Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

Finally, of course, the ‘reforms’ were about Henry VIII himself. Although he tried to follow – and did – his father’s practice of signing everything personally, and could display a familiar obsession with detail when the mood took him, he was impatient with the minutiae of government, preferring to leave it to others, and his participation in it was fitful. After all, he had to concentrate on the pursuit of virtue, glory and immortality. The fearsome thoroughness and power of Henry VII’s extrajudicial tribunals had depended on the king’s tight personal control. They would hardly have the same effectiveness under a monarch who could, quite evidently, not be bothered with them half the time, and who needed his reports in easily digestible ‘short parcels’.⁴⁵

In December 1509, twelve royal informers, imprisoned without trial during the round-ups the previous spring, were released on bail. Among them were the notorious Henry Toft, and the wardrobe servant William Smith, who had been ‘in good favour with our sovereign lord Henry VII’, and who had been convicted as a promoter days after Dudley. The following February, John Baptist Grimaldi was pardoned, to nobody’s surprise: after all, the bank of Grimaldi had processed Catherine’s dowry, while his cousin Francesco, now married to the queen’s lady-in-waiting Francesca de Caceres, was once more back in favour. The furious reaction among London’s politicians and merchants, though, probably helped set the seal on the fate of Empson and Dudley.⁴⁶

As the two men perhaps realized, they had no one left to speak for them. After a failed bid to escape from the Tower – the plans were leaked by his two accomplices – Dudley tried other avenues, his cousin Richard offering Thomas lord Darcy ?200 to put in a word for him with the king. Darcy refused.⁴⁷

Their end came in summer 1510. On progress through Surrey, Hampshire and into the west country, the king’s hawking and hunting were apparently interrupted by a succession of disgruntled locals, petitioning him with ‘grievous bills and complaints’ against Empson and Dudley. However, the fact that the only mention of this rather vague episode comes in the London chronicle – and, at that, nearly a year after the royal commission had reported back – suggests that it may have been a cover for concerted pressure brought to bear on the king by city politicians. Whatever the case, Henry VIII had had enough. In what was to become a familiar reaction to knotty political problems, he sent a warrant to the earl of Oxford, constable of the Tower, ordering that the pair should immediately be ‘put to execution’.⁴⁸

On 18 August, Henry VII’s former counsellors were brought through cat-calling, jeering crowds to the public scaffold on Tower Hill, where they were to be beheaded. Also present, inevitably, was Thomas More. According to one of his early biographers, the condemned Dudley stopped to exchange words with More, telling him he had done well not to confess to any wrongdoing over his role in thwarting the late king back in 1504. Had More done so, Dudley told him, Henry VII would have undoubtedly had him executed.

The encounter may well have occurred, but the details of the story are apocryphal: Henry VII’s preferred method of punishment, after all, was death by a thousand financial cuts. But, as the biographer – Thomas Stapleton, a Catholic who fled the Protestant England of Henry VII’s granddaughter Elizabeth with an armful of source material, including quantities of More’s correspondence – undoubtedly intended, the exchange foreshadowed More’s own martyrdom.⁴⁹

Two weeks later, More would be appointed to the post Dudley had once held, of under-sheriff of the city of London; in his case, too, the job would be a stepping-stone to royal service, whose allure and glory he would be unable to resist. More’s career, of course, far outstripped Dudley’s in its brilliance. But like Henry VII’s notorious administrator, he too would be framed by the Tudor regime whose sovereignty he had worked with zealous ruthlessness to enforce.

In the quarter-century separating the two executions, however, the boundaries of royal power would change in ways that even Dudley and his colleagues, with their relentless drive to enforce the king’s laws and their slavish ‘obedience to our sovereign lord the king’, could scarcely have imagined. Thomas More would die denying the supreme jurisdiction of the crown, not over its own laws and its subjects, but over the laws of God and the church. What Henry VII would have made of it can only be guessed at. He might have been appalled by his son’s single- minded, and ultimately cataclysmic, efforts to find himself a wife who could provide him with an heir and thereby secure another dynastic succession, and his equally destructive efforts to augment his income. He might also have seen him as a chip off the old block.⁵⁰

1. A miniature astrological world map, with the signs of the Zodiac and personifications of the four winds. This is the frontispiece of the ‘Liber de optimo fato’, or ‘Book of Excellent Fortunes’, by William Parron, the Italian astrologer who prophesied the deaths of Warbeck and Warwick. Given as a New Year’s gift in January 1503, the book predicts that Queen Elizabeth would live to the age of eighty.

2. Terracotta portrait bust of Henry VII by Pietro Torrigiano.

3. Portrait of Elizabeth of York, Henry’s queen.

4. A laughing boy, thought to be Prince Henry aged about eight, by Guido Mazzoni, c. 1498.

5. Lady Margaret Beaufort, the pious and politicking mother of Henry VII, in characteristic dress and pose.

6. Portrait of Catherine of Aragon, aged about twenty, by Michael Sittow.

7. Richmond, ‘the beauteous exemplar of all proper lodgings’. Drawing by Antonis van Wyngaerde, c. 1562.

8. The ‘score cheque’ from the first day of the Westminster jousts of November 1501, celebrating the marriage of Prince Arthur to Catherine of Aragon. The columns represent the two teams. Each combatant’s score is indicated in the box next to his name: strokes indicate blows to the head or body and, bisecting the horizontal lines, lances broken. Heading the ‘challengers’ team (left) is the duke of Buckingham; the ‘answerers’ team (right) is led by (top) the marquis of Dorset and includes (second) the earl of Essex and (third) Lord William Courtenay, all of whom were suspected of conspiring with Suffolk. Fifth down is a youthful Charles Brandon.

9. A group of plate-armoured jousters arrives at a tournament. These are the ‘venants’, or ‘challengers’, who take up the challenge issued on the king’s behalf. On the left, ladies of court look on from the royal pavilion.

10. Informer’s report by John Flamank, detailing the secret conversation among Henry VII’s officials at Calais, September 1504. The officials describe the king as ‘a weak man and sickly, not likely to be no long-lived man’ (line 6) and discuss a debate among ‘great personages’ at court over possible heirs to the throne: ‘none of them spoke of my lord prince’ (lines 12–13).

11. ‘They think he is a fox – and such is his name.’ Richard Fox, Henry VII’s lord privy seal and diplomatic mastermind. Portrait by Hans Corvus.

12. The death of Henry VII, ‘secretly kept by the space of two days after’. Drawing by Garter king-of-arms Thomas Wriothesley.

13. From Thomas More’s coronation verses, on the rainstorm that disrupted Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon’s procession through London, 23 June 1509: ‘if one looks at the omen, it could not have been better. To our rulers, days of abundance are promised by Phoebus with his sunshine, and by Jove’s wife with her rains.’ Below, an intertwined red-and-white rose and pomegranate of Granada, flanked by a French fleur-de-lys and Beaufort portcullis, are surmounted by a crown imperial.