Maximilian now proposed that they should apply only to his hereditary Habsburg lands – ‘far countries to the which your subjects seldom or never have any resort’, Warham and Somerset told Henry. Maximilian was terribly sorry, but he could not give any such guarantees to Henry regarding the free imperial cities, the autonomous entities dotted throughout the imperial lands, for the electors would never commit to such an agreement. Maximilian probably anticipated Henry’s request, for he had sent Suffolk to just one such city: Aachen. And he took Henry’s ?10,000.14
Calais’s fortifications were strengthened, with a ‘great substance of timber’ shipped over, and England’s coastal defences checked, from the south-eastern ports to Berwick on the Scottish border, whose captain, Sir Thomas Darcy, was ordered to employ a team of masons and labourers ‘continually in occupation for the reparations’ there.
In Kent, Sussex and the Channel ports, Sir Richard Guildford’s men sifted loyalties; so too did those of Sir Reynold Bray. Information and tip-offs flooded in of suspicious behaviour, stolen ships and people slipping out of the country. In October 1501, as Catherine’s flotilla fought its way through the Atlantic storms, a plot was uncovered at Beaulieu Abbey on the south coast, where Perkin Warbeck had once sought sanctuary. The abbot’s porter, one Baskerville, and ten of the sanctuary men in his custody, tried to commandeer a ship to join Suffolk and were intercepted in the act, ‘even at the point of going’. Under torture, Baskerville confessed and ‘cursed much’ two other men who, in a related plot, had stolen a ship full of Cornish tin, which they had intended to steer across the Channel. The insecurities of Warbeck had, it seemed, reignited. Each and every disturbance seemed to be construed as part of Suffolk’s plot.15
As he moved to prevent events spinning out of control, and to assess and monitor the extent of Suffolk’s support, Henry turned to the bonds and financial sureties that he and his administrators entered meticulously in his various books of accounts. In fact, his reliance on this system was intensifying markedly. Towards the end of 1499, after Suffolk’s first flight, he had ordered officials in chancery to enrol – formally record – all names of both ‘subjects and strangers’, Englishmen and foreigners, who had been involved in cases of treason and of misprision – failing to report, or actively concealing, suspects – and who had been bound for sums of money. Armed with these lists and books of names, offences and fines, Henry and his counsellors had started to trawl through all cases of people who had been issued with bonds of various kinds – for debts owed, or for allegiance, ‘good abearing’ – whether recent or way back in the past, whether they had in fact committed an offence or not. In the wake of Suffolk’s second flight, they started to use bonds systematically, not just to punish offences, but to guarantee loyalty: or, to put it another way, as a method of pre-emption.16
That summer, the king’s administrators took an unprecedented series of bonds: in the standing garrison of Berwick, where Darcy was bound for ?4,000 for the security of the town and castle, along with a number of the king’s household knights, and across the country in Carlisle. In October, the preparations for Arthur and Catherine’s wedding were being finalized, royal officials moved into East Anglia, armed with lists of the ‘names of such persons as were servants of our rebel’. In his fortress of Headingham on the Essex–Suffolk border, Henry’s point-man in the region, the earl of Oxford, took bond after bond from those associated with Suffolk: tenants and clients, yeomen, esquires, knights and lawyers. Anybody who failed to appear was deemed guilty and, when found, would be committed to prison ‘till they find security’.17
Henry continued to spin his web. He played the long game, waiting and waiting, steadily assembling information as if nothing were untoward. Contemporaries all said the same thing. He would, said one, proceed ‘circumspectly and with convenient diligence’; another, that he would ‘always grope further’, always with ‘good await and espial’ to those under surveillance. Almost invariably, few – even his closest servants – could tell anything from the king’s outward appearance. Henry’s method was to proceed with ‘
Sometime in early 1502 a confidential discussion between two men took place in the Tower of London. One, William Hussey, was the younger brother of Sir John, one of Henry’s financial administrators. The previous year, William had become caught up in some unspecified trouble, and had been forced to sign over his lands to leading royal officers – among them Sir Reynold Bray, Sir Thomas Lovell and his own brother – to be administered on behalf of the crown. Somehow, he had ended up in the Tower. And he was obviously rumoured to have connections to the earl of Suffolk, because he had got friendly with somebody – a fellow inmate, perhaps – who had asked his advice about the best way to defect. Hussey’s friend never gave his name. His report of the conversation, though, ended up on the desk of one of Henry’s spymasters.19
Hussey had spoken like somebody who knew what he was talking about. He urged the man to be upfront: to go direct to Suffolk and offer him ‘true and faithful service’. His interlocutor agreed wholeheartedly, saying that this was what he had planned to do. The conversation was larded with the usual conspiratorial talk about astrological portents, while Hussey gave the man tokens that Suffolk would recognize as his, and that would accordingly lend credence to the defector.
But the exchange was not quite what it seemed. Access to many areas of the sprawling complex of the Tower – part royal palace, part armoury, part open prison – was for the most part relatively straightforward. Only the privy lodgings and the maximum security quarters in its bowels, into which people disappeared and rarely came out again, were difficult to get to. In 1499, the plotters trying to release Warwick and Warbeck had found it easy enough to contact them. And in the murky world of counter-espionage, this arrangement could work both ways. Then, there had been much to suggest that a number of the plotters were royal agents provocateurs, egging the two reluctant Yorkist captives on to their deaths. The constable of the Tower Sir Simon Digby, and his deputy Sir Thomas Lovell, one of Henry’s most intimate counsellors, had watched everything, waited, and then pounced.
As old allegiances stirred again, the same tactic was, it seems, being used. The man seeking William Hussey’s advice was a plant – a royal spy posing as an adherent of Suffolk’s, trying to inveigle himself into the exiled earl’s household in order to find out the extent to which the conspiracy had taken root in England, and what was being planned. As he reported, Hussey clearly knew exactly what had gone on when Suffolk had absconded the previous summer. Hussey named times, places – and, above all, he named names.
Less than a week before Suffolk fled, according to Hussey, the earl had ‘privily’ hosted a dinner for a small group of close friends in London. The guests were high profile indeed. They included the young marquis of Dorset Thomas Grey, Henry Bourchier, earl of Essex, and Lord William Courtenay, heir of the earl of Devon. Essex and Courtenay were close companions of Suffolk. Essex had fought alongside him at Blackheath, while Courtenay had been caught up in the affray that had led to Suffolk’s indictment for murder. All three had been named in Suffolk’s team in the tournaments for the forthcoming wedding.20
Then, around the time of his flight, Suffolk had invited Courtenay’s father, the earl of Devon, and an East Anglian gentleman, Sir Thomas Green, a friend of the Tyrell family, to dinner in a house in Warwick Lane, just around the corner from St Paul’s. An onlooker – a servant in Suffolk’s own household, maybe – reported how the earl himself came to the house’s outer gate, to welcome his guest ‘with great reverence’, a sign perhaps that the earl of Devon knew all about Suffolk’s impending flight. All this, Hussey said to the spy, had already ‘come to the king’s knowledge’.21
If this was the case, Henry had reacted to the news of potential conspiracy and betrayal with no outward change of demeanour. Throughout the wedding celebrations, as observers noted, he remained unruffled, the picture of poised majesty. The festivities, indeed, were the perfect opportunity to watch the behaviour of those whose loyalties had been called into question. This was precisely what Henry had done back in the autumn of 1494 when, amid the banqueting and tournaments for Prince Henry’s creation as duke of York, he had scrutinized his rogue lord chamberlain Sir William Stanley and his associates until he was ready to move against them fast. In 1501, at the Westminster jousts, the moment when he rewarded Dorset’s performance with a red-and-white rose of rubies and diamonds may have been a question, as much as a confirmation, of the young marquis’s loyalty.
The spy’s report of his conversation with Hussey had a sequel. In it, the spy recounted how he had made his way to Aachen and had succeeded in talking with Suffolk himself. Telling Suffolk how much the king already knew about the circumstances of his flight, the spy tried tentatively to draw the earl out on the allegiances of his fellow diners: ‘in many men’s minds’, he said, the fact that they had been seen just before the flight made them suspect. Also, he said, it was widely rumoured that the earl of Devon was ‘agreeable’ to Suffolk’s plans to flee and, when Suffolk returned to England with his invasion force, for him to land on the south Devon coast. Was this true?
Suffolk was hot-headed, proud and in many respects obtuse. But his reply was canny, deliberately preying on
