Conway would have instantly recognized: the benevolent demeanour masking a relentless probing for weakness and information. In the face of this, the only thing to do, Emerson said, was to play a straight bat. Plumpton should tell the king that he would be happy with any counsellors that the king chose to judge his case – except any of those ‘belonging to Mr Bray’, who would be sure to conclude the case in Empson’s favour. It was advice that spoke volumes for Bray’s dominance: nobody, however influential, wanted to be known to be intriguing against one of his men.15
Plumpton did well to listen, because his own friends at court were influential indeed. In February 1504, he wrote a Valentine’s-day letter to his wife from a wintry London, where he was trying vainly to move his ‘matter’ forward. Things were still stuck, but he was reassured by the king’s behaviour, and that of his own ‘good friends’: the bishop of Winchester and lord privy seal Richard Fox, Sir Thomas Lovell, Sir Richard Guildford, and Richard Weston. Although Guildford’s influence was fast waning, Fox and Lovell were perhaps the closest of the king’s advisers after Bray, while the pleasant, courteous Weston was one of the king’s secret servants. Behind the scenes, Plumpton’s matter was raised. Words were spoken in the king’s ear and counsellors were discreetly lobbied. Plumpton was granted immunity from arrest for his debts and could breathe again.
At first glance, it might seem surprising that Fox, Lovell and Guildford should have moved against Empson, a man with whom, along with his master Bray, they had worked since the beginning of the reign. But by 1504, when Henry’s select committee of counsellors met to judge Plumpton’s case, Bray was dead and as people circled, looking for opportunity, Empson was on the rise. Perhaps Plumpton’s ‘good friends’, long-established advisers and servants, looked askance at Empson’s hunger for power and influence. Then again, perhaps they just didn’t like him.
The death of Bray, the man who had come closest to understanding the workings of the king’s mind and who held the mechanisms of law-enforcement, security and fundraising in a fine balance, left Henry with a problem. With the cumulative crises of the past years, he was more wary than ever of the political nation, even of the counsellors around him, to whom he was increasingly disinclined to listen. His illness, too, had left him more withdrawn, exacerbating this remoteness. Henry’s relationship with the world around him seemed more than ever a financial one: where trust was replaced by contracts and the bonds of allegiance by the monitoring of behaviour, backed up by the ever-present threat of financial penalties. It seemed that written bonds and fines, the physicality of hard cash, jewels and plate, were more secure, more real to Henry than the intangible vagaries of men’s minds.
Henry seemed increasingly obsessed by the equation of security and money. His chamber system, informal and flexible, had developed to allow him personal control over the ever-increasing quantities of cash and financial sureties generated by the activities of Bray and his fellow counsellors. Sitting in his offices behind the high walls of Westminster Abbey sanctuary, the chamber treasurer John Heron and his small team of clerks recorded the receipt and expenditure of massive quantities of cash, written bonds and debts, their account books personally audited by the king, his spidery monogram adorning the bottom of every page – and, when in particularly obsessive mood, every accounting entry. Heron, too, supervised the siphoning-off of tens of thousands of pounds in gold into the king’s coffers, chests and strongboxes in the Tower, the treasury at Calais, the jewel house and other closely guarded ‘secret places’ where he accumulated cash and treasure, the fruits of Bray’s meticulous revenue- collection.
But even Heron didn’t know everything that went on. Much of the time, the king processed accounts himself. In the front of Heron’s book of receipts, he scribbled in a fluent, elegant hand pages of closely written description of monies accumulated from various sources: revenues from the Calais wool staple; from his French pension; a tranche of Prince Arthur’s marriage portion; speculations on the European currency markets handled by his favoured broker, the Bolognese financier Lodovico della Fava. His hands delving into bags of cash, Henry recorded money in Flemish gold, Spanish gold and silver, ‘Romish’ guilders and guilders from Utrecht, French Louis d’or and ‘crowns of soleil’. He examined hard currency with an intimate care, feeling in his hand the substance of each type of coin: ‘light crowns’, he noted, ‘good crowns’, and, most approvingly, ‘old weighty crowns’.16 These were the actions, not of a miser, but of a sophisticated financial mind; a king with a complex, all-consuming obsession with the control, influence and power that money represented, both at home and abroad.
Henry had taken a close personal interest in enforcing his rights. But now, at a time when he was stepping up the use of his financial sureties, he was physically unable to sign and oversee everything. With his Bosworth advisers dying off – and others, like Guildford, proving themselves inadequate – Henry needed people who would answer to him unconditionally, and whose work he could control. Characteristically, rather than hand over Bray’s all-encompassing role to another counsellor, he decided to split it up, portioning it between a number of administrators. At the centre, he could hold the strings himself.
The first signs of this reshuffle came towards the end of 1503, when the lawyer and financial specialist Robert Southwell started to take charge of the auditing duties, together with another colleague, the bishop of Carlisle William Sever. Like Southwell, Sever had worked closely with Bray as the king’s financial enforcer in the north of England. He was well used to spotting opportunities that might be manipulated ‘to the king’s advantage’ – the delicate phrase, beloved of Henry’s administrators, which belied a multitude of exploitative practices. Sever, who had a bleak sense of humour, put the reality rather better: in a note to Bray he once described his role as that of a ravening dog taking a bone from two others while they distractedly tore lumps out of each other.17 Under Southwell and Sever, the auditing process soon hardened into another informal tribunal, invested with the authority to oversee, vet and approve accounts – and, if there were evidence of malpractice or corruption, to follow it up with the council learned. In fact, given that both men were members of the council learned, they could simply put on their other hats and judge the case themselves.
At around the same time, Henry appointed a dedicated master of the wards. Bray had run this big and lucrative income stream with considerable success. Now, the job of buying and selling the legal control of minor heirs, their property and revenues, and sniffing out other opportunities for the crown to intervene (‘idiots’ mentally unable to manage their property, widows with no legal rights) was hived off to John Hussey, a bluff ex-colleague of Bray’s who had not long before displayed a dubious aptitude for the task by selling wardships for substantial backhanders. Hussey had been caught, fined and hit with the ubiquitous bonds into the bargain, something which, Henry may have felt, now made him all the more compliant a servant.18 That he was the son of one of Henry’s chief justices, was an ex-employee of the king’s mother, and had just married his son to Sir Thomas Lovell’s niece was all grist to the mill.19 There remained, however, a big, Bray-sized gap at the heart of Henry’s system. In the autumn of 1503 he found his man.
A sharp, silver-tongued and intellectually curious lawyer in his early forties, Edmund Dudley was from a good Sussex family, but – for him at least – one whose glory days were behind it. Though his grandfather was a baron and his uncle a bishop of Durham, his own father had been the younger son, meaning that for Edmund nobility, spiritual and temporal, had remained tantalizingly close but just out of reach. It was this, perhaps, as well as his fascination for the intricacies of law and a hungry ambition that simmered beneath his affability, which had driven his rise through the legal ranks. Enrolling at Gray’s Inn, Dudley had been shrewd enough to focus his work on one of the obscure – but, to the king, highly lucrative – prerogative statutes. In 1495, the year that Henry had started to take a sustained interest in his prerogative rights, Dudley had displayed his aptitude in a series of forensically brilliant readings; a year later, he took a job as under-sheriff in the London law courts. His appointment was a testament to his networking skills as well as his legal ability: relentless lobbying by ‘all the friends he could make’ led the city to overlook the fact that he was, as its chronicler disparagingly put it, a ‘poor man’ who did not possess the requisite wealth needed to maintain the dignity of such an office.20
During his six years working in London’s courts of justice, Dudley became intimately familiar with the city’s workings. He knew its corridors of power, its Guildhall politics, its major players – wealthy merchant-politicians like Sir Henry Colet and Sir William Capel – and the intricate web of rivalry, opportunism and mistrust that linked the city’s guilds and companies, from the the mercers and drapers to the goldsmiths and haberdashers. He understood, too, the mechanisms of commerce, international banking and trade, and the rampant sharp practice and corruption that flourished, from the coin-clipping and proliferation of illegal exchanges to the import-export rackets that the customs officers down at London’s port tried vainly to track – or, more commonly, to turn a blind eye to, or participate in. All of which made him familiar with London’s alien communities, from the Thamesside ghetto of the Hanse Steelyard, whose high, fortified walls contained a whole German- and Dutch-speaking world – houses, gardens, warehouses bursting with fish, timber, furs, wax and Rhenish wine – to the Italian merchant-bankers, dominated by the great Florentine houses of Frescobaldi, the Bonvisi of Lucca, and the Genoese Grimaldi.
Dudley, in fact, seemed particularly drawn to the Italian merchant-bankers. Clustered around Lombard Street and their religious and commercial centre of Austin Friars, whose precincts formed the centre of London’s
