Henry (23 page)

H
E WAS KING
. H
ENRY HAD BEEN A KNIGHT
before he was four; now, aged seventeen years and ten months, he was king. King! The word – even across the great gulf fixed by revolution, republicanism and modernity – still resonates. Then, in a king-centred world, it was a be-all and end-all of imagination and fact. Kings were the heroes and villains of knightly romance. Their deeds filled the chronicles which Henry had read so assiduously with Skelton and Mountjoy. Kings, good and bad, were just as prominent in the Bible, while God himself was King of Kings and Lord of Lords. The laws were the king’s, as was the public peace, the coinage and the very highway. Church and court alike conspired to elevate the king’s person and make it sacred to the point of idolatry. The trumpets and the heralds’ cry had proclaimed his name, number and titles and wished him long life:

Three or four days into his reign, however, Henry had experienced little if any of the glamour or romance of kingship. Instead, his accession had been as hole-in-the-corner as anything under his father. And – it is clear – with
his
connivance. Henry, who had been present at his father’s deathbed, must have been a willing actor in the strange game of concealment which was played out at Richmond in the following forty-eight hours. He must likewise have acquiesced at least in its prime aim of bringing down Empson and Dudley.

Nor did things alter much when, three days after his father’s death, he took up residence in the Tower on 24 April. The earl of Oxford, who was also constable of the Tower, resumed his role as military strongman of the regime. Under Oxford’s command, the Tower itself was put under heavy guard; strict watch was kept throughout all the wards of the City of London, while Henry himself remained ‘closely and secret’ within the fortress.
1

Was it an accession? Or a
coup
d’état
?
Or fear of a
coup
d’état
?
There was certainly an element of the last. The former pretender, the earl of Suffolk, was safely in the Tower, as was his brother William. But the remaining de la Pole brother, Richard, was still at large in exile and still proclaiming himself the ‘White Rose’ and true inheritor of England. Also at large, and at home, was Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham. A few years previously, political gossip
in high circles had rated Buckingham appreciatively as ‘a noble man’ and touted him as a possible king who ‘would be a royal ruler’; now, in 1509, rumours were also swirling among the servants and adherents of Buckingham’s close friend and ally the earl of Northumberland that the duke would be ‘lord protector of England’.
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The last lord protector had been Richard, duke of Gloucester. And then and previously the protectorship had been a stepping stone to the throne.

Finally, there was the real possibility of civil strife among the old king’s warring councillors. ‘Perceiving that [Henry VII’s] illness would prove fatal,’ Empson’s indictment alleged, ‘he resolved to seize the government of the young king and realm for himself and others of his affinity and opinion,’ and to this end summoned his armed retainers to London. Dudley was also charged with the same offence of summoning retainers, and the detail of both sets of charges has been described as ‘remarkably credible’.
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None of this would have much surprised the young Henry, nor, I imagine, greatly disconcerted him. For he had been well prepared by both education and experience. Skelton’s
Speculum
had painted an unremittingly grim picture of the likely fate of kings. And – if he required the evidence – five years of living at his father’s court and in close proximity to the king in his decline had exposed him to the endless varieties of human weakness, greed and delusion. Lastly and most importantly, there were his own memories of the build
ing where he now found himself. It was here, in the Tower, that he and his mother had taken refuge in 1497 as the Cornish rebel army skirted the city. For days, his father’s throne and his own life had hung in the balance until the crushing royal victory at Blackheath.

After that, Henry – even at his youngest and callowest – had a short way with rebels.

Etiquette, as was usual in the life of kings, also played a part in the course of events. English custom, it was explained to the puzzled Fuensalida, required a king to keep a low profile until the funeral of his predecessor. Indeed, until Henry VII was buried, there were in effect
two
kings in England: the living, though largely invisible, King Henry in the Tower, and his dead father at Richmond. And it was the latter who enjoyed all the pomp and show, as his corpse was moved stage by stage from its first resting place in the closet or private oratory next to the king’s bedchamber, out through the black-hung chambers and gallery to the chapel royal, where it lay in state for a week, until its departure for London and its burial at Westminster.

All this time ‘there was continually kept a right sumptuous household, all lords and other officers as they did in the king’s living kept their rooms [places] and better served than the ordinary custom was’. And it was not only the royal household which stayed behind with Henry VII. ‘The council’ too, Wriothesley noted, ‘attended upon the corpse of the late king defunct’ and remained at Richmond.
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It was
headed by Henry’s grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, who seems to have acted as virtual regent, while its other dominant members were Richard Foxe, lord privy seal, and Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey and lord treasurer.

In stark contrast, the living King Henry was accompanied to the Tower only by his former princely household – which now became,
de facto
, the new inner royal household – and a skeleton council consisting of William Warham, archbishop of Canterbury and lord chancellor, and Thomas Ruthall, royal secretary and bishop-elect of Durham. The pair were in no position to take decisions independent of the parent-body at Richmond, nor did they attempt to do so. But they
did
command, with the combination of the great seal and the sign manual or signature of the new king, the means to give effect to the decisions already taken at Richmond in the frantic forty-eight hours or so of plotting and horse-trading which had followed Henry VII’s death.

The most sensational decision, to arrest Empson and Dudley, had already been implemented; but the council had decided to go further, and not only make scapegoats of Henry VII’s most unpopular ministers, but also to signal a sharp change of policy. The method of making this clear was to be the issuing of a general pardon, or wiping-clean of the legal slate. Henry VII, in fulfilment of his promise to his confessor to become a new man, had already issued a deathbed general pardon on 16 April. But the general pardon was not quite what it seemed. For it to be effective, individuals had to sue
out pardons in their own names and to pay the necessary fees in chancery. This – such was the fear of Henry VII’s regime of law enforcement – they did in droves, and at least forty-four people rushed to take it out in only a couple of days.

But Henry VII’s pardon died with him. Now the triumphant faction of his councillors resolved to reissue it – but with a difference. The old king’s pardon was a dry list of offences that were eligible to be excused; the new monarch’s was to be a lush exercise in feel-good rhetoric. The judges, Henry was made to say, from the highest to the lowest, were to ‘minister justice … freely, rightwisely, and indifferently to every of his subjects’ – even when the king himself was a party. And if Henry or his councillors lapsed from his own high standards and tried to pressure the judges into giving the king a favourable verdict, they were to ignore the intervention, whatever the cost.

Not only justice was to be free, but trade and manufactures as well. Henry VII’s relations with the City had degenerated into a cold war that threatened to break out into open resistance and rioting. Henry VIII, on the other hand, offered his royal word to ‘all manner of merchants … clothiers, artificers, and folks of all manner of mysteries and occupations’ that they could go about their business ‘freely, quietly and peaceably and without any fear of forfeiture’ from over-zealous officials or prying informers.

Nor, finally, were Henry’s subjects left to draw their own conclusions about the differences between his father’s
pardon and his own.
His
pardon, the text declared, had been issued of the new king’s ‘good heart’ and was ‘much more ample, gracious and beneficial’ than his father’s.

In short, the text came within a whisper of turning the two pardons into a contrast between two kings: the bad old man versus the good new youth.

The text must have been brought up in draft with the royal party when it rode from Richmond to the Tower; it may even have been already written out in proper form. At any rate, shortly after Henry’s arrival in the Tower, it was presented to him to sign. He did so slowly and carefully, and making sure that each letter was properly formed: ‘Henry R’.

It was his first official act as king, and his first repudiation of his father.

The moment Henry had finished writing, the ‘signed bill’, as it was now known, was taken to Lord Chancellor Warham and his officials to be rewritten, sealed and enrolled. This was the ancient process of authenticating and recording royal acts that stretched back to the Conquest and beyond. But new, cutting-edge technology was deployed as well, as the text was also rushed to the workshop of the king’s printer, Richard Pynson, to be turned into a printed proclamation.

Bearing in mind its length, it was an all-night job for the compositors and printers. But the following morning, 25 April, it was ready. First the pardon was proclaimed in a loud
voice at central points in the City; then the printed copies were posted and distributed, ‘that every man might thereof have knowledge’.
5

The effect was instantaneous, as popular rejoicing broke out throughout the City. Over the next few days a little more red meat was thrown to the people, with the well-publicized arrests of some of the fallen ministers’ most notorious agents. Henry played a direct part in this process too, since he was at the centre of the lobbying which determined just who was an extortioner and who was not (the line, after all, was a fine one, since not only Empson and Dudley but more or less the whole political elite had been involved in Henry VII’s policies up to the neck). Thus, when the list of those who were to be excepted from the general pardon was presented to him for signature on the thirtieth, he added a name in his own hand.

But long before then, the verdict of public opinion was clear. ‘Henry VII’s death,’ Fuensalida reported home on 27 April, ‘is now public knowledge because Henry VIII is in the Tower and has proclaimed a general pardon. He has released many prisoners and arrested all those responsible for the bribery and tyranny of his father’s reign.’ ‘The people,’ the ambassador continued, ‘are very happy and few tears are being shed for Henry VII. Instead, people are as joyful as if they had been released from prison.’ And they knew whom to thank for their deliverance: ‘the new king’, Fuensalida’s report concludes, ‘has ordered the arrest of two of Henry
VII’s officials who were responsible for collecting the king’s monies and has proclaimed that all those who feel they were wronged by either his father or his officials should present their reasons to his council so that amends can be made’.
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It is also clear just how cleverly the traditional etiquette surrounding the end of one reign and the beginning of the next was exploited for current political ends. Henry’s strange, secluded sojourn in the Tower allowed him to repudiate his father’s most unpopular policies without quite associating himself with the unfilial act of criticising his father. Similarly, the ostentatious attendance of the council on the body of their dead master at Richmond squared another awkward circle. They, after all, had organized the coup against two of the dead king’s leading ministers almost before the breath was out of his body; they had also ventrilo-quized his son’s behaviour. That could easily be construed as the blackest ingratitude. But the separation between Richmond and London saved the day: events might have been planned at Richmond by the council, but they were put into effect miles away in London, where they were presented as the sole initiative of the new king.

Finally, and conversely, the parallel households of the dead and living kings helped make the contrast between the two regimes seem much greater than it really was. The truth was that everybody who held real power round Henry VIII had also held it round his father. That was not what public opinion wanted to hear. It wanted a clean break. But the mass
attendance of the council on the corpse of the dead king on the one hand, and Henry VIII’s apparently uncounselled state on the other, did indeed offer the simulacrum of a rupture.

And that, with the new king’s character and appearance, was enough.

Henry VII’s posthumous usefulness was now almost at an end. On Wednesday, 9 May, at about 3 p. m., the late king’s funeral procession, having made its way from Richmond along the south bank, crossed London Bridge and entered the City. Headed by the sword-bearer of London and the king’s messengers, riding two by two ‘with their boxes at their breasts’, and including the serried ranks of the church, the judiciary, the City, the foreign merchant communities resident in London, the royal household, the heralds, the peerage and the yeomen of the guard, it numbered hundreds if not thousands, all arrayed in order and clad in mourning black. Henry’s personal household marched there too, with ‘torches innumerable’.