Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

Running through all this was the perpetual question of legitimacy and loyalty. In the aftermath of Blackheath, an intelligence report landed on the desk of Henry’s administrator Sir Reynold Bray. Reporting an exchange between two men who had fought for Henry against the Cornish rebels, it revealed the unease that permeated the minds even of those loyal to the regime. One had urged the other to pray for Henry VII. The reply was evasive: ‘we need not pray for the king by name’, he said, ‘but pro rege nostro tunc’ – just, ‘for our king’. Asked to explain what he meant, he elaborated: ‘’tis hard to know who is righteous king.’ His dilemma summed up Henry’s deepest fear. Even those keen to uphold the status quo didn’t know, deep down, who should embody it.⁴²

Late in the evening of 9 June 1498, Trinity Sunday, Warbeck climbed through an unlocked window in Westminster Palace and fled upstream to the Charterhouse at Sheen, where he claimed sanctuary. The following day he was turned over to royal guards. The circumstances of his escape were puzzling. A Venetian dispatch probably came closest, reasoning that it was a put-up job, and that Henry’s own servants had seeded the idea of escape in Warbeck’s mind. Warbeck’s living quarters had been in the wardrobe of robes, which housed the king’s clothes and personal belongings, and which was sited directly below the privy chamber. His gaolers were two of the king’s privy servants, William Smith and James Braybroke and, in the resulting inquiry into Warbeck’s flight, both got off scot-free. Henry wanted a reason to move him out of sight and – he hoped – out of mind; so he created one.⁴³

After his recapture, Warbeck’s treatment changed. Publicly pilloried in London, he was then moved into the Tower and locked in a windowless cell. Towards the end of July, Henry took ambassadors from Flanders, sent to agree newly normalized trade relations between England and the Low Countries, to visit the prisoner; also present was the Spanish ambassador, Rodrigo de Puebla. When Warbeck was brought in, shackled and chained, his appearance had, de Puebla reported, been ‘much altered’, his princely good looks so savagely disfigured ‘that I, and all other persons here, believed his life will be very short’. That, de Puebla concluded briskly, was that: ‘He must pay for what he has done.’⁴⁴

But the disturbances continued. The simple fact of Warbeck’s existence, and that of Edward earl of Warwick, now in his early twenties, seemed to be motivation enough. In January 1499 a fresh plot was uncovered in Cambridge. It involved a young university student named Ralph Wilford who, groomed by a local priest to believe that he too was the earl of Warwick, had experienced a series of dream-visions in which he was anointed king. Brought to London, Wilford was hanged the following month, his body left on a gibbet on the Old Kent Road, the main south-eastern approach to London. For Henry the episode, which bore so many hallmarks of the Lambert Simnel case twelve years before, was traumatic. Outwardly calm, his body betrayed him. He seemed to age twenty years in two weeks.

Henry’s preoccupation with what the future held began to seem coloured by his own ill-health. There were telltale signs, such as the ?2 paid to ‘a stranger of Perpignan that showed quintessentia’, the fabled water of life that could cure everything from gout to tuberculosis, poisoning and ‘troubles from devils’ – and, into the bargain, restore youth to old men and convert base metals into gold. He frequently resorted to prophecy, the practice that he himself had made illegal in one of the first acts of his reign, and whose ban was stringently enforced. In the months after Wilford’s execution, he summoned a Welsh priest who had foretold the deaths of Edward IV and Richard III and who, among ‘many other unpleasant things’, advised Henry that his life was in danger and that there were ‘two parties of very different political creeds’ in the kingdom. Yorkist conspiracy, in other words, was alive.⁴⁵

In the middle of the year, royal agents began to pick up whispers of old plots, resurrected in a sequence of meetings in secret houses across London, involving an assortment of city merchants, opportunist hangers-on looking for a chance to make money and, disturbingly, four of Warbeck and Warwick’s warders, who acted as go- betweens with their two charges. Fuelled by the inevitable astrological consultations, the plot coalesced into a plan to seize the Tower, steal its treasure, blow up the magazine of explosives there, and smuggle the pair out of the country in a ship filled with a cargo of woolcloth. The conspirators would make their move that summer when the city was quiet and the king and his household on progress in the country; he would, they swore, never return to London alive.

Oddly, neither Warbeck nor Warwick seemed particularly engaged. Warbeck, very probably, had been tortured to the point of uninterest; either way, after a lifetime of assumed identities, he barely seemed to know who he was any more. Indeed, it was Warwick, the gentle, bewildered prince who it was said could not tell a goose from a capon and who had spent the last fourteen years in the Tower, who was the more enthusiastic: he simply seemed glad of the attention. The two were given pep talks and constantly prompted with encouraging news and the small change of conspiracy: secret tokens, a book of cipher, and a file and hammer for Warbeck to break his shackles. Mingling with the genuine conspirators were royal agents provocateurs, pushing and shaping the plot, incriminating the two prisoners, giving them enough rope to hang themselves. In early August, one of the plotters, filled with a sense of creeping unease, got cold feet and, announcing that Henry knew everything, bolted to the safety of sanctuary. Still the king and his counsellors waited, for another three weeks. On 25 August, the conspirators met for a final time. Then the net closed.⁴⁶

That October, an Italian astrologer known by his anglicized name of William Parron presented to Henry his prognostication for the year ahead. De Astrorum vi fatali, The Fateful Meaning of the Stars, concerned why it was that the innocent should die – indeed, why sometimes it was necessary for them to do so. If people were born under bad stars, natural law decreed that, even if they were utterly innocent of any crime, they were destined to die unnatural deaths of one kind or another: beheading, hanging, poverty or disease. Parron’s treatise went on to demonstrate how unlucky were the stars of two men and, although the pair were not named, the reference was clearly to Warbeck and Warwick. These ill-starred people infected the country and, until they died, they would continue to be a focus for revolt – but die they surely would, because they were ill-starred. It was a satisfyingly closed logic, and it satisfied Henry’s conscience.

Saturday 23 November 1499, St Clement’s Day, was the first day of winter. That year, autumn had blown itself out with gales and storms, but even the foulest weather could not prevent Londoners from turning out in numbers for an execution. Lining the badly paved streets, out through the suburbs of Holborn and west through the fields, they watched as the twenty-five-year-old Warbeck bumped along behind a horse, lashed to a wooden hurdle. At Tyburn, amid the crowds and assembled dignitaries, he was hauled up a ladder to the scaffold. There, with the noose round his neck, he confessed. He was not Edward IV’s second son – in fact, he had no Yorkist blood at all – but was just a ‘stranger’, a foreigner, the son of a boatman from Tournai. Begging absolution from the king and ‘all others he had offended’, he composed himself ‘meekly’. Then the ladder was whipped away and he jerked downwards, his body convulsing violently, then twitching, then limp.⁴⁷

Five days later, on the other side of the city, the ambassadors were present at another execution, this one a private affair, as befitted a true nobleman. If Warbeck’s trial had been perfunctory, Warwick’s was a farce. At his hearing in London’s Guildhall, as utterly confused now as he had been by the plot to free him, the earl had to be ‘compelled to answer’. The records of his trial were locked away in a cupboard with three locks, the keys allocated separately to three unnamed royal officers. Under louring skies, lightning and thunder, with rain driving in off the Thames, Warwick was led out to his place of execution on Tower Green, and beheaded.

Henry VII had been on the throne for fifteen years and three months. Only now, with these two executions, did he feel safe.⁴⁸

As the new century began, the Spanish ambassador Rodrigo de Puebla posted a dispatch from London to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. He expatiated on England’s tranquillity and obedience. There had, he wrote, ‘always been Pretenders to the crown’; more than that, there had been a number of contesting claims to the English throne, ‘and of such quality that the matter could be disputed between the two sides’. Now, however, ‘it has pleased God that all should be thoroughly and duly purged and cleansed’. There remained ‘not a drop of doubtful royal blood’. The only royal blood in the kingdom was the ‘true blood’ of Henry VII, his queen, Elizabeth, and ‘above all’ their first-born son Arthur, prince of Wales and heir to the throne. The civil wars, he said, were over.

De Puebla’s mood was skittish; he really should, he added breezily, stop harping on about the two executions, as he was aware that he had written ‘so often’ about them recently. The way was now paved for a spectacular royal wedding between England and Spain, one which would set the seal on Henry VII’s dynastic ambitions. It was a dispatch intended specifically to communicate a sense of closure to the Spanish monarchs, to show that England possessed a dynasty fit for an infanta of Spain. The wedding preparations could begin.⁴⁹