creature comforts along with fame, England could now provide him with both.
Behind all this was an ulterior motive, one that struck at the heart of Erasmus’s principles of intellectual independence. The new England wanted a monopoly on Europe’s finest mind. It wanted him as its mouthpiece, amplifying its virtues to the world: where once he had written verses extolling the superhuman qualities of the king’s boyhood hero Philip of Burgundy, he could now do the same for Henry VIII. The new regime, with its glorious young monarch, didn’t want second-rate poets like Pietro Carmeliano or Bernard Andre – but it did want Erasmus to demonstrate his loyalty, to be
All of which was evident in a letter from Warham, which was probably enclosed with Mountjoy’s. Warham had a high regard for Erasmus’s abilities, but thoroughly disapproved of his flightiness. Now he offered Erasmus a deal, an exclusive contract with the English crown. As soon as Erasmus arrived in England, Warham promised, he would receive a golden handshake of 150 nobles ‘from me’, and a job for life. The condition was simple: that ‘you agree to spend the rest of your life in England’ – though he would be allowed trips to the Netherlands to see family and friends, ‘on suitable occasions’.8
It was this, undoubtedly, that gave Erasmus pause for thought. His dilemma was voiced by an Italian friend, Jacobo Piso, who wrote congratulating him on his ‘offer from England’, before warning him to beware of the dangers of such jobs: ‘Look into your heart’, he wrote, ‘but do not lose your head. It is certainly pleasant to be rich, but still more pleasant to be free.’ Erasmus, too, knew that another hand lay behind the skilled rhetoric of Mountjoy’s letter: that of his new secretary, Erasmus’s Lucchese friend Andrea Ammonio, who after years spent in the shadow of the old king’s Italian favourites, now found himself in a new world of opportunity. Indeed, the name of ‘Andreas Ammonius’ was written at the top of the letter. Erasmus, who always liked to feel he had friends in high places, crossed it out and wrote ‘Guilhelmus Montioius’ instead. As he knew perfectly well, though, this first, glowing picture of Henry VIII’s reign, one that would become the blueprint for similar images to follow, was written not by Mountjoy but by a jobbing Italian humanist with an axe to grind.9
Nevertheless, Mountjoy/Ammonio’s letter hit its mark. Being free, hungry, poor and ill in war-torn Italy for the sake of one’s principles was ghastly. By July, Erasmus was on his way back to England. A decade later he would still be vainly invoking Philip of Burgundy’s name in the hope of something more substantial than fair words.10
The most extraordinary transformation in fortunes came for Catherine. Fuensalida’s first dispatch of the new reign had been couched in his now-accustomed gloom. Francesco Grimaldi, he wrote, had already transferred fifty thousand crowns of Catherine’s dowry back out of England to Bruges, and it was just as well. On 24 April, as news of Henry VII’s death was proclaimed, Fuensalida had learned from his sources that the dying king had repeated the same old mantra to his son: he was free to marry whoever he wanted. That bride, Fuensalida was further informed, would not be Catherine, for it was known that the new king would find it a burden to his conscience to marry his brother’s widow.11
Days later, Fuensalida was summoned to Greenwich by the new king’s advisers – who, consisting of Fox and his colleagues, looked much like the old. Accordingly, the ambassador launched into a long-winded defence of his actions and of the non-payment of the dowry. Then a side door opened, and secretary Thomas Ruthall swept in from an adjoining chamber, where he had been locked in private discussions with Henry VIII. Cutting through the ambassador’s speech, he accepted all Fuensalida’s assurances. The king, he said briskly, was utterly unconcerned about all the red tape; he was sure the dowry would be paid, and just wanted to get on with his marriage, as soon as possible. What was more, it was about time England and Spain joined forces against France: together, the two countries would be at the heart of a pan-European coalition against their common enemy.
Fox then spelled it out in black and white to Fuensalida who, for once, was dumbstruck. ‘You must remember now, the king is king, and not prince’, he said. ‘One must speak in a different way in this matter than when he was prince. Until now, things were discussed with his father, and now one must treat with him who is king.’
With his customary elegance Fox had got to the heart of the matter. People needed to adapt, and fast, to the new king’s ambitions and ways of doing things. It meant, suddenly, having to fulfil the desires of a monarch who would far rather spend his time and money in the quest for ‘virtue, glory and immortality’ than micro-managing government. What the king really wanted to do, apart from invade France, was to marry Catherine, as quickly as possible. His counsellors, who had spent the last years thinking up new ways of preventing precisely this turn of events, thoroughly approved.12
It was hardly surprising that Fuensalida was struggling to keep up. Now, Henry VIII was telling the world that his father’s dying wish had been that he should marry Catherine, a wish which he was bound to respect. But as he wrote to Margaret of Savoy that July, even if he had been free to choose, it was Catherine who he would have chosen for his bride ‘before all other’. Quite what provoked this sea change remains unclear, but there seems little doubt that Henry VIII liked the idea of Catherine, and – with his parents’ example at the back of his mind – he liked the idea of marriage. And now he was king, he could do what he liked. Having endured endless tales of the exploits of Charles Brandon and his friends, and followed Lord Mountjoy’s wooing of Inez de Venegas, he wanted to make up for lost time. Besides which, Spain would prove an invaluable ally in the military adventures he was planning.13
Talking in confidence to Fuensalida, Fox said he would urge the new king to marry quickly, before other people started trying to persuade him against the match. He suggested that the ambassador advise Ferdinand to take advantage of this window of opportunity while the king’s council was favourably disposed to help push things forward.
For his part, Ferdinand was frantic to secure the marriage. Although, as he wrote to Fuensalida, Henry VII had been ‘a bad friend and ally’, Catherine’s father had high hopes of the new king – particularly of his desire to fight the French. This was a marriage of ‘great political importance’, he stressed. He knew perfectly well that time was key, since – echoing Fox’s words – ‘the French, as well as others’ would do everything they could to prevent it happening. Fuensalida, he instructed, was to pull out all the stops to make sure it went ahead, ‘without delay’. There should be no obstacles: the marriage was perfectly lawful, as the pope had provided a dispensation for it; Ferdinand would pay the dowry punctually; and he was even prepared to acknowledge Princess Mary’s betrothal to his grandson, Charles of Castile, into the bargain. In what was presumably an unconscious revealing of his real motives, he intended, he said, to look after the interests of the new king of England ‘as though they were his own’.
Ferdinand’s letters to Catherine, meanwhile, were fulsome. More than anything else on earth, he had her welfare and her marriage at heart. He apologized for Fuensalida, he wrote, who had been sent to England with the best of intentions and who had evidently ‘acted from ignorance’. But, he insisted, Catherine had to be nice to the ambassador, and also to Francesco Grimaldi: after all, he was ‘to pay her dower’.14
Fox had been given a straightforward hand to play, but he did so consummately. By mid-May, the negotiations had been wrapped up, and a guarantee extracted from Ferdinand that the dowry would be paid ‘at once’ – which it duly was. Fox’s manoeuvrings would prove a high-water mark in the management of the king’s marital affairs: his successors, Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, would lose their heads trying to achieve similar success. What was more, Fox’s playing hard-to-get with Fuensalida evidently had its material benefits. Should the ambassador think it expedient ‘to corrupt some of the most influential counsellors of the king’, Ferdinand told him, he was to ‘offer them money’.15
Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine took place with astonishing speed. On 11 June, three days after he had rushed through the marriage licence, Archbishop Warham wed the pair in a private ceremony in the queen’s closet in Greenwich. There was nothing deliberately furtive about it. The king wanted a wife, her dowry, and her father’s support against France. Unlike his own father’s marriage, delayed until after he had been crowned king in his own right, for Henry VIII there were no such concerns.
At 4 p.m. on Saturday, 23 June, the eve of the coronation, the royal procession set out on the familiar route from the Tower, through London’s densely packed streets and lanes, to Westminster. With his parliament robe of crimson velvet draped over a cloth-of-gold jacket encrusted with jewels, the king rode under a canopy borne by four high-ranking officers. Catherine, of course, had been this way before. She sat dressed entirely in white, in a canopied litter of cloth-of-gold, her auburn hair let down, on her head a gold circlet set with pearls. As the procession went down Cornhill, its houses draped with brightly coloured cloths and tapestries, and up Cheapside, storm clouds gathered ominously. The procession had just passed the Cardinal’s Hat tavern when the heavens opened. The flimsy canopies were little protection: soaked through, Catherine had to take refuge in a nearby draper’s stall. People sought to make light of it, though the London chronicler’s grumblings about the ‘no little
