The household then turned southwest, towards the earl of Kent’s Bedfordshire manor of Ampthill, which it reached by 15 August. ‘Standing stately upon an hill’, Ampthill’s generously proportioned inner court contained ‘4 or 5 fair towers of stone’; outside its large gatehouse, a sprawling courtyard was formed from a range of lodgings and stabling. With its well-stocked wooded parkland and noted ‘cleanness of air’, Ampthill was the ideal hunting place for the tubercular king.31
Henry, in fact, seemed in better health than he had been for years – indeed, he had ‘grown fat’. In marked contrast with the painful progresses of recent years, where he had lingered, bedridden, in the same house for weeks on end, he was now constantly in motion, ‘going from one hunting place to another’ with a vigorous, almost manic energy. Not only were messengers and ambassadors, shuttling to and from the itinerant household, left trailing in his wake, they couldn’t find him half the time. His evasiveness, indeed, seemed almost deliberate. Catherine, marooned in London at Durham House, complained that he stayed nowhere long enough to get down to business – by which she meant dealing with the matter of her dowry.32
But between the incessant hawking and hunting, Henry was, as usual, constantly involved in business. Surrounded by his coterie of administrators and counsellors, he continued to read correspondence, receive diplomats, sign accounts and hear lawsuits. Among the matters he tied up at Ampthill was that of the earl of Kent.33
Earlier that summer, Henry had summoned to him all those who had been involved in real-estate dealings with the hapless earl, and told them to detail their transactions in full. Then, ‘in discharge of their conscience’, he presented them with two options. Either the estates they had purchased would be confiscated by the crown – or they could pay the king large sums of money to keep them. Sir John Hussey, who had obviously driven a sensational bargain with Kent, opted for the latter, paying the king ?66 13s 4d for permission to hold on to his newly acquired lands in Northamptonshire.
Henry had had his cake and eaten it. He had allowed his counsellors free rein to exploit the earl; then, when they had done so, he moved in and did the same to them. At the same time, he had assumed the moral high ground. Kent was obviously incapable of looking after his own property, so Henry, ‘perceiving and knowing the danger that would be the confusion and utter undoing of the said earl of Kent’, acted as custodian. Income from Kent’s lands would flood into the royal coffers, and lucrative estate-manager jobs would be sold to the highest bidders. There would be no chance of the impecunious earl buying them back. As ever, the king’s sense of timing was vicious. On 14 August, the day before he arrived at Ampthill, he ordered Kent to sign indentures making it over to the crown.
For Kent, insult followed injury. Five days later, Henry imposed on him a number of draconian conditions, including a personal control order that stipulated that he had to ‘be seen daily once in the day within the king’s house’, and was not to leave court without written authorization. Kent was effectively gated. To encourage him to keep his word, Henry made him sign a bond for ?10,000.34
By 22 August, the royal household had moved on to Easton Neston in Northamptonshire. This was Empson’s manor: he had been born and brought up in the nearby market town of Towcester, on Watling Street, the Roman road that ran arrow-straight between London and the east midlands. In 1499, Empson had obtained a licence from Henry to create a park around his house. He enclosed four hundred acres, including all the former common lands of the adjacent village; the village itself was destroyed and its inhabitants turfed out. His aspirations did not end there. He transformed Easton Neston into a lordly mansion, with a crenellated gatehouse (built across a public right-of- way), twenty-two chambers, two kitchens and a profusion of up-to-the-minute architectural features, glazed windows and tiled floors.35 The result was a house and park fit for a king.
Henry’s stay at Easton Neston that summer – his first visit there – was another benchmark in Empson’s rise. With Lovell, the king had stayed three days: with Empson, it was five. As the royal hunting party moved through Empson’s cultivated parkland, shooting its way through flocks and herds of game, which Henry distributed to local notables, the counsellor’s smooth easiness in the king’s presence – at the king’s side, no less – was noted. Typically, though, Henry missed no opportunity to take him down a peg or two. When, the following month, Empson petitioned him for a grant of ‘certain manors’, Henry paused, crossed out the clause that read ‘for term of life’, and scribbled in the margin, ‘at pleasure’. It was a reminder to Empson, if he needed it, that what the king gave he could also take away.36
By late August, Henry had arrived at Woodstock. One of the royal standing houses, it was big enough to accommodate not just the itinerant household but the whole circus of court. Earlier in the reign, it had been one of Henry’s favourite places to hunt, and he had frequented it often, making extensive improvements and upgrades: a vaulted conduit for running water, a new gatehouse and two new courts, refurbished apartments for him and for Elizabeth. The location of Prince Arthur’s first proxy marriage, Woodstock had held fond memories – memories which, with Arthur’s death, had become unbearable. Henry hadn’t been there for years. Now, he would be based there for a fortnight, allowing the various envoys and diplomats to catch up with him. Among them was the ailing Rodrigo de Puebla, whose gout was giving him such pain that he had to be carried in a litter from his cramped, overpriced rooms in the nearby village. There, too, Catherine finally joined the party.37
For Catherine, things had got desperate. Now twenty-two, she had been in England for six years, and was part of the furniture. But she was oddly out of place. There seemed no room for her in Henry’s vision for a Europe dominated by an Anglo-Habsburg alliance. In April 1507, Ferdinand had compounded the problem. Missing yet another deadline for payment of Catherine’s dowry, he had written to Henry asking for an extension until the end of September. Henry had agreed.
On hearing of this latest setback, Catherine wrote a desperate letter to her father, painting a melodramatic picture of her destitution. Her servants, she wrote, walked about in rags. She had been forced to sell quantities of her jewels and plate in order to maintain her household in some semblance of dignity. Worse still, Henry now treated her not with the loving respect of a father-in-law, but with polite indifference. She was, too, refused access to the prince, ‘even though’, as she wrote, ‘he lived in the same house as her’. Indeed, she had not had so much as a glimpse of him for four months. But, she wrote proudly, she followed her father’s orders, always conducting herself as though her betrothal remained an established fact, ‘as though God alone could undo what has been done’. It was an attitude that these difficult years would ingrain in her for the rest of her life.
Catherine, though, was beginning to learn the lesson that de Puebla had impressed upon her, following her disastrous attempt to try and mix it in Anglo-Spanish diplomacy almost two years previously. ‘Dissimulate’, he had said. That spring, she tried to do exactly that. One source of this new-found worldliness, it seems, was a recent arrival in her household: her confessor, a young friar called Father Diego Fernandez.
Quite where Father Diego had come from, or when he had materialized, is uncertain – a member of Henry’s favoured order of Observant Franciscans, he may well have been resident at the friary at Greenwich – but one thing was clear: Ferdinand had not sent him. In April 1507, writing in response to her father’s concern for the state of her soul, Catherine reassured him that she already had a confessor who was ‘competent’. In fact, Father Diego quickly proved more than competent. In the way of spiritual mentors, he quickly came to exercise what some viewed as an unhealthy hold over the young princess. And, somehow, he had imbued in her a renewed sense of purpose. Lamenting the ‘insufficiency’ and ‘incompetence’ of ambassadors – she meant de Puebla – Catherine wrote to her father asking for the keys to the Spanish diplomatic cipher. She had taught herself to read code, and had indeed written to him in it, but perhaps she had done so incorrectly, perhaps he had not understood her clearly. She wanted to be able to write confidentially to Ferdinand about her marriage – and to be absolutely sure that he got the message.38
There was one thing that, she knew, might yet swing matters in her favour. Henry was still keen to remarry. Philip of Burgundy’s unexpected death in September 1506 had got him thinking again about Catherine’s older sister Juana, whose pale, isolated beauty he had admired at Richmond the previous year, and who was now Philip’s widow. In recent years Henry had of course been pursuing Philip’s sister, Margaret of Savoy – rich, Habsburg, and aunt to Philip and Juana’s son Charles of Castile, who was due to be betrothed to Henry’s daughter Mary. Marriage to Margaret of Savoy would, Henry told Catherine, suit him ‘perfectly well’, but marriage to Juana would be ‘still better’. In fact Juana, queen of Castile, could provide him with a direct route on to the European stage. By the spring of 1507, Henry had begun to fixate: both on Juana herself, and on the possibilities for European domination that she represented. Behind the scenes, he had started to agitate hard for the marriage. Catherine realized that as Juana’s sister and a way to her ear, she now had value. If she could help Henry achieve his desire, she could also help herself.
In mid-July Catherine wrote to Ferdinand having successfully deciphered her father’s dispatches, something
