Londoners had prepared pageants celebrating Henry’s Lancastrian descent from John of Gaunt – the common ancestor of Arthur and Katherine – and the ten-year-old Henry, Duke of York, accompanied his new sister-in-law as the crowds cheered their welcome. He was huge for his age, with a casual artlessness that was quite in contrast to his father’s and brother’s formality. Later that week he would be seen ripping off his gown to dance freely in his jacket, full of energy and life. Margaret Beaufort had a particularly soft spot for him and had even asked the king’s permission for her northern tenants to swear their lives as retainers to ‘my Lord of York, your sweet fair son’.12 But it was the fifteen-year-old Katherine of Aragon who was the centre of attention. Dressed in ‘rich apparel’ and riding on a mule, she wore ‘a little hat fashioned like a cardinal’s of a pretty braid’ pinned on her long hair.13 A witness commented that she ‘thrilled the hearts of everyone’, having ‘all those qualities that make for beauty in a very charming young girl’.14
Katherine spent her wedding eve with her future mother-in-law and the other women of the family at Baynard’s Castle.15 A programme of building had transformed the fortress into a pleasure palace which stretched between two massive octagonal towers and was crowned by French-inspired turrets. Katherine enjoyed a convivial evening of ‘good conversation, dancing and disportes’ with the English ladies dressed in the latest French fashions.16 The following day St Paul’s was packed with people for the wedding ceremony. The walls of the cathedral were dressed with tapestries and gold plate, as well as holy relics hanging in their exquisite cases of precious metals and stones.17 Platforms, covered with red cloth and tacked with gilded nails, had been built at head height so that the bride and groom could be seen above the crowded congregation. Amongst them was Owen Tudor’s bastard son, Sir David Owen, who had his memories too of the marriage of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York.18 Holding hands, Katherine and Arthur turned this way and that on the raised walkways to show themselves: Katherine dressed in white satin, her veil bordered with a broad band of pearls, gold thread and precious stones, and Arthur dressed alike, also in bejewelled white.19
There are no contemporary descriptions of Katherine and Arthur in the immediate aftermath to the wedding. It was later claimed that on the first morning Arthur had called for ale to quench his thirst after spending a night ‘in the midst of Spain’. Katherine remembered only that they were exhausted by the entertainments. A week of further celebrations followed, culminating in a final party at Richmond Palace, which was in the process of being rebuilt on the ancient royal manor of Sheen. It was to become Henry VII’s favourite residence, and the first phase of his project had just been completed. There were courtyards with fountains, light-filled galleries overlooking knot gardens decorated with the royal heraldic beasts, and new, private interior rooms for the royal family. Henry had decided to divide the above-stairs chamber into a personal and a ceremonial area. The former was now called the Privy Chamber, and it was here he found the privacy he longed for, with access granted to only a handful of people, and with a small and humble staff of its own.20
The newly-weds left court after Christmas for the principality of Wales, and with the couple installed at Ludlow Castle the stage was left bare for the next royal wedding – the proxy marriage of Arthur’s sister, Margaret Tudor, to James IV of Scotland. Henry hoped his eldest daughter’s marriage would end the centuries-long feud between the neighbouring kingdoms. The wedding followed a peace treaty signed on 24 January 1502, with the ceremony taking place at Elizabeth of York’s great chamber at Richmond. About ninety people were present, but the groom remained in Scotland with his proxy taking his place. Margaret Tudor, at twelve, was the same age her grandmother had been when she was married to Edmund Tudor. Margaret Beaufort had not forgotten her experience of that early marriage, and was determined her granddaughter would not have sex with her husband before she was physically mature. Henry VII admitted to the Spanish ambassador that his mother had joined forces with the queen to insist the girl remain in England for a time, fearful that if they sent her north too soon, ‘the King of Scotland would not wait [to consummate the marriage] but injure her and endanger her health’.21 It would be eighteen months before Margaret Tudor would be sent to James in Scotland. But when the ceremony ended she was considered Queen of Scots, and after the men left, mother and daughter dined as queens and equals.
More days of celebration followed with the rising stars of the court performing at the wedding joust. Charles Brandon, the son of the standard-bearer killed at Henry’s side at Bosworth, was one such, and an outstanding athlete. Another was the Duke of Buckingham, whose costume at the wedding was reputed to have cost £1,500: more than all the pageants put together. As a show of strength at the end of the joust, he shattered three spears into the ground. It was an impressive display, but the danger his royal blood posed to Henry’s children was fading. The weddings announced they were becoming adults – or so it was hoped. But that spring was to bring tragedy.
Arthur was unwell at Shrovetide in February, and a contemporary observed that his illness ‘grew and increased upon his body’ until by Easter it had ‘overcome the pure and friendful blood’. He died on 2 April, less than five months after his wedding day. Henry VII and Elizabeth of York were at Greenwich Palace when the devastating news arrived. This beautiful brick courtyard house with a river frontage articulated by huge bay windows had been designed by the queen: it was a palace filled with light, but it would now always be associated for them with the darkest of days.22 Henry’s councillors asked his confessor to deliver the news to the king. The humble Franciscan friar knew Henry’s inner life better than most, and where he might find solace. On Tuesday morning the priest appeared at the king’s chamber door, in his Order’s modest habit of undyed wool. He ordered everyone to leave. When they had, he addressed the king in Latin: ‘If we receive good from the hand of God, should we not also tolerate the bad?’ It was then that he ‘showed his Grace that his dearest son was departed to God’.
Henry, who had fought so long to protect his family, had lost his first and favourite child. He had hoped Arthur would be the prince he had aspired to be when he had landed at Mill Bay in 1485 under the banner of the Red Dragon. Distraught, Henry asked for his wife, ‘saying that he and his queen would take the painful sorrows together’. Elizabeth of York came immediately. Henry’s loyal wife reminded him how ‘my Lady his mother’ had him as her only child, ‘and that by God his Grace had ever preserved him, and brought him where he was. Over that, how God had left him yet a fair prince, two fair princesses.’ They were, she promised, still young enough to have more children. Only when Elizabeth of York had returned to her own room did she allow her grief expression.
The queen was used to hiding her feelings – over her vanished brothers and her mother dying far from the court – but now her emotions overwhelmed her. A witness recorded the ‘natural and motherly remembrance of that great loss smote her so sorrowful to the heart’ that the king, in turn, had to be called to comfort her. In ‘true and faithful love’ he did his best to reassure her that ‘he would for his part thank God for his [remaining] son and would she would do likewise’.23 What Elizabeth of York did instead was to try and give her husband another boy. Ten months later, in the Tower where her brothers, the princes, had vanished, the queen went into premature labour. She delivered a girl whom she named Katherine – perhaps a compliment to Arthur’s widow, perhaps in memory of Catherine of Valois. The king had the best doctors attending them both, but the queen caught an infection. She died nine days later on her thirty-seventh birthday. Her daughter died the following week.
Henry went into seclusion after his wife’s death, ‘her departing’, noted one contemporary, ‘as heavy and dolorous to the king’s highness as has been seen or heard of’.24 Elizabeth of York had been his constant companion for eighteen years, through many trials and after his long period of exile. She had learned from her mother, who had a difficult and waywar
d husband in Edward IV, how to keep her dignity and remain patient. She had played her role as a wife and a queen to perfection, winning the long-closed heart of Henry Tudor.
An image in a religious book written in French during this period, and which is said to have belonged to Henry, depicts him wearing his royal robes, while behind him are two girls playing music by a roaring fire next to a black-draped table bed. A boy, perhaps their brother, appears to be weeping, his head folded in his arms on the black cloth. It has been suggested they are the surviving Tudor children.25 Henry VII’s physical and mental health would never be the same following his wife’s death, and his dynasty looked suddenly more fragile than ever. The death of Arthur and his mother had echoes of the deaths of Richard III’s heir and his wife, in 1484 and 1485. It seemed a judgement.26
The security Henry thought he had gained with the executions of Perkin Warbeck and Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, had proved illusory. The new Tudor heir, Henry, Duke of York, aged eleven, was younger even than Edward V had been when he disappeared in 1483. The future of the dynasty depended on Henry VII retaining control over his leading subjects and living long enough for his remaining son to reach adulthood.
13
DEATH AND JUDGEMENT
‘IT IS QUITE WONDERFUL’, THE SPANISH AMBASSADOR NOTED, ‘HOW much the king likes the Prince of Wales.’1 The company of Henry VII’s good-looking, energetic, surviving son was the breath of life to him. The boy was already bigger than his father but another Spaniard noted Henry was as protective of him as if he had been a young girl.2 Perhaps more so; in June 1503, just a few months after the death of Elizabeth of York, he was ready to bid farewell to his elder daughter, Margaret, Queen of Scots, and escort her on the first leg of her journey north to her new homeland.
An impatient and gregarious thirteen-year-old who enjoyed archery, music, dancing and cards, Queen Margaret would need all her high spirits and optimism now she was to leave those she loved. Scotland was notoriously violent and it was considered a rare thing for a Scottish king to die of natural causes.3 The husband she had not yet seen, James IV, wore an iron belt as penance for his unwitting role in the death of his own father, James III, killed by rebels whose cause he had been supporting.
Near Stamford in Lincolnshire Queen Margaret and her father reached her grandmother’s house, Collyweston, where the formal court farewell was to take place. Four great bay windows with stained glass depicting the Beaufort arms had been added to the palace especially for this visit. The chapel had been freshly painted too, with new images of angels, the Virgin and the Trinity, and several outstanding singers were brought in to bolster the already impressive chapel choir.4
Margaret Beaufort entertained the whole court ‘right royally’ for a fortnight and when the dances and the feasts were over, the family gathered in the hall. Queen Margaret entered, richly dressed, to make her formal farewells, before she rode boldly out of the main gate with a vast cavalcade towards Grantham and a new life. She had one close family member with her – Sir David Owen, the illegitimate son of Owen Tudor who had been sent by her father as her carver, a highly honoured role, and one he would carry out at her wedding feast, wearing his chain of office.
The marriage was already being celebrated in Scotland as the union of the Scottish thistle and the English rose when Queen Margaret met James IV on 3 August at Dalkeith Castle, Midlothian. She heard James’ arrival before she saw him, as he clattered into the courtyard with sixty horsemen. He was a popular king of Scotland. A lover of women and the arts, of hunting and jousting, James was said to be ‘of noble stature, neither tall nor short, and as handsome in complexion as a man may be’. He appeared in her rooms dressed in the costume of a hunstman from a chivalric romance, with a jacket of crimson and gold, and a lyre on his back instead of a bow. This fulfilled the tradition of chivalric romances whereby a royal groom would happen to come across his foreign bride, often while out hunting, and they would fall in love at first sight. Margaret’s reaction was, however, one of disconcertion. He was thirty years of age, with long hair like her father, but also an enormous red beard. In Scotland it was thought ‘to suit him very well’.5 Margaret, barely past puberty, was less enamoured by it, and although she said nothing in public, on her wedding night she made her feelings plain. He dutifully shaved it off the next day.
James would always treat his young wife with warmth, his future dalliances notwithstanding. But Queen Margaret missed her family badly, and in a letter to her father not long after her arrival she admitted ‘I would I were with your grace now, and many times more’.6 Henry, on his part, must have doubted that he would ever see his eldest daughter again. His health was increasingly poor, and he had already begun work on his tomb in the Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey where his wife lay. The grandeur of his plans suggests that he hoped it would become a resting place for his successors, a rival to the magnificent mausoleum of the French kings at Saint-Denis. It would also define his reign.
Central to this was Henry’s intention to have the body of his half-uncle Henry VI moved from Windsor and re-interred in the heart of the Lady Chapel. Henry was lobbying hard in Rome for official recognition that his half-uncle was a saint, and as soon as this was achieved Henry planned a new tomb in the Lady Chapel where the saint’s bones would attract international as well as English pilgrims, and serve as a reminder that Henry VI had foretold Henry’s reign. There was also to be a reminder of how the prophecy came to pass. Henry planned to build a life-size, golden image of himself, on his knees, returning to God and the Virgin the actual circlet that he had been crowned with on the battlefield of Bosworth. It was to be placed in the royal shrine of the founding English royal saint, Edward the Confessor.7
The chapel was covered with royal and religious symbols – the Beaufort portcullis, the French lily, and everywhere the red rose. They were painted not only on the chapel walls, but were also embroidered on the priests’ golden vestments.8 It is striking, however, that Henry’s Tudor antecedents were barely acknowledged. The body of Henry’s father, Edmund Tudor, remained buried at the Franciscan priory in Carmarthen, where Henry now paid for a tomb of purbeck marble, and a chantry so Masses might be said for his soul. Equally, Owen Tudor remained buried at the Hereford Greyfriars, to which Jasper had bequeathed his best cloth of gold gown for vestments, and where Sir David Owen would pay for a tomb.9 In dynastic terms, it was only those of royal blood who mattered. Henry had been unable to prove Tudor descent from the last British king, Cadwaladr, and had lost enthusiasm for the myth of the return of a prince from that line. For Henry the legend of ‘the once and future king’ had died with his Arthur.10
Amongst the notable things that Henry did further commission for his tomb was a medallion of Vincent Ferrer, the messenger of penance to whom he had been devoted since his time in exile. His continued need to purge himself of his sins saw him suffer periodic spasms of conscience over the ruthless manner in which he found it necessary to rule. He admitted ruefully to his mother that he appointed churchmen rather because they could do ‘us and our realm acceptable service’ than for any spiritual qualities. In recompense, however, he promoted her devout and brilliant confessor, John Fisher, ‘for the great and singular good that I know and see in him’. In August 1504 he also issued a proclamation stating that anyone ‘who can reasonably and truly claim’ they had been wrongfully indebted to the king, their property rights violated, or received any other wrong at the hands of the Crown, could submit a complaint in writing anytime in the following two years. Yet he still persisted in his old ways.
By September 1504 Henry had employed a new hard man: the lawyer Edmund Dudley, whose task it was to keep the elite ‘in danger at his pleasure . . . bound to his grace for great sums of money’.11 Henry remained fearful of the possible foreign backing for the representative of ‘the White Rose’, Edmund de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, and paid vast sums in bribes to European rulers in order to isolate the pretender. In 1505 his bribes to Philip the Fair, Duke
of Burgundy, amounted to £108,000, which equated to his ordinary annual income. To find this kind of money he had become increasingly efficient in raising the revenues from his estates, which was now fourfold what it had been in the days of Edward IV. But he also sought more dubious means, undercutting the papacy’s profits from its monopoly in alum (used in dye fixing), by trading illegal product and bleeding his own subjects dry with unjustified fines.
People would be informed, out of the blue, that they had broken some obscure law, hundreds of years old, for which they had to pay a massive sum. Informers earned a good trade accusing innocent men, who in turn were forced not only to pay their fines, but also to turn informer. The image of Henry as the fair unknown, chosen by God, was giving way to something ignoble: as Vergil described it, ‘the good prince by degrees lost all sense of moderation and was led into avarice’.12
Good fortune, nevertheless, still blessed Henry. In a storm in January 1506, a ship ran aground on the Dorset coast carrying Philip the Fair and his wife Juana, elder sister of Katherine of Aragon. Henry saw an opportunity to revive the old Anglo-Burgundian alliance (enjoyed under Edward IV), and also a means of getting his hands on the ‘White Rose’. Philip was showered with hospitality, but this was, in reality, a kidnap: he could not leave until he had given Henry what he wanted (and got): a promise to hand over the Duke of Suffolk.13 As a sop to Philip’s honour Henry agreed not to execute the duke, who went to the Tower instead. A few months later Philip died; but there was a further legacy of the visit: the betrothal of Henry’s youngest daughter, Mary, to Philip’s young son, the future Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V (grandson of Maximilian).
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