No Sure Way
On 3 July 1503, a week after Prince Henry and Catherine’s betrothal, seven men were arraigned at a hearing in the great hall at London’s Guildhall. All were indicted with treason for conspiring with Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk. Their trial was perfunctory. The following morning, they were found guilty as charged by a panel of judges, and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. The seven had, it seems, been in prison awaiting trial for over a year, having been rounded up during the arrests in Calais and the royal household in the spring of 1502. The man who supplied the key evidence for their conviction was Robert Wellesbourne, ‘alias Hodgekinson’, the shadowy turncoat whose information had condemned Tyrell, Wyndham and their colleagues the year before.
Among the condemned were two shipmen, and two men whose names carried disturbing resonances: one ‘Pole’, the bailiff of Thurrock, a port town on the Thames estuary in the low-lying Essex marshland; and Oliver St John, a member of Lady Margaret Beaufort’s extended family. These four were duly executed, their heads spiked and displayed on London Bridge. But three others escaped death and had their sentences commuted. One, Robert Symson, had friends in high places. A wealthy Kentish landowner, he was a retainer of Henry’s trusted counsellor Sir Richard Guildford, one of the king’s inner circle, whose men maintained royal influence in Kent. By November, Symson had been pardoned – and, in the increasingly idiosyncratic way Henry’s justice worked, he paid heavily for it. Both the king and his counsellors did well out of the deal. Guildford paid the king ?100 for Symson’s pardon; in turn, Symson had then been forced to sell his lucrative estates to Guildford and a syndicate of royal counsellors for the knockdown price of ?200.1
With the king about to go on progress, the trials and executions were deliberately timed. That summer, Henry decided, he would accompany his thirteen-year-old daughter Margaret on the first stage of her journey to Scotland, where she would cement the Tudor–Stuart alliance in a marriage to James IV. Prince Henry would remain behind, at Eltham. As his father was well aware, summer progresses, with the king away from London, were an ideal time for unrest to brew: in 1499, Warbeck’s men had plotted their conspiracy with a leaked copy of Henry’s summer itinerary to hand. Now, with the kingdom insecure, and with Prince Henry taking his first, tentative steps as heir to the throne, the executions were intended to send out a message of uncompromising royal authority to any would-be plotters on behalf of Suffolk.
In early August, as London’s half-emptied streets baked, two royal officials sat in a room in the Tower with a suspect who had been hauled in for questioning. The case was serious. Confronting the accused were Brian Sanford, one of the Tower’s senior commanders, and the clerk of the royal council, Robert Rydon, who sat at a table minuting the interrogation in detail, quill scratching busily over parchment.2
Alexander Symson, a sawyer, had been drinking heavily in a pub in Erith, a booming port town on the south bank of the Thames estuary, where ships unloaded their goods for the short onward journey overland to London, and in whose streets foreign accents and languages, predominantly Dutch and French, were commonplace. Symson had got talking to the ‘good man of the house’ and, increasingly inebriated, had poured out a complicated scheme in which he proposed to abduct a local boy and flee by boat to France or Zeeland, the coastal region around Antwerp, where he would groom the boy as a pretender, a ‘great inheritor and next unto the crown’. He had a proposal for the landlord: if he could arrange a ship for them, he could earn forty shillings a year. It was then that Symson’s evening came to an abrupt halt, for the landlord was not the landlord at all. Thomas Broke, a man from the nearby village of Crayford, was – for some reason – standing in for the evening. He reported the conversation to the local authorities, who had brought Symson into London under armed guard and had given their own statement of events to Sanford and Rydon.
Symson’s ramblings were the kind of talk about which Henry had good reason to be concerned. It was grooming of this sort that had produced the two royal pretenders Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck. In 1487, Suffolk’s older brother, John de la Pole earl of Lincoln, had used the twelve-year-old Simnel’s impersonation of Edward earl of Warwick as a front for his own designs on the English crown – and twelve years later, the Cambridge student Ralph Wilford, also brainwashed into believing he was Warwick, acted as a rallying cry for Yorkist dissidents in Suffolk’s own East Anglian backyard. Warwick himself was now dead, but the pattern was familiar: to the king, this was the kind of scheme that had Suffolk’s fingerprints all over it.
Henry was concerned for another reason, too. Through his informers, his household men, his administrators and their agents, he had tried to extend his reach far into the provinces, to bind and control the influence of powerful families, local big men and their retainers, backed up by his increasingly ruthless system of financial penalties. Different regions presented different challenges, from the power vacuum of Northumberland, whose earl was too young to govern for much of the 1490s, to the northwest, where the huge retinues of the powerful Stanley clan, Henry’s step-family, had provided much of his military muscle from Bosworth onwards. Henry had rewarded the family with political office and a position at the heart of power – until Warbeck had caused doubt to seep into Sir William Stanley’s mind and Henry’s whole relationship with the family had changed. Now, the appearance of Suffolk and the regime’s new vulnerability cast local vendettas and grudges, resentments and grievances against the king and his counsellors in an altered light. In Kent, a particularly toxic blend of dynastic instability and local lawlessness was brewing. Sir Richard Guildford was at its heart; and hovering on its periphery, connected by loose strands of allegiance and affinity, was Alexander Symson.3
Symson’s name would have rung a bell with his interrogators. Another prisoner in the Tower, his namesake Robert, was the Londoner with Kentish connections who had been convicted of treason just weeks before. Not only did the Symsons share a name, they shared a master. Robert Symson had narrowly avoided death through Sir Richard Guildford’s personal intervention with the king. Now, as Alexander Symson recounted his own version of events, it turned out that he too was connected to Guildford. What was more, when detained in Erith, he had been on his way to report to the man himself. In fact, as he recounted to his perplexed questioners, he was a royal spy, recruited by one of Guildford’s own retainers, and he had just returned from the Low Countries, where he had been sent to infiltrate Suffolk’s household. Symson had news that would be deeply troubling both to Guildford and to Henry: Guildford’s spy network was rotten.
Symson started his story from the beginning. He lived in the Kentish village of Cranbrook, squarely in Sir Richard Guildford’s territory, and had been recruited by a man called Walter Roberts, a man of considerable local standing and one of the Guildford family’s most trusted retainers in the area. But, standing in front of the two officials in the Tower, Symson accused his control, Roberts, of being of a double-agent, who was working not on behalf of Guildford and the king, but of Suffolk. In fact, Roberts took up so much of Symson’s testimony that Rydon, the clerk, scribbled at the top ‘Deposition contra Robertum’: ‘against Roberts’.4
Symson had, he told Sanford and Rydon, been in Walter Roberts’ service for a long time, had ‘belonged’ to him for over twenty years ‘for the more part’. Early in 1503, Roberts had been casting around for recruits to supplement the crown’s information network, presumably on Guildford’s behalf. Symson’s recruitment began that Easter, in a meadow outside Cranbrook, when Roberts casually asked Symson whether he could be trusted. Yes, came the reply, he could. Things then fell quiet. Their next contact was about five weeks later, and Symson remembered the time precisely: it was in the Rogation days, when locals processed around their parish boundaries amid a riot of brightly coloured religious banners, ringing handbells, chanting litanies invoking God’s blessing on the fields, and drinking prodigious quantities of beer.5 Symson, meanwhile, was among a group of workers weeding a pond belonging to Roberts, who took him aside and briefed him on his assignment: to go to Aachen, make contact with Suffolk, and try to find out what kind of backing – and from whom – he was expecting ‘for his coming into England’. At this point in the inquisition Rydon, with clerical precision, looked up from his note- taking. How did Roberts refer to Suffolk: as ‘duke’ or ‘earl’? The former would have been a telltale sign of Roberts’ sympathies. Symson couldn’t recall.
Symson had clearly been jumpy about his mission from the outset. On the morning of 4 June, Whit Sunday, he had attended matins in Cranbrook church. After the service, most of the congregation had filed outside into the late spring sun. Lingering behind, Symson waited for Roberts, who possessed the elusiveness of spymasters through the ages. Appearing suddenly in the gloom of the church, he asked Symson whether he was ready, gave him his expenses, and sent him on his way, urging him to ‘be secret’ and not to reveal his true identity.
Landing on the Dutch coast, Symson made his way southeast to Aachen without any difficulty and, lodged in the city, started making enquiries. News of the inquisitive Englishman reached Suffolk’s right-hand man Sir George Neville, ‘the bastard’. Their encounter was, initially, a bruising one. Neville produced a knife and, threatening to cut off Symson’s ears, demanded to know what his business was and who had sent him. Terrified, Symson blurted out
