In the chill damp of the new year, Henry’s tuberculosis returned. His public appearances, always infrequent, were now fleeting. For most of February, he was holed up in the privy apartments at Richmond, where access to him was even more constrained than usual. Reports of his physical condition leaked out. He was breathing with difficulty, unable to eat, and had again grown weak and emaciated. An arthritic condition left his hip joints swollen and inflamed. At Candlemas, on the anniversary of Elizabeth’s death, unable to move, he dispatched Daubeney to attend her memorial service at Westminster Abbey, and to make the customary offerings.
For many, Henry seemed a name only, a cipher for the activities of his agents. Rarely visible, he seemed not to want to be seen. For people who caught a glimpse of him, hollow-cheeked, blue eyes burning fiercely, he seemed more dead than alive. Illness seemed to provoke even further his fierce obsession with control and obedience: in between fits of choking and arthritic pain, with his army of physicians on hand, he continued to pursue his subjects with an intensity even more savage than before, almost as if he was afraid that he might lose people’s loyalty. In the midst of all this, he tipped lavishly – as he had always done – small acts of service and kindness, such as the twenty shillings given to the sergeant-at-arms who brought a bottle of mead for his ravaged throat. There were days, too, when he could haul himself to his feet and give unfortunate petitioners a dressing-down.16 But, more often that not, he was incapacitated. The annotated names in John Heron’s chamber accounts reveal the identity of the men in charge, making payments and sending an incessant stream of privy seals and letters on the king’s behalf: the master of the wards Sir John Hussey, Empson’s, Dudley’s and Denys’s associate Roger Lupton, and Dudley himself.17
In a sure sign of the gravity of the situation, Lady Margaret Beaufort had again descended on Richmond. With lodgings constructed for her household servants, she settled in for the duration with her retinue and chief advisers, including her confessor, John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, and fired off a volley of letters and commissions, ordering – a typical maternal reaction to the quality of her son’s furniture – new beds, and dispatching a servant upriver to London for a barrel of muscadel.18
Towards the end of February, a new ambassador from Aragon arrived, and with him, renewed hope for Catherine. Finally giving in to his daughter’s carping about de Puebla, Ferdinand had sent a man who was the very antithesis of the subtle, low-born, disabled Jew: Don Gutierre Gomez de Fuensalida.19 A stiff-necked aristocrat and ex-military man, Fuensalida may have ticked the right social boxes but his diplomacy had all the subtlety of a sergeant-major on parade. He had won his ambassadorial spurs at the Burgundian court, where he developed an idiosyncratic approach to tricky negotiations. As he told Ferdinand in one dispatch, there was only one way to deal with scheming foreigners, and that was to show them who was boss – ‘they’re only humble when they’re badly treated’ – a strategy which inevitably failed with both the Burgundians and his diplomatic colleagues. Why Ferdinand thought Fuensalida was the man to improve Anglo-Spanish relations is a mystery. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t.
Ferdinand had given his new ambassador two letters, both addressed to de Puebla: one confirming him in his post as resident ambassador, the other dismissing him from his duties. After sizing up exactly where de Puebla’s loyalties lay – with Henry and England, Ferdinand strongly suspected – Fuensalida could use whichever he saw fit. What was more, Fuensalida had not travelled alone. With him came a representative of the Aragonese branch of the Grimaldi bank. Francesco Grimaldi, cousin of Dudley’s sidekick John Baptist, was carrying the bills of exchange for Catherine’s marriage portion. Finally, Ferdinand had stumped up, and, despite sidelining de Puebla, had used his recommended broker to do so. Catherine’s purgatory seemingly was almost at an end. But appearances, as ever, were to prove deceptive.
While his father remained in the seclusion of Richmond, Prince Henry and his companions had again retreated to Kennington. There, throughout February, they practised for the early March jousts, in honour of the arrival of the latest embassy from Maximilian, to be held downriver at Greenwich.
Two days before the festivities, the king staggered to his barge. Thick with carpets and cushions under its canopy, the barge nosed down the Thames to the bishop of Bath and Wells’s luxuriously appointed palace on the Strand, which the king had recently confiscated from Adriano Castellesi. Arriving at Greenwich, Henry made a brief appearance before the assembled ambassadors in a forced display of familial unity. Taking his daughter Mary by the hand, and gripping Catherine with the other, he discussed his prospective daughter-in-law with the ambassadors. He and his son talked often about Catherine, Henry said to Fuensalida, and the prince thought her ‘a beautiful creature’.20 But whatever the prince thought, as Fuensalida was to discover, was neither here nor there.
The prince looked on enviously at his companions-in-arms, Buckingham’s brother Henry Stafford and Richard earl of Kent, as they fought ‘fiercely backwards and forwards’. After the jousts, the king retreated to his privy apartments, ill, reluctant to be seen, closeted away. He was worsening: all the telltale signs were there. Masses were ordered: two thousand to be sung by the Friars Observant at Chertsey, eight thousand at Oxford and Cambridge, at sixpence the mass. Diversions of every kind were tried – in a boat on the Thames, mariners ‘rowed up and down singing’, music drifting into the royal apartments. Outside, in the public rooms of the palace, the entertainments continued. On 15 March, in the presence chamber, the prince dined ‘with certain lords, as was customary’. Served by his father’s waiters, presided over by his gentleman-ushers, he sat ‘in place of the king’.21
Easter came and went, and still Henry was withdrawn. Physically, he had begun to recover, but he was rarely seen. Bernard Andre, for once, seemed to put his finger on it: the king was, he said, ‘depressed’, exhausted and thin. As the prince practised incessantly in the tiltyard at Greenwich, Henry remained shut away, absorbed in his worlds of finance and diplomacy, distracted intermittently by minstrels, new chess sets and dice, and by tempting offerings from his French pastry chef.22
Disregarding the advice of de Puebla, and of Catherine, whom he dismissed as little more than a girl, Fuensalida plunged into the negotiations. In an interview headed by Henry’s crack diplomats – Fox, Nicholas West, Surrey and Charles Somerset, Lord Herbert – the entente quickly unravelled. Although Fuensalida had brought the bankers’ drafts, there was a major catch: they only covered two-thirds of the dowry. The balance would be paid in Catherine’s jewels and plate. The problem was, as Fox and West blandly outlined, the treasure was not Catherine’s to pay. When she had married Arthur, it became his; and when he died, it reverted not to her, but to the king. Henry had, of course, graciously allowed her to keep it – but since then, she had sold nearly half of it. If Ferdinand really wanted his daughter’s marriage to the prince to go ahead, he would have to pay the whole dowry upfront, in cash.
Fox and his colleagues ran legal rings around Fuensalida, and the more sweetly reasonable they were, the more irascible the ambassador became. His requests to see Henry were batted away by Fox, who would emerge from the privy apartments, the door closing quietly behind him, shaking his head: the king, regretfully, was indisposed, and could not be seen. Fuensalida had got precisely nowhere. Ultimately, though, the underlying problem was not the money.
With his daughter’s Habsburg marriage in the bag, and obsessed with his balance-of-power policy, Henry wanted, it seems, to continue manoeuvring his son around the European marriage market as long as he could: the prince could marry another Habsburg, perhaps; even Louis XII’s daughter Margaret of Angouleme was mooted. Although Catherine remained, in theory, a reasonable option, Henry by now found the idea of an alliance with her father utterly noxious. Over the years Ferdinand had slighted him with his constant procrastinations over the marriage portion, accompanied by barely believable excuses. He had played fast and loose with Henry’s protestations of love for Juana. He had refused to countenance Mary’s betrothal to his grandson Charles. In short, he had behaved with much the same calculated suspicion as Henry himself.23
Ferdinand understood all too well that Henry was, as his secretary of state Almazan put it, ‘not his friend’. Having reached a dead end with the king, he urged Fuensalida to try another tack: the ambassador must get as close as possible to the prince, and get him onside. Prince Henry, Ferdinand was sure, wanted to marry Catherine. What was more, with his chivalric bravado the prince had the air of somebody who might be far more amenable to the kind of foreign adventures that Ferdinand had tried so long, and so unsuccessfully, to get his father embroiled in.
Fuensalida had little luck this way either. The prince was kept apart from the rest of court, he wrote acidly, in seclusion, ‘like a girl’. At Richmond, his chamber could only be reached by way of the king’s apartments, which were themselves inaccessible. When exiting the palace – to joust, perhaps, or hunt – the prince was hustled out of a side door into a private park, presumably the privy gardens adjoining Richmond, and surrounded only by those people expressly appointed to accompany him: his chamber companions and security advisers. Nobody, Fuensalida
