Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (56 page)

Nevertheless, Mountjoy/Ammonio’s letter hit its mark. Being free, hungry, poor and ill in war-torn Italy for the sake of one’s principles was ghastly. By July, Erasmus was on his way back to England. A decade later he would still be vainly invoking Philip of Burgundy’s name in the hope of something more substantial than fair words.
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The most extraordinary transformation in fortunes came for Catherine. Fuensalida’s first dispatch of the new reign had been couched in his now-accustomed gloom. Francesco Grimaldi, he wrote, had already transferred fifty thousand crowns of Catherine’s dowry back out of England to Bruges, and it was just as well. On 24 April, as news of Henry VII’s death was proclaimed, Fuensalida had learned from his sources that the dying king had repeated the same old mantra to his son: he was free to marry whoever he wanted. That bride, Fuensalida was further informed, would not be Catherine, for it was known that the new king would find it a burden to his conscience to marry his brother’s widow.
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Days later, Fuensalida was summoned to Greenwich by the new king’s advisers – who, consisting of Fox and his colleagues, looked much like the old. Accordingly, the ambassador launched into a long-winded defence of his actions and of the non-payment of the dowry. Then a side door opened, and secretary Thomas Ruthall swept in from an adjoining chamber, where he had been locked in private discussions with Henry VIII. Cutting through the ambassador’s speech, he accepted all Fuensalida’s assurances. The king, he said briskly, was utterly unconcerned about all the red tape; he was sure the dowry would be paid, and just wanted to get on with his marriage, as soon as possible. What was more, it was about time England and Spain joined forces against France: together, the two countries would be at the heart of a pan-European coalition against their common enemy.

Fox then spelled it out in black and white to Fuensalida who, for once, was dumbstruck. ‘You must remember now, the king is king, and not prince’, he said. ‘One must speak in a different way in this matter than when he was prince. Until now, things were discussed with his father, and now one must treat with him who is king.’

With his customary elegance Fox had got to the heart of the matter. People needed to adapt, and fast, to the new king’s ambitions and ways of doing things. It meant, suddenly, having to fulfil the desires of a monarch who would far rather spend his time and money in the quest for ‘virtue, glory and immortality’ than micro-managing government. What the king really wanted to do, apart from invade France, was to marry Catherine, as quickly as possible. His counsellors, who had spent the last years thinking up new ways of preventing precisely this turn of events, thoroughly approved.
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It was hardly surprising that Fuensalida was struggling to keep up. Now, Henry VIII was telling the world that his father’s dying wish had been that he should marry Catherine, a wish which he was bound to respect. But as he wrote to Margaret of Savoy that July, even if he had been free to choose, it was Catherine who he would have chosen for his bride ‘before all other’. Quite what provoked this sea change remains unclear, but there seems little doubt that Henry VIII liked the idea of Catherine, and – with his parents’ example at the back of his mind – he liked the idea of marriage. And now he was king, he could do what he liked. Having endured endless tales of the exploits of Charles Brandon and his friends, and followed Lord Mountjoy’s wooing of Inez de Venegas, he wanted to make up for lost time. Besides which, Spain would prove an invaluable ally in the military adventures he was planning.
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Talking in confidence to Fuensalida, Fox said he would urge the new king to marry quickly, before other people started trying to persuade him against the match. He suggested that the ambassador advise Ferdinand to take advantage of this window of opportunity while the king’s council was favourably disposed to help push things forward.

For his part, Ferdinand was frantic to secure the marriage. Although, as he wrote to Fuensalida, Henry VII had been ‘a bad friend and ally’, Catherine’s father had high hopes of the new king – particularly of his desire to fight the French. This was a marriage of ‘great political importance’, he stressed. He knew perfectly well that time was key, since – echoing Fox’s words – ‘the French, as well as others’ would do everything they could to prevent it happening. Fuensalida, he instructed, was to pull out all the stops to make sure it went ahead, ‘without delay’. There should be no obstacles: the marriage was perfectly lawful, as the pope had provided a dispensation for it; Ferdinand would pay the dowry punctually; and he was even prepared to acknowledge Princess Mary’s betrothal to his grandson, Charles of Castile, into the bargain. In what was presumably an unconscious revealing of his real motives, he intended, he said, to look after the interests of the new king of England ‘as though they were his own’.

Ferdinand’s letters to Catherine, meanwhile, were fulsome. More than anything else on earth, he had her welfare and her marriage at heart. He apologized for Fuensalida, he wrote, who had been sent to England with the best of intentions and who had evidently ‘acted from ignorance’. But, he insisted, Catherine had to be nice to the ambassador, and also to Francesco Grimaldi: after all, he was ‘to pay her dower’.
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Fox had been given a straightforward hand to play, but he did so consummately. By mid-May, the negotiations had been wrapped up, and a guarantee extracted from Ferdinand that the dowry would be paid ‘at once’ – which it duly was. Fox’s manoeuvrings would prove a high-water mark in the management of the king’s marital affairs: his successors, Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, would lose their heads trying to achieve similar success. What was more, Fox’s playing hard-to-get with Fuensalida evidently had its material benefits. Should the ambassador think it expedient ‘to corrupt some of the most influential counsellors of the king’, Ferdinand told him, he was to ‘offer them money’.
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Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine took place with astonishing speed. On 11 June, three days after he had rushed through the marriage licence, Archbishop Warham wed the pair in a private ceremony in the queen’s closet in Greenwich. There was nothing deliberately furtive about it. The king wanted a wife, her dowry, and her father’s support against France. Unlike his own father’s marriage, delayed until after he had been crowned king in his own right, for Henry VIII there were no such concerns.

At 4 p.m. on Saturday, 23 June, the eve of the coronation, the royal procession set out on the familiar route from the Tower, through London’s densely packed streets and lanes, to Westminster. With his parliament robe of crimson velvet draped over a cloth-of-gold jacket encrusted with jewels, the king rode under a canopy borne by four high-ranking officers. Catherine, of course, had been this way before. She sat dressed entirely in white, in a canopied litter of cloth-of-gold, her auburn hair let down, on her head a gold circlet set with pearls. As the procession went down Cornhill, its houses draped with brightly coloured cloths and tapestries, and up Cheapside, storm clouds gathered ominously. The procession had just passed the Cardinal’s Hat tavern when the heavens opened. The flimsy canopies were little protection: soaked through, Catherine had to take refuge in a nearby draper’s stall. People sought to make light of it, though the London chronicler’s grumblings about the ‘no little damage’ done to the expensive textiles by the ‘foresaid shower’ suggested otherwise – ‘as little while it endured’, he added hastily.
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Among the onlookers, as he had been back in 1501, was Thomas More, who later recorded the scenes in a poem celebrating the coronation, part of a deluge of verse written in praise of the new regime. Henry VIII’s coming, he wrote, represented ‘the limit of our slavery, the beginning of our freedom, the end of sadness, the source of joy’. More’s poem praised the king’s physicality, his strength, brilliance and bravery in arms, his pre-eminence among his war-band of nobles. It waxed lyrical about the sensitive, feminine beauty of his face, which, radiating the excellence of his mind, shone with virtue and wisdom. His justice, meanwhile, could be seen in the faces of his happy subjects. Already, More said, the young king had achieved an astonishing amount. He had restored the rule of law – which, all but suspended in the previous reign, had now regained its ‘proper authority’ – and the natural order, the ‘ancient rights’ of the nobility; he had also repealed taxes and dues on merchants, who could now trade freely again. The shadow of repression and terror had vanished: ‘Now, it is a delight to ignore informers. Only ex-informers fear informers now.’ People could emerge into the sunlight of the king’s goodness: ‘Hence it is that, while other kings have been feared by their subjects, this king is loved.’
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More, of course, was speaking from first-hand experience of the last years of Henry VII’s reign. But he was also deliberately reflecting the general tone, lifting phrases directly from the new king’s pardon and echoing the sentiments of Mountjoy and Ammonio’s letter to Erasmus. And, he also borrowed directly from Erasmus himself, the man who was a master at this kind of rhetoric, of advice and admonition dressed up as flattery. In fact, More was praising the new king in exactly the same way that, years before, Erasmus had praised Philip of Burgundy – a panegyric which he had sent to England in the hope that it might get him a job. In endowing Henry VIII with all these attributes, More was telling the king everything he should and would be able to achieve because of the marvellous liberal education he had received.
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Nowhere, of course, did this apply more than the favour shown by the discerning monarch to ‘learned men’, who ‘by a happy reversal of circumstances’, now received the privileges that ‘ignoramuses carried off in the past’. Indeed, contributions from the ‘ignoramuses’ – Carmeliano, André and their friends – were noticeably absent. They probably wrote verses to the young king; equally probably, they were ignored.

When he heard of his former pupil’s accession, John Skelton rushed to London from his Norfolk parish of Diss. He wrote a coronation poem for the festivities, to be painted out on boards or copied onto parchment, framed and hung on display. The poem evidently made it as far as the planning stage: a wardrobe official folded up Skelton’s original draft and left it in a book of accounts for jousts and revels. The unfortunate Stephen Hawes tried to write his way back into royal favour with a ‘Joyful Meditation to all England’, printed as a souvenir edition by Wynkyn de Worde. Andrea Ammonio’s elegy for Henry VII ‘
et felice successione Henrici Octavi
’, meanwhile, killed two birds with one stone.
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All the poems stressed the evils of the old reign, and the restoring of the natural order. Hawes, understandably the most cautious, hedged his bets, though even he wrote of people’s opinion that Henry VII was inclined to avarice. Skelton talked of the wolves and bears ‘That wrought have much care/ And brought England in woe’; no longer would people be scared of their extortion and treachery. And all the poets, in their various ways, used the Platonic idea of the Golden Age, which writers through the ages had used to celebrate the birth of a new regime. History, More explained, repeated itself. ‘As spring is banished and returns’, and in the same way that ‘winter at regular intervals returns as it was before’, so after ‘many revolutions’ all things will come again. For there to be a time of rebirth, moreover, there had to be a dark age, an ‘age of iron’, before it. Back in 1485, the likes of Carmeliano and André had drawn on precisely the same images in praising Henry VII – but then, they had been celebrating England’s deliverance from the rule of a usurper, Richard III. Twenty-four years later, the new king’s poets were using the same idea to commemorate a peaceful dynastic succession, albeit one in which a son was delivering the country from his own father’s tyranny. The alacrity with which they did so suggests that the new king and his counsellors thoroughly approved.

Henry VII had worked tirelessly to disassociate his reign from the civil wars out of which it had emerged. Now, it was shoved together with them into a century of upheaval and instability: a ‘hundred years’, Skelton wrote, in which ‘a man could not espy/ That right dwelt us among’. In the hands of Henry VIII’s court poets, the age of rebirth started not in 1485, but in 1509.
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‘The rose both white and red/ In one rose now doth grow’, declaimed Skelton. Thomas More said the same. A white rose, he wrote, had grown near a red one, and each had tried to crowd out the other. But now, both had combined to become a single flower, a rose with the qualities of both; and so, ‘the contest ends the only way it can’. If, wrote More, ‘anyone loved either one of these roses, let him love this one in which is found whatever he loved’. Henry VIII’s coronation, in other words, was the end of a particular history: the wars of the roses were over.
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The coronation took place on Sunday 24 June, Midsummer’s Day, exactly five years after Prince Henry had left Eltham for his father’s court. At 8 a.m., the procession, headed by twenty-eight bishops, set off from Westminster Hall down a carpet of blue cloth that stretched across the palace yard and through King Street gate, past the shell of Henry VII’s near-complete chapel and along the lane that bounded the abbey sanctuary. As the royal party disappeared into the abbey, the crowd descended on the cloth, hacking and ripping up the costly fabric for souvenirs and relics.
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Enthroned alongside his queen on a high stage, Henry VIII took the traditional oaths to defend the laws of the land, and ‘especially of the laws, customs and liberties’ of the church. But the ceremonies also underscored an idea that his father had drawn on to bolster his power and authority, that of imperial kingship – which trumped royal power, because it claimed sovereignty over all other authorities in its lands, including the church. Henry VII had favoured the arched, closed imperial crown, which had also appeared on the gold coins to which he had given the name ‘sovereigns’, and he had found the idea a useful prop to his lawyers’ aggressive and highly lucrative attacks on church liberties and jurisdictions. At his coronation, Henry VIII wore vestments like a bishop’s, stressing his sacred as well as his temporal power; in the celebratory jousts that followed, a ‘great crown imperial’ topped the royal pavilion. As the likes of Erasmus and More had shown, ideas of a supreme Christian king devoted to justice and the common good were much in vogue – but then, that midsummer morning, as the new king vowed to uphold and protect the church and its rights, few could have foreseen Henry VIII’s later obsession with his God-given supremacy, which alone could give him what Rome would deny him: a divorce.
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