by John Guy
THE CHILDREN OF HENRY VIII
Books by the same author include
Thomas Becket: Warrior, Priest, Rebel, Victim.
A 900-Year-Old Story Retold
A Daughter’s Love: Thomas and Margaret More
‘My Heart is My Own’: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots
The Tudors: A Very Short Introduction
The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade
The Tudor Monarchy
Tudor England
Contributor to
The Oxford History of Britain
The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain
The Short Oxford History of the British Isles:
The Sixteenth Century
The Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain
THE CHILDREN OF HENRY VIII
JOHN GUY
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
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© John Guy 2013
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First Edition published in 2013
Impression: 1
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ISBN 978–0–19–284090–5
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Praise for My Heart is My Own:
‘Guy’s scholarly biography, as enthralling as a detective story, provides a wider vision of Tudor history and shows with stunning clarity how the historical narrative was shaped.’
The New York Times
‘Rarely have first-class scholarship and first-class story-telling been so effectively combined.’
John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph
‘A biography that reads as thrillingly as a detective story, and is rich in details and authoritative in its analysis.’
Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times
‘Will be the definitive biography of Mary Stuart for many years to come.’
The Washington Post
‘An absorbing biography … meticulously researched … scholarly and intriguing.’
Peter Ackroyd, The Times
‘Seldom does one encounter a book so perfect: a serious academic study written with the lyrical quality of a good novel.’
Scotland on Sunday
Praise for A Daughter’s Love:
‘An outstanding talent for stop-the-reader-dead-in-their-tracks storytelling … it has restored my faith in biography’.
Lisa Jardine, Sunday Times
‘Absorbing and profoundly moving. Guy’s subtle portrait depends on his own refusal to accept the received wisdom of historical tradition.’
Helen Castor, Sunday Telegraph
‘John Guy has written an admirable account … the result is a minor masterpiece.’
Jonathan Sumption, The Spectator
‘[Guy’s] absorbing, thoroughly researched book does justice to two exemplary women—and reminds us that history is full of ironies.’
Claire Tomalin, The New York Times
‘Compelling … Guy’s scholarship is irreproachable.’
The Independent on Sunday
‘Carries its learning lightly … this warm and vivid portrait of the most attractive father and daughter relationship in English history will reward the specialist as well as the general reader.’
Eamon Duffy, The Independent
Praise for Thomas Becket:
‘It is to Guy’s immense credit that he has written such a lively, effortlessly readable biography—a book that not only corrects many historical errors and uncertainties, but merits reading more than once, for the sheer joy of its superb storytelling.’
The Times
‘… breathes new life into an oft-told tale of throne and altar antagonism, with its complex undercurrents of money, politics, religion and shocking violence. However well you think you know the story, it is well worth the read.’
Financial Times
‘Guy deftly sets a timeless and all-too-familiar emotional tussle … against the less familiar social and political landscape of medieval Europe.’
The New York Times
‘A compelling read … [Guy] knows how to take the familiar and shape it into a narrative that both improves our historical knowledge and is entertainingly astute, and in places positively moving.’
Peter Stanford, The Independent
‘Guy wears his learning lightly, and this is undoubtedly the most accessible Life of Thomas Becket to be published in recent years.’
Katherine Harvey, Times Literary Supplement
‘Magnificently successful … John Guy deserves both our thanks and our admiration.’
Nicholas Vincent, The Tablet
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I gladly acknowledge the generosity and kindness of the many archivists and librarians who have helped to smooth my path, chiefly at the British Library, the National Archives at Kew, the Fellows’ Library at Clare College, the Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and especially the London Library. The genealogical tables were drawn and digitized by Richard Guy of Orang-Utan Productions from my rough drafts.
I’ve nothing but thanks and admiration for Peter Robinson, my agent, for his constant encouragement and for giving helpful advice on the manuscript. I owe an immense debt to Luciana O’Flaherty at Oxford University Press, whose idea the book was, and who edited it with astonishing speed and efficiency. She was ably assisted by Matthew Cotton, whom I thank especially for his tact when the manuscript arrived a few weeks later than I had predicted. Alan Bryson was generous with advice and suggestions and I am indebted to him for showing me some newly discovered letters of the young Elizabeth that he is currently co-editing for publication. I express heartfelt thanks to my students at Cambridge, especially those from Clare and Gonville and Caius Colleges, whose supervisions on the Tudors unaccountably strayed on several occasions into territory discussed in this book. Julia, as ever, was a tower of strength and read the complete manuscript several times, making a number of invaluable suggestions. I also warmly thank David and Frances Waters, whose astonishing talent for booking opera tickets ensured that Julia and I were able to go to Bayreuth immediately after I had done the final revisions to the book.
London
August 2012
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
List of Colour Plates
Note on Units of Currency
Genealogical Tables
The Tudor Succession
The Boleyns
The Howards
Prologue
1 In the Beginning
2 Smoke and Mirrors
3 Prince or Princess?
4 Sons and Lovers
5 A Family Feud
6 Ruling from the Grave
7 Faith and Exclus
ion
8 Sisters, Rivals, Queens
9 Uncharted Waters
Abbreviations Used in the References
Notes on Dates and Quotations
Notes and References
Illustration Credits
Index
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1 Prince Arthur, from a stained-glass window in the north transept of Great Malvern Priory, attrib. Richard Twygge and Thomas Wodshawe
2 The gatehouse at Ludlow Castle, Shropshire
3 Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby
4 Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham
5 A letter to Queen Jane Seymour in 1536 from Henry’s elder daughter, Mary
6 Henry Fitzroy’s earliest letter to Henry VIII, thanking him for a New Year’s gift, 14 January 1527
7 The Old Palace at Hatfield in Hertfordshire
8 The tomb of Henry Fitzroy, Church of St Michael, Framlingham, Suffolk
9 The opening page of one of Edward VI’s schoolroom exercises
10 Elizabeth’s letter to Katherine Parr, May 1548
11 Edward VI’s Reformation
12 Hugh Latimer preaching before Edward VI
13 Edward VI’s ‘Device for the Succession’
14 A view of London Bridge as it appeared in c.1632, by the Dutch artist Claude de Jongh
15 John Foxe’s Account of the ‘Miraculous Preservation’ of Elizabeth in Mary’s reign
16 Elizabeth kneeling in prayer, with the sceptre and the sword of justice on the floor beside her
17 View of Windsor Castle as it appeared in 1582
18 A letter signed at the top by Elizabeth using her characteristic sign manual, addressed in 1588 to Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby
LIST OF COLOUR PLATES
1 Henry VIII as he approached the age of 55, engraving by Cornelis Metsys, c.1548
2 Katherine Parr, c.1545, by ‘Master John’
3 Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond and Somerset, c.1534, by Lucas Horenboute
4 Sir Thomas Seymour, c.1543, attrib. Hans Holbein the Younger
5 Edward VI, attrib. William Scrots
6 Elizabeth, c.1551, attrib. William Scrots
7 Portrait of an unknown woman, possibly Jane Grey, attrib. Levina Teerlinc
8 Philip and Mary as King and Queen of England, c.1558, by Hans Eworth
9 Elizabeth I, c.1560
10 Robert Dudley, c.1564, by Steven van der Meulen
11 An Allegory of the Tudor Succession: The Family of Henry VIII, by an unknown artist, c.1572
NOTE ON UNITS OF CURRENCY
In citing units of currency, the old sterling denominations of pounds, shillings and pence have been retained. There are twelve pence (12d.) in a shilling (modern 5p or US 8 cents), twenty shillings (20s.) in a pound (£1 or US $1.60), and so on. A mark is 13s. 4d. (66p or US $1.05). Rough estimates of modern values for sixteenth-century figures can be obtained by multiplying all the numbers by a thousand. Equivalents for European denominations, where possible, are worked out from ‘Money and Coinage of the Age of Erasmus’, in Collected Works of Erasmus, 76 vols (Toronto, 1974– ), I, pp. 311–47, and P. Spufford (ed.), Handbook of Medieval Exchange (London, 1986).
GENEALOGICAL TABLES
THE TUDOR SUCCESSION
THE BOLEYNS
THE HOWARDS
Prologue
ON Saturday, 2 April 1502, Arthur, Prince of Wales, the elder son of the king of England, Henry VII, died at Ludlow Castle on the Welsh borders, aged just 15. The young prince, married less than five months before at St Paul’s Cathedral to the Spanish princess, Katherine of Aragon, had first felt unwell at Shrovetide in early February.1 On Easter Day (27 March), his condition rapidly worsened, ‘at the which season [there] grew and increased upon his body … the most pitiful disease and sickness, that with so sore and great violence had battled and driven [itself] in[to] the singular parts of him inward.’ Finally, ‘that cruel and fervent enemy of nature, the deadly corruption, did utterly vanquish and overcome the pure and friendful blood, without all manner of physical help and remedy.’2
The causes of Arthur’s death are keenly debated. A credible hypothesis is that he died of bubonic plague, which returned to the West Country in 1502. If that was so, little could have been done for him, for the best that medical science could offer at this time was to tuck the patient up warmly in bed and dose him with a cocktail of white wine mixed with the powder of dried ivy berries ground in a mortar, failing which he should have the anus (or ‘vent’) of three or four partially plucked hens pressed against his buboes (or sores) to draw out the infection, after which the buboes were to be rubbed with treacle.3
The ‘sweating sickness’ and tuberculosis are also regularly suggested.4 A viral pulmonary disease, the ‘sweating sickness’ or ‘sweat’ had first reached England with the French mercenaries fighting alongside Henry VII’s troops at Bosworth in 1485 when, as Earl of Richmond, he had captured the crown in battle from Richard III, the last of the Yorkist kings. Its usual victims were not children or teenagers, but the middle-aged; the classic symptoms were myalgia and headache, accompanied by ‘a deadly and burning sweat’, leading to abdominal pain, vomiting, increased headache and delirium, followed by cardiac palpitations, paralysis and death. Dreaded for its ‘sudden sharpness and unwonted cruelness’, the ‘sweat’ normally took less than twenty-four hours to kill: those who lasted that long were almost certain to survive the attack.5
Since Arthur had felt unwell for two months, and even after the onset of his final decline took almost a week to die, his illness would seem to be different. Only one historian makes a positive claim for the reappearance of the ‘sweat’ in 1502, and no evidence is cited to substantiate the assertion.6 Moreover, while the ‘sweat’ returned to England in 1506 and 1508, these outbreaks are known to have been mild.
FIGURE 1 Prince Arthur, from a stained-glass window in the north transept of Great Malvern Priory, attrib. Richard Twygge and Thomas Wodshawe.
Tuberculosis is improbable, since the condition develops very slowly and Arthur was considered to be a fit and healthy teenager before he fell ill. The idea that he was generally ‘weak and sickly’ derives from a nineteenth-century misreading of a letter, written in Latin, that his father sent to Katherine’s parents, King Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, a few weeks after their daughter’s wedding. In it, Henry explained that Katherine had been allowed to accompany her young husband to Wales even though many people had advised against it, ‘because of the tender age of our son’.7
Arthur was nine months younger than his wife, and Henry had been warned against the perceived dangers of allowing a 15-year-old boy to enjoy unlimited sex—a risk particularly feared by the Spanish ambassador in London, Don Pedro de Ayala, since it was commonly believed in Spain that ‘an undue indulgence’ in ‘the pleasures of marriage’ had caused the death of Katherine’s elder brother Juan, who died aged 19 in 1497, six months after marrying Margaret of Burgundy.8
A further possibility is testicular cancer, perhaps suggested by the phrase ‘the singular parts of him inward’.9 If correct, this diagnosis would not merely establish the cause of death but could conceivably explain the protestations of Katherine’s first lady of the bedchamber, Doña Elvira Manuel, in a letter to Queen Isabella sent shortly after Arthur’s funeral that, although Katherine was a widow, she was still a virgin. For if the prince had testicular cancer, a disease most frequently found in men aged between 15 and 44, the pains and the damage to his reproductive system could have resulted in an impaired sexual function. Although Doña Elvira’s letter can no longer be traced in the archives, its contents are known because Isabella quoted them on 12 July in a letter written at Toledo, saying, ‘It is already known for a certainty that the said Princess of Wales, our daughter, remains as she was here, for so Doña Elvira has written to us.’10
FIGURE 2 The gatehouse at Ludlow Castle, Shropshire. Prince Arthur and Katherine of Aragon passed through it when the
y arrived at Ludlow in 1502.
Barely was Arthur’s body cold than Sir Richard Pole, the lord chamberlain of the prince’s household, sent letters announcing his death to the king’s councillors at Greenwich Palace. As the messenger arrived during the night of Monday, 4 April, when the king was in bed, the councillors decided to break the news to him early the next morning through his confessor, a Franciscan friar.11 Knocking at Henry’s chamber door ‘somewhat before the time accustomed’, the friar was admitted and asked all the servants to leave. Once he and Henry were alone, the friar quoted a text from the Book of Job, using the version from the Latin Vulgate Bible. ‘If we have received good things from the hand of God’, he solemnly intoned, ‘why should we not endure bad things?’12
Henry knew instantly that he was about to receive a devastating blow. When the friar blurted out that his ‘dearest son was departed to God’, the king at once sent for his wife, Elizabeth of York, saying that ‘he and his queen would take the painful sorrows together’. As soon as she arrived ‘and saw the king her lord and husband in that natural and painful sorrow’, she—using ‘full, great and constant comfortable words’—besought him ‘that he would first, after God, remember the welfare of his own noble person, the comfort of his realm and of her.’ The living, said Elizabeth, had to take priority over the dead.
In a valiant effort to comfort the husband whom she seems genuinely to have loved, and for the moment concealing the true extent of her own grief, Elizabeth reminded him that his own mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort—married to King Henry VI’s half-brother, Edmund Tudor, at the age of 12—had been able to have only one child. Quickly made pregnant, she had been left with a serious gynaecological impairment after her son’s delivery. Despite this, Elizabeth recalled, Henry had survived through innumerable tribulations to manhood and won the crown. He also still had a healthy young son and two daughters. And she quickly added, were they themselves not still both young enough to have more children?13
