Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (45 page)

So when, in spring 1507, Henry lay convalescing, it was only natural that he should leave the tournament plans in the hands of the prince and his friends. That year there would be two tournaments, in May and June. Both would take place at the prince’s manor of Kennington, and they would highlight the group of jousters who had featured in the previous year’s tournaments in honour of Philip and the new Anglo-Habsburg entente cordiale.
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As the prince grew and began to present that focus for loyalties that Henry had hoped he would, courtiers and counsellors placed their sons where they could best impress him: in the tiltyard. Younger sons of the nobility like the belligerent Sir Edward Howard, Henry Stafford and Sir Edward Neville – a man with an uncanny physical resemblance to the prince – jostled for favour with the offspring of Henry’s financial advisers and diplomats. There were, inevitably, tensions. Personal rivalries and political faction compounded nobles’ dim view of the pushy lower orders muscling their way up the social order via the tiltyard. Sir Edward Neville, son of the Kentish nobleman Lord Bergavenny, was a talented improviser of ‘merry songs’ and apparently had a taste for ripe political ballads about knaves being put down and lords reigning.
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This tangled skein of interests was evident in the team of challengers chosen for the May jousts to take on all comers: William Hussey, Giles Capel, a newcomer called Thomas Knyvet, and the man who seemed the tournament’s guiding spirit, Charles Brandon.

William Hussey was the son of the royal counsellor Sir John, who as the king’s master of the wards was intimately associated with the king’s financial exactions. Sir John had bought himself into the nobility, marrying the sister of Richard Grey, earl of Kent, and had married William off to Ursula Lovell, the niece of Sir Thomas. Marriage had also provided Knyvet, an athletic twenty-one-year-old and superb horseman, with his big break: in July 1506, his wedding to the earl of Surrey’s daughter brought him into the fold of the most influential noble clan in Henry’s court and council. Capel’s father, meanwhile, was Sir William, the rich, influential London draper and former mayor who was fighting a running battle with the king’s informers, in particular his nemesis John Baptist Grimaldi.
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Like most aspiring courtiers, Giles Capel had been packed off to be educated in a noble household, to serve and learn manners. As befitted the son of one of London’s most affluent businessmen, he had been sent to the best: the household of Henry Bourchier, earl of Essex, which had an unrivalled reputation as a chivalric finishing school, and whose London house was in Knightrider Street, a short walk from Lord Mountjoy’s.
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In November 1501, Essex’s men, with their fancy horsemanship and fabulous costumes, had wowed the crowds during Catherine of Aragon’s procession through London. But by that point Essex was already a watched man. Of all the guests at Suffolk’s fateful supper in Warwick Lane, he had been the only one to escape Henry’s wrath. Essex, though, had had the good sense to keep his head down and demonstrate his unswerving loyalty to the regime. He stayed at court, cultivated his friends close to the king, like Arthur Plantagenet, and supplied to the royal household a steady stream of gentlemen trained in ‘feats of arms’ – including Capel, who became a member of the king’s spears. Another familiar face in Essex’s household was Charles Brandon.

Brandon had an impeccable pedigree as far as Henry VII was concerned. Back in 1484, his father, William, and his uncle Thomas had fled to join Henry in France after an abortive uprising against Richard III in their native East Anglia; later that year they had spearheaded the special-forces-style raid on Hammes that had liberated the earl of Oxford. Henry’s standard-bearer at Bosworth, William Brandon had become one of the regime’s first martyrs. Thomas had gone on to become one of the king’s intimates: royal counsellor, master of the horse, and a trusted diplomat. His nephew Charles, meanwhile, had grown up in the royal household, working as a sewer, or waiter. A job in which you needed to have your wits about you – ‘full cunning’ and ‘diligence’ – it involved descending into the ‘veritable hell’ of the royal kitchens to liaise with cooks, taste the innumerable dishes, and supervise their presentation. It was also a role that needed an awareness of the minutiae of precedence, as well as ‘courtesy’ – impeccable manners, charm and good looks: attributes that Charles Brandon had in spades. In his spare time, he had ready access to the royal stables through his uncle and had, evidently, become an exceptional horseman.
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By the age of seventeen, when he jousted at Arthur and Catherine’s wedding, Brandon was already the consummate courtier; in 1505, around the time he became one of the king’s spears, he landed the prestigious post of Essex’s master of horse. Seven years older than the prince, Brandon was frequently around him at court, in the tiltyard and, probably, his own small household, where Brandon’s uncle was the prince’s treasurer.

Brandon, though, had inherited a distinctly unchivalrous approach to women. His father’s own behaviour made contemporaries wince: on one occasion, William Brandon had raped an ‘old gentlewoman’ and, ‘not therewith eased’, moved on to her older daughter and was only narrowly prevented from doing the same to the younger. Charles, it seemed, was a chip off the old block – though his behaviour was altogether more calculating. Some time around 1503, he confided to a friend and fellow servant that he was in love with one of Queen Elizabeth’s gentlewomen, Anne Browne – the daughter of Sir Anthony Browne of Calais Castle and the troublesome Lady Lucy – to whose company he ‘much resorted’. His resorting was so enthusiastic that she was soon pregnant. In the ensuing scandal, Brandon was hauled in front of the earl of Essex’s council, where he pledged to marry her. Shortly after, though, he broke off the engagement, instead marrying Anne’s aunt Dame Margaret Mortimer, twenty years older than him, a shock which apparently induced Anne to miscarry their child. Charles, however, only wanted to get his hands on Dame Margaret’s assets. Selling off his wife’s portfolio of property, he pocketed the proceeds to fund his extravagant life at court – clothes, horses and, undoubtedly, the organization for the spring 1507 jousts, into which the participants ploughed their own funds.
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For all its fancy ritual and style, jousting remained an extreme sport. It was one that called for a cool head and precision, particularly when executing the flashy techniques which Brandon, Knyvet and their friends performed, and which they were teaching the prince. Even with blunted lances and filed-down or ‘rebated’ blades, grave injury and death were all too frequent, and tended to ‘disturb the cheerfulness of such events’, as a contemporary Spanish herald understatedly put it. Edmund Dudley echoed the prevailing opinion at Henry VII’s court: ‘beware of dangerous sports, for casualties that might fall’, he later wrote, emphasizing that in his son’s ‘only person dependeth the whole wealth and honour of this your realm.’
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So, although the prince’s skills were obvious to all who had seen him in practice, he would not be given the chance to show them off in public. While his friends charged each other in plate armour either side of the wooden tilt, and fought on foot with axes and swords across knee-high barriers, he would sit and watch.

None of this was intended to belittle the prince – in fact, quite the opposite. As Henry increasingly preferred to shun the limelight, so he thrust his son into it, as the visible face of the regime. An enthusiastic sponsor of her grandson’s chivalric pretensions, Lady Margaret Beaufort paid for ‘a saddle making and harness’ for his appearance in the accompanying ceremonies. Ultimately, though, the prince was not where he wanted to be, in the tiltyard, but in the stands, presiding over the jousters – he was playing not his own role, but his father’s. In the May jousts, moreover, he was not even the main focus of attention. Rather, the jousts were all about his younger sister Mary.
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On each Sunday and Thursday in May, as late spring shaded into summer, people flocked to the tournament from all over the country. Among the crowds filing into Kennington was Lady Margaret’s cultivated young cupbearer, Henry Parker, to whom she had given expenses to travel down to London for the occasion.
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Above the din of anticipation, the food- and drink-hawkers shouting their wares, and the musicians – lutenists, flutes and the dry percussive crack of taborins – trumpet fanfares heralded the start and conclusion of each round of jousting. From two in the afternoon until church bells struck six, charging plate-armour-clad horses raised clouds of dust. The action was so vivid that to one observer, it was as though it happened in slow-motion: ‘it seemed to a man’s eye/ That they would have hanged still in the sky’. Presiding over the jousts in a flower-strewn pavilion, alongside a blossoming hawthorn tree festooned with coats of arms and, at their centre, a shield quartered with the Tudor green and white – ‘which colours be comfortable and pleasant for all seasons’ – sat the prince and Princess Mary. The king, it appeared, was absent: still recovering from illness or, perhaps, just disinclined to be seen in public.
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Two months previously, Mary’s marriage contract with the Habsburg heir Charles of Castile had been drawn up. Now, appropriately enough, she played the lead role in the dramatic tableau that introduced the tournament’s theme: that of new love, of Venus and Cupid, symbolized by the colour green. In a green dress entwined with spring flowers, surrounded by green-clad servants, Mary herself played the Lady May, ‘this lady sovereign’, presiding over the contest and awarding prizes. Her challengers fought wearing her favours: green badges fixed at their throats. Now thirteen years old, Mary clearly had the presence to carry off the lead in this game of courtly love. As the reporter swooned, she ‘had such beauty/ It would a heart constrain to serve her.’
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All this was the currency of courtly love, and seemed decorous enough. But a souvenir account, in rhyme, published to commemorate the games – the author remained anonymous – hinted at an undertow of discontent. Some people, it appeared, had not been happy with what they had witnessed. Not only that, but there had clearly been none-too-complimentary whisperings in some quarters against those involved with the tournament. ‘Some reprehend’, the versifier wrote, before politely telling the detractors to be quiet: ‘God them amend/ And grace them send/ Not to offend more/ Till they die.’ In the following month’s jousts, the tensions came to the surface in spectacular fashion.

The two men given star billing in the June jousts were Brandon and another ubiquitous presence in the tiltyard, Richard Grey, earl of Kent. One of Queen Elizabeth’s Woodville relatives, Kent, in his late twenties, was a contemporary of Northumberland and Buckingham. Like them, he spent plenty of time and money acting as a glorified clothes-horse in royal ceremonials, with little visible return by way of political responsibility or power. And he was a disaster waiting to happen.

Since inheriting his earldom and estates in December 1503, Kent had done his best to uphold his father’s gloomy deathbed prediction that his son would ‘not thrive but be a waster’. Profligate and chaotic, he squandered prodigious amounts of money at the gambling tables of the Lombard Street inns – situated conveniently near his own London base, the sign of the George, a familiar haunt of rackety jousting types – where he also found a supply of brokers ready to extend him credit, many of them Italian moneylenders. He also found willing creditors among the most practised and manipulative of Henry VII’s counsellors. Proving a corrupt and astonishingly inept businessman, ‘as unmeet to govern his estates as a natural born idiot’, Kent walked straight into their clutches.

Those who took full advantage of Kent, a ‘prey set open to the spoil of all men’, were the same royal counsellors that shook their heads meaningfully at his lack of education and self-control. Foremost among them were Giles lord Daubeney and the vice-chamberlain Sir Charles Somerset, the king’s jewel-house keeper Sir Henry Wyatt, Sir John Hussey and, inevitably, Empson and Dudley.
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Trying to ingratiate himself with the king’s inner circle, and to pay off his crippling debts, Kent mortgaged and sold off tracts of his Bedfordshire estates at knockdown prices. Some of them he practically gave away: Lord Daubeney apparently bought one of his manors for two pieces of cloth and a horse with its harness on.
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Desperately casting around for sources of cash, Kent abducted an heiress whose lucrative wardship had been left to his half-brother and, in the ensuing tug-of-war over the young girl, the inevitable happened. The king intervened, confiscated the disputed wardship and imposed on him a series of punishing fines. The man who took care of business for the crown was Kent’s new brother-in-law, Sir John Hussey – who had paid the earl two thousand marks to marry his sister.

By early 1507 the hapless Kent had mortgaged the greater part of the family estates. He had tried to play the property game, to buy influence and mix it as a sophisticate at court and with the king’s counsellors, but he had failed. More than that, he was being ruined and humiliated into the bargain. Something, it was clear, had to give and, as court geared up for the spring jousts, it did so.

On 6 May, when Kent defaulted on his programme of repayments to the king, Henry’s ruthless, opportunistic response was masked by a veneer of concern for the earl’s financial state. As the suave legalese put it, given that Kent had neither the wherewithal – nor, it added, the inclination – to pay up, the king, ‘of his gracious and benign mercy and pity’ agreed to step in, to call his counsellors to heel, and to help Kent work out how to meet his debts. In part-payment Henry agreed to accept the income from two of the earl’s prime estates in north Wales – which added to the portfolio of lands, including the Bedfordshire manor of Ampthill, that the king had already annexed from him. But this was no act of mercy. Henry had long had his eye on Kent’s Welsh estates. The earl had blundered into a trap. And the men who had stitched him up on the king’s behalf were the lawyers whom he had retained as informal financial advisers: Empson and Dudley.
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