Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

the abbey to bury Henry VII. After three masses had been sung, the last of them a requiem led by Archbishop Warham, the earl of Surrey’s second son Sir Edward, dressed in the late king’s plate armour and bearing his shield and poleaxe, rode a warhorse through the west doors of the abbey and up to the altar. Dismounting, he was stripped of the weapons and armour, which were offered up ‘with great reverence’ by the duke of Buckingham and the earl of Northumberland. Then, Henry VII’s corpse was lowered into the vault, buried, as his will stipulated, alongside ‘our dearest late wife the queen’, whose body awaited his.⁴⁴

After Warham had cast earth into the open tomb, the old king’s household officers broke their staves of office and threw them in. The heralds, taking off their emblazoned coats, shouted in French, ‘The noble king Henry the Seventh is dead.’ As the words’ echo dissolved in the silence of the abbey, they put their coats of arms back on and cried ‘Vive le noble Roy Henry le VIIIth’ – which as the herald’s account of the funeral helpfully explained, ‘is to say in English tongue, “God send the noble king Henry the eight long life.” ’

These shouts of acclamation – ‘long live the king’ – were familiar enough. But for Henry VII’s funeral, his counsellors had made two crucial changes. The cries ‘the king is dead; long live the king’ were run together in a way that was new in England, though it had been done before in France, after the death of Charles VIII in 1498. And, for the first time, the names of the king and his heir were included. Kingship was perpetual: the king himself may have died, but the institution, the ‘dignity’, had not, because it was automatically transferred to his heir. Now, Henry VII’s counsellors, the men who had transferred their loyalties seamlessly to the new king, had given full expression to this crucial concept – and in doing so, they confirmed the association of one family’s name with the crown of England. The Tudor dynasty had begun.⁴⁵

15

Rich, Ferocious, Thirsting for Glory

In mid-May 1509, after his father’s funeral, the seventeen-year-old king and his court left the Tower for the riverside tranquillity of Greenwich. Here, in his mother’s favourite house and the place of his birth, the new reign began to unfurl. Even those who knew him seemed taken aback by the transformation of a teenager who had been so subdued in his father’s company. ‘However dutiful he was before’, Thomas More observed, the new king has ‘a character which deserves to rule.’ Henry VIII was magnificent, liberal and bullish. As the Venetian ambassador delightedly reported back to the Signoria, the new king had announced that the first thing he planned to do, as soon as he was crowned, was make war on France. And, as everybody was aware, his father had left him a fortune – which he fully intended to spend. Machiavelli, whose pithy character sketches were rarely wide of the mark, got the new king in a nutshell: ‘ricco, feroce, cupido di gloria’.¹

The old king’s opaque accounting methods meant that nobody, not even his closest advisers, knew quite how much he had salted away in money, jewels and gold and silver plate, in the Tower, Westminster, Calais, and other ‘secret places’ under his own personal control. This, however, only fuelled the myth. The Venetian ambassador’s estimate reflected the kind of conversations and calculations that were taking place at court and in the city: Henry VII, he wrote, had ‘accumulated so much gold that he is supposed to have more than well nigh all the other kings in Christendom’.² This, coupled with the fact that the new king seemed eager to dispel the dark last years of his father’s reign, seemed to make up for everything that people had endured. Nobles like Buckingham and Northumberland felt they would now regain their rightful place as the king’s natural counsellors, with their confiscated lands restored to them; churchmen and merchants alike anticipated the rolling-back of aggressive royal legislation against their privileges and liberties. And everybody whose names had found their way into the account books of the old king and his counsellors fully expected them to be erased.³ Henry VIII, in other words, would be all things to all men – and an easy touch into the bargain.

In the warm sun of the new king’s favour, the scramble for lucrative grants of office and land began. All his father’s counsellors, from the earl of Oxford, to Sir Thomas Lovell, to the jewel-house keeper Sir Henry Wyatt, were rewarded; Lady Margaret Beaufort, meanwhile, was quick to reclaim the palace of Woking, which her son had annexed from her six years previously. Fittingly, Richard Weston was awarded the keepership of Hanworth, whose muted corridors he had patrolled in the last weeks of Henry VII’s reign. Also recognized were the new king’s tiltyard friends: the likes of Sir Edward Howard, Thomas Knyvet and, of course, Charles Brandon. These were men whose stylish aggression he admired – and who could now egg on his desire for warlike glory and his easy way with money without fear of censure.⁴

One of those who rose fastest and furthest was Sir Henry Marney. Mirroring the role he had played in the prince’s household, he was appointed captain of the guard – head of security – and vice-chamberlain, two posts which tended to come together. Among a raft of other offices given him was the chancellorship of the duchy of Lancaster, previously held by the disgraced Empson. Marney’s pre-eminence was evident in the new reign’s first meeting of the Order of the Garter, which the young king called with alacrity for 18 May – and for which occasion he had bought himself a Lancastrian collar of esses, in emulation of his hero Henry V. Put forward for election to the order, Marney was unanimously voted in.⁵

In its way, William Compton’s advancement was no less meteoric. In the first days of the reign, the man who had been the prince’s closest servant had emerged as first among equals in the new king’s privy chamber; soon, he would be groom of the stool. Like Hugh Denys before him, Compton looked after the king’s goods and personal affairs, which would be rather different from those of his father. He would handle industrial quantities of money on Henry VIII’s behalf: in the first year of the reign, Compton received some ?2,328 to spend; four years later, it would rise to ?17,517. One of the first to recognize the importance of his intimacy with the king was, predictably enough, Richard Fox.⁶

On 27 May, Lord Mountjoy, intoxicated by the air of the new reign, signed a breathless letter to Erasmus.⁷ Still in Italy, Erasmus’s woes had deepened. He had failed to gain regular funding and he was, as he had emphasized in a stream of unanswered letters to England, sick and depressed. Now, Mountjoy apologized for being a terrible correspondent: ‘many distractions’ had prevented him from writing, including – he hinted darkly at the events surrounding the old king’s death – ‘certain reasons which I did not venture to set down on paper’. Then, with his customary breeziness, he told Erasmus to cheer up, for his former pupil had ascended the throne and ‘all were congratulating themselves on their prince’s greatness’.

The new reign, Mountjoy said, was the Promised Land. ‘Heaven smiles, earth rejoices; all is milk and honey and nectar’ – and if only Erasmus could see the scenes, he would weep for joy. The young king could not be more different from his father: ‘Tight-fistedness is well and truly banished. Generosity scatters wealth with unstinting hand.’ This was a monarch for whom gold and jewels were nothing compared with virtue and eternal renown. Why, only days before, the king had told Mountjoy how he longed to be a better scholar. Thinking quickly, Mountjoy had assured him that nobody expected him to be an intellectual – but he was expected to ‘foster and encourage’ men of learning. ‘Of course,’ replied the king, ‘for without them we should scarcely exist.’ Henry VIII, the implication went, had learned his lessons well.

Then, Mountjoy got to the point. He had ‘never pressed’ Erasmus to go to Italy in the first place. Everybody in England was reading the new, expanded edition of his Adages with admiration – Archbishop Warham, no less, was ‘praising it to the skies’. Erasmus must come back to England. As if to settle the matter, Mountjoy enclosed a bill of exchange for ten pounds: five from him and five from Warham. This was not, he added, a gift – there would be plenty of gifts forthcoming when he arrived – but to cover his travel expenses, ‘to speed your journey to us’. Moreover, he added, Warham promised Erasmus a benefice if he came back.

If Mountjoy laid the flattery on thick, it was hardly surprising. Erasmus had fallen for the blase optimism of his former pupil before – twice before, in fact – and both times, expansive promises of rewards and benefices had added up to precisely nothing. It was all very well for Mountjoy to say he had never told Erasmus to go to Italy, but given the complete lack of opportunity in England back in 1506, he had had little choice. Which was why, while Mountjoy’s letter was fulsome, it was artful too. After reminding Erasmus pointedly of his destitute conditions in Italy – he was sorry to hear Erasmus was sick, but then, he supposed, one had to suffer for one’s art, fame being ‘worth the price of hunger, poverty and illness, even death itself’ – Mountjoy offered hard cash. If Erasmus wanted