Around the same time, Empson was up to his old tricks.
That month, the king’s chapelman William Cornish was waylaid and beaten up by Empson’s men and immured in the Fleet, the notorious debtors’ prison sandwiched between the city’s western wall and the river from which it took its name, the sluggish open sewer that seeped out into the nearby Thames at Blackfriars. Cornish was not formally charged. His crime, though, seems to have been the spreading of rumour – ‘false news’ or, as he put it, ‘false information’ – a serious, statutory offence, against which Henry had legislated early in the reign. Cornish pleaded his innocence, in a poem that he addressed to the king himself.31
In ‘A Treatise between Truth and Information’, Cornish took the court poet’s typical precaution of veiling his complaint in allegory – as Skelton put it, ‘metaphora, allegoria withal’ was the poet’s ‘protection, his pavis and his wall’.32 But there was no mistaking Cornish’s message. He had, he wrote, been the victim of a travesty of justice. His poem, riddled with fear and bewilderment, hinted at the palpable atmosphere of unease that hung over the royal household. What he – or rather his allegorical narrator, Truth – had tried to do was to speak out against an injustice perpetrated in the king’s name, one that the king would surely right if only he knew about it.
The scene of the poem was Cornish’s own stamping-ground, the Chapel Royal, where the choir were performing one of the soaring polyphonic masses for which Cornish and his colleagues were renowned, sung from the chapel’s elaborate illuminated songbooks. But one of the choristers, Truth, was finding the music difficult to follow. It was burdensome, badly written ‘with force’ and ‘lettered with wrong’; what was more, his voice was weak and hoarse, people couldn’t hear it. After ‘a day or two’ off resting his voice and eating sugar candies to soothe his vocal cords, Truth took his place among his colleagues, determined to sing out ‘true and plain’. But there were those who hated what he was singing, who had ‘spite’ at his song, and would do whatever they could ‘to have it sung wrong’. Chief among them was another singer called Information, who was ‘so curious in his chanting’ that his loud, over-intricate variations turned Truth’s melody into a cacophony, distorting, stifling and twisting his ‘true plain song’.
Cornish’s nightmarish musical vision was the same world that Conway, Nanfan and Norton’s anxious conversation had figured forth: of suspicion and rumour, where true loyalties had been displaced by something else, and which was dominated by informers who, in Cornish’s words, ‘disgorge their venom’. In this warped universe, he wrote, false information ruled truth, and people believed that ‘the righteous shall do wrong’.
There were shades, too, of Emerson’s warning to Plumpton to keep his causes and his friends secret. Cornish had ‘sounded out’ influential support, trying out his music on ‘both knight and lord’, but ‘none would speak’. Inadvisedly, he had gone it alone and spoken out. If only he could have a proper hearing, and the due process of law, he could prove his case.
Cornish was of course drawing on a rich literary tradition that portrayed the court as hell, much as Skelton had done in his
What exactly Cornish had said or written to provoke Empson’s brutal response can probably never be known. There seems little doubt, though, that he had got caught up in the power politics of court, and in particular with interests opposed to the ever-increasing influence of Empson and his fellow financial counsellors. One name suggests itself: Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, who, weeks before Cornish had been thrown in prison, had narrowly escaped being shot by Archbishop Savage’s men. Northumberland had a taste for literature and, whether or not he had had anything to do with Cornish’s poem, its vision of a duplicitous court governed by false information spoke strongly to him: he ordered his secretary to copy it painstakingly into a manuscript of collected verse.
Henry’s bond against Empson was a slap across the wrist of the kind he was fond of, a warning shot against those who were too free in wielding the power he had invested in them. But while Cornish had escaped, the dangers of voicing healthy criticism of the king’s counsellors were all too evident – and the beating-up and incarceration of one of the high-profile cultural mouthpieces at court had its effect. Cornish would think very hard before speaking out again, as for that matter would others. Gradually, the pressure-valve of dissent and satire, through which court voiced its criticism, would be shut off. When the inevitable explosion came, it would be all the greater.
That August, messengers rode out from Westminster into all parts of the country, carrying with them copies of a royal proclamation, the king’s elaborate scrawl in the top-left hand corner, the signatures of counsellors at the bottom and the heavy wax disc of the great seal attached, to be proclaimed in marketplaces and affixed to church doors throughout the country.34 In it, after a preamble stating his love for his subjects and his desire for justice, Henry stated that anyone who could ‘reasonably and truly’ claim that they had been wrongfully indebted to the king, that their property rights had been violated, or that the crown had otherwise done them ‘any wrong’, could submit a complaint in writing at any time in the following two years, up to Michaelmas 1506, to any of seven named officials: Fox, the king’s secretary Thomas Ruthal and Geoffrey Symeon, dean of the chapel royal, all civil lawyers, and the common lawyers Thomas Lovell, the two chief justices, and the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster John Mordaunt.35
The proclamation seems to have been prompted in part by one of the periodic fits of spiritual conscience to which Henry, acutely aware of his failing health, was increasingly prone. Not long before, he had ruefully acknowledged in a letter to his pious mother that most of his appointments to the bench of bishops had been motivated by distinctly temporal impulses. William Warham, his new archbishop of Canterbury and a man whose attributes included ‘cunning and worldly wisdom’, was the latest in a long line of lawyers and diplomats – men like Morton and Fox, the venal Savage, Adriano Castellesi – whom Henry had favoured with rich bishoprics. Warham’s promotion had been, the king baldly explained, more about doing ‘us and our realm good and acceptable service’ than about his spiritual qualities.
Now, as Henry wrote to Lady Margaret, he planned the rapid promotion of her devout, ascetic confessor, John Fisher, to the bishopric of Rochester for very different reasons: ‘for the great and singular virtue that I know and see in him’. Not that it was a particularly grandiloquent gesture – one of the poorest sees in England, Rochester was hardly an attractive office with which to reward people of influence – but Henry was anxious about the state of his soul, and about his legacy. All this appeared to chime with Henry’s proclamation: a slate-cleaning exercise, an expression of the king’s justice, mercy and good government, and an act of repentance and remorse. It seemed, almost, as though he were already preparing to meet his maker. But, as always with Henry, there was a flip side. Issued alongside the king’s ever more constricting programme of investigation, surveillance and enforcement, and the tribunals that applied the ‘due order and course of his laws’ in direct and punitive ways, the proclamation allowed Henry to have his cake and eat it. Having salved his conscience, the king was about to put in place the latest piece in his jigsaw of finance and security.36
On 11 September 1504, as he wrote on the first leaf of a new account book, Edmund Dudley entered royal service. He had been made a royal counsellor, drawing a substantial annual salary of a hundred marks. This simple title, though, hid the extraordinary role that he had been given.
The king had made it quite clear what he required of Dudley. Henry, he later wrote, wanted ‘many persons in danger at his pleasure … bound to his grace for great sums of money.’ Dudley was to sniff out every and any legal infraction, any opportunity for applying the law ‘to the king’s advantage’. He was then to punish such violations by ‘a simple bond absolute payable at a certain day, for his grace would have them so made’. In other words, Henry was giving him a free hand to do what Bray, Lovell and his other financial administrators had been doing – but Dudley’s new role had a particular intensity and focus. He had been made a kind of chief financial enforcer, with a free hand to sniff out all potential sources of revenue due under the king’s rights. Although he would work alongside the nebulous council learned, Dudley had been given a roving brief. He would operate on his own – and report directly to Henry himself.37
Rummaging through the assorted books, parchment rolls and bundles of indentures detailing old debts and fines, bonds taken over years, decades, long-forgotten and never chased up, the king handed them over to Dudley to investigate, and to action. On one book, a list of suspended fines taken in the court of King’s Bench stretching
