the situation was monitored and until his father was buried. Henry VII’s executors, Lady Margaret and Warham chief among them, would stay upriver at Richmond to implement the terms of his will. But first, they had to send out an emphatic statement that the new regime would not be like the old.
Polydore Vergil, in attendance on Lady Margaret at Richmond during these uncertain days, later summed it up. Empson and Dudley were, he wrote, singled out by a ‘politic mean’. In the sun of Henry VII’s favour they had risen far and fast, but now he was dead – and they were intimately associated with the repressive activities of his regime. For the old king’s veteran counsellors, it was a chance to get rid of two men who might, potentially, build a close relationship with the new king, and to offer them up as scapegoats in the process. Empson and Dudley had to go.33
Early on 24 April, the round-ups started. At court the duke of Buckingham’s brother and the marquis of Dorset’s stepfather, Henry Stafford, identified as a potential troublemaker, was arrested. Meanwhile Dudley’s associate Richard Page had been intercepted, and the letters he was carrying ripped open. As dawn rose over the city, bodies of armed guards – ferried downriver from Richmond, or let in through the city gates – slipped through the empty streets and quietly surrounded Empson’s and Dudley’s slumbering houses. Then came the hammering on doors, with bleary-eyed household servants sliding back bolts and lifting latches. Whatever moves the counsellors might have made were nipped in the bud. They were taken away to the Tower.34
In London later that morning, Henry VII’s death was announced and the succession proclaimed. In the afternoon, the ‘prince called king’ rode through a city crawling with royal soldiers, to the Tower. On the following day, the 25th, Henry VIII set his signature, a painstaking ‘Henry R’, to his first piece of legislation: a new general pardon, superseding the one issued just over a week before in his father’s name. Probably drawn up following the intensive discussions on that evening of the 23rd, it was carefully, deliberately worded, its expansive tone indicating what people could expect in the new dispensation – and in doing so, distinguishing it emphatically from the old.
Exhorting the king’s subjects to peace, the pardon stressed that normal judicial service had been resumed, ‘according to the old true course of his letters’. Justice would henceforth be ‘freely, righteously and indifferently’ applied – and the king would be as subject to the law as anybody: his judges would see to it that there would be no privileging of any kind. What was more, all merchants, ‘clothiers, artificers and folks in all manner of mysteries and occupations’ could now work and trade ‘freely, quietly and peaceably’, with no fear of ‘untrue informations’. There would be no more informers or prying royal agents, no ‘persons calling themselves promoters’. The new king would provide ‘reformation of the rigour wherewith they [his subjects] have been vexed’. Neither was there to be any violent settling of scores: nobody, of whatever rank, was to take the opportunity to revenge his or anybody else’s quarrel ‘by way of fight’. The crown, it was implied, would take care of that.35
A copy of the pardon was dispatched to the king’s printer Richard Pynson at his print-shop by Temple Bar on Fleet Street. He and his assistants set to work with concentrated precision and speed, the compositors setting and securing the type in place, then passing it to the printers, who inked it up, swung the frame of taut paper over it, slid the whole into the press and forced the press-plate down, removed the freshly printed sheet and began the process of inking again: a copy every twenty seconds.36 By the morning of the 26th, thousands of copies were in circulation, to be posted on church doors from St Paul’s to the remotest parish in the land, and proclaimed aloud at crosses and marketplaces, ‘that every man thereof might have knowledge’.
In the city, a mood of retribution was in the air. Among the flood of prisoners emerging from the Tower and cells across London were the three former mayors, Kneseworth, Aylmer and Capel, all bent on revenge. When, days later, the pardon roll marking the start of the new reign was published, a number of names had been excluded.37 John Camby was arrested, along with the financier Henry Toft and several who had sat on Empson’s and Dudley’s carefully packed juries. Forcibly entering Camby’s home to recover the fruits of his ‘vice and polling’, city officials expressed astonishment at the quantity of fine textiles stashed neatly away in a room that was ‘more like a mercer or draper’s shop than a man’s chamber’. But the man they particularly wanted, the counsellors’ ‘worst disciple’, had disappeared into thin air. Like his bosses, John Baptist Grimaldi had sensed the changing mood as Henry lay dying; unlike them, he had found an escape route. Securing his possessions out of reach of the crown’s officers, he had fled beyond the reach of royal justice to the precincts of Westminster Abbey, where he claimed sanctuary.38
By 27 April, Fuensalida was writing in dispatches of the gaoling of the two most prominent of the old king’s ‘ministers of the briberies and tyrannies which used to be’. Empson and Dudley were, he stressed, the ‘two principal men … who gathered all the riches’. It was a story that all the others involved in the ‘briberies and tyrannies’ were only too happy to run with. Fuelling the atmosphere of moral indignation were a slew of hastily composed ‘opprobrious and shameful rhymes and tales’: scrawled down, printed, passed from hand to hand, sniggered and frowned over, pinned up and read out in public places. Pouring out all the pent-up frustration of the previous years, they documented in lurid terms the abuses of the disgraced counsellors and their promoters.39
The London chronicler, who had heard and seen an assortment of these ‘opprobrious rhymes’ sung in taverns and posted on walls and doors, faithfully copied down two of them for posterity. One of the poems was a ‘detestable legend’ of John Baptist Grimaldi – so ‘vile’ a subject, the anonymous rhymester declared, that one could hardly expect poets of the calibre of John Skelton, Thomas More or William Cornish to sully themselves by writing about him. The other poem written out by the chronicler, a ‘Ballad of Empson’, consisted of a litany of the wrongs perpetrated under Henry VII, blame for which was placed squarely at the door of the gaoled counsellor. This, however, was very probably composed by Cornish, who had suffered abuse at Empson’s hands. What was more, it had been commissioned or ‘caused’ by Richard earl of Kent, desperate for Empson’s comeuppance. The new regime’s efforts to ‘shift the noise’ on to Empson and Dudley, ‘for to satisfy and appease the people’, was bearing fruit. Meanwhile, in the Tower, one of Henry VIII’s first actions was to command the head of the clerk of works to construct a tilt: as the young king waited, he jousted.40
At Richmond, as the dead king’s body, washed, anointed and embalmed, lay in state, a ‘right sumptuous household’ was kept.41 But beneath the enforced jollity, there was a palpable anxiety among those implicated with the old regime and with the two counsellors. Men kept their heads down, or tried to make themselves indispensable, or both. The head of the great wardrobe Sir Andrew Windsor, Dudley’s brother-in-law, and Sir John Cutt busied themselves with the funeral arrangements. For them, the danger passed. Others were not so lucky. Dudley’s fellow-counsellor Sir John Hussey was omitted from the accession pardon and arrested; so too was William Smith, groom of Henry VII’s personal wardrobe and sometime factotum of Empson’s, who was stripped of office and carted off to the Tower.
On 9 May, late in the afternoon, Henry VII’s funeral cortege reached the southern entrance to London Bridge, and processed through the city’s streets, following the time-honoured route to St Paul’s. Amid the heralds, the chanting monks and friars, the black-clad household servants, the nobles, prelates, knights and officials, rolled a carriage containing the king’s coffin, drawn by five coursers draped in black velvet and decorated with heraldic banners and flags depicting Henry’s titles and dominions. On top of the coffin, reposing on cloth-of-gold cushions, was a life-size effigy, its head worked uncannily after the king’s death mask, dressed – as perceptive observers might have noted with some irony – in the parliament robes he had barely had occasion to wear in the last twelve years, its right hand gripping his sceptre and its left an orb of gold. At the cathedral’s west door, twelve yeomen of the guard carried the coffin and effigy to the high altar, staggering under its weight. There the
Ranging over the achievements of Henry’s reign, Fisher described the king’s last days: his illness and piety, his exemplary death, his promises for reform. Henry, he said, had had ‘full little pleasure’ from this ‘wretched world’, but ‘much displeasure and sorrow’. As Fisher urged his listeners to mourn and pray for the dead king, he seemed to interrupt himself in full flow. ‘Ah king Henry, king Henry’, he declaimed ruefully, ‘if thou were alive again, many a one that is here present now would pretend a full great pity and tenderness upon thee.’42 The enforcers of Henry VII’s regime, bent on preserving a system of power and their place in it, had already succeeded in disassociating themselves from their late master, who had died just a fortnight before.
That afternoon, the cortege resumed its journey, down Fleet Street, past Charing Cross to Westminster. Henry’s body was borne into the abbey and placed in its hearse, a multi-storeyed stage hung with banners, standards and lit with ‘the most costly and curious light possibly to be made by man’s hand’.43
It was already light when, at six the following morning, 11 May, nobles, clergy and heralds reassembled in
