The Last White Rose (27 page)

The king agreed to do much more than spare Edmund’s life. Adrian de Croy (one of Archduke Philip’s household) told the emperor that Henry had given his master a written promise ‘sealed with his own seal’ that the earl should be pardoned unconditionally and that his estates would be restored to him.
⁵
Venetian sources confirm this. But by pure chance the promise disappeared, after being entrusted to a man who was apparently
poisoned by King Ferdinand’s ambassador in Flanders – for reasons that had nothing to do with Henry.

There was no question of the archduke being allowed to leave until Suffolk had been handed over. As quickly as possible, Philip’s officers went to Mechlin, where by now the earl was confined, and on 16 March he was brought to Calais. According toVergil, Edmund was not especially worried, confident that Philip would soon persuade Henry to forgive him and give back his estates. Escorted across the Channel to Dover a week later by Sir John Wiltshire and six men-at-arms in full armour from the Calais garrison, the White Rose was at once taken to London where his illusions were immediately dispelled. He disappeared into a cell at the Tower, probably tethered by a chain, despite Henry’s promises and even though Vergil described it as ‘honourable confinement’.
⁶

The king ordered Edmund to be interrogated, hinting at torture if he did not cooperate. In the event, he gave full details about his followers and any steps they had taken to forward his cause. Among names he supplied were those of Lord Bergavenny and Sir Thomas Green of Greens Norton in Northamptonshire, who were arrested and taken to the Tower for questioning. Nothing could be proved, however, because Edmund had not accused them of plotting but merely included them among his supporters. Although Bergavenny was soon released, Sir Thomas fell ill, dying in the Tower. Vergil comments that King Henry suspected that in both cases the earl was not telling the truth – conceivably, he named them for the sake of revenge, but it is more likely he did so to give the impresssion he was cooperating and to avoid torture.
⁷

Suffolk implicated two other magnates, however, whose treatment was so severe as to imply there was evidence they had been ready to rise for him. The
Chronicle of
Calais
tells us what happened to the Marquess of Dorset and Lord William Courtenay, ‘which were both of kin to the late Queen Elizabeth and her blood’ and had been in the Tower for a long time. In
October 1507 the pair were taken across the Channel, where they were ‘kept prisoners in the castle of Calais as long as King Henry VII lived and should have been put to death if he had lived longer’.
⁸

For by then the king was a very sick man indeed. During the last three years of his life he fell ill annually, always in the spring, a progressive collapse in his physical health that was accompanied by an unmistakeable decline in mental powers. As early as 1502 Vergil noticed he was treating his subjects much more harshly and saying he wanted to frighten them into loyalty.
⁹

Despite the apparent security of his regime, with the current White Rose firmly under lock and key, Henry did not feel safe. There are indications that, after decades of fighting off Yorkist pretenders, his paranoia had grown so intense that he began to see his own son and heir as a potential rival. Ironically, the hope of the Tudors was kept under close surveillance, guarded so strictly that he was all but under lock and key. (Perhaps his father, no mean judge of character, realized that his son was a very dangerous young man.)

The end of Henry VII’s reign was a thoroughly unhappy time for England and not just for the king. Driven by increasing avarice, Henry used the bonds he had developed to deter potential rebels (ruinous fines hanging over their heads) to screw money out of all and sundry. By now, his principal ministers were two ruthless young careerists, Sir Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, both brutal extortioners. ‘As for Empson and Dudley’s mills, they did grind more than ever, so that it was a strange thing to see what golden showers poured down on the King’s treasury,’ comments Bacon. ‘Belike he thought to leave his son a kingdom and such a mass of treasure as he might choose his greatness where he would.’
¹⁰

Although the rich of whatever political hue suffered – blameless country gentlemen with large estates and rich city aldermen were favourite targets – there are indications that those who had
long-standing Yorkist links were singled out in particular. Dudley, awaiting execution after Henry’s death, wrote a ‘Petition’, citing victims of the late king’s extortion. Among them were the Earl of Northumberland whose father’s loyalty had always been suspect; the Abbot of Furness, a friend and neighbour of Sir Thomas Broughton; and William Catesby of Northampton, the son and heir of Richard III’s henchman.
¹¹

Meanwhile, the fate of the Yorkist pretender, the White Rose, could not have been unhappier. At any moment he might be taken from the Tower and executed as a traitor – there was no need for a trial since he had been condemned to death during his exile. At some time in 1507 his faithful steward Killingworth sent a ‘memorial’ to Emperor Maximilian in which he says that, should the King of England die, then ‘the lord Duke Edmund will be in the greatest danger [
maximo
pericolo
]’.
¹²
All Europe knew that Henry VII’s health had been giving cause for alarm.

The king died on 21 April 1509. He had succeeded in keeping his throne by unremitting vigilance, never able to relax for a moment and enjoy what he had won, because of the threat from the White Rose. On his deathbed, however, Henry revealed to his son that he felt guilty about certain acts of injustice that he had committed during his reign, particularly the Earl of Warwick’s death, and he asked him to restore Warwick’s sister Margaret to her inheritance.
¹³

16. Winter 1505–6: An Ill Wind

1
.
Chronicle of the Grey Friars
,
op. cit
., p. 28.

2
.
LP Hen VII
,
op. cit
., vol. I, pp. 278–85.

3
.
Chronicles of London,
op. cit
., p. 261.

4
. Vergil,
op. cit
., p. 136.

5
.
CSP Sp
,
op. cit
., vol. I, 456.

6
. Vergil,
op. cit
., p. 136.

7
.
Ibid.
, pp. 138–40.

8
. The Chronicle of Calais
, p. 126.

9
. Vergil,
op. cit
., p. 126.

10
. Bacon,
op. cit
., pp. 182–3.

11
. C.J. Harrison, ‘The Petition of Edmund Dudley’,
English Historical
Review
, 87 (1972).

12
.
LP Hen VII
,
op. cit
., vol. I, p. 319.

13
.
CSP Ven,
op. cit
., vol. 5, 575.

P
ART
2

Henry VIII and the White Rose 

17

Spring 1509: A Yorkist Tudor?

‘The Rose both White and Red In one Rose now doth grow.’

John Skelton, ‘A Laud and Praise made for our Sovereign Lord the King’, 1509
¹

In a poem extolling Henry VIII’s coronation, perhaps with a certain exaggeration, Thomas More spoke of a new Messiah. Yet no monarch had ascended the throne in such tranquility since Henry VI in 1422. The new ruler could claim to be the heir of York, as indeed he was in most Englishmen’s eyes, and on more convincing grounds than the Tudors’ dubious pretensions to represent Lancaster. ‘Of Kingès line most straight his title doth record,’ wrote Skelton pointedly in his own
Laud
. Hall called him the ‘flower and very heir of both the said lineages’, stressing his White as well as his Red Rose blood.
²

Henry even looked like his maternal grandfather, KingEdward. A handsome giant, well over six foot tall – in an age
when most men were little more than five – vigorous, athletic, he possessed the same superb presence and magnetic personality. Above a long, slender throat he had a delicate, sensitive and almost girlish face framed by long, thick, auburn hair – contemporaries said it might have belonged to a pretty woman. An undistinguished portrait of 1513, which is attributed to an unknown court artist but is possibly by a French painter, shows the same, unusual, strikingly handsome looks. Yet it has to be said that his eyes are on the small side, with a bird-like watchfulness, while his odd little mouth – scarcely wider than the space between his nostrils – already has the same tight lips of later years.

In June 1509, a fortnight before his coronation, the king married his brother’s widow, Katherine of Aragon. Although nearly seven years older than her new husband, she was still only twenty-four, as dignified and intelligent as she was beautiful, adaptable and sympathetic, with an instinctive understanding of her adopted country. Most of England was in ecstasies over the attractive young couple who presided over so glamorous a court. Not yet eighteen, the king gave himself up to pleasure and Queen Catherine remembered the early years of her marriage as a time of continuous feasting.

Henry’s loyal chronicler Edward Hall, who captures theidyllic existence of his court at the start of his reign, writes:

On May day then next following, in the second year of his reign His Grace being young and willing not to be idle, rose in the morning very early to fetch May or green boughs, himself fresh and richly apparelled, and clothed all his knights, squires and gentlemen in white satin, and all his Guard and Yeomen of the Crown in white sarcenet,

… And so went every man with his bow and arrows shooting to the wood, and so repaired again to the court, every man with a green bough in his hat, and at his returning many hearing of his going a Maying were desirous to see him shoot, for at that time His Grace shot as strong and as great a length as any in his guard….