Great Harry

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  according to Caroz she suffered from an irregularity in her menstrual periods—one cause of the continuing uncertainty about her condition, and perhaps a hindrance to conception. The ambassador attributed this to nothing more serious than poor eating habits, and thought that if Katherine could be taught to take more care for what she ate the problem would disappear. But the rumors continued, even after the queen came out of confinement and the ambassadors and courtiers were told she had suffered a miscarriage. A shadow of doubt had been cast over the marriage, a shadow that lengthened with the king's first infidelity.

  Anne Stafford came to Henry's court when she married Sir George Hastings some time during the first year of the new reign. She had been a very young girl when she married her first husband, who left her a widow in her teens; on her second marriage she became one of Katherine's ladies of highest rank. Her sister Elizabeth was already in Katherine's service, and was one of her favorites; as sisters to the duke of Buckingham both women were given places of prominence at banquets and entertainments, and Anne quickly became known to the king and his companions.

  It was William Compton, Henry's former page and groom of the bedchamber, who acted as the king's go-between when he made Anne Stafford his mistress. Compton made a habit of coming to Anne's private chamber, talking with her, and arranging her meetings with Henry, and while this plan worked well for a while, eventually Elizabeth Stafford guessed the truth and confided her suspicions to her husband and brother. The duke, the greatest peer in England and a hot-tempered man given to ''rail and misuse himself in words," determined to intervene. Waiting in Anne's chamber, he confronted Compton the next time he came in. The groom of the bedchamber could say little in reply to the sulphurous duke, who ''severely reproached him in many and very hard words." But once he escaped from Lady Hastings' chamber Compton went at once to the king, who sought out Buckingham and shouted at him until he left the palace.

  Henry's anger was boundless. There was little he could do to Anne's husband Lord Hastings, who had ridden off in terror immediately after the confrontation between Buckingham and Compton. Anne herself had been packed off to a convent sixty miles away, but her sister remained to face the king's extreme displeasure. If Elizabeth Stafford thought the queen would protect her she soon found out how powerless Katherine was. She and her husband were ordered in the harshest terms possible to leave the palace and not to return, and for a time Henry swore he would dismiss a good many others as well. "Believing that there were other women in the employment of [Elizabeth Stafford], that is to say, such as go about the palace insidiously spying out every unwatched moment, in order to tell the queen," Caroz wrote in his version of the incident, "the king would have liked to turn all of them out, only that it has appeared to him too great a scandal."^

  He had had his fill of women—of his wife and her malfunctioning womb, of the network of watchful females who spied on him, of righteous court ladies who interfered in his private affairs. For weeks his conscience

  and the queen's angry silence made him pay for what he had done, though, and "almost all the court knew that the queen had been vexed with the king, and the king with her, and thus this storm went on between them."^

  In public Katherine continued to take her place as Henry's ever smiling, ever gracious queen, but she carried out her duties with a heavy heart. Henry's affection for her had been strained. He still jousted in her honor, wearing her symbol, the pomegranate, embroidered on his horse trappings; he gave her gifts, and spoke frequently of her in her absence, and in time the bad feeling between them lessened. Yet the gift she treasured most now made her sad. It was Elizabeth of York's missal, in which Henry had written "I am yours, Henry R. for ever." He was no longer hers alone. She could no longer be sure that, as he wrote her father shortly after their marriage, "if he were still free he would choose her in preference to all others."^

  Amid the young beauties of the court Katherine seemed plain. That her confessor saw her as beautiful only made their relationship suspect, for if others noted her "lively and gracious disposition" and her clear, glowing complexion no one but a lover would have called her pretty. A candid Venetian described the queen as "rather ugly than otherwise," though it was generally agreed that she excelled at the courtly diversions of dancing and music-making. Katherine's excellent education helped to compensate for her foreigner's English; she spoke and wrote more accurately than many of the carelessly educated ladies of her suite.^ Her piety too was exemplary. She often got up at midnight to say matins, and then again at five for mass, dressing hurriedly and telling her maids that any time spent in adorning herself was time wasted. On Fridays and Saturdays she fasted all day; she read the Office of the Blessed Virgin daily and, after dinner, read a saint's life to her women. It was said that when she knelt to pray, she denied herself the comfort of a cushion.

  These virtues would have counted for little had Katherine proved to be barren. But she was pregnant again, and before long she found the courage to inform Henry. In September of 1510 the "King's Nursery" was fitted out once more. New hangings were ordered for the rooms where the lady mistress would superintend the birth, and later watch over the infant's nurse and rockers; a new bearing pane with a long train was sewn in purple velvet. Everything was ready for the birth of a prince.

  Henry's second Christmas as king was celebrated more joyously than any feast yet seen. The court was at Richmond, for the queen had chosen to be delivered there and had already retired to her apartments. On New Year's Day, just after midnight, she gave birth to a son. When the news reached London bonfires were made and wine was set out in the streets for the rejoicing Londoners to drink. They cheered for the king, for the queen, and for the New Year's Boy, who was called Henry after his father. They came to see him christened, marveling at the precious golden gifts his illustrious godparents Margaret of Savoy and Louis XII of France presented. And they cheered for the midwife, proud and relieved that the birth had been successful, as she took her place in the church. Around her neck she wore a gold chain worth ten pounds, the gift of the grateful king.^

  As soon as he had appointed the officers of his infant son's household —a sergeant at arms, a clerk of the signet, yeomen of the beds and wardrobe, and of course a nurse, Elizabeth Poyntes—Henry made a pilgrimage to the shrine at Walsingham to give thanks for the safe arrival of his son. This done, he called for a solemn joust at Westminster in honor of the queen.

  Leaving the little prince in the care of his nurse at Richmond the entire court moved to the great palace where day after day pageants and feats of arms were held. The king was the star performer, making his entry onto the tiltyard under a pavilion of cloth of gold adorned with golden letters. He rode as Sir Loyal Heart, sharing the prizes with Thomas Knevet and Edward Howard, and after the joust had formally ended he ran extra courses with Howard and Charles Brandon *'for the king's lady's sake."

  In all, the banquets, costumes and pageant finery cost Henry as much as sixteen new ships of war, but the expense was justified. His eldest son, his heir, deserved to be ushered in with splendor.

  But as the spectacles went on the baby weakened, and toward the end of February he died. No one was blamed. Elizabeth Poyntes, "late nurse unto our dearest son the prince," was given her twenty pounds annuity, and the keeper of the great wardrobe, who had so recently fitted out the nursery, now provided the hearse. Four hundred pounds of wax candles burned around it night and day in the monastery of Westminster until the New Year's Boy was laid to rest.

  (

  Great Harry

  I

  Pray we to God that all may gyde That for our kyng so to provid, To send hym power to hys corage He may acheffe this gret viage: Now let us syng this rownd all thre; Sent George, graunt hym the victory!

  At midday on June 30, 1513, the waters off Dover teemed with ships. Three- and four-masted warships with huge emblazoned banners flying from their masts rode at anchor side by side, while rowboats wove in and out among them, bringing aboard t
he last loads of bowstaves and flour and beer. Twenty-five thousand oxen had been killed and salted down to feed the soldiers—causing the local price of beef to triple—and twelve thousand suits of armor had been ordered from the arms merchants of Flanders for them to fight in. "Certain secret engines" made for the king by a joiner were locked securely in the hold, along with two special large field guns, demi-culverins, which he affectionately called his "minions," and the giant "Twelve Apostles," heavy guns with figures of Saint John, Saint Thomas and the others cast on their barrels.^ The crews of the ships had been outfitted in coats of green and silver-white, the Tudor colors— made in damask for the captain, camlet for the pilots and masters, and for the mariners, good woolen cloth. They stood at their posts now, waiting for the signal from the flagship to draw up anchor.

  Finally Henry, who had said his goodbyes to Katherine at Dover Castle, was rowed out to his ship. Only three weeks earlier it had been reported that she meant to cross with him to France, despite her condition—she was pregnant for the fourth time—but he had decided to leave her behind as his regent. Pride overwhelmed her disappointment as she watched him embark, standing in the bow of the rowboat in gleaming armor, his polished steel headpiece crowned with a rich coronal. Over his armor—a new and more flexible type made with overlapping plates which slid on rivets—he wore the tunic of a crusading knight, a simple fall of white cloth of gold with a large red cross sewn on the front. With a jeweled Saint George on his crown, the cross of Christ on his breast and the arms of the pope on his banners, the crusader Harry the Eighth was off to war.

  Exactly a hundred years earlier England's greatest hero, Henry V, had asserted his right to the French throne. Two years afterward he too had

  71

  sailed to France with an army, and had met the French on a field sewn with winter wheat near the village of Agincourt. Like his sixteenth-century namesake, Henry V had been an athletic young king who dreamed of restoring the French lands that had been England's centuries before, and then of capturing Jerusalem. And at Agincourt, his thousand men-at-arms and six thousand archers had resoundingly defeated the twenty-five thousand heavily armed Frenchmen who came against them, slaughtering the encumbered enemy until they lay in heaps of dead and dying, "taller than a man's height," as a chronicler wrote with exuberant inaccuracy. The English, he went on, climbed these walls of dead "and butchered the adversaries below with swords, axes and other weapons." So great was the victory that nothing could darken it in the memories of the English—not even the king's unchivalrous order that all captives be killed in cold blood, a command which led to the incineration of wounded French prisoners in the cottages which sheltered them. After all, the command had been rescinded in time to spare the noblest and richest of the French, and no one objected to the dishonorable treatment of the dead, whose corpses were ransacked for valuables before being buried b> the thousands in pits dug by the peasants of Arras.^

  After Agincourt Henry V had made his name even more illustrious by conquering Normandy, besieging town after town and in the end winning the right to the French throne. He had died, still a hero, at thirty-five, and the dented helmet he had worn at Agincourt was hung on his tomb in Westminster Abbey, a symbol of renown for the young Henry VIII to dream on.

  As the new reign went forward and the king's determination to fight the French grew greater and greater the image of Henry V was often conjured to inspire his ambition. Courtiers and foreign visitors alike predicted that he "would now renew the name of Henry V," and noted that like his predecessor Henry was devoted to the joust and to other military skills, and was beguiled by schemes of conquest on a vast scale. To the knights at Henry's court war meant valorous deeds and feats of arms, the exploits of Edward III during the Hundred Years' War and the chivalrous triumphs described in Froissart's Chronicles: one of these knights. Lord Bemers, "a martial man, well seen in all military discipline," translated Froissart at the king's request. Another Englishman anonymously translated an Italian life of Henry V, hoping that King Henry, seeing the "virtuous manners and victorious conquests" of his namesake would be inspired to "conform himself to his life and manners."^

  At least one court observer had no doubt the young king would surpass all his predecessors. The Venetian ambassador Badoer looked forward to hearing that Henry had marched straight through to Paris to be crowned king of France, "which result may God grant, he being the true king of France, and deservedly so, as within the last thousand years there never was a king more noble and more valiant."^

  No one expected more of Henry than he did of himself. He was "not unmindful," he told his councilors, "that it was his duty to seek fame by

  military skill," and alarmed them by announcing that he was not only eager to make war on the French but to lead the army into battle in person. Englishmen fight more bravely and fiercely when led by their king, he explained, though he had a strong personal motive as well. He hoped "to create such a fine opinion about his valor among all men that they could understand that his ambition was not merely to equal but to excel the glorious deeds of his ancestors."^

  Glory, military glory, culminating in a famous name and a permanent place in the annals of chivalry had been Henry's coveted aspiration since boyhood. He knew by heart the stories of the Holy Grail, of Lancelot, Galahad, Tristram and Percival; he longed to enter into their world, where all else was forgotten in the selfless quest for the unobtainable. And he knew that, though the chivalric tradition was ebbing, it was not quite out of reach. Only a generation earlier the earl of Warwick, Richard Beauchamp, had lit all Europe with his shining renown. Brilliant in the tiltyard and on the battlefield, he had been proclaimed the "Father of Courtesy"; should all knowledge of true knighthood be lost, it was said, it could be recovered again in him.

  Henry's tutor Skelton had given his pupil's hunger for glory a fixed purpose: the conquest of France. His reading—Malory, Caxton, Froissart and the tales of Henry V—was all of English kings waging war on French lands. He knew how the English had taken Therouanne after the great victory of Crecy, how Edward III had besieged Toumai for many weeks, how Henry V, inexhaustible, had ridden around his camp in the pouring rain, exhorting his sodden soldiers to take heart and defeat the French. And as the prince's young body had developed its heroic proportions, his dreams too had widened to encompass the hallowed, almost mystical vision of the sublime moment of triumph—when, for an instant outside time, all odds were overcome, all physical limitations transcended, and a mortal knight was exalted to immortal fame.

  By the time he reached early manhood these ideals had taken a deep and compelling urgency for Henry. England in the early sixteenth century was at a cultural crossroads. The influence of Renaissance Italy was already bringing about change in English statecraft, while the social order of the middle ages was rapidly giving way to newer and less settled forms. In the popular mind the old images of heroism and knight-errantry, of Arthurian ideals and enchanted adventure held firm, but the better educated, more sophisticated of Henry's subjects were adopting the non-chivalric outlook of the English humanists. To the humanists the glories of war did not compensate for its butchery and misery, while personal honor, as an end in itself, was a highly suspect goal. In scholarship as in music Henry was a prodigiously gifted amateur, and men of learning were very much at home at his court. But by temperment he belonged to the chivalric past; the high principles that ruled him were drawn from the time-honored code of his medieval ancestors.

  Oddly enough it was Erasmus who gave a name to this quality in the king. He called Henry cordatissimus —of all men "the man most full of heart."^ Even more than high-heartedness and cheerful high spirits the

  word connoted courage, magnanimity, unsullied integrity. Henry appeared to incarnate all the ardent vitality of Christian knighthood, the dauntless zeal for the right that could outbrave all dangers. Here the expectations of Henry's fellow-soldiers and the scholars he patronized came together, for both saw in him an example of virtue to his
subjects. ''A king's command goes far," Erasmus wrote, ''but the king's example goes further." As he explained in a letter to Henry written in 1519, ''By their monarch's character realms are ennobled or depraved. Future ages will tell how England throve, how virtue flourished in the reign of Henry VIII, how the nation was bom again, how piety revived, how learning grew to a height which Italy might envy, and how the prince who reigned over it was a rule and a pattern for all time to come." England was becoming another Camelot; in coming ages, Erasmus dreamed, it would be told "how a king once reigned there who in his own person revived the virtues of the ancient heroes."^

  The most revered of heroes was the crusader, and Henry had long seen himself in that role. When he set off for France in the garb of a crusading knight he was in fact fulfilling a long-held desire of his father's, who, as he told the emperor Maximilian, had discussed the matter of a crusade "very seriously," though circumstances prevented him from undertaking it. He cherished his father's ambition as an heirloom, Henry said; since the start of his reign he had thought of nothing else but taking the cross.**

  Not long after he went to France a genuine call for help came from the Holy Land itself. Friar John of St. Martin, guardian of his order in Jerusalem, wrote to Henry urging him to send help to protect the holy places from being defiled. A Turkish captain, abetted by his Christian ally the king of Georgia, had destroyed the altar of the Latin Christians on Mount Calvary. The friars built it up again, but had to pay the Turkish sultan more than a thousand ducats for the privilege. The safety of pilgrims visiting the holy sepulcher of Christ had been threatened; to guarantee it the Christians had had to bribe the emir of Jerusalem, the caliphs of Gaza and other Saracen officials with robes of silk and velvet. All the shrines were costly to maintain, the friar told Henry, and whereas in the past he and his brethren had been supported by many of the European sovereigns their only income now was an inadequate legacy from the late Queen Isabella of Spain. Another letter was even more poignant. The monks of Mount Sinai informed Henry that, though they continued to live their religious life as best they could, they were so poor they had had to pawn their sacred vessels and furniture in order to buy food. Eventually he helped them in some way, for in another letter they thanked him gratefully for his succor.^