Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

had confiscated from the earl of Suffolk, at Reading Abbey, and at Woking, a spacious house set in orchards and parkland that had formerly been owned by his mother – much to Lady Margaret’s chagrin, he had forced her to swap it for the rather less agreeable manor of Hunsdon in Hertfordshire.⁴⁸ Towards the end of October, Henry arrived at the most recent addition to his property portfolio.

He had chosen Hanworth with studied care. Within easy riding distance of Richmond, a few miles to the east, it was a bolt-hole from court – much like Wanstead on the other side of London, whose keeper was Hugh Denys, Henry’s groom of the stool and head of his secret chamber. It was an appointment that spoke volumes for how Henry regarded the secluded manors at which he increasingly spent much of his time. Denys, the man who oversaw Henry’s private world, was perfectly placed to make security and domestic arrangements when the king was ill, or when the privy apartments were not enough of a refuge. When at Richmond, Richard Fox recollected, Henry would leave the court behind and ride the few miles south, crossing the Thames to the bishop of Winchester’s palace at Esher, where Fox – the bishop in question – would provide him with an atmosphere of monastic calm. Esher had been, Fox said, Henry’s ‘cell to Richmond’.⁴⁹ Now, in Hanworth, equidistant from both Richmond and Esher and sited conveniently near the Benedictine monastery of Chertsey, which Henry favoured, the king had found his own ‘cell’ where, heavily guarded by his yeomen and secret servants, he could be alone with his thoughts – and with his accounts.

On acquiring Hanworth – another compulsory purchase, this time from his administrator Sir John Hussey – Henry had immediately set about transforming it. By the time he arrived that October, a hunting park had been enclosed and the grounds emptied of detritus. Now, with typical attention to detail, he planned a pleasure garden, with sunken beds, a hunting lodge and an aviary.⁵⁰

Henry’s studied distance, exacerbated by conspiracy and illness, had become acute. Increasingly, and even when in the best of health, he seemed not to want to be seen: during his energetic progress that summer, even though his itinerary had been detailed in the published ‘gests’, he had been impossible to pin down. He paid lip- service to the rhythms and rituals of court, but this was a king whose will operated through his counsellors. The contrast with the vital son whom he pushed into the ceremonial limelight on every occasion was there for all to see. So, too, was the confined, powerless life that the prince led.

13

Savage Harshness Made Complete

Through the late summer and autumn of 1507, the carts and carriages of the royal household rumbled slowly along the Thames valley from house to house, the sixteen-year-old prince and his servants trailing along in their wake. He shadowed his father’s progress, a swift gallop away in the event of any emergency, or a recurrence of Henry’s ill-health – or in case of anything untoward in his own retinue. On occasions when space for both households was lacking, the prince might lodge at a separate house – while the king was at Woking on 11 October he spent the night at Easthampstead, from where his brother had set out eagerly to meet Catherine six years before. But ultimately, where Henry went, the prince went too. At his side, through the whole progress, ‘per totum itinerum’, were Lord Mountjoy and the man who appears to have been the prince’s head of security, Sir John Rainsford.¹

Rainsford was one of the king’s household knights. A link in the crown’s chain of command in his native Essex, where he had ties with the earl of Oxford, he had got his job with the prince through his chamberlain Sir Henry Marney, a neighbour and in-law. Rainsford seems to have been a security chief of the shoot-first-and-ask- afterwards variety. He passed his violent disposition on to his son, John junior, ‘a very dangerous man of his hands and one that delighteth much in beating, mayheming and evil entreating the king’s subjects’. Such violence, of course, came in handy when maintaining a ring of steel around the prince – if properly controlled.²

The sixteen-year-old Henry seemed a model prince: magnificent in ceremonial, chivalrous in the tiltyard, and pious in prayer. But even if the impulse took him, he knew that any aberrant behaviour would be likely to get back to his father through Sir Henry Marney, or one or other of the servants who doubled as members of the royal household. On progress, there seemed little opportunity for the kind of teenaged rampaging up and down the Thames valley that his ancestor Edward I had indulged in when barely a year older: waylaying passers-by, assaulting them and making off with their horses, carts and provisions.

Within this closely controlled environment, however, there were already hints of the extravagant carelessness to come. That August, hunting at Langley, the prince had contrived to lose a number of jewels, among them a ruby ring given him years before by his mother, and a red-and-black enamelled diamond ring, a present from Edmund Dudley. The sloppiness was catching: the keeper of the prince’s jewels, Ralph Pudsey, mislaid a delicate gold chain of the prince’s – ‘and’, wrote the king’s jewel-house keeper Sir Henry Wyatt grimly, ‘the king knoweth of it’.³ The prince had men around him who, like all good servants, were keen to bend themselves to his will, to have ‘good wait to come to him if he do call them, or make any countenance to them, to do him service or message’. Servants rode up and down the Thames valley, to London and back ‘pro negociis suis’, on his business or on shopping trips for necessaries and luxuries – musical instruments, perhaps, to add to the prince’s growing collection, or books of ‘ballets’ such as the voguish ballad ‘A Gest of Robin Hood’, in which the outlaw roamed through the countryside, bow at the ready, looking for random targets or ‘rovers’ to fire at. The prince particularly liked to think of himself as Robin, and he was, of course, a crack shot. Maybe he danced late into the evening with his companions and select female company, ‘in his shirt and without shoes’, as he would do in his first years as king: ‘he does wonders and leaps like a stag’, said the Milanese ambassador admiringly.⁴

One servant to whom the prince was becoming particularly attached was William Compton. Now in his mid- twenties, Compton’s life had been defined and shaped by the royal household in which he had made his way since the age of eleven. Performing his domestic duties, he watched how men gained power and wealth: the swagger of Empson and Dudley; the discreet, submissive confidence with which privy servants like Denys, William Smith and Richard Weston moved in the king’s presence. Slowly, Compton was making himself similarly indispensable to the prince, becoming his confidant and fixer, prized for his ‘wisdom and fidelity’ and wordlessly anticipating his every desire: shortly after Henry VIII became king, Compton would be arranging his sexual liaisons.⁵ A servant-companion of a different calibre was Henry Guildford, son of Sir Richard, who had been a constant presence at the prince’s side for almost a decade. Stocky, a head shorter and two years older than him, Guildford was an imaginative, exuberant influence who had inherited his father’s love of court entertainments. An enthusiastic master of the revels under Henry VIII, he would dress up as one of the merry men to the king’s Robin. Together with his half-brother Sir Edward, Henry Guildford was a fully paid-up member of the jousting set.

Both Compton and Guildford, in their different ways, were vital conduits to the world from which the prince was, by and large, insulated, bringing the news and gossip he craved. The talk of the town, more often than not, was Charles Brandon.

Brandon’s behaviour had gone from bad to worse. Having jettisoned the pregnant Anne Browne to marry her aunt Dame Margaret Mortimer, Brandon, flush with the proceeds from the sale of Dame Margaret’s lands, had annulled his marriage on grounds of consanguinity and transferred his attentions back to the more fragrant Anne. As the inevitable court case ensued, late in 1507 he rode into Essex, where Anne was living in traumatized seclusion, and whisked her away. The witnesses to their shotgun marriage in Stepney church early the following year included Brandon’s partners-in-crime, Sir Edward Guildford and the earl of Surrey’s belligerent second son, Sir Edward Howard.⁶

With his limited freedom, the prince probably viewed the dashing Brandon’s liaisons with something like a scandalized and envious admiration. But there was – and always would be – a strong romantic idealism in him. Brandon’s grubby, exploitative behaviour may well have acquired a chivalric lustre in the retelling, an adventure story in which he swooped to carry off his damsel-in-distress, heedless of the consequences. This, after all, was the way that the prince’s own parents’ love-story had been portrayed in verse, with the dashing Henry Tudor, ‘banished