teams lined up and eyeballed each other, the jousters in enamelled plate armour: Tudor green-and-white, black paled with gold, all red, all green. Charles Brandon’s armour was gold, from helmet to spurs. Then, the jousts’ scenario was acted out, and the trouble started.26
The defenders, the Scholars, would joust on behalf of the goddess of wisdom, Dame Pallas; the challengers, for Love of Ladies.27 The challengers’ representative, a bellicose horsebacked Cupid clothed in a jacket of blue velvet and clutching his golden dart of love, sneeringly suggested to Dame Pallas that her scholars clearly didn’t know whether they were there to give a lesson in jousting, or to be taught one – the implication being the latter.
The rivalry between the teams simmered all through the first day of the jousts, and exploded on the second. On 28 June, Henry VIII’s eighteenth birthday, a huge, stylized arcadia – an enclosed forest on wheels, with fretworked trees, bushes and ferns – was wheeled into the palace yard. Its doors were pulled open and live deer released, pursued and savaged to death by mastiffs: the bloodied corpses were presented to Catherine. In the ensuing jousts, sparks flew – ‘the fire sprang out of their helmets’ – to such an extent that the king brought the combatants to a halt, perceiving some ‘grudge and displeasure’ between them. He then imposed rules restricting each side to a certain number of sword strokes; rules which, in the melee that followed, were completely ignored. In the pandemonium, with the tournament marshals unable to exert any control, the king ‘cried out to his guard’, who waded in, but even the robust yeomen were unable to separate the teams without ‘great pain’. The rest of the games were called off: ‘and so these jousts broke up’, as one observer lamely put it.28
Thomas More’s epigram on the occasion was up to his recent artful standards. ‘All the tournaments kings have held until now’, he wrote, gesturing expansively towards history, ‘have been marked by some sad mishap or by disaster.’ Knights had been mortally wounded; commoners had been skewered by stray lances or trampled by maddened horses; sometimes, stands had collapsed under the weight of cheering spectators jumping up and down. But not this time: ‘this tournament of yours, sire, the most beautiful we have ever seen, is disfigured by no misfortune.’
In concluding that the coronation games had been ‘conspicuous for such freedom from trouble as is appropriate to your character’, either More was becoming as blind or as supine as Bernard Andre, the poet on whom both he and Erasmus had poured scorn, or he was daring to suggest something rather different: that the violence of the prematurely abandoned games reflected something in the nature of the king himself. Or, in More’s typical fashion, perhaps he was saying both.
Over the following months, the late king’s financial grip over a number of prominent nobles was relaxed. A series of bonds was cancelled, including those of Buckingham, Northumberland, Bergavenny and Mountjoy. Squashed onto the bottom of a page of accounts, almost as an afterthought, was a payment of ?1,000 for Catherine’s longstanding debts. Henry VII’s political prisoners, too, were released: in Calais, Thomas Grey marquis of Dorset was freed by a smiling Sir Thomas Lovell; William Courtenay, in prison for some seven years, followed soon after. The new king, after all, was the rose both red and white. Unlike his father, he seemed perfectly comfortable with having his Yorkist relatives at large – and, as everybody was telling him, he was magnanimous to boot. But even for him, the line had to be drawn at some point. The earl of Suffolk remained in the Tower. And others found that the milk, honey and nectar flowed rather less freely than they had anticipated.29
During the coronation preparations, Buckingham had been restored to the post of constable of England, a title that he, like his father, believed was his by hereditary right. Henry VIII had, accordingly, restored it to him – but for a single day: ‘the 23rd June only, viz., the day preceding the coronation’.30 Buckingham’s brother-in-law, the earl of Northumberland, was similarly irritated. Many of the estates and offices in the northeast that he regarded as rightfully his had, following his minority, never been returned to him, but had been held on behalf of the king by Thomas lord Darcy, one of Henry VII’s household men; now, Darcy had all his posts confirmed, and received more, for good measure.31 To Buckingham and Northumberland it could only mean one thing: that the king was being got at, by his father’s old counsellors.
That August, Darcy wrote to Richard Fox from Yorkshire with news of local talk that had been circulating since Henry VIII’s coronation. Northumberland’s servants were bragging that England would be carved up between their master and the duke of Buckingham, who had his eye on the protectorship of England. Northumberland, meanwhile, aimed for what he regarded as his hereditary overlordship of all England north of the River Trent, the traditional boundary between the north and south of the country. If the king failed to grant them these offices, all ‘should not long be well’.
There was more, Darcy added. As usual, merchants coming north from London brought gossip, and Richard Fox’s ambitions were, apparently, the talk of the town. He had, it was said, failed to dominate the new king, and in the process to exclude from royal favour a tight-knit group of counsellors including the earl of Surrey, Sir Henry Marney and Thomas Ruthall. Now, ‘it was the saying of every market man from London’ that Fox was trying a different approach: to create a clique with Buckingham and Northumberland, and to rule the king that way.
‘My lord’, Darcy urged Fox, ‘good it is to have a good eye, though much be but sayings.’ Darcy concluded by saying that he would keep his ear to the ground, and would continue to supply Fox, Ruthall and Marney with information. Meanwhile, he would try to round up the rumour-mongers.32
All this may have been ‘sayings’, but it indicated something else about the new climate. Nobody ever talked about people ‘ruling’ Henry VII. In fact, people rarely talked openly at all – and when they did, out of turn, they soon learned not to. In the expansive glory of the new young king, however, people felt they detected a distinct susceptibility to influence. Where his father had kept even his closest counsellors at a distance, and by the end of the reign had given the impression of having no confidential advisers at all, this kind of talk indicated that people thought quite the opposite about Henry VIII.33
On 8 July, the king appointed a number of high-profile commissions, because, as he said, it had come to his attention that his laws had been subverted, along with the good governance of his realm. These panels of nobles, judges and counsellors were empowered to determine and punish the full spectrum of criminal offences, from trespass to treason. In particular, they were to look into all possible violations of ‘the Statute of Magna Carta, concerning the liberties of England’, the compact between the king and his noble subjects that, people believed, had been torn up by Henry VII and his administrators. This slate-cleaning exercise had, however, been stipulated in his will, which had instructed his executors to carry out such investigations within three months of his death. Now, the old king’s counsellors were instrumental in setting up a commission empowered to investigate the abuses in which they themselves had been involved.34
Inevitably, any detailed inquest into grievances concerning the abuses of the old regime would raise uncomfortable questions about who had been responsible for them – not only the counsellors, but Henry VII himself. The vague remit of the commission, though, neatly precluded any genuine inquiry.35 Besides which, there were two scapegoats conveniently to hand. The problem facing the commissioners concerning Empson’s and Dudley’s indictments was how to make the mud stick without incriminating anybody else. They soon found a solution.
Four days after the commissions were appointed, Edmund Dudley was hauled out of the Tower and brought before a panel of judges at London’s Guildhall. Richard Empson was indicted soon after, and taken into his native Northamptonshire to be tried. Notably, there was no mention of any financial and legal offences committed under Henry VII; this, after all, was territory that the new regime wanted to avoid. Instead, scraps of circumstantial evidence were distorted into highly speculative charges of treason. As Henry VII lay dying, the charge sheets read, Empson and Dudley had conspired ‘with a great force of men and armed power’ to manipulate the succession to their own ends. Here, the letters Dudley had written ordering knights and their retinues to London were flourished, and the whispered pledges of allegiance between Empson’s retainers cited: ‘Will you be the same men that you were?’ ‘We will keep our promise …’ This, it was now claimed, was evidence of the most heinous crime of all. The pair had plotted to take control of the young king, to deprive him of his liberty and to rule through him. Should the king and his rightful counsellors – his nobles and knights – have put up any resistance, Empson and Dudley would simply have destroyed them.36
Under the gaze of Buckingham, Northumberland and former colleagues like Lovell and Sir John Hussey, rapidly restored to grace after having been left out of Henry VIII’s first pardon, Dudley pleaded not guilty; so too did Empson. Each man tried to argue his case on different grounds, attempting to excuse and justify his conduct under the late king. But nobody really wanted to listen, and given that this was a treason trial, it was a pointless defence. There was an air of inevitability about the whole thing. Both were found guilty, sentenced to the traitors’ death of
