control – something to which the young princess seemed oblivious or was unable to do anything about. Henry wrote to her that he was sorry that the few servants she had ‘cannot live in peace with one another’, and urged her to put her house in order with help from her parents. Because Catherine’s servants were all Spanish, he was careful to add, the problem was out of his jurisdiction. But in confusion, Henry had, as ever, seen opportunity.
Confronted with a stream of reports detailing the breakdown of order in Catherine’s household, Isabella had decided a firm hand on the tiller was needed. Following Catherine’s betrothal to Prince Henry, the influence of her duenna Dona Elvira had slackened. But by October 1504 Dona Elvira was back in charge and Catherine was once more on a short leash. What was more, when Catherine and her servants rejoined the royal household at Westminster that Christmas, she was kept in the ‘same rule, seclusion and observance as in her own house’. Even de Puebla, who detested Dona Elvira and her latent Castilian tendencies, agreed that this increased discipline was a good idea – and Henry, he wrote, particularly approved. But the king had done more than approve the new arrangements. Behind the scenes, he had evidently been lobbying hard for Dona Elvira’s reappointment. He insisted to de Puebla both that Catherine should not find out about his involvement and that the changes in the running of her household remain concealed. To reinforce the princess’s public image and authority, Henry sent her a magnificent gold headdress – but there was no doubt who was pulling the strings. After Isabella’s death that winter, Dona Elvira’s ascendancy brought Henry further benefits. Her close ties to her brother, Don Manuel, meant that Durham House was now a useful diplomatic back-channel to the Burgundian court – and hence to Castile.6
Throughout the first half of 1505, Henry kept up appearances with Ferdinand. Apart from anything else, he was preoccupied with his own remarriage, and Catherine’s parents had proposed a bride for him. That May, he dispatched two of his privy servants, Hugh Denys’s sidekick James Braybroke and the diminutive Breton Francis Marzen, to the Aragonese court at Valencia, to look into the state of the twenty-seven-year-old Giovanna, queen of Naples. They took with them a questionnaire drawn up by the king himself, who was determined not to accept her ‘if she were ugly, and not beautiful’. This meticulously compiled document covered everything from Giovanna’s finances to her personal attributes: her figure, her face – including eye colour, complexion and breath – to neck, breasts and facial hair. Marzen and Braybroke studied her carefully and compiled the answers minutely. The young queen wore a mantle, concealing much of her body. She was short and plump, making her appear ‘somewhat round’, but vivacious and attractive, with grey-brown eyes, clear, fair skin, and ‘great, full’ breasts – though they could not approach close enough to find out whether she had bad breath. But if all this appealed to Henry, her financial assets were less enticing.7
Having sent their dispatch, Marzen and Braybroke moved on to the second part of their mission. Travelling on to Ferdinand’s court, then at Segovia, ostensibly to cement the Anglo-Aragonese entente, they were to find out as much as possible about the newly precarious situation in Spain, and about the likely reception that Philip and Juana would meet with when they arrived to claim the crown of Castile.8 Unbeknown to Ferdinand, Henry had already started making new overtures to the Habsburgs. And he was using Catherine and her fractured household to do so.
Some months before Marzen and Braybroke set off, Henry had reopened negotiations with the Habsburgs over a marriage contract between his younger daughter Mary, and Philip and Juana’s infant son Charles of Ghent; and for himself, with Philip’s sister, the wealthy, recently widowed Margaret of Savoy. It was a match that both Philip and Maximilian, with an eye on Henry’s overflowing coffers, were quick to encourage – though the prospective bride was said to be less than keen. Later that year Henry sat for a portrait, to be sent to Margaret of Savoy.
The finished painting, which was to become Henry’s most celebrated portrait, provides a snapshot of the king as he approached his fiftieth year. He wears a gown of rich crimson velvet cloth-of-gold trimmed with white fur, and – a nod to the Anglo-Habsburg entente cordiale – his collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece, Burgundy’s answer to the Garter. The ubiquitous black felt cap and dark shoulder-length hair flecked with grey frame a face whose sharply defined, hollowed cheekbones suggest the illnesses he had suffered, but whose firm chin and set mouth express firmness of purpose. His long, fine hands rest lightly on the border of the painting itself: the right clasping a small bouquet of red roses, the tips of the fingers of his left perching on it, anticipatory. Rather than looking detachedly off-camera, his characteristic sidelong glance causes him to look directly out of the frame; his uneven, heavy-lidded eyes glinting, the interrogatory stare with its arched left eyebrow. This was the public Henry, regal, coolly appraising, the reader of the viewer’s inmost thoughts. The reality, though, was rather different.9
Henry’s prolonged intelligence operation against the earl of Suffolk had had its successes. Some time in 1504 Sir Robert Curzon had resurfaced in Calais. Henry’s agents had worked away on the precarious loyalties of the man whose conversations with Emperor Maximilian had prepared the ground for Suffolk’s flight. Having succumbed to the king’s ‘importunate labour’ – bribery and the offer of a royal pardon – the rogue captain of Hammes had once again switched sides.10 Curzon was now doing very well indeed out of his treachery. Drawing a handsome annual salary of ?400 from the king’s chamber, he was also renting the lands of Suffolk’s unfortunate steward, Thomas Killingworth, which the king had annexed.11 And, in Calais, he was liaising with the man who had in all probability turned him, the spymaster Sir John Wilshere. Both men continued to receive substantial quantities of cash for their intelligence operation against Suffolk. One of the men through whom they received funds was a banker from Bologna, Lodovico della Fava.
Of the cluster of Italian merchant-bankers at court who ‘never stopped giving the king advices’, della Fava had emerged as the king’s favoured broker. For years, he had been head of the London branch of the Medici bank, following which he led the English operation of one of the firms that had filled the vacuum left by the Medici’s collapse, the Florentine bank of Frescobaldi. Della Fava was involved in the usual trade in fine Italian imports – gold, silks, satins and damasks. But he had gained Henry’s affections through finance: offering the king business opportunities, investing large sums of money on the international currency markets on his behalf, taking delivery of iron coffers full of coin, and preparing bankers’ drafts, to be cashed at other Frescobaldi offices across Europe. In 1502 Girolamo Frescobaldi, della Fava’s boss in the bank’s Bruges headquarters, had overseen Henry’s ?10,000 payment to Maximilian; indeed, he had been the only banker willing or able to arrange the transfer of ‘so great a sum’. The Frescobaldi proved particularly Anglophile. The following year, the head of its Florentine branch, Francisco, welcomed an eighteen-year-old English boy into his household, training him as a clerk. His name was Thomas Cromwell.12
Payments to Lodovico della Fava peppered Henry’s accounts. He seemed part of the furniture, submitting expenses claims ‘upon his bill’ to the king’s chamber treasurer John Heron for all the world like one of Henry’s regular privy chamber staff. Della Fava, it was clear, had the king’s confidence. Not only did he handle funds from the king’s French pension, but he oversaw payments to Henry’s spies and key intelligence officers abroad: cash to Wilshere and Curzon at Calais, letters of credit to Matthew Baker and Sir Charles Somerset in France. Della Fava was one of the vital cogs that kept Henry’s information network ticking over, liberally supplied with funds.13
But by 1505, this formidable operation had drawn a blank as far as Suffolk was concerned. Henry’s men roamed through Flanders’ febrile patchwork of heavily militarized city-states, watched and listened among the expatriate merchant communities, and floated around the courts of Burgundy and France. With the flourish of a token, a handshake, or the uttering of a codename, information was filtered through the counting-houses and warehouses of Antwerp; posts galloped along the roads of the Low Countries, while dispatches streamed through Calais, and were passed off the merchant galleys arriving in London from the Flanders ports. But nobody could provide the breakthough that Henry so desperately wanted.
In one of his characteristically detailed questionnaires, encrypted and sent to his point man at the Burgundian court, Anthony Savage, Henry laid bare his concerns. After a long series of questions about Margaret of Savoy, he came to the crunch. What was likely to become of the earl of Suffolk – or, as Henry referred to him, Edmund de la Pole? Did Maximilian favour him, in words or deeds? Was Philip in cahoots with the duke of Guelders over Edmund’s imprisonment there? What were the duke’s plans for Edmund? Did he like him, or not? Was he keeping the earl closely guarded, or was he given freedom to move around? Apart from the obvious security value of such answers to his agents, Henry’s questions betrayed his own anxieties. Henry himself, when dealing with previous pretenders, had made a point of belittling them to emphasize their low birth and insubstantiality: Simnel had been set to work as a spit-turner in the royal kitchens, while Warbeck had been kept at court as a whimsical curio, an object of amusement – until the joke had finally worn thin. But as a genuine aristocrat of the blood, Suffolk would be treated far differently by his captors. How he was being kept, moreover, would reveal just how credible they felt his
