24.Vergil, Anglica Historia, p. 25.
25.Desmond Seward, The Last White Rose (2010), p. 40.
26.This includes the wills of their grandmother, mother, or aunts. I also looked at Little Malvern Priory and Canterbury Cathedral, both of which had stained glass depicting the princes commissioned in 1482, but found nothing. The nearest I found was associated with the chantry set up originally by William Hastings, Edward IV’s best friend, at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Hastings made his will on 27 June 1481, when the children were still alive. He directed his body to be buried in the place assigned to him by the king, and for Mass and divine service ‘at the awter next to the place where my body shall be buryed’. However, when the full chantry was established in 1504, the children were (probably) dead. The terms of the grant of the manors of Farmanby and East Hallgarth were that every 10 June Mass was to be said for the souls of William, late Lord Hastings, Katherine his wife, Edward, now Lord Hastings, Mary his wife, for their fathers and mothers, and for the souls of King Edward IV and Queen Elizabeth his wife and for their children (unnamed) and all Christian souls. An annual obituary was established in which the children, presumably also Edward V and Richard, were to be included. Then there was to be in addition daily Mass said at the altar at the chapel where Lord Hastings was buried, for the souls of the said Lord Hastings and for all souls abovesaid. It would seem that although not specifically mentioned, Edward V and Richard were to be included in the daily prayers and annual obituary said by the Hastings chantry priest. Thank you to Eleanor Cracknell, Windsor Archives, St George’s Chapel, Windsor. MSS refs SGC IV 8.2; SGC XV 58 C 17.
27.Henderson, ‘Rethinking Henry VII’ in op. cit., p. 325.
28.Vergil, Anglica Historia, p. 56.
11The Lost Prince
1.Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens, p. 217.
2.Ralph Griffiths, ‘Succession and the Royal Dead in Later Medieval England’ in Making and Breaking the Rules: Succession in Medieval Europe c.1000–c.1600 (eds Michael Penman and Frederique Lachaud) (2008), p. 102.
3.We do not know how the duchess had viewed the disappearance of her nephews, the princes in the Tower, in 1483. But she accepted Richard III’s rule and was in contact with him in 1484 without any signs of there being ill will between them.
4.As Maximilian told the Venetian ambassador in Worms in 1495; A. J. J. Schnitker, ‘Margaret of York, Princess of England and Duchess of Burgundy, 1446–1503: female power, influence and authority in later fifteenth-century North-western Europe’, PhD diss., Edinburgh (2007), p. 125.
5.It had the added advantage of highlighting that York came second to Lancaster, the dukedom he held, and which continues to be held by the monarch, while York remains that of a second son.
6.Okerlund, Elizabeth of York, p. 192. http://www.archive.org/details/privypurseexpens00nicouoft, pp. 74, 75.
7.The conspirator was Sir Robert Clifford.
8.During the later investigations into the 3rd Duke of Buckingham in 1521 it was recalled that Henry VII knew of Sir William’s treason and that of his co-conspirators ‘two or three years before he charged them with it’. L&P 3 (1283).
9.Okerlund, Elizabeth of York, pp. 120, 121; Great Chronicle of London (ed Thomas and Thornley), p. 151.
10.Elizabeth I behaved similarly. There were fifty-seven peers at her accession and fifty-five at her death. Like her grandfather Elizabeth also kept an eye on marriage alliances.
11.In return for his army Perkin had promised the Duchess of Burgundy the manors of Hunsden in Hertfordshire and Scarborough in Yorkshire, as well as the money he owed for her financial support. Maximilian was offered a potentially still greater prize: if Perkin died without issue, Maximilian was to inherit England, France and Ireland.
12.James would have dropped Perkin in a moment if the Spanish had responded positively to his own request for an infanta as his bride – but none was available. Norman Macdougall, James IV (2006), pp. 124, 125.
13.Davies, ‘Information, disinformation . . .’ in op.cit., p. 3.
14.Vergil, Three Books, p. 89.
15.Raphael Holinshed, Chronicle (1587), Vol. 2, p. 782.
16.CSPV 1 (751) (754); CSPM (539) (540).
17.Ibid.
18.CSPV 1 (751).
19.CSPM (541). Another of Perkin’s standards was of a boy escaping a wolf’s mouth, as Richard had escaped his would-be murderer, Richard III.
20.Perkin’s confession is in English Historical Documents Vol. 5 1485–1558 (ed David Douglas) (1967), p. 118.
21.It was probably written by the blind poet Bernard André whose tedious Latin verses had greeted Henry on the outskirts of London in September 1485. The first three triumphs described Henry’s escapes from the clutches of Edward IV and Richard III (who appears as the epitome of evil, not least for the ‘affair of the nephews’). But the dominant narrative concerned Henry and the duchess.
22.In England the mud thrown at the duchess would stick. Francis Bacon, writing in the seventeenth century, echoed ‘The Twelve Triumphs of Henry VII’, observing that ‘having the spirit of a man and the malice of a woman . . . [the duchess] was for the king what Juno was to Aeneas troubling heaven and hell to annoy him’. Christine Weightman, Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy (1989), p. 154.
23.CSPS 1 (221). Perkin was not seen in the dungeon as is often said.
24.Warrant dated 25 November, National Archives, E36/209 f. 10v.
25.Condon, ‘The Last Will of Henry VII’ in op. cit., p. 130.
26.CSPS 1 ( 239).
27.See consultant forensic psychologist Ian Stephen on Jon Venables, imprisoned aged eleven, The Times, Saturday 24 July 2010, p. 9, headline: ‘He may be stuck in his own abusive and fearful childhood’.
28.CSPS 1 (249).
29.Or so Francis Bacon tells us.
30.The tombs were at Bisham Priory in Berkshire, and were destroyed in the Reformation. The heads of Henry Tudor’s great-granddaughter, Mary, Queen of Scots, and great-grandson, Charles I, were also (later) buried with their bodies.
31.Vergil, Anglica Historia, p. 119.
32.Ibid.
12Punishment
1.Original letters (ed Ellis), Vol. 1, pp. 43–6.
2.Francis Bacon; see http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/henry/11eng.html.
3.David Starkey, Henry: Virtuous Prince (2008), pp. 195, 196.
4.The last Earl of Bohun had died in 1373. The three earldoms and the broad lands of the Bohuns had then been divided between two co-heiresses. Both married members of the then royal house. The elder, Eleanor, was given in 1374 to Thomas of Woodstock, seventh son of Edward III. The younger, Mary, in 1380 or 1381, to Henry, son of John of Gaunt and afterwards Henry IV. The swan and the antelope was their device.
5.Ian Arthurson, ‘The King of Spain’s daughter came to visit me: marriage, princes and politics’ in Arthur Tudor, Prince of Wales: Life, Death and Commemoration (eds Steven Gunn and Linda Monckton) (2009), pp. 20–9.
6.Ives, The Reformation Experience, pp. 13, 14, 19, 20.
7.CSPS 1 (312).
8.‘Impression of England by an Italian Visitor, November 1497’ in English Historical Documents Vol. 5 1485–1558 (ed David Douglas) (1967), pp. 188, 189.
9.Many of the leading court women of the next century would similarly take control of their lives following child marriages, either by staying widows, or by marrying their servants. It may be there is no connection with Margaret Beaufort’s actions, but her intellectual pursuits were much imitated, and her decision in this regard would have been carefully noted.
10.‘The Mirror of Gold for the Sinful Soul’, and Thomas à Kempis’ ‘The Imitation of Christ’.
11.When Margaret Beaufort had wanted to promote a particular candidate to the bishopric of Worcester, a letter from Pope Alexander warned her that Henry had promised the queen to appoint her candidate, and so her choice had to be dropped. Okerlund, Elizabeth of York, p. 136.
12.Starkey, Henry, p. 158.
13.Routh, Lady Marga
ret, p. 92.
14.Thomas More, quoted in Starkey, Henry, p. 143.
15.The Receyt of the Ladie Kateryne (ed G. Kipling), Early English Text Society original series 296 (1990), p. 38.
16.Amongst whom remained Perkin Warbeck’s widow, the former Lady Catherine Gordon.
17.Some reliquaries contained fakes: the equivalent today of ‘healing crystals’, they still offered hope of well-being, even if the artefacts had no intrinsic spiritual qualities. Many others, however, were the genuine remains or former possessions of men and women admired for the extraordinary qualities they had demonstrated in life. Just as people today visit the graves of relatives they have lost, so people then liked to have some physical connection to the saints who were so much part of their spiritual life – the English more than most.
18.L&P 4, Pt III, 2577; British Library Cotton MSS Vitellius B XII, f. 98.
19.Frederick Hepburn, ‘The Portraiture of Arthur and Katherine’, in Arthur Tudor, Prince of Wales (eds Steven Gunn and Linda Monkton) (2009), p. 38.
20.Simon Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England (1993), p. 31.
21.CSPS 1 (176).
22.Thurley, Royal Palaces, pp. 35, 36.
23.S. B. Chrimes, Henry VII (1999). This contemporary description is quoted in full on pp. 302, 303.
24.Okerlund, Elizabeth of York, pp. 185, 186, 204.
25.See http://www.historyextra.com/henrypicture.
26.It may be coincidence but it was in 1502, the year Arthur died, that Henry paid for a rich chasuble and two altar fronts for the cathedral at Vannes, which had the shrine to St Vincent Ferrer. Condon, ‘The Last Will of Henry VII’, in op. cit., n. 4, p. 113.
13Death and Judgement
1.CSPS 1, 295. Henry, Duke of York was made Prince of Wales in 1503.
2.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (1997), p. 7.
3.It is mentioned in the Scottish Treasury accounts of January 1507. Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland 1473–1513 (eds T. Dickson and J. B. Paul) (1877–1902), Vol. 3, p. 250, cols i–iv.
4.Fiona Kisby, ‘A Mirror of Monarchy: Music and Musicians in the Household Chapel of the Lady Margaret Beaufort, Mother of Henry VII’ in Early Music History, Vol. 16 (ed Iain Fenlon) (1997), pp. 225, 227.
5.Spanish ambassador Don Pedro de Ayala, quoted in Macdougall, James IV, p. 283.
6.Maria Perry, The Sisters of Henry VIII: The Tumultuous Lives of Margaret of Scotland and Mary of France (1999), p. 44.
7.Condon, ‘The Last Will of Henry VII’ in op. cit., p. 133. Interestingly, given what followed under Henry VIII, his will also invested in a silver gilt image of himself, to be placed in the shrine at Canterbury of Thomas Becket. On it were to be the words ‘Saint Thomas Intercede for Me’. Another image of Henry, similar in scale, was to be placed at the famous shrine to the Virgin at Walsingham, where he had prayed for victory against the pretender Lambert Simnel.
8.Twenty-nine such copes were bequeathed to the abbey in 1509. A hundred years later only eleven were left, which the Puritans burned in 1643. The Jesuits had, however, removed some before 1608 and one set survives. It belongs to the Jesuit college at Stoneyhurst and celebrates the houses of Beaufort and Lancaster with its embroidered portcullis surmounted by a crown and the border representing the Lancaster SS collar worn by Margaret Beaufort’s grandfather on his tomb.
9.Testamenta vetusta in op. cit., p. 430.
10.As the twentieth-century novelist T. H. White romantically translated Thomas Malory’s ‘REX QUONDAM, REXQUE FUTURUS’.
11.Thomas Penn, Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England (2012), pp. 166, 167.
12.Vergil, Anglica Historia, p. 129.
13.It was to their father, the late John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, that Margaret Beaufort had been betrothed before she was married to Edmund Tudor. If he had married her instead of Edward IV’s sister (another Elizabeth), the story of his children’s lives might have been very different.
14.CSPS 1 (552).
15.Jones and Underwood, The Making of the Tudor Dynasty, p. 89.
16.Margaret Aston, ‘Death’ in Fifteenth-Century Attitudes (ed R. Horrox) (1994), p. 203.
17.Starkey, Henry, p. 264.
18.Sydney Anglo, Images of Tudor Kingship (1992) p. 100.
19.This comment of Fisher’s is usually misunderstood and given a political rather than the religious meaning intended. Henderson, ‘Rethinking Henry VII’, pp. 333, 334.
20.Ibid., p. 331. Henry had already paid for 10,000 or more Masses to be said during the previous three Lenten seasons, for his health, soul and family.
21.Hall, Chronicle, in English Historical Documents Vol. 5 1485–1558 (ed David Douglas) (1967), p. 146.
22.I wonder if this influenced the Hastings chantry at Windsor instituting prayers for the souls of Edward IV’s children in 1504.
23.More’s The History of Richard III can be seen at http://www.r3.org/bookcase/more/moretext.html. It offers a detailed account (or ‘story’) of the murder of the princes.
14Exit Margaret Beaufort
1.Tuberculosis is a slow killer that induces fatigue, and the genitourinary tract is the most common site, after the lungs, for infection. This is turn can spread to the testes, as it may have done in Arthur’s case.
2.Craig, ‘Royalty, Virtue, and Adversity: The Cult of King Henry VI’ in op. cit., p. 199.
3.Giles Tremlett, Catherine of Aragon (2010), p. 164.
4.Henry was dressed in a costume of red and gold, furred with ermine and studded with rubies, diamonds, pearls and emeralds.
5.John Fisher, A Mourning Remembrance of Margaret, Countess of Richmond (1509).
6.According to the later cardinal, Reginald Pole, whose parents’ marriage Margaret had arranged, her last words were to commend Henry to Fisher’s guidance (Margaret Beaufort arranged the marriage of Margaret Plantagenet, daughter of the Duke of Clarence, to her nephew of the half-blood Richard Pole).
7.It is now in the British Library.
Part Two
INHERITANCE: THE LEGACY OF ARTHUR
15The Elder Sister: Margaret, Queen of Scots
1.Margaret McIntyre, ‘Tudor Family Politics in Early Sixteenth-Century Scotland’ in History, Literature and Music in Scotland 700–1560 (ed R. Andrew McDonald) (2002), p. 198.
2.L&P 1, Pt I (1775).
3.William Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 4, Scene 3.
4.Suzannah Lipscomb, 1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII (2009), p. 32; and the ‘better things’ were like what the English victory at Shakespeare’s Agincourt would ensure: ‘From this day until the ending of the world/But we in it shall be remember’d.’ Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 4, Scene 3.
5.Tremlett, Catherine of Aragon, p. 194.
6.‘Such large . . .’: L&P 1 (2283); ‘with many muckle . . .’: John Sadler and Stephen Walsh, Flodden 1513: Scotland’s Greatest Defeat (2006), p. 76. Priests were not supposed to spill blood, but in the Middle Ages they had often argued to their own satisfaction that it was permissible to fight with a mace and bludgeon their enemy, rather than cut with a sword.
7.The words were written in the eighteenth century.
8.The Royal Arms of Scotland are ‘a lion rampant gules, armed and langued azure, within a double tressure flory-counter-flory of the second’.
9.J. Leslie, History of Scotland (1895), p. 95. James IV’s body was identified by Thomas, Lord Dacre who knew the king well. Henry VIII also reported the king was found dead on the battlefield. But an Italian heard that James had been captured only to die of his wounds within the hour: CSPV 2 (332). He was, perhaps, not quite dead when his body was found. In Scotland rumours would later circulate that he was still alive and in hiding.
10.L&P 1 (2246).
11.L&P 1, Pt II (2283–84); Macdougall, James IV, pp. 274, 275, 276. For King Henry reporting death of James IV, CSPM 1 (655).
12.L&P 1 (2460).
13.L&P 1 (4451).
14.CSPV 2 (316).
15.CSPV 2 (309), CSPS 2 (142). For the fate of James’ b
ody see Appendix 1.
16.L&P 2 (2440).
17.L&P 1, Pt II (2973). Reported by Lord Dacre to Henry VIII. I have modernised the English. James IV had done much to restore law and order to Scotland, but the violence had returned worse than ever.
18.His father had died at Flodden.
19.Bishop Leslie, quoted in Caroline Bingham, James V King of Scots (1971), p. 32 and William Kevin Emond, ‘The Minority of James V 1513–1528’, PhD diss., St Andrews (1988), p. 24.
20.Erin A. Sadlack, The French Queen’s Letters (2011), p. 156.
16The Younger Sister: Mary, The French Queen
1.‘Narrative of the visit of the duke de Najera’ in Archaeologia 33 (1831), p. 350.
2.CSPV 2 (500); L&P 2 (395).
3.L&P 2 (227).
4.L&P 2 (327).
5.L&P 2 (228).
6.CSPV 2, pp. 211, 496; Perry, Sisters, pp. 141, 142.
7.Michael Sherman, ‘Pomp and Circumstances: Pageantry, Politics, and Propaganda in France during the Reign of Louis XII, 1498–1515’ in The Sixteenth Century Journal (winter 1978), p. 26.
8.L&P 1, Pt II (3416); Perry, Sisters, p. 144.
9.Walter C. Richardson, Mary Tudor, The White Queen (1970), p. 113.
10.Ibid., p. 126.
11.Henry’s future daughter Elizabeth would similarly want to know about the appearance of Mary, Queen of Scots, and how they compared. She inherited her infamous vanity from her father. L&P 2 (411).
12.L&P 2 (222).
13.L&P 2 (224).
14.L&P 2 (226) (227); Richardson, Mary Tudor, pp. 174, 175.
15.Richardson, Mary Tudor, p. 173.
16.L&P 2 (327).
17.Richardson, Mary Tudor, p. 82.
18.English Historical Documents (ed Douglas), p. 388. Elizabeth I owned a Mirror of France, which may well be the Mirror of Naples. A jewel matching its description features in a portrait of Anne of Denmark (wife of James VI and I). James also refers to the Mirror of France in a letter to the future Charles I, suggesting he wear it in his hat with a little black feather. It appears to have been pawned in 1625, and vanished thereafter. Roy Strong, ‘Three Royal Jewels: The Three Brothers, the Mirror of Great Britain and the Feather’ in Burlington Magazine 108, No. 760 (July 1966), pp. 350–3.
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