she was dependent on the king’s goodwill even for her food, which ‘is given me almost as alms’. The situation, it seemed, was hopeless, and Catherine began to think the unthinkable: after over seven years in England, and now twenty-three years old, she would have to return to Spain.10 But while the king’s lassitude reflected his almost total indifference towards Catherine as a bride for his son, it was also a sign of something else. Whether or not Fuensalida suspected it, Henry was, by degrees, losing control. As he declined, faction stirred at the heart of power: in the king’s privy chamber. Barely detectable, it revealed itself, almost inevitably, in his account books.
Over the years, the name of Hugh Denys, the groom of the stool and head of the privy chamber, had been a constant in the accounts of chamber treasurer John Heron, with whom he had an open-ended expense account on the king’s behalf. In recent times, the informal ‘privy purse’ that Denys kept to meet Henry’s personal payments had been supplemented by other forms of income, in particular the profits of justice: fines siphoned off from various courts of law. The latest of these were the fines generated by the efforts of Edward Belknap, which were assessed by Henry himself and paid straight into Denys’s hands. Belknap, who had barely been in his role for six months, was already proving a highly effective fundraiser – which may have been why, from 14 January 1509, Denys’s name ceased to appear in the king’s chamber accounts: he no longer needed to take his chits and receipts to Heron now that he had a ready supply of cash on tap. But then, that February, Henry stopped signing Belknap’s books – and from the end of the month, Denys’s name vanished from them, too.11
Why this should have been remains a mystery. Illness is one possibility. Although Denys had survived the sweating sickness the previous summer, it had, perhaps, left him weak and unable to fulfil his duties. There is, though, a more likely explanation: that Denys’s influence was fading along with the king, with whom his fortunes were inextricably entwined. Quietly, with no outward change in status, he had relinquished his leading role; others, equally quietly, were stepping into his shoes. None of this was formalized, and to anybody outside the privy chamber, it was undetectable. But for those familiar with the delicate web of relationships that knitted together the king’s close counsellors and servants, it was a warning sign.
Richard Weston was one of Denys’s longstanding colleagues in the privy chamber, and he had profited greatly from his intimacy with the king. Like Denys, he had become closely acquainted with the circle around Edmund Dudley, taking debts with his colleagues on the king’s behalf. But while Denys’s association with Dudley was particularly close, Weston’s friends were different.12 Years before, Queen Elizabeth had favoured him with particular commissions; Prince Henry, too, liked his air of agreeable urbanity. In recent years, Weston had gone out of his way to express quiet solidarity with certain prominent nobles, standing surety for the earl of Northumberland’s extortionate debts and receiving a grant from him in return. And he was linked, in particular, with two of Henry’s greatest counsellors. Back in 1503, in his battle with Sir Richard Empson, the Yorkshire knight Sir Robert Plumpton had remarked that Weston was a man who could be trusted – along with his friends, the bishop of Winchester Richard Fox and Sir Thomas Lovell.13 Over the next weeks, Hugh Denys, Dudley’s line of information into the privy chamber, would be replaced by Fox and Lovell’s man, Weston. It would prove crucial to what followed.
By the end of March, the king was close to death. Henry’s spiritual officers ordered thousands of masses to be sung on his behalf, among them, padding around, the now-ubiquitous Thomas Wolsey. In early April, Lady Margaret’s retinues arrived at Richmond and quantities of ‘kitchen stuff’ were rowed downstream from her London house of Coldharbour, along with her favourite bed. Shortly after, the familiar slight, wimpled figure descended from her litter.14
Unable to eat and struggling for breath, Henry’s mind was fixated on the hereafter. On Easter Sunday, 8 April, emaciated and in intense pain, he staggered into his privy closet, where he dropped to his knees and crawled to receive the sacrament. Chief among those who guided the king through his preparations for death was John Fisher. Close to both Lady Margaret and Richard Fox, the intense Fisher was one of those clerics who quietly detested the rapacity of Henry’s common lawyers, and their aggression against the privileges and liberties of the church. As he interrogated Henry relentlessly, in the way that priests did in order to bring the dying to a ‘wholesome fear and dread’ of their sinful condition, Fisher apparently worked away at one particular aspect of the king’s sinfulness.
Pervading the carefully worded penitential formulas, Fisher later noted, was a sense that the king acknowledged and truly repented the depredations of his regime. As Henry lay amid mounds of pillows, cushions and bolsters, throat rattling, gasping for breath, he mumbled again and again to the clerics, doctors and secret servants around him – indeed, ‘freely’, to anyone within the close confines of the privy chamber – that ‘if it pleased God to send him life they should find him a new changed man’.15 This was all fairly customary. Contemporary treatises stipulated that the dying man, appealing to the ‘good lord Jesus Christ’, was to ‘acknowledge that I have sinned grievously, and by thy grace I will gladly amend me if I should live’. But the king’s promises, Fisher said, took very specific form. If he lived, Henry promised a ‘true reformation of all them that were officers and ministers of his laws’.16
All of which caused deep disquiet among all those associated with the reign. In the face of widespread resentments, they had to prepare for a transfer of power that was fraught with uncertainty; to show, in other words, that they were part of the brave new dispensation, rather than the old.
The air of tension and repentance masked something else, too – a sense of things fragmenting and falling apart. It was evident in the latest version of Henry’s will, drawn up on 31 March. This was the ultimate expression of his legacy, spiritual and earthly, a document drafted years before and revised constantly. Much of it was formulaic, even the carefully turned words of penitence and the provision for the most faithful of servants, who had put themselves ‘in extreme jeopardy of their lives’ in his service; there were also blanks for dates to be filled in. There was, however, no doubting the genuine contrition with which the king exhorted his executors to implement the conditions of the will with meticulous care, and to ensure ‘restitutions and satisfactions for wrongs’ were made. The king’s path through purgatory depended on his will being carried out properly; so, too, did the regime’s continuance and the executors’ place in it. But the will also, inadvertently, betrayed that the king’s mind was slipping away.17
Uncharacteristically for Henry’s micro-management, the will was riddled with copyist’s errors that went uncorrected: he had even failed to fill in a space left blank for the date of his recent dynastic triumph, Mary’s proxy marriage to Charles of Castile. What was more, treading quietly around the bedridden king, his servants were already starting to implement the terms of the will, and to prepare for the succession.18
Amid the public signs of the king’s decline – the releasing of prisoners, copious distribution of alms, profusions of paid masses – a general pardon was proclaimed on 16 April. In recent years, people had become accustomed to the brief window of opportunity afforded them by these displays of royal contrition, before the king recovered and his counsellors started again. Now, they scrambled to avail themselves of the opportunity, filing into the chancery offices off Westminster Hall, where scribes enrolled their names and issued pardons – in return, naturally, for a fee.19
By the evening of the 20th, Henry was fading. Still, Fisher recalled, he hung on with fierce determination, ‘abiding the sharp assaults of death’ for ‘no short while, but by long continuance by the space of 27 hours together’. Henry made an exemplary death: eyes fixed intently on the crucifix held out before him, lifting his head up feebly towards it, reaching out and enfolding it in his thin arms, kissing it fervently, beating it repeatedly against his chest. Finally, as his life vanished and death drew on, the king’s grey-habited confessor urged him to speak, if he could: ‘
The servants standing around the royal bed raised their bowed heads, dried their ritual tears and met each others’ eyes. It was 11 o’clock at night on Saturday, 21 April 1509. Henry VII had dragged the kingdom to the brink of dynastic succession. Almost, but not quite.
Outside the privy chamber the palace slept, life continued as before. The scene around the dead king’s canopied bed, his eyelids being closed by one of the servants bending over the body, was later depicted by Garter herald Thomas Wriothesley in a detailed pen-and-ink drawing. In the flickering candlelight fourteen figures clustered around. Three, including Henry’s chief physician Giovanni Battista Boerio, were doctors clutching flasks; two, as indicated by their tonsures, were clerics – the king’s confessor and, perhaps, Thomas Wolsey. The identities of the nine others we know, because Wriothesley painstakingly painted in their coats-of-arms above their heads. They included the bruising Sir Matthew Baker, who had accompanied Henry on his escape from Brittany into France some quarter-century before; and the gentleman ushers John Sharp and William Tyler, who had reported to the king
