energetic, would make a very useful apprentice indeed, a ‘meet and an apt person to be preferred to witty affairs’, affairs that might range from diplomatic missions to rather more informal requests, such as keeping a close eye on the goings-on around the ailing king’s bed. A discreet, watchful presence, Wolsey registered who controlled admission, who let people in and rebuffed others, who stayed longest. He saw, too, how the secret chamber, an arrangement designed by the king to control access, might have its weak points, how in certain conditions – when the king was in extreme ill-health, perhaps – it might seem as if those closest to Henry were controlling him, rather than the other way round.28
Particularly notable were the number of servants with close connections to Empson and Dudley. William Smith, Henry’s groom of the wardrobe of robes and a financial enforcer for the council learned, was a close colleague of Empson’s; then there was the groom of the stool Hugh Denys, the man in charge of the running of the secret chamber. Responsible for the king’s everyday necessities, Denys was handling increasing quantities of cash, while fines for certain common-law offences were being siphoned off to him. He got on well with Dudley, with whom he shared business interests in finance and real estate. What was perhaps Denys’s most remarkable acquisition had come the previous year, when he and a syndicate of ‘feoffees’ or trustees had bought Edmund Dudley’s alma mater, Gray’s Inn: astonishingly, the owner of one of the four legal inns of court was now the king’s closest personal servant.
That March, too, the sudden appearance in the king’s chamber accounts of one of Denys’s fellow Gray’s Inn trustees, a ‘Master Lupton’, seems to confirm what was happening. Roger Lupton, a canon lawyer and provost of Eton College, was another of the coterie of royal chaplains around the king’s bedside. But now, for the first time, Lupton was invested with considerable financial responsibility. Like Denys and William Smith, he made payments, arranging for alms to be distributed and money disbursed to redeem debtors from London’s prisons in the customary acts of contrition, a sure sign that the king was nearing his end. But there was a particular reason for Lupton’s rise to prominence: he was an associate of Dudley’s.29
Men like Denys, Smith and Lupton were faithful, trusted servants of the king, people who could be relied upon in the most serious of crises. But they were also Empson and Dudley’s friends, and their preeminence around the dying king revealed which way the wind of royal favour was blowing.
On 19 March, a clerk was paid forty shillings to draw up the king’s will, copying meticulously from an earlier draft and incorporating new provisions. Added to the list of the twelve key executors, Henry’s most intimate and trustworthy advisers that included Fox, Lovell and the vice-chamberlain Sir Charles Somerset, were two new names: Sir Richard Empson and, at the bottom, ‘Edmund Dudley, esquire’. Both men had proved themselves indispensable. Now, they were among those few brokers charged with arranging the transfer of power from Henry VII to his son, who would be responsible not just for the first proper dynastic succession for a hundred years, but who, guiding the new, young king, would help determine what kind of regime it would be.
Downriver from Richmond, the London chronicler remarked on a renewed air of optimism. With a warm, early spring – in March, ‘buds were as far out this year as some year they be, by the latter end of April’ – came an atmosphere of detente. From Camby’s Counter prison in the Poultry to the Fleet prison, from the Marshalsea, the King’s Bench gaol run by Sir Thomas Brandon across the river in Southwark, to the fetid dungeon under Ludgate, cell doors swung open and debtors were released.30
Henry’s act of contrition seemed to work. Towards the end of the month, he was out of danger. On 31 March, Wednesday of Holy Week, Rodrigo de Puebla was admitted to the king’s presence; sidling into the privy chamber, he found Henry convalescing and still, as he reported with a certain self-importance, not seeing many people. Asked to return the following week, de Puebla spent time locked in discussions with the king, counsellors occasionally flitting in and out.31 But as Henry recovered, so the brief thaw dissipated. Empson, Dudley and their men went about their work with renewed vigour.
London’s prisons started to fill again. The city chronicler described a daily stream of men from all regions of England through the city gates, hauled before Henry’s learned counsellors and committed to the Tower or one or other of London’s prisons ‘where they remained to their displeasures long after’. Victims were subject to the now ubiquitous process: summary imprisonment until they agreed to pay large fines for their supposed crimes, more fines for pardons, and yet more fines for agreeing not to break the law in the future. Anybody who approached members of the judiciary for advice or representation was told with a shrug of the shoulders to ‘fall to agreement’. There was no way that any lawyer was about to represent a case against the king’s counsellors, while few people were brave or stupid enough to stand witness.32
Following the crisis of spring 1507, Empson and Dudley had emerged even more prominent among the king’s inner circle; they seemed, too, to be working more closely together, their access to the king more exclusive. Following his arrival at the king’s bedside, business now kept Empson increasingly in the environs of court. That summer, he took a lease on a large house next to the duchy offices at Bridewell, south of Fleet Street on the city’s western edge. ‘Le Parsonage’ was surrounded by orchards running down to the Thames, and was within easy reach of the inns of court and the London houses of the nobility, which extended around the curve of the river towards Westminster.33
In April 1507, as Henry recovered, a man mingling among the crowds of petitioners and lawyers in Westminster Hall could be heard telling anybody who would listen an appalling story. It concerned the London haberdasher Thomas Sunnyff – a prosperous, respectable man – and his wife, Alice. They had murdered a newborn child, then dumped the tiny body in the Thames. Even by the standards of the myriad malicious ‘informations’ lodged with the king’s counsellors it was a truly horrible allegation. What made things even worse was the fact that it was entirely false. The rumour-monger was a servant of Dudley’s promoter, John Camby, who had fabricated the entire case in order to force Sunnyff into paying a fine of ?500 that was apparently owing to the king.34
The ‘fine’, though, was nothing of the sort. It was an old, run-of-the-mill bond to keep the peace – a bond whose conditions Sunnyff had now, according to Camby, broken in the most horrific way. Helpfully, Camby supplied evidence: the testimony of a prostitute, Alice Damston, whose child it seems to have been. Probably a prisoner of Camby’s, given that the Counter prisons were where those convicted of prostitution offences ended up, Damston had been forced to testify against the Sunnyffs. Undoubtedly, she had no choice in the matter. With his information lodged, and his evidence in hand, Camby arrested the bewildered haberdasher and frogmarched him to Empson’s house for a hearing. What happened next was a terrifying example of how Empson and Dudley’s roles increasingly interlocked in pursuit of the king’s rights, and of the impunity with which they and their promoters moved through London.
After Camby had repeated his trumped-up case, Empson ordered Sunnyff to settle his ‘fine’ of ?500. When the haberdasher refused, he was carted off to the Fleet prison and locked up.35 Six weeks went by, and with Sunnyff still refusing to pay, Camby decided to try another avenue. Extracting his victim from the Fleet, the pair went downriver to Greenwich, where the king was in residence. Leaving the nervous Sunnyff under guard, Camby wandered off to find Dudley; after a while, the pair returned. Dudley said, shortly, ‘Sunnyff, agree with the king or else you must go to the Tower.’ When the draper refused to ‘agree’, Camby rowed him back to London, taking him not to the Tower but to his own prison, where he locked Sunnyff up and embarked on a campaign of psychological intimidation. The king, he said, wanted his ?500 and what the king wanted, the king got. He gave Sunnyff an example. When Henry had coveted Wanstead manor, he had victimized its owner, Sir Ralph Hastings, until Hastings sold it to him. Hastings had died of the stress: the implication was that Sunnyff would, too. But again, the draper was resolute, demanding a proper trial. In an unconscious echo of William Cornish’s plea from the Fleet three years previously, he retorted: ‘if the king’s good grace knew the truth of my matter he would not take a penny from me’.
When Sunnyff’s case was, finally, brought in front of the court of King’s Bench in Westminster Hall, another of the king’s judicial cabal, the attorney-general James Hobart, told the judges not to grant him bail. Committing Sunnyff to the Marshalsea, the judges ruled that they had to obey the king’s commandment because Hobart said so: ‘in so much that Camby had brought with him the king’s attorney.’ With Sunnyff back in prison and still refusing to pay up, Dudley, Camby and Richard Page broke into his house in Bower Row, in the north of the city, on 26 June and helped themselves to goods worth the required amount – vastly undervaluing the goods as they did so.36
Having been moved between royal prisons, beyond the city’s jurisdiction, for over three months, subjected to a rigged trial, and with no prospect of release, Sunnyff broke. He agreed to the fine, fearing that he ‘should have died in prison’. On 21 July, Dudley entered in his account book Sunnyff’s ?500 fine in exchange for a pardon ‘for the
