Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII

by Robert Hutchinson

  He was quick to take advantage of Henry VII’s absence on royal progress in Lancashire and the North. After becoming becalmed, the pretender had arrived off Deal in Kent on 3 July 1495, with troops and ships paid for by Burgundian cash. Warbeck mistakenly expected to rally popular support for his cause. The partisan historian Edward Hall was contemptuous of this forlorn hope of an invasion force:

  So gathering a great army of valiant captains of all nations … some English sanctuary men, some thieves, robbers and vagabonds which [desired] only to live of[f] robbery and rapine, came to be his servants and soldiers.

  The Kentish men, hearing that this feigned duke was come and … that he was but a painted image … thought it neither expedient or profitable … to aid and assist him.62

  Warbeck – wisely, perhaps – decided not to disembark from his ship, as the four hundred troops who came ashore were quickly cut off by the local militia and one hundred and fifty hacked to pieces before the handful of survivors were driven back in panic to their ships. A further one hundred and sixty were taken prisoner and dragged off to London ‘railed in ropes like a team [of] horses drawing … a cart’.63 These riffraff soldiers of fortune were executed, some in London and others in towns along the coasts of Kent, Sussex and Norfolk, and their corpses were left hanging to rot near the high-water mark as a terrible warning to those who contemplated insurrection.

  Warbeck may have been down, but he was not out. He sailed on to Ireland and there, with support from Maurice Fitzgerald, Ninth Earl of Desmond, besieged Waterford that August. His ships, however, were driven off after eleven days’ determined resistance by the city and he fled to Scotland and the protection of King James IV, who was always delighted to be a thorn in England’s side.64 He promptly fed and clothed ‘Prince Richard of England’ and provided him with spending money. Furthermore, Warbeck married the king’s cousin, Catherine Gordon, daughter of George Gordon, Second Earl of Huntly – ‘a young virgin of excellent beauty and virtue’ – on 13 January 1496 and was granted the munificent pension of £112 a month. It was the closest he came to any pretence of royalty.

  Warbeck was certainly dogged in his attempts to claim the English crown; some might have considered him almost suicidally so. If he hoped for more than half-hearted Scottish military support, James was too crafty to supply it, even though Warbeck had promised him the handsome prize of the border fortress town of Berwick-upon-Tweed.65 In September 1496 the pretender led just 1,400 men into England, hoping to rally the population of Northumberland to his standard.66 It quickly became merely another tiresome border raid. After just three days of pillaging and burning, it was obvious that his cause was as unpopular in the north as it had been in Kent and he quickly retreated to Scotland, his tail between his legs.67

  Far away from the alarums of the north, family life for the real Duke of York still centred on his nursery at Eltham Palace. He was to see little of his elder brother and lived away from his father for much of his young life.

  There are only fleeting glimpses of father and son together during this period. On 17 May 1495, young Henry received the Garter, the highest order of chivalry in England. He wore a long crimson velvet gown and bonnet of the same material, specially made for the occasion.68 Later that year the king paid out £7 10s for ‘diverse yards of silk bought for my lord of York and [his sister] my lady Margaret’. The royal accounts for 1496 – 7 also record purchases of a furred gown in black camlet,69 a black satin coat and a scarlet petticoat for Henry. Thriftily, an old lambskin garment of his was repaired so it could be used as a gown, as good as new. There was an order on 4 December for a crimson velvet gown trimmed with black lamb’s wool, possibly intended for little Henry to wear that coming Christmas, as a present from his father.70

  The child would have noticed the increasing absences from play of his younger sister Elizabeth. Unknown to the royal physicians, she was suffering from atrophy, a wasting disease caused by the breakdown of her body’s tissues, and on Saturday 14 September 1495 Henry’s sibling and playmate died at Eltham Palace, aged three years and two months.

  Her funeral, attended by one hundred poor men in black gowns and hoods, was arranged by Cardinal Morton; the newly appointed Lord Chamberlain, Giles, Lord Daubeney; and the Lord High Treasurer, John, Lord Dynham, at an unusually high cost for a child of £318.71 She was buried in Westminster Abbey, as close as possible to the sacred shrine of St Edward the Confessor, beneath a Purbeck marble tomb-chest with her effigy in gilded copper placed on the black marble cover-stone. Her Latin epitaph read:

  The royal child lies after death in this sarcophagus,

  A young noble Elizabeth, an illustrious princess,

  The daughter of King Henry VII

  Who holds the flourishing sceptres of two kingdoms.

  Atropos, the severe messenger of death, took her away

  But may there be eternal life for her above in heaven.72

  The loss of Elizabeth was eased by the birth of another sister, Mary, on 18 March 1496, who joined Margaret and Henry in the nursery at Eltham.

  Henry’s first public duty came at Windsor on 21 September 1496, when he was aged five. This was his formal witnessing of a royal grant of a charter to the abbot and convent of Glastonbury to hold two annual fairs in the Somerset town.73 Paradoxically, forty-three years later as king, he destroyed the abbey during the Dissolution of the Monasteries and had its last abbot brutally hanged for high treason.74

  Meanwhile in Cornwall, discontent was mounting over the additional taxation levied on the population to pay for a planned retaliatory war against Scotland. Disgruntlement morphed into insurrection in mid-May 1497 and a Cornish host, totalling around 15,000, marched towards London via Salisbury, Winchester and Guildford. This may have been a fearsome sight, but a tactician would have wryly noted their lack of any cavalry or artillery.

  Even so, something akin to panic swept the streets of the capital at the approach of the rebel army. Edward Hall recorded that there was ‘great fear through the city and cries were made, “every man to harness, to harness” [armour]. Some ran to the gates, others mounted the [city] walls so that no part was undefended.’75

  Henry had journeyed with his mother from Sheen on 6 June to stay at his grandmother’s London home, ‘The Coldharbour’ in Thames Street, as a discreet precaution. Six days later he and the queen were hustled off to the nearby Tower of London for safety as the rebels passed south of the Thames and concentrated their forces at Blackheath, only a few miles to the south-east and near both Greenwich and Eltham Palaces. It was Henry’s first experience of the acrid stench of rebellion and one, as a six year old, that he was never to forget.

  Continual watch was kept by the city’s magistrates ‘lest the rebels, being poor and needy, would descend from their camp and invade the city and spoil, and rob the riches and substance of the merchants’. It was ever thus – the city was seemingly worried more about its wealth than providing patriotic support for the government of the day.

  As they nervously awaited battle with the royalist forces, many Cornishmen deserted, fearful of Henry VII’s vengeance if they were defeated. When the 25,000-strong royalist army under the king attacked on Saturday 17 June 1497, the Cornish were quickly surrounded by Henry’s three ‘battles’ (or battalions) of archers and armoured men-at-arms on the battlefield alongside the River Ravensbourne. It was no contest and all over within hours. Hall recounts how

  there were slain of the rebels which fought and resisted, 2,000 men and more and taken prisoners an infinite number and amongst them Michael Joseph, surnamed ‘the blacksmith’ one of the captains of this dung hill and draught-sacked ruffians.76

  The royalists lost about three hundred men in the fighting.

  The king rode through the streets of the City of London in triumph at two o’clock that afternoon. The leaders of the Cornishmen were executed, but most of the rebels were allowed to return home unmolested.

  A few months later, Warbeck decided on his final throw of the dice
. He landed on the broad, flat sweep of Whitesand Bay, near Land’s End in Cornwall, on 7 September, with the three-hundred-strong remnant of his force, pledging to the restless and still truculent Cornish that he would halt Henry VII’s tide of taxation. This time he received an enthusiastic welcome and was proclaimed ‘Richard IV’ by his new supporters on Bodmin Moor before he tried unsuccessfully to capture the city of Exeter at the head of an army of 8,000. After several costly assaults on the city’s walls and gates, Warbeck and his Cornish supporters headed for Taunton in Somerset.

  Henry VII now had the measure of the pretender and knew that he could finally quash the threat he posed to the Tudor crown. The king claimed to be ‘cured of those privy stitches which … had long [been] about his heart and had sometimes broken his sleep’77 and he lost £9 coolly playing cards while he awaited his forces to muster at Taunton.78 Despite his bravado, Queen Elizabeth, again accompanied by Prince Henry, was quietly packed off on a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham, five miles (8.1 km) from the north coast of Norfolk, well away from any likely fighting.79

  But when Warbeck heard that advanced elements of the royal army were sending out scouting parties, he panicked and fled with three companions to the Cistercian monastery of Beaulieu – possibly hoping to escape from England by a small boat from one of the many little creeks splintering that part of the Hampshire coastline. He had a bounty of 1,000 marks (£666 – or £357,000 at today’s values) on his head. There he was found and seized by royalist forces on or about 5 October, either by violating the sanctuary offered by the monks, or by luring Warbeck out of it with tempting yet specious offers of a free pardon.80

  Warbeck was now safely in Henry’s grateful hands – as was his wife, Catherine, captured as she hid in the Church of St Bryan, near Marazion, Cornwall. The king, after admiring ‘her beauty and amiable countenance’, dispatched her to London to his queen ‘as a true and undoubted token of his victory’.81 The most serious threat to Henry VII and his dynasty had at last been neutralised.

  Like his Tudor descendants, the king was not altogether magnanimous in victory. He brought Warbeck back to London and subjected him to the derision and taunts of the mob. He also appointed

  certain keepers to attend on him which should not (the breadth of a nail) go from his person, to the extent that he might not neither convey himself out of the land, nor fly any[where], nor yet … be able to sow again no new sedition nor seditious tumult within his realm82

  although he did manage to escape custody. He was eventually thrown into the Tower and kept ‘with the greatest care’ in a cell ‘where he sees neither sun nor moon’.83 A fellow prisoner was that other claimant to the throne, Edward Plantagenet, Seventeenth Earl of Warwick, who had languished as Henry’s prisoner since the king’s accession after Bosworth, when the earl was aged just ten. Warwick had grown into a handsome youth, though sadly somewhat mentally impaired.84 He was held in a room above Warbeck and Warwick knocked a hole through the floor to communicate with his fellow pretender, who was chained securely by the leg to the wall. ‘How goes it with you? Be of good cheer!’ the earl called merrily through the opening.85

  In February 1499, another claimant appeared to tax Henry VII’s depleted store of patience. Ralph Wilford, the nineteen-year-old son of a shoemaker who traded under the sign of the bull in London’s Bishopsgate Street, also declared himself to be the imprisoned Warwick. He was swiftly arrested, tried and hanged, as was the priest who promoted his cause from the pulpit.

  Furthermore, Edmund de la Pole, the Sixth Earl of Suffolk and a surviving nephew of the Yorkist kings through his mother, fled England for France that July after being indicted for murdering Thomas Crue, in the parish of All Hallows next to the Tower, a man involved in litigation against him in the King’s Council.86 Another potential claimant was therefore on the loose in Europe and Henry ordered that he should be persuaded to return, or at worst, be brought back forcibly.

  Henry VII was told by a priest that ‘his life would be in great danger’ throughout that year and the tension created by this prophecy and the strain of putting down seemingly constant rebellions was beginning to tell on him. The Spanish ambassador in London reported: ‘Henry has aged so much during the last two weeks that he seems to be twenty years older. The king is growing very devout. He has heard a sermon every day during Lent and has continued his devotions during the rest of the day.’87

  Wilford may have been the last straw for Henry Tudor, who by now had had more than his fill of impersonators. If the king sought divine guidance, he received it. In August, Warwick and Warbeck were accused of trying to escape from the Tower. It may have been that Henry had shrewdly manufactured the ideal excuse to rid himself finally of these politically sensitive prisoners. On 12 November, a sixty-strong meeting of his council advised the king to impose harsh justice on this unlikely pair of prisoners.

  Warbeck was hanged at Tyburn88 beyond the western walls of London on Saturday 23 November, after reading out a carefully worded confession on the scaffold that duly confirmed that he had impersonated Richard, First Duke of York.

  Five days later, Warwick was beheaded on Tower Hill. It was only the second time he had been outside the gates of the Tower – the first being when Henry paraded him to scotch talk of his impersonation by Lambert Simnel in 1487. With that blow of the headsman’s axe, the last Plantagenet in the legitimate male line was judicially murdered. Perhaps even the weather gods were affronted by this palpably unjust act on Henry VII’s part. That day there were ‘great floods, winds, thunder, lightning which did much harm and hurt in diverse places and countries in England’.89

  Henry VII could now afford the time to look overseas to seek spouses for his children and alliances to secure England’s rightful place in the cockpit of European diplomacy.

  Already his heir Arthur had been betrothed to Princess Katherine, the fourteen-year-old daughter of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile, and they were married by proxy on 19 May 1499 at Bewdley in Worcestershire. The Spanish ambassador in London, Don Pedro de Ayala, told the Spanish monarchs: ‘There does not remain a drop of doubtful royal blood; the only royal blood being the true blood of the king, the queen and, above all, of the Prince of Wales.’90

  The Milanese ambassador Raimondo de Soncino presented his letters of credence to Henry and Arthur at Woodstock in September 1497:

  The king was standing and remained so until our departure.

  There was also … [the] Prince of Wales, almost eleven years of age, but taller than his years would warrant, of remarkable beauty and grace and very ready in speaking Latin.

  His majesty, in addition to his wonderful presence, was adorned with a most rich collar, full of great pearls and many other jewels, in four rows, and in his bonnet he had a pear-shaped pearl which seemed to be something most rich.91

  No wonder the king looked relaxed and ‘in a most quiet spirit’. For the first time in fourteen years on the English throne, he could sleep easier at night. There remained only the still latent threat posed by the Earl of Suffolk.

  Furthermore, Elizabeth of York had given birth to another son, named Edmund after the king’s father, on Friday 20 February.92

  There were now three sons in direct line of succession to the Tudor crown.

  2

  THE SPARE HEIR

  ‘In the midst stood Prince Henry then nine years old and having already something of royalty in his demeanour, in which there was a certain dignity combined with singular courtesy.’

  The Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus meets the royal children during his stay in England, 1499.1

  A painted and gilded terracotta bust of a laughing child, just over one foot (31.8 cm) in height of c.1498 probably portrays a boisterous young Henry at the age of seven.2 It seems to have been part of the Royal Collection since it was carved, and may have been the result of a special commission by Henry VII himself.

  The bust (Plate 6) has been attributed to the Moden
ese sculptor Guido Mazzoni (1450 – 1518) who submitted designs and estimates for Henry VII’s grandiose tomb at Westminster Abbey. These were rejected3 and this commission may have been awarded as something of a consolation prize. It takes the form of the head and shoulders of a young boy dressed in a high-collared green tunic and a gold lace skullcap – originally it had a green glaze over a tinfoil layer to imitate a rich cloth of gold for the garment. But it is the face that instantly captures our attention. Here is a rumbustious, mischievous child, with dimpled, chubby red cheeks, his blue-grey eyes cast downwards to the left, seemingly pondering on what impish prank to indulge in next. He has a broad, knowing grin – as if he is well aware that he will always evade punishment for any transgressions, as Henry, sequestered within his adoring, tolerant female world at Eltham, would know and slyly exploit all too easily. It is a charming sculpture, redolent of boyish high spirits and rude, youthful health.

  As noted earlier, his mother, Elizabeth of York, probably taught Henry to read and write – as she did his sisters. When the boy was almost five years old, his father paid £1 on 2 November 1495 ‘for a book bought for my lord of York’,4 doubtless a simple reading primer, full of colourful pictures. Henry, Margaret and Mary’s handwriting all closely resemble one another’s, although later examples of the young duke’s letters are bolder, more deeply inscribed and angular, resembling the fashionable Italianate style.5