blossoming hawthorn tree festooned with coats of arms and, at their centre, a shield quartered with the Tudor green and white – ‘which colours be comfortable and pleasant for all seasons’ – sat the prince and Princess Mary. The king, it appeared, was absent: still recovering from illness or, perhaps, just disinclined to be seen in public.13
Two months previously, Mary’s marriage contract with the Habsburg heir Charles of Castile had been drawn up. Now, appropriately enough, she played the lead role in the dramatic tableau that introduced the tournament’s theme: that of new love, of Venus and Cupid, symbolized by the colour green. In a green dress entwined with spring flowers, surrounded by green-clad servants, Mary herself played the Lady May, ‘this lady sovereign’, presiding over the contest and awarding prizes. Her challengers fought wearing her favours: green badges fixed at their throats. Now thirteen years old, Mary clearly had the presence to carry off the lead in this game of courtly love. As the reporter swooned, she ‘had such beauty/ It would a heart constrain to serve her.’14
All this was the currency of courtly love, and seemed decorous enough. But a souvenir account, in rhyme, published to commemorate the games – the author remained anonymous – hinted at an undertow of discontent. Some people, it appeared, had not been happy with what they had witnessed. Not only that, but there had clearly been none-too-complimentary whisperings in some quarters against those involved with the tournament. ‘Some reprehend’, the versifier wrote, before politely telling the detractors to be quiet: ‘God them amend/ And grace them send/ Not to offend more/ Till they die.’ In the following month’s jousts, the tensions came to the surface in spectacular fashion.
The two men given star billing in the June jousts were Brandon and another ubiquitous presence in the tiltyard, Richard Grey, earl of Kent. One of Queen Elizabeth’s Woodville relatives, Kent, in his late twenties, was a contemporary of Northumberland and Buckingham. Like them, he spent plenty of time and money acting as a glorified clothes-horse in royal ceremonials, with little visible return by way of political responsibility or power. And he was a disaster waiting to happen.
Since inheriting his earldom and estates in December 1503, Kent had done his best to uphold his father’s gloomy deathbed prediction that his son would ‘not thrive but be a waster’. Profligate and chaotic, he squandered prodigious amounts of money at the gambling tables of the Lombard Street inns – situated conveniently near his own London base, the sign of the George, a familiar haunt of rackety jousting types – where he also found a supply of brokers ready to extend him credit, many of them Italian moneylenders. He also found willing creditors among the most practised and manipulative of Henry VII’s counsellors. Proving a corrupt and astonishingly inept businessman, ‘as unmeet to govern his estates as a natural born idiot’, Kent walked straight into their clutches.
Those who took full advantage of Kent, a ‘prey set open to the spoil of all men’, were the same royal counsellors that shook their heads meaningfully at his lack of education and self-control. Foremost among them were Giles lord Daubeney and the vice-chamberlain Sir Charles Somerset, the king’s jewel-house keeper Sir Henry Wyatt, Sir John Hussey and, inevitably, Empson and Dudley.15
Trying to ingratiate himself with the king’s inner circle, and to pay off his crippling debts, Kent mortgaged and sold off tracts of his Bedfordshire estates at knockdown prices. Some of them he practically gave away: Lord Daubeney apparently bought one of his manors for two pieces of cloth and a horse with its harness on.16 Desperately casting around for sources of cash, Kent abducted an heiress whose lucrative wardship had been left to his half-brother and, in the ensuing tug-of-war over the young girl, the inevitable happened. The king intervened, confiscated the disputed wardship and imposed on him a series of punishing fines. The man who took care of business for the crown was Kent’s new brother-in-law, Sir John Hussey – who had paid the earl two thousand marks to marry his sister.
By early 1507 the hapless Kent had mortgaged the greater part of the family estates. He had tried to play the property game, to buy influence and mix it as a sophisticate at court and with the king’s counsellors, but he had failed. More than that, he was being ruined and humiliated into the bargain. Something, it was clear, had to give and, as court geared up for the spring jousts, it did so.
On 6 May, when Kent defaulted on his programme of repayments to the king, Henry’s ruthless, opportunistic response was masked by a veneer of concern for the earl’s financial state. As the suave legalese put it, given that Kent had neither the wherewithal – nor, it added, the inclination – to pay up, the king, ‘of his gracious and benign mercy and pity’ agreed to step in, to call his counsellors to heel, and to help Kent work out how to meet his debts. In part-payment Henry agreed to accept the income from two of the earl’s prime estates in north Wales – which added to the portfolio of lands, including the Bedfordshire manor of Ampthill, that the king had already annexed from him. But this was no act of mercy. Henry had long had his eye on Kent’s Welsh estates. The earl had blundered into a trap. And the men who had stitched him up on the king’s behalf were the lawyers whom he had retained as informal financial advisers: Empson and Dudley.17
Having placed considerable faith in the ‘loving’ advice of the pair, Kent had been lured into a false sense of security over his repayment deadlines. The counsellors had seemed perfectly relaxed, telling him that the paperwork ‘should not require so great haste’, and assuring him that he ‘should incur no indemnity for non-payment thereof at the said time appointed’. The day after the deadline passed, they swung into action, hitting Kent with a royal summons demanding immediate payment on the king’s behalf – and, because he had defaulted, payment in full. Kent had fallen for the cheapest of confidence tricks. As people at court sniggered behind their hands, it had finally begun to dawn on the earl that he was being played.
Bewildered, angry and utterly unable to protest, he had nowhere to turn. By the time of the June jousts, weeks later, he was still simmering with a pent-up sense of injustice. Having been systematically asset-stripped by the king’s counsellors, and by extension by Henry himself, Kent had come to realize that, politically marginalized and with no way out of his financial entanglements, he would not get any change out of the current regime. He was not alone. The jousts of June seemed to mark a change in the atmosphere, a palpable shift of focus. Although the king, now fully recovered from illness, was attending the spectacle, there was little doubt who the participants wanted to impress the most. The same anonymous author that had written the account of the May jousts picked up on it, too: ‘Every man of them was the more ready/ Perceiving that our Prince Henry should it behold.’18
That June, instead of a refined demonstration of chivalric loyalty, the protagonists tore up the rule book and lashed out. Pieces of body armour were sheared off; swords splintered and broke as the combatants hacked away at each other. Most of the contestants were injured to some extent or other – ‘none of the lusty sort/ Escaped free’ – and one of them, not mentioned by name, was ‘hurt in deed’ and had to retire. Maybe the combatants were simply bad technicians, but this seems improbable: the likes of Brandon, Kent and Sir Edward Howard had years of experience jousting in the spotlight of royal tournaments, while Knyvet was by all accounts a shimmering talent. Rather, for one reason or another, it seems as though they were deliberately pushing the sport to its boundaries in a thrilling, violent spectacle.
For Henry and his counsellors it was all highly troubling. There was something brash and warlike about it, something uncontainable. There was, of course, a prominent strand of intellectual opinion about the king that disliked chivalric culture and the way it gave precedence to the military classes – who were bad enough as it was – and the warmongering it led to. Men like Richard Fox had spent decades masterminding Henry’s diplomacy, an approach designed to avoid war at all costs and – in Dudley’s words – they saw war as pointless and a ‘great consumer of treasure and riches’. In fact, this went for the majority of Henry’s lawyer-counsellors, who, of course, were echoing the king’s own mind.19
Now, profligate, louche and belligerent men like Brandon, Kent and Sir Edward Howard – ‘by whose wanton means’, it was later noted disapprovingly, the young Henry VIII ‘spendeth much money, and is more disposed to war than to peace’ – had put on a display that was ‘fondly’, or foolishly, undertaken. In fact, some seemed to suggest, the jousts’ violence was no accident, but deliberately subversive, a mailed fist in the face of Henry VII’s kingship. People connected with the tournament were, it was insinuated, ‘most busy’ spreading ‘evil’, ‘false tongues’ were ‘slandering’ Henry and his counsellors. Certain people around the king clearly felt threatened – not least, because the prince loved it.20
So unlike his father in other respects, the prince had nevertheless inherited his singleminded focus – though the objects of his desires would prove rather different. In years to come, his obsessiveness would manifest itself most obviously in his pursuit of love. ‘So ardent was he when he had begun to form an attachment’, said one observer, ‘that he could give himself no rest.’ Martial arts, though, always competed with women for his affections and, that June, his all-consuming absorption in the tournament was evident.21
Ruddy with excitement, the prince sat massively alongside his father, fidgeting with passion. Caught up in
