prospects were.14
After memorizing the contents of Henry’s questionnaire, Savage was to slip it to the papal representative at Philip’s court: a man who Henry regarded, he wrote to Savage, as ‘one of his most intimate councillors’. For all Henry’s meticulous staking-out of Philip’s court, it said something that the contact who he valued most was Pedro de Ayala, previously Dona Elvira’s boss in England. De Ayala, who back in 1498 had offered one of the sharpest critiques of Henry and his style of government, was hardly a man of staunch English loyalties. In fact, he was a Castilian through and through – and, since Isabella’s death his allegiances had been transferred lock, stock and barrel to the court of Suffolk’s captor, Burgundy.
Henry tried every trick in the book. He peremptorily demanded that Maximilian extradite Suffolk’s younger brother Richard, in order that he could ‘make an example’ of him; he bribed Archduke Philip’s enemy, Guelders, brazenly denying he was doing so in the face of Philip’s irritation. He continued resolutely to hold in place the economic sanctions against Flanders that had been reimposed following Suffolk’s flight to Habsburg territory in 1501 – much to the chagrin of London’s merchant adventurers, who were now forced to sell all their textiles through the Calais staple, and to pay its substantial duties.15 But if all this constituted the stick, Henry was also prepared to offer the Habsburgs something besides his and his daughter’s hands in marriage: money, and on a scale that beggared belief.
Bribing princes had been an integral part of Henry’s strategy in dealing with Suffolk. As he watched the shifting currents of European politics, he could barely help but notice, as his first and most celebrated biographer put it, ‘the necessities and shifts for money of other great Princes abroad’ – particularly those who, like Maximilian, Ferdinand and Louis XII of France, were prosecuting ruinously expensive foreign wars. In April 1505, in the same week that saw the Garter procession through London, Henry’s chamber treasurer John Heron recorded an astonishing transaction. In exchange for ‘certain writings’, a secret understanding between Henry and Archduke Philip, the king ordered delivery of ?108,000 to the waiting ambassadors from Flanders – processed, very probably, by letters of credit supplied by Lodovico della Fava. A massive sum, it equated to Henry’s entire ordinary annual income.16 No other monarch in Europe could produce such quantities of hard cash. And it was not just danger money, but an irrefutable statement of the regime’s wealth and ambition, against which fugitive Plantagenet claims paled into insignificance.
As well as guarantees about Suffolk’s security, Henry was buying himself a seat at the dynastic high table of Europe. Archduke Philip was now the self-styled king of Castile and, as John Heron recorded in his neat secretary hand, the money was to fund Philip’s ‘next voyage unto Spain’ to mastermind the Habsburg takeover of Castile, and the extension of the empire of which Henry was determined to be a part.17
The question of how Henry could lay his hands on such prodigious quantities of liquid capital is one that has long exercised historians. There was of course his substantial French pension, paid annually, while the proceeds of his financial ‘aid’, granted by Parliament the previous year, were siphoned directly into his chamber accounts.18 Henry’s zealous financial administrators, with Edmund Dudley at their head, had started their drive to enforce and collect on financial bonds. But there was another source of income, too, one which has gone almost completely unnoticed. It was Henry’s trade in one of Europe’s most precious commodities, a trade that bound England closer to the Habsburgs, and which had the king’s broker, Lodovico della Fava, at its heart: alum.
A natural astringent and antiseptic, potassium alum was coveted for its medicinal and cosmetic properties. But in the late Middle Ages, it was used on an industrial scale in the textile industry of northern Europe as a dye- fixer, a property which made it indispensable to the functioning of the wool and cloth trades of England and the Low Countries. As a result, alum was very big business indeed. It was, in short, a mineral without which the Western economy would grind to a halt.19
In the Turkish-controlled eastern Mediterranean, alum was plentiful, but in Western Europe there was only one main source: the papal-owned mine complex at Tolfa, near Rome, where massive deposits of high-grade alum had been discovered back in 1462. To a perennially impecunious papacy, it was heaven-sent. Alum profits were assigned to the ‘crusade’, the all-encompassing term that the papacy gave for its expansionist projects under the fig-leaf of a Christian war of liberation against the Muslim Ottoman Empire. And those profits had to be maximized and protected.
In order to exploit its lucrative new resource to the full, the papacy assigned the Tolfa monopoly to a succession of banking firms, the first of which was the Medici; by 1501, it had been taken over by the Sienese bank of Agostino Chigi, who had built a reputation as the most ruthless businessman in Italy. In order to ring-fence its monopoly – an economic practice illegal in canon law and one that could only be validated by the excuse of the crusade – to restrict the supply of alum and keep prices high, the papacy operated cartels. It backed up this rigged market with the full range of spiritual threats and punishments, bulls visiting excommunication, anathema and perpetual condemnation on anybody trading alum illegally with the ‘infidel’ – that is, anybody who exported alum from anywhere except Tolfa.20 In the Low Countries, these controls had, more or less, been in place for two decades when Pope Julius II arrived on the scene in late 1503 and, needing income to fund his bellicose plans to restore papal power in central Italy, immediately ramped up the price of papal alum. The combination of high price and scarcity hit hard. The ensuing economic slump in the textile trade brought outbreaks of violence in the commercial centres of Bruges and Antwerp, which threatened to escalate into something bigger. Maximilian and Philip were very worried indeed.
They convened a group of merchants from Bruges to explore possible solutions to the crisis. There was, the merchants argued, only one way out: to fly in the face of papal injunctions and increase the supply of illegal alum from the eastern Mediterranean. Maximilian and Philip agreed – but as Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian could hardly be seen to flout papal decrees openly. Another option presented itself. The alum could go via England, where it would effectively be laundered to disguise its origin, then re-imported to the Low Countries. The middleman for this massive, illegal trade would be the Frescobaldi bank, whose European dominance and reach made it ideal – and whose representative in England was Henry’s own broker, Lodovico della Fava.21
Henry, of course, had made conspicuous efforts to toe the papal line, assiduous in his courting of successive popes. On Julius’s election in 1503 he had sent embassies and gifts, loudly proclaiming himself a faithful son of the church and expressing his desire to go on crusade, and had indulged Julius’s nepotism, lavishing favour and high office on the pope’s friends and relatives. Henry’s loyalty, it appeared, extended to the alum trade. He had a contract with the pope’s monopolist, Agostino Chigi, who imported substantial quantities of the mineral to England and whose representative, Francesco Tomasi, known popularly as ‘signore della lume’ – ‘Mr Alum’ – maintained a high profile in Austin Friars. But as he dutifully signed up for papal alum, Henry was up to his neck in the illegal alum racket. In fact, he had, it seems, been involved in it – or at the very least, had been well aware of its potential – from the very start of his reign.22
Back in February 1486, a Genoese merchant trading in England, Giovanni Ambrogio da Negroni, hearing of a Spanish ship en route to the Low Countries with an illegal consignment of alum, had sensed an opportunity. He hired a crew of English pirates, who waylaid the ship in the English Channel, boarded it, killed several of its crew and towed it into port in England. There, Negroni, flourishing papal legislation against illicit alum imports, had intended to appropriate the cargo on behalf of the ‘Apostolic treasury’ – no doubt taking a very healthy cut himself. But at this point a shadowy figure, a ‘certain Florentine merchant’, intervened with Henry through unnamed representatives. The merchant protested that there were no laws in England against the free trade in alum, and what Negroni had done – capturing the ship by force, without the king’s consent – was wrong. The protracted case became an international incident, and the pope intervened. Henry explained that he was desperate to favour the Apostolic See, but that his hands were tied; he could hardly go against existing laws of the land, not least, he added demurely, because ‘he was new to the kingdom’. Negroni and the pope lost their case; Henry, probably, was paid a large chunk of the alum proceeds by the grateful merchant.23
Who the ‘certain Florentine merchant’ was remains unknown – though it was, very possibly, della Fava himself. Whatever the case, when in 1504 della Fava came to Henry with details of the new Frescobaldi scheme, the king knew precisely what was involved and his eyes, it seems, lit up. The scheme was simple, and the potential profit margins enormous.
Through della Fava, Henry loaned capital to the Frescobaldi and licensed them ships, including his great carracks
