southern England, much of it compulsorily purchased. He played the administrator’s trick of trapping people in debt to the crown, then setting fines so high that people were unable to pay them; he took over their debts in exchange for their land, sold to him at knockdown prices. He built houses and palaces, employed thousands of staff, and kept a fine wardrobe. His most prized possession was ‘a gown of crimson with the hood lined with white sarcenet of the order of Saint George’, his robe of the Order of the Garter, into which he had been elected along with the likes of Sir Thomas Lovell; Bray’s coat of arms still scatter the ceiling of the Garter’s spiritual home, St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle, into which he ploughed funds. Not only was Bray more powerful than most nobles; he looked like one too. The crucial difference was that he owed everything he had to the king. Bray, in short, did what all Henry’s counsellors and servants were doing – only he did it best.5
Bray had played an instrumental role in the development of Henry’s peculiar system of government. Over the years, his influence, and that of his duchy of Lancaster staff, had spread inexorably into the flexible, protean committees, offshoots of the king’s council, which hunted down and exploited the king’s prerogative rights, which sliced through the intractable meanderings of the common law courts like a hot knife through butter – and which helped generate the revenues that flooded into Henry’s chamber treasury, bypassing the grindingly slow process of the exchequer. By 1500, Bray’s name had become synonymous with one such tribunal, which enforced the king’s rights with a zealous rigour and which would become the most infamous expression of Henry’s rule.6
The tribunal’s name, in a sense, said it all. The phrase by which it referred to itself, and by which it came to be known by its victims, the ‘council learned in the law’ – or ‘council learned’ for short – was a generic term used to refer to a body of lawyers retained by a nobleman to arbitrate on cases within their private jurisdiction, or by a rich merchant to provide legal advice. The council headed by Bray, therefore, didn’t really have a name. It didn’t have a fixed membership either: consisting generally of a small quorum of between six and nine of the king’s counsellors, specialists in law or administration, its composition constantly mutated. And it was never legally constituted.
The council learned’s presence, unsurprisingly, was elusive. Its minute books rarely recorded the dates of its sessions, or names of attendees.7 Sometimes it met in the warren of government offices housing the exchequer and chancery that led off Westminster Hall; sometimes in the duchy of Lancaster’s rooms at St Bride’s on the western edge of the city, between Fleet Street and the Thames, and conveniently near the duchy’s favoured place of incarceration a few minutes’ frogmarch away from its offices, the Fleet prison. More often than not, it met simply where a few of its members happened to be gathered – at Greenwich or Richmond, or wherever the king was in residence. Given that its clerk, William Heydon, didn’t even know where the council learned was convening half the time, it was unsurprising that defendants hauled before it didn’t, either: one man who had travelled down from Nottingham in answer to a summons protested to the council that he had been in London for a week and ‘could not have knowledge where he should appear’.
The methods by which it worked were equally opaque. It was fed by a constant stream of information supplied by a well-entrenched network of retainers, agents and informers. Its subpoenas – consisting of a summons stamped with the privy seal, or a ‘sharp letter’ from the king or one of his counsellors – could be delivered by anyone, even an anonymous messenger. These writs rarely, if ever, stated a precise charge – simply a demand that the defendant should turn up in response to some unspecified accusation: ‘to answer to such things as shall be objected against him’.8 And because the council learned was not a recognized court of law, and its writs were not formally enrolled when they were issued, the defendant had to appear clutching the subpoena that he had been served. A process that filled people with fear, frustration and rage, it bypassed and overrode the common law courts, plucking people out of the normal workings of the legal system and hauling them straight in front of a panel invested with the king’s ultimate judicial authority. Henry himself never attended the council’s hearings, but then he didn’t have to. It was the perfect expression of his will, and of his personal rule – with Bray at its head.9
In a royal household which, underneath the carefully calibrated magnificence, was suffused with uncertainty and watchfulness, Bray’s men were everywhere, eyes on the lookout, ears pricked for loose talk. Sir John Mordaunt, a grizzled Middle-Temple lawyer who had fought for Henry at Bosworth, was increasingly prominent. So too was the duchy receiver-general John Cutt, a man with a no-nonsense attitude to interrogation: suspecting one of his household servants of stealing, he had dragged him into a privy and put a knife to his throat, stating bluntly that if the servant didn’t produce the stolen goods there and then, he would kill him. Then there was the auditor Robert Southwell, one of the small group of men who helped Henry cross-check his accounts, and another assiduous supplier of intelligence reports on flaky loyalties.10
Bray also had friends among the king’s secret servants, including William Smith, a man who worked closely with Bray and the council learned as a revenue-collector and financial enforcer. Wearing his other hat, Smith was page of the king’s wardrobe of robes, the personal wardrobe in which the king’s clothes were stored in a carefully organized sequence of racks, shelves and presses, and which was connected with the king’s privy chamber via a back stair. In this capacity, he was constantly about the king: brushing, storing and preparing his clothes, dressing him, handling petty cash and buying necessaries.11 As one of Perkin Warbeck’s keepers, Smith had turned provocateur, enticing him into trying to escape and providing Henry with the excuse he needed to lock the pretender in the Tower and to disfigure and mutilate him so that he no longer resembled the Yorkist prince he claimed to be.
If, as the Calais treasurer Sir Hugh Conway had feared, Lord Daubeney’s men were ‘strong in the king’s court’, so too, in their different way, were Bray’s. As a landed noble, Daubeney brought into the king’s service retainers from his own regional estates, men whose loyalties, in the final analysis, lay with him. Bray’s men were among those who, in John Skelton’s words, stood in small groups in the corridors of power ‘in sad communication’, who ‘pointed and nodded’ meaningfully, who strolled through the galleries and chambers in constant motion so as not to be overheard, who ‘wandered aye and stood still in no stead’.12
One of the regular faces on the council learned was Bray’s right-hand man Richard Empson. A Middle- Temple-trained lawyer and career bureaucrat, Empson had been the duchy’s attorney-general under Edward IV, before being sacked by Richard III – possibly owing to his connection with Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, whom Richard had summarily executed in 1483. Bad associations under Richard III, however, tended to be good ones in the new regime, and Empson was reappointed the same day as his new boss, Bray. Like his mentor and colleagues, Empson combined tireless service to the crown with tireless self-advancement. A suave, able networker – ‘he maketh his friends’, as one observer put it – his political career burgeoned. In 1497, he gained the dubious distinction of being named by Warbeck as prominent among the king’s ‘low-born and evil counsellors’.13
In one of the long-running legal battles characteristic of the age, Empson had tried to disinherit the Yorkshire knight Sir Robert Plumpton in favour of his own daughter, aiming to land some prime pieces of real estate for himself in the process. No angel himself, Plumpton wilted in the face of Empson’s sustained campaign of intimidation and perversion of the course of justice, leading one of Plumpton’s relatives to condemn the counsellor’s ‘utter and malicious enmity, and false craft’. One of Empson’s associates, accompanied by a group of servants, assaulted a bailiff of Plumpton’s, battering him almost to death before making him sign a statement in their favour. At a hearing at the York assizes in 1502, Empson appeared with a powerful display of muscle. Among two hundred servants, all wearing the red rose badge, were a number of Henry’s household knights and members of the king’s own security forces, the yeomen of the guard, who showed Empson exaggerated respect, holding the counsellor’s stirrup as he swung himself down from his horse. Suitably cowed, the jury returned in Empson’s favour, plunging Plumpton deep into debt. With these liveried retinues, Empson was behaving more like a member of the high nobility than the government lawyer he was. His appearance, Plumpton bitterly recalled, would have been more fitting for a duke.14
The all-pervasive influence of Bray and his men was evident in an anxious letter to Plumpton from one of his legal advisers, written the following year. Having been stitched up by Empson at the York assizes, Plumpton was now desperately trying to appeal to the king’s council. The Lincoln’s Inn lawyer George Emerson, hanging around the Westminster law-courts monitoring his case, sent him some judicious words of advice.
Should Plumpton gain an audience with the king, Emerson wrote, he would very likely ask Plumpton to propose the names of counsellors ‘which you would should have examination of your matters’. But, Emerson insisted, Plumpton should name nobody. The king would immediately assume that any names he mentioned would be biased in Plumpton’s favour – and, more to the point, his own allies at court would be revealed: ‘your friends should be known’. Emerson’s portrait of Henry’s counter-intuitive methods was one that courtiers from Soncino to
