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

In its way, William Compton’s advancement was no less meteoric. In the first days of the reign, the man who had been the prince’s closest servant had emerged as first among equals in the new king’s privy chamber; soon, he would be groom of the stool. Like Hugh Denys before him, Compton looked after the king’s goods and personal affairs, which would be rather different from those of his father. He would handle industrial quantities of money on Henry VIII’s behalf: in the first year of the reign, Compton received some £2,328 to spend; four years later, it would rise to £17,517. One of the first to recognize the importance of his intimacy with the king was, predictably enough, Richard Fox. 6

On 27 May, Lord Mountjoy, intoxicated by the air of the new reign, signed a breathless letter to Erasmus. 7Still in Italy, Erasmus’s woes had deepened. He had failed to gain regular funding and he was, as he had emphasized in a stream of unanswered letters to England, sick and depressed. Now, Mountjoy apologized for being a terrible correspondent: ‘many distractions’ had prevented him from writing, including – he hinted darkly at the events surrounding the old king’s death – ‘certain reasons which I did not venture to set down on paper’. Then, with his customary breeziness, he told Erasmus to cheer up, for his former pupil had ascended the throne and ‘all were congratulating themselves on their prince’s greatness’.

The new reign, Mountjoy said, was the Promised Land. ‘Heaven smiles, earth rejoices; all is milk and honey and nectar’ – and if only Erasmus could see the scenes, he would weep for joy. The young king could not be more different from his father: ‘Tight-fistedness is well and truly banished. Generosity scatters wealth with unstinting hand.’ This was a monarch for whom gold and jewels were nothing compared with virtue and eternal renown. Why, only days before, the king had told Mountjoy how he longed to be a better scholar. Thinking quickly, Mountjoy had assured him that nobody expected him to be an intellectual – but he was expected to ‘foster and encourage’ men of learning. ‘Of course,’ replied the king, ‘for without them we should scarcely exist.’ Henry VIII, the implication went, had learned his lessons well.

Then, Mountjoy got to the point. He had ‘never pressed’ Erasmus to go to Italy in the first place. Everybody in England was reading the new, expanded edition of his Adages with admiration – Archbishop Warham, no less, was ‘praising it to the skies’. Erasmus must come back to England. As if to settle the matter, Mountjoy enclosed a bill of exchange for ten pounds: five from him and five from Warham. This was not, he added, a gift – there would be plenty of gifts forthcoming when he arrived – but to cover his travel expenses, ‘to speed your journey to us’. Moreover, he added, Warham promised Erasmus a benefice if he came back.

If Mountjoy laid the flattery on thick, it was hardly surprising. Erasmus had fallen for the blasé optimism of his former pupil before – twice before, in fact – and both times, expansive promises of rewards and benefices had added up to precisely nothing. It was all very well for Mountjoy to say he had never told Erasmus to go to Italy, but given the complete lack of opportunity in England back in 1506, he had had little choice. Which was why, while Mountjoy’s letter was fulsome, it was artful too. After reminding Erasmus pointedly of his destitute conditions in Italy – he was sorry to hear Erasmus was sick, but then, he supposed, one had to suffer for one’s art, fame being ‘worth the price of hunger, poverty and illness, even death itself’ – Mountjoy offered hard cash. If Erasmus wanted creature comforts along with fame, England could now provide him with both.

Behind all this was an ulterior motive, one that struck at the heart of Erasmus’s principles of intellectual independence. The new England wanted a monopoly on Europe’s finest mind. It wanted him as its mouthpiece, amplifying its virtues to the world: where once he had written verses extolling the superhuman qualities of the king’s boyhood hero Philip of Burgundy, he could now do the same for Henry VIII. The new regime, with its glorious young monarch, didn’t want second-rate poets like Pietro Carmeliano or Bernard André – but it did want Erasmus to demonstrate his loyalty, to be ex toto Anglicus .

All of which was evident in a letter from Warham, which was probably enclosed with Mountjoy’s. Warham had a high regard for Erasmus’s abilities, but thoroughly disapproved of his flightiness. Now he offered Erasmus a deal, an exclusive contract with the English crown. As soon as Erasmus arrived in England, Warham promised, he would receive a golden handshake of 150 nobles ‘from me’, and a job for life. The condition was simple: that ‘you agree to spend the rest of your life in England’ – though he would be allowed trips to the Netherlands to see family and friends, ‘on suitable occasions’. 8

It was this, undoubtedly, that gave Erasmus pause for thought. His dilemma was voiced by an Italian friend, Jacobo Piso, who wrote congratulating him on his ‘offer from England’, before warning him to beware of the dangers of such jobs: ‘Look into your heart’, he wrote, ‘but do not lose your head. It is certainly pleasant to be rich, but still more pleasant to be free.’ Erasmus, too, knew that another hand lay behind the skilled rhetoric of Mountjoy’s letter: that of his new secretary, Erasmus’s Lucchese friend Andrea Ammonio, who after years spent in the shadow of the old king’s Italian favourites, now found himself in a new world of opportunity. Indeed, the name of ‘Andreas Ammonius’ was written at the top of the letter. Erasmus, who always liked to feel he had friends in high places, crossed it out and wrote ‘Guilhelmus Montioius’ instead. As he knew perfectly well, though, this first, glowing picture of Henry VIII’s reign, one that would become the blueprint for similar images to follow, was written not by Mountjoy but by a jobbing Italian humanist with an axe to grind. 9

Nevertheless, Mountjoy/Ammonio’s letter hit its mark. Being free, hungry, poor and ill in war-torn Italy for the sake of one’s principles was ghastly. By July, Erasmus was on his way back to England. A decade later he would still be vainly invoking Philip of Burgundy’s name in the hope of something more substantial than fair words. 10

The most extraordinary transformation in fortunes came for Catherine. Fuensalida’s first dispatch of the new reign had been couched in his now-accustomed gloom. Francesco Grimaldi, he wrote, had already transferred fifty thousand crowns of Catherine’s dowry back out of England to Bruges, and it was just as well. On 24 April, as news of Henry VII’s death was proclaimed, Fuensalida had learned from his sources that the dying king had repeated the same old mantra to his son: he was free to marry whoever he wanted. That bride, Fuensalida was further informed, would not be Catherine, for it was known that the new king would find it a burden to his conscience to marry his brother’s widow. 11

Days later, Fuensalida was summoned to Greenwich by the new king’s advisers – who, consisting of Fox and his colleagues, looked much like the old. Accordingly, the ambassador launched into a long-winded defence of his actions and of the non-payment of the dowry. Then a side door opened, and secretary Thomas Ruthall swept in from an adjoining chamber, where he had been locked in private discussions with Henry VIII. Cutting through the ambassador’s speech, he accepted all Fuensalida’s assurances. The king, he said briskly, was utterly unconcerned about all the red tape; he was sure the dowry would be paid, and just wanted to get on with his marriage, as soon as possible. What was more, it was about time England and Spain joined forces against France: together, the two countries would be at the heart of a pan-European coalition against their common enemy.