Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII

by Robert Hutchinson

  Eventually the new Pope got around to the question of Henry and Katherine’s marriage and dictated a one-page aide-memoire immediately after Christmas 1503 summarising his initial reactions:

  We have been informed that the Princess Katherine of Spain had contracted a marriage with Arthur, late Prince of Wales, and that this marriage has, perhaps, been consummated.

  Notwithstanding this, in his quality as the Head of the Church, [the Pope] authorises Henry Prince of Wales and the Princess Katherine to contract a lawful marriage.70

  In the sixteenth century, the Vatican’s civil service was notorious for its snail-like progress in processing paperwork, or indeed arriving at any kind of decision. To the clerks, bureaucracy was a creed almost as fervently followed as their devotion to the Catholic faith. The all-important process of unhurried ‘mature consideration’ was always the order of the day. The long-desired formal dispensation, with its weighty lead papal seal, or bulla, was frustratingly slow to arrive in both England and Spain. The following year, on 6 July, Julius wrote to Henry VII, regretting the delay.

  We never intended to withhold the dispensation and all that has been said to the contrary is an invention of ill-intentioned persons.

  It is true [there have been delays] to dispense with the obstacles to the marriage … but this was done only from the wish to consider the case more maturely.

  The document was to be handed over to Robert Sherborne, Dean of St Paul’s and the English ambassador to the papal court:

  There could not be a safer person to whom to entrust it and at the same time the life of that excellent man would be preserved by a journey to England, for a longer stay in Rome would prove fatal to him.71

  Julius pointed out, a little primly, that there was absolutely no need to thank him ‘as the Pope cannot be otherwise than gracious and benevolent’.72

  Despite these august promises, nothing arrived.

  Ferdinand, Duke de Estrada, the Spanish ambassador in London, was in abject despair: ‘I had expected the brief of the Pope containing the dispensation would have come a long while ago,’ he told Isabella. ‘As it has not come, doubts have arisen whether the dispensation will be given and a [papal] brief even seems to confirm these doubts.’ He told the English king that if it did not arrive by the end of August 1504, ‘it would be clear that the Pope did not like to give it’.73

  On 28 November, Henry VII wrote to Julius, expressing some barely restrained exasperation:

  We had written to Pope Alexander VI and Pope Pius III, asking them to grant the dispensation necessary for the marriage …

  Both these Popes, your immediate predecessors, had received our demands so favourably that the dispensation would have been given long ago if they had not so suddenly died.

  We have repeated our demands afterwards, very often, in our letters and by our ambassadors.

  Julius, Henry reminded the Pope, had promised ‘in different letters and by word of mouth’ to send the dispensation to England with Robert Sherborne, but the envoy had returned empty-handed. ‘It seems,’ added the king with some asperity, ‘as if nothing at all has been done in Rome in this matter.’ He repeated his earnest prayers that permission for the marriage be granted ‘as soon as possible’ and the papal Bull be delivered ‘at once to the English ambassadors who are remaining at Rome’.74

  Back in London, Katherine meanwhile had fallen ill, suffering from a malarial fever and frequent stomach cramps. Whether her constitution had been weakened by worries over the Vatican’s procrastination and her own future must remain a matter for conjecture. On 4 August 1504, Henry VII wrote to her in oily tones:

  As you were not well when we left Greenwich, the time which will have passed before we receive good news from you will in any case seem too long.

  We love you as our own daughter.

  We send one of our most trusty servants not only to visit you but also to do anything for you that may be desirable with respect to your health or that may give you some pleasure.75

  After a brief improvement, Katherine suffered a relapse. The Spanish ambassador reported to Queen Isabella that the illness

  seems sometimes serious, for the Princess has no appetite and her complexion has changed completely … [She] has had at intervals a bad cold and cough. The physicians have twice purged her and twice attempted to bleed her [in the arm and in the ankle] but no blood came. She desires very much that the operation be repeated, being persuaded that if she were bled, she would be well directly.76

  It is likely that Katherine was not only suffering from anaemia but was also born with fragile veins, which went into spasm as the surgeon wielded his scalpel – hence the lack of blood.77

  To compound all her troubles, there were quarrels within her largely Spanish household at her lonely home in the Bishop of Ely’s residence, Durham House off The Strand, between the City of London and Westminster.78

  Henry VII was now her paymaster, having refused to refund the first portion of her dowry for her marriage with Arthur. She had become a pawn in his diplomatic games, granting her money for her living expenses only when he needed Spanish political support. He brusquely rejected her pleas to settle the strife amongst her servants, pointing out that they were beyond his jurisdiction.79

  In Spain, her mother Isabella was dying. A copy of the dispensation was delivered to her on her deathbed, as some kind of papal send-off on her journey to heaven. It arrived just in time: on 24 November 1504 she was dead. Her eldest surviving daughter Juana, as heir-apparent, became Queen of Castile. She was the wife of Archduke Philip, Duke of Burgundy, the son of Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor. Unfortunately, she was also mad – she suffered from schizophrenia – and Ferdinand moved swiftly to retain control.

  At last, in March 1505, Henry VII heard that the original dispensation was on its way to England. Silvestro de’ Gigli, Bishop of Worcester, reported from Rome that it had

  pleased his Holiness to command him to go to England with the original Bull of the dispensation for the marriage.

  It had grieved his Holiness to learn that copies had been sent from Spain to England of the Bull, which under seal of secrecy, had been sent to Queen Isabella only for her consolation when on her deathbed.

  The bishop was to set out on his journey ‘within a few days’.80

  But Henry VII had grown tired of waiting. He needed to put pressure on the Spanish to speed payment of the second instalment of Katherine’s marriage dowry. Perhaps William Warham, the new Archbishop of Canterbury and the king’s Lord Chancellor, who harboured serious doubts about the wisdom of the marriage, suggested a dramatic new tactic. The king, after his customary cautious consideration, issued a new command to his son and heir.

  On 27 June 1505, the eve of his fourteenth birthday, his son made his ‘protestation’ – his firm renouncement – of his marriage with Katherine. It was very much a covert, hole-in-the-corner affair. The prince swore a statement before Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester and Lord Privy Seal; Giles, Lord Daubeny, Lord Chamberlain;81 Thomas Ruthal, the king’s secretary; and James Read, a public notary, in a bizarre formal ceremony hidden away in a cellar below the eastern end of Richmond Palace. After he appended his signature in Latin – ‘Henricum Walliæ Principeu’ – he read out the document, declaring that

  … whereas I being under age was married to the Princess Katherine, yet now coming to be of age, I do not confirm that marriage but retract and annul it and will not proceed in it, but intend in full form of law to void it and break it off which I do freely and without compulsion.82

  Katherine, penniless, lonely and frequently ill, knew nothing of this repudiation by her husband-to-be. In November, Henry VII stopped paying her the parsimonious monthly allowance of £100 for her frugal existence at Durham House.

  Her fate seemed entirely hopeless.

  4

  KING IN WAITING

  ‘It is quite wonderful how much the King likes the Prince of Wales. He has good reason to do so, for the prince deserves
all love. It is not only from love that the king takes the prince with him: he wishes to improve him.’

  Ferdinand, Duke de Estrada, to Queen Isabella, London, 10 August 1504.1

  With just one healthy heir left alive, the old distressing doubts about the future of the Tudor dynasty crept back to dog Henry VII and haunt his every waking hour. He had fought off so many challenges to his possession of the English crown. Now, in the evening of his troubled reign, would his hopes and dreams come to naught?

  The widower king had two clear courses of action open to him to finally banish his fears.

  He could marry again and produce more sons, as an insurance against Prince Henry dying and thus snuffing out the precious and precarious Tudor succession. Time was moving rapidly against him: the average life expectancy of a male in England in the early sixteenth century was only about forty. The king was already in his mid-forties and not enjoying the rudest health.

  Henry VII should also neutralise the outstanding Yorkist pretender, Edmund de la Pole, Sixth Earl of Suffolk,2 and a ‘cunning’ nobleman who was ‘bold, impetuous and readily roused to anger’.3 Suffolk’s elder brother John, Earl of Lincoln, was killed in open rebellion at the Battle of Stoke Field in 1487 and his cousin Edward, Earl of Warwick, had been executed twelve years later by Henry VII. Suffolk, resentful and aggrieved, posed a disquieting dormant threat to the Tudors as the thorny ‘White Rose of York’, around whom disaffected subjects might rally.

  Suffolk had fled England in July 1499 after he killed a commoner in a mad moment of passion during a brawl and was accused of homicide.4 But the earl had returned voluntarily, was fined £1,000 in exchange for a pardon and then attempted to claw his way back into royal favour. He witnessed the king’s confirmation of the marriage treaty of Arthur and Katherine at Canterbury on 5 May 1500 and was due to take a starring role in the celebratory jousts that followed their carefully planned wedding in November 1501. Having heard that the Emperor Maximilian, King of the Romans, was no friend of Henry VII’s, Suffolk again quit the shores of England that August, heavily in debt, but intent on seeking imperial assistance in reclaiming the throne for the Yorkist cause. The earl was accompanied in his flight by his younger brother Richard, but oddly left behind in London another sibling, William. The king ‘was greatly disturbed [and] regretted that he had spared him on the first occasion and began to fear fresh upheavals’, according to Vergil.5

  A round-up of Yorkist sympathisers was not a comfortable option whilst the celebrations of the Prince of Wales’ marriage were being so sumptuously staged in London to showcase the Tudor dynasty. So Henry VII, fighting back his eagerness to act, had to wait until the first Sunday in Lent, 13 February 1502, to arrest Suffolk’s near relations and friends. Heading the list of the usual suspects was, naturally, William de la Pole. But they also included the courtier Sir William Courtenay, eldest son of the Earl of Devonshire, and Sir John Wyndham, who fought for Henry at Stoke Field and had been knighted afterwards for his loyalty. All were charged with complicity in Suffolk’s treason and held in the Tower in the custody of the ambitious Welshman Sir Hugh Vaughan, who was responsible for the detention of royal prisoners there.6

  Already imprisoned behind its walls was Sir James Tyrell, governor of the castle of Guisnes in the English territory (or ‘pale’) in the hinterland of Calais, who had unwisely sheltered Suffolk on his first panicky excursion abroad and had been tricked into returning to London. Tyrell was a man of evil repute: he was the knight who supposedly had been ordered by Richard III to murder the two princes in the Tower in 1483.7 His death – and eternal silence – would be doubly expedient to Henry VII, who may have known more about the ramifications of the princes’ disappearance than was politically safe. Tyrell and Wyndham were executed on 6 May – the former suspiciously not being allowed to speak on the Tower Hill scaffold – and the two Williams, de la Pole and Courtenay, were imprisoned at the king’s pleasure.8

  Suffolk himself, aside from being outlawed on 26 December 1502, was seemingly beyond Henry’s vengeful reach in Aix-la-Chapelle (present-day Aachen in Germany), although the king managed to convince Pope Alexander VI to place the errant earl under the fearsome papal ban of anathema, which included all who supported his cause.9 However, Maximilian proved less than a loyal and dependable ally to Suffolk. Instead of the pledged assistance to overthrow the Tudors, his bellicosity towards Henry VII had melted away at the first whiff of a generous bribe. The spendthrift and always penniless King of the Romans promised that July no longer to harbour any English rebels; a guarantee made in return for £10,000 of Henry’s precious English gold. In modern spending terms, this is equivalent to £4.5 million – suggestive of just how much the king wanted Suffolk safely in his clutches.

  Despite this generous enticement, the earl was left unmolested to plan his increasingly unlikely invasion of England, at the same time building up substantial debts. Just before Easter 1504, Suffolk and his followers left Aix, leaving his brother Richard as a hostage to his creditors. While en route to Friesland and the hoped-for protection of the irascible George ‘the Bearded’, Duke of Saxony, the earl was imprisoned in Hattem Castle, near Roermond (in today’s Netherlands), by Charles of Egmont, Duke of Gueldres. Back in Westminster, an overjoyed English king began negotiations with Archduke Philip of Burgundy, who held sway over the Low Countries, to return the traitor Suffolk to his power.10

  Henry VII meanwhile also turned his attention to finding himself a new bedmate. After the shameful, half-hearted suggestion of marrying his daughter-in-law Katherine, the king’s prime choice was the recently widowed Queen Joan of Naples, the twenty-seven-year-old niece of Ferdinand of Spain.11 He sent three trusty envoys to Valencia in 1505, armed with detailed, if not prurient, questions about her physical appearance and – being thrifty, if not sometimes niggardly – detailed instructions to assess her financial prospects. Even today, many of the twenty-four questions posed by Henry VII appear breathtakingly impertinent, if not injudicious, and the ambassadors’ answers equally forthright:

  Note well her eyes, brows, teeth and lips – The eyes of the queen be of colour brown, somewhat greyish and her brows of a brown hair and very small like a wire of hair …

  Mark her breasts, whether they be big or small – The queen’s breasts be somewhat great and full [but] they were trussed … high, which causes her grace to seem much the fuller.

  Mark whether there appear any hair about her lips or not – As far as we can perceive and see, the queen has no hair about her lips or mouth.

  Approach as near to her mouth as they honestly may … that they may feel the condition of her breath, whether it be sweet or not – We could feel no savour of any spices … and we think by her complexion and of her mouth that the queen is like to be of a sweet savour and well aired.

  Inquire whether she be a great feeder or drinker . . . The queen eats well her meat twice a day and her grace drinks not often … most commonly water and sometimes that water is boiled with cinnamon and sometimes she drinks hippocras,12 but not often.13

  If all this smacks of being something of a cattle market, this was what the royal marriage stakes were like in sixteenth-century Europe. As far as Joan was concerned, it was a case of so far, so good. The brown-haired queen was attractive, physically well endowed and happily entirely free of halitosis. Furthermore, she did not pig herself at mealtimes with food or even alcohol, so she might even retain her voluptuous figure. But was all this enough to capture the capricious fancy of the aging English king?

  In potential royal wedlock, as in politics and the all-important state of his exchequer, Henry VII was as careful and cautious as ever. Despite the favourable replies and enthusiasm of his envoys, he swiftly abandoned Joan as a potential wife14 after he discovered that her marriage jointure15 in Naples, worth 30,000 ducats (about £14,000) had been summarily confiscated. Moreover, Ferdinand had married Germaine de Foix, the red-haired niece of the French king, Louis XII, in 1505, so his erstwhile friend had become a trifl
e suspect.

  Marriages were much on Henry VII’s agenda. At long last, his delicate eldest daughter Margaret, now aged just over thirteen, was judged mature and fit enough to travel to Scotland and have her marriage to James IV solemnised and then consummated. In preparation for her new life, Henry ordered ‘certain jewels, plate and other stuff for the Queen of Scots as well as for the king’s own use’, paying out the very large sum of £16,000 (more than £7 million at today’s prices) on 23 June 1503.16 Escorted by a huge retinue of English lords and ladies, led by Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, the Lord Treasurer, Margaret left Richmond Palace on 2 July for the slow, stately progress to Edinburgh, via her grandmother’s house at Collyweston. Prince Henry may have been secretly pleased to see his elder sister depart out of his life: some claimed he threw a raucous tantrum after his discovery that as Queen of Scots, Margaret would enjoy precedence over him during court ceremonies.

  After crossing the Scottish border at Berwick, she was met by her husband ‘and the flower of Scotland’ at the small village of Lamberton Kirk and formally delivered up to James IV by the gorgeously dressed Algernon Percy, Fifth Earl of Northumberland.17 Margaret was married on 8 August in the chapel of Holyrood House, Edinburgh, with Surrey giving away the bride who was stunningly dressed in a gown of cloth of gold.18