including six bishops, ‘lords spiritual’. In their midst stood the king.

What the ambassadors noted first was his stillness, standing, fingertips resting lightly on the gilt chair beside him. As they approached, bowing and scraping, the details came into focus. Spare, high-cheekboned, with dark hair faintly greying around the temples, Henry VII was dressed in a long violet, gold-lined cloak and, around his neck, a collar comprising four rows of ‘great pearls’ and many other jewels. On his head he wore a black felt cap studded with a pear-shaped pearl which, said Soncino fascinatedly, ‘seemed to me something most rich’. As the ambassadors delivered their diplomatic orations, carefully turned in the most fashionable Ciceronian Latin, the king’s eyes, small, blue and penetrating, remained fixed on them. 6