Henry (28 page)

There were other straws in the wind. Tuesday, 31 July was the last day Henry spent at Greenwich before leaving for the progress. Among the final items of business he transacted was the signing of bills for annuities for two of his closest female relations:
£
100 a year for Margaret Pole and 200 marks (
£
133.6s.8
d
) for Catherine Courtenay.
10

Margaret Pole, née Plantagenet, was daughter of Henry’s great-uncle, George, duke of Clarence, and sister of Edward, earl of Warwick. The former had been executed by Edward IV in 1478, and the latter by Henry VII in 1499. This left Margaret with her royal blood but with little else following the attainders of both her father and her brother and the forfeiture of all their possessions. Soon after the battle of Stoke in 1487, Lady Margaret Beaufort engineered Margaret’s marriage to Richard Pole, her nephew of the half-blood. The
marriage took place in the presence of the king and queen; in 1493 Richard was appointed chamberlain to Prince Arthur and in 1499 he became knight of the Garter. With his abilities and his marriage, he seemed destined for great things. But he died in 1504, leaving his wife and her brood of five children in straitened circumstances.

In theory, Margaret’s galaxy of royal relations should have ensured that she was well looked after in her widowhood. But these were dark days for the house of York. Rather uncharacteristically, Lady Margaret Beaufort seems to have done nothing; while Henry VII did as little as possible. He helped pay for Sir Richard’s funeral expenses and his widow’s initial resettlement costs of board, lodging and clothing. That, bearing in mind their ties of kinship and service, was the least that was decent. But then he quickly lost interest.

A better bet for Margaret was Catherine of Aragon. The two women had become close during Catherine’s brief married life at Ludlow. But Catherine too seemed a broken reed after the death of her mother, Isabella of Castile, had reduced her value in the marriage market. It may be that Margaret and Catherine remained in touch in the last, miserable years of Henry VII’s reign. But all they could have offered each other was cold comfort.

Henry VIII’s accession transformed Margaret’s prospects, as it had done so much else. Quite why in Margaret’s case is not fully clear. Since all her connexions had been with Arthur’s
Marcher household and not Henry’s Home Counties one, their paths had crossed only rarely, and Henry can scarcely have known her. But she had a powerful advocate in Catherine of Aragon, who chose her as one of her principal attendants during the coronation. Margaret was summoned to London, lodged at the king’s expense and given livery clothing as though she had been a countess.
11

But Catherine’s advocacy can only explain so much. And it certainly cannot account for Henry’s eventual decision to restore Margaret to her ancestral status and make her a countess indeed and in her own right as heiress, through her mother, of the earls of Salisbury. Reginald, Margaret’s third son and later cardinal, claimed that the restoration was the result of another act of deathbed repentance by Henry VII, and was enjoined upon his son with his last breaths. It is possible. But not, I think, very likely.

Instead, Henry restored Margaret – as he did his other Yorkist relations – because he wanted to. He thought it a duty (which is perhaps where his father’s wishes come in). But it was also a pleasure. Like his mother, Elizabeth of York, he had a strong sense of family and family obligation. It flattered his ego to see himself (still in his teens!) as patriarch of a spreading family tree. It enormously increased the security of the Tudor dynasty. And above all, perhaps, it pointed the contrast between his father and himself: the former uneasily grasping a crown that was his by force rather than right; the latter in secure, relaxed and supremely rightful possession.

That, Henry might feel, was worth more than the lands of a few earldoms.

Complications over her late brother Warwick’s attainder and rival claims to the lands (not least Henry’s) delayed Margaret’s restoration until the parliament of 1512. Long before then, others had jumped the queue – not least the family of the other noble lady who was given an annuity at the same time as Margaret: Catherine Courtenay, née Plantagenet.

There was a thirteen-year gap between Catherine, the next to youngest child of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, and Elizabeth of York as the eldest. Nevertheless, the two sisters were close, and the disaster of the arrest and subsequent attainder of Catherine’s husband, Lord William Courtenay, only made them closer. And after Elizabeth of York’s early death, it was Catherine’s nephew Henry who stepped into the breach. ‘My Lady Catherine’ and her attendant groom lived with Henry as members of his household as prince of Wales. As such, she gave him gifts, albeit modest ones as befitted her reduced circumstances – a gold ring, and another ‘little ring with a little triangle diamond’. But Henry, as was his regular practice, gave them away again to other members of his entourage.
12

Nothing, however, should be read into this: Catherine was already a fixture in Henry’s circle while he was still prince. And she and hers would benefit correspondingly when he became king: she appeared as the principal attendant on
Henry’s sister Mary for their father’s funeral; she kept her place at court and she received a
£
40 reward while Henry was still at Greenwich in July 1509. But, above all, with the grant of her annuity came formal recognition as ‘the king’s aunt’.
13

Sorting out the position of her husband, Lord William Courtenay, took much longer, however, since he found himself in a legal minefield. Following his involvement in the Suffolk affair, he had been attainted by act of parliament in 1504. The act acknowledged that his father Edward Courtenay, earl of Devon, was ‘not privy or partner to the offences of his son’, and therefore guaranteed the earl his property for life. But, the act declared, in view of William’s treason, ‘it were not reason he should inherit’; instead, it provided that ‘immediately after [the earl’s] death’ all his possessions should ‘revert to the king’. A final clause, reflecting the uncertainties of the time, also gave Henry VII the power to reverse William’s attainder by ‘pardon of treason by the king’s letters patent under his great seal made’.
14

William now found himself caught between these several provisions of the act as between the upper and nether millstones. And they threatened to grind him as fine. His father had died on 29 May 1509. This immediately gave effect to the forfeiture of the earldom and its lands. But Henry VII had also died a month earlier. And this, unfortunately for William, meant that the king’s power to reverse the attainder by letters patent had died with him.

This was a challenge to Henry as much as to William. Henry now had to learn another lesson: not even he could abrogate an act of parliament; only another act of another parliament could do that.

But if Henry could not repeal the act, he could evade it. And that is what he now proceeded to do. William was still in custody in Calais in September 1509. There, despite his imprisonment, he was evidently living in some style, since his gaoler complained of ‘his great charge’ in keeping him. Then, at some point in the next few months, he was released and brought back to England. And by 1 June 1510 he was slugging it out in a tourney with his old friend and sparring partner, Sir Thomas Knyvet. It was as though the seven years which had elapsed since his arrest in 1502 had vanished like a bad dream.
15

Not quite, however. William might be back at court and in favour. But he was still in legal limbo. Finally, and no doubt many hours of lawyers’ time later, a solution was come up with. On 9 May 1511 Henry reversed William’s attainder by letters patent ‘as much as is legally in our power’ (
quantum in
nobis est
). Then, the following day, on 10 May, he created him earl of Devon by royal charter. It remained only for Henry formally to invest him with the earldom by girding on a sword and his restoration would be complete.

But, only a month later, and before the ceremony could be carried out, William, who had survived so many legal threats to his life, died of a sudden attack of pleurisy on 9
June. His body lay ‘in his chamber in the court’ at Greenwich, before being taken by river for burial at the Black Friars. His old jousting companions, like Sir Thomas Knyvet and Sir Edward Howard, acted as his mourners.

And Henry, able to make full reparation at last, ordered him to be buried with the honours due to an earl.
16

This was not quite the new heaven and new earth of More’s messianic verses. But it did represent a genuine fresh start in politics. It was also a renewal of the hope of dynastic reconciliation which had been offered long ago by the marriage of Henry’s parents and then so quickly dashed.

Undoubtedly, Henry had help and advice. More himself might have come in useful, for there is a strikingly ‘Yorkist’ vein running through his early works. We have already seen something of this in his ‘Rueful Lamentation’ for Henry’s mother, Elizabeth of York; even more striking is the measured, stately opening of his
History of King Richard III
, which he wrote three or four years after Henry’s accession. This lists Edward IV’s ‘much fair issue’, beginning with the two princes and ending with a delightful thumbnail sketch of Catherine, wife of William Courtenay:

And More, he could reflect with satisfaction, had helped bring about this happy ending: he acted as one of her legal advisers in her final settlement with Henry; he had also, we can be sure, put in a good word behind the scenes.

But More’s ‘Yorkist’ sympathies only mattered because they were shared by Henry. They also formed part of a wider pattern, in which Henry, despite his reaction against his father, showed himself very much a chip off the old block. Henry the elder had kept the English elites in fear by the recognizances he had imposed; Henry the younger would bind them to him with gratitude for the recognizances he had cancelled.

But he was just as careful to record the facts. A list of the cancelled recognizances was drawn up, carefully noting the name of the recognizors and the nature, cause and amount of each obligation. It was prefaced with an elaborate heading, written in Henry’s name, and certainly expressing his sentiments. He may even have dictated it word for word.

There, alongside dozens of lesser fry, were the names of Northumberland and Dorset, Dacre and Darcy, and Dorset’s mother, the dowager marchioness. But the book was not only to record Henry’s generosity, it was also to serve as a reminder to the recipients of what they owed him in turn – not in money, as to his father, but in something more precious: gratitude. They had been spared much: ‘whereby they stand the more especially bounden unto us, and therefore truly and faithfully to serve us … when and as oft as the case … shall require’.
18

And Henry already knew the circumstances in which he would call in these debts of gratitude: it was war.

H
ENRY DECIDED TO SPEND HIS FIRST
C
HRISTMAS
as king at Richmond, his father’s great palace to the west of London, with its clustering onion-domes, its galleries, gardens and parks.

But first, en route from Greenwich, he stopped off at the Tower on 12–14 December 1509. The Tower was not only palace and prison, it was also the principal arsenal of the kingdom and a working fortress with a massive complement of heavy cannon. All this was irresistible to Henry, for whom fortifications and ordnance were a lifelong passion. No doubt he had used his residence in the Tower in the first few weeks of his reign to familiarize himself with the set-up and in July he issued an ‘ordnance’ to regulate the yeomen of the guard
on garrison duty there. Now this flying visit gave the gunners of the Tower the opportunity to nobble
him
. Headed by Richard Falconer, the master gunner, they approached Henry in a body on 14 December and got him to sign the ‘bills’ for the letters patent for their wages. All but Falconer have foreign names and one, Blasius Billard, is explicitly described as ‘Sowecher’ or ‘Swiss’.
1

Making England less dependent on imports and foreign expertise in munitions would be one of Henry’s great aims – and achievements.

Henry arrived at Richmond on the twenty-third and the familiar round of Christmas festivities began. On Christmas Day he heard mass and took communion (though only the consecrated wafer) in the chapel royal and the choir sang
Gloria in
excelsis
Deo
; there were plays in the hall on Thursday the twenty-seventh and Sunday the thirtieth; on New Year’s Day he gave and received gifts and rewarded the heralds when they proclaimed his titles (he really was king!) and cried ‘Largesse!’; and on Twelfth Night he watched another play in the hall.

It was the same as the Christmases of his childhood and youth. Yet it was different too because he, not his father, was king. But, he perhaps found himself wondering, just
how
different?

Still the great armed image of his father as the prince of warrior kings looked down on him from the roof of the hall. Still there were the memories of the endless plots and
pretenders of his father’s reign. He had tried to lay to rest as many of these ghosts as possible. But some remained obstinately unexorcised, as he had just been reminded when he paid out the
£
200 half-yearly instalment of the vast annuity of
£
400 which his father had given Sir Robert Curzon as his reward for betraying Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk. And still Suffolk and his youngest brother William languished in the Tower, where he too had so recently stayed.
2

And still, above all, the council –
his
council – was dominated by his father’s ministers who acted towards him, he must often have felt, as a sort of collective father: their favourite word too was ‘no’.

Even his wife Catherine of Aragon, of whom he was genuinely fond, constantly reminded him that he still had a father in Ferdinand of Aragon, to whom he likewise owed a duty of filial obedience:

Was there no escape from fathers?

One who
had
escaped early from his own father was William Compton, William Thomas’s colleague as groom of the
privy chamber to Henry as prince of Wales. Compton’s father Edmund, a modest Warwickshire gentleman, had died on 21 April 1493 – sixteen years to the day before Henry VII – leaving as his heir his son William, aged ‘eleven years old and more’.
4
We do not know when or by whose patronage William joined Prince Henry’s household. But by the end of Henry VII’s reign he was one of Henry’s closest attendants. Along with William Royt, who acted as Henry’s usher, Compton was trusted to ride ahead and prepare Henry’s chambers in the next residence the court was due to use.
5

Henry, as princes of Wales tend to be, was fussy about such things. Compton was gaining valuable experience in what his master wanted and how to deliver it.

He would have plenty of opportunity to use it when Henry became king.

For then his rise was meteoric. By the time of the coronation on 24 June Compton was already, along with Thomas, the leading member of the new king’s privy or secret chamber. He is not formally described as groom of the stool till almost a year later, in April 1510, but almost certainly he had stepped into Hugh Denys’s shoes within weeks or even days of Henry’s accession. And soon he was handling much greater sums of money than his predecessor ever had.
6

Denys had dealt in the dribs and drabs wrung out of Henry VII’s subjects by the surveyor of the king’s prerogative; Compton, by contrast, found himself the recipient of the riches which, paradoxically, descended on the new king as a
result of his own generosity. Henry (in so far as he had been allowed to) had dealt out largesse with an open hand – whether as straightforward patronage, cancelled bonds and recognizances, or his ‘much more ample, gracious and beneficial’ general pardon. But all needed royal letters patent to put them into effect. And letters patent, as we have seen, needed to be paid for.

The resulting cash windfall was collected in the first instance by the financial officer of the chancery, known as the clerk of the hanaper. In the first twelve weeks of the reign, the money – some
£
2,000 – was handed over directly to the king. Thereafter, as was to become the practice in so many instances, great and small, Compton acted on Henry’s behalf and received the money instead:
£
1,040 on 1 December (which no doubt came in handy for Christmas),
£
607 on 1 March 1510,
£
400 in both June and July, and
£
340 in November. Nor was this all. At the same time, Compton received other large sums from the king’s consolidated land revenues:
£
2,328 in 1509–10,
£
1,406 in 1510–11, and
£
812 in 1511–12.
7

In all of this Compton was simply a proxy for Henry: he was receiving large sums because Henry wished to spend large sums on his personal pleasures and amusements and his everyday living. For Henry’s attitude to money was both like and very unlike his father’s. Both were fond of money and both needed lots of it. But there the resemblance ended. Henry’s father, at least towards the end of his reign, came to
see the accumulation of money as an end in itself, which is why he left so much of it. For Henry, on the other hand, money was only a means to an end, be it honour, glory, immortality – or simply having a good time.

In a nutshell, the father was a saver; the son, a spender.

Which is why, having spent several fortunes in the course of his reign, Henry died almost as heavily in debt as his father had been in credit.

Compton’s financial role at the beginning of the reign was the perfect epitome of this: the privy purse, as his account became known, was a purely spending agency. And it was the only one in which Henry showed any direct interest or involvement.

Compton would have been at the king’s side throughout the Christmas and New Year festivities. But it was also his job to be the king’s eyes and ears. And it was no doubt through Compton that Henry heard ‘secretly’ that ‘diverse gentlemen’ had organized a joust at Richmond for 12 January 1510.

This was both a challenge and an opportunity. Henry, to his mounting frustration, had been held to his father’s veto on participation in tournaments: ‘the king ran never openly before’, as the chronicler Edward Hall observes in his account of the affair.

But, Henry quickly decided, this tournament, relatively low-key and well away from the glare of publicity in London, might provide just the opportunity he had been
waiting for to challenge – or at least evade – the ban on his taking part in jousting. And he turned to Compton to find the means. For Compton had yet another job. It was the same as other confidential servants’ throughout the ages, in literature as in life: Sancho Panza for his master, Don Quixote; Figaro for his, Count Almaviva; Jeeves for his, the ineffable Bertie Wooster. So it was for Compton and Henry. Master and man were a team, a pantomime horse, in which Compton – like his fictional counterparts – had, simultaneously, to play the rear legs and be the brains of the enterprise.

Between the two of them, it was decided that Henry should take part in the joust. But he would do so incognito, ‘unknown to all persons and unlooked for’. This more or less squared the circle. Henry would have his fun, without openly defying the ban on his taking part. Compton would ride as Henry’s aide or assistant, just like Sancho Panza with Don Quixote, and he would sort out the practical details.

This he did with his accustomed efficiency. Arms, armour and horses were prepared and the two of them were ‘secretly armed in the little park of Richmond’.

Then they entered the lists. ‘Stranger’ knights, with visors closed and without identifying coats of arms, were stock figures of chivalric fiction. Henry was now taking part in one of the knightly romances that were a staple of his teenage reading. And, as with most parts, he played it well. So did
Compton. ‘There were broken many staves’, Hall reports, ‘and great praise [was] given to the two strangers.’

But then near disaster struck and wrecked the scheme. Compton’s next opponent was Sir Edward Neville. Neville, the younger brother of Lord Abergavenny, was one of the original ‘spears’ appointed under Henry’s father. As such, he was a more-or-less professional jouster. He also shared Henry’s own height and physique; indeed, when they were masked in a court revel, it was easy to mix them up. This combination was too much for Compton: Neville ‘hurt him sore, and [Compton] was likely to die’.

The play was now in danger of turning into a tragedy. It was time to bring down the curtain. ‘One person there was that knew the king, and cried “God save the king!”’ But that only made matters worse. Was the badly injured stranger-knight the king? Was it accident or treason? ‘With that’, Hall reports, ‘all the people were astonished.’

It was left to Henry to save the day, which he did in a single dramatic gesture. ‘Then the king disclosed himself, to the great comfort of all the people.’
8

Henry, as was to become a habit, got away with it. Compton, too, made a good recovery from his accident and soon resumed his place as the king’s right-hand man.

Henry had broken the ban on participation, but not flagrantly. And he continued to tread warily. There was of course no question of going back to his seat in the royal box. Instead, he decided that his next outing would be in a running at the ring.
For who could object at that? Even his father had allowed him to do it and had actually watched him perform.

Now there was no father, but there were his father-in-law Ferdinand’s ambassadors to impress and patronize. They ‘had never seen the king in harness [armour]’ and were eager to do so. Henry was only too happy to oblige. The competition was set for 17 March and Henry captained one of the two teams. Over their armour, both he and his horse were magnificently attired in purple velvet, cut in letter shapes and backed in cloth-of-gold, so that it looked as though it had been embroidered with various mottoes. There was also a thick scattering of hundreds of sheaves of arrows (for Aragon) and castles (for Castile). These were made of pure gold and came from the stores of treasure that Compton had already begun to accumulate.

Then came the contest. Everybody ran twelve courses. Henry, who carried the ring off five times and touched it thrice, did best and was awarded the prize. The ambassadors crowded round to congratulate him. Could they have some of the badges?, they asked. Grandly, Henry agreed and they helped themselves. Hall xenophobically suggests that they ‘took all or the more part’. The accounts of Richard Gibson, the master of the revels, tell a different story. ‘Given by the king’, they note, ‘to the lords of Spain that beheld the king’s running at the ring: 10 pieces.’

After the show was over, the outfits of the king and his horse were handed back over to Henry, who promptly passed them on to ‘Mr Compton’.
9

* * *

Next time, Henry and Compton decided, Henry’s public was ready for him to take part in a real joust. Or at least some of them were. For, according to Hall, there was a clear division of opinion between young and old. ‘All young persons highly praised’ Henry’s decision to ride in the lists, he writes, ‘but the ancient fathers much doubted’. Then he elaborates: the latter ‘consider [ed] the tender youth of the king, and divers chances of horse and armour: in so much that it was openly spoken, that steel was not so strong, but that it might be broken, nor no horse could be so sure of foot, but he may fall’.