the vast mine complex at Phocaea on the Gulf of Smyrna; in London, della Fava then brokered deals onwards to the Low Countries.25 For all parties except the pope, it was a win-win situation. Despite the re- importation charges and massive customs duties demanded by Henry, the Frescobaldi could still get an excellent price for alum – which was for the purchaser still much cheaper than the stuff that came from Tolfa. For Henry, the increased flow of cheaper alum placated English merchants and drapers, allowed him further control over the alum supply and therefore the textile industry, and in the process increased his revenues. All he had to do was to supply money to della Fava and turn a blind eye. At Henry’s shoulder, helping him broker the deals, was Edmund Dudley, with his intimate knowledge of London’s customs and excise.
Henry stood to make a lot of money out of the racket. Duties payable on each ‘quintal’ or hundredweight of alum seem to have been in the region of one mark, or 13s 4d. In one import licence alone, the merchant in question was instructed to bring in 13,000 quintals of alum, which, snapped up by industries in England and the Low Countries, would yield the king a cool ?8,666 13s 4d. Another alum shipment brokered by Henry, Dudley and della Fava, the biggest single mercantile deal of the reign, was worth ?15,166 13s 4d.26
All of which, too, added a further level of sophistication to Henry’s vast ?108,000 ‘loan’ to Philip in the spring of 1505. Unwilling to get involved in foreign wars directly, Henry was nevertheless desperate to remain at the heart of European power politics. With his grasp of the financial and commodity markets, surrounded by sharp advisers and with ample funds, he knew a better way of brokering power: through investments and capital flows he could, he felt, manoeuvre the situation to his advantage, tip the scales one way or the other as it suited him. But in all this he had, quietly, determined one thing. Ferdinand had had his chance to marry Catherine off – and he had blown it. He had also failed to come up with her long-overdue dowry, and now, as far as Henry was concerned, he was at the bottom of the pile.
On 27 June 1505, the day before his fourteenth birthday, in a room on the ground floor on the eastern side of Richmond Palace, Prince Henry gathered with a small group of counsellors. In front of the king’s diplomatic mastermind, Richard Fox, bishop of Winchester, he read from a short statement that his marriage to Catherine had been contracted before he was of age. Now, as he was ‘near the age of puberty’, he was taking matters into his own hands. The timing was significant. Canon law considered marriages made after the age of puberty – twelve for girls, fourteen for boys – indissoluble, because they could be consummated. Child marriages, on the other hand, might be dissolved, and regularly were. Of his own free will, the prince declared, he would not ratify the marriage contract; it was, he stated, ‘null and void’. He then signed the statement, followed by the other witnesses. They included the king’s chamberlain and vice-chamberlain, Lord Daubeney and Sir Charles Somerset, the king’s secretary Thomas Ruthal and Fox’s protege Nicholas West; also there was the prince’s own chamberlain, Sir Henry Marney. With a day to spare, Prince Henry had cancelled his long-projected marriage to Catherine.27
It was quite clear, however, that this act of adolescent self-assertion was nothing of the sort. Rather, his renunciation was a put-up job, carefully co-ordinated by the king and a select group of counsellors headed by Fox, who as a trained canon lawyer and one of those most closely associated with the prince since his christening, was perfectly placed to advise on the matter.
Some quarter-century later, Fox, blind and seventy-nine years old, was quizzed by Henry VIII’s lawyers during the tortuous preliminaries to the king’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Casting his mind back, he could not recollect precisely the young prince’s opinion of the marriage when the papal bull was obtained but, he thought, he wanted it because he loved Catherine. His memories of the prince’s protest were, he regretted, similarly hazy. He remembered being in a room at Durham House when the statement was later read out in front of the anguished princess; and believed that it was made ‘at the command of Henry VII’, the reason being that Henry was livid at Ferdinand’s refusal – or inability – to pay Catherine’s marriage portion. The renunciation was never publicized; neither, Fox added, did the king object to his son ‘showing signs of love’ to Catherine thereafter. But the fact remained that, whatever his assertions, and whether of age or not, the prince had little say in the matter – in fact, he had about as much as Catherine herself.
As far as Henry was concerned, the secret declaration was insurance against Ferdinand’s foot-dragging over the dowry. But it was, ultimately, about control. Some four years previously, the French king Louis XII, trying to prevent his wife, Anne of Brittany, from marrying off their only daughter to Philip and Juana’s son, the infant Charles of Ghent, had signed a similarly clandestine document to be flourished should political circumstances change and need arise. With one eye on the changing European situation, Henry was very keen indeed to keep in reserve the hand of his eligible young son, heir to some of the deepest coffers in Christendom. For good measure, however, he sent a letter to Ferdinand days before, saying that the marriage was still on. If circumstances changed, the prince’s renunciation could be flourished, and the whole thing blamed on the independent-mindedness of youth.28
One Friday not long after, the Spanish ambassador de Puebla was summoned to Richmond. Admitted to the privy chamber, he found it quiet: ‘nobody there but the king’, his secret servants hovering unobtrusively in the background. Henry exploded with rage. Breaking bilateral trade agreements contained in the Anglo-Spanish marriage treaty, Ferdinand had forbidden English ships to export goods from Spain, leaving eight hundred sailors to make their way, destitute, back to England from Seville. And still Ferdinand was promising much and delivering nothing. Where was the outstanding payment of 100,000 scudos of Catherine’s marriage portion? And what about the jewels and treasure that Catherine was busy frittering away? And all the ‘other things, which he had already forgotten’?
In the face of this torrent of obsessive abuse, de Puebla stood silent until the king had exhausted himself. That weekend, a messenger arrived at the ambassador’s house bearing a freshly slaughtered deer, a gift from the king. The following Monday, when he returned to Richmond to thank Henry, he found him ‘perfectly calm’. They conversed about affairs of state as though Friday’s meeting had never occurred. In light of the prince’s renunciation – an episode about which de Puebla knew nothing – there was, perhaps, something calculated, stage-managed about Henry’s anger, almost as though he were preparing the ground for a decisive rupture with Ferdinand, Aragon and Catherine.29
As summer drifted on, the household set off on progress, down through Surrey and Sussex, into Hampshire and the New Forest. In the suburbs west of the city, the law courts were deserted; so too the riverine palaces along the Strand, occupied only by their desultory skeleton staff. But at Durham House, Catherine and her household, left behind, were still in residence. One day in early August, de Puebla walked over from his lodgings in Austin Friars to see her and, on his way in, bumped into one of her chamber attendants. Gesturing inside, the servant told him that an ambassador from Philip of Burgundy, en route to the king, had stopped off to pay his respects to the princess, and was waiting to see her. Taken aback, de Puebla went into Catherine’s apartment and told her the news; she cheerfully asked him to show the ambassador in. Kneeling at Catherine’s feet, the diplomat placed the services of Philip, Maximilian and Margaret of Savoy at her disposal. Then, in front of the horrified de Puebla, he and the princess launched into a full and frank conversation about diplomatic affairs, taking in the latest news about Suffolk and Henry’s prospective marriage plans. The ambassador had, he said, brought portraits of Margaret of Savoy with him for Henry’s inspection. Catherine, apparently oblivious to her father’s plans for Henry’s marriage to his niece, Queen Giovanna of Naples, asked to see them and, when they were brought in and uncovered, enthusiastically critiqued them. Not bad, she said, though in her view Michel Sittow – the Dutch master who had painted her and whose workshop had done Henry’s portrait – would have done a better job.30
Catherine seemed transformed from the nervous, ill girl of the preceding months. The reason was clear: suddenly, she was wanted. Dona Elvira, it transpired, had been grooming the princess for a key role in Anglo- Castilian affairs, encouraging a steady stream of Habsburg diplomatic staff to Durham House, and advising Catherine to part with more expensive gifts from her dowry. To the princess, it seemed that her household had become a hub of European diplomacy, and that her role was to bring about a new political entente: an ever-closer union between her own adoptive country and the most fashionable dynasty in Europe. Under the direction of her brother, Don Manuel, Dona Elvira had proposed that Catherine herself could engineer a summit meeting between Philip, Henry and Margaret of Savoy, at Calais – and, too, she would have her own reunion with her sister Juana.31
Shortly after the troubling episode with the Flanders ambassador, de Puebla was summoned back to Durham House. He entered Catherine’s chamber to find her sat at her desk, radiant, surrounded by paper, quills and ink. She picked up two letters and flourished them at the ambassador. One was from Philip – written in his own hand, no less – the other from Don Manuel: both agreed to the summit. Another letter, folded and sealed, was from her to
