with his father-in-law Nanfan, his own unpopularity among his colleagues in the Calais garrison and a self-seeking ambition. His report was, in other words, precisely the kind of rumour-mongering that Henry might have been expected to dismiss, as having been made out of ‘envy, ill-will and malice’. For Henry, however, the problem was the uncertainty, the ambiguities and fence-sitting that pervaded everything and everybody: from the evasive testimony of Alexander Symson in the Tower and the turf wars of Kent, to Northumberland and Buckingham’s sullen acquiescence, to the loyalties of Daubeney’s men in the household, the arrangements made by Vaux and Browne, and Conway’s desperate attempts to find out the truth through espionage. Flamank’s report provided not answers, but yet more questions about allegiance: known unknowns.
It was as John Skelton’s protagonist Dread had described in his nightmarish vision of court, confronted by doubleness and inconstancy at every turn, people creeping just out of his eyeline, whispering in corners as they looked him up and down, unable to be sure of anything or anybody. A kind of terror had settled on the royal household. And it stemmed from the king himself.36
Writing less than a decade later, Machiavelli, inevitably, described it best. Discussing the knotty question of whether it was better for a prince to be loved or feared, he wrote that, in an ideal world, ‘one would like to be both one and the other’. But, Machiavelli continued, the world was not ideal. It was difficult to inspire both qualities, so if you had to choose one, it would be fear. The problem with love was that it was sustained by a ‘chain of obligation’, of service, which, ‘because men are a wretched lot, is broken on every occasion for their own self-interest’. Fear, though, was different. It was sustained by a constant dread of punishment, by a sense of the prince’s all- encompassing power.
Fear, Machiavelli concluded, worked better because ‘men love at their own pleasure, and fear at the pleasure of the prince.’ The wise prince should build his foundation on what belongs to him, not on what belongs to others. Faced with profound instability, that was exactly what Henry had done. Looking into the void of dynastic uncertainty, he was perfecting a system, idiosyncratic and terrifying, that would allow him unprecedented control over his subjects. He would describe this plan in terms that were an uncanny foreshadowing of Machiavelli’s own. It was designed, he said, to allow him to keep his subjects ‘in danger at his pleasure’.37
Council Learned
As the latest round of executions of de la Pole’s confederates took place in summer 1503, Henry VII and his older daughter Margaret, together with a ‘great multitude of lords and other noble persons’, set out from Richmond and progressed north on the first stages of her journey to Edinburgh, where she would marry the Scottish king James IV. By early July, the household had arrived at Collyweston, Lady Margaret Beaufort’s Northamptonshire palace and the centre of royal power in the east midlands. Set in rolling parkland, with water meadows, orchards, ponds and summer-houses, Collyweston had undergone months of improvements in preparation for the visit: the main gate had been newly crenellated and a new lodging built, with four large bay windows glazed with the Beaufort portcullis and clusters of daisies or ‘marguerites’. After two weeks of entertainments, Lady Margaret hosted a select gathering in the great hall – only those related by blood to the family were admitted – to bid farewell to the young girl, Henry pressing into her hand a book of hours and telling her to write. The forthcoming marriage may have been key to Scottish peace, but both the king and his mother appeared reluctant to let go of the fragile thirteen-year-old, whose departure seemed to compound the recent family losses. Margaret, too, was his oldest surviving child. Should anything happen to Prince Henry, she would be heir – and the English throne would on her death pass to the Stuart kings of Scotland. Exactly a century later, on the death of Henry VII’s granddaughter Queen Elizabeth, this was precisely what would happen, as Margaret’s great-grandson James VI of Scotland became James I of England.1
As Margaret’s party made its way with appropriate pomp towards Scotland, minstrels and trumpeters playing ‘in all the departings of the towns and in the entering of the same’, Henry and his household progressed as far as Nottingham, where news came of another hammer blow: Sir Reynold Bray, Henry’s chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster and the mastermind behind his financial policies, was dead. As the king’s household turned back, Henry took stock. Heading southwest, he reached the duchy of Lancaster estates at Tutbury by 31 August; a week later, he moved south to Merevale Abbey. There, he paid for the new stained-glass depiction of his favoured Breton saint, Armel, a belated commemoration of his victory at nearby Bosworth. Little would have remained of the battle site, ploughed over for the last eighteen years, but the time of year and the ripening cornfields, which his forces had once trampled down as they advanced steadily towards Richard III’s armies, perhaps prompted memories of his fugitive past and of the carnage that had yielded his God-given victory, and the sense that his dynastic ambitions were, now, just as uncertain as they had been then. The death of Bray, one of the chief architects of his reign, only added to the sense of insecurity.2
Of Henry’s small group of intimate advisers, Bray was the man of whom he had earliest memories. Aged eleven, growing up in Raglan Castle in the care of his Yorkist custodian Sir William Herbert, Henry had received a visit from the thickset, shaggy-haired son of a Worcestershire bone-setter and blood-letter who was then his mother’s indefatigable steward, and who had presented the young boy with a bow and a quiverful of arrows. During Henry’s exile, Bray had worked on behalf of Lady Margaret, supplying information to the insurgency and, crucially, raising finance for the invasion through his network of contacts in the city of London. In the first cash-strapped years of the reign, Bray’s financial acumen had been critical. Appointed chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, the crown lands that the king ran as his own private estates, his brutally efficient methods of management and revenue-collection were quickly extended throughout Henry’s government. He was trusted implicitly by the king and his mother, and remained a vital channel of communication between them.
Over the years, Bray had become pre-eminent among those in Henry’s inner circle. It was said that, in their long, private conversations in the privy chamber, the abrasive, straight-talking midlander even contradicted the king; that he could, as an observer succinctly put it, ‘do anything’ with Henry. On one occasion, the ever- impecunious Sir Richard Guildford, loitering around the privy chamber in the hope of waylaying Bray in order to borrow money from him, was summarily dismissed to entertain Catherine of Aragon until Bray and the king had finished talking business. Later, when Guildford returned, Bray, ‘so multifariously charged’ with the king’s affairs, had vanished.3
A snapshot of Bray’s omnicompetence comes in a memorandum that he drew up late in 1502, as the regime recovered from the shock of Prince Arthur’s death. This wide-ranging to-do list shows exactly how far his remit extended. In it, he reminded himself to fine gaolers for escaped prisoners; to process the sales of royal wardships and marriages; to investigate customs offences (a shipload of tin had been impounded at Southampton docks ‘to our behalf’; Venetian shippers owed import duties on a thousand butts of sweet wine, which as far as Bray could make out, London’s customs officers ‘must answer for’); and the inevitable actioning of financial bonds. At the head of this list he had itemized ‘three great matters in especial’: running the rule over details in the king’s will; conducting an audit into the household accounts and ‘setting some good order therein’; and carrying out a wide- ranging investigation into all the ‘revenues and receipts’ of the king’s lands that had not been properly accounted.
All of which confirms what everybody knew: all roads led to Bray. With no formal office, no formal appointment by letters patent, he sat at the top of the tree, the king’s chief executive. As the many ingratiating letters to him attested, the highest nobles in the land trod the well-worn path to the door of their ‘loving friend’ Bray, knowing that a few words from him in the king’s ear could unlock the door to royal favour, plunge people into a lifetime of debt – or release them from it. For one petitioner, the son of Henry’s steward Lord Willoughby, Bray was behind only the king and Prince Henry in the pecking order of loyalties: ‘next to the king’s grace and my lord prince’, he wrote to Bray, he was bound ‘to owe you my service and [that of] all the friends I can make.’4
In his remorseless pursuit of the king’s interests, Bray had made himself enormously rich. The ways to profit from his position were legion, and he was good at all of them. He acquired plum crown offices, and, as the man who oversaw the king’s finances, knew best where the good deals were. He sold – on Henry’s behalf, naturally, although he took his cut – leases of crown lands, marriages to rich heiresses in the crown’s charge, and the custody of wards (the investment market in propertied minors, and widows for that matter, was booming). He received pensions, or financial retainers for access to royal favour, from several noblemen, and, indeed, the king of France. Then there was the sale of justice, in the form of fines and pardons for offences, or bonds whose conditions had, he and his colleagues had found, been broken. He bought up a vast portfolio of estates, which arced through eastern and
