presence of Suffolk just across the Channel, Henry had to choose between Guildford, one of the dwindling number of loyal servants who had been with him in exile and who had served him resolutely, and Bergavenny, with his dubious lineage, who he did not trust an inch. But the facts on the ground had changed, and Henry had to change with them. Guildford’s demise was not long in coming.
Kent was not Henry’s only concern, by a long chalk. With his dynasty hanging by a thread, he looked askance not only at those, like Bergavenny, who had much to gain from a change of regime, but those nobles who might expect to form part of a new dispensation; indeed, who had aspirations to the crown themselves. Two such men were at the forefront of the emerging generation of aristocrats. They had spent most of their lives growing up as wards of court, incubated at the very heart of the king’s family. And it did not seem to have done them much good.
Born a year apart, and in their early twenties, the duke of Buckingham and the earl of Northumberland cut dazzling figures at Henry’s court.13 Both men had similar axes to grind. Their fathers had died when they were young. Buckingham was five years old when in autumn 1483 his father, a focus for the abortive uprising against Richard III, had been captured and beheaded. Later, he was cast as a pro-Tudor martyr, although his impulses for rebelling appear to have been prompted more by his own royal ambitions – as a direct descendant of Edward III – than by any particular inclination towards Henry. Six years later Northumberland’s father, the fourth earl, had been trying to collect taxes on Henry’s behalf in the restless northeast of England when he was assaulted and stabbed to death by resentful locals. His retainers, apparently, had quietly stood aside and let it happen – revenge, it was said, for the earl’s own inaction at Bosworth, when he left Richard to the mercy of Henry’s forces.14
As minors, Buckingham and Northumberland both became royal wards: Buckingham was raised in Lady Margaret Beaufort’s household, Northumberland in the king’s. Their sweeping family lands – Buckingham’s estates in the Welsh Marches and Gloucestershire made him the greatest landowner in the country – were given into the custody of royal officials, and the revenues from them flooded into Henry’s coffers. During the Warbeck years the young nobles were paraded at court as magnificent but obedient subjects, and their fortunes became increasingly entwined. They became brothers-in-law after Henry, always unable to resist a sale, had arranged Buckingham’s marriage to Northumberland’s sister for ?4,000, and they were both admitted to the Order of the Garter in the same year. But if Henry hoped that their upbringing at the heart of the regime would have instilled in them a sense of their proper place in it, and their loyalty to it, he was to be sorely disappointed.
While they grew up, Henry’s administrators had been busily eating away, termite-like, at their estates and their authority. As they approached their majorities, both men looked for signs that they would gain the pre- eminence and responsibility as the king’s ‘natural’ counsellors that their rank, and their fathers’ sacrifices on the regime’s behalf, demanded – as well, of course, as the lucrative crown offices and titles that they believed were theirs by hereditary right. Northumberland was broodingly conscious of his family’s role as great lords in the traditionally unstable northeast; Buckingham, meanwhile, hankered after the office of Constable of England, a title that Richard III had withheld from his father – one of the factors that had tipped him into rebellion.15 All of which left Henry singularly unimpressed. As a contemporary commentator put it, for the king to confer high office and political power on noblemen ‘of his free disposition’ was ‘laudable’ – but, he warned, lords should ‘not presume to take it of their own authority, for then it will surely choke them’.16 It was for nobles to display good service and loyalty, and for the king to reward it, not the other way round. As Henry watched the young nobles parading themselves at court – Buckingham, in particular, was turning out to be a ‘high-minded man’ with a reputation for quick-tempered vindictiveness, who spoke ‘as in a rage’ – he probably convinced himself that these were not men who were suitable for political responsibility. Running under this, however, was his awareness that both nobles were due to inherit vast independent lordships; and, too, the perpetual question of allegiance – particularly as far as Buckingham was concerned. For, as everybody knew, he had a royal claim of his own.17
All of which lent a certain inevitability to what followed. Both lords had to go through the process of reclaiming their lands from the crown, and ‘suing livery’, as it was termed, rarely came cheap. As he had done with the youthful Suffolk, Henry took every opportunity to ratchet up the charges. Exploiting legal technicalities and irregularities in Buckingham’s paperwork, Henry managed to squeeze a total of ?6,600 out of the young duke in fines and bonds. While Buckingham was still a minor, Henry made him pay ?2,000 on his mother’s behalf for remarrying without the king’s licence – which, Buckingham grumbled, was ‘against right and good conscience’ – and pocketed his wife’s dowry for good measure. Financially harassed, and borrowing huge sums off Italian bankers to meet his repayments – and to sustain the lavish lifestyle which his rank demanded – Buckingham was already simmering with resentment by the time he regained his estates.18
Very little by way of royal favour was forthcoming. At court, Henry treated both men as courtly clothes- horses. But even here, Buckingham presented a threat, parading himself with a glamour and arrogance that was troubling even as it added lustre to Henry’s court. On horseback, admirers noted, he resembled a ‘Paris or Hector of Troy’, while the spectacular outfits that had attracted such admiration at Prince Arthur and Catherine’s wedding trod a fine line along the careful distinctions of rank and fabric made by contemporary sumptuary laws. In sheer cloth-of-gold tissue, purple and sable, Buckingham maintained his exalted status as the greatest noble in the land. He dressed in semi-regal fashion – almost as though he felt, as his father had done, that in the event of a contested succession he might make a good king himself. It was hardly surprising that, after Prince Arthur died, he was not invited to the funeral.19
Though Buckingham had the good sense to keep his mouth shut, he detested Henry and his administrators. And, away at his Gloucestershire seat of Thornbury, he steadily recruited men from his sweeping estates in the west country and the Welsh Marches into what was already a huge affinity. Capitalizing on a loophole in Henry’s retaining laws, he invented non-existent jobs, ‘much studying to make many particular offices in his lands, to the intent that he might retain as many men by the said offices as he could.’ Or, in other words, to build up an army. As people started to whisper quietly, he was beginning to look like a king-in-waiting.20
In the decade that Northumberland had spent growing up at court, the political landscape of his own region had changed dramatically: north of the River Trent, the traditional domain of the Percy family, England was crawling with royal officials. As lieutenant of the North during the 1490s, parachuted in from his native East Anglia, Thomas Howard earl of Surrey had made his mark; so too had administrators like Sir Reynold Bray’s man William Sever, the bishop of Carlisle. Now, there was a royal council in the North, headed by the archbishop of York, Thomas Savage, and many of the plum jobs that Northumberland had expected to fall into his hands, in order to distribute to his own men, had been hoovered up by royal servants – many, indeed, were held in Prince Henry’s name, in his capacity of duke of York.21
When, during that summer of 1503, Northumberland had accompanied Princess Margaret on the last stage of her journey north to Edinburgh, he met her party outside York at the head of a glittering retinue, seated on a horse draped in crimson velvet scattered with his coat of arms, wearing a gown of the same crimson, his cuffs and collars encrusted with precious stones, gold spurs on his feet.22 Beneath the ostensibly loyal splendour, he, too, was recruiting – and not so quietly. And as far away as the southeast of England, in increasingly unstable Kent, stories of his independent-minded petulance were doing the rounds. People gleefully related the insolent excuse that he had given the king for failing to appear at court: he couldn’t, he said truculently, find a farrier to shoe his horses.
In towns across Yorkshire, including York itself, in place of the ‘red roses of silver’ distributed by the king’s representatives, men wore the Percy blue-and-yellow livery and its crescent badge, and walked the streets looking for trouble. Royal officials reported intimidation and beatings; those who refused to recognize Northumberland’s pre-eminence were subject to ‘sundry misdemeanours, enormities, injuries and wrongs’. It had to be said, however, that the men encroaching on what Northumberland saw as his personal jurisdiction were no angels, either. Many of the household officers whom Henry employed in the regions tended to use the royal authority with which they were invested to advance their own interests, pursue personal grudges and settle scores. In the northeast, the household knights Sir John Hotham and Sir Robert Constable were bywords for violence and corruption: both had run-ins with Northumberland. Hotham tried to drag him into a dispute over land, a quarrel behind which – as in so many cases – was the hidden hand of the king, testing, probing, controlling and undermining the authority of his greatest subjects. Constable, meanwhile, was described simply as ‘dangerous’ by one court of law.23
Northumberland’s real bete noire was Constable’s boss: the head of Henry’s council in the north, Thomas Savage, archbishop of York. An Italian-trained civil lawyer who had helped broker the original marriage treaty
