problems, then accused them of breaking the law. Then, they sold their victims justice on the king’s behalf. It was all, said one of Dudley’s victims, Sir William Clopton, ‘contrary to the right and order of the law’. Clopton’s own case illustrated the point. Dudley had halted a private suit which Clopton was on the point of winning, then let it proceed after Clopton offered the king half the ‘profits’: two hundred marks, a sum for which he sought the counsellor’s approval. Dudley then invited him and his lawyer in for a chat. In Dudley’s eyes, the agreed settlement was too low. Evidently thinking he could do better, he offered Clopton fifty marks to ‘go his way’, he proposed to take on the case himself, on the king’s behalf, at which point Clopton’s lawyer – himself a royal counsellor, as it happened – intervened, mildly pointing out the blatant irregularity: this was a private case and the king had ‘no right’ in it anyway. Dudley exploded. ‘Are you of the king’s council and yet would argue against the king’s advantage?’ What happened next had an air of inevitability about it. Dudley took the case on and won, receiving damages of three hundred marks, which disappeared into the king’s coffers; Clopton received ‘not one penny thereof’.8 If this behaviour – the probing inquisition, the pleasant, reasoned benevolence combined with violent anger – seemed familiar, it was. Dudley was behaving rather like Henry himself.
As the London chronicler bitterly observed of Dudley, the greatest lords in England were ‘glad to be in his favour, and were fain to sue to him for many urgent causes’. In an echo of Robert Plumpton’s comment about Empson, he noted that it was easier to approach and speak to ‘the best duke in the land’ than to Dudley, a mere esquire, a man who flaunted his title of ‘counsellor to our sovereign lord the king’ as though it were a noble title.9 A deep-rooted sense of betrayal underscored Londoners’ criticisms of Dudley – after all, the city had nurtured him, helped make him what he had become. It was, above all, in the economic honeypot of London, through its wharves and warehouses loaded high with luxury goods, its whorehouses and taverns, townhouses, marketplaces and Guildhall that Dudley’s shadow was spreading inexorably.
Despite Henry’s sporadic trade embargoes with the Netherlands and his interference in city politics, business in London was booming. Although in meetings of the common council, self-censorship was the norm – minute books often revealed large gaps where full and frank discussions about the king’s attentions had presumably taken place – and the city inveighed against Henry’s preference for foreign merchants – ‘we the king’s subjects’ merchants no thing in regard to them’, noted the mercers grimly – the truth was more complex. City merchants and London’s alien communities worked hand in hand in illegal exchanges and import/export rackets, while with the increase in trade came endless ‘new ways or deceits’ to avoid the crown’s attentions.10 But where there were offences, Henry’s lawyers saw opportunities to extract wealth, and to extend royal control over the city’s government. For those who knew where to look, and how to use the law, the dark underbelly of finance and commerce represented almost limitless opportunities for threats, intimidation and extortion. Edmund Dudley did, and Henry gave him open season.
In Dudley’s hands, Henry’s tactics against the city reached fruition. He knew exactly how much the Corporation would be prepared to pay for renewal of its charters of self-government and trade privileges, and how much he could squeeze out of London’s merchants in customs duties and the sale of export licences. He knew, too, how to exploit the city’s pressure points, meddling in its politics and preying on the grudges and jealousies between its guilds, privileging certain companies over others and interfering in city elections. As various London politicians pointed out uneasily, the king was riding roughshod over due process, changing procedures when he had ‘none authority’ to do so. In the municipal elections of autumn 1506, the city rejected the king’s preferred candidate for sheriff, the merchant taylor Sir William Fitzwilliam. Dudley walked into Guildhall, annulled the results and called a new election, which Fitzwilliam duly won – paying Henry ?100 for the king’s ‘gracious favour for being sheriff’. The London chronicler noted acidly how city elections were now fairly academic anyway – it didn’t much matter who Londoners voted in because ‘whosoever had the sword borne before him, Dudley was mayor, and whatever his pleasure was, was done’.11 The real centre of power was, as the chronicler intimated, not to be found in Guildhall, but a short walk east and south from there in Dudley’s own house in Candlewick Street.
One of the city’s main commercial thoroughfares, running east to west parallel with the river, Candlewick Street was the centre of the city’s textile trade, lined with wealthy drapers’ warehouses. With the financial centre of Lombard Street a few minutes’ walk north, and the port of London to the south, Dudley’s house was perfectly positioned, an island of royal power in the city’s commercial heart.
Despite a two-storey frontage extending 180 feet along the street, the house’s exterior was unassuming enough. Like many merchants’ townhouses with their small windows and plain facades that to one unimpressed Venetian ‘do not seem very large from the outside’, it gave little sense of the extent within. But once inside, such houses – living spaces, offices and warehouses rolled into one – seemed to expand to an extraordinary degree in a proliferation of chambers, parlours, corridors and closets. As the same visitor discovered, to his surprise, ‘they contain a great number of rooms and garrets and are quite considerable’.12
So it was with Candlewick Street. In its warren of rooms, fashionable touches of interior design – ‘rich arras’ lining the walls, fine inlaid furniture and exotic glassware of ‘beyond sea making’ – vied for space with the luxury goods and textiles in which Dudley dabbled, and the endless coffers and boxes crammed with financial and legal paperwork, ‘bills, obligations, evidences and other writings’. At the back, its double-storeyed gallery gave onto a fine garden. The nerve centre of his operations, Candlewick Street was incessantly in motion. Apart from its domestic staff, the house admitted a constant flow of clerks, messengers, city representatives, guild- and company-men, royal officials and counsellors and, above all, Dudley’s victims. People came to plead their innocence, arrange their schedule of payments, or to pay an instalment of their debt, received and logged by one of his clerks: the smaller of the two parlours where he conducted his interviews incorporated a counting-house. Or, like Sir William Clopton, they came to progress matters in which Dudley had taken a hand, and left defrauded or bound over to the king.
Among the regular faces in Candlewick Street were Dudley’s eyes and ears in the city, those who supplied the fuel for Henry’s fiscal machine. Many of them worked in the world of economic crime where, in the way of informers more generally, they were allowed a cut of the possessions of those they managed to convict, and where the pickings were particularly rich. People had a special name for them: promoters. Royal promoters had long been at work in the city, several of them familiar and hated faces; now, working with Dudley and his sidekick and enforcer Richard Page, their activities acquired a new virulence and impunity.13
As warden of the exchanges, Henry Toft was part of the regulatory machine that attempted to control London’s rampantly corrupt money markets. Toft was a regular presence in Lombard Street, at the new currency exchange at Leadenhall market, and at Westminster, where he paid into the exchequer the crown’s profits from financial dealings in the city. ‘Affectionate’ – or manipulative – and ‘covetous’, Toft regularly abused his authority and, in Londoners’ eyes, was a man to be avoided as far as possible. Involved in inummerable prosecutions, his biggest catch had come in May 1496, when he successfully sued the then mayor, the prominent draper William Capel, for financial irregularities. Capel was fined the sum of ?2,763. Toft, though, had not been operating alone. The man who supplied him with the evidence for Capel’s prosecution was a man who was to become the doyen of promoters, Empson and Dudley’s ‘worst disciple’: Giovanni Battista Grimaldi, or, as he was more commonly known, ‘John Baptist’ or ‘Grumbold’.14
Grimaldi, a broker, was head of the London branch of the eponymous Genoese banking house which his father, Lodovico, had opened decades previously. The Genoese were the largest of the Italian merchant ‘nations’ or communities that clustered around the traditional Italian quarter of Lombard Street, and the Grimaldi one of the foremost families, their names featuring prominently in the lists of licensed alien brokers approved by the Corporation of London. The Genoese were a byword for sharp practice and corruption – perhaps unsurprisingly, given that they were Europe’s finest financiers – and it was a stereotype to which John Baptist fully adhered. Even where illegalism was the norm, he stood out, his career littered with examples of extortion, bribery and intimidation. In 1488, he was imprisoned for racketeering, and it may well have been then that he agreed with the royal authorities to turn informer.15
Suffering from an acute skin condition, erysipelas, Grimaldi stood out from the crowd with his swollen ‘blobby face’ and ‘cankered complexion’. He had the invaluable ability to engage people in conversation, to ‘feel and tempt’ them, make them speak out of turn and betray confidences. His rancour towards London’s notoriously xenophobic mercantile community only made him more driven. Styling himself a member of the royal household, Grimaldi shuttled around the city picking up gossip, sifting information and bringing cases to the attention of the king’s counsellors. He drifted into the exchequer offices at Westminster with impunity. Treating its staff with a casual familiarity, he had much ‘privileging’ there – though no formal royal position – riffling through official documents and peering over clerks’ shoulders as they enrolled debts. In his previous career as under-sheriff, Dudley would have
