Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

He had better results with Carmeliano who, in return for a gift of money, received the loose change of Erasmus’s flattery: Carmeliano, he wrote, was the ‘high prince of elegance’, a ‘prince of letters’. In fact, Erasmus thought him nothing of the sort. Back at the Old Barge, he, More and Ammonio bitched about the Latin secretary’s uninspired and ungrammatical Latin. As Erasmus later wrote to Richard Whitford, there were plenty at the English court who claimed to be steeped in the most eloquent authors – which was surprising, given there were ‘so few who do not seem totally inarticulate’ when called upon to deliver an official speech.²¹ All this, of course, was born out of feelings of resentment and insecurity, as much as intellectual superiority. And to the chagrin of Erasmus and Ammonio, somebody else was getting ahead at court, someone whose scholarly credentials could not be impugned: Polydore Vergil.

As Philip of Burgundy finally left that April, Henry, with the ink still wet on the new Anglo-Habsburg treaty, and with his conversations with Philip fresh in his mind, was thinking of new ways to cement his legacy. As Erasmus had noted, Henry ‘especially regarded’ the study of history. Now, he wanted a new history of England, one which underscored his family and its achievements, and written in fashionable humanist Latin for international consumption.

Vergil was perfectly placed to write it. Since his arrival in England four years previously, he had immersed himself in his adopted country’s history, keeping a journal in which he jotted down his thoughts and ideas. While he delighted in some native historians – the muscular Latin of the sixth-century Gildas, and the worldly erudition of the twelfth-century monk William of Malmesbury – he could barely disguise his contempt for the most popular chronicle of them all: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s bestselling History of the Kings of England, which had given new impetus and credibility to the founding myth of King Arthur in British history. Monmouth’s twelfth- century work, in Vergil’s eyes, was barely history at all. It was ‘fable’, he spat; he could barely mention it without ‘extreme distaste’.

Vergil could learn about the traumatic events of England’s recent past from those who had been intimately involved in it. A number of those people were his diplomatic colleagues, sources ‘worthy of credit’ like Richard Fox. It was very probably Fox – who Vergil would write prominently into his account as a man of ‘excellent wit’ – that suggested Vergil’s name to Henry. Summoned to the king’s presence, Vergil was commissioned to write an official history of England, which would encompass, as Henry put it, ‘the deeds of his people … from early times to the present day’ – with his family as the latest and most glorious instalment.²²

The result, Vergil’s Anglica Historia, would be years in the writing, and Henry would not live to see the result. First completed in 1513, it was finally printed in 1534 in a form substantially revised to suit the convulsive politics of those years. From prehistory to Vergil’s present, it would be England’s first modern history: a continuous narrative structured around the lives of kings, and containing analysis – ‘digressions’, Vergil called them – on everything from his source material to the country’s political development.²³ And while Vergil’s account, with its sustained assault on the Arthurian ‘British history’ tradition, was vilified in some quarters, it was astonishingly influential. In his Chronicle of 1548 the lawyer Edmund Hall paid it the ultimate compliment, translating it and passing copious undigested chunks of it off as his own work. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Anglica Historia had become the accepted national story, as Shakespeare recognized: the plots of his history plays, Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, Henry V and Richard III, are pure Vergil.²⁴ The Italian, in fact, might be said to be one of the most influential English historians of them all – and Fox, one of the architects of Henry’s reign, was the man who spotted his potential.

In mid-1506 Erasmus finally got his break. It came in the unexpected form of Giovanni Battista Boerio, a member of London’s affluent Genoese community and, as one of Henry VII’s physicians and diplomats, a man with regular access to the king. Boerio asked Erasmus to accompany his two sons to Italy and supervise their education; Erasmus, who had been dreaming of a trip to Italy for decades, leaped at the chance. By the start of June, he was en route with his two young charges. After an appalling, four-day-long Channel crossing, he recovered for some days with Mountjoy in Hammes Castle, from where he dispatched the last of his Lucianic dialogues and a series of valedictory letters to his friends in England: More, and Ammonio, for whom things at court had failed to improve, and whose mood was darkened still further by the departure of his intellectual mentor. Far from home, disillusioned and short of cash, Ammonio was appalled by London’s noise and grime – ‘the dirt of these people is altogether hateful to me’, he sniffed fastidiously in a letter to Erasmus. His only refuge, it seemed, was the Old Barge, where he spent an increasing amount of time.²⁵

As Erasmus made his way to Italy in the summer of 1506, Pope Julius II was on the warpath. Agitating for a new Holy League, a grand coalition to confront the Turkish armies rampant in southeast Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, he announced the latest in a long line of papal calls for a crusade. But whether or not the Ottoman Empire was his ultimate end in view, his immediate aim was Venice: to reconquer the papal states it had annexed and, ultimately, to bring the republic to its knees. To fund his military adventures, Julius knew he had to protect his revenues. On 17 May, he launched his most forceful and wide-ranging papal proclamation to date against the illegal alum trade. The first of its kind to be printed, it was addressed to ‘all persons secular or ecclesiastical, of whatever state or condition they might be’. It inveighed against iniquitous dealers and brokers involved in the trade, and forbade, under pain of anathema, all Christian princes and their subjects to have anything to do with any other alum than that which came from the Tolfa mines, whose alum was ‘reserved and consecrated to the preparations for a great crusade against the Sultan of Constantinople’.

Throughout the financial centres of northern Europe, from the Low Countries to London, papal representatives marched into banking houses and served the bull on merchants, together with covering letters stating that dealings with certain alum speculators, who were ‘the source of a pernicious contagion to the souls of the faithful’, were certain to be harmful to the spiritual health of those faithful to Christ. In Bruges, the papal commissioner’s letter included a list of the dealers to be avoided. Among the seven principal names were ‘Nicolas Vuaringh’, or Nicholas Waring, the skipper of Henry’s ship the Sovereign; the head of the Frescobaldi company Jerome, or Girolamo, da Frescobaldi; and Louis – or Lodovico – della Fava, Henry’s own broker.²⁶

In the Low Countries, publication of the bull provoked enough consternation to make Margaret of Savoy, Henry’s hoped-for bride, summon her council for an urgent discussion of the situation. But in London, the pronouncement appeared to have no effect at all. Julius had dispatched a new commissioner, Pietro Griffo, to remind Henry of his responsibilities and to persuade him to join the crusade.²⁷ Henry was unmoved. Having previously contributed funds both to the pope and to the knights of St John of Jerusalem – earlier that year, he had received the rare title of ‘protector’ to the knights’ garrison at Rhodes – he was perfectly enthusiastic for the idea of a crusade; just not Julius’s war against Venice.

That autumn, at the head of an army of Swiss mercenaries and French soldiers, Julius cut an all-conquering swathe through the Romagna, the Venetian armies in headlong retreat. As he entered Bologna in triumph on 11 November, away in Richmond Lodovico della Fava came to Henry with a new business proposition. He offered the king the opportunity to invest in a consignment of 7,000 hundredweight of alum worth ?10,000 – a huge deal, by any standards. Henry would pay in two tranches, 60 per cent up front. As usual, as well as this cheap consignment of high-grade alum, he would receive from della Fava and the Frescobaldi company customs duties payable on the imports, and a large fee for the lease of the vessel in which the consignment would be shipped. Edmund Dudley, who helped broker the deal, was also present, itemizing everything in his account book, which was signed, as ever, by the king. The combined sum owing to Henry on customs duties and lease of his 4-masted, 600-ton, 225-cannon carrack Regent – the perfect way to transport such a precious cargo – was ?5,100. And on 18 December, the chamber treasurer John Heron signed off the first instalment of ?6,000 to della Fava, who drew up bills of exchange to send to the Frescobaldi branch in Florence.²⁸ Henry had effectively ripped up Julius’s papal bull and thrown it in his face.

Livid, Julius recalled Pietro Griffo, ordering him to fix copies of the papal censure to every English church door he passed on his way to Dover. Little did Julius know, but during his stay at the English court Griffo had succumbed to temptation. Whatever his conversation with Henry had been, the outcome was glaringly evident in an entry in Dudley’s account book: ‘Pope’s orator Peter de Griffo for licence and custom of 1,300 kintals [hundredweight] of alum to come in by assent of Lodovico della Fava ?433 6s 8d by obligation.’ Sent by Julius to persuade Henry to give up his illegal alum racket, Griffo had come in on it instead. Even for the pope’s own commissioner, the lure of alum had proved too great to resist.²⁹

Money, of course, was not the only motivating factor. Julius’s efforts to form an anti-Venetian coalition in the