Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

back to the beginning of the reign, Henry scribbled that ‘Dudley hath taken charge, to make our proof of all those [debts] that be unpaid.’

From the king’s privy chamber, from John Heron’s treasury offices in the shadow of Westminster Abbey, Dudley and his clerk John Mitchell carried away bags and boxes of legal and financial documents. Heron sat at a desk, itemizing the files that Dudley had taken away to ‘keep and pursue unto the use and behove of our sovereign lord’: in this unregulated and unaccountable system, there was no way Heron was going to get caught without a paper trail. All this work, moreover, would be done not from government offices, but from Dudley’s own house in Candlewick Street, deep within the city of London.³⁸

Dudley set to work with a will, sifting through pages and pages of suspended fines, looking at who had defaulted, or broken the conditions under which the fines had been made. Henry and Dudley would discuss individual cases, heads together, Dudley’s account book open in front of them. Then, they would decide on an appropriate financial penalty; the king signed each page of Dudley’s book. Still an esquire, and in his early forties – young, compared to the Bosworth generation who comprised the majority of Henry’s close financial advisers – Dudley had, quite suddenly, become a mini-Bray. Invested with direct sovereign authority, this ambitious London lawyer was answerable to nobody but the king. It was a meteoric, heady rise.

It was easy to understand what the king saw in the pleasant and intellectually sophisticated Dudley. He had a creative way with the penal laws and statutes in which he was expert, deploying the obscure, semi-French patois of the common lawyers – a ‘barbarous tongue’, as the sixteenth-century lawyer Thomas Starkey put it – with a precise smoothness. Like most common lawyers, he believed strongly in the supremacy of the king’s law, and was keen to show Henry how it could be made to do what he wanted it to. Then, too, there was Dudley’s London background: his awareness of the ‘large profits and customs’ that could be gained from trade and his ability to action them. Dudley, as it would transpire, was more than a lawyer; he also knew how to cut a deal.³⁹

In Dudley, too, the impulse of service was concentrated. Parachuted into a position of exceptional influence, he was not about to speak truth to power in the direct way that somebody like Bray, his relationship with the king forged in adversity and tempered over decades of service, had done. Dudley may have been experienced in the ways of the courtroom, of city-hall politics and the grubby world of financial corruption, but now he was exposed to a rarefied, intoxicating atmosphere: that of proximity to the king, to sovereign power. He was not going to start advising Henry, as Bray had done, that it was better that certain lines should not be crossed, or, as Lovell did, that it was occasionally worth ‘respiting’ people.⁴⁰ Grasping immediately what the king wanted to achieve, that his ‘security standeth much in plenty of treasure’, Dudley would go out of his way to provide it, by any means necessary. He was now a royal servant, his new post held at the king’s pleasure – and his own career path, his future success and wealth lay in ‘studying to serve’. He was hardly about to start examining his conscience. Ultimately, he was a yes-man. And that, increasingly, was how Henry liked it.

In fact, as Dudley would later write, there were plenty of servants who, in pursuing the king’s causes, would go ‘further than conscience requireth … oftentimes to win a special thank of the king’ – all the while lining their own pockets and pursuing their own private vendettas, ‘their own quarrels, grudges or malice’. Dudley, though, would prove even more zealous than his colleagues in the pursuit of the king’s interests, and of his own. Henry, undoubtedly, had noticed that Dudley possessed the tireless willingness of the attack dog.⁴¹

On the same day that Dudley entered royal service, John Mordaunt died unexpectedly, after a short illness. That October, Sir Richard Empson received the call that he had been waiting for: Henry handed him the seals of the duchy of Lancaster, and with them the ultimate responsibility for enforcing the king’s rights, presiding over the council learned in the law.

As 1504 drew to a close, Empson and Dudley had emerged among the leading group of Henry’s lawyer- counsellors. With them came the full flowering of a system which, intended for efficient administration and swift justice, was beginning to resemble something very different, with its twisting and distorting of law and the exploitation of legal technicalities, the indiscriminate suspension of due process and, above all, the imposition of financial penalties in all shapes and sizes: bonds, recognizances, obligations.

The only person who was really sure how this curiously contingent form of government worked was the king, in whose hands the various threads – the court of wards and audits, the council learned, the counsellors who came together in small groups to take bonds and fines on the king’s behalf, Dudley’s financial freelancing – all came together. The way Henry’s councils functioned was legal – indeed, it was founded on forensic research into and rigorous application of the law – but it was not normal or customary, and nor, for the most part, was it just. Its processes were extrajudicial, existing outside courts of record, and they depended entirely on the king’s personal control. A system which encouraged and thrived on informers, which functioned by the arbitrary use of ‘sharp letters’ and subpoenas, and which was enforced with punitive fines, it was unpredictable, unaccountable, unchallengeable and terrifying. Edmund Dudley himself summed it up in a nutshell. It was, he said, ‘extraordinary justice’.⁴²

But over all this hovered the unanswered – and unanswerable – question, posed by the officials at Calais, by the great lords, and discussed in lowered voices in taverns and households throughout the land. If the king died before the prince was of an age to rule, what then?

Our Second Treasure

In the hot, dry June of 1504, Prince Henry and his household came to court. They arrived at Richmond in time for midsummer. The Nativity of St John the Baptist, on the 24th, was one of the great days of estate: processions, masses in the Chapel Royal, feasting and, in the evening, a ‘void’ involving wine, a spice-plate and sweetmeats. It was, too, the solstice, midsummer night, marked with pageants and passion plays, and by the great bonfire scented with branches of birch and fennel, built by the pages of the hall, its flames leaping into the dark. In the privy garden, the king’s secret servants kept watch in their doublets and gowns of black satin and damask. It was a time that, despite the ordered ritual and liturgy, still resonated with magic and unruliness, disorder and instability. Whatever the prince felt about it that June – excitement and anticipation, probably – it would come to trouble him; 24 June, he noted decades later, was a date associated with ‘sundry occasions of evil’.¹

His arrival had been deliberately planned. Turning thirteen on 28 June, he was on the threshold of adolescentia, the age when boyhood merged into adulthood. Since his mother’s death over a year previously, through the rumours, alerts, arrests and executions, he had remained with his sisters out at the backwater of Eltham, apart from the occasional visit to court. Now, however, things were changing. He was moving into the royal household, where he would live with the father he hardly knew.²

Henry’s reasons for leaving his son at Eltham had been pragmatic. The repeated crises of the past years had left him with his hands full, at a time when he was battling constantly with illness. And, very probably, he was in a quandary about precisely how to bring the boy up.

By the age of seven, Prince Arthur had had his own independent household and council in the Welsh Marches, and was already gaining the hands-on experience deemed so necessary for kingship. From afar, the king had kept in constant touch with the prince’s council, who reported on his progress and on anything untoward, including any ‘unprincely demeaning’ on Arthur’s part – and on the behaviour of members of his household. Since Elizabeth’s death, he had been doing the same for Prince Henry, gradually reshaping his son’s household from the establishment of his infancy into one fit for an adolescent heir to the throne. He did so in conjunction with that stickler for organization, his mother, and the prince’s grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort.³

In the intervening years, the prince’s household had taken on a new tone. His footmen and personal servants were now dressed, not in the blue and tawny of the duke of York, but in tawny and black: royal colours.⁴ The female-dominated atmosphere of his early years had changed, too. His lady mistress Elizabeth Denton, the woman who had been like a second mother to him, had had her wages paid up and left the prince’s service to become a gentlewoman in Lady Margaret’s household. Several new, male, servants joined him. Many of them, in their late teens and early twenties, had spent the greater part of their lives in royal service, like the devout Welshman William Thomas, previously one of Prince Arthur’s close attendants, and Ralph Pudsey, a groom of Henry VII’s chamber who became the prince’s waiter and keeper of his jewellery. Among them was a man called William Compton. A ward of court from the age of eleven following the death of his father, a minor Warwickshire landowner, Compton had been brought up among the menial servants of the royal household, learning how to serve. It was an education that, now aged twenty-two, he had fully absorbed, knowing when to speak and