It lasted for less than six months.
On 2 February 1487, Henry celebrated the feast of the purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, colloquially known as Candlemas because of the lavish deployment of candles in the ritual, at his favourite palace of Sheen. Candlemas was one of the ‘days of estate’ or unusual ceremony at court. Large numbers of nobles were in attendance on such occasions, and now Henry took advantage of the fact to call a ‘great council’. A ‘great council’ was, in effect, a parliament without the commons, and this one had more impact, both on the country and on Henry’s family, than most parliaments.
The background was a sudden escalation of Yorkist opposition. This had never entirely died away, but now it took on disturbing echoes of Henry Tudor’s own successful campaign for the throne. An impostor appeared in Ireland, and was successfully passed off as a Yorkist prince. Survivors of Richard III’s regime offered support in England, and the Duchess Margaret in the Netherlands gave refuge and help to Yorkist exiles, just as Brittany had done to Lancastrian émigrés a few years earlier.
The great council agreed a series of counter measures. Most dramatic was the decision to strip Elizabeth Woodville of her recently regranted dower lands. These were given instead to her daughter the queen, while Elizabeth Woodville herself withdrew from court to live in retirement at St Saviour’s Abbey, Bermondsey, on a comfortable pension.
Did Henry VII really fear that Elizabeth Woodville might join in the developing Yorkist conspiracy? That she was on the point of turning against her own daughter and grandson, to whom she had just stood as sponsor at his christening? It seems hard to believe. On the other hand, he may have simply decided it was better to be safe than sorry.
Whatever the case, the effect was the same. With Elizabeth Woodville’s retirement, followed by her death in 1492, Lady Margaret Beaufort emerged as the unchallenged matriarch of her son’s court. Henry would have only one grandmother. Bearing in mind Lady Margaret’s imperious character, he was probably grateful.
* * *
The great council had another important result: it flushed out John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln. Lincoln was the son and heir of the duke of Suffolk; he was also, through his mother Elizabeth Plantagenet, the nephew of both Edward IV and Richard III. He was especially close to the latter, who may have nominated him as his heir. Despite this, Lincoln had accommodated himself to the new Tudor world. He presented his aunt, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, with the towel after her ceremonial washing at Arthur’s christening, and a few months later he was one of the ornaments of the court at the celebration of All Saints’ Day at Greenwich.
He had attended the great council too. But the Yorkist revival had tested his allegiance too far. Immediately after the council, he absconded from court and fled to join the other Yorkist émigrés in the Netherlands.
It was the beginning of a deadly feud between the Tudors and the de la Poles that only ended thirty years later. Part of the trouble was that the de la Poles proved only too adept at copying Henry Tudor’s tactics in exile. Lincoln raised a force of professional German troops in the Netherlands, sailed with it to Ireland, crowned the impostor as Edward VI and then invaded England at the head of an army swollen with Irish soldiers.
For the second time in two years, Henry VII had to prepare to fight for his crown in battle.
He took as his base the mighty fortress of Kenilworth in Warwickshire. Thence, in May 1486 he wrote to the earl of Ormond, the queen’s lord chamberlain, to order him to escort Elizabeth of York and Lady Margaret Beaufort, who were staying at Chertsey Abbey in Surrey, to join him.18 A month later, the king and queen separated once more. Henry VII moved east to Coventry as he prepared to close in on the rebels. But the queen, accompanied by Peter Courtenay, bishop of Winchester, hastened back to be with her son Arthur at Farnham, where she arrived on 11 June. It also looks as though a detachment of the household was sent ahead to Romsey Abbey, eight miles north of the Solent, to prepare an escape route abroad for the queen and prince if things went badly.19
It proved an unnecessary precaution. Henry met the rebels at Stoke, near Newark in Nottinghamshire, on 16 June. The royal army was much larger and the Yorkists were crushed. Lincoln was killed in the battle, while the pretender was captured, uncrowned and, in an act of ironical mercy, sent to spend the rest of his life in the royal kitchens.
Stoke had confirmed the result of Bosworth, and Henry’s crown sat that much more firmly on his brow. To celebrate he had a new one made – a ‘rich crown of gold set with full many rich precious stones’ – which he wore for the first time on 6 January 1488, the feast of the Epiphany and the most important of the four ‘crown-wearing’ days at court.20
This, almost certainly, was the diadem later known as the Imperial Crown. In the fullness of time, the Imperial Crown would become the supreme symbol of Henry VIII’s own monarchy and of his revolutionary claims to authority over church as well as state. For his father, on the other hand, it was much more straightforward: a second victory in battle had made his claim to the throne more solid, and he would wear a crown of unusual size, weight and richness to prove it.
Another royal visit to Arthur’s nursery at Farnham followed in March 1489. By this time Elizabeth of York was pregnant again. Once more the birth and baptism would be made to symbolize Tudor power, this time in a setting that was even more magnificent than that chosen for Arthur: Westminster.
Since the thirteenth century the palace of Westminster had been the principal seat of the English monarchy – being, at one and the same time, the king’s main residence and the headquarters of royal government, where parliament, the law courts and the exchequer all sat.
The royal birth was to be only one element in an autumn of ceremony. On 14 October, parliament, which had been prorogued on 23 February, reassembled. A meeting of parliament brought together everybody who mattered in Tudor England: nobles and knights, clergy and layfolk. The opportunity was too good to miss. Not only would the lords and commons provide a ready-made audience for the birth of the second royal child, they would also, the king decided, dignify the creation of his first-born as prince of Wales.
The decision to invest the three-year-old Arthur was taken soon after the assembly of parliament; the date was set for St Andrew’s Eve (29 November), and summonses were sent out. It is clear that this date was expected to coincide quite closely with the birth of the king and queen’s second child. But was it assumed that the birth and baptism would take place before the creation? Or afterwards?21
No one, however, would have been bold enough to predict what actually happened – unless, perhaps, one of Henry VII’s astrologers had worked his apparent magic again.
On Halloween, 31 October, the queen commenced her confinement with the ceremony known as ‘taking to her chamber’. ‘The greater part of the nobles of the realm present at this parliament’ were in attendance. A month later, on 29 November, the rituals of Arthur’s creation began. First he was to be made a knight of the Bath. The ceremonies started ‘when it was night’ and lasted to the following morning.
But, just as the ceremonies got under way, the queen went into labour. As the king was giving his son ‘the advertisement [or solemn admonition] of the order of knighthood’, the chapel royal were reading psalms for Elizabeth of York’s safe delivery. At a quarter past nine that night a healthy daughter was born.
The following morning, Arthur was created prince of Wales in the parliament chamber, and immediately afterwards his sister was baptised in the adjacent church of St Margaret’s Westminster. She was named Margaret after Lady Margaret Beaufort, who stood as her godmother.
After the christening, the infant Margaret was carried back in triumph to the palace, ‘with noise of trumpets … [and] with Christ’s blessing’.22 And indeed God (or the stars) seemed to be on the side of the Tudors: the double family event was a powerful signal of their strengthening grip on the throne; it also meant that the first two pieces on the dynastic chessboard were in place.
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It remained to be seen how much room there would be for the third child, Henry, whose entry into the world – so understated in comparison with the ceremonies for Arthur and Margaret – followed eighteen months later in June 1491.
Notes - CHAPTER 3: THE HEIR
1. Memorials, 39.
2. Loc. cit.
3. For all this, see D. Starkey, ‘King Henry and King Arthur’ in J. P. Carley and F. Riddy, eds, Arthurian Literature,16 (Cambridge, 1998), 171–96, pp. 177–8.
4. Collectanea IV, 204, 206.
5. Beaufort Hours, 279.
6. Collectanea IV, 204.
7. Ibid., 206.
8. Vergil A, 208.
9. Ibid., 207; BL Add. MS 4617, fo. 186; Staniland, ‘Royal Entry’, 307 n. 60.
10. Materials II, 349, 459; BL Add. MS 4617, fo. 202; CPR Edward IV, Edward V, Richard III (1476–85), p. 241.
11. Materials II, 298, 343, 394, 404, 437, 553, 556.
12. Materials II, 343, 349, 370, 459; BL Add. MS 4617, fo. 205.
13. OxfordDNB, ‘Alcock’.
14. N. Orme, ‘The Education of Edward IV’, HR 57 (1984), 119–30, 126–30.
15. OxfordDNB, ‘Courtenay’.
16. N. Pronay and J. Cox, eds, The Crowland Chronicle Continuations: 1459–1486 (1986), 181; W. Jerdan, ed., Rutland Papers CS old series 21 (1842), 10.
17. M. Condon, ‘Itinerary’ (unpublished); CPR Henry VIII I (1485–94), 152; Materials II, 115.
18. Original Letters, 1st s. I, 18–19 (misdated to the later crisis of 1492).
19. Collectanea IV, 212; Condon, ‘Itinerary’.
20. Collectanea IV, 236.
21. Ibid., 249–57.
22. Collectanea IV, 249–54.
4
INFANCY
IMMEDIATELY AFTER HIS BIRTH AND CHRISTENING, Henry, like his elder siblings and indeed almost all elite children from the dawn of time to the beginning of the twentieth century, was handed over to be suckled by his wet-nurse. Her name was Anne Uxbridge, and for the first two years or so of his life she was the person closest to Henry. She would have acted as his surrogate mother emotionally as well as physically, and his very survival depended on her good health and assiduity.
Unfortunately, despite her importance to Henry, almost nothing is known about her. We are even ignorant of her maiden name. She had married into a family of minor Sussex gentry, and within a few years would be widowed and remarried to Walter Luke. Assisting Anne were Henry’s two ‘rockers’, Margaret Draughton and Frideswide Puttenham. Theirs was a merely menial duty, and they were paid only a third as much as Anne Uxbridge: £3.6s.8d a year as against £10 for Henry’s nurse.1
But, menial or not, at least one of them was to remain around long enough to become a fixture in Henry’s boyhood and youth.
These staffing arrangements were more or less identical to those for Henry’s elder siblings, Arthur and Margaret. And much the same physical provisions would have been made for Henry as well. These are described in great detail in The Ryalle Book.2 The royal child was to have a nursery apartment consisting of two main interconnecting rooms – an inner or sleeping chamber and an outer or receiving chamber – and smaller service rooms. Dominating both principal chambers were Henry’s cradles, known respectively as the ‘great’ and ‘little’ cradles.
The ‘little cradle’ stood in the inner or sleeping chamber of Henry’s two-room apartment. It was made of painted and gilded wood, and was just under four feet long. There were four silver-gilt pommels, one at each corner, and two similar pommels on top of the U-shaped frame in which the body of the cradle swung. The bedding consisted of a mattress, sheets, pillows and a rich counterpane of cloth-of-gold furred with ermine. Sensibly, two sets of each were provided. There were also five ‘swathing’ bands, each with its silver buckle, to hold the child in place and, it was thought, encourage him to grow straight and strong. Over the cradle hung a ‘sparver’ or canopy, while a traverse, or curtain, could be drawn round it.
And that was the little cradle! The ‘great cradle of estate’, which stood in the outer or receiving chamber, more than lived up to its name. It was a third larger than the other, and covered in cloth-of-gold: the royal arms were placed at its head, rich carpets surrounded it on the floor and its cloth-of-gold canopy was fringed in silk and suspended from a silver-gilt boss.
These features – the cloth-of-gold, canopy and carpets – were the essential elements of the chair of estate, or throne, which stood in the Presence Chamber of Henry’s father and mother. Even when empty, etiquette dictated that the chair be treated with the same respect as though the sovereign or consort sat in it. The same went for Henry’s cradle of estate: gentlemen doffed their hats and bowed; ladies curtsied. And when Henry lay there the bows and curtsies would have been extra deep. Henry might not have been born to a throne. But he was swaddled in the infant equivalent of one.
The equipment of the smaller service rooms of the nursery apartment was more practical, and took account of the fact that the occupant of the nursery was a baby as well as a prince, with the mundane need of all babies for washing, bathing and feeding. There were ‘two great basins of pewter for the laundry in the nursery’, a ‘chafer’ (to heat water) and a brass basin in which to wash the child, and a liquid-and stain-proof ‘cushion of leather, made like a carving cushion, for the nurse’, on which Anne Uxbridge sat while breast-feeding Henry.3
Such an infancy – with its wet-nurse and rockers, its cloth-of-gold and ermine, its rituals and deference – seems almost impossibly strange. But then it was par for the royal course: it was neither peculiar to Henry, nor can it have contributed much to what would make him distinctive.
For that we need to look elsewhere, to aspects of Henry’s upbringing that were less bound by rules and conventions. Should he, for instance, be brought up with his elder brother? Or his sister? The choice was a real one, since separate establishments already existed for the two older children.
Arthur, as we have seen, had had his own independent princely household from the earliest days of his infancy. For the first two years or more of his life, it had been based at the bishop of Winchester’s castle-palace at Farnham, Surrey. A year or two later, by the time of Arthur’s creation as prince of Wales, it seems to have moved a score or two miles east and to have been situated in or near Ashford in Kent.4
Even less is known about the location of Margaret’s much smaller nursery establishment. But it seems a safe bet that it moved from palace to palace with her mother, Elizabeth of York, who normally followed a much less hectic itinerary than her husband, the king. This meant that Margaret was living at Greenwich at the time of her little brother Henry’s birth elsewhere in the palace. As she was only eighteen months old herself, she still had her wet-nurse, Alice Davy, as well as her rockers, Ann Mayland, Margery Gower and Alice Bywymble.5
At some point in the latter half of 1491, Margaret was weaned and her nurse, Alice Davy, paid off. This still left her with her three rockers, who were duly paid their half-year wages of £1.13s.4d on 31 December. But the ‘warrant’, or instruction to pay their wages, also lists Henry’s own nursery establishment, headed by Nurse Uxbridge. A similar joint warrant for both Henry and Margaret’s servants was issued a half-year later, in July 1492.6
What was going on? Henry, it seems clear, had been moved in at birth with his sister Margaret. They always kept their separate rooms and, to begin with, their staffs also retained their distinct identities. But the move towards a collective nursery had begun.
It accelerated in the course of the year. By early July 1492 Henry had a younger sister as well. His mother began her fourth confinement at Sheen (which Henry’s father was later to rename Richmond) in early June. Shortly after, Henry’s maternal grandmother, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, who had been forced into a discontented retirement at Bermondsey Abbey in 1487, died on 8 June. Because of her condition, Elizabeth of York was unable to attend the funeral. Her new daughter, born on 2 July, was christened Elizabeth,
after both her mother and her grandmother. She also seems to have inherited the Woodville good looks.7
Elizabeth joined Henry and Margaret in the new collective nursery, and a warrant was issued to pay the salaries of all three groups of attendants. First to be named was Cecily Burbage, ‘nurse to our right dearly beloved daughter the Lady Elizabeth’, who enjoyed the accustomed £10 per annum; then came the remaining ‘servants attending upon our right dearly well-beloved children, the Lord Henry and the Ladies Margaret and Elizabeth’.8
Henry, as the male, came first. But he was outnumbered, as he was to remain for all his boyhood, by his sisters.
The name of one royal child is, of course, conspicuous by its absence from these warrants: Henry’s elder brother, Arthur, prince of Wales. He, it seems clear, was still being brought up elsewhere and alone. Quite where at this point we have no idea. But the uncertainty vanishes with the other great event of 1492: Henry VII’s campaign against France.
To go to war with France was the natural destiny for a late medieval English king. When it came Henry’s own turn, he would embrace it with enthusiasm. His father, however, did so hesitantly and reluctantly. He knew the reality of war in a way his son never would – and, as a usurper who had won his crown on the field, he was all too aware of the risks of battle as well. Go, however, Henry VII finally did, though he put off embarking till October, when the campaigning season had at most only a few more weeks to run.
Henry, who was barely eighteen months old, was of course far too young to understand anything of this. But he could not escape its consequences. Indeed, the war and its aftermath turned out to be the dominant event of his childhood, creating a poisonous web of intrigue and danger of which he found himself the unwitting centre.
Henry Page 5
