Some time early in 1510 Katherine miscarried of a baby girl at Greenwich. The dates are confused – some reports suggest the miscarriage occurred on 31 January, but warrants dated February and March authorised payments for preparations for the birth,57 and it seems likely her miscarriage occurred much later in the spring, perhaps at the end of April.58
On 27 May Katherine told her father that she had been delivered of a still-born daughter, ‘an event which in England is considered unlucky’, and therefore she had not written sooner. She begged him ‘not to be angry with her, for it has been the will of God’. Despite this tragedy, both she and her husband remained cheerful and Katherine ‘[thanked] God for a husband such as the King of England’.
The letter then contains a bizarre request from the queen. Whilst in the agony of labour, the queen vowed to present one of her most costly headdresses to St Peter the Martyr59 (a favourite saint of the Franciscan friars). Katherine gave it to one of her longest-serving servants of the chamber, a niece of Pedro Morales (her treasurer),60 to deliver to the prioress of the nunnery of the Virgin and St Francis, at Aldgate, on the eastern edge of the City of London.61 But Morales retained both the queen’s letter and the headdress and declared before a public notary that the latter belonged to his daughter. Katherine asked Ferdinand to reprimand her treasurer ‘for such want of respect’.62
Fernández, the queen’s confessor, reported that the queen had ‘brought forth prematurely a daughter without any pain except that one knee pained her the night before’. The matter had been kept a closely guarded secret except for ‘the king, my lord, two Spanish women, a physician and I’. Even Caroz, the Spanish ambassador, had been forbidden by Katherine to speak of the matter.63
The most startling news followed: ‘The physician said that her highness remained pregnant of another child and it was believed and kept secret.’ The queen tried to conceal it but
… her belly became swollen so much as never was seen in a pregnant woman.
Her highness denies it to all the world and to the king but to me she has [said] she is since three months pregnant …
All the physicians know and affirm it and a Spanish woman who is in her private chamber told me the same thing from secret signs that they have.
Her highness is very healthy and is the most beautiful creature in the world with the greatest gaiety and contentment that ever was.
The king, my lord, adores her and her highness him.64
Then the swelling decreased – it was probably a post-natal infection of the womb – and Katherine’s menstrual periods resumed. Although the pretence of a new pregnancy was maintained for a while, these were false hopes, born of wishful thinking.
Now the lie of a fresh pregnancy – if lie it was – had to be confronted. Caroz complained bitterly about those who suggested
… that a menstruating woman was pregnant and … make her withdraw publicly for her delivery.
The privy councillors of the king are very vexed and angry at this mistake – as they have said to me – although from courtesy they give the blame to the bedchamber women who gave the queen to understand that she was pregnant when she was not.
I have asked them … [that] they and the king should comfort and console the queen who might perhaps be sad and disconsolate as she had desired to gladden the king and the people with a prince.
I know that many of the privy councillors and other persons are murmuring and they presume that since the queen is not pregnant, she is incapable of conceiving …
I have spoken with the king as to what we are to say of the queen’s confinement. They find the case so difficult that they do not know what to determine.65
Caroz was painfully aware of more bad news for Katherine, probably leaked to him by Francesca de Carceres, one of the queen’s former attendants.66
While she was sequestered in Greenwich for her confinement, her husband’s eye had begun to rove salaciously over the coquettish young women surrounding him at court.
Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, had two sisters who served as ladies-in-waiting to the queen. Elizabeth, the elder, was married to Robert Radcliffe, Lord Fitzwalter, and twenty-seven-year-old Anne was the newly-wed wife of George, Lord Hastings.67 ‘The one of them,’ Caroz reported to Miguel de Almazan, First Secretary of State to Ferdinand, ‘is the favourite of the queen and the other … is much liked by the king, who went after her.’68 It is all too easy to speculate that Henry’s affair with Anne lay behind the decision to create her younger brother, Henry Lord Stafford, Earl of Wiltshire on 3 February.69
Another rumour circulating at court was that William Compton, who had happily recovered from his jousting accident, was involved in an illicit relationship with Lady Hastings. It seems more likely that as Henry’s close confidant, Compton’s liaison was merely a smokescreen to conceal the king’s own dalliance with the stunningly beautiful dark-haired girl. Unfortunately, her elder sister got wind of events and consulted both Buckingham and Anne’s husband as to the proper course of action – perhaps Elizabeth Fitzwalter also sneakily told Katherine of her husband’s infidelity. Caroz excitedly related its denouement:
Whilst the duke was in the private apartment of his sister who was suspected [of intriguing] with the king, Compton came there to talk with her.
[He] saw the duke, who intercepted him, quarrelled with him and the end of it was that he was severely reproached in many and very hard words.
Buckingham heatedly told the courtier: ‘Women of the Stafford family are no game for Comptons,’ and added tellingly: ‘no, nor for Tudors either!’ No doubt the duke’s angry words were backed up with his fists – such was his reputation for violent anger. Caroz takes up the story again:
The king was so offended at this that he reprimanded the duke angrily.
The same night the duke left the palace and did not enter or return there for some days.
At the same time, the husband of the lady went away, carried her off and placed her in a convent sixty miles [96.5 km] off that no one may see her.70
Henry was beside himself with fury – probably more than anything at almost getting caught in flagrante delicto – and immediately threw Elizabeth and her husband out of the palace precincts. He suspected there were some around him who had been spying on him on Katherine’s behalf and ‘the king would have liked to turn all of them out, only that it has appeared to him too great a scandal’.
It was Henry and Katherine’s first major marital row, with her reputedly weeping and ranting at her husband.71
Caroz declared that ‘almost all the court knew that the queen had been vexed with the king and the king with her and thus this storm went on between them’. She also frequently demonstrated her own fiery Iberian brand of ill-will towards Henry’s favourite William Compton.
Fernández, the queen’s confessor, steadfastly denied anything had happened and the ambassador branded him ‘stubborn’ and ‘deranged’. Moreover, ‘as the English ladies of this household, as well as the Spanish who are near the queen, are rather simple, I fear lest the queen should behave ill in this ado’.72
The sound and fury of that ‘ado’ may explain Henry’s half-hearted, if not somewhat callous, letter to Ferdinand after his wife’s miscarriage – written the same day as Katherine revealed to him her sad news. The king explained that he had not ‘written of late because nothing has happened worth telling’. He and his queen ‘are perfectly happy and his kingdom enjoys undisturbed tranquillity’. Henry wished ‘like a good son’ for more news from his ‘good father’ in Spain. It was composed sulkily, out of duty, almost as a pro forma communication written by a guilty son to a stern father-in-law.
Katherine’s loss of her daughter came hard on the heels of a new treaty of alliance and friendship with France,73 which some saw as a double blow to Spain’s cause at the court of Henry VIII.
Caroz believed that the king’s ministers were in the pay of France and he begged Henry to tell him ‘which of them are the most trustworthy,
because suspicions are rife in all quarters’. The king pondered for a moment and then replied: ‘Do not speak with anyone except with the Bishop of Winchester [Richard Fox, Lord Privy Seal] about French affairs.’
The Spaniard asked the king: ‘Do you confide in him?’ and Henry replied, ‘Yes, at my risk. Here in England they think he is a fox and such is his name.’
Caroz claimed that when the English learnt ‘how arrogantly the French had behaved … and how they threatened and boasted on account of the treaty they had concluded with England, they were offended’. But Henry’s ministers believed they had no choice but to sign the peace treaty with France ‘because the king being young and not having a son, it would have been dangerous to engage in a war with France’. However, court gossip suggested that the king was against signing the treaty, but that
some of his most intimate councillors insisted so much … that he at last gave way. The Duke of Buckingham and many others are mortal enemies of the French. It is due to their influence that the treaty was not concerted in a more offensive manner.
Caroz quickly sought a parallel alliance with Spain, asking Henry: ‘Sire, why do we not conclude a closer union … ?’ The king said he wished for nothing better and ordered ‘three or four’ councillors to be delegated to negotiate a new treaty.74
The envoy shrewdly observed that Henry ‘does not like to occupy himself much with business’. It was always difficult to capture and hold his attention in dealing with important state papers, unless they concerned an issue that interested him. The king’s preferred time for processing documents was during Mass, before the consecration of the Host, and just before bed. Most were read out to him and decisions transacted by word of mouth. ‘The king,’ complained his counsellors, ‘is young and does not care to occupy himself with anything but the pleasures of his age. All other affairs he neglects.’75
The ambassador enlarged on this theme in a second dispatch to Spain, written immediately afterwards:
The king amuses himself almost every day of the week with running the ring, and with jousts and tournaments on foot, in which one single person fights with an appointed adversary.
Two days in the week are consecrated to this kind of tournament, which is to continue till the Feast of St John. The combatants are clad in breastplates, and wear a particular kind of helmet. They use lances of fourteen hands’-breadth[s] long, with blunt iron points.
They throw these lances at one another [sic] and fight afterwards with two-handed swords, each of the combatants dealing twelve strokes.
They are separated from one another by a barrier which reaches up to the girdle, in order to prevent them from seizing one another and wrestling.
He added:
There are many young men who excel in this kind of warfare, but the most conspicuous amongst them all, the most assiduous, and the most interested in the combats is the king himself, who never omits being present at them.76
There were other entertainments. May Day was a red-letter occasion in the court calendar. On 1 May 1510, Henry, ‘being young and willing not to be idle, rose in the morning very early to fetch May or green boughs’. He had dressed himself ‘all fresh and richly apparelled’ and clothed his Privy Chamber officials in white satin and his guard in white sarsenet (a lightweight silk) especially for the occasion.
And so went every man with his bow and arrow, shooting [in] the wood and so repaired again to the court, every man with a bough [twig] in his cap.
At [Henry’s] returning, many hearing of his going ‘a-Maying’ were desirous to see him shoot, for at that time his grace shot as strong and as great a length as any of his guard.
Along came an archer boasting of his prowess and shot an arrow – ‘a very good shot and well towards his mark, whereof not only his grace but all other persons greatly marvelled’.77
Henry had won back his happiness and marital bliss. Katherine swiftly became pregnant again and their progress along the Thames Valley that summer, beginning at Windsor, was unmarred by strife within the royal household.
The king exercised daily ‘in shooting, singing, dancing [and] wrestling’. He also satisfied his love of music – playing the recorder, flute and virginals, and in writing songs and ballads. Being a pious man, he also composed two ‘goodly Masses, every one of them in five parts, which were sung oftentimes in his chapel and afterwards in diverse other places’. The household stayed at the manor of Woking where there were more jousts and tournaments before they returned to Greenwich in October.
The king, not minded to see young gentlemen inexpert in martial feats, caused a place to be prepared within the park of Greenwich for the queen and [her] ladies to stand and see the fight with battle-axes that should be done there.
And the king himself armed fought with one Gyot, a gentleman of [Germany], a tall man and a good man [with] arms.
[Afterwards] Gyot fought with Sir Edward Howard, which Gyot was by him stricken to the ground.
The next day, the royal party moved on to the Tower and fearing there had been bad blood between the combatants of the previous day, Henry donated two hundred marks (£123) for a cheerful banquet for them at the Fishmongers’ Hall in London’s Thames Street.78
While all this merriment was going on, the question remained of the fate of Henry VII’s disgraced councillors, Edmund Dudley and Sir Richard Empson, imprisoned at the end of April the year before. Dudley was unaware of Parliament’s failure to pass the bill of attainder against him in January and made an unsuccessful attempt to escape from the Tower.
Dudley was accused of attempting to seize Henry and his council by force and of calling on knights, gentlemen and other friends to come to London ‘in warlike guise’. In his will, he complained of standing ‘attainted of high treason by an untrue verdict lately passed against me in the Guildhall’ on 18 July 1509.79 In a petition to his late ministerial colleague Bishop Fox, he described himself as ‘the most wretched and sorrowful creature, being a dead man by the king’s laws’ and appended a veritable litany of his extortion during the later years of Henry VII’s reign. For example, there was the case of Robert Hawkins, a London haberdasher, who paid one hundred marks (£67) in January 1505 for a pardon for the death of a man ‘upon [the] surmise of a lewd fellow’. Then there was Sir Henry Vernon, ‘who was sore dealt with’ – being fined £100 and £800 in recognisances for involvement in his son’s abduction of a widow, Margaret Kebell, and his marriage to her against her will in July 1507.80
Dudley was beheaded on Tower Hill on 17 August 1510 and buried in the Church of the Blackfriars. His wealth at his death was estimated at £333 in cash and goods worth £5,000.81 In November 1511 his widow Elizabeth married Arthur Plantagenet, the bastard son of Edward IV, who was created Viscount Lisle in 1523.
Empson was taken from the Tower to Northampton Castle82 and, a lawyer to the last, he defended himself before a special court on 1 October 1509, accused of treason. Although the charge was probably false, he should have realised he was wasting his breath. He was beheaded at Tower Hill with Dudley and left only lands worth £200 – £300 and goods worth £100.
Henry VIII had promised his subjects instant justice. Two scapegoats had been slaughtered to appease public opinion. It was time to redress their legal wrongs. In July 1509, commissions of oyer et terminer83 were set up to inquire into the injustices perpetrated by Empson and Dudley. During the first year of the new reign, at least forty-five of these councillors’ recognisances were cancelled and a further one hundred and thirty nullified over the following five years. Fifty-one of them specifically stated that the recognisances had been ‘unjustly extorted’.84
Beyond the final bloody resolution of these domestic issues and Henry’s constant jousting and revelry, there were grimmer signs that the king was preparing for war to further his burgeoning appetite for military glory. In October 1509, he authorised a warrant to pay £1,000 for metal to be used for ‘making certain of our artillery and ordnance’85 and that December, Venetian merchants in
London reported ruefully that the price of Cornish tin had rocketed because Henry had bought ‘a great quantity to make one hundred pieces of artillery’. Furthermore, the king ‘wished to launch and arm four ships which he has been building in [South]ampton’.86
Early in the New Year, 1510, Thomas Spinelly, Henry’s agent in the Low Countries, signed a covenant with the famous Flemish gunmaker Hans Poppenruyter of Malines to deliver forty-eight canon to fire lead or iron shot weighing between thirty-five and forty pounds (16 – 18 kg).87 These were delivered between December that year and June 1512, each one marked with a name redolent of patriotism or heraldry: ‘Rose’, ‘Portcullis’, ‘York’, ‘Elephant’, ‘Dragon’, Lizard’, ‘Scorpion’ or the more descriptive ‘Smite’.88
Margaret, Duchess of Savoy and Regent of the Netherlands, pledged that the artillery would be made ‘as cheap for the King of England as for the Prince of Castile’ and had helpfully seized a consignment of artillery already completed for King James IV of Scotland. Spinelly asked that 8,000 or 10,000 tons of tin should be sent to him to make the gun metal, ‘as the tin of England is better and cheaper than foreign tin’.89
Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII Page 17
