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

On 9 May, late in the afternoon, Henry VII’s funeral cortège reached the southern entrance to London Bridge, and processed through the city’s streets, following the time-honoured route to St Paul’s. Amid the heralds, the chanting monks and friars, the black-clad household servants, the nobles, prelates, knights and officials, rolled a carriage containing the king’s coffin, drawn by five coursers draped in black velvet and decorated with heraldic banners and flags depicting Henry’s titles and dominions. On top of the coffin, reposing on cloth-of-gold cushions, was a life-size effigy, its head worked uncannily after the king’s death mask, dressed – as perceptive observers might have noted with some irony – in the parliament robes he had barely had occasion to wear in the last twelve years, its right hand gripping his sceptre and its left an orb of gold. At the cathedral’s west door, twelve yeomen of the guard carried the coffin and effigy to the high altar, staggering under its weight. There the placebo , the office for the dead, was sung, and a vigil kept throughout the night. The following morning, after mass, John Fisher climbed the pulpit stairs, placed his skull in front of him, and preached a funeral sermon.

Ranging over the achievements of Henry’s reign, Fisher described the king’s last days: his illness and piety, his exemplary death, his promises for reform. Henry, he said, had had ‘full little pleasure’ from this ‘wretched world’, but ‘much displeasure and sorrow’. As Fisher urged his listeners to mourn and pray for the dead king, he seemed to interrupt himself in full flow. ‘Ah king Henry, king Henry’, he declaimed ruefully, ‘if thou were alive again, many a one that is here present now would pretend a full great pity and tenderness upon thee.’ 42The enforcers of Henry VII’s regime, bent on preserving a system of power and their place in it, had already succeeded in disassociating themselves from their late master, who had died just a fortnight before.

That afternoon, the cortège resumed its journey, down Fleet Street, past Charing Cross to Westminster. Henry’s body was borne into the abbey and placed in its hearse, a multi-storeyed stage hung with banners, standards and lit with ‘the most costly and curious light possibly to be made by man’s hand’. 43

It was already light when, at six the following morning, 11 May, nobles, clergy and heralds reassembled in the abbey to bury Henry VII. After three masses had been sung, the last of them a requiem led by Archbishop Warham, the earl of Surrey’s second son Sir Edward, dressed in the late king’s plate armour and bearing his shield and poleaxe, rode a warhorse through the west doors of the abbey and up to the altar. Dismounting, he was stripped of the weapons and armour, which were offered up ‘with great reverence’ by the duke of Buckingham and the earl of Northumberland. Then, Henry VII’s corpse was lowered into the vault, buried, as his will stipulated, alongside ‘our dearest late wife the queen’, whose body awaited his. 44

After Warham had cast earth into the open tomb, the old king’s household officers broke their staves of office and threw them in. The heralds, taking off their emblazoned coats, shouted in French, ‘The noble king Henry the Seventh is dead.’ As the words’ echo dissolved in the silence of the abbey, they put their coats of arms back on and cried ‘ Vive le noble Roy Henry le VIIIth ’ – which as the herald’s account of the funeral helpfully explained, ‘is to say in English tongue, “God send the noble king Henry the eight long life.” ’

These shouts of acclamation – ‘long live the king’ – were familiar enough. But for Henry VII’s funeral, his counsellors had made two crucial changes. The cries ‘the king is dead; long live the king’ were run together in a way that was new in England, though it had been done before in France, after the death of Charles VIII in 1498. And, for the first time, the names of the king and his heir were included. Kingship was perpetual: the king himself may have died, but the institution, the ‘dignity’, had not, because it was automatically transferred to his heir. Now, Henry VII’s counsellors, the men who had transferred their loyalties seamlessly to the new king, had given full expression to this crucial concept – and in doing so, they confirmed the association of one family’s name with the crown of England. The Tudor dynasty had begun. 45

15

Rich, Ferocious, Thirsting for Glory

In mid-May 1509, after his father’s funeral, the seventeen-year-old king and his court left the Tower for the riverside tranquillity of Greenwich. Here, in his mother’s favourite house and the place of his birth, the new reign began to unfurl. Even those who knew him seemed taken aback by the transformation of a teenager who had been so subdued in his father’s company. ‘However dutiful he was before’, Thomas More observed, the new king has ‘a character which deserves to rule.’ Henry VIII was magnificent, liberal and bullish. As the Venetian ambassador delightedly reported back to the Signoria, the new king had announced that the first thing he planned to do, as soon as he was crowned, was make war on France. And, as everybody was aware, his father had left him a fortune – which he fully intended to spend. Machiavelli, whose pithy character sketches were rarely wide of the mark, got the new king in a nutshell: ‘ ricco, feroce, cupido di gloria ’. 1

The old king’s opaque accounting methods meant that nobody, not even his closest advisers, knew quite how much he had salted away in money, jewels and gold and silver plate, in the Tower, Westminster, Calais, and other ‘secret places’ under his own personal control. This, however, only fuelled the myth. The Venetian ambassador’s estimate reflected the kind of conversations and calculations that were taking place at court and in the city: Henry VII, he wrote, had ‘accumulated so much gold that he is supposed to have more than well nigh all the other kings in Christendom’. 2This, coupled with the fact that the new king seemed eager to dispel the dark last years of his father’s reign, seemed to make up for everything that people had endured. Nobles like Buckingham and Northumberland felt they would now regain their rightful place as the king’s natural counsellors, with their confiscated lands restored to them; churchmen and merchants alike anticipated the rolling-back of aggressive royal legislation against their privileges and liberties. And everybody whose names had found their way into the account books of the old king and his counsellors fully expected them to be erased. 3Henry VIII, in other words, would be all things to all men – and an easy touch into the bargain.

In the warm sun of the new king’s favour, the scramble for lucrative grants of office and land began. All his father’s counsellors, from the earl of Oxford, to Sir Thomas Lovell, to the jewel-house keeper Sir Henry Wyatt, were rewarded; Lady Margaret Beaufort, meanwhile, was quick to reclaim the palace of Woking, which her son had annexed from her six years previously. Fittingly, Richard Weston was awarded the keepership of Hanworth, whose muted corridors he had patrolled in the last weeks of Henry VII’s reign. Also recognized were the new king’s tiltyard friends: the likes of Sir Edward Howard, Thomas Knyvet and, of course, Charles Brandon. These were men whose stylish aggression he admired – and who could now egg on his desire for warlike glory and his easy way with money without fear of censure. 4

One of those who rose fastest and furthest was Sir Henry Marney. Mirroring the role he had played in the prince’s household, he was appointed captain of the guard – head of security – and vice-chamberlain, two posts which tended to come together. Among a raft of other offices given him was the chancellorship of the duchy of Lancaster, previously held by the disgraced Empson. Marney’s pre-eminence was evident in the new reign’s first meeting of the Order of the Garter, which the young king called with alacrity for 18 May – and for which occasion he had bought himself a Lancastrian collar of esses, in emulation of his hero Henry V. Put forward for election to the order, Marney was unanimously voted in. 5