between Arthur and Catherine back in 1489, Savage wore his title of king’s commissioner like a badge of nobility. He was also a flamboyant, worldly sophisticate, a keen hunter and a keeper of peacocks, with an unholy penchant for taking the Lord’s name in vain.24 His corruption, too, had a distinctly Italian flavour. A nepotist of the highest order, he exploited his position to the full, twisting the law in favour of friends and family. Underscoring all this was a deep-seated inferiority complex, born out of the fact, as he later stressed to Henry, that he was ‘of little substance, but a poor gentleman and a younger brother’, who owed not only his living but his very existence to the king – it was as though ‘his highness had made him out of clay’. Northumberland and Savage, the wilful hereditary peer and the new man moulded by Henry, were like chalk and cheese. With every clash between the earl’s men and royal retainers, tensions mounted. Finally, on 23 May 1504, they boiled over.
In late afternoon, Northumberland left the town of Fulford, outside York, accompanied by a small escort of thirteen riders. Not long before, Archbishop Savage had passed the same way with eighty armed men on horseback, having been at a boozy reception with York’s mayor and corporation. Throughout the day, the two parties had crossed each other’s paths; on each occasion, there had been provocation. Now, on the road out of Fulford, Northumberland encountered about a dozen of the archbishop’s men, who had hung back, two of whom rode deliberately between the earl and his servants; Northumberland’s horse stumbled and fell to its knees. ‘Is there no way, sirs, but over me?’ he snarled, grabbed one of the horsemen and punched him in the face. As swords were drawn and blows exchanged, the main body of the archbishop’s force charged back and surrounded them, crossbows levelled, shouting abuse at the earl: ‘traitor’and ‘whoreson’. One of Savage’s men aimed his bow at Northumberland; another, thinking quickly, cut the bowstring before he could fire. As the earl, dishevelled, clothes ripped, struggled in the grip of the archbishop’s men, Savage asked him, blandly, ‘What needs this work, my lord of Northumberland? I know well you are a gentleman, and I am another.’ Northumberland’s noncommittal reply riled the archbishop, who again prompted: ‘Yea, I say am I, and that as good a gentleman as you.’ Northumberland stared at his feet: ‘Nay, not so.’25
When tempers cooled, both men were genuinely apprehensive about the king’s reaction. They and their retainers were ordered down to London later that year and hauled in front of a panel of counsellors at Westminster. Despite Savage’s insistence that Northumberland had started everything, the king punished both with equal severity, forcing them to enter into bonds for ?2,000 to keep the peace.26
Henry was livid about the fracas – and about Savage’s role in it as much as Northumberland’s. Back in 1489 Northumberland’s own father had been murdered during a popular uprising behind which, Henry feared, Yorkist conspiracy lurked. At a time when the shock of Warwick’s extrajudicial murder continued to linger, Northumberland’s killing in suspicious circumstances, by a royal servant, would have been incendiary, setting a match to local rivalries and tensions, and sending shockwaves through an already volatile country. Besides which, Henry always welcomed the opportunity to impose his authority – and to make a profit into the bargain.
The career of Savage, formerly so energetic both on the king’s behalf and his own, entered a gentle downward path, ending in his death three years later. But for Northumberland, the incident was only the beginning. Fuelled by a lifetime of perceived slights and thwarted entitlement, and hungry for the restoration of his family’s authority north of the River Trent, he embarked on a career of criminality and riot, almost as if he were trying to see how far he could push the king. Henry would crack down hard.27
In June 1503, as Prince Henry and Catherine were betrothed and Alexander Symson made his clandestine way to Aachen, the king continued to overhaul security at Calais. Alongside Sir John Wilshere, who doubled as comptroller and spymaster co-ordinating Calais’s operation against the earl of Suffolk, another new face was Prince Henry’s mentor Lord Mountjoy, who the king appointed as captain of the border fortress of Hammes, previously the stamping-ground of Suffolk’s right-hand man Sir Robert Curzon.
After the debacle of Suffolk, Tyrell and Curzon, Henry badly needed loyal men with strong local connections in Calais – and, given his family’s long association with the Pale, Mountjoy was a logical choice. His own reaction to the appointment, though, was probably mixed. Exchanging his unhurried but influential role at Eltham – a role which had acquired far greater significance since Prince Henry had become heir to the throne – for the remote boredom of the frontier garrison was, on the face of it, hardly an ideal career move. But his presence would not be required all the time – a deputy could do much of the donkey work – and besides, jobs at Calais were often stepping stones on a career path leading to great office. There were, too, opportunities to dabble in the lucrative textile trade on the side. What shocked Mountjoy, however, were his terms of employment.28
Of all the financial bonds that Henry imposed during his reign, Mountjoy’s were among the most complex and extensive. His conditions of office – keeping the castle secure, reporting to the king and council on reasonable written notice – were enforced by a pledge of ?10,000, backed up by guarantors providing securities for the same sum. Although Mountjoy was well connected, it was hardly a surprise that his friends could, between them, only scrape together pledges for a little over half the amount.29
While indentures of office regularly included financial pledges for doing the job properly, the size and scale of those attached to Mountjoy’s new role were unprecedented. What lay at the root of these conditions of office was Henry’s increasing obsession, verging on paranoia, with allegiance to the regime – even in the case of people like Mountjoy, who had proved themselves time and again. After all, even household men like Tyrell and Curzon, whose loyalties had been thought secure, had been fallible. By binding Mountjoy and his guarantors so closely to the regime, Henry aimed to remove any similar temptation, should it arise. Soon after Mountjoy’s arrival, an incident at Calais would illuminate how precarious and strained the allegiances of even the most loyal of Henry’s servants were becoming.
In 1504, ‘about the last day of September’, five men gathered in a small, private room at the house of Sir Richard Nanfan, acting head of Calais during the prolonged absences of the enclave’s overall commander Lord Daubeney, whose duties as chamberlain of the royal household and as one of the king’s inner circle kept him at court. The meeting included the master porter and military expert Sir Sampson Norton and Sir Hugh Conway, the new treasurer of Calais. All three were longstanding members of the king’s household: experienced, loyal political veterans. With them were two younger men, Nanfan’s son William, and John Flamank, his son-in-law and a member of the Calais garrison, both of whom were there to be seen rather than heard.30
The atmosphere was fraught. As the men settled, Nanfan, clearly on edge, turned to his son and to Flamank and, producing a Bible, swore them to confidentiality, not to repeat anything ‘that is now here spoken’. The three senior men then discussed the perennial problem of Calais’s security, Nanfan a moderating voice between Conway’s agitated concern and Norton’s blunt, straight-talking scepticism. It was Conway, scared and insistent, who led the conversation.
On disembarking at Calais three months previously to take up his new appointment, Conway had immediately smelt disloyalty in the air. Sniffing around, he picked up hints of a plot to murder Nanfan, and a sense that of the six-hundred-strong Calais garrison, the ‘greater part’ that had been recruited by Lord Daubeney could not be relied upon: they ‘will never love none of us’, Conway said, gesturing at his colleagues. What was more, he added, this factionalism stretched all the way into the royal household where, in his role as lord chamberlain, Daubeney was responsible for vetting and appointing its chamber servants. The household, Conway said, was crawling with Daubeney’s men – you just had to look at the king’s security force, the yeomen of the guard, the ‘most part’ of whom were drawn from his own retinues. Daubeney, Conway insinuated, was manoeuvring for position, right under the king’s nose.31 In the event of Henry’s death, both Calais and the royal household would be packed with men whose primary loyalties would be not to the young prince, but to Daubeney himself.
This was, on the face of it, a staggering claim. Daubeney’s relationship with Henry had been forged in exile and in battle. He was one of the king’s trusted right-hand men, a member of his inner circle, one of the very few who had traction with him. His disloyalty was inconceivable – and, indeed, everybody in the room hastily agreed that nobody was casting aspersions on his trustworthiness. But then Nanfan interjected. Thinking about it, he ruminated, back in the summer of 1497 the chamberlain had been ‘very slack’ in redeploying his forces, which had been en route to the Scottish border to fight James IV, against the Cornish rebels swarming towards London. If he had followed orders with more alacrity, the insurgents would have been destroyed long before they were in sight of the city. Henry, Nanfan said, had been ‘discontent’. Daubeney’s commitment to the regime, he implied, was distinctly shaky.32
As everybody knew, Conway continued, the king was ‘a weak man and a sickly, not likely to be a long-lived man’. Henry’s increasingly frequent illnesses could hardly be kept secret for long: his chamber accounts betrayed how, on progress around his hunting lodges, the court would come to a halt in one place for weeks on end, a sure sign that he had relapsed. Conway recounted how on one such occasion, when Henry lay ill at his manor of
