The Uncrowned Kings of England: The Black Legend of the Dudleys Read online

  In his service to the Crown Lord Dudley was no less violent. When Henry VI’s regime collapsed he transferred his allegiance to the Yorkist Edward IV. However, 1470–71 saw a brief restoration of Lancastrian fortunes. Henry VI (now no more than a prematurely aged, feeble puppet in the hands of his own faction) was placed back on the throne. The triumph was short-lived. Edward rallied his forces and in the spring of 1471 crushed his enemies, first at Barnet and then at Tewkesbury (where the heir to Henry’s throne perished). Edward purged the realm of his foes and had the rival king lodged in the Tower of London for safekeeping. The man to whom he entrusted the keys of the fortress as Constable was Lord Dudley. There could now only be one way to render the white rose victory permanent. On the very night following Edward’s return to his capital someone entered the apartments of the fifty-year-old ex-king and battered him to death. The perpetrator was never identified but the deed could not have been carried out without the knowledge and, perhaps, the organization of the Constable of the Tower.

  Such vicious exercise of realpolitik was not uncommon in a land torn by baronial faction fighting. For members of the political class advancement and survival constantly involved conflict between Christian morality, the law of the land and loyalty to the anointed king. Everyone acknowledged that without the framework of law society would collapse but just as important was the buttress of strong government.

  Old Lord John saw each of his four sons well settled in life. One became Prince-Bishop of Durham, but three predeceased him and it was his grandson, Edward, who inherited his title and Midlands estates. Only the second son, John, survived his father. Like all younger sons, he was expected to make his own way in the world. Marriage was a standard route to wealth and respectability and, around 1470, he secured a moderately wealthy wife in Elizabeth, the co-heiress of Thomas Bramshot, a man of substance with lands in the Isle of Wight and Hampshire. John settled at Atherington on the coast between Littlehampton and Bognor, raised three sons and two daughters and became a member of the respected Sussex squirearchy. The year of Bosworth found him serving as sheriff of the county. It must have seemed that the Sussex Dudleys were on the way to descending into the relative obscurity reserved for the cadet branches of most noble dynasties. However, John had useful family contacts and made the most of them when it came to planning the career of Edmund, his eldest son.

  By this time the power see-saw had tilted once more in the favour of the House of Lancaster. In 1483 Richard III usurped the crown which rightfully belonged to the son of Edward IV, his brother, and split the Yorkist camp. Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, intrigued with some of the leading political figures at home and with her son in exile. The plan was that Henry should pledge himself to marry Edward IV’s eldest daughter, thus uniting the red and white rose factions, then lead a rebellion of all who were disenchanted with Richard III’s regime. It was this plan which reached its bloody fulfilment at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, where one usurper was killed and another usurper emerged from the fray as King Henry VII.

  Margaret’s go-between in all the negotiations leading to the coup was Reginald Bray, the steward of her household and a man with a fine head for administration and intrigue. The new king was devoted to his mother and it is not surprising that when he chose the men who were to form the inner circle of his government a prime position was found for Lady Margaret’s agent. The chronicler Edmund Hall eulogized Bray as a man of principle and a fearless royal adviser. He was

  a very father of his country, a sage and a grave person and a fervent lover of justice. Insomuch that if anything had been done against good law or equity, he would, after an humble fashion, plainly reprehend the king and give him good advertisement how to reform that offence and to be more circumspect in another like case.2

  Bray was created a Knight of the Bath at Henry’s coronation and soon afterwards Knight of the Garter. He was appointed to the privy council, awarded the chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster, and enriched with a steady stream of grants and offices, which not only made him very wealthy, but also demonstrated to all members of the political class the sort of royal servant who was most highly valued by the Tudor king.

  Unlike most of those to whom Henry was beholden for the Crown of England, Bray was not a military man. He was an organizer, a fixer, a shrewd judge of character and a balancer of books. He had a vision for the creation of a new England, a land at peace in which piety and the arts could flourish. It is to his patronage and organizational skills, as much as to the talents of stonemasons, that we own such Gothic masterpieces as St George’s Chapel, Windsor, Henry VII’s Chapel at Westminster and Bath Abbey. Fittingly, his portrait appears in a fine transept window at Malvern Priory alongside those of Henry VII, his queen and his elder son. As a member of Lady Margaret Beaufort’s cultured and pious circle, he took a close interest in her numerous benefactions to religious foundations and, particularly, to the universities. But it was as a financial administrator that Sir Reginald was of greatest value to his sovereign. Henry VII understood that a full treasury was the basis of strong government and Bray had long experience of extracting maximum profit from Lady Margaret’s estates. As the reign progressed he exercised increasing control of the traditional sources of royal income and helped Henry to develop those policies that would earn him his reputation as a grasping, miser king. It was the administrative machine Bray created for the Duchy of Lancaster which became the model for royal government.

  For any who hoped to advance themselves and their families in the service of the new dynasty Reginald Bray was a man whose patronage was to be coveted. This was obvious to Lord Dudley. Already in his eighties by the year of Bosworth, the Midlands magnate had lost none of his political acumen. He had always managed to stay on the winning side and knew how to cultivate the men in power. It is not surprising, therefore, to find him striking up a close relationship with Sir Reginald Bray. John named him as executor of his will, along with Sir William Hussey, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench (who was related by marriage to Bray). John Dudley of Atherington shared his father’s intimacy with several of the new men, including Bray, with whom he often had to work closely because of the latter’s extensive lands in the southern counties and the Isle of Wight.

  Young Edmund Dudley, therefore, grew up with access to the Tudor establishment and had an easy start as he set out on his own career path. Born in 1471 or 1472, he showed early promise as an intelligent boy. When he was barely into his teens he was probably sent to Oxford, perhaps at the instigation of his Uncle William, Bishop of Durham, who later became chancellor of the university.3 Bray, steadily building up an efficient royal secretariat, was on the lookout for bright young men and recognized in Sir John’s son someone with real potential.

  If the England that Bray and his royal master wanted to build was to become a reality the first necessity was to centralize power in the person of the king. The Tudor dynasty must be assured and potential threats to it removed. Henry VII’s overwhelming preoccupation for most of his reign was survival. He had spent all the years of his early manhood in precarious, uncomfortable exile and was resolved not to repeat it. We know that the Battle of Bosworth marked the end of the Wars of the Roses but that was far from clear to Henry’s contemporaries. All over the land were powerful men who sneered at the Frenchified young man with the tenuous claim who had made a successful grab for the crown. For them the struggle was not over. They intrigued together, formed makeshift alliances and, from time to time, raised the standard of revolt. Rarely was Henry free from the anxiety that his throne might be shaken. In the spring of 1486, less than six months after the new king’s coronation, three of Richard III’s supporters broke out of the sanctuary where they had taken refuge and tried to raise forces in Yorkshire and Worcestershire. The insurrection collapsed, and Henry demonstrated his ruthlessness by dragging two of the ringleaders out of sanctuary.

  However, within months a more dangerous plot was afoot. Yorkist leaders we
re claiming that ten-year-old Lambert Simnel, a tradesman’s son, was the Earl of Warwick, son of the executed Duke of Clarence. The boy was taken to Dublin, a Yorkist stronghold, and proclaimed king. The conspirators, backed by their own levies as well as troops from Ireland and 1,500 German mercenaries, faced the royal army at Stoke in June 1487. The outcome was by no means a foregone conclusion and only after three hours of bloody fighting did victory go to Henry.

  Still the enemies of the regime were not cowed. In Flanders they found another imposter in the person of Perkin Warbeck or Osbeck and groomed him for the role of Richard of York, one of Edward IV’s sons who had disappeared in the Tower. Henry employed spies to penetrate the councils of the conspirators and this led to a spate of arrests and executions which effectively deterred more malcontents from joining the rebellion. At last, in the summer of 1497, the Yorkists’ campaign fizzled out ignominiously in the west country. Even now the new regime was not secure. Genuine potential Yorkist claimants were skulking abroad under the protection of foreign princes, just as Henry had between 1471 and 1485. Efforts to winkle these would-be challengers out of their continental refuges kept Henry’s diplomatic corps well occupied. To make matters worse, of the eight children born to Henry and his queen only two boys survived infancy and the elder died at the age of fifteen.

  After the death of Prince Arthur in 1502 the survival of the Tudor dynasty rested entirely on the shoulders of Henry’s remaining son, Henry, Duke of York, who did not in his early years show much sign of growing into a vigorous man with voracious appetites. If Prince Henry, like his brother, failed to attain manhood, then all that Henry VII had worked for would come to nothing and England would be plunged back into anarchy. Several dismal and menacing ghosts thus clustered round the Tudor throne – rebellion, diplomatic isolation, illness, impecuniousness, regional unrest, sudden death. They could not all be exorcized but Henry VII increasingly wielded the law as a means of bolstering royal power and so needed the best legal and administrative brains available. He surrounded himself with experts in the common law and even the senior churchmen admitted to his court and Council tended to be versed in canon or civil law rather than theology. In his early years Sir Reginald Bray, described as ‘secret, sober and well-witted’, was joined as trusted adviser by Cardinal John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury, whom Thomas More characterized as having ‘a deep insight in politic worldly drifts’. The archbishop was Henry’s Lord Chancellor for most of the reign, an expert in common and canon law and an advocate of the uncompromising use of royal prerogative. He has gone down in history as the inventor of ‘Morton’s fork’, which suggested that any man who lived lavishly was obviously wealthy and could, therefore, afford to contribute to the royal coffers, while his more frugal neighbour had, equally clearly, laid aside sufficient cash to be able, similarly, to come to the king’s aid. In fact, this tax collector’s catch-all was around before Morton’s time but its early attribution to the archbishop indicates the policy he advocated and suggests why he was widely unpopular.

  It was the tidy-minded and industrious Bray who created the mechanism of ‘chamber government’. He made the king and his personal, confidential staff the hub of the administrative and judicial systems, bypassing the offices of state and even the law courts and operating a network of agents and officials which ensured that the royal will was felt throughout the land. The most effective, and the most controversial, of all Bray’s administrative innovations was the Council Learned in the Law, to which we shall return shortly.

  The underlying motivation for these changes was financial. Henry was very far from being the miserable miser of legend. He spent lavishly on redesigning and decorating the royal quarters at Windsor. He completely rebuilt the palaces of Greenwich and Richmond in the latest style and he brought in craftsmen from France, Flanders and Italy. Henry’s household was resplendent by the standards of the day and he understood the importance of making an impression. But his security depended on constant vigilance and preparedness. He needed armies to deter revolt. He needed spies to keep watch on those who might plan revolt. He needed diplomatic agents to persuade other princes not to support those who might become figureheads for revolt. For all this he needed money. Therefore, with the aid of Bray and other administrative experts, he set about reorganizing the royal finances – personally.

  The Spanish ambassador reported that the king ‘spends all the time he is not in public or in his council in writing the accounts of his expenses with his own hand’,4 and Henry’s initials on page after page of royal accounts prove this to be true. In order to exercise this personal control he had to change the ways revenue and expenditure were recorded and channelled. During the years of exile he had observed the power and freedom enjoyed by the French monarch. After the end of the debilitating Hundred Years’ War with England, Charles VII and Louis XI had painstakingly made themselves masters in their own domains. They reduced the power of the nobility, ruled with the aid of their own chosen favourites and, over much of the country, levied taxes without consultation. The antiquated and regionalized system of revenue collection was streamlined and all payments were made into the Treasury. The shrewd Spanish ambassador observed of Henry that, ‘He would like to govern England in the French fashion but . . . he is subject to his council [though] he has already shaken off some and got rid of some part of this subjection.’5 This certainly applied to financial administration. Hitherto the Exchequer, a separate office of state, had handled most government revenue. By 1485 outmoded practices and the disruptions of the wars had undermined its competence, but that was not Henry’s principal motive for sidelining it; he wanted as much of the government’s cash as possible to pass through his own hands. Therefore he ordered that all monies except the customs revenue should go to the Treasurer of the Chamber. The king changed the actual layout of royal apartments by adding to the Hall and the Chamber, staffed by men of high rank, the Privy Chamber, an inner sanctum where he was served by personally chosen men of low degree loyal to him alone. It was in this semireclusive lodging that he pored over his accounts.

  Edmund Dudley, a gifted young lawyer of loyal family and a protégé of Reginald Bray, was being groomed to take his place in the intimate and secretive microcosm of Tudor chamber government. Edmund had not failed his mentor. After the university he entered Staple Inn or Barnard’s Inn, lesser Inns of Chancery, before graduating to Gray’s Inn, then the most prestigious of the four Inns of Court situated in the suburbs between London and Westminster, where barristers and judges learned their craft. This involved a rigorous mental discipline under the watchful eyes of harsh taskmasters. Edmund had to attend lectures by the seniors of his Inn. He had to take notes at the trials held in the courts which met in Westminster Hall. He had to argue cases with fellow students and with his tutors. Most arduous of all, he had to commit to memory hundreds of statutes and key precedents.

  Like students of all times, Edmund and his contemporaries frequently let off steam in the alehouse and the brothel, the brawl and the demonstration. Rioting had become almost an official fixture on May Day, when respectable citizens shut up their shops and locked up their daughtes. In 1515 Thomas More was among the City leaders who had to call in the soldiery to arrest over 300 unruly cudgel-wielding students and apprentices after a night of terrorizing inhabitants and looting their homes. Yet, whatever extra-curricular activities Edmund may have indulged in, he did not neglect his studies. He passed rapidly through the stages of his training and emerged as a more-than-competent advocate with a firm grasp of the intricacies of the law and an effective courtroom manner. By the time he was in his mid-twenties he had achieved quite a reputation for rhetoric and we can catch a glimpse of his style from his only extant written work, The Tree of Commonwealth:

  If there be no truth what availeth interchange of merchandise? What availeth cities or towns built? If there be no truth what availeth fraternities and fellowships to be made? And, for the more part, if there be no truth, what availeth laws and or
dinances to be made or to ordain parliaments or courts to be kept? If there be no truth what availeth men to have servants? If there be no truth what availeth a king to have subjects? And so, finally, where is no truth can be neither honour nor goodness.6

  In 1493 Edmund received his first official appointment, with his father on the commission of the peace for Sussex. By now he had established his own practice and had sufficient income to contemplate marriage. The young woman he chose was Anne, the sister of Andrew Windsor, later Lord Windsor of Stanwell, Berkshire. She was already widowed, having previously been married to Roger Corbet, member of an ancient Shropshire family. The Windsors and Corbets came from the same stratum of society as the Sussex Dudleys, moderately well-to-do landowners having strong connections with the legal profession. The couple had one daughter but within ten years Anne died, perhaps in childbirth.

  1496 was a particularly good year for the twenty-four-year-old Edmund. He was nominated a lecturer at Gray’s Inn and also elected by the City corporation as an undersheriff for London. His training equipped him to specialize in court work and also in the administration of estates and he seems to have divided his time between the two. He acted as a judge in minor cases and as an adviser to senior justices. Anyone who knew him at this time would have recognized a confident, well-connected, upwardly mobile young lawyer, destined for greater things. He was certainly very popular with the City fathers, for when he retired as undersheriff in 1500 they provided him with a generous pension and livery allowance.

  At the turn of the century Edmund came into his own inheritance on the death of his father. John Dudley ended his life as a gentleman of considerable means, able to proclaim his status to later generations in the impressive marble memorial he had built in the magnificent collegiate church of the Holy Trinity at Arundel. There his remains rest still, in company with those of the Fitzalan Earls of Arundel.