The imperial ambassadors left in the depths of January. With them, the energy of the past months dissipated, and a miasma of ill-health seemed to settle over Richmond. Ordering plentiful supplies of medicine, devotional literature and alcohol, Lady Margaret had retreated to her chamber, surrounded by attentive apothecaries, members of the king’s privy chamber, and her dutiful grandchildren. When in the middle of the month she departed with her household, so too did Henry, retreating to the seclusion of nearby Hanworth. There he settled back into his routine of paperwork and looked over the improvements: newly laid ornamental gardens, together with espaliered apple trees and an aviary; and, in the surrounding parkland, a hunting lodge. But then, in the winter damp and cold, he fell ill again.1 The symptoms were all too familiar: tuberculosis, combined with the suffocating quinsy. He fought on but, as he had done before, he sensed death approaching.
Henry’s preparations for death, modified and developed over the ten years since his illnesses had started, had always been meticulous and to the letter. In his devotion to the sacraments, to the Virgin Mary and the saints, in his good works and religious foundations – the chapel at Westminster Abbey, sightseers already admiring its soaring fan vaulting; the Savoy hospital, on which work had just commenced – the strength of his piety was evident.2 In all this, Henry mirrored the attitudes of the age. People were terrified by the idea of death coming suddenly and unexpectedly. To prepare yourself for death – a battleground for the human soul between God and the devil – was the stuff of life itself: ‘Learn to die’, so one authority stated, ‘and thou shall learn to live.’ It was, too, an art. The countless cheap printed editions of
In early February Henry paid a visit to the Benedictine abbey of Chertsey, returning a few days later. On his way back to Hanworth, there was a slight but unusual adjustment to his itinerary. Henry rarely travelled on a Sunday. This time, however, he did, journeying south and east to the bishop of Winchester’s palace at Esher, Henry’s ‘cell to Richmond’, the home of Richard Fox. What the king was doing there can never be known for sure, but it seems likely that he and Fox, the man who had been close to him for over twenty-five years, mulled over the possible outcomes and dangers that would face the dynasty on his death.4
There remained the possibility of a challenge for the throne. The earl of Suffolk was still in the Tower, while his brother Richard continued to float around Europe. Then, too, there was Buckingham, who gave the impression of wanting nothing more than the heads of Henry’s counsellors on the block and the crown on his own. Those resentful at their exclusion from favour or at their ill-treatment, from the earls of Northumberland and Kent to London’s merchants, had no lack of figureheads from which to choose; neither did foreign powers, such as France or Spain, which would sense an opportunity to manipulate things in their favour. On the other hand, Henry’s death would bring about regime change anyway. Prince Henry had given little indication of wanting to continue the system that his father had sustained – he was, it seemed, far more interested in the glory of kingship. Everybody, from his jousting friends, to nobles, churchmen and men of business, looked to him to provide reform: to restore the political order that his father’s reign had twisted out of shape – in their favour, naturally. The king’s regime would, it was clear, die with him; or it would have to give every impression of doing so. The question now, for both Henry VII and those close to him, was how to smooth his son’s path to the throne while preserving the status quo. In order for things to remain the same, it was clear that they would have to change.5
Candlemas came and went. Again, Henry was unable to make the short barge journey to Westminster, but Elizabeth seemed to linger in his thoughts as he ordered money to be given to a ‘woman that lay in childbed’.6 Shortly after that time, people around him started to notice the familiar signs of death.
On the first Sunday in Lent, 25 February, John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, preached before the king at Hanworth. Even by the standards of the age, Lady Margaret’s confessor had a morbid fixation: when saying mass, ‘he always accustomed to set upon one end of the altar a dead man’s skull’, and would also place the same skull before him ‘when he dined or supped’ – a habit which undoubtedly caused the table talk to evaporate. Fisher, who had been at hand during the king’s illnesses, knew death when he saw it. By the beginning of Lent, he recollected, the king had ‘clearly recognized that he was going to die’. While there was probably some dramatic license involved in the timing – nothing, after all, could become the king’s preparation for death so much as its coinciding with the season of penitence – he had probably spotted what others saw, too: the mental deterioration that accompanied Henry’s physical decline.
So when at the end of February the royal household moved the few miles downriver to Richmond, it was evident that Henry was going there to die.
Few glimpsed Henry from then on. In the presence chamber, courtiers and servants alike did obeisance to the empty throne under its cloth of estate. The king’s health remained a closely guarded secret and Fuensalida reported how, inaccessible behind the firmly shut door to his privy apartments, he would ‘not allow himself to be seen’.7 As the ambassador acknowledged ruefully, this was hardly surprising on his own account: Henry had blackballed him three months previously, since when he had had no access to the king whatsoever. But it was impossible to conceal from the wider court that all was not well. When ambassadors from Maximilian and Margaret of Savoy arrived on 6 March to consolidate the new treaty, Henry would not even admit them. Instead, they were received and handsomely entertained by the prince. But around the same time the king, hankering after young female company, sent for his daughter Mary and also for Catherine, then at nearby Windsor.
Following the frustrations of Mary’s proxy wedding, Catherine had gained a new boldness. Determined to get to the root of the problems over her dowry, she demanded to inspect the original treaty of her marriage to Arthur. Ill, angry, Henry turned the air blue – or, as Catherine delicately put it in a letter to Ferdinand, ‘permitted himself to be led so far as to say things which are not fit to be written to your highness’. But Catherine, Fuensalida implied in his latest, prurient, dispatch to Spain, was out of control, her assertiveness encouraged by the only man who she would now listen to: her Rasputin-like confessor Friar Diego, who preyed on her extreme devotion and was a bad influence on her, in more ways than one. In fact, Diego’s influence caused Catherine to commit ‘many faults’.
Fuensalida did not list these faults – except, that was, for her spreading malicious gossip about him – but, he said, the blame lay at Diego’s door: he was ‘scandalous in an extreme manner’. Skirting delicately around the subject, Fuensalida finally got to the point. The king and his advisers, he said, could not bear to see the lubricious friar ‘so continually about the palace and amongst the women’. He let the insinuations about Diego and Catherine hang in the air.8
For Catherine, on the other hand, Fuensalida was proving even worse than de Puebla. Apart from treating her like a child, and his utter lack of diplomatic finesse, he had introduced her months before to the Genoese banker who had come with him from Spain: Francesco Grimaldi, cousin to Edmund Dudley’s sidekick John Baptist. At first, Francesco had seemed too good to be true. Not only had he brought with him the letters of credit for Catherine’s dowry, but he was more than happy to accommodate her desperate need for cash.
On the advice of Friar Diego – now, apparently, her financial adviser as well as everything else – Catherine borrowed substantial funds from the bank of Grimaldi. Meanwhile, Francesco proceeded to make himself thoroughly at home in her household, seducing her lady-in-waiting Francesca de Caceres. When Catherine dismissed her in a fit of petulance, Fuensalida acted as guardian angel, employing Francesca himself and encouraging her to marry her suitor. For his part Grimaldi, put out by Catherine’s wilfulness, now wanted his money back – with menaces. If she refused to pay her debts, he said, he would leave England, and would take the letters of credit with him.
Early that March, when Catherine – who had been sick much of the night – emerged to join Mary on the short ride from Windsor to Richmond, she found Friar Diego blocking her path with a quiet ‘You shall not go today.’ Not having seen the king for over three weeks and desperate to remain in his good books, Catherine protested. Her confessor was insistent. After two hours, Mary’s party eventually rode off, leaving Catherine behind. On his sickbed, Henry was reportedly ‘very much vexed’ at Catherine’s absence, but, to Fuensalida’s astonishment, he let the episode pass. ‘That the king allows these things’, the ambassador pondered, ‘is not considered a good sign by those who know him.’9
When Catherine eventually arrived at Richmond with her down-at-heel entourage, Fuensalida’s fears were confirmed. Henry, it appeared, could barely be bothered with her any more. It was not, the king told her, his job to keep her shoddy household in order and subsidize its expenses, but ‘the love he bore her would not allow him to do otherwise’. Imagine, Catherine wrote to her father in miserable indignation, the state she was in: to be told that
