Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

begun to believe, could reinterpret the world anew. It could reform society, strip away ingrained customs and traditions that blinded people to the evils of the world – like chivalric culture, which conferred a veneer of legitimacy and glory on the war and conquest of the military classes, and the outward rituals and observances, the indulgences and graven images that were the expressions of a church riddled with corruption. Knowledge, Erasmus believed, should be liberated from the clutches of the scholastics, with their arcane, hair-splitting debates, and, through the new technology of print, be brought out into the full light of the world and put to the service of humanity. He was, in short, becoming the complete humanist.

Nonetheless, he also remained a pragmatist. He knew how power politics worked and was perfectly happy to tailor his thinking to it. If princes were to be the true rulers of society, they should abandon their militaristic tendencies, embrace the studia humanitatis and rule not through the abuse of power but through wisdom. Yet as with many humanists, it was impossible to tell where his reforming zeal stopped and his self-interest began. Behind every good prince was a good educator. Erasmus needed a patron. That December, from a wintry Paris, he wrote to Colet.

His letter, he knew, had to be finely judged. Insulated by his family’s phenomenal mercantile wealth and connections, Colet viewed with fastidious distaste the desperate scrabbling-after-favour of the less privileged, of networking academics and clergymen who ran, panting, after ‘fat benefices and high promotions’ – even when it involved his friends. Erasmus pressed all the right buttons. Heaping fulsome praise on Colet’s scholarship, he said how desperate he was for someone to help him realize his ‘burning zeal for sacred studies’, and enclosed a copy of his new book, the Enchiridion, of which he knew Colet would approve: an all-purpose spiritual guide to everyday life based on a pure piety and ‘true goodness’ rather than relics, images, cults and convoluted ceremonial and liturgy.¹

But Erasmus also had some awkward explaining to do. The previous year, he had written a poem in praise of Philip of Burgundy, a syrupy panegyric dripping with wheedling flattery of the worst kind. He had been reluctant to write it, he told Colet; in fact, he could not remember ever having done anything ‘more unwillingly’. However, he continued, his panegyric was not just sycophancy. It was, in fact, a ‘novel stratagem’, something more subtle: a way of educating princes, of speaking truth to power without seeming to do so.

In telling Philip how wonderful he was, Erasmus was in fact telling him how he ought to behave. What better way to reproach a wicked ruler ‘more safely, yet more severely’, than by proclaiming his mildness, or ‘for his greed, violence and lust, than by celebrating his generosity, self-control and chastity?’ This ‘pattern for goodness’ became a way to ‘reform bad rulers, improve the good, educate the boorish’. In Erasmus’s hands, flattery had become advice, praise a policy document. A new twist to the kind of ‘advice to princes’ literature that had been peddled hopefully to princes for centuries, it also subtly repositioned the relationship between the intellectual and his patron. It showed that scholars were not a frivolous luxury, but essential to princes: they educated them, and they made them glorious too.²

Although in his letter to Colet Erasmus seemed to deprecate his panegyric to Philip, he shrewdly guessed that the picture it depicted of a glorious, learned prince was likely to prove as effective a calling-card as anything else he had written. For it was not Colet that he had in his sights, but his former pupil Lord Mountjoy – and through Mountjoy, his student Prince Henry, now heir to the English throne. Would Colet, Erasmus asked delicately, put in a discreet word on his behalf with Mountjoy? It would make sense, given their previous association – but he was terrible at petitioning for favour and could not possibly approach Mountjoy himself.³

Erasmus’s letter worked a treat. By autumn 1505 he was back in London, boasting how Mountjoy had ‘pressingly invited me to come back to England’. Settling into the comfort of Mountjoy’s townhouse in Knightrider Street, he looked up old friends, Colet, Grocyn, Linacre, and Thomas More, now immersed in his legal career and in city life. Erasmus basked in their attention: ‘without flattering myself’, he purred, ‘I do believe there is not one of them who does not pay high tribute to my talents and learning’. Fuelled by his friends’ admiration, and Mountjoy’s expansive predictions of rewards forthcoming from Henry VII, Erasmus was convinced that a torrent of royal favour would soon be flowing in his direction. Previous experience should have warned him not to take Mountjoy’s words at face value.⁴

Erasmus was entirely ignorant of the transformation that had taken place since his last visit: that Mountjoy’s conditions of office, hedged about with bonds and financial sureties, had left him rushed off his feet, constantly looking over his shoulder for royal informers eager to make money reporting alleged infractions of service; and that Prince Henry was now incubated in his father’s household. As Erasmus would find, the king and his advisers had a hard-edged attitude to scholarship that was worlds away from the enquiring dilettantism of Eltham.

In seeking favour from Henry, Erasmus was treading a path already well worn by the footsteps of countless humanists who, from France, Italy and the Low Countries, had come to England flourishing presentation manuscripts of fashionable Latin and Greek texts, which they hoped would be passports to royal favour. As his sons’ tuition had shown, Henry knew the value of a cutting-edge classical education, and he loved employing foreigners. But for him intellectual brilliance was only half the equation. When he admired the erudition of foreign men-of- letters, he did so wondering how they could serve him, how they could add value and authority to his rule and his dynasty, how they could provide the access that he craved to the courts and chancelleries, trading centres and financial and commodity markets of Europe.

As Erasmus’s friends would tell him, actually getting to Henry was the most difficult thing of all. It meant approaching the cluster of senior foreign policy advisers, canon lawyers with their interests in international culture and political theory who were the gatekeepers to his favour, who appraised, selected and vetted people for diplomatic service. At their head was Henry’s omnipresent eminence grise, the man whom scholar after scholar had addressed hopefully as Maecenas, that epitome of classical patrons, and whose hand lay behind the royal preferment of practically every humanist during the course of Henry’s rule: the privy seal and bishop of Winchester, Richard Fox.

While Erasmus had a sophisticated grasp of how humanist letters might be put to the service of power, he had little desire to enter the cut-throat world of power politics, to commit himself, like Adriano Castellesi, to be ex toto anglicus, English through and through. Rather, he wanted the freedom of the public intellectual, with his international network of friends, drifting from house to house, country to country, wherever there was good conversation, ample hospitality and – with any luck – funding.⁵ But Erasmus and his friends would find that their attempts to gain favour with the king and his counsellors would become enmeshed in political rivalries, faction and the machinations of Henry’s international affairs.

At first, all seemed well. Erasmus was ‘in high favour’, he felt, and spent much of his time getting reacquainted with his friend Thomas More. Recently married, More had moved into a sprawling stone-and-timber manor house, the Old Barge, in the middle of London. In Bucklersbury, a narrow street lined with herbalists and druggists’ shops, the house’s name was a nod to the nearby Walbrook, the paved-over waterway which in former times brought boats up from the Thames into the heart of the city. A short walk east lay the Stocks Market and the financial district of Lombard Street; to the north, across the teeming thoroughfare of Cheapside, lay the headquarters of the Mercers’ company, from whom More had rented his accommodation, and Guildhall, the centre of London’s political life.

More’s debate with himself about whether or not to enter this world, to test himself against its dangers and pitfalls, had found expression in his recent translation of a biography of Pico della Mirandola, the Italian thinker whose deep spirituality had a profound and formative influence on him. More’s Life of Pico stressed the Italian’s refusal to compromise his principles, his constant cheerfulness in the face of tribulation, and his eventual turning away from the world to a life of piety. Pico was a ‘pattern of life’ to More – not least because More, like him, was drawn irresistibly towards that public arena whose temptations and corruptibility he so feared. All this was evident in a letter that More had written to Colet, in which, describing his native London as a claustrophobic city of sin, he lingered over a description of its vices with a brilliant, lascivious relish.

The overhanging upper storeys of buildings, he wrote, leaned in on the narrow streets, seeming to block out natural light. The atmosphere choked and asphyxiated, heightening the senses: the gleam of goldsmiths’ and silversmiths’ shops, the fine, richly coloured silks of drapers, the tempting scents of cooking mingling with the sights and smells of decay and corruption. All this, More wrote, to produce an endless supply of ‘materials for gluttony and the world, and the world’s lord, the devil’.⁶ This was now More’s everyday life, surrounded by ‘feigned love and the honeyed poisons of smooth flatterers’, by ‘fierce hatred and quarrels’. It was a struggle that he found intoxicating, and his vocal opposition to Henry’s tax in the 1504 parliament displayed a desire to get involved at the sharp end of politics. Despite – or perhaps because of – all this, Erasmus found his friend, at the centre of a busy