royal authority – at every opportunity, while the fruits of his exorbitant taxation of the church, and fees for appointments to bishoprics, tended to disappear into his coffers rather than making their way to Rome. Once, when a papal representative opened a collecting box installed at Henry’s court, he found at the bottom a measly ?11 11s – along, no doubt, with a few cobwebs. But Henry also knew the value of warm diplomatic relations and good intelligence. By mid-1503, his agents and legal representatives in the papal curia seemed well placed.50
In favouring the well-connected, politically and culturally sophisticated Italian merchants and diplomats who regularly arrived in England on curial business Henry killed two birds with one stone, gratifying popes by the attention and respect shown to their intimates, and employing them as his own eyes and ears at Rome, along with a number of highly educated permanent English representatives there. By mid-1503, as Henry and Ferdinand prepared to petition Alexander VI for the dispensation, the first-named among Henry’s diplomatic staff at the papal curia was a confidant of the pope himself.
Arriving in London in 1488 as a papal mediator in the ongoing conflict between England and Scotland, Adriano Castellesi had immediately come to Henry’s attention. Steeped in classical scholarship and sliding easily through the treacherous waters of curial politics, Castellesi embodied everything that Henry looked for in his diplomats. The king ‘much fantasied’ his political know-how and contacts, his precise, measured speech, and his willingness to put his talents at the king’s service. Castellesi was showered with grants and offices, including the bishopric of Hereford, a see from which he was almost always absent. As collector of papal taxes in England, he became the king’s ‘creature’ as much as the pope’s, in the process becoming close to the shrewdest of all Henry’s diplomats. Immediately recognizing the ease with which Castellesi moulded his considerable talents to fit the king’s desires, Richard Fox showed him ‘all good will and affection’. Henry and his advisers had backed the right horse, for in 1497 Castellesi became private secretary to Pope Alexander VI.51
In autumn 1501 Castellesi had helped secure the bull anathematizing the earl of Suffolk; the following year he helped ratify the marriage of Henry’s daughter Margaret to Scotland’s James IV. When, in 1502, Castellesi sent a deputy to London to look after his affairs, he selected his agent with typical discernment and a shrewd awareness of the king’s interests. Polydore Vergil was a promising young historian from Urbino, one of the fortified hilltop towns perched in the jagged spine of the Italian Marches, whose court under the famed Montefeltro dukes had become a byword for intellectual culture. Henry received him with the courtesy and kindliness that he always reserved for foreign men-of-letters whose skills he might be able to put to political use – and he was to take a particular interest in Vergil’s literary abilities.
By summer 1503, and now a cardinal, Castellesi was in Rome trying to engineer the papal dispensation for the new Anglo-Spanish marriage. On 6 August he invited the seventy-eight-year-old Alexander and his implacable son Cesare Borgia, so remorseless that even his father was scared of him, to a banquet at his gleaming new palazzo near the papal enclave in Borgo. Dinner went on late into the balmy summer evening; the table talk, fuelled by fine wines, would undoubtedly have taken in the political situation in Italy, where Aragonese forces had pushed the previously rampant French armies back up the peninsula, retaking Naples the previous month. The subject of the papal dispensation, too, would have come up. The Aragon-born Alexander, constantly playing off French and Spanish interests against each other to his own and his son’s advantage and aware of Henry VII’s full coffers, must have been delighted at the bargaining chip with which he was now presented. But it was to be the last dinner the Borgia pope ever ate.52
Whether, as was widely rumoured, Alexander was poisoned, or whether he died of disease, is unclear – though the fact that both Castellesi and Cesare Borgia were both dangerously ill in the days following the banquet perhaps tells its own story. Alexander VI died on 12 August, to widespread rejoicing in Rome. Following a disorderly funeral, at which fights broke out, Alexander’s bloated, decomposing body, its complexion ‘foul and black’, was unceremoniously rolled up in an old carpet and jammed into an undersized coffin by six labourers who made blasphemous jokes about the corpse as they did so.53 His successor, the decrepit Pius III, died within twenty-six days of his election; in his place came Julius II, the ‘terrible’, the warrior pope, who harboured an implacable hatred of all things Borgia.54 All those who had gone in fear and trembling under Borgia rule were delighted; Henry and Ferdinand were less so. They would have to recalibrate their approach – and so too would the former Borgia favourite Adriano Castellesi.
Eager to push things forward, Ferdinand now changed his story. Although the new Anglo-Spanish treaty had indeed stated that Catherine and Prince Arthur’s marriage had been consummated, it was not in fact the case. Dona Elvira, who had superintended Catherine’s preparations for her wedding night, and who had doubtless found out as much detail as she could about what had gone on, was resolutely insistent that she was still a virgin – something Ferdinand was now more than prepared to accept.
Henry, though, insisted otherwise. His reasons for doing so were not hard to fathom: they were, typically, financial. According to the previous marriage contract between Arthur and Catherine, if the marriage were consummated Catherine’s parents would have to hand over the outstanding 100,000 crowns of the marriage portion to Henry before he, in turn, released any of Catherine’s dower – the lands and revenues due to her in the event of her husband’s death.55 Ferdinand was not in a position to argue. He wrote to his ambassador in Rome that the princess was still a virgin, ‘as is well known in England’. But, he shrugged, as the English wanted to argue the case, it would be better to humour them and proceed according to the wording of the treaty drawn up by Fox and his colleagues – as if, in other words, the marriage between Arthur and Catherine had indeed been consummated. In his rush to get the papal documentation completed, and the English onside, Ferdinand had muddied the waters still further. The question of the finance was now thoroughly confused – and so, as it would transpire, with ultimately seismic consequences, was the question of Catherine’s virginity. But that autumn, as a new round of papal lobbying began, Henry had other things on his mind.56
In little over a year, Henry’s best-laid plans for the security and succession of his reign had been brought crashing down around him. Over time, and through constant political upheaval, people had become reconciled – or resigned – to the fact of his rule. But with Arthur’s death, that idea had been shaken; with Elizabeth’s, it all but disintegrated. The political settlement that Henry and Elizabeth’s marriage represented had been practically torn up. Many of those who had accepted Henry as king had done so out of their loyalty to Edward IV’s children: were Henry to remarry and have further offspring, they would embody something quite different.
In theory, that loyalty could be transferred to Elizabeth’s one remaining son. But with the king’s ill-health patently obvious, the question of succession, embodied by Prince Henry’s youth and vulnerability, was now starkly exposed. The memory of events following Edward IV’s death, whose aftershocks had reverberated throughout the first fifteen years of Henry’s reign, were still raw – and Edward’s son had been about the same age as Prince Henry was now. The spectre of political instability began to loom.
PART TWO
Change of Worlds
