And at Westminster on the morning of 31 January Catherine suddenly miscarried of a baby girl. According to her confessor, she had experienced no discomfort or other symptoms, ‘except that one knee pained her the night before’. The miscarriage was kept secret, the confessor continued, so that ‘no one knew about it … except the king … two Spanish women, a physician and I’. Instead of diminishing, however, Catherine’s belly remained swollen and, if anything, got bigger. This was probably the result of infection, but her physician persuaded himself that she remained pregnant with a second foetus. And, despite Catherine’s own doubts and the fact that her periods resumed, he was believed.8
The ceremonious machinery of a royal birth now moved inexorably into gear. In mid-February the Venetian ambassador ‘congratulated the king on the queen’s pregnancy’ and on the twenty-sixth a warrant was issued for the materials needed to refurbish ‘our nursery, God willing’. This was probably the very nursery in which Henry himself had been suckled. The ‘cradle of estate’, where he had once lain, was to be re-covered in crimson cloth-of-gold and the royal arms ‘amended if need be’. The customary generous supplies of pillows, sheets, counterpanes and swaddling bands were to be provided, together with beds for the wet-nurse and the two rockers, and hangings for the chamber of the lady mistress.9
Even the lady mistress was the same Elizabeth Denton who had ruled Henry’s infancy with a rod of iron – always tempered, it would seem, for her beguiling charge. For Henry retained the fondest memories of her. Many people from Henry’s youth had done well out of his accession, including his wet-nurse, Anne Lock. But few did as well as Mrs Denton. In quick succession she had been given an income, accommodation and a lifetime’s supply of wine. All were on a lavish scale: an annuity of £50, the keepership of The Coldharbour – formerly Lady Margaret Beaufort’s London residence, where Henry and his mother had first taken refuge from the threat of the Cornish rebels in 1497 – and a tun of Gascon wine a year.10
Now Henry was about to trust his first-born to her as well.
As Catherine’s due date approached, Henry became all solicitude. On 28 February, shortly before she was due to begin her formal confinement by ‘taking to her chamber’, Henry laid on a banquet in the parliament chamber at Westminster for all the foreign ambassadors then resident in his court. He led Catherine into the chamber and placed her, to all appearances in the final stages of pregnancy, on the royal throne to preside over the proceedings. Nor did his condescension stop there, as he acted every role in the lexicon of hospitality. He served as his own master of ceremonies, directing the ambassadors and ladies to their seats in person. And he revelled in playing the good host as, refusing to sit himself, he ‘walked from place to place, making cheer to the queen and the strangers’.11
No one, then or subsequently, could be more charming than Henry when he felt so inclined – or felt he had to be.
Soon after the banquet the court moved to Greenwich and the queen began her formal confinement. It was now only a matter of weeks before Catherine was due to go into labour and Henry – like many expectant fathers – flung himself into a welter of preparations. First he turned his mind to the important business of the christening. The precedents of Henry’s own birth and those of his siblings were pored over and The Ryalle Book consulted. For his child was to have an entry into the world as grand as any of his or her royal predecessors. He signed the necessary warrant on 12 March. This ordered the supply of red cloth to cover the steps of the font and ‘cypress’ to line it, just as had been done for his own christening. The font itself was to be the great silver font of Canterbury, in which the baby Henry had been plunged by Bishop Foxe, who was now his own chief minister. Finally, and with that eye for detail which was already pronounced, he ordered another six ells (seven and a half yards) of good quality linen to make ‘aprons and napkins for four gentlemen [-in-waiting] … according to the old use and custom in that case heretofore used’.12
He or one of his assistants also noticed that an item had been forgotten for the nursery. This was the canopy ‘to hang over the cradle of estate in our nursery’. Another warrant was drawn up for the delivery of the necessary materials to one of the yeomen ushers of ‘our dearest wife the queen’. It was dated at Greenwich in ‘the first year of our reign’. But the day – that all important day when Catherine would be delivered – was left blank.13
That day never came. It was not for want of waiting. For of course calculations in these matters were never precise. Thus, probably, Henry consoled himself as Catherine remained in her courtly purdah for March. And April. And on into May.
But then he snapped. He had not had sex with Catherine since she entered her darkened, tapestry hung chamber in early March and his patience was exhausted. Moreover, inside the birthing chamber – impenetrable to men – the truth was gradually dawning on the queen’s terrified entourage.
For her ‘right heavy belly’ began to go down of its own accord. Or, as her confessor (who was allowed into her chamber) put it sententiously: ‘it has pleased our Lord to be her physician in such a way that the swelling decreased’. It was no thanks to her actual physician, whose false diagnosis of a continued pregnancy after her miscarriage in January had started the whole sorry business. Or to her women, who had refused to draw the obvious conclusion from her resumed periods. Or, indeed, to Catherine herself, who had let herself be persuaded, it would seem, against her own better judgment.
Wise after the event, the newly arrived Spanish ambassador, Luis Caroz, railed at the folly of supposed experts who would ‘affirm that a menstruating woman was pregnant and … make her withdraw publicly for her delivery’.14
But that did not solve the problem of how to break the news to Henry. Finally it was probably Catherine herself who plucked up the courage. Her pregnancy had been a false one. The preparations, the warrants had been in vain. The ambassadorial congratulations rang hollow.
Henry had been misled into taking part in a very public and humiliating farce.
The preparations were stood down. The great silver font was returned to its custodians at Canterbury. And Henry was left with his thoughts.
We do not know his real reactions. His councillors may have spoken for him when they made plain they were ‘very vexed and angry’ – though, from courtesy, they protested they blamed Catherine’s women rather than the queen herself. More darkly, they also began to draw dangerous conclusions about Catherine’s infertility: murmuring that ‘since the queen is not pregnant, she is incapable of conceiving’.
On the other hand, her confessor blithely asserted that all was well and that ‘the king my lord [Henry] adores her, and her highness [Catherine] him’.
Possibly. But there was also the problem of going public with the news and what spin to put upon it. This exercised all those in the know. Ambassador Caroz first discussed it with the council. And then, in view of the delicacy of the matter, he had an audience with Henry in person. ‘I have spoken with the king’, he reported home, ‘as to what we are to say of the queen’s confinement.’ ‘They find the case so difficult’, he continued, ‘that they do not know what to determine.’15
Finally, as governments usually do in such circumstances, they decided to lie. The queen, it was blandly announced, had suffered a miscarriage. The ‘news’ was current in London in the first week of June and on the eighth the Venetian ambassador reported it in despatches: ‘The queen’, he wrote, ‘has had a miscarriage, to the great sorrow of everyone.’ ‘They are forming fresh projects,’ he added somewhat mysteriously.16
But it was not only the government which lied. So did Catherine. And to her own father, to whom she repeated the official line in a letter written in her own hand. Indeed she went further. The official communiqués seem to have left the date of the miscarriage studiously vague. But Catherine, in her letter dated 27 May, informed Ferdinand that it had happened ‘some days before’.
We can sympathize with Catherine’s motives, since she so evidently feare
d her father’s wrath. Do not be angry, she pleaded, ‘for it has been the will of God’. Whatever its motives, however, a lie is a lie.17
And one lie tends to lead to another. ‘She and the king her husband are cheerful,’ she protested to her father. In fact, they had just had their first serious quarrel.
* * *
This also had arisen out of her false pregnancy. Henry, as we have seen, had been excluded from his wife’s bed, by both etiquette and respect for her supposed condition, for nearly three months. And the strain was beginning to tell.
Enter William Compton once more, this time in the role of Leporello to Henry’s would-be Don Giovanni.
Ambassador Caroz reported the resulting imbroglio to his government in cipher and breathless haste. Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham, he explained, had two sisters, Elizabeth and Anne. Both lived in the palace as the queen’s ladies-in-waiting and both were married, Elizabeth to Robert Ratcliffe, Lord Fitzwalter, and Anne to George Hastings, Lord Hastings. Elizabeth was the elder and had long been a fixture in Henry’s life. She had been his mother’s principal attendant, and had kept in touch with Henry after Elizabeth of York’s death, when she gave him a present of ‘a pomander of gold with a red rose enamelled’. She had quickly become the favourite of Catherine of Aragon as well.18
Anne was younger, fresher and – it would seem – soon caught the eye of Henry, ‘who’, Caroz reports knowingly, ‘went after her’. Catherine’s extended lying-in provided an opportunity – and Henry’s resulting enforced abstinence from marital sex an incentive – for the affair to develop.
And, as usual, Henry turned to Compton to get him what he wanted.
* * *
Compton resorted to the go-between’s old trick of pretending to woo Anne on his own behalf. But, bearing in mind his known place in Henry’s favour, the stratagem was transparent and Elizabeth became seriously concerned at the threat to her sister’s virtue. She took her brother the duke, her husband and her brother-in-law Lord Hastings, into her confidence and sought their advice. Buckingham reacted to the disparagement of his family honour with typical choleric impetuosity. He was in Anne’s chamber at court when Compton entered to speak with her. The duke accosted him and ‘reproached [him] in many and very hard words’.
It was now Henry’s turn to lose his temper at the insult to his confidential servant and ‘he reprimanded the duke angrily’. Outraged to be upbraided by one whom he regarded as little more than a boy, Buckingham withdrew in a huff from court, while Hastings packed Anne off to a convent sixty miles away, where she was out of even the king’s reach.
Once again Henry escalated the affair. The day after Anne’s removal, he turned Elizabeth and Fitzwalter out of the palace. And he wanted to go further still. He believed that Elizabeth had other minions at court who went ‘about the palace insidiously spying out every unwatched moment in order to tell the queen’. Henry wanted to expel all these as well until, on cooler reflection, he decided that it would cause ‘too great a scandal’.
The damage was done, however, and the affair became public knowledge. As did the fact that Catherine had sided with Buckingham against her husband. ‘Afterwards’, Caroz reports, ‘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.’
Compton’s position also threatened to become an issue: Catherine ‘by no means conceals her ill-will towards Compton, and the king is very sorry for it’.19
But then there was another twist in the extraordinary tale of Catherine’s first pregnancy. Henry had continued to sleep with Catherine until the very eve of her confinement at the beginning of March. Clad only in his nightgown and shirt, he would have been escorted to the door of the queen’s chamber by Compton. Early in the marriage William Thomas, who was almost as close to Henry as Compton, would probably have played the role of escort too. But no longer. For Thomas had quickly given up his post: he is last described as a groom of the privy chamber on 17 April 1510 and had disappeared from the privy chamber list by December. Was he tired of his existence at court? Eager for the delights of life as a prosperous Welsh country gentleman?
Or did he know too much about Catherine’s first marriage with Henry’s elder brother Arthur for her to feel comfortable with his presence?20
After all, the Anne Stafford affair shows that Catherine was not shy of making her feelings known and that she could be a formidable and ruthless opponent.
* * *
She also – which mattered most of all – had luck. Her periods, which had resumed soon after her miscarriage in January, gave Caroz some concern. She does ‘not menstruate well’, he fretted, and blamed her diet. Be that as it may, and despite the infection in her uterus, she was fertile enough for Henry to impregnate her in late February or early March.
The result was bizarre: by late May, when she finally gave up on her false pregnancy, she was really pregnant for the second time.21
And this time all went smoothly. At the end of October the couple took up residence at Richmond. In November, the formal preparations for the lying-in and christening got under way and the prior of Canterbury was put on stand-by to send up the font. Towards the end of the month, Catherine began her confinement, which continued through the Christmas festivities. Then, on New Year’s Eve she went into labour and the baby was born at half past one the following morning.
It was healthy. It was a boy. It was the best New Year’s gift that Henry had ever received.
London went wild: bells were rung; bonfires lit; the streets ran with wine; thanksgiving processions of clergy wended through the City and at the Tower the gunners blasted their way through 207 pounds of gunpowder as the great cannon thundered out salute after salute.22
* * *
The christening took place on the following Sunday, 5 January. A processional way, twenty-four feet wide, was made from the hall doors to the adjacent church of the Friars Observant. The way was railed, gravelled and hung with cloth of arras, as was the church itself. The ceremony was conducted ‘with very great pomp and rejoicing’: the king of France was godfather and the Habsburg Archduchess Margaret godmother; the ambassadors of France, Spain, Venice and the papacy were in attendance and the boy was christened Henry.
That same day Henry, bursting with pride and love, issued a challenge to a celebratory tournament and got the preparations under way.23
He then went on a pilgrimage of thanksgiving to Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk. He left on the eleventh and reached the shrine shortly after the twentieth. Erasmus, Henry’s acquaintance and correspondent, visited Walsingham the following year and, no doubt, the king’s experience was much like his.
The relic of the Virgin’s milk was kept on the high altar. It was solidified, like ‘powered chalk, tempered with white of egg’, and protected by a crystal vial. The custodian, wearing a linen vestment with a stole round his neck, prostrated himself in adoration before proffering the sacred vial to be kissed. The pilgrim knelt on the lowest step of the altar and reverently touched the relic with his or her lips.
Then the custodian held out a board ‘like those used in Germany by toll collectors on bridges’. It was for a cash offering.
Henry offered £1.13s.4d.
And, just as with the devotions in the bede-roll of his youth, his act of piety gained him remission of forty days in purgatory.24
Henry was back at the Tower by 31 January 1511. By this time Catherine was ‘churched’, or ritually purified from the pollution of childbirth. She was also fully recovered from its physical aftereffects and ready to preside over the joust which Henry had prepared in her honour. These took place at Westminster on 12 and 13 February and were of unparalleled magnificence. Everything was blue velvet, damask and cloth-of-gold, and the costumes and pavilions of Henry and his three fellow challengers were covered with letters of ‘H’ and ‘K’, likewise of fine gold.
Henry ran as Coeur Loyall (‘Sir Loyal Heart’). On the first day of the to
urnament the prize was carried off by his principal aid, Sir Thomas Knyvet, who ran under the nom de guerre of Vaillaunt Desyre. However, Henry, as usual, stole the show by putting on an impromptu display of spectacular horsemanship, which left one observer in ecstasy:
No man could do better, nor sit more close nor faster, nor yet keep his stirrups more surely. For notwithstanding the horse was very courageous and excellent in leaping, turning and exceeding flinging, he [Henry] moved no more upon him than he had been holding a soft and plain trot.
But this was just the overture. When Henry came in front of the queen’s grandstand or tent, he performed another set of manoeuvres and ‘leapt and coursed the horse up and down in wonderful manner’. Finally, he turned his horse’s hooves against the massive wooden barrier or tilt which ran down the centre of the lists and ‘caused him to fling and beat the boards with his feet’. The noise was ear-splitting and ‘rebounded about the place as it had been shot of guns’.
Finally, Henry turned to the queen, ‘made a lowly obeisance [bow] and so passed in a demure manner into Westminster Hall’.
There he quickly unarmed and returned to Catherine’s grandstand, ‘where shortly after … he was seen … kissing and clipping [hugging] her in most loving manner’.25
It was the same at the end of the second day of the tournament, when Henry carried off the prize. This time, he was all chivalrous submission. He rode round the lists bareheaded at a slow, solemn trot, and each time he passed in front of the queen ‘he forgot not his humble obeisance to the erudition and learning of all well nurtured and gentle wedded men’.26
Never had Henry been so in love with Catherine as at that moment; never would he be so fully again.
* * *
That night there was a revel in the White Hall at Westminster. Henry and his fellow challengers appeared in character, with their garments covered in the gold letters ‘H’ and ‘K’ and further festooned with their noms de guerre, also in letters of gold: Henry as Coeur Loyall, Knyvet as Vaillaunt Desyre and so on.
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