9. A. Wroe, Perkin (2003), 471.
10. RP VI, 278.
3
THE HEIR
THE WEDDING OF HENRY’S PARENTS was followed by scenes of popular rejoicing. ‘The people,’ Bernard André writes in his contemporary life of Henry VII, ‘constructed bonfires far and wide to show their gladness and the City of London was filled with dancing, singing and entertainment.’1 At last, and after so long, it was possible to hope for peace.
But the marriage was only the first step to the union of the roses. To complete it, the royal couple needed children: the ‘progeny of the race of kings’ to which the speaker had looked forward in his petition of 10 December 1485.
And, bearing in mind the uncertainty of the times, they needed them quickly. Here again Henry VII’s extraordinary luck held. Among his immediate predecessors, Henry VI had had to wait almost eight years for a son, and even the strapping Edward IV for six. Elizabeth of York, instead, gave Henry VII his son and heir within eight months.
He was named Arthur, and the king idolized him. Arthur was unique. Matchless. Perfect in body and mind. Nothing was too good for him, and no limit was placed on the hopes invested in him. He would be more honourably brought up than any king’s son in England before. And, in time, he would outdo them all. Never, in short, have so many eggs been placed in one basket.
In time, his father’s unapologetic favouritism towards his elder brother would be deeply invidious to Henry. But, in a backhanded way, it gave him space. He was never allowed to share Arthur’s glory. But equally, Arthur was never on his back either. Nor was his father. It was a quid pro quo that was to have profound effects for both Henry’s upbringing and his character.
All queens, of course, were expected to bear children: that – as many of Henry’s wives would find to their cost – was their job. But in 1486 the pressures on Elizabeth of York had been particularly intense, as André makes clear in his account: ‘Both men and women prayed to Almighty God that the king and queen would be favoured with offspring, and that eventually a child might be conceived and a new prince be born, so that they might heap up further joys upon their present delights.’
The prayers were answered. And sooner than anybody dared hope. For ‘the fairest queen’ became pregnant almost immediately: non multis post diebus (‘after only a few days’).
The celebrations for Elizabeth of York’s pregnancy were, André claims, almost greater than those for the wedding itself. Everyone, high and low, in court and country and church and state joined in:
Then a new happiness took over the happiest kingdom, great enjoyment filled the queen, the church experienced perfect joy, while huge excitement gripped the court and an incredible pleasure arose over the whole country.2
For the queen, no doubt, the joy was mingled with relief. But Henry VII knew nothing of such modest emotions. Instead, his forthcoming fatherhood only opened up new prospects: greater, grander even than anything yet.
The birth of his first child, the king decided, would be no ordinary affair. It would take place at Winchester. And it would invoke the atmosphere of history and romance that hung around the place. For Winchester was believed to be the site of King Arthur’s castle and capital of Camelot. After all, as Caxton had just pointed out in his new edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, published only the month before Bosworth, the Round Table itself was still there to prove it.3
Then, having been born in Arthur’s capital, the child would be christened Arthur too, and Britain’s golden age would be renewed.
It was a giddy prospect indeed. But it depended on one enormous assumption: that the child the queen was carrying was a son. Presumably the royal doctors and astrologers had declared this to be the case. And the king must have believed them. For if he were not confident that the child could be christened Arthur, what was the point of dragging the court, the heavily pregnant queen, and the whole bulky apparatus of royal ceremonial some sixty-odd miles to Winchester, over roads that had turned into muddy quagmires in the torrential autumn rains?4
It was a tremendous gamble (imagine the shame and confusion if the child had turned out to be a girl!). Yet the gamble paid off, as Henry VII’s gambles always seemed to.
But only just. The court arrived at Winchester at the beginning of September. Less than three weeks later, Elizabeth of York went into labour and the child was born in the early hours of 20 September 1486, ‘afore one o’clock after midnight’, as Lady Margaret Beaufort noted in her book of hours.5
The birth was at least a month premature.
Perhaps the queen had been shaken by the journey, in her gaily decorated but springless carriage or, when the going got really rough, in her litter slung between two horses. Or perhaps it was merely the difficulties of a first pregnancy.
* * *
But at least the child was healthy, and – above all – it was the promised boy. The Te Deum was sung in the cathedral, bonfires lit in the streets and messengers sent off with the good news to the four corners of the kingdom.6
It remained only to get the ceremonies of his baptism – dislocated by his premature birth – back on track. The main problem was the whereabouts of the intended godfather, the earl of Oxford. He was still at Lavenham, the immensely rich cloth-making town that was the jewel in the crown of the de Vere family’s principal estates in Suffolk. Lavenham was over a hundred miles from Winchester, and the roads were getting slower by the hour as the rains continued. To give Oxford time to make the journey, the christening was put back to Sunday, 24 September.
On the day appointed, the other actors assembled: the prince’s procession formed in his mother’s apartments; while the clergy and his godmother, the queen dowager Elizabeth Woodville, who had been restored to the title and lands which had been forfeit under Richard III, prepared to receive the baby in the cathedral. The earl, they were then informed, was ‘within a mile’. It was decided to wait for him.
They kept on waiting. And waiting.
Finally, after ‘three hours largely and more’, and with still no sight of Oxford, Henry VII intervened. As protocol dictated, the king was out of sight. But he was never out of touch, and, losing patience at last, he ordered the ceremonies to begin. The prince was named and baptised with a substitute godparent, Thomas Stanley, the king’s stepfather, who had been made earl of Derby as a reward for his family’s behaviour at Bosworth, as his sponsor.7
At this moment, Oxford entered. John de Vere, 13th earl of Oxford, was probably the most powerful man in England after the king; he was certainly the noblest, with an earldom going back to 1142. He had been a Lancastrian loyalist even in the dark days after the destruction of the house of Lancaster at Tewkesbury in 1471, and had been imprisoned by Edward IV. In 1484 he escaped and joined Henry Tudor in France. Almost all of his other supporters were tarnished with accommodation at the least with Edward IV; Oxford was unblemished and Henry, who trusted so few, felt he could trust him implicitly, as one ‘in whom he might repose his hope, and settle himself more safely than in any other’.8 It was a relationship that endured, and Oxford became both Henry VII’s most important military commander and – by virtue of his hereditary office of lord great chamberlain, to which he was restored – his leading courtier as well.
Oxford now assumed his intended role in the ceremonies. He ‘took the prince in his right arm’ – the arm that had fought so often for Lancaster – and presented him for his Confirmation. That done, another procession formed and the child was carried to the shrine of St Swithun, the patron saint of the cathedral, in whose honour more anthems were sung.
The adults then took refreshments – ‘spices and hypocras, with other sweet wines [in] great plenty’ – while the prince was handed back to the Lady Cecily, the queen’s eldest sister, who carried him home in triumph with ‘all the torches burning’. The procession passed through the nursery, ‘the king’s trumpets and minstrels playing on their instruments’, and brought him at last to his father and mother, who gave him
their blessing.
Arthur’s christening was the first of the many spectacular ceremonies that Henry VII used to mark each stage of the advance and consolidation of the Tudor dynasty. Like its successors, it was carefully planned, staged and recorded. It also showed Henry VII’s bold eye for theatre – and his willingness to take the risks that all great theatre involves.
Finally, and above all, its scale and ambition make clear why Henry’s own christening ceremonies at Greenwich, which were almost domestic in comparison, were so comprehensively ignored by contemporaries.
The court remained at Winchester for the next five or six weeks. Partly this was out of necessity. The queen was ill with an ‘ague’, which was almost certainly a post-partum fever following a difficult birth, and was taking time to recover. Indeed, she seems to have attributed her recovery and her child’s survival only to the attentions of Alice Massy, her obstetrix or midwife, whom she insisted on using for all her future births. There were also the formalities of her ‘churching’, or ceremonial purification from the pollution of childbirth, to go through. For most women, the church would only perform the ceremony after sixty days had elapsed from the time of delivery. For the queen this was normally abbreviated to about forty, as indeed seems to have been the case on this occasion.9
The time appears to have been put to good use as well to finalize the details of Arthur’s upbringing during his infancy – and perhaps beyond.
The basic arrangements for the upbringing of the little prince were already in place. One of the ladies who had attended the christening was ‘my lady Darcy, lady mistress’. This was Elizabeth, Lady Darcy, the widow of Sir Robert Darcy. She was the best-qualified person possible for the job, since she had fulfilled the same function, which carried overall charge of the royal nursery, for Edward IV’s eldest son, Edward.10 The substantial fee, of 40 marks, or £26.13s.4d a year, was commensurate with the responsibilities of the post.
Almost as well paid, with £20 per annum, was Arthur’s wet-nurse, Catherine Gibbs, who as was then customary suckled the boy on his mother’s behalf.11 This was double the amount that would be paid to the nurses of subsequent royal children, including Henry himself, and it was a sum which the cash-strapped exchequer of these years frequently had difficulty in raising. But Catherine became expert at extorting it. On one occasion she resorted to a sob-story. The treasurer was instructed to pay the £10 outstanding on the nail as Catherine ‘is now in Our Lady’s bonds nigh the time of her deliverance’ – in other words, she too was pregnant and near term. Assisting Catherine were Arthur’s two ‘rockers’, Agnes Butler and Evelyn Hobbes, whose job was to rock the prince in his cradle.12
No doubt Lady Darcy was the practical expert on the Yorkist nursery. But many others in Winchester for Arthur’s christening were well informed as well. Elizabeth Woodville, the queen dowager, had been instrumental in setting it up. Elizabeth of York had been on the receiving end as a conscientious eldest daughter. But most interesting is the role of John Alcock, bishop of Worcester, who had just christened Arthur ‘in pontificals’ or full priestly vestments.13
Alcock belonged to the other elite of late medieval England. Aristocrats and gentlemen, like Oxford, supplied the brawn and (occasionally) the beauty and style in public life; the brains and organization came from university-educated clergymen like Alcock.
Their origins were from almost the opposite end of the social spectrum to Oxford: they owed their position to talent and education, not pedigree and breeding, and they wielded their authority by the pen, not the sword. But, despite its very different sources, their power was commensurate with that of the titled aristocracy. They had a virtual monopoly on the two greatest offices in the council, the positions of lord chancellor and lord privy seal; they even had comparable incomes, since the richest bishoprics, like Canterbury and Winchester, which enjoyed princely revenues, were generally reserved for them.
The greatest, the richest, the most splendid of such clerical ministers was to be Henry’s own cardinal-chancellor, Thomas Wolsey, who did more, built more and impressed himself more vividly on his contemporaries than any of his predecessors.
But he was also the last – and in part for reasons that were already present in the kind of sophisticated, Latinate education which was even now being planned for Henry’s elder brother, and was in time to be enjoyed by Henry himself.
Alcock was thus part of an Indian summer. Born in about 1430, he was the son of a burgess of Hull. He received his early education at the grammar school attached to Beverley Minster, and then continued to Cambridge, where he stuck through the whole programme of degrees, from bachelor to doctor. By then he was about twenty-nine. The result, however, was anything but otherworldly. Hardly any of Alcock’s contemporaries opted for theology; instead, like him, they chose law.
The result was honed, organized, hungry minds.
But Alcock had to wait over ten years for the first crumbs of patronage. Then it fell like manna from heaven. The turning point was the crucial year 1470–71, when Alcock, then an up-and-coming lawyer, seems to have been one of the select group who showed kindness to Elizabeth Woodville and her children when they took refuge in the Westminster sanctuary. Neither Edward IV nor Elizabeth Woodville ever forgot it. In quick succession Alcock became dean of St Stephen’s, Westminster, master of the rolls or deputy chancellor, and bishop of Rochester.
This was the prelude to the decision in 1473 to give Alcock joint custody of Edward, prince of Wales and the presidency of his council at Ludlow. His co-adjutor was Elizabeth Woodville’s brother, Anthony, Earl Rivers. Rivers had ‘the guiding of our son’s person’, Alcock the responsibility for managing his household as well as presiding over his council. He had also probably had a major hand in drafting the ‘ordinances’ which laid out their joint roles.14
Understandably, in view of his closeness to the Woodvilles and Edward V, Alcock was marginalized by Richard III. But Henry VII restored him to full favour. He was acting lord chancellor at the beginning of the reign and, as a notable preacher (one sermon to the University of Cambridge lasted more than two hours), he became the principal propagandist for the new regime in the pulpit.
Now he, the former guardian of the Yorkist prince of Wales, had been chosen to name and baptize the new Tudor prince. Probably he still had records of the upbringing of Prince Edward; if not, as a seasoned administrator, he knew where to find them.
Alcock’s knowledge clearly informed Henry VII’s decisions about the rearing of his own son. But Alcock’s episcopal colleague, Peter Courtenay, bishop of Exeter, who had just confirmed Arthur in the second half of the ceremonies in the cathedral, also had an important part to play in how the new prince would be brought up.15
Courtenay’s career was a bolder, bigger version of Alcock’s. He was a cut above socially, as a member of the cadet line of the earls of Devon. He had also studied abroad, at Cologne and Padua, the latter then the most famous law school in Europe. There he became rector, and put the finances of the faculty on a sound footing. In the 1460s he had been Edward IV’s proctor or legal agent at the papal court; in the 1470s he acted as Edward’s own secretary.
Then, in 1483 he took the most important decision of his career. He joined in the risings against Richard III, and after their failure fled to join Henry Tudor in Brittany. With his position, talents and combination of top-level administrative and political experience, he immediately became one of Henry Tudor’s most influential advisers. He was with him at Bosworth, when he was described (rather strangely for a bishop) as ‘the flower of knighthood of his country’. A fortnight later he was made lord privy seal, alongside Alcock as chancellor. And he supported the new king’s right hand throughout the coronation service.16
Now, in Winchester, he was about to get his reward.
Or rather, he was about to get Winchester. William Waynflete, the scholar-bishop who had held the see for almost forty years, had died at his palace at Bishop’s Waltham, five miles to the south-east of Winc
hester, on 11 August, only three weeks before the arrival of the court in the city. Winchester was the plum of the English church, with an income of £4,000 a year – almost three times that of the Earl of Oxford, who for all the antiquity of his title had only £1,400 a year. And it had buildings to match. There was a splendid town palace, Winchester House, in Southwark on the south bank of the Thames opposite St Paul’s, and three grand country residences, apart from Bishop’s Waltham, at Farnham, Wolvesey and Esher.
The formalities of Courtenay’s ‘translation’ to Winchester, as it was known, were not completed till April 1487. But the king had probably taken the decision to appoint him on the spot. Part of the deal seems to have been that Courtenay should make Farnham Castle available as a nursery residence for Arthur.
It was ideally suited to the purpose. It was on the way back to London; it was near, but not too near, the city; it had extensive parkland; and it had recently been extended and beautified by Waynflete, who was a great builder.
The king and queen left Winchester in the third week of October, and arrived at Farnham on the twenty-sixth. Arthur, with his nurse Catherine Gibbs and his little household headed by his lady mistress, Lady Darcy, was settled into his new home, and the court continued to Greenwich to celebrate the great feasts of All Saints and Christmas. His mother visited him in January 1487 to make sure that all was well. And in February the townsmen of Farnham successfully petitioned for permission to set up a chantry or endowed chapel with a priest to pray for the king and queen and Arthur himself, who was ‘now being nursed’ in the town. The same month the king assigned 1,000 marks (£666.13s.4d) for the expenses of the household of his ‘most dear son the prince’.17 It was the kind of solitary upbringing that befitted the heir. And it was one that Henry would never experience.
But even before the final details of Arthur’s household were in place, the political settlement which had been dramatized by his christening had crumbled. One of his godparents had been the great Lancastrian stalwart, the earl of Oxford; the other was the principal survivor of the Yorkist political establishment, the queen dowager Elizabeth Woodville. This was the union of the red rose with the white as it was intended to be.
Henry Page 4
