this ‘true and perpetual friendship between the empire of Rome, the kingdom of Castile, Flanders, Brabant, and the kingdom of England.’ Turning to his son, Henry then embarked on a fatherly lecture of the ‘watch and learn’ variety.
Why, he asked the prince rhetorically, did he think he had lavished such expense on Philip? It was, he continued, solely because he wanted to recognize Philip’s honour and his virtuousness – and ‘absolutely not’, he insisted, because he was ‘looking for something from him in return’. Henry also gave voice to the thought that had been revolving incessantly in his mind since the death of Prince Arthur nearly four years before: ‘My son of Wales’, he told the prince, ‘you see that I am old. Soon you will need your good friends.’
Prince Henry, though, needed no invitation from his father. He revelled in the thought of Philip as his ‘good friend’. When the French ambassador, newly arrived at court, greeted him, the prince, noted one of Philip’s retinue delightedly, barely favoured him with a glance. Struggling to come to terms with the new entente between England and Castile, the ambassador tried to make up ground; during a hunting expedition, Prince Henry brought down a buck with a clinical shot, eliciting gushing compliments from him. ‘It would have been good for a Frenchman’, came the whip-smart retort. As one of Philip’s party was at pains to point out, the ambassador chose to misinterpret the prince: rather than complimenting French archery, he was saying that he would have preferred to be shooting Frenchmen rather than deer. The prince’s barbs, it was clear, were as effortless as his shots.21
Queen Juana’s arrival the following day could hardly have been more different from that of her husband. Philip had tried to keep Juana as far away from the English court as possible. On his arrival at Windsor he claimed that ‘a small incident’ had kept her from accompanying him – even his close attendants claimed not to know where she was staying – and he was keen to avoid her being accorded a reception befitting her status as Queen of Castile in her own right.22 At his insistence Juana and her entourage entered Windsor unobtrusively, via a side gate. But Henry, his interest undoubtedly piqued by the reports of Juana’s celebrated beauty, ignored Philip’s repeated requests for him not to give Juana an official welcome and waited for her, together with Catherine and Princess Mary. His appraising gaze took in Juana’s jet-black hair and feline eyes, and he embraced her in welcome, perhaps a little too long.23 For both sisters, meanwhile, the reunion was heartfelt, though all too brief. Philip immediately whisked Juana off to his apartments and left her there. As far as he was concerned, Juana was at Windsor solely to add her signature to the new trade agreement. He would pack her off again the next day, when the ink was barely dry.
In marked contrast to the activity of the previous days, Henry kept to his chamber on the 11th, the anniversary of Elizabeth’s death. While he contemplated his own wife, Philip could not wait to get away from his, and asked Henry if they could have dinner together in his privy chamber. As if all this were not evidence enough of Philip and Juana’s estrangement, the king of Castile’s attendants were at pains to emphasize quite how mad his wife was. During the storm that had shipwrecked them, they described how she had been a liability, sobbing at her husband’s feet, her arms locked fast round his legs. Later, the Venetian ambassador travelling with Philip’s party put it rather differently: she had, he wrote, ‘evinced intrepidity throughout’. Henry concurred with the Venetian. Reports of Juana’s insanity were, he later concluded, groundless. ‘She seemed very well to me’, he recalled. ‘And although her husband and those who came with him depicted her as crazy, I did not see her as other than sane.’24
As a well-armed detachment, headed by the veteran diplomat Sir Henry Wyatt, left Richmond for the Low Countries to take Suffolk into custody, Henry prolonged his guest’s stay with a further programme of entertainments, as he awaited news that Suffolk was safely under lock and key. Hunting parties were punctuated by a trip down the Thames to London, whose highlight included a ‘wonderful peal of guns [shot] out of the Tower’. Would Philip, Henry asked, like a guided tour inside the Tower? His guest hastily declined.
The party, including Prince Henry and Princess Mary, also rode over to the nearby palace of Croydon, to pay a call on the king’s mother. There, gifts were exchanged – Lady Margaret was presented with a commemorative account of ‘the coming of the king of Castile’ – and Philip’s minstrels performed in front of the king’s mother who sat, appreciative, her customary glass of malvesey to hand. Then, there was a surprise for the prince from his doting grandmother: a new horse, and with it a custom-made saddle finished with tuffets of Venetian cloth-of-gold, gold buckles and pendants, and a harness fringed with flowers of black velvet and gold. It was a well-judged gift. As Lady Margaret was well aware, the culmination of Philip’s visit would be a tournament, at Richmond: Henry’s jousters against Philip and his men. Probably mindful of the spectacular display of Burgundian chivalry at Calais six years before, the king was determined to show his guest that the English could compete. Prince Henry would not take part in combat – but he could show off his skills and horsemanship, anyway, on his new horse.25
For the king’s spears, it was a rare chance to pit themselves against the best jousters in Europe, men like Philip’s favourite, the cool, cultivated Henri, lord of Nassau-Breda: a member of the Golden Fleece who would joust alongside Philip then host lavish banquets and after-parties that lasted ‘well nigh the whole night’, and which involved dancing ‘and other amusements’. During these soirees, Nassau-Breda would fold open the panels of a triptych recently commissioned from his favourite artist Hieronymus Bosch, to reveal the world of supercharged erotic anarchism contained in
Finally, Philip was ready to continue his journey onward to Spain, the first stage of which was the long ride two hundred and fifty miles southwest to Falmouth in Cornwall, ‘a wild place which no human being ever visits, in the midst of a most barbarous race’, where repairs were being made to the wrecked fleet that had been swept ashore, and where the majority of Philip’s retinue – including the two thousand German mercenaries – had spent the last six weeks kicking their heels. As he and his entourage prepared to depart, shortly after the midday dinner on 2 March, their saddled horses waiting, Henry and the prince appeared; at first refusing to let Philip leave, they then insisted on accompanying him on the first leg of his journey. It was the kind of ponderous charade that Henry VIII, with his love of ‘surprise’ entrances, would later delight in.28
As soon as he had waved Philip off, the smile disappeared from Henry’s face. Philip had pledged that Suffolk would be handed over before he embarked. Henry kept him to his word, keeping close watch on him all the way to Falmouth, in constant contact with Philip’s escorts, the earl of Surrey and Thomas Brandon, through his system of posts; meanwhile, messengers rode hard between London, Calais and Flanders with updates on Suffolk. In fact, laid low by illness and then to his ‘intense vexation’ kept in port by spring storms, Philip’s departure was further delayed; he eventually set sail on 16 April.29
Even before he had done so, Prince Henry had put pen to paper – remarkably, for someone who would prove a reluctant letter-writer at the best of times. Desperate to consolidate this friendship with his new-found chivalric hero, he wrote from Greenwich on 9 April asking after Philip’s health, ‘which I particularly and with all my heart desire to be of long continuance as I would my own’, and asking him to stay in touch, to write ‘from time to time’ – as, he said keenly, would he.
In the way of infatuated teenagers through the ages, he had bashfully cited an excuse for getting in touch with Philip so soon after his departure. Don Pedro Manrique, Catherine’s chamberlain, was planning a trip to Castile ‘for certain matters’ and had buttonholed Prince Henry, asking him to write to Philip ‘in his favour’. And then, the prince went on to refer to Catherine, the bride who he had so resoundingly jilted at his father’s direction the previous year, as ‘
There was, however, more to the prince’s letter than his own schoolboy crush. Don Pedro Manrique was the husband of Catherine’s former duenna Dona Elvira, whose pro-Habsburg intriguing the previous year had resulted in her dismissal. Catherine’s household was still full of servants with Castilian sympathies, Don Pedro among them, and, as the prince’s letter now revealed, it was still being used as a diplomatic back-channel to Philip and Juana’s court. There was, too, no doubt that Henry’s hand lay behind the letter, which was, after all, an official communication. Through his son, Henry was exploiting Catherine’s household to cement the new Anglo-Habsburg entente cordiale. The prince’s undoubtedly sincere protestations of love for his bride, too, masked the king’s increasing indifference to her. Less than two weeks after his letter, Catherine wrote in desperation to her father: she was deep in debt, not for ‘extravagant things’, but just to pay her household expenses. She had written to
