These advantages would have meant little had the Venerable Margaret been a less impressive woman. As it was they gave a naturally dominant woman license to exercise indirect rule. "The king is much influenced by his mother," a court observer wrote in 1498. "The queen, as is generally the case, does not like it."'* Henry and his mother exchanged "intimate and tender" letters when they were apart, with Margaret addressing her son as "my own sweet and most dear king and all my worldly joy" and "my dearest and only desired joy in this world." More often they were together, for whenever the king wanted to "be merry" he sought out his mother at Coldharbour and "re-created his spirits and solaced himself" in her company. It was during these times, with her women singing and her minstrels playing in the background, that her advice was sought and her wishes made known.
Margaret's formal sphere of authority was limited, but it gave her a degree of control over Prince Henry and his brothers and sisters that was virtually absolute. As mistress of court ceremonial, she was in charge of all procedures to be followed in the royal nurseries. The everyday care of the children was in her hands, and if the wet nurse's food and drink were not carefully tasted, or if the physician neglected to supervise the nurse while she fed the younger children, it was my lady the king's mother who called the guilty servants to account. Of all her charges Margaret favored most her grandson Henry. It is tempting to think that she saw in him some of her own tenacity and vigor, something of the stubborn, cunning will to survive that had carried her through a stormy life. Whatever the reason, by the time he was ten she had singled the boy out as her heir, notifying his father of her intention to keep her tenants free for "my lord of York, your fair sweet son" when he should come of age.^
Henry must have feared his grandmother as much as he loved her, for she was both stem and affectionate with him. He had to be wary of everything he did in her watchful presence, and little seems to have escaped her notice. She was a woman of sharp wits, with a trained mind accustomed to scholarly exercise. She kept rooms at Christ's College, Cambridge (endowing a professorship of divinity there whose tenant was called "Margaret Professor"), and had a large library of English and French books; her "holding memory" earned her an enviable reputation among the masters at Cambridge, one of whom, her friend and confessor John Fisher, wrote that she was "of singular wisdom, far surpassing the
common rate ot women," with "a ready wit to conceive all things albeit they were right dark."®
Grow ing up under her scrutiny Henry was constantly witness not only to Margaret's intelligence but to the emotional intensity of her world view. Her religious devotion went beyond dutiful observance and heartfelt prayer; she longed to devote her entire life to Christ and his church. If only the kings of Christendom would launch another crusade against the Moslems, she liked to say, she would join them gladly, "and help to wash their cloths, for love of Jesu."" Even the simplest acts of piety called forth floods of tears. Fisher noted her "marvellous weeping" whenever she confessed her sins or took communion, and formal occasions of all kinds left her limp from sobbing. It was an age when tears were more respected than repressed, but Margaret's tears had a special poignancy. Believing that fate had decreed pain and suffering as the price of all happiness, she wept most copiously in times of greatest rejoicing. Thus, "either she was in sorrow by reason of the present adversities," Fisher commented, "or else when she was in prosperity she was in dread of the adversity for to come."**
Everpresent, ever watchful, masterful yet drained by weeping for unglimpsed tragedies, the figure of Margaret Beaufort haunted her grandson's childhood. Her imprint was indelible; all Henry's life he would be wary of strong women.
All is hazard that we have, There is nothing biding; Days of pleasure are like streams Through fair meadows gliding. Weal and woe, time doth go, Time is never turning; Secret fates guide our states, Both in mirth and mourning.
Prince Henry was at the riverside town of Kingston-on-Thames in November of 1501, waiting for the arrival of the Spanish princess who was to be his sister-in-law. With him was the duke of Buckingham, lord steward of his father's household, dressed in his customary splendor and accompanied by a retinue of some three hundred gentlemen-at-arms. Princess Katherine of Aragon was to be Prince Arthur's bride, but as Spanish custom forbade the meeting of bride and groom before the wedding it was Henry who was deputed to accompany Katherine to the capital, and to serve as her escort during the days of celebrations preceding the ceremony. Of course, the king had already offended all the Spaniards in Katherine's suite by refusing to respect the custom; he had presented himself at the house where she was staying at Dogmersfield and asserted his guardian rights over her. He would see the face and form of this sixteen-year-old girl his diplomats had acquired for his son. If she were less than the envoys he sent to Spain had reported her to be, there might be no wedding.
Apparently she pleased him—and Arthur, who also came to Dogmersfield to view his future wife—^for the king and his son made themselves at home among the Spaniards, listening to the minstrels Katherine had brought with her and watching her dance. Henry found her manners both agreeable and dignified, or so he wrote to her father King Ferdinand, while Arthur seems to have voiced no complaint. The next day father and son left for London, where they would next see Katherine at the center of a festive procession, making her ceremonial entry with Prince Henry by her side.
Ten-year-old Henry performed his duties well over the following days, riding up to greet Katherine outside Kingston-on-Thames, leading her to her temporary lodgings at Lambeth, and then escorting her the next day
39
as she rode her Spanish mule through the lavishly decorated streets and cheering crowds ot the capital. The cheering was lusty and sincere. When she landed at Plymouth the townspeople had gone wild with delight; "she could not have been received with greater rejoicings," one of her attendants wrote, "if she had been the Saviour of the world." Katherine now captivated Londoners no less, riding side-saddle on her mule, her long auburn hair loose under a large round hat tied on with gold lace. She was not a beauty, but she was young and demure, and charming in her quaint Spanish dress. 'There is nothing wanting in her," wrote Thomas More, then a law student in the city, "that the most beautiful girl should have."
As he rode along beside her Katherine's boyish companion must have studied closely the foreign being who was about to enter his family. When Arthur became king, she would be queen, though it was hard to imagine this slight girl in such a role. As she spoke no English, her brief conversations with her future brother-in-law must have been limited to Latin; when talk failed, they doubtless resorted to the chivalrous pantomime of courtesy. Henry's attention was in any case divided between Katherine and the street pageants put on in her honor. At London Bridge, Saints Katherine and Ursula recited long poems in her praise, while figures representing "Polycy," "Noblesse," "Vertue" and the Archangel Raphael saluted her at other points along her route. God himself—"a man goodly apparelled representing the father of heaven"—met her in a final spectacular pageant, standing in an elaborate structure painted to resemble the sky and ornamented with seven golden candlesticks.
Two days later Henry, in a suit of white velvet and gold, led Katherine up the nave of St. Paul's to the scarlet-covered platform where Arthur awaited her. As the king and queen, the ambassadors and courtiers and a great crowd of Londoners looked on—the Venerable Margaret weeping copiously—the young couple were married. Prince Henry, who had stood aside during the ceremony, took Katherine's arm immediately afterward to accompany her to her wedding banquet, her husband staying behind to complete the formalities of endowing the princess with one third of the revenues of Wales, Cornwall and Chester. Ten days of feasting, jousting and entertainments followed. During the afternoons the wedding guests disported themselves in the gardens at Richmond, playing chess, gambling, shooting at the butts and watching a Spanish acrobat do "wondrous and delicious Points of Tumbling, Dancing and other Sleights."
In the
evenings elaborate disguisings were mounted. In one a huge lantern was unveiled, carrying within it more than a hundred great lights and twelve beautiful ladies of the court. In another, two mountains, "subtly conveyed and drawn upon wheels," were rolled into the banquet hall, one representing England and the other Spain. The mount of England was planted full of greenery, and was complete with "rocks, marvellous beasts and a goodly young lady in her hair pleasantly beseen"; the mount of Spain was barren, a scorched rock out of whose blasted sides grew a wealth of metals and precious gems. Dancing followed the disguisings. Katherine and one of her ladies dipped and bowed in a slow Spanish dance, and Arthur, dancing with his aunt Princess Cecily, trod out an
English measure as the courtiers looked on in respectful silence. But it was Prince Henry whose leaps and kicks astounded everyone. Taking as his partner his sister Margaret, he gave such a lively performance that the onlookers demanded more. The prince and princess started in again, and Henry, "perceiving himself to be encumbered with his clothes, suddenly cast off his gown and danced in his jacket," amid smiles of delight and approval.
The celebrations surrounding his brother's marriage were a high point of Henry's childhood. Now on the sidelines, now at the center of the activities, he had shared in the adulation of the court with none of the strains faced by Arthur and Katherine. Henry could not have foreseen that his exertions had in a way been a rehearsal for a new and more demanding role.
Arthur and his bride had barely settled into their palace at Ludlow when the prince of Wales fell grievously ill. His malady was sudden and inexplicable. If, as some historians believe, he had been tubercular for some time he had shown little or no sign of it; the Spanish ambassador would hardly have allowed Princess Katherine to marry a boy whose health was seriously in doubt, and besides, Arthur had been robust enough on the dance floor only weeks earlier. In any event, plague, or the sweating sickness, or simply fatally low resistance and weak recuperative powers turned the honeymoon into tragedy. Married less than five months, in April of 1502 Prince Arthur died, and his brother, the duke of York, became heir to the English throne.
There was no concealing the severity of the loss. At Greenwich, King Henry and his queen "took the painful sorrows together," consoling one another with assurances that more children might yet be bom to them and that all things, even this, were ruled by God's grace. At Ludlow, Katherine lay grieving in her own sickbed, bewildered by a course of events that had turned her from maiden to wife to widow in less than half a year.
Her head had been clouded by recurrent heavy colds and coughs ever since her arrival in England, and as Arthur lay dying she was struck by the same sickness that carried him off. Her recovery took several weeks, giving her time to ponder the odd terms of Arthur's will. Instead of bestowing his worldly goods on his widow, he had left all his personal property—his jewels, plate and wearing apparel—to his favorite sister Margaret. Katherine's mother-in-law at least was solicitous of her welfare, and ordered a mourning litter for her in black velvet fringed with a valance of black cloth. In this grim conveyance she made the journey back to London, where the queen arranged for her to live at Croydon until plans for her future could be made.
Though Henry was undoubtedly next in line for the throne ten months were allowed to elapse before he was declared prince of Wales. Cardinal Wolsey was later to declare that the delay was caused by a widespread belief that Katherine might be pregnant; Arthur's posthumous child by her would inherit his title. But Wolsey's claim was made at a time when the exact circumstances of Arthur and Katherine's marriage had become
the greatest issue in the realm, and it is difficult to say what view prevailed in the spring of 1502. Katherine's duenna wrote to Queen Isabella insisting that though she had lived as Arthur's wife the princess was still a virgin, and this judgment coincided neatly with Spanish interests. Arthur died in early April; by May 10 Katherine's parents, the Spanish monarchs King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, were planning to marry Katherine to Henry.' Their daughter must become the next queen of England, no matter how many of King Henry's sons she had to marry in the process.
Of course, before the prince could take his brother's widow as his wife he would have to have a papal dispensation, and to be on the safe side both the dispensation and the marriage treaty drafted by the English and Spanish negotiators stated that Katherine and Arthur had in fact consummated their marriage. King Ferdinand was quick to point out, however, that this was nothing more than a legal fiction inserted to forestall future objections by the disputatious English. 'The fact is," he wrote in August of 1503, ''that although they were wedded, Prince Arthur and the Princess Katherine never consummated their marriage. It is well known that the princess is still a virgin. But as the English are much disposed to cavil, it has seemed to be more prudent to provide for the case as though the marriage had been consummated, and the dispensation of the pope must be in perfect keeping with the said clause of the treaty."^ In the end the only unarguable fact of Katherine's marriage was that it produced no child. She did not prove to be pregnant during her time of mourning, and after ten months Henry assumed the title prince of Wales.
His unexpected elevation in status was to bring extraordinary changes in Henry's life, but not before a second family tragedy struck. As if to back up her assurances to her husband that it was not too late for her to bear him more sons, Elizabeth of York became pregnant within months of Arthur's death. She redoubled her usual acts of piety in supplication for the health of her child, and had a special relic—a girdle of the Virgin Mary—brought to her to wear during her delivery. At thirty-seven, the queen faced a considerable risk, and to compound the danger the onset of premature labor prevented her from having the child as planned, in the familiar and comfortable surroundings of Richmond Palace. Instead she was forced to seek refuge in the Tower apartments, within the cold, cramped White Tower whose thick walls had sheltered her and her son from the Cornish rebels nearly six years earlier.
In this provisional setting the queen gave birth to a sickly daughter on February 2, 1503. Both mother and child were wrapped in furs against the midwinter chill, but Elizabeth, who was always subject to ague, became so "alarmingly ill" that the king was desperate. He sent a messenger to Kent, with instructions to ride night and day until he found the best physician in the county. Dr. Aylsworth, and then to bring him back to London. Despite the doctor's ministrations the queen died ten days after her child was bom, on her own thirty-eighth birthday.^ Within weeks her little daughter too was dead.
The king's grief was so profound he was unable to take charge of the funeral. Leaving orders that his wife should be buried in the most splendid
L
fashion possible, he "privily departed to a solitary place to pass his sorrow, and would no man resort unto him." Prince Henry, though, watched as the noblest of the courtiers and household officials "laid their hands to the corpse" and bore the queen's wooden coffin to the Tower chapel. There the chief mourner, the queen's sister Katherine Courtenay, took up her position at the head of the corpse, surrounded by a guard of ladies, grooms and officers of arms.
For thirteen days the death watch continued, the hours of ritual numbing the grief of courtiers and family alike. Finally on February 22 a wax effigy of the deceased, dressed in her royal robes and with a gold circlet on her head, was borne on a raised platform to the church of St. Margaret in Westminster. The banners surrounding the effigy, representing the Christian apotheosis of childbearing—the Salutation, the Nativity of Christ—were painted on a white background to signify that the queen had died in childbed. Along the route thirty-seven virgins, one for each birthday Elizabeth had lived to celebrate, saluted the effigy; they were dressed all in white and carried lighted tapers.
At the church, a final requiem sermon was delivered. Then the grave was opened and the coffin lowered into it.
To Henry it must have seemed one of those sudden reversals of fortune his grandmother Margaret Beaufort lived in dread of. Hi
s mother and brother taken from him within the same year, his own safe position as second in line suddenly changed to the awesome status of heir to the throne, the comfortable patterns of his life altered irreparably. In his uncertainty Henry nurtured darker fears—of death itself, and of the killing diseases that could be avoided only by constant vigilance. Four of his brothers and sisters had now died; could he be next? Disturbed by these worries, and still grieving for his beautiful mother, Henry, prince of Wales, embarked on his first lessons in kingship.
When I was come to
The age of fifteen ye re.
In all this lond, nowther fre nor bond,
Methought I had no pere.
B the summer of 1504 Henry and his father were constantly in one another's company. ''It is quite wonderful how much the king likes the prince of Wales," the Spaniard Heman Duque wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella. "He has good reason to do so, for the prince deserves all love. But it is not only from love that the king takes the prince with him; he wishes to improve him.''^
At thirteen Henry was being actively instructed in the art of government. The kingdom he was being groomed to govern was in a more peaceful and prosperous condition than it had been for many generations. The pretenders had been put down for good. There was no immediate threat of war, either from within England or from foreign enemies. The king feared conspirators, but none were apprehended, and though their complaints about his inordinate love of money were increasing Henry VII's subjects in fact accepted his rule with far greater docility now than they had in Prince Henry's early childhood. Foreign observers at court concurred in envying the king his calm and orderly kingdom. "England has never been so tranquil and obedient as at present," the Spanish ambassador remarked. "From this time forward he is perfectly secure against Fortune," the Milanese envoy wrote of Henry VII. "His majesty can stand like one at the top of a tower looking on at what is passing in the plain."2
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