Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

Henry, summarizing what she had done and begging him to agree. Outside Durham House, a horsebacked courier was waiting to leave for the king.

Aghast at this Castilian stitch-up, de Puebla proposed that Catherine hand over the letters to him, as Ferdinand’s accredited ambassador, to deliver to Henry; Catherine, rightly suspecting that the letters would never be seen again, refused. De Puebla then hurried off to confront Dona Elvira. He knew exactly what was going on, he told her, and made her promise that the letters would not be dispatched. No sooner had he got back home and sat down to dinner than an attendant, who he had left watching the house, ran in: the courier had galloped off. Hurrying back to Durham House, de Puebla burst into Catherine’s chamber in a state of high emotion; tears streaming down his cheeks, he swore the princess to secrecy before spelling out the situation. She had, he told her, been duped by Dona Elvira and Don Manuel into furthering Anglo-Habsburg diplomatic ties that would leave both her father and sister highly vulnerable. Under de Puebla’s direction, Catherine scribbled another note to Henry disavowing the previous one and beseeching him to put her father’s interests first. De Puebla’s messenger rode off in a cloud of dust, the gouty ambassador following behind as fast as his mule could carry him, to explain everything in full.

Before he left, de Puebla told Catherine that she must pretend that nothing at all had changed – not to alter her behaviour at all. She was too open, he said; she had to learn to keep secrets. ‘Dissimulation’, he stressed, was the key. It was a lesson Catherine would learn well.

When Henry received the news of Catherine’s amateurish backdoor diplomacy he was, reportedly, ‘astonished’.³² It seems highly unlikely, though, that he was genuinely surprised. After all, he had been calculatedly involved in Dona Elvira’s reinstatement at the heart of Catherine’s household – what was more, he would himself soon be using Catherine as a go-between in much the same way. More probably, he was taken aback by a situation that had got out of control. Dona Elvira, it was clear, was working not for English interests, but for those of Castile. Catherine, meanwhile, with her loyalties veering wildly between Castile and her sister, and Aragon and her father, was proving a loose cannon – and Henry, whatever his aims, was concerned to keep them secret. It would not do for him to be openly implicated in any plot against Ferdinand. Moreover, Henry already knew what Ferdinand was now telling him: that Dona Elvira’s brother, Don Manuel, had been instrumental in convincing Philip to keep hold of the earl of Suffolk at all costs. Perhaps Henry’s questions to his agent Anthony Savage had been spot on, and that Suffolk’s custodian the duke of Guelders, far from being Philip’s enemy, was in cahoots with him. That summer, rumours reached court that 6,000 armed men were massing in Guelders to help Suffolk invade England.

Whatever the case, Dona Elvira, now known to be openly intriguing against Ferdinand, could hardly remain at Durham House as the head of Catherine’s household. After a vicious struggle behind the scenes – a ‘horrible hour’, one of Catherine’s servants recalled – Dona Elvira left to join her brother in the Netherlands. She would not return.³³

Throughout the summer of 1505 fighting in Flanders continued to flare spasmodically. In July the duchy of Guelders was captured by Philip’s men, and with it the castle of Hattem, where Suffolk was held prisoner. In Antwerp, talk filled the Burgundian court of how Philip was planning to ‘bridle’ the king of England. Henry, meanwhile, continued to throw money at the problem. That September, in four large iron coffers bought for the purpose, the Flanders ambassadors carried away another huge non-returnable loan from the royal coffers: ?30,000, lent by Henry to Philip, now ‘King of Castile’, for his impending voyage to claim his throne. Honour- and treaty-bound to hand Suffolk over, Philip resorted to a stratagem worthy of his father, Maximilian. Returning Suffolk to Guelderland, and having taken the money, he blandly told Henry that there was nothing he could do: Suffolk was out of his hands, and his territory. Given that Philip was now openly styling himself duke of Guelders, this was a bit rich.³⁴

As 1505 drew to a close, Catherine wrote to her father from Richmond in a state of nervous anxiety. She had, she wrote, hardly a penny since her arrival in England, except for food, and she could barely keep her servants decently clothed. On the face of it, the complaint seems curious: Catherine was not – yet – financially embarrassed, and Henry continued to pay her monthly expenses. What had changed, however, was the organization of her household.

On Dona Elvira’s departure, Catherine had begged de Puebla to ask the king for a new mistress of her household, somebody harmless, like an ‘old English lady’. Henry, though, had other ideas. The Dona Elvira experiment having failed, he dismantled the princess’s household, sacked a number of her male servants, and absorbed Catherine and her remaining staff into his own. It was a move that looked uncannily like the arrangements he had made for his own son.³⁵

Unable to blame her father, or Henry, for the limbo in which she found herself, Catherine directed her ire at the one person who remained in the firing line: the ambassador Rodrigo de Puebla. With his suspiciously comprehensive knowledge of English affairs and his subtle behaviour, the corpulent, deformed lawyer was an obvious target. What was more, his daughter’s recent arrest by the Seville Inquisition – a Jewish converso like her father, she had probably failed to display the requisite enthusiasm for her new Christian religion – only confirmed to the Spanish everything that they had suspected about de Puebla’s general shiftiness and evasiveness. Despite his increasingly frantic dispatches beseeching that his daughter not be treated ‘with too great rigour’ – the danger she was in, he wrote pleadingly, ‘deprives me of my tranquillity, my energy of mind, and my health’ – no strings were pulled on his behalf. It was de Puebla, Catherine wrote to her father, who had wrecked everything, who was the cause of all her troubles. Ferdinand, she said, should send a new ambassador, somebody she could trust.³⁶

Meanwhile, Henry’s agents continued to circle around Suffolk, whose circumstances were dire. A virtual prisoner in Philip’s fortress of Namur, in southern Flanders, he was kept on a meagre allowance in a lodging with barred windows and six guards who doubled as attendants. His dwindling band of followers were scattered through towns in the region, some – including his brother Richard, still in Aachen – detained for non-payment of Suffolk’s mounting debts. Always prone to flights of self-delusion, the earl had become manic, veering from fevered panic to flashes of grandiose optimism, still believing that he could dictate his own terms for his voluntary return to England – a belief that Henry did much to encourage.³⁷ Although Suffolk’s conviction of his own importance was not entirely misplaced, his future remained Philip’s to decide and to manipulate.

That winter of 1505, talk at the archduke’s court described the earl as a ‘great thorn’ in Henry’s eye, how ‘the people of England love and long for him’, and the considerable damage he could do Henry.³⁸ Philip knew how much the king feared the spectre of Suffolk backed by a well-equipped Burgundian army. Having banked ?138,000 in danger money from Henry in that year alone, Philip was hardly about to yield up his Yorkist cash cow, whatever Suffolk wanted. In the meantime, he was focused on his impending voyage to Castile, now finally coming to fruition with the aid of Henry’s funds.³⁹

In his pre-Christmas dispatch to the Signoria, the Venetian ambassador to Flanders reported on Philip’s preparations. It was a high-risk journey. Philip may have got Henry over a barrel as far as Suffolk was concerned, but he needed more than the English king’s neutrality. An overland trip to Spain, which would have involved negotiating French territory, was impossible. Habsburg–French relations were at a new low – as the Venetian ambassador drily remarked, the mere mention of Louis XII’s name caused words of a ‘very evil nature to escape the king of Castile’s lips’. The only alternative route, west along the English Channel between a hostile French coastline and England, and through the Bay of Biscay, was treacherous, particularly in winter; should ‘fortune cast him on the shore of England’, Philip wanted to make sure that Henry would not hinder his onward journey. With this in mind, he was willing to concede all Henry’s swingeing trade demands; he was even, it seems, happy to facilitate some contact with Suffolk. That December, the earl was jubilant to receive a series of visits from an English contact who he referred to as ‘father’ – but who, unknown to him, was almost certainly one of Henry’s double-agents. But still Philip was in no hurry to give the earl up, and, to add insult to injury, he made the trouble-making Don Manuel a knight of the prestigious Order of the Golden Fleece. Then, as winter deepened, where four long years of cat-and- mouse over Suffolk had failed to yield Henry any result, fortune intervened.⁴⁰

This Day Came de la Pole

On the evening of 15 January 1506, icy storms raged across southern England. Funnelling up the English Channel from the Atlantic, gales hit London with such force that trees were uprooted, ‘weak houses’ collapsed and roofs were ripped off. Torrential rain swamped the city and surrounding countryside ‘to the great hurt of sundry cattle and especially of sheep’. The bronze eagle that topped the steeple of St Paul’s was ripped off its perch and