If Henry only wished to associate himself more closely with his half-uncle Henry VI, he could have chosen a more favoured Lancastrian device: Henry VI had used variously a spotted panther, an antelope, and ostrich feathers. Henry Tudor preferred the rarely-used red rose because it was a powerful religious symbol, representing Christ’s Passion – his suffering on the Cross for the sins of mankind – the five petals of the heraldic rose corresponding to the five wounds on Christ’s crucified body.9 Twenty-four years later, when the dying Henry ordered thousands of Masses to be said for his soul, he asked for a quarter of them to be dedicated to the Five Wounds.10
With the coronation preparations well under way, seven yards of scarlet velvet in dragons and red roses were commissioned, as well as four yards of white cloth of gold with a border of red roses for the ornamental covering, or trapping, for horses. A further couple of hundred roses were ordered in fine lace made of pure gold thread, and the arms of Cadwaladr embroidered, while the footmen were to have jackets in the Tudor colours, of white and green: the colours of purity and renewal.11
The coronation began, at last, on 28 October with Henry taking formal possession of the Tower. The next day he was processed to Westminster before the London crowds. Heralds, sergeants-at-arms, trumpeters, esquires, the mayor, aldermen, and nobles, preceded the king dressed in their rich liveries, amongst them the seven-year-old Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, whose father had rebelled against Richard III in 1483. Mindful perhaps of the fate of her nephews, the princes in the Tower, the boy’s mother, Katherine Woodville, had hidden him from Richard, shaving his head and dressing him as a girl. With £1,000 on his head he had fled across country from Wales to a family friend in Hereford, riding side-saddle behind a servant.12 Today he rode astride as a boy once more, dressed in crimson velvet, with a saddle to match his clothes. Henry VII would give his mother Buckingham’s wardship the following year, so that any future threat he might pose could be contained, along with that of her other charges.13
The king rode under a canopy fringed with twenty-eight ounces of gold and silk, carried by four knights on foot. He was bare-headed, his light brown hair reaching his shoulders, a rich belt slung across his chest, and a long gown of purple velvet furred with ermine on his back. Behind Henry was Jasper Tudor, the newly created Duke of Bedford. He was to be married to the young Duke of Buckingham’s mother, Katherine Woodville.14 Alongside Jasper rode another significant figure: John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, husband of Elizabeth Plantagenet, a sister of Edward IV and Richard III. It was said that Richard III had named de la Pole’s eldest son, the Earl of Lincoln, as his heir, but Henry was inviting the de la Pole family into the fold, to support him as the true king.15
On Sunday 30 October Henry was crowned and anointed at Westminster Abbey, its walls hung with the fine wool cloth known as scarlet. Margaret Beaufort’s superior right was overlooked. What power she had would be wielded behind the throne, but it would be very real nonetheless. This was as much her moment of triumph as Henry’s, and ‘when the king her son was crowned in all that great triumph and glory, she wept marvellously’.16 Her tears were not of joy alone, however. She was as anxious as her son about the future.
In November Henry sought for his rule the necessary approval of Parliament: the high court of the realm. It was duly confirmed that ‘the inheritance of the crowns of England and France abide in the most royal person of our sovereign Lord King Henry VII and in the heirs of his body’. But in contrast to his predecessor, Henry’s right to the throne was not described or explained – it was simply accepted as the will of God, made evident by his victory at Bosworth: Henry now had to demonstrate his piety.
The previous year Richard III had announced his ‘principal intent and fervent desire . . . to see virtue and cleanliness of living to be advanced’.17 Henry followed his lead. One of his first statutes was to address the sexual conduct of the clergy. He also intended that his chastity would be publicly advertised in a faithful and fruitful marriage. Henry had met Elizabeth of York several times in the privacy of his mother’s house, and found the nineteen-year-old was every inch the beauty she was reputed to be: tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed, with perfectly balanced features.18 It would emerge that she was also sweet-natured, diplomatic and intelligent. In love, as in war, Henry had proved fortunate.
Elizabeth of York, in turn, was being given an opportunity to get to know her husband-to-be, and she found Henry could be good company. In Brittany he had enjoyed gambling, music, dancing, poetry and literature. He was quick to smile, with an exceptionally expressive face, but his years of vulnerability had made him a man anxious to be in control of every detail of his environment. For his physical protection Henry had replaced the personal service the nobility traditionally offered an English king with a security guard in the French model: huge yeomen, dressed in livery embroidered with red roses. To gain the trust of a man as suspicious as Henry, to breach his defences and win his love: that was Elizabeth of York’s challenge.
The royal wedding took place on 18 January 1486. Amongst those present was Owen Tudor’s son, Sir David Owen, whose loyalty to Henry was not forgotten. He had been made the king’s carver, serving him personally at meals, and would attend all important family occasions over the next forty years. In exchange for his future loyalty as commissioner of the peace in Sussex and serving the king in times of war, he would be given valuable property in England, be made a knight banneret, and marry the heiress to Cowdray in Sussex.19 He proved to be a chip off the old block too, not only leaving a large family but also several illegitimate children, who were evidently still being conceived well into his old age.20
Elizabeth and Henry were reassured that their own children would carry no taint of bastardy. Parliament had rescinded the illegitimacy with which Richard III had labelled Edward IV’s children, and the Beaufort line of descent from John of Gaunt had also been declared legitimate, with no exclusion from inheriting the crown, as had existed in the past. With the rights of Elizabeth and Henry’s future children secured, their marriage also received particular praise from the Pope, as the basis of a conciliation between the houses of York and Lancaster.21 The first known broadsheets, the predecessor of the newspaper, were mass printed to advertise this Papal blessing for Henry’s rule. Unfortunately the peace Henry had supposedly achieved was not yet truly secured. A Ricardian rebellion had broken out in north Yorkshire and although it soon fizzled out Henry feared there would be further unrest.
The potential Yorkist candidate, as Henry’s rival, Edward Planatagent, Earl of Warwick, was returned to the Tower, now aged eleven, and there he would stay.22 More positive steps were taken to win over the north, with Henry arriving in York in April to woo the capital of Richard III’s former heartlands. Reconciliation was to be the theme. Henry VII’s entry at the city gate was greeted with designs of red and white roses.23 The Royal Mint had also issued a coin featuring the first example of the so-called ‘Tudor rose’ – more accurately the union rose – in which the petals of Henry’s red rose are depicted surrounding the petals of the white rose of Elizabeth of York. Most significantly the first child of the union was soon promised: Elizabeth was pregnant.24
Late that summer King Henry moved his wife to Winchester, the city believed to have once been the capital of Camelot. Caxton’s first edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur had revitalised enthusiasm for the Arthurian legends and Henry saw Malory’s account as reflecting his own example of the ‘fair unknown’ who comes from obscurity to claim his crown. In Malory’s story the realm had ‘stood in great jeopardy a long while, for every lord that was mighty of men made himself strong, and many wished to be king’. But after Arthur performed the miraculous feat of pulling the sword from the stone the violent English barons were obliged to accept him, ‘And so anon was the coronation made, and there was he sworn . . . for to be a true king, to stand with true justice thenceforth, all the days of his life.’25 A round table, said to have belonged to Arthur, was di
splayed on a wall of the Great Hall at Winchester. And it was in this city that Henry hoped his heir – the first prince of the Tudor dynasty – would be born.
10
SECURING THE SUCCESSION
THE HEAVILY PREGNANT ELIZABETH OF YORK WAS PROCESSED TO her Great Chamber at St Swithin’s Priory, Winchester.1 She stepped up a low platform and sat on a chair under the canopy of rich fabric known as a cloth of estate. A line of courtiers honoured her one by one with formal offerings of wine and spices before she retired in a further procession, with her ladies, to an inner chamber for her confinement. She expected to spend three or four weeks there before she delivered her child, but her labour came early. Margaret Beaufort noted the time in her Book of Hours as ‘afore one o’clock after midnight’ on 20 September 1486 – only eight months after the marriage.2 Happily the baby was a healthy boy. Henry VII named him Arthur after the legendary hero on whose tomb the prophecy had been written ‘Here lies Arthur, king once, and king to be.’3
Margaret Beaufort drew up detailed instructions, based on Lancastrian precedent, for future royal confinements and christenings. Henceforth, Elizabeth of York would deliver her children in a room hung with tapestry decorated with gold fleurs-de-lys, and on a bed with a canopy of crimson satin embroidered with crowns of gold, just as the Lancastrian queen Margaret of Anjou had done.4 It cannot have been easy for Elizabeth to have her mother-in-law involved, as Margaret was, in even the most intimate areas of her life. Margaret’s writ included the running of the nursery, and the private rooms of her son and daughter-in-law. She had ordered, for example, that a physician supervise the nurse breastfeeding Elizabeth’s baby, and a yeoman test the king’s mattress daily, ‘leap upon the bed and roll him up and down’.5 She was, furthermore, always there, her tiny frame an almost inescapable presence. At Woodstock Palace near Oxford, Margaret’s rooms were linked to those of the king by a withdrawing chamber, and in the Tower they were next to the king’s chamber. Whenever Elizabeth attended important ceremonial occasions Margaret would be at her side, dressed ‘in like mantel and surcoat as the queen, with a rich crownall on her head’, or identical ‘robes of blood-red cloth furred in white squirrel belly’.6 This was a public advertisement that they held equal rank.
Although Margaret was known officially only as ‘My Lady the King’s Mother’, she was a queen in all but name and continued to maintain enormous influence over Henry. ‘I shall be glad to please you as your heart desire it’, he once wrote to her, ‘I know well that I am as much bounden so to do, as any creature living, for the great, and singular motherly love and affection that it has pleased you, at all times, to bear me.’ He could hardly forget that she had risked her life plotting on his behalf in 1483 and 1485 and it was in this spirit that Henry granted Margaret the rights of a ‘femme sole’. Usually a woman’s land and legal status went to her husband on her marriage, and only as a widow did she become head of a household as a ‘femme sole’. Margaret, although married, could own her property and transact business as a widow could, so that she was subject to no one but the king. Henry also continued to value her judgement. Those who served in her household often went on to serve Henry, and she played an important diplomatic role too, entertaining dignitaries at her London palace, Coldharbour.
Margaret’s household was second only to the king’s in size and largesse. A servant recalled how at Christmas her hall would feed visiting gentlemen from nine in the morning until seven at night, and no poor were turned away, ‘if he were of any honesty, but that he might come to the Buttery or the cellar and drink at his leisure’. ‘Few kings [were] better’ served than Margaret, and the servant remembered that one Christmas, when he was acting as her carver, he had twenty-five knights follow him in ceremonial procession to her table. There she was sat under a cloth of estate alongside her guest, Cecily of York, the most beautiful of Edward IV’s daughters, and a regular visitor.7
Cecily’s marriage to one of Richard III’s allies had been dissolved after Bosworth, and Margaret arranged in 1487/88 for the eighteen-year-old to be married instead to her half-brother Richard Welles. Margaret remained devoted to her non-royal relations, but she extended this warmth to Cecily and Elizabeth of York. Cecily grew very fond of her despite being married off to a man twenty years her senior, and she continued to worship in Margaret’s households even after she was widowed in 1499. Later, in 1502, when Cecily angered the king by remarrying a lowly esquire, Margaret defended her, and gave the couple shelter until the king had forgiven them.8 It is in the context of a loving, but sometimes domineering matriarch, that we have to understand Margaret Beaufort’s intriguing relationship with her daughter-in-law.
Margaret kept rooms ever ready for Elizabeth of York to visit, and worried over her daughter-in-law’s health and well-being. Following Elizabeth’s recovery from one spell of sickness, Margaret thanked God that ‘the queen and all our sweet children be in good health’.9 Elizabeth of York surely found her mother-in-law irritating at times, but a Spanish claim that Elizabeth was ‘kept in subjection by the mother of the king’, and resented this deeply, is inspired, at least in part, by a long literary tradition of conflict between mother and daughter-in-law. Elizabeth of York had the wisdom to learn to accept Margaret for her warmth, as well as her loyalty, and over the years the two women collaborated on charitable projects, as well as in matters concerning the children. When Henry and Elizabeth had their second child on 28 November 1489 – a girl this time – she was named Margaret after ‘my lady the king’s mother’.10
The devoted new grandmother prepared every detail of the princess’ christening and gave her a silver and gilt chest filled with gold.11 In time Margaret Tudor would prove as crucial to the future of the dynasty as Margaret Beaufort was to its founding, but for the time being the political focus remained on her brother, Arthur, as King Henry’s heir. The three-year-old had been created Prince of Wales by 1489 and the royal wardrobe sent regular deliveries for Arthur’s servants and himself. They included white velvets and damasks, ermine and black lambskin.
Eighteen months after the birth of Margaret Tudor, a brother was born at Greenwich Palace on 28 June 1491 – the future Henry VIII. It was a testament to Elizabeth of York’s fertility that in July 1492 a second daughter was born, named Elizabeth. This was the only time Henry allowed one of his children to be given a name with a stronger association to the queen’s family than his own; an acknowledgement of his wife’s grief following the recent death of her mother. Sadly, baby Elizabeth died aged three. A further daughter, born in 1496 and named Mary, proved more fortunate, and was an outstandingly pretty child. Two more children would die as infants, Edmund, born in 1499, and Katherine in 1503.
As Henry embarked on fathering this family of the union rose, he continued to work to heal the old divisions amongst the elite. His councillors included veteran Lancastrians like Jasper Tudor, but also old servants of Edward IV like Sir William Stanley, now Chamberlain of the Household. Even former Ricardians were allowed to work their way gradually back into favour. Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, whose father, the Duke (‘Jack’) of Norfolk, was killed at Bosworth, became treasurer. Henry, however, remained an enigma for most Englishmen. The Great Chronicle of London, compiled in 1512, could still only venture that the king was ‘a gentleman being in the parts of Brittany named Henry and son unto the Earl of Richmond’, who was ‘induced to claim the crown as right’ following the death of the princes in the Tower.12
Instead of explaining his past in historical terms Henry promoted the providential nature of his reign – that it was the consequence of God’s intervention on earth. The story was told of St Nicholas appearing to his nine-year-old mother, advising her to marry Edmund Tudor, and Henry VI foretelling Henry’s reign became all the more significant with the growth of Henry VI’s cult. Richard III had hoped to expiate his brother’s crime in killing the king and gain control of the cult by moving Henry VI’s body from Chertsey Abbey to the royal St George’s Chapel at Windsor. With Hen
ry’s encouragement the tomb had since become a place of pilgrimage to rival the internationally famous shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. He was now campaigning to have his half-uncle beatified.13 It was Bosworth, however, that had confirmed the providential nature of Henry’s reign, and he wrote proudly of ‘the crown which it has pleased God to give us with the victory over our enemy at our first field’.14 The problem for Henry was that if he lost a future battle, his claims to have been chosen by God would be fatally undermined. All that his enemies needed was a new narrative, and their own ‘fair unknown’ to rally round.
Henry’s anxiety about the continued Yorkist threat was evident in his treatment of Elizabeth Woodville. The dowager queen had been a prominent figure at Arthur’s christening, yet five months later, in February 1487, her dower lands were passed to Elizabeth of York and she retired to the convent where she would die in 1492. Historians have suggested that she was mourning the loss of her sons, or that Margaret Beaufort saw her as a rival and wanted her out of the way. But Polydore Vergil believed that Henry wanted her out of sight, and that her retirement was linked to the appearance in Ireland, in February 1487, of a boy claiming he was Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, and the rightful King of England.15 Although Henry had the real Plantagenet brought out of the Tower and paraded through the streets of London, not everyone was certain which boy was the genuine article.16 Henry rightly feared the pretender could, therefore, be used as a Yorkist rallying figure to overthrow him. Elizabeth Woodville’s presence at court was extremely unhelpful to Henry in this regard: however loyal she might be to her little grandson Arthur, he was a Tudor and she was a reminder of the former glories of the House of York.17
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