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

War was something the nobility expected of monarchs, and war with France was a rite of passage for English kings who were expected to lay claim to the kingdom they felt was theirs by right. 20But Henry’s abortive expedition of 1492 was a strange episode. The biggest invasion force of the century, involving fifteen thousand troops and seven hundred ships, was assembled, its mobilization had taken much of the year. By the time his armies had crossed the English Channel, however, the campaigning season was all but over. Citing all manner of excuses, from fickle allies – which, given Maximilian’s track record, was hardly unreasonable – to their surprise at Boulogne’s bristling fortifications, Henry and his counsellors quickly sealed a peace treaty with Charles VIII, who agreed to pay a massive annual pension of 50,000 French crowns. But if Henry felt he had won the peace, he was deceiving himself.

To the English soldiers that trudged back home with barely a shot fired, and then sat grumbling in taverns throughout the country, and to the commons, who continued to pay extortionate taxes for a non-existent campaign, the settlement did not feel remotely honourable. Maximilian, who had been cut out of the Anglo-French treaty and was ‘left sitting between two chairs’, as one of his commanders put it, was apoplectic with humiliated rage. Little did Henry realize, but Maximilian’s means of revenge – and, he hoped, the possibility of placing a rather more compliant English king on the throne – was already at hand. 21

In the new Anglo-French détente, Warbeck, fearing extradition to England, had fled to Malines in a curious mirror-image of Henry’s own flight from Brittany to France. He had been well groomed in his role – well enough, at any rate, for the childless Margaret of Burgundy, desperate for revenge against Henry VII, to accept it wholeheartedly: ‘I believed it immediately’, she wrote to Isabella of Castile. Maximilian, who was close to the dowager-duchess, was equally enthusiastic. Early in 1493, news of the Yorkist pretender was carried ‘blazing and thundering’ into England by the merchant ships that coasted around the entrepôts of the Low Countries, and spread like a cancer.

Henry scrambled to make sense of the threat. It was, he stated, beyond all logic, ‘completely absurd’, ‘the height of madness’ that people should believe that this ‘feigned lad’ was who he said he was. Diplomatic efforts with Burgundy and Maximilian were stepped up in order to secure the pretender’s extradition, but without success. Relations between England and the Low Countries deteriorated. Henry imposed economic sanctions, refusing to let English merchants trade with Flanders; Maximilian retaliated in kind. In Bruges, the headquarters of the English ‘nation’ of resident merchants was boarded up; in London, warehouses were piled high with wool and cloth ready for export, gathering dust. Riots broke out; enclaves of foreign merchants, their ships not subject to the embargo, were attacked. Political and economic discontent mingled, and rumour abounded.

Warbeck, it was widely believed, was about to invade. Cells of his supporters were scattered throughout the country. On the road, those who had good reason to travel – merchants of all kinds, pedlars, friars, musicians and performers journeying from town to town and house to house – were suspected of linking up with them, ‘artfully and subtly’. There were reported plots to assassinate Henry and his family, including a plan to daub the doorframes and handles of the royal household with a lethal poison. Flybills detailing ‘seditions and treacheries and uprisings’ were passed from hand to hand. In London, there were co-ordinated flypostings urging the city to revolt; overnight, placards would appear fixed to church doors, including those of St Paul’s itself. 22

Meanwhile, Warbeck’s profile continued to grow. In the summer of 1494, Maximilian’s father, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick, died. At his funeral in Vienna Cathedral, in front of the representatives of Europe’s foremost dynasties, Warbeck was paraded as the king of England and then brought back through the cities of the Low Countries on a triumphal progress alongside Maximilian’s teenage son and heir, Archduke Philip of Burgundy. Henry desperately needed another focus for English loyalties, one which would allow him to take back the title of duke of York and enfold the dangerous Yorkist sentiments within the narrative of his own emerging dynasty. He found this figure in his three-year-old second son, to whom he had given the name of the great kings of Lancaster and his own.

Prince Henry was born on 28 June 1491 at Queen Elizabeth’s favourite house of Greenwich, which dominated the expanse of the Thames as it opened out towards the estuary. The family had been fortunate in a succession of healthy births and Henry was their third child, after his sister Margaret. Custom dictated that while the heir was brought up in his father’s world, groomed for kingship, the remaining royal children – male and female – were entrusted to the care of their mother. At Greenwich, Elizabeth’s household servants organized Prince Henry’s baptism in the nearby church of the Friars Observant. Her wardrobers furnished the tapestries that swathed the walls and floors, built a tiered wooden stage, hung it with fine textiles – cloth-of-gold, damask, cypress linens – and placed on it the solid silver font brought from Canterbury Cathedral for the occasion. In front of an audience of dignitaries crammed into the church, the lord privy seal Richard Fox, now bishop of Exeter, immersed the baby boy three times then, as trumpets blared out and torchbearers lit their tapers, swathed him in a mantle of ermine-trimmed cloth-of-gold. 23With his cluster of wet-nurses and cradle-rockers, the infant prince was moved into the nearby manor house of Eltham. There he spent his childhood with his sister Margaret and the younger siblings, Mary and the short-lived Elizabeth, who would join them soon after.

But by autumn 1494, the three-year-old prince had a new role to play: that of a real, palpable duke of York, in the face of Warbeck’s nebulous threat. On 29 October, he rode – unaided, to the astonishment of onlookers – through London’s teeming streets to Westminster. The following day, in Westminster Hall, his father dubbed him knight, then lifted him up proudly and ‘set him upon the table’, in full view of the assembled court. On All Hallows’ Day, 1 November, Prince Henry was created duke of York. The heavy formality of his investiture with his symbols of office, cap, sword, rod and coronet, was followed by a celebratory mass in the adjoining chapel of St Stephen’s, taken by Archbishop Morton surrounded by eight mitred bishops, to the soaring accompaniment of the Chapel Royal choir. Next came the procession in state in the wavering torchlight, a profusion of purple and crimson silks, jewelled collars, cloth-of-gold. Henry VII, in his robes of estate, was imperious; his small son, tired, had to be carried for much of the time. On the first day of the celebratory jousts that followed, combatants wore the regime’s green and white; on the second, they wore blue and tawny, for the young new duke of York. 24

Amid the feasting and tourneying, Henry had been closing in on Warbeck’s English support. His tireless monitoring of networks of retainers – embedding spies in suspects’ households, interviewing their servants and the chaplains and confessors to whom they opened their souls – had led him, to his horror, back into the heart of the royal household itself. At the centre of the conspiracy were his two most powerful household officials, the head of the ‘below stairs’, his lord steward Lord Fitzwalter, and, most disturbingly of all, his lord chamberlain, the man who controlled access to the chamber, the public and private apartments, Sir William Stanley. 25