Thomas More’s insubordination in the parliament of 1504. Then there was Hugh Denys and the new, de facto head of the secret chamber, Richard Weston. And at the head of the royal bed, on its left-hand side, was the bishop of Winchester and lord privy seal, Richard Fox.21
Fox, a key architect of Henry’s regime, the man who had been privy to his inmost anxieties in exile, who had fought for him, who had masterminded his foreign affairs and conducted espionage on his behalf, whose palace had been the king’s refuge, and who had watched as, in recent years, Dudley and Empson had moved closer and closer to the king, was at the heart of what followed. This time, the two lawyers were nowhere near Henry’s bedside, but away in London. The only people who knew of his death were those present in the privy chamber. Fox and his fellow-counsellors now had a brief window of opportunity to order the succession to their advantage, to position themselves around the new, young king. It was what Henry VII would have wanted – and it would ensure their own survival.
There would be no announcement of the king’s death, no general summons to court. Rather, the news would be, as Wriothesley put it, ‘secretly kept’. For, as it turned out, the timing of Henry’s death was almost perfect: in two days’ time, one of the ceremonies of the ritual year would bring to court ‘the substance of the lords’, among them the great men of the regime.22
St George’s Day, 23 April, was the feast of the Order of the Garter. Among the order’s members were many of Henry’s named executors: Fox himself, as the Garter’s prelate, and his close colleague Sir Thomas Lovell; the two chief military commanders, the earls of Oxford and Surrey, and the chamberlain Charles Somerset, Lord Herbert. Those hoping for election included Thomas lord Darcy, and the prince’s chamberlain, Sir Henry Marney. Also present, and a member of the order, was Lady Margaret Beaufort, who numbered the likes of Fox, Lovell, Herbert and Marney among her own executors. Just as significant, however, would be the absentees. Buckingham and Northumberland were both Garter knights, but both, perhaps in fits of independent-minded petulance, had made their excuses and stayed away. Dudley and Empson, meanwhile, had nothing to do with the Garter at all.23
In the last weeks of Henry’s life, the workload of both men had intensified as his faculties diminished. Their eyes and ears at court kept them in touch with developments at the king’s bedside – but unknown to them, the information that continued to flow through their usual channels in the privy chamber was being filtered. They were, though, sharply aware of the mounting tensions in London that, simmering for years, were coming to the surface as rumours spread of the king’s impending death; foreign merchants scurried for cover, securing their valuable goods in safe storage.24 It was, very probably, this potential for widespread disorder – or worse – that had kept Empson and Dudley in the city. If anybody could be trusted to ferret out information on planned riots and conspiracies against the regime, it was the two counsellors and their network of informers.
Around the time the general pardon was proclaimed on 16 April, unusual movements of men and materiel had been noticed around Le Parsonage, Empson’s house on the city’s western edge, and in Dudley’s parish of St Swithin. Clearly anticipating trouble, both men were assembling armed retinues. Empson sent dispatches into his home county of Northamptonshire, mustering ‘as many persons … whom he could firmly and secretly retain, to be ready in defence’. By mid-April, several had slipped through the city gates; others were making their way ‘by separate companies’.25 On the 22nd, as the king’s body grew cold and rumours of his death filtered into Candlewick Street, Dudley scribbled separate orders to his sidekick Richard Page to take to nine men, including the household knight and jouster Sir Edward Darrell. The notes required them urgently to muster groups of armed retainers ‘arrayed in manner of war’, and to join Dudley in the city, where they were to await his further command. Meanwhile, he checked the well-stocked armoury in his house: quantities of plate armour and mail; sixty spiked, bladed bills; over a hundred and fifty bows – longbows and crossbows; thirty-five sheaves of arrows.26
Watchful, tense, both counsellors were acting on behalf of the regime’s security. But there was, perhaps, more to it than that. In marshalling these private armies, Empson and Dudley were also positioning themselves for a potential struggle for influence over the young king. But, so accustomed to wielding power and to the king’s confidence, both men evidently felt secure in the friendships of influential fellow-counsellors such as Fox, Lovell, Herbert and Oxford, and of Lady Margaret, who had recently sent the two lawyers a gift of fresh fish in reward for a lawsuit of hers they were prosecuting, as she passed through the city to Richmond. Empson and Dudley had failed to understand how resented and isolated their rapidly acquired power now made them, and how exposed they now were. Consequently, they failed to watch their backs.27
On the morning of St George’s Day, the presence chamber at Richmond was packed. Garter herald Wriothesley presided over the ceremonies with a punctilious eye. By this point, he too had very probably been told the truth: he had the heralds cry Henry VII’s largesse quite deliberately, in order that all those at court ‘should have less suspicion of his death’. At noon, the assembled lords dined in the presence chamber, headed by Prince Henry, who was ‘named and served as prince and not as king’. Surveying proceedings, pacing up and down the chamber with their staves of office, were the four gentleman ushers, three of whom – Sharp, Tyler and William Fitzwilliam – had been present at the dead king’s bedside some thirty-six hours previously.28 Then, after dinner, a slight movement fixed everybody’s attention: the oak door leading to the privy apartments was opened from the inside.
Emerging with a ‘smiling countenance’, Richard Weston walked unhurriedly over to Archbishop Warham and told him and ‘certain other lords’ – almost certainly the likes of Oxford, Surrey and Herbert – that the king, Henry VII, wished them to attend on him. Following Weston back through the door, the small group of nobles stayed in the privy apartments ‘a good pause’ before emerging unconcernedly, ‘with good countenance … as though the king had not been dead, showing no great manner of mourning that men might perceive’.29
But Warham and the most senior of Henry VII’s counsellors now knew that the king was dead. The timing of their summons, moreover, had been deliberate. Shortly after, the prince – in place of the king – would progress with the assembled company to evensong in the Chapel Royal: it would provide the perfect cover for the counsellors to brief him on what was to be done. As was customary, the prince would hear mass in the holyday closet – sumptuously furnished with cushions, carpets, relics and its own altar – on the first floor of the ante-chapel. From there, when occasion demanded, he could descend via a private staircase to the main body of the chapel, to take part in the focal points of the service. But most of the time, the privacy of the closet allowed its occupants to catch up on business and discuss confidential matters undisturbed while the mass proceeded. This, very probably, was precisely what happened during that St George’s Day evensong.30
Towering above the pack of counsellors and nobles clustering around him, Prince Henry, swathed in his hood and cloak of the Garter, passed through the crowded galleries leading to the Chapel Royal, his way lined on both sides by the guard in quartered white-and-green, halberds gleaming. He and a select few counsellors were ushered into the holyday closet, and the doors were shut on the jostling petitioners and courtiers outside. As the voices of the choristers and the sonorous notes of the chapel organ drifted up from the main body of the chapel below, Archbishop Warham and the ‘other lords’ that had emerged from the privy chamber hours earlier briefed the prince on what they believed should happen.31
After evensong, the prince returned to the presence chamber for the ceremonial Garter supper, ‘all which time he was served and named as prince and not as king’. Finally, after supper, Henry VII’s death was announced.
At this point, Wriothesley’s account of proceedings gives no sense of any triumphant acclamation of Henry VIII. In fact, he fails to mention the seventeen-year-old king at all. The sense, rather, is of a small group of counsellors taking control, ‘over seen by the mother of the said late king’. Far into the night, this coterie, headed by Lady Margaret and Archbishop Warham, and including Richard Fox, John Fisher, Thomas Howard earl of Surrey and the chamberlain Lord Herbert, discussed what was to be done. In all this, Henry VIII was deferred to: he, after all, was king. But he was, too, young and remarkably inexperienced – and he was now dealing directly with the powerful inner circle of his father’s counsellors, men who were now suggesting to him in their thoughtful, measured way a certain course of action that was entirely necessary for the regime’s security and his own. The impressionable seventeen-year-old, now finally the focus of a fast-moving, unstable and undeniably exciting sequence of events, and made to feel as though he was very much in charge, undoubtedly agreed to everything that was proposed.32
The following day, the ‘prince called king’ would be transferred to the Tower, now in the control of Henry VII’s seasoned military commander the earl of Oxford, ‘for the surety of his person’. Accompanied by members of his own household – the likes of Marney, Mountjoy, Compton, and the brutish Rainsford – he would stay there while
