Tudor_Passion. Manipulation. Murder. the Story of England's Most Notorious Royal Family
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TUDOR
ALSO BY LEANDA DE LISLE
After Elizabeth: How James King of Scots won the Crown of England in 1603
The Sisters who would be Queen: The Tragedy of Mary, Katherine and Lady Jane Grey
TUDOR
Passion. Manipulation. Murder.
The Story of England’s
Most Notorious Royal Family
LEANDA
DE LISLE
PUBLICAFFAIRS
New York
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Chatto & Windus.
Published in 2013 in the United States by PublicAffairs™, a Member of the Perseus Books Group
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2013 by Leanda de Lisle.
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Typeset in Arno Pro by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
Library of Congress Control Number: 201394541
ISBN 978-1-61039-364-5 (EB)
First Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In memory of Eric Ives
Contents
List of Illustrations
Map
Family trees
The Past
The Family
Introduction
Part One
THE COMING OF THE TUDORS:
A MOTHER’S LOVE
1.An Ordinary Man
2.A Child Bride
3.A Prisoner, Honourably Brought up
4.The Wheel of Fortune
5.Enter Richard III
6.The Princes in the Tower
7.The Exile
8.Bosworth
9.The Rose and the Passion
10.Securing the Succession
11.The Lost Prince
12.Punishment
13.Death and Judgement
14.Exit Margaret Beaufort
Part Two
INHERITANCE:
THE LEGACY OF ARTHUR
15.The Elder Sister: Margaret, Queen of Scots
16.The Younger Sister: Mary, The French Queen
17.A Family Reunion and a Royal Rival
18.Enter Anne Boleyn
19.A Marriage on Trial
20.The Return of Margaret Douglas
21.The Terror Begins
22.The Fall of Anne Boleyn
23.Love and Death
24.Three Wives
25.The Last Years of Henry VIII
26.Elizabeth in Danger
27.Mary in Danger
28.The Last Tudor King
Part Three
SETTING SUN:
THE TUDOR QUEENS
29.Nine Days
30.Revolt
31.Marriage and Sons
32.A Flickering Light
33.A Married Man
34.Dangerous Cousins
35.Royal Prisoners
36.Murder in the Family
37.Exit Margaret Douglas
38.The Virgin Queen
39.The Daughter of Debate
40.The Armada
41.Setting Sun
42.The Hollow Crown
Epilogue
APPENDICES
1.What happened to the body of James IV?
2.The Mysterious Quarrel between Henry VIII and Margaret Douglas
3.Guildford and Jane Dudley
4.The Myth of Frances Brandon the Child Abuser
5.The Obscure Margaret Clifford, Heir to the Throne 1578–96
Author’s Note and Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
List of Illustrations
PAGE
1:Fall of the Angels, fifteenth century (Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ms Douce, 134. fol 98).
2a:The Marriage of Henry V and Catharine de Valois, Jean Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, France (Calais), 1490, and England, before 1494 (© The British Library Board, Royal 20 E VI f9v).
2b:Henry VI, rood screen, Barton Turf Church, Norfolk (© Barton Turf PCC).
3a:Portrait of Henry VII as a young man, unknown French artist (The Art Archive/Musée Calvert/Avignon Gianni Dagli Orti).
3b:Tomb effigy of Margaret Beaufort, Pietro Torrigiano, Westminster Abbey (Werner Forman Archive/The Bridgeman Art Library).
3c:Margaret Beaufort’s Book of Hours, Bruges and London (?), 1401–1415 (© The British Library Board, Royal 2 A XVIII f13v).
4a:Richard III, British school, 1520 (Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013).
4b:The Princes in the Tower, James Northcote (Private Collection/Photo © Christie’s Images/The Bridgeman Art Library).
4c:Silver gilt livery badge, Richard III’s emblem, found at Chiddingly, East Sussex (© The Trustees of the British Museum).
5a:Shakespeare window at Southwark Cathedral, Christopher Webb, 1954 (Reproduced by kind permission of The Chapter of Southwark Cathedral).
5b:Allegorical poem celebrating the House of Tudor as depicted in a Dutch illuminated manuscript of motets, 1516 (© The British Library Board, Royal 11 E XI f.2).
5c:Round Table, Great Hall, Winchester Castle, c.1290 (By kind permission of The Great Hall, Winchester © Hampshire County Council).
6a:Elizabeth of York, unknown artist, c. 1500 (© National Portrait Gallery, London).
6b:Painted funeral effigy of Henry VII, Westminster Abbey (© Dean and Chapter of Westminster).
7a:Portrait of Henry VIII in a girdle book, c.1540 (© The British Library Board).
7b:Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots, with her first husband, James IV of Scots, in the Seton Armorial (Acc. 9309, f.18. By kind permission of Sir Francis Ogilvy and the National Library of Scotland).
7c:Mary Tudor, the French Queen (Bibliothèque Municipale Méjanes, Aix en Provence, Ms. 4428. Rés.ms.20).
8:Copy of The Whitehall Mural, George Vertue, 1737, after Hans Holbein the Younger, 1537. (Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013).
9:The Family of Henry VIII – Henry, Jane Seymour, Mary, Elizabeth and Edward – British school, c.1545 (Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013).
10a:Catherine of Aragon, unknown artist, c.1520 (By permission of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Church Commissioners).
10b:Ring with a portrait of Anne Boleyn (© The Chequers Trust).
10c:Jane Seymour, Hans Holbein, 1536–7 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).
10d:Anne of Cleves, Bartel Bruyen the Elder (The President and Fellows of St. John’s College, Oxford).
10e:Portrait of a lady, perhaps Katherine Howard, Hans Holbein the Younger, c.1540 (Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013).
10f:Catherine Parr, attributed to Master John, c.1545 (© National Portrait Gallery, London).
11a:Mary I, Master John, 1544 (© National Portrait Gallery, London).
11b:Elizabeth I when a Princess, attributed to William Scrots, c.1546 (Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013).
; 11c:Edward VI as a Child, Hans Holkein the Younger, probably 1538 (© NGA Images, Washington, D.C.).
12a:Edward VI, attributed to William Scrots, before 1547 (Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013).
12b:The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, Paul Delaroche, 1833 (© National Gallery, London).
12c:Mary I, Anthonis Mor, 1554 (© Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado).
13a:Queen Elizabeth I, ‘The Rainbow Portrait’, Isaac Oliver, c.1600 (Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library).
13b:Portrait miniature of Lady Katherine Seymour, née Grey, holding her infant son, attributed to Lievine Teerlink, c.1562 (© Belvoir Castle, Leicestershire, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library).
14a:The Somerley portrait, originally identified as Lady Jane Grey, perhaps Margaret Douglas, c. 1530s (Used by permission, Somerley Estate, and J. Stephan Edwards).
14b:Tomb of Margaret Douglas, with kneeling images of her four children, Westminster Abbey, 1578 (Werner Forman Archive/The Bridgeman Art Library).
15a:Mary, Queen of Scots, Nicholas Hilliard, 1579 (Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013).
15b:Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, and his brother Charles Stuart, Earl of Lennox, Hans Eworth, 1563 (Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013).
15c:James VI of Scotland, aged twenty, Falkland Palace (© National Trust for Scotland Images).
15d:Lady Arbella Stuart aged 23 months, anon, 1577 (© National Trust Images/John Hammond).
16:Genealogical chart tracing the Tudor roots of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her son James VI of Scotland and I of England c.1603 (Parham Park, Nr Pulborough, West Sussex, UK/Photo © Mark Fiennes/The Bridgeman Art Library).
The Past: The Houses of Lancaster and York
The Family: The Descendants of Henry VII
Introduction
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
RICHARD II ACT 3, SCENE 2
In fifteenth-century France it was believed that the English bore the mark of Cain for their habit of killing their kings.1 Before the slaughter of Richard III in 1485, when the Tudor crown was won on the battlefield of Bosworth, a series of English kings had been deposed and then died or disappeared in mysterious circumstances that century. The overthrow of the first of these, Richard II, in 1399, had brought a long-standing element of instability to the monarchy.
At that time, the paternal ancestors of the Tudors were modest landowners in north Wales – and even this status was lost the following year. In 1400 they joined a Welsh rebellion against Richard II’s heir, the usurper Henry IV, first king of the House of Lancaster. The family was ruined after the rebellion was crushed, but eventually a child of the youngest son left Wales with his son to seek a better life in England. It was this man, Owen Tudor, who was to give the Tudor dynasty its name. Looking back, Owen’s life is that of a modern-day hero: a common man who lived against convention, often thumbed his nose at authority, and died, bravely, with a joke on his lips. Owen, however, is lost to the family story in histories of the Tudors that so often begin at Bosworth in 1485. So is the remarkable life of Owen’s daughter-in-law, Lady Margaret Beaufort, whose descent from the House of Lancaster provided the basis for her son Henry Tudor’s royal claim. Indeed his reign, as Henry VII, rarely merits more than a chapter or two before these Tudor histories propel us towards Henry VIII and the ‘divorce’ from Katherine of Aragon. Written by the children of the Reformation, the Reformation has become where the story of the ‘real’ Tudors begins; but the Tudors were the children of an earlier period, and their preoccupations and myths were rooted in that past.
The famous mystery of the disappearance of the princes in the Tower in 1483, which turned Henry Tudor from a helpless exile into Richard III’s rival overnight, becomes less mysterious when it is considered in the light of the culture and beliefs of the fifteenth century; the life of Margaret Beaufort also emerges in a more sympathetic light once we have recalibrated our perspective, and the actions of Henry VIII and his children can likewise be much better understood. England was not predominantly Protestant until very late in the Tudor period, and habits of thought were still shaped by England’s long, and recent, Catholic past. Similarly, while the Tudors are often recalled in terms of a historical enmity with Spain, this too is history written with hindsight: the Armada did not take place until a generation after Elizabeth became queen. It was memories of the Hundred Years War with France that remained strong, and although the war that began with Edward III laying claim to the French throne had ended in 1453, over thirty years before Bosworth, it was to have a lasting impact on England’s political character.
The English had not needed French land, as the country was under-populated after the Black Death. Successive English kings had been obliged to persuade their subjects to come into partnership with them to help achieve their ambitions for the French throne. The result was that in England military service was offered, not assumed, and royal revenue was a matter of negotiation, not of taxation imposed on the realm. English kings were, in practical terms, dependent on obedience freely given, and that had to be earned. They had certain duties, such as ensuring peace, prosperity, harmony and justice (if a crown was taken from an expected heir or an incumbent monarch, the perceived ability to restore harmony within the kingdom was particularly important) and kings were also supposed to maintain, or even increase, their landed inheritance. England’s empire in France had reached its zenith under Henry IV’s son, Henry V, and his son Henry VI was crowned as a boy King of France as well as England. But then he lost the empire he had inherited. The humiliation of the final defeat at French hands in 1453 was not something England had recovered from even a century later, which is why the Tudors were devastated by the loss of Calais. It was the last remnant of a once great empire.
In England the loss of France in 1453 was followed by eighteen years of sporadic but violent struggle as the rival royal House of York fought for supremacy over Henry VI and the House of Lancaster. This was the period into which the first Tudor king, Henry VII, was born. It was still remembered in the reign of his grandson with horror as a time when ‘the nobles as well as the common people were into two parts divided, to the destruction of many a man, and to the great ruin and decay of this region’.2 It was the promise of peace, and the healing of old wounds, that was the raison d’être of the Tudor dynasty. The Pope himself praised Henry’s marriage to Elizabeth of York in 1486 as marking the conciliation of the royal houses. This was symbolised in the union rose of red (for Henry VII and Lancaster) and white (for York). Although Henry VII denied he owed any of his royal right to his marriage and faced further opposition from within the House of York, the union rose became an immensely popular image with artists and poets in the sixteenth century.
The key importance of the royal lines of Lancaster and York that stretched back long before Henry VII, and which had nothing to do with his non-royal Tudor ancestors, has inspired the recent assertion that the Tudor kings and queens did not see themselves as Tudors at all, but as individual monarchs sprung from the ancient royal house, and that the use of terms such as ‘the Tudor age’ only creates a false separation from a hypothetical Middle Ages.3 This is an important reminder that the Tudors did not exist in a time bubble, yet it is not the full story. It was well understood in 1603 that the Stuarts were a break from the family which had preceded them, and if Henry VII and his descendants did not see themselves exactly as a dynasty – a term not then used to describe an English royal line – they had a palpable sense of family.4 It is there in Henry VII’s tomb in the Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey, where he lies with his mother, his wife and three crowned Tudor grandchildren; it is also there in the Holbein mural commissioned by Henry VIII of the king with his pare
nts and his son’s late mother. The Tudors believed they were building on the past to create something different – and better – even if they differed on how.
The struggle of Henry VII and his heirs to secure the line of succession, and the hopes, loves and losses of the claimants – which dominated and shaped the history of the Tudor family and their times – are the focus of this book. The universal appeal of the Tudors also lies in the family stories: of a mother’s love for her son, of the husband who kills his wives, of siblings who betray one another, of reckless love affairs, of rival cousins, of an old spinster whose heirs hope to hurry her to her end. ‘I am Richard II,’ as the last of the Tudors joked bitterly, ‘know ye not that?’5
Part One
THE COMING OF THE TUDORS: A MOTHER’S LOVE
Henry Tudor, son of Edmund Tudor, son of Owen Tudor, who of his ambitious and insatiable covertise encroaches and usurps upon him the name and title of royal estate of this Realm of England whereunto he has no manner, interest, right, title or colour, as every man well knows.
RICHARD III PROCLAMATION, 23 JUNE 1485
1
AN ORDINARY MAN
ON 8 FEBRUARY 1437 A ROYAL FUNERAL PROCESSION WOUND through the streets of London. At its heart was a hearse pulled by horses and bearing a queen’s coffin. It was draped with red cloth of gold stitched with golden flowers. On top lay her effigy carved in wood and dressed in a mantle of purple satin.1 The head, resting on a velvet cushion, bore a crown of silver gilt, while the face was painted to look as the lovely Catherine of Valois had in life, the eyes blue and the lips red. Real light-brown hair was dressed above delicately carved ears, and the arms, crossing the body, embraced a sceptre, the insignia of her royal rank.
At Westminster the coffin was carried into the abbey under a canopy of black velvet hung with bells that tinkled as it moved.2 Following a requiem Mass, Catherine was buried in the Lady Chapel, so called because it was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Her tomb had been built close to that of her first husband, Henry V, the great victor of Agincourt. His successes would be remembered in song and tales of chivalric romance for generations. In 1420, as conqueror of France, he had been recognised as heir to Catherine’s father, the French king Charles VI, with their marriage sealing the treaty and the union of the crowns. But though it proved happy, their marriage was as short-lived as the peace. Catherine of Valois had been Queen of England for only eighteen months when Henry V died on campaign in France, leaving her a widow aged twenty, with their son, Henry VI, a mere eight months old.