What Katherine made of her fifteen-year-old groom is not recorded. He was half a head shorter than her, with a pallor to his face and lips. In appearance, he took after his father and grandmother, with hooded eyes, finely drawn features and a long nose. He did not look very healthy (Plate 4).
On 14 November 1501 their marriage took place in St Paul’s Cathedral. Ten-year-old Henry was granted the honour of giving the bride away. A wardrobe of new clothes had been ordered for him for the celebrations: six gowns, including one for riding; eight pairs of hose; five bonnets or hats; and new boots and spurs. Livery was also provided for his four footmen and two minstrels, and his lute-player and teacher D’Ewes was given sixteen yards (14.3 m) of black camlet82 for a new gown ‘for the solemnisation of the marriage of our dearest son’.83
Henry had escorted Katherine in her dazzling entrance into the city of London two days before the wedding. It was his first sight of the girl who was to preoccupy his life, for better, for worse, for more than three decades.
She wore a broad-brimmed round hat, tied with gold lace, and in the fashion of unmarried women allowed her long auburn hair to stream down over her shoulders.84 In a carefully orchestrated spectacle, they led the Anglo – Spanish procession of nobles and clergy through Southwark, across London Bridge and on to the bishop’s palace alongside St Paul’s Cathedral. The roads had been sanded for the horses’ hooves, and the timing was thought critical: Lord Abergavenny had been deputed to ensure there was not ‘too much haste, nor too much tarrying’.85
Edward Hall was beside himself with excitement, stunned by the splendour of ‘the rich apparel of the princess, the strange fashion of the Spanish nation, the beauty of the English ladies, the goodly demeanour of the young damsels, the amorous countenance of the lusty bachelors’.86 Thomas More was less impressed. He believed Katherine’s escort of swarthy Spanish grandees resembled ‘pigmy Ethiopians’.87
Inside the cathedral, a circular tiered wooden platform was built for the wedding ceremony, connected to the quire door by a twelve-foot- (3.66 m) wide carpeted walkway, five feet (1.52 m) above the floor. There were to be no embarrassing accidents: ‘Sir Charles Somerset and the comptroller of the king’s house have taken upon them that the said work should be made sure and substantial.’ The cathedral walls were resplendent with costly cloth of Arras, hanging down from seven or eight feet (2.14 to 2.44 m) above the ground. Over the west door, the king’s trumpeters were told to ‘blow continually’ when the princess left her lodgings in the palace next door ‘till she be in the church upon the high place’.88
Henry, dressed all in white satin like the groom, escorted the bride in by the great west door and they mounted the walkway. She wore a dress of white silk with a border of gold, pearls and precious stones and her train was carried by Lady Cecily, Elizabeth of York’s eldest sister. Above, in the consistory, Henry VII, his queen, and his mother watched the marriage ceremony from a closet89 while the nave was packed with English nobility. The flamboyant Edward Stafford, Third Duke of Buckingham, wore a gown said to be worth £1,500.
Many days of feasting and celebratory jousts followed. An entertainment was staged at Westminster Hall which included dancing by the guests. Henry, enlivened by all that had gone on before, danced with his older sister Margaret. Then boyish high spirits took over. He shrugged off his expensive gown and ‘danced in his jacket’ as his excitement swept aside any thought of courtly etiquette.90 But this exuberance drew no chiding looks from his parents; brother and sister ‘in so goodly and pleasant a manner’ provided ‘great and singular pleasure’ to Henry VII and Elizabeth of York.91
Shortly before Christmas the newly-weds left the Palace of Richmond to begin their new life together on the Welsh borders at Ludlow Castle.
On 2 April 1502 – less than twenty weeks after that sumptuous wedding – Arthur was dead and cold in his bed.
3
PRINCE OF WALES
‘There is no finer youth in the world than the Prince of Wales. He is already taller than his father and his limbs are of a gigantic size. He is as prudent as is to be expected from a son of Henry VII.’
Spanish ambassador Roderigo de Puebla to King Ferdinand of Spain, 5 October 1507.1
Henry, Duke of York, spent the Christmas of 1501 with his parents at their new palace at Richmond. His elder brother and his new bride had departed for Ludlow2 but the court was still buzzing with excitement and expectation over the forthcoming proxy marriage between the boy’s elder sister Margaret, now aged twelve, and James IV, the King of Scotland, three weeks into the New Year.
England’s new-found ally Spain had mediated in Henry VII’s protracted disputes with his irascible neighbour to the north, resulting in a fragile peace treaty being signed in July 1498. It had been a difficult and elusive diplomatic assignment, as the Spanish ambassador Pedro de Ayala acknowledged afterwards: ‘The old enmity is so great it is a wonder the peace is not already broken.’3 Almost immediately, the notion of a marriage between Margaret and the Scottish king was mooted as a means to cement the alliance and build future amity between the traditional enemies. However, negotiations over the projected marriage had dragged on for three years, with Henry VII initially being opposed to the match. In 1498, he told the Spanish envoy de Puebla:
I have already told you more than once that a marriage between him [James IV] and my daughter has many inconveniences.
She has not yet completed the ninth year of her age and is so delicate and weak that she must be married much later than other young ladies. Thus it would be necessary to wait at least another nine years.
Besides my own doubts, the queen and my mother are very much against this marriage. They say if the marriage were concluded we should be obliged to send the princess directly to Scotland, in which case they fear the King of Scots would not wait, but injure her, and endanger her health.
De Puebla confirmed to Ferdinand and Isabella that ‘the daughter of Henry is, in fact, very young and very small for her years’.4
Three years later, diplomatic necessity had overcome Henry VII’s nicer paternal scruples and a marriage treaty was finally signed on 24 January 1502 with a proxy wedding arranged in the queen’s newly refurbished great chamber at Richmond the next day. Henry, Elizabeth of York and the king’s mother still retained serious concerns about Margaret’s delicate health: the treaty contained a clause stipulating a maximum delay of eighteen months before she could join her husband in Edinburgh.
The delightfully named Robert Blackadder, Archbishop of Glasgow, officiated at the ceremony, asking Margaret whether she was ‘content without compulsion [to marry] and of her free will?’
[She answered:] ‘If it please my lord and father the king and my lady, my mother the queen.’ Then the king showed her that it was his will and pleasure and that she had the king’s and queen’s blessings.
Such was the dumb duty and predestined fate of a Tudor princess. Patrick Hepburn, First Earl of Bothwell and Lord High Admiral of Scotland, stood proxy for the Scottish king, promising
in his name and behalf and by his special commandment, [I] contract marriage with thee Margaret and take thee into and for the wife and spouse of my said sovereign lord James, King of Scotland … during his and your lives natural … 5
Ten-year-old Henry watched his sister’s proxy marriage, heading the list of many dignitaries who attended, which graciously included Catherine Gordon, widow of the pretender Warbeck and a cousin to James IV.6
The Duke of York was now of an age when he enjoyed the beginnings of his own small household and some clues to its membership occur in his mother’s Privy Purse accounts and elsewhere. In March 1502, Elizabeth of York gave a shilling to ‘John Goose, my lord of York’s fool’ for bringing a carp for her dinner table – this was probably the young master’s nickname for the jester who was called John Goor.7 Like his sister Margaret, Henry had his own company of minstrels8 and there were other attendants. Three shillings and four pence were repaid to a ‘footman to my
lord prince’ who donated alms to the poor on Henry’s behalf at Abingdon in Berkshire in October that year. In the same month, ‘one of his servants’ was given 6s 8d after bringing a message from the prince to his mother.9 Livery in Henry’s personal colours of blue and tawny brown were supplied to his footmen, ‘John Williams and Richard Wiggins’, in October 1501 and the following May.10 There were nobler companions as well, somewhat older than Henry and therefore not playmates: we have already met William Blount, Fourth Baron Mountjoy, who mentored the prince’s studies in history and Latin. There was also Algernon Percy, Fifth Earl of Northumberland, who had woken Henry after his vigil in St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, and afterwards regularly attended on the prince.11
Two numbing, sledgehammer blows now fell painfully upon Henry VII.
First, his fifteen-year-old heir apparent Arthur died in Ludlow Castle on Saturday 2 April 1502, having fallen sick in late March after attending the traditional ceremony of alms-giving to the poor on Maundy Thursday. There was no doubt about the seriousness of his affliction. A herald recorded him suffering
a most pitiful disease and sickness that with so sore and great violence had battled and driven in the singular parts of him inwards; that cruel and fervent enemy of nature, the deadly corruption, did utterly vanquish and overcome the pure … blood without manner of physical help and remedy.12
His death seems to have come like a bolt from the blue. Lady Margaret had recently bought gold damask garters as gifts for both Arthur and Henry for a total of 12s 6d from ‘Mistress Windsor’, but Arthur’s was never delivered.13 He had not even received all his wedding presents; a magnificent window in Flemish glass depicting the Crucifixion had been given by the good magistrates and burghers of Dort in Gouda (in today’s Netherlands), to be erected in Henry VII’s new chapel at Westminster, but it arrived too late for Arthur to see it.14
Based on the scant and unreliable medical evidence surviving, three causes of death appear tenable. For two of the possible diseases, Henry VII himself may have been the unwitting agent of this crushing disaster to his dynasty.
The most probable is tuberculosis – an infectious disease that became the curse of the Tudor dynasty and one which had afflicted the king himself.15 It may be that Henry VII passed it on to Arthur through the prince’s inhalation of bacillus-infected droplets of saliva or mucus after a royal sneeze. Tuberculosis can lie dormant for years before eventually endangering the victim; symptoms include a persistent cough, breathlessness, fever, weight loss and fatigue. We know that the prince developed a recurrent fever shortly before his wedding – probably caused by a chronic and lingering chest infection.16
Secondly, it is possible that he succumbed to the sudor Anglicus, the so-called English sweating sickness. Again, it is cruel irony that this disease may have been introduced into England by the French mercenary soldiers of Henry Tudor, as the scourge made its first appearance shortly after he landed with his small army at Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, on 7 August 1485 to snatch the crown from Richard III.17 Dr John Caius, who fifty years later published a study of the disease, described its effects:
It … immediately killed some in opening their windows, some in playing with children in their street doors; some in one hour, many in two it destroyed.
As it found them, so it took them, some in sleep, some in wake, some in mirth [and] some in care. Some fasting and some full, some busy and some idle and in one house, sometimes three, sometimes five, sometimes more [died] sometimes all.
Of the which, if the half in every town escaped it was thought a great favour.18
Symptoms began with a fever and a sweat, accompanied by sharp pains in the back, shoulders and head. The disease then attacked the liver and the victim became leaden-limbed and drowsy. Delirium and vomiting followed together with palpitations of the heart. Death occurred within twelve to twenty-four hours of the onset of symptoms. Most at risk from this disease – now thought to be a pulmonary infection, such as an acute viral pneumonia – were young, rich males living in towns and cities. It was thus the original ‘yuppie’ sickness.19 There were five major epidemics of the sweating sickness in this period – 1485, 1508, 1517, 1528 and 1551, so superficially it seems unlikely that Arthur was a victim of this disease, although there may have been localised outbreaks.
Thirdly, an undefined plague – almost certainly bubonic – was raging in Worcester, thirty-six miles (58.1 km) from Ludlow, and in Chester, seventy miles (112.3 km) away, around the time of his death.20 Symptoms of this included fever, headache, nausea and vomiting, diarrhoea and the telltale tender ‘buboes’, up to four inches (10 cm) in diameter, found under the arms, in the groin and on the neck of sufferers, for which the disease is named.21
On the balance of the limited evidence, it seems most likely that tuberculosis finished off Prince Arthur. Symptoms of the ‘sweating sickness’ and plague were so familiar to the contemporary chroniclers that they probably would have identified either one of these as the cause of his death.
But there is one joker in this pack of the Grim Reaper’s cards of mortality. There is hazy evidence that Arthur’s already fragile constitution may have been undermined by his over-enthusiastic performance in the marital bed – an issue that was to cast such a black shadow over the middle portion of his younger brother’s reign. More than three decades later, when the question of whether or not Arthur had consummated his marriage with Katherine of Aragon was on the prurient lips of most of England, testimony was taken from his attendants about the early love life of the newly-weds.
By favour of his father, who was steward of the king’s household, Sir Anthony Willoughby was present when Arthur went to bed on his marriage night in the palace of the Bishop of London. He swore that
in the morning, the prince … said to him: ‘Willoughby, bring me a cup of ale for I have been this night in the midst of Spain,’ and afterwards said openly, ‘Masters, it is a good pastime to have a wife.’22
These were merry, laddish words coming from a youth hitherto regarded as something of a swot – said to be ‘studious and learned beyond his years’.23 Edward Hall reports a similar brash boast, this time overheard by one of Arthur’s household chamberlains: ‘I have this night been in the midst of Spain which is a hot region and that journey makes me so dry. If you had been under that hot climate, you would have been drier than I.’ Perhaps Arthur, with all his Tudor bragging and swagger, repeated this daring bon mot to all who would listen. It must eventually have become rather tiresome coming from a fifteen year old, even if he was heir to the throne.24
Another unidentified witness waited on Arthur during his breakfast after the wedding night. ‘Sir,’ he told his master, with the leer, nudges and winks of the trusted male servant, ‘you look well upon the matter.’ But he was later warned by one of the prince’s officials, Maurice St John, a favoured great-nephew of Lady Margaret Beaufort, that
after [Arthur] had lain with the Lady Katherine at Shrovetide25 after his marriage, [he] began to decay and was never so lusty in body and courage until his death.
St John said [this] was because he lay with the Lady Katherine.26
For her part, Katherine steadfastly maintained, years later, that they had shared their marital bed for only seven nights and that ‘she [had] remained as intact and incorrupt as when she emerged from her mother’s womb’.27 So much for Arthur’s gamecock bravura.
Whatever the cause, the heir was dead and his staff had the painful duty of informing the king. Sir Richard Pole, chamberlain of Arthur’s household, sent letters off by messenger to Greenwich where the king and queen were staying.
Even riding post-haste, the courier took more than two days to reach London. With commendable sensitivity, Pole had insisted that the letters should first be seen by members of the king’s council. Ducking an unpleasant task, they immediately sent for Henry’s confessor, one of the Greenwich Friar Observants, to break the dreadful news to him.
On the Tuesday morning, ‘somewhat before the
time accustomed’, the friar knocked at the king’s bedchamber door. The attendants were instructed to leave, and in the awkward silence – Henry must have instinctively sensed imminent bad news – the Friar declared: ‘Si bona de manu dei suscipimus mala autem quare non sustineamus.’ God, he said, in His wisdom, had decided to take the king’s good son to be with Him and His divine judgement must be accepted.
Henry VII must have been left stunned and speechless by the friar’s hesitant and stumbling Latin. The contemporary account by a herald of that tragic day’s events says simply that ‘when his Grace understood these sorrowful and heavy tidings, [he] sent for the queen, saying that he and his queen would take the painful sorrows together’.28
Amid her own deep grief, Elizabeth of York (Plate 2) sought bravely to comfort her distraught husband with ‘full, great and constant comfortable words’. She told him that he should remember after God
Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII Page 7
