In the fifteenth century England had been a country turned in on itself, but the first Tudor king had begun to redirect its energies outward again. Certainly his court had an international and more specifically an Italian-ate flavor. He surrounded himself with Italian men of letters—his master of ceremonies Silvestro Gigli, his Latin secretaries Carmeliano, Am-monio, and Peter Vannes, the historian Polydore Vergil—and filled his palaces with Italian furniture. He imported Italian cloth of gold and fine damask for his clothes, and ordered sumptuous church vestments sewn by Florentine embroiderers. It was the Italian sculptor Torrigiano who made his most vivid likeness, and who was given the responsibility of carving his tomb. Both Henry and his courtiers kept themselves unusually well informed about Italian affairs, "receiving especial information of
44
every event," relying heavily on the Florentine merchants in London to keep them supplied with news.
The king's fascination with Italy had much to do with the style of rule he had adopted. Like the Italian despots he kept his public presence awesome; he seemed always to be at the center of a spectacle. He hardly entered or left a room without ceremony, and invariably received visitors under his golden cloth of estate. The royal household reflected this personal magnificence. Palace furnishings became more and more luxurious, with rich tapestries and carpets and cushions ornamenting the bedchambers and hangings of cloth of gold covering the walls of the presence chamber. The elaborate regulations for the running of Henry VII's household were unlike any drawn up by his predecessors. Everything the king did had its accompanying ritual; even in his absence the dishes he ate from, the clothes he wore, the bed he slept in were approached with reverent solemnity. The formality was at its height when the court was in residence at Westminster. Here, unlike Richmond or Greenwich, the king slept with his crown beside his bed on a cushion.
In keeping with his exaltation of the monarchy Henry exalted the royal family itself. The matches he made for his children were not merely aristocratic, but royal. Arthur's bride had been a Spanish princess; it looked as though she would one day become Prince Henry's bride as well. The only other immediate candidate to become princess of Wales, Margaret of Angouleme, belonged to the French royal house. And Margaret Tudor, who at fourteen had become a glowing, feisty young woman whose blonde handsomeness matched her brother's, had recently married the Scots king James IV. It had been Elizabeth of York's last happy responsibility to order the utensils and household implements for Margaret to take with her to her new home in Scotland—huge pewter basins, washing bowls, a pair of bellows and a fire pan, "a great trussing basket." Margaret left England saddened by her mother's death and apprehensive about her new life, but what counted in her father's eyes was that she carried the Tudor blood northward, at once ennobling her lineage and cementing relations with a potential enemy.
But what impressed his subjects and foreign envoys even more than Henry VII's majesty and remoteness was his wealth. His riches seemed to grow greater every day; more and more jewels were stored in his jewel house, and more and more heavy gold plate weighed down the display cupboards in his banquet chambers. Once a gold coin entered his strongboxes, it was said, it never came out again, for he paid his debts in depreciated coins only and made large profits from the royal mints. The king's servants, like their master, were said to possess "a wonderful dexterity in getting other people's money"; beyond what their efforts produced, income from crown lands nearly tripled.^ The king's palace at Richmond became known as "Rich Mount," the repository of all his treasure. "It was spoken to the world's end," the chronicler wrote, "that in this realm was the golden hill."*
His wealth, his shrewd mastery of government, his steady enlarging of England's place in European affairs seemed to make Henry an ideal
mentor for his son. "Certainly there could be no better school in the world than the society of such a father," the Spanish envoy Heman Duque wrote. "He is so wise and so attentive to everything; nothing escapes his attention. There is no doubt the prince has an excellent governor and steward in his father." The king's health was slowly failing, but he was only forty-seven; with luck the prince's apprenticeship might go on until he reached adulthood. **lf he lives ten years longer," Duque speculated, "he will leave the prince furnished with good habits, and with immense riches, and in as happy circumstances as a man can be."^
As he grew out of childhood Prince Henry watched and learned a great deal from his father, absorbing as much about the manner and style of kingship as about its mechanics of politics and ceremony. At the same time, though, he was a constant witness to the king's expanding idiosyncrasies, and confused these with the craft of rule so that at some level of awareness he came to believe that an integral part of ruling was the indulgence of personal obsessions and violent bad temper. It was young Henry's misfortune that his period of training came at a time when his father lapsed more and more into compulsive preoccupations and instability. Henry VII was not able to teach his son the cardinal principle of wise kingship: to discriminate between the use and abuse of power.
The king's ruling passions had by this time grown to consume much of his time. He was less driven by avarice than his critics contended, but was bemused with making gold by alchemy. Hunting out relics became a besetting distraction, and he planned to be surrounded by his relic collection even in death, ordering that his fragment of the holy cross and his leg of Saint George be incorporated into the altar by his tomb. He made frequent pilgrimages to the shrines of the English saints, and arranged that after his death each of these shrines would receive a statue representing the king kneeling in golden armor, holding his crown in his hands. To the Garter chapel at Windsor he pledged a little Saint George in gold, set with diamonds, rubies, sapphires and pearls.^ Heresy too distracted King Henry. He burned heretics at Smithfield and elsewhere— including one man he personally converted before ordering the fire lit under him—and commanded that those he pardoned wear red crosses and faggots embroidered on their gowns for the rest of their lives.^
Once when the prince was fourteen he looked on as his father was confronted with a diplomatic and social crisis. Relations between England and Spain were strained, and a commercial dispute between the two countries had idled eight hundred English sailors. They came in a body to Richmond, "all ruined and lost," demanding to see the king. Henry, taken by surprise, stood before them, his thinning gray hair and squinting eyes giving him the look of an alert old man. After searching their faces and hearing their complaints he turned on the Spanish ambassador de F^iebla the full force of his wrath. "The words which came from his mouth were vipers," de Puebla complained, "and he indulged in every kind of passion." Part ungovernable anger, part calculated histrionics, the display of bitter invective reassured the sailors and left the ambassador temporarily speechless. By the force of royal fury a crisis had for the
moment been averted. The lesson, which was not lost on Prince Henry, was that bluster and a sharp tongue are a monarch's first line of defense. And he noted too how the king at once astonished and soothed de Puebla by sending him a present of a freshly killed buck a few days after the incident.^
In January of 1506 a ship carrying Queen Joanna of Castile and her Hapsburg husband Philip the Handsome nearly capsized in a violent storm and had to take refuge in the English port of Weymouth in Devon. King Henry at once offered them the hospitality of his court. Joanna's sister Katherine was betrothed to his son, and would be eager to see Joanna again. And a meeting with Philip promised to be opportune, for political reasons. Philip was at odds with his father-in-law Ferdinand over Castile, which Joanna had recently inherited on her mother's death. Henry was always glad to see Ferdinand's vexations increase, so when news came of the unexpected visitors he made ready to give them a splendid welcome.
He rode out from Windsor to meet the royal couple as their small retinue approached, their few retainers in somber liveries and Philip himself all in black. The bright gold and crimson and blue gowns of the English
lords stood out by contrast, the gold spangles and golden letters hanging on their long striped sleeves glowing dully in the pale winter light. King Henry wore a purple velvet gown and hood, his only ornament a heavy gold chain with a diamond pendant. The hood helped to disguise the signs of recent illness on his face, but the visitors noticed that he dismounted slowly and with difficulty from his magnificent bay.
During the next three months much was accomplished. The two kings struck a bargain. Henry agreed to join with Philip against Ferdinand, and Philip in return handed over to Henry one of the remaining Plantagenet heirs to the English throne—the earl of Suffolk, called the "White Rose," who would spend the rest of his life in the Tower. For Joanna the time was bittersweet. There was much to tell Katherine—about her six children, the eldest of whom, Charles, would some day rule Castile and his father's Hapsburg lands, about their mother's last years, and about her own unhappy marriage. But early in her stay Joanna quarreled so sharply with her husband that they could not be reconciled, and she left as suddenly as she had arrived. Much distressed, Henry would have intervened, but his councilors advised him not to.
In his wife's absence Philip continued to make himself agreeable to the king, and was particularly attentive to his son. It was apparent that the sunny, strapping fifteen-year-old Prince Henry would not have long to wait before becoming king, and Philip hoped that English support for his interests would endure into the next reign. He cultivated the prince's friendship, and invested him with the highest honor in his gift, the Order of the Golden Fleece.
The visit of Philip and Joanna would have been no more than a minor incident had it not been for its consequences. The king seems to have been much taken with the beautiful and spirited Joanna, and when her husband died suddenly the following fall Henry looked seriously into the
possibility of marrying her himself. As always his political interests were primary. He wanted Joanna less than he wanted her kingdom of Castile, and if he could not acquire it by marrying her he was prepared to gain it by marrying his daughter Mary to Joanna's heir Prince Charles. But no matter how calculated his offer—and he was currently involved in at least two other sets of marriage negotiations—Henry's personal interest in Joanna was considerable, and he took it badly when he learned that there was a bizarre impediment to her remarriage.
Ever since Philip's death his widow had kept his corpse with her, ordering the coffin carried from place to place along with the other furnishings of her household. No one, not even Ferdinand, could persuade her to give the dead man up for burial; finally Ferdinand concluded that, like her grandmother before her, Joanna had lost her mind. Her affliction made marriage unthinkable. According to the Spanish ambassador de Puebla the English were willing to overlook Joanna's insanity as long as she retained her fertility, but Ferdinand's answer proved final.^
His affections thwarted. King Henry took out his anger on Joanna's sister. Katherine of Aragon (who for as long as she lived continued to spell her name "Katerina") was now twenty-one, and though she was hardly acclimatized to English ways she was trying her best to make herself useful at court in an effort to better her unfortunate situation. She had begun to serve as an informal representative of Spanish interests in England; by 1507 she had received formal diplomatic credentials, and was writing to her father that she had managed to decode the Spanish diplomatic cipher unaided.
Katherine still clung to Spanish ways. ''I do not understand the English language," she wrote to Ferdinand in 1506, ''nor know how to speak it." She had only Spaniards around her, and never saw the courtiers or the king's children as she had once had. For a year or so after her betrothal to Prince Henry Katherine had been taken into the life of the court, hunting with the prince and his sister and traveling with the princess and the ladies of the court. She had not been able to adapt well to the English diet and climate, however, and had suffered recurrent "derangement of the stomach" and chills. The king had been solicitous, sending her messages, offering to visit her and, if necessary, to call together all the physicians in the kingdom to effect a cure.'*^
But this royal gallantry evaporated once King Henry decided not to let the marriage proceed. According to the treaty. Prince Henry was to marry Katherine when he reached the age of fourteen; his fourteenth birthday came and went, and no wedding preparations were discussed. Unknown to Katherine, he was being instructed to make a formal protest against the treaty, sworn in secret before the bishop of Winchester in a private chamber of Richmond Palace.
From 1505 on Katherine was little more than a diplomatic hostage. Worsening relations between England and Spain, Ferdinand's obstinacy in the matter of Queen Joanna's remarriage and, above all, his unwillingness to pay what remained of Katherine's dowry all increased Henry's resentment. He turned Katherine out of the house she had been living in.
I
cut off the allowance he had been giving her, and made plain to her that she would enjoy neither his money nor his favor until her father honored his obligations.
The princess saw her situation as desperate. Her creditors came every day to insult her, she wrote. She had no money to give them, or to pay the wages of her five remaining Spanish serving women. They had seen Katherine faithfully through years of changing fortune; all they had to show for their loyalty and sacrifice were the ragged clothes she had not been able to replace. They were so wretched they were "ready to ask alms," the princess complained to her father, while her own state was hardly better. "About my own person, I have nothing for chemises," she wrote, "wherefore, by your Highness' life, I have now sold some bracelets to get a dress of black velvet, for I was all but naked."
Katherine's pride and self-esteem had been grievously assaulted. "I have suffered martyrdom," she said simply, and went on to describe how she had appeared before King Henry and all his Council, in a plain dress she would not have allowed her maid to wear five years earlier, pleading with tears that he would pay her debts. The king had taken no notice, and she had been forced to leave his presence deeply humiliated.
But there was a worse cause of anxiety. By 1507 Henry was tormenting Katherine by keeping her away from his son. "The most difficult thing for me to bear," she told her father, "was to see the prince so seldom. As we all lived in the same house, it seemed to me a great cruelty that four months should have passed without my seeing him." Her only hope was that somehow a way would be found for her to marry Henry. He was her future, and the daily sight of him must have heartened her in her misery. Deprived even of this she was in despair, a despair deepened by the probability that she was already in love with him.
For his part Prince Henry took little notice of the unfortunate princess he had forsworn before Bishop Fox. She hovered uncertainly in the background of his life, hardly able to speak with him unless they spoke Latin, shabbily dressed, and with the cast of chronic sickness darkening her complexion. She was a pitiable, alien creature, but her misery was so much a fixture of the court it was almost invisible. When he thought of her at all the prince associated her with mistreatment and neglect, and when he thought of his own future she held no place in it.
For they wold have hym hys libertye refrayne And all mery company for to dysdayne; But I will not so whatsoever thay say, But follow hys mynd in all that we may
*There is no finer youth in the world than the prince of Wales," de Puebla wrote to Ferdinand of Aragon in 1507. The blond, apple-cheeked prince was sixteen; he was already taller than his father, and was developing an extraordinary physique. "His limbs are of a gigantic size," de Puebla remarked; along with his uncommon dimensions and strength the prince had the coordination and dexterity of a gifted athlete. In features he resembled his dead brother Arthur, with Arthur's close-set eyes, thin brows and pretty, bow-shaped lips. The oldest of his father's courtiers said he resembled his grandfather Edward IV even more. King Edward had been nearly six feet four inches tall, a striking knight '*of visage lovely, of body mighty, strong," and in Prince Henry he seemed to live again.
The exuberant child had grown into an energetic young man. Though he did not neglect his music or his learning he seemed always to be in the tiltyard, riding up and down its length lance in hand, or throwing himself against another boy until he wrestled him to the ground. In the summer months the prince and his companions rarely missed a day of this exercise; a visitor to Richmond in July of 1508 joined the king and his mother in watching young Henry ride in a mock tournament, "the prince excelling over all the others."^
What only a few of the most intimate courtiers and household servants knew was that the prince's exercise was all the more precious to him as a release from the close confinement in which he was living. The Spanish envoy Fuensalida, who came to the English court in the spring of 1508, found that young Henry was kept "as locked away as a woman," in a room just off the king's bedchamber. The king or his guardsmen watched everyone who entered and left the prince's room, and allowed only a few attendants to see him. For recreation he was permitted to go through a secret door into a park, where he practiced jousting with his carefully chosen companions, but even then he was never out of sight of his bodyguard.^
Young Henry was kept in almost total isolation, seeing and speaking to no one outside his small circle. He appeared beside his father on ceremo-
Great Harry Page 5
