Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  As Catherine progressed away from the river and into the heart of the city, the tumult of feast-day London pressed in on all sides. Lining the streets – freshly sanded for the benefit of horses and to absorb the evil-smelling mud that seeped through the cracked paving – people surged forward to get a glimpse of the cavalcade. Onlookers filled every available vantage point, leaning from windows, balanced precariously on rooftops, as dislodged tiles skittered down under slipping feet. Tapestry and arras, cloth-of-gold, satin and velvet were hung from the houses lining the route, fine drapery whipped in the autumn winds.38 Separated from the crowds by wooden barriers, members of London’s guilds stood dressed in the various ‘liveries and hoods of their manor’. Halfway up Gracechurch Street, at the road’s widest point, the second pageant soared into the air – a battlemented, turreted castle, covered with more of the dynasty’s emblems and badges and, hovering above it, a huge red dragon. Standing in the castle’s gatehouse, a man dressed as a Roman senator addressed the princess and the assembled multitudes. His name, he said, was Policy. Among the stock allegorical figures, the pageant deviser had managed to insinuate a character resembling nothing so much as one of Henry’s lawyer-counsellors who represented good and accountable government, with his ‘eye on the commonwealth’. Policy was evidently meant to send out a reassuring note to the onlooking subjects: Henry’s counsellors were not an unaccountable cabal; rather, they were tireless servants of the public interest. It was a touch typical of Henry VII – or perhaps of the reception’s co-ordinator, Richard Fox.39

  Moving slowly up Gracechurch Street, the party then turned left, down Cornhill, the city’s financial heart. The next three pageants enacted elaborate astrological variations on the marriage. As Catherine and her retinue approached, each in succession came alive: musicians playing, cogs whirring, mechanical constellations operated by costumed children puffing around treadmills. Constructed over Cornhill’s barrel-shaped conduit, the Tun, the third pageant, of the moon, was the most ingenious, extravagant and costly of the set-pieces, featuring lengthy prognostications of nuptial bliss expounded by Catherine’s ancestor, Alfonso X. But the going was so slow that the short November afternoon had already begun to wane. Having ‘well aviewed the goodly device’, the princess had to leave the orating Alfonso behind, and move on, past the Stocks Market and up the great commercial thoroughfare of Cheapside, whose goldsmiths were, according to one Italian visitor, mouth agape, more impressive than ‘all the shops in Milan, Rome, Venice and Florence put together’. Here the last three pageants were waiting, together with Henry VII and Prince Arthur, who had ‘somewhat privily and secretly’ taken a vantage point halfway up the street.40

  During the reception and wedding Henry’s carefully calibrated public appearances would present him as the wellspring of honour, justice and power, the unknowable, all-seeing sovereign who, as the Milanese ambassador Soncino nicely observed, appeared in public ‘like one at the top of a tower looking on at what is passing in the plain’.41 Henry had done exactly this at Exeter in 1497 when, in the wake of Warbeck’s failed invasion, he had received the submission of captured rebels while lodged at the treasurer’s house on the cathedral green. With half the trees on the green cut down so that he could enjoy the view, and standing at a ‘fair large’ window knocked through for the purpose, he watched, imperious, as the commons of Devon, in only their shirts and with halters round their necks, knelt with ‘lamentable cries for our grace and remission’, before lecturing them on the obedience he expected of them.42

  Now, rejecting the usual arrangement of a grandstand, he had commandeered the house of a rich London haberdasher, one of a number of wide-windowed multi-storeyed merchant houses that lined the south side of Cheapside.43 Henry’s elite security force, the three-hundred-strong yeomen of the guard, had secured the area. With their spiked, bladed halberds, and white-and-green jackets stamped with the red rose, they swarmed all over the house, taking up positions ‘in windows, leads, gutters and battlements’. Surrounded by a cluster of his close counsellors, including Arthur’s godfather the earl of Oxford and Richard Fox, Henry stood at the window in ‘open sight’, lifted above the crowds, remote, untouchable.44

  At the king’s side, the royal chronicler documenting proceedings noted the first indications of Catherine’s approach: the expectant shifting of the crowds, and the royal heralds pushing them back. Then came the young lords and their attention-seeking gallants, ‘making gambads’, pirouetting their decorated horses to shouts of approbation from the onlookers.45 Following them, surrounded by a mass of footmen, rode the animated Prince Henry and, alongside him, Catherine. A tiny, upright figure on muleback, she wore a hat of deep red, her auburn hair falling down about her shoulders. Bringing up the rear came the ladies of Queen Elizabeth’s household paired with Catherine’s. The spectacle seemed to convince even the most coolly appraising of London’s bourgeoisie, including the sceptical, ascetic young legal student Thomas More. More wrote to his former schoolmaster John Holt that everything about the reception was superb, apart from Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting who, he sneered, looked like ‘refugees from hell’ – Isabella had evidently not seen fit to prioritize Henry and Elizabeth’s pleas for comeliness. But when it came to the princess herself, More was positively dreamy: ‘Take my word for it, she thrilled the hearts of everyone; she possesses all those qualities that make for beauty in a very charming young girl. Everywhere she receives the highest of praises, but even that is inadequate.’ He concluded, though, on a slightly hesitant note: ‘I do hope this highly publicized union will prove a happy omen for England.’ It was as if, in their staggering magnificence and heaping up of favourable portents and astrological conjunctions, More felt that the festivities were somehow tempting fate.46

  The procession came to a halt in front of the house commandeered by the king, and the fifth pageant. Built over the Standard, another of London’s conduits and a notorious place of punishment, the tableau was a stylized heaven in which mellifluous choirs of angels – Cornish’s highly trained child singers – surrounded an enthroned godlike figure dressed entirely in gold. A second character dressed as a bishop, gesturing towards the onlooking Henry VII, compared him with the costumed deity: ‘Right so,’ he declaimed, ‘our sovereign lord the king/ May be resembled to the king celestial/ As well as any prince earthly now living.’ Looking from one to the other, the onlookers must have been struck by the uncanny resemblance: the costumed god of the pageant was made up to look like Henry himself. Under the king’s approving eye, the enthroned actor showered the princess with benedictions, blessing ‘the fruit of your belly’. Kingliness, as embodied by Henry VII, was next to Godliness.47

  At the top of Cheapside, Catherine reached the final pageant. The Little Conduit, in front of the church of St Michael Le Querne, marked the eastern entrance to St Paul’s churchyard. Here, the costumed figure of Honour showed Catherine that she had reached the end of her quest, indicating as he did so two vacant thrones, containing crowns and sceptres, on either side of him, awaiting the happy couple. Receiving gifts of gold and plate from London’s dignitaries, the party then progressed around the streets bounding the churchyard before entering the cathedral where, giving thanks and making offerings, Catherine was blessed by the archbishop of Canterbury. When she emerged, the procession broke up, Catherine and her retinue withdrawing to the bishop of London’s palace on the north side of St Paul’s churchyard. Prince Arthur headed southwest, where the city shelved steeply towards the river in a tangle of backstreets, to his lodgings at the Great Wardrobe, one of the inner-city royal houses.48 Prince Henry, meanwhile, overnighted at the bishop of Durham’s great house on the Strand. The various nobles, servants in tow, retired to their ‘places, lodgings and inns’ scattered throughout the city.

  The following day, Saturday, the king received the Spanish ambassadors at Baynard’s Castle, his lavishly rebuilt residence on the Thames, east of Blackfriars.49 With the two princes at his right and left, he listened as the a
mbassadors itemized the terms of the forthcoming marriage, in particular, the ‘assureness’ of Catherine’s virginity. As the afternoon wore on, Catherine was brought down the hill to Baynard’s Castle for an introduction to Queen Elizabeth, in whose frank brown-eyed gaze, cupid’s-bow mouth and strawberry-blonde hair so characteristic of the Plantagenets Catherine would have immediately seen the resemblance to the boy who had accompanied her through London’s streets the previous day. The queen and young princess immediately clicked. Formalities over, the afternoon dissolved into something altogether more relaxed: conversation flowed, unforced; Elizabeth called for ‘disports’, music and dancing. Late in the evening, ‘with torches lit to a great number’, Catherine was conveyed through the dark, silent streets back up the hill to her lodgings.50

  Mid-morning on Sunday 14 November, the gates of the bishop of London’s palace swung open. Through them, surrounded by a multitude of English and Spanish nobility and with Prince Henry at her side, Catherine emerged, a vision in white satin, Spanish style, along a wide carpet of blue cloth. She wore a hooped, pleated dress and a headdress of white silk bordered by gold and precious stones, her face veiled. Henry VII’s courtiers, meanwhile, had dressed to impress – and impressed the onlookers duly were, London’s merchants pricing everything they saw. The highlight was, predictably enough, Buckingham, whose gown, worth a staggering £1,500 – the cost of all the pageants put together – elicited gasps from the crowd. Trumpet fanfares blared out as the party paraded across the square and up the broad steps to the cathedral’s west door, where the marriage agreements, including the paperwork for the long-negotiated dowry, were exchanged between the English and Spanish dignitaries.51

  Inside, the cathedral’s cavernous interior was transformed, its walls hung with massive tapestries.52 Under its stained-glass rose window, the high altar glinted with gold plate, ornaments and relics encrusted with precious stones. And from the west door, an elevated walkway covered in fine red cloth stretched the length of cathedral, some six hundred feet, to a stage in the round where the ceremony was to take place and which created an effect ‘like unto a mountain’. Together with Queen Elizabeth, his mother Lady Margaret Beaufort and a number of his counsellors and servants, the king, who ‘would make no open show nor appearance that day’, had concealed himself in a closet adjoining the stage, reached by a door specially knocked through for the purpose. Barely visible behind the closet’s latticed windows, they stood ‘secretly to see and apperceive the form and manner of the ministration’.53

  While all eyes were on Catherine and Prince Henry as they paraded slowly down the walkway, Arthur had appeared on the great stage. There, surrounded by the archbishop of Canterbury, eighteen bishops, and attendants dressed in coloured silks and cloth-of-gold, the three children met; Henry gave up the princess to his older brother. As the three-hour-long ceremony drew to a close, the brass section, positioned high above the west door of the cathedral, struck up. The newlyweds, hand in hand, turned to north and south, presenting themselves to the multitudes packed within the cathedral. In the middle of this sea of colour, the two slight figures in white satin saw ‘nothing but faces’.

  Following a celebratory mass, and after wine and refreshments had been served, Arthur left as he had arrived: by a side entrance, to greet his new bride at the bishop of London’s palace. Catherine and Prince Henry retraced their steps down the walkway to the west door. Emerging, they were confronted by a green mountain covered in precious metals: the king’s towering monument to Tudor kingship, his contentious Rich Mount. On its summit stood three trees, against which were positioned three kings dressed in armour. In the middle, flanked by the monarchs of France – to which England, of course, still laid claim – and Spain, was King Arthur; from his tree, covered with red roses, sprang a snarling red dragon. As the couple watched, a constant stream of people filed through a gate in the surrounding picket fence to help themselves to the wine that flowed continuously and, it seemed, by magic, from a spring in the mountain’s core.54

  The wedding feast was a suitably sumptuous affair, stretching on until five in the evening and followed by drinking and entertainments. At between seven and eight o’clock Arthur was dragged away from his companions and their ‘goodly disports’ by the earl of Oxford, overseer of the nuptial arrangements. Accompanied to the bedchamber by a group of clergy and courtiers, Arthur found Catherine, surrounded by her attendants, stretched out in the carefully prepared marriage bed. After he had lain down beside her, the pair and the bed were blessed, prayers offered up, censers wafted and holy water liberally sprinkled. Then all withdrew, and the just-married teenagers were left alone.55

  The next day, Monday 15 November, everything was still. The bishop’s palace was ‘under silence’, and Catherine stayed in her chamber together with her ladies and gentlewomen; ‘no access utterly’ was to be had to her and the only person admitted was the earl of Oxford, bearing a loving note from Catherine’s new father-in-law. Earlier Arthur had, apparently, emerged from the bridal suite with a ‘good and sanguine complexion’ and an air of awkward bravado. He called one of his body servants, Anthony Willoughby, the son of Henry VII’s lord steward, to bring him a cup of ale, ‘for I have this night been in the midst of Spain’.56 On Tuesday, the 16th, Henry VII and his two sons, accompanied by five hundred members of the royal household and Catherine’s retinue, processed back to St Paul’s. The new bride was ‘secretly conveyed’ to the closet, high up in the cathedral, from where the king had scrutinized proceedings two days previously. Catherine stood alone, watching as Henry VII gave thanks that ‘this noble and excellent act’ had been brought to its most ‘laudable conclusion’.

  That afternoon, an armada of forty barges conveyed the royal party and London’s civic dignitaries some two miles downstream to Westminster Palace. Abutting the abbey, from whose sanctuary it was separated by a high wall, and the seething lanes of its cramped satellite town, the palace was prepared for a week-long programme of sporting and dramatic entertainment. Security details had searched all the tenements within the abbey grounds and Canon Row, the narrow lane whose houses gave on to the palace yard’s north wall, submitting a written report of their findings; their inhabitants had all been ordered to clean and decorate their homes. Open to the river at its southern end, the expanse of the yard had been gravelled and sanded for the sure footing of the horses; in it had been erected a temporary stadium, ready for a series of jousts. The low-slung bulk of Westminster Hall, in term-time swarming with the business of London’s law courts, stood decorated, prepared to receive the wedding party.57

  A torrential downpour having finally abated, expectant crowds thronged the palace yard. Londoners filed in, mingling with lawyers and students from the nearby inns of court, many of whom had been ordered to attend on pain of royal displeasure – and to pay a hefty 12d entrance fee into the bargain. Onlookers craned out of the overlooking houses, so many ‘that unto sight and perceiving was no thing to the eye but only visages and faces without appearance of their bodies’, straining to catch a glimpse of the Spanish princess as the royal party, some hundreds strong, took their seats in a purpose-built gallery.58 The atmosphere built to fever pitch. Trumpets announced the chief challenger, Buckingham, who emerged from Westminster Hall, fully armoured and on horseback, inside a white-and-green satin pavilion on wheels, scattered with red roses. Followed by his team, he circled the yard slowly, milking the thunderous applause, before doing obeisance to the king. Half an hour later, the five ‘defenders’ appeared through the opposite entrance: Lord William Courtenay, in blood-red plate armour, riding a red dragon led by a giant carrying a tree; the team captain, the marquis of Dorset, in a suit of coal-black armour, horsed, in a pavilion of cloth-of-gold. One of the ‘answerers’ on the opposing team, Lord Rivers, topped the lot, arriving in a ship firing cannon, ‘which made a great and an huge noise’. The Rich Mount made another appearance, this time on wheels as the earl of Essex’s ‘pavilion’; sitting atop it was a young woman i
n white, hair flowing around her shoulders. Such entrances, said an eyewitness, had not been seen ‘in very long remembrance’.59

  Poring through his big book of jousts, bought from the widow of Edward IV’s king-of-arms, Garter herald John Writhe had devised an elaborate world of stylized violence to rival the famed tournaments of the Yorkists and which bore comparison with the matchless displays of Burgundian chivalry.60 At Calais the year before, Writhe and Henry VII’s tournament-planner, Sir Richard Guildford, had been close and interested observers of Archduke Philip and his knights. Now, conjuring up a world of chivalric make-believe, dream landscapes, damsels in distress, wildmen and unicorns, the pair had created a supreme articulation of political loyalty to Henry VII. In a last-minute adjustment to the Tree of Chivalry standing in one corner of the palace yard, both teams’ escutcheons hung together in a solid expression of unity. The previous arrangement, in which the shields of the teams led by Buckingham and Suffolk were to have faced each other in aggressive opposition, would have sent out entirely the wrong signals. The inconvenient fact of Suffolk’s rebellion had been thoroughly effaced.

  Fantasy heroes within a securely Tudor universe, the combatants thundered together, ‘striking, cutting and lashing at each other … Some of their swords were broken of 2 pieces, and some other their harness [armour] was hewn off from their body.’ Guildford, the experienced referee, ensured that the violence stayed within reasonable limits; Writhe kept score. In the grandstand, Henry sat like a Solomon, watching and judging, leaning forward with an aficionado’s keenness, conversing with Guildford and sending messages of encouragement and approbation out to the nobles who jousted in his honour. Following each round, the jousters trotted up, dismounted and climbed the pavilion stairs to do obeisance. At the end of the week, in a prize-giving ceremony, the king’s blue eyes searched the faces of the participants as he congratulated them and distributed precious stones, tokens of his favour. Buckingham received a diamond of ‘great virtue and price’. Dorset, the opposing captain, was presented with a rose made of rubies inset with a diamond: the red-and-white rose was, Henry seemed to say, a highly appropriate prize for the loyal jousting of Suffolk’s replacement.61