That May, Edmund Dudley had completed the book of accounts that he had started nearly four years previously. Since that time, through the endlessly complex proliferation of fines that he had ferreted out on the king’s behalf, Dudley had accrued a staggering ?219, 316 6s 11d, singlehandedly increasing the crown’s yearly income by 50 per cent. And that was in just one of his account books. As Dudley himself noted, there were several more besides, such as the book of ?31,000-worth of old debts that the king had handed over to him to sniff out. Another telling statistic showed the rampant effectiveness of Henry’s administrators and promoters. In the first fifteen years of the reign, some 870 people had been bound in debt; in the last seven – from around the time of Suffolk’s flight and Arthur’s death – it was 3,500.35 And that July, another building block was put in place.
The latest in the production line of ruthless royal officials, Edward Belknap was cut from Dudley’s cloth, a ‘mini-me’ of the most obnoxious variety. John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, would complain that Belknap’s zealous ‘straight handling’ was far worse than the man who he had previously been forced to deal with, the king’s chief auditor Sir Robert Southwell. That July, Belknap was appointed ‘surveyor of the king’s prerogative’, a newly created office that gave formal expression to much of the nebulous work that Empson, Dudley and their colleagues had been doing. But where, four years before, Dudley had simply been told by Henry what he wanted doing, Belknap’s job description was drawn up in minute detail.36
The surveyor would shine the spotlight of the king’s prerogative into the darkest, most obscure recesses of the realm. He was to create a national network of deputies, who were to investigate all possible instances where the king’s rights might be applied to his financial advantage, where bonds could be imposed and fines taken. He and his men would be furnished with search warrants on request – no questions asked – and as usual, their work would not be salaried, but incentivized: they would receive a cut of the profits they made for the king. In paying in these funds, Belknap was to bypass even the chamber treasury, the shadow financial system run by John Heron. He was to remit them straight to the closest man to the king, his groom of the stool Hugh Denys; Belknap’s accounts, moreover, were to be audited personally by Henry.
Never legalized, the office of surveyor was the fullest expression of Henry’s government, of what Dudley described as exactions of ‘set plan’, the elastic policy which had emerged from the king’s piecemeal attempts to provide a rapid, decisive response to the emergencies of his reign, run by the financial and legal specialists – ‘fiscal judges’, Polydore Vergil called them – who were accountable to him, and to him only. The surveyor formalized all this: the undermining of the common law courts, the dismembering of the body politic, the compact by which the king was bound to listen and respond to his subjects, and the discernible outline of a very different kind of rule – a French one, in fact: absolutism.37
On 1 July 1508, Edward Belknap signed indentures for his new role with Sir Thomas Lovell, Sir Henry Wyatt, Empson and Dudley. Three days later, he gave financial guarantees, bonds of a thousand marks, for the good performing of his role. The men who took the money, who oversaw his work, and to whom he was accountable – indeed, the men who had very probably devised his role in the first place – were Empson and Dudley.38 ‘Thus’, as Vergil said, ‘through the agency of these two men, who behaved as if they were plotting to snatch all lay and ecclesiastical wealth, the most savage harshness was made complete.’
By the end of July, as the grass season approached, Henry was strong enough to go out, north and east of the city, on progress. But underlying the leisurely stages was a new panic. In the hot, stagnant summer, the sweating sickness had settled over London. People collapsed in the streets, slumped in doorways playing with their children, tumbled off horses as they rode. They ate dinner at 11 a.m. with every appearance of health and were dead by suppertime. They died ‘everywhere in this city’, wrote Bernard Andre. Carts rolled through the deserted streets and lanes, carrying away bodies; bells tolled; occasional fervent gatherings of people praying, mourning. Prayers were said daily in St Paul’s, at the cross, whispered in thousands of houses throughout the city. And the sweat seemed to follow the royal family, a constant, invisible presence, first in Greenwich and Eltham, burrowing into the households of the prince, and of the king himself. It was no use running away, said Andre, for death conquered all: ‘
That August, the stately progress north of London, from Thomas Lovell’s house at Enfield to Lady Margaret’s at Hatfield, and east through Essex became a frantic dance: bags, coffers and trunks hastily packed at the first sign of pestilence; servants quarantined, harbingers riding ahead with particular vigilance. Three of the prince’s chamber servants died; by mid-August, at Wanstead, disease had wormed its way into the king’s privy chamber. Hugh Denys, the groom of the stool, was struck down. So too were Richard Fox, and the man who had replaced Lord Daubeney as chamberlain, the trusted Charles Somerset, now lord Herbert. Henry, anxious, issued an edict. Nobody travelling from London was to be admitted to the household precincts, and nobody was to go to the city on business or pleasure, except for medical staff – physicians and apothecaries.39
In the infected city, nothing seemed to stop the promoters. John Baptist Grimaldi’s vendetta against Sir William Capel re-ignited, the Genoese informing Empson and Dudley of coinage offences that the merchant had failed to prosecute during his mayoralty. Found guilty by a jury packed with men ‘fast bound to the girdles of Empson and Dudley’, Capel was ordered to pay ?2,000. When he refused, Camby locked him up. London’s prisons were bursting.40
The atmosphere of impunity took curious turns. At Old Ford, near the king’s disease-ridden manor of Wanstead, the prince’s bodyguard Sir John Rainsford turned highwayman. Holding up a convoy of Italian merchants travelling into London, he found to his delight a consignment of furniture of exquisite manufacture, which he pillaged. Rainsford, though, had put his foot in it: the consignment, it turned out, was an order placed by Henry himself for Mary’s betrothal ceremonies. Rainsford was given a dressing-down – possibly escaping harsher punishment in the general panic over the sweating sickness, possibly through the quick intervention of Sir Henry Marney, or even the prince himself. But maybe, too, this was not such an isolated incident. The only reason it was recorded was that it concerned the king’s goods: the ensuing investigation, and presumably Rainsford’s abject self-abasement in front of the king, had come to Bernard Andre’s attention. Perhaps the prince’s household, with the thuggish Rainsford, pranksters like Henry Guildford, and the sly, streetwise Compton, was more like the rampaging youthful Edward I’s than people cared to admit.41
By the end of August, the disease had disappeared as quickly as it came. The king’s household had had a remarkable escape. Both Fox and Lord Herbert recovered; so too, eventually, did Denys. With the end of summer, the king arrived back at Greenwich, and the travelling household folded smoothly back into the larger, standing household. With a renewed, almost manic determination, Henry set about putting the final pieces of his daughter’s marriage treaty into place.42
As one of Henry’s coterie of chaplains, Thomas Wolsey’s diplomatic career was progressing fast. Close to his mentors Fox and Lovell, and ingratiating himself with up-and-coming ambassadors like Silvestro Gigli and his literary protege Andrea Ammonio, he was increasingly entrusted with important diplomatic missions. Indeed, he had already proved himself to the king in a spectacular feat of diplomacy, one that he later recalled for the benefit of his admiring biographer, George Cavendish. Henry had sent Wolsey on embassy to Maximilian in the Low Countries, a mission he accomplished with superhuman speed. Leaving Richmond around noon, he arrived back three and a half days later in the dead of night; slipping into his surplice, he was waiting demurely in the king’s closet when Henry arrived for early-morning mass. As he debriefed his chaplain, the king’s scepticism – had Wolsey actually been away at all, he wondered – turned to amazement, ‘a great confuse and wonder of his hasty speed’. Fox and Lovell rejoiced ‘not a little’: their man was another confirmed route to the king.43
That autumn, Wolsey was an unctuous presence at Margaret of Savoy’s court at Malines, sending back studious, detailed dispatches, and drawing on a handsome expense account set up by della Fava with the local Frescobaldi branch.44 Finally, the Habsburg diplomatic wheels were turning. In early December, after another ratification of the treaty at Calais overseen by Richard Fox and Thomas Howard earl of Surrey, the imperial ambassadors crossed the Channel and rode through Kent, the bare winter landscape punctuated by lavish receptions, handsome gifts of wine, wax and spices, along the route. Lord Bergavenny and his unruly retainers were long gone. The lone big man in the county, whose retinues now accompanied the ambassadors, was Sir Edward Poynings, the renowned military commander whose loyalties had been constant since Henry’s exile, through Bosworth and the many battles, clashes and emergencies of the reign. In the fields outside Dartford, the bishop of Worcester, Silvestro Gigli, rode towards them at the head of a reception committee, and 150 horsemen, followed by Archbishop Warham and the earl of Oxford. Escorted through the town to the nearby Thames, the ambassadors were rowed upriver by barge to Greenwich, where Henry and the prince, surrounded by the anxious Spanish ambassador Fuensalida, ‘twelve or thirteen’ bishops and an array of nobles, made them welcome. It was true,
