Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (27 page)

What exactly Cornish had said or written to provoke Empson’s brutal response can probably never be known. There seems little doubt, though, that he had got caught up in the power politics of court, and in particular with interests opposed to the ever-increasing influence of Empson and his fellow financial counsellors. One name suggests itself: Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, who, weeks before Cornish had been thrown in prison, had narrowly escaped being shot by Archbishop Savage’s men. Northumberland had a taste for literature and, whether or not he had had anything to do with Cornish’s poem, its vision of a duplicitous court governed by false information spoke strongly to him: he ordered his secretary to copy it painstakingly into a manuscript of collected verse.

Henry’s bond against Empson was a slap across the wrist of the kind he was fond of, a warning shot against those who were too free in wielding the power he had invested in them. But while Cornish had escaped, the dangers of voicing healthy criticism of the king’s counsellors were all too evident – and the beating-up and incarceration of one of the high-profile cultural mouthpieces at court had its effect. Cornish would think very hard before speaking out again, as for that matter would others. Gradually, the pressure-valve of dissent and satire, through which court voiced its criticism, would be shut off. When the inevitable explosion came, it would be all the greater.

That August, messengers rode out from Westminster into all parts of the country, carrying with them copies of a royal proclamation, the king’s elaborate scrawl in the top-left hand corner, the signatures of counsellors at the bottom and the heavy wax disc of the great seal attached, to be proclaimed in marketplaces and affixed to church doors throughout the country.
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In it, after a preamble stating his love for his subjects and his desire for justice, Henry stated that anyone who could ‘reasonably and truly’ claim that they had been wrongfully indebted to the king, that their property rights had been violated, or that the crown had otherwise done them ‘any wrong’, could submit a complaint in writing at any time in the following two years, up to Michaelmas 1506, to any of seven named officials: Fox, the king’s secretary Thomas Ruthal and Geoffrey Symeon, dean of the chapel royal, all civil lawyers, and the common lawyers Thomas Lovell, the two chief justices, and the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster John Mordaunt.
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The proclamation seems to have been prompted in part by one of the periodic fits of spiritual conscience to which Henry, acutely aware of his failing health, was increasingly prone. Not long before, he had ruefully acknowledged in a letter to his pious mother that most of his appointments to the bench of bishops had been motivated by distinctly temporal impulses. William Warham, his new archbishop of Canterbury and a man whose attributes included ‘cunning and worldly wisdom’, was the latest in a long line of lawyers and diplomats – men like Morton and Fox, the venal Savage, Adriano Castellesi – whom Henry had favoured with rich bishoprics. Warham’s promotion had been, the king baldly explained, more about doing ‘us and our realm good and acceptable service’ than about his spiritual qualities.

Now, as Henry wrote to Lady Margaret, he planned the rapid promotion of her devout, ascetic confessor, John Fisher, to the bishopric of Rochester for very different reasons: ‘for the great and singular virtue that I know and see in him’. Not that it was a particularly grandiloquent gesture – one of the poorest sees in England, Rochester was hardly an attractive office with which to reward people of influence – but Henry was anxious about the state of his soul, and about his legacy. All this appeared to chime with Henry’s proclamation: a slate-cleaning exercise, an expression of the king’s justice, mercy and good government, and an act of repentance and remorse. It seemed, almost, as though he were already preparing to meet his maker. But, as always with Henry, there was a flip side. Issued alongside the king’s ever more constricting programme of investigation, surveillance and enforcement, and the tribunals that applied the ‘due order and course of his laws’ in direct and punitive ways, the proclamation allowed Henry to have his cake and eat it. Having salved his conscience, the king was about to put in place the latest piece in his jigsaw of finance and security.
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On 11 September 1504, as he wrote on the first leaf of a new account book, Edmund Dudley entered royal service. He had been made a royal counsellor, drawing a substantial annual salary of a hundred marks. This simple title, though, hid the extraordinary role that he had been given.

The king had made it quite clear what he required of Dudley. Henry, he later wrote, wanted ‘many persons in danger at his pleasure … bound to his grace for great sums of money.’ Dudley was to sniff out every and any legal infraction, any opportunity for applying the law ‘to the king’s advantage’. He was then to punish such violations by ‘a simple bond absolute payable at a certain day, for his grace would have them so made’. In other words, Henry was giving him a free hand to do what Bray, Lovell and his other financial administrators had been doing – but Dudley’s new role had a particular intensity and focus. He had been made a kind of chief financial enforcer, with a free hand to sniff out all potential sources of revenue due under the king’s rights. Although he would work alongside the nebulous council learned, Dudley had been given a roving brief. He would operate on his own – and report directly to Henry himself.
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Rummaging through the assorted books, parchment rolls and bundles of indentures detailing old debts and fines, bonds taken over years, decades, long-forgotten and never chased up, the king handed them over to Dudley to investigate, and to action. On one book, a list of suspended fines taken in the court of King’s Bench stretching back to the beginning of the reign, Henry scribbled that ‘Dudley hath taken charge, to make our proof of all those [debts] that be unpaid.’

From the king’s privy chamber, from John Heron’s treasury offices in the shadow of Westminster Abbey, Dudley and his clerk John Mitchell carried away bags and boxes of legal and financial documents. Heron sat at a desk, itemizing the files that Dudley had taken away to ‘keep and pursue unto the use and behove of our sovereign lord’: in this unregulated and unaccountable system, there was no way Heron was going to get caught without a paper trail. All this work, moreover, would be done not from government offices, but from Dudley’s own house in Candlewick Street, deep within the city of London.
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Dudley set to work with a will, sifting through pages and pages of suspended fines, looking at who had defaulted, or broken the conditions under which the fines had been made. Henry and Dudley would discuss individual cases, heads together, Dudley’s account book open in front of them. Then, they would decide on an appropriate financial penalty; the king signed each page of Dudley’s book. Still an esquire, and in his early forties – young, compared to the Bosworth generation who comprised the majority of Henry’s close financial advisers – Dudley had, quite suddenly, become a mini-Bray. Invested with direct sovereign authority, this ambitious London lawyer was answerable to nobody but the king. It was a meteoric, heady rise.

It was easy to understand what the king saw in the pleasant and intellectually sophisticated Dudley. He had a creative way with the penal laws and statutes in which he was expert, deploying the obscure, semi-French patois of the common lawyers – a ‘barbarous tongue’, as the sixteenth-century lawyer Thomas Starkey put it – with a precise smoothness. Like most common lawyers, he believed strongly in the supremacy of the king’s law, and was keen to show Henry how it could be made to do what he wanted it to. Then, too, there was Dudley’s London background: his awareness of the ‘large profits and customs’ that could be gained from trade and his ability to action them. Dudley, as it would transpire, was more than a lawyer; he also knew how to cut a deal.
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In Dudley, too, the impulse of service was concentrated. Parachuted into a position of exceptional influence, he was not about to speak truth to power in the direct way that somebody like Bray, his relationship with the king forged in adversity and tempered over decades of service, had done. Dudley may have been experienced in the ways of the courtroom, of city-hall politics and the grubby world of financial corruption, but now he was exposed to a rarefied, intoxicating atmosphere: that of proximity to the king, to sovereign power. He was not going to start advising Henry, as Bray had done, that it was better that certain lines should not be crossed, or, as Lovell did, that it was occasionally worth ‘respiting’ people.
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Grasping immediately what the king wanted to achieve, that his ‘security standeth much in plenty of treasure’, Dudley would go out of his way to provide it, by any means necessary. He was now a royal servant, his new post held at the king’s pleasure – and his own career path, his future success and wealth lay in ‘studying to serve’. He was hardly about to start examining his conscience. Ultimately, he was a yes-man. And that, increasingly, was how Henry liked it.

In fact, as Dudley would later write, there were plenty of servants who, in pursuing the king’s causes, would go ‘further than conscience requireth … oftentimes to win a special thank of the king’ – all the while lining their own pockets and pursuing their own private vendettas, ‘their own quarrels, grudges or malice’. Dudley, though, would prove even more zealous than his colleagues in the pursuit of the king’s interests, and of his own. Henry, undoubtedly, had noticed that Dudley possessed the tireless willingness of the attack dog.
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On the same day that Dudley entered royal service, John Mordaunt died unexpectedly, after a short illness. That October, Sir Richard Empson received the call that he had been waiting for: Henry handed him the seals of the duchy of Lancaster, and with them the ultimate responsibility for enforcing the king’s rights, presiding over the council learned in the law.

As 1504 drew to a close, Empson and Dudley had emerged among the leading group of Henry’s lawyer-counsellors. With them came the full flowering of a system which, intended for efficient administration and swift justice, was beginning to resemble something very different, with its twisting and distorting of law and the exploitation of legal technicalities, the indiscriminate suspension of due process and, above all, the imposition of financial penalties in all shapes and sizes: bonds, recognizances, obligations.

The only person who was really sure how this curiously contingent form of government worked was the king, in whose hands the various threads – the court of wards and audits, the council learned, the counsellors who came together in small groups to take bonds and fines on the king’s behalf, Dudley’s financial freelancing – all came together. The way Henry’s councils functioned was legal – indeed, it was founded on forensic research into and rigorous application of the law – but it was not normal or customary, and nor, for the most part, was it just. Its processes were extrajudicial, existing outside courts of record, and they depended entirely on the king’s personal control. A system which encouraged and thrived on informers, which functioned by the arbitrary use of ‘sharp letters’ and subpoenas, and which was enforced with punitive fines, it was unpredictable, unaccountable, unchallengeable and terrifying. Edmund Dudley himself summed it up in a nutshell. It was, he said, ‘extraordinary justice’.
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But over all this hovered the unanswered – and unanswerable – question, posed by the officials at Calais, by the great lords, and discussed in lowered voices in taverns and households throughout the land. If the king died before the prince was of an age to rule, what then?

In the hot, dry June of 1504, Prince Henry and his household came to court. They arrived at Richmond in time for midsummer. The Nativity of St John the Baptist, on the 24th, was one of the great days of estate: processions, masses in the Chapel Royal, feasting and, in the evening, a ‘void’ involving wine, a spice-plate and sweetmeats. It was, too, the solstice, midsummer night, marked with pageants and passion plays, and by the great bonfire scented with branches of birch and fennel, built by the pages of the hall, its flames leaping into the dark. In the privy garden, the king’s secret servants kept watch in their doublets and gowns of black satin and damask. It was a time that, despite the ordered ritual and liturgy, still resonated with magic and unruliness, disorder and instability. Whatever the prince felt about it that June – excitement and anticipation, probably – it would come to trouble him; 24 June, he noted decades later, was a date associated with ‘sundry occasions of evil’.
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His arrival had been deliberately planned. Turning thirteen on 28 June, he was on the threshold of
adolescentia
, the age when boyhood merged into adulthood. Since his mother’s death over a year previously, through the rumours, alerts, arrests and executions, he had remained with his sisters out at the backwater of Eltham, apart from the occasional visit to court. Now, however, things were changing. He was moving into the royal household, where he would live with the father he hardly knew.
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Henry’s reasons for leaving his son at Eltham had been pragmatic. The repeated crises of the past years had left him with his hands full, at a time when he was battling constantly with illness. And, very probably, he was in a quandary about precisely how to bring the boy up.

By the age of seven, Prince Arthur had had his own independent household and council in the Welsh Marches, and was already gaining the hands-on experience deemed so necessary for kingship. From afar, the king had kept in constant touch with the prince’s council, who reported on his progress and on anything untoward, including any ‘unprincely demeaning’ on Arthur’s part – and on the behaviour of members of his household. Since Elizabeth’s death, he had been doing the same for Prince Henry, gradually reshaping his son’s household from the establishment of his infancy into one fit for an adolescent heir to the throne. He did so in conjunction with that stickler for organization, his mother, and the prince’s grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort.
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