Almost three years after Philip’s shipwreck, the Christmas celebrations at court in 1508 saw the betrothal confirmed in a binding ceremony at Richmond. The lovely twelve-year-old Mary Tudor spoke her vows ‘perfectly and distinctly in the French tongue . . . without any bashing of countenance, stop or interruption’. But it was Mary’s strapping seventeen-year-old brother, Prince Henry, who drew the most attention. ‘There is no finer prince in all the world’, a Spaniard thought: he was ‘gigantic’.14 The young prince was surrounded with admiring young courtiers looking to the future, as Henry VII was increasingly consumed by poor health.
The long, wavy brown hair Henry VII had as a young man had grown thin and white, his pale complexion had yellowed, and his expensive black clothes hung on his withered frame as bleak as a winter’s night. Margaret Beaufort spent as much time as she could in the palaces of the south-east to remain close to her son. Her small, wimpled figure was seen often at his side, and when she was away her letters lavished affection on a man whose youthful loneliness returned as a widower. She called him ‘my dear heart’, ‘my very joy’, ‘my own sweet and most dear king’, and despite her age continued to give him practical, political help. In the East Midlands, based at Collyweston, Margaret Beaufort presided over a regional court, something no woman in living memory had ever done or would do again for a further hundred years.15 Its scope was wide and included investigations of treasonable intent, suits delegated from the king’s council, and even matters that would normally have been handled in the ecclesiastic courts, such as the case of a priest accused of baptising a cat. Such work helped spread the load of the growing burden borne by those few councillors Henry trusted.
A few weeks after the lavish wedding banquets for Mary and Charles were over, King Henry fell seriously ill. The symptoms were those he had suffered every spring for the past three years. He had a debilitating cough and an agonising infection in his throat; only this year, by the time Lent began, Henry knew he was dying and faced his last opportunity to demonstrate true repentance for his sins.
There was a story, often told in sermons, of a ghostly knight on a black horse who had appeared to a city official. The knight, breathing smoke, was dressed in burning sheepskins, and round his neck he carried a heavy weight of earth. He explained ‘this horse . . . bears me to the pain of hell; for I died and made no restitution of my wrongs. I was shriven and was sorry for my sin, but I would not restore the harm I did, and therefore I am damned.’ The burning sheepskins were shorn off sheep he had taken from a poor widow and the earth was the land he had stolen.16 King Henry did not want to face such a fate. He promised that henceforth he would give promotions in the church only to those who were ‘virtuous and well learned’, and agreed to a general pardon of the people: the fines would end.
In March 1509 new lodgings were hurriedly created at Richmond Palace to house Margaret Beaufort’s servants so she could better look after her dying son. Her hands, now cramped with arthritis, were so painful that she would sometimes cry out ‘Oh blessed Jesus help me!’ But to watch her son suffer was much worse. The dying king sobbed as he reflected on the lives he had ruined. His last agonies began at about 10 p.m. on Friday 20 April and lasted twenty-seven hours, but finally he was anointed with the oil of extreme unction: the seventh and last sacrament. This had the power to revive his spiritual health even as his body died. It brought him a sense of peace before he breathed his last at eleven o’clock on Saturday 21 April.
Immediately the grief-wracked Margaret had to prepare to usher in her grandson’s reign. With the king’s death kept secret she organised a meeting with key councillors and her co-executors of his will, to take place at the Garter ceremonies three days later. Margaret had first seen the ceremonies of the Garter as a girl aged nine. She was now a member of the Order – the last woman to be so before Queen Alexandra four centuries later. Come St George’s Day – the feast day of the Order – the meeting of executors took place and her grandson, who was just two months shy of his eighteenth birthday, was informed of their next moves. Like his father, Henry VIII trusted Margaret’s loyalty completely.
Late that night Henry VII’s death was announced to the court and public. It emerged that a general pardon was to be issued decreeing that all debts to the Crown were cleared immediately. Convenient scapegoats were also being found for the late king’s unpopular actions. Amongst them were Henry VII’s tax collector, Edmund Dudley, and an equally efficient individual called Richard Empson. They had run what amounted to a gigantic protection racket in London, and their arrests – and later executions – were greeted with celebration. ‘The people’, the Spanish ambassador reported, ‘are very happy, and few tears are being shed for Henry VII. Instead people are as joyful as if they had been released from prison.’17
For two weeks, Henry VII’s body remained at Richmond Palace. The coffin was then placed on a chariot beneath his effigy ‘crowned and richly appareled in his parliament robe, bearing in his right hand a sceptre and in his left a ball of gold’.18 Seven great horses, trapped in black velvet bearing the royal arms, drew the chariot through the streets towards St Paul’s. It was a vast procession with torchbearers and prelates singing the office for the dead; the household officers, servants and other mourners took the numbers to 2,000 people. These crowds swelled as the procession reached St George’s Fields near Southwark where an enormous group of civic dignitaries and religious fraternities joined them, as did representatives from Portugal, Spain, France, Venice and Florence.
St Paul’s was the great church where Henry VII had placed his banners after Bosworth, and Margaret Beaufort’s confessor, John Fisher, had been chosen to deliver the obituary sermon here. If the king were still alive and suffering, ‘many a one that is here present now would pretend a great pity and tenderness’, the bishop noted, and urged them to be faithful servants still, and aid the king’s soul on its journey from purgatory to heaven by praying for his soul.19 Fisher claimed Henry had asked for 10,000 Masses to aid his journey. In fact, in accordance with French and Breton tradition, Henry VII’s will had instituted far more than that, with money lavished on daily Masses in perpetuity, as well as gifts for churches and charitable works.20
At last, the procession moved on to Westminster Abbey where the coffin was taken to the Lady Chapel. There, massive wax tapers weighing 1,200 pounds were burning as Henry was lowered into his tomb to rest alongside his beloved wife, so ‘pretty, chaste and fruitful’. As the coffin disappeared the choir sang ‘Libera me’:21
Deliver me, O Lord, from death eternal on that fearful
day, . . . when thou shalt come to judge the world by fire.
Whatever the judgement of a merciful God on Henry VII, that of historians has not always been complimentary. What are most often recalled are his last years and the accusations of avarice. Was he a better king than Richard III might have been had he survived Bosworth? Richard’s abolition of forced loans to the Crown, his emphasis on the prerogative of Parliament to vote for taxes to the king, his protection of the church, and his promotion of justice for rich and poor alike, are in stark contrast to Henry VII’s latter years. But Henry’s had been a remarkable success story. Here was a fatherless boy and penniless exile with the name of a humble Welsh farmer who had nonetheless become a king.
Henry had been shaped profoundly by his years on the run. With his life dependent on the whims of a frivolous Breton duke he had found consolation in his religious faith, and when his fortunes changed he had looked to God for an explanation. As king, Henry had aspired to be the redeemer-hero of chivalric romance; he had been a faithful husband, a devoted father, and had continued to win his battles both on the field and off it. He founded a dynasty, and a bloodline that continues in the royal family today.
Yet the incident that had made Henry’s reign possible – and without which there would have been no Tudor dynasty – was the disappearance and suspected murder of two children. Those who find it hard to believe that a man of Richard III’s
qualities would have killed his nephews have accused Henry and his mother of somehow being guilty of their deaths, either in the summer of 1483 or later, with it suggested that Richard hid the princes away and that they were killed after Henry became king. In reality what Henry was guilty of was failing to investigate what had happened, and it proved an error. It is very specifically the disappearance of the princes that lies at the heart of modern conspiracy theories about the origins of the Tudor seizure of power. Solving this mystery is not likely to be achieved by piecing together who was where and when, 530 years after the event; it can, however, be understood in the context of the times. This was an era of visual symbols and display. Kings projected their power and significance in palaces decorated with their badges, in rich clothes and elaborate ceremonies. The vanished princes were denied any such images; like Hamlet’s father they were given no ‘noble rite nor formal ostentation’ in burial, no great funeral procession with effigies and banners, no hatchments over their bones, no annual Masses. The intention was to avoid creating a religious cult that would have outshone even the powerful cult of Henry VI and been immensely damaging for Henry VII, who was fearful of being regarded as a mere king consort to his wife, the sister and heir to the princes. But as Shakespeare knew, under such circumstances the royal dead would haunt the living. The absence of bodies allowed the suspicion to flourish that at least one of the princes might be alive. Perkin Warbeck’s masquerade as the younger of the princes had posed a considerable threat to Henry, and even if it was a threat he eventually removed, Perkin’s execution in 1499 did nothing to lay the ghosts of the princes to rest.
In 1502, three years after Perkin was hanged, a man called Sir James Tyrrell was arrested and executed. An ally of ‘the White Rose’ Edmund de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, it was revealed that he had confessed to the murder of Edward IV’s sons.22 This was picked up and repeated in different forms by Polydore Vergil and Henry VIII’s future Lord Chancellor, Thomas More.23 The latter claimed he had learned that the murdered boys were first buried at the foot of some stairs in the Tower. If such a thing had become public knowledge there would have been huge pressure on Henry to have the princes reburied in sacred ground. But More was told Richard III had asked for the bodies to be moved somewhere more suitable for a king’s sons, and that those involved had subsequently died, so the princes’ final resting place would be forever unknown – a most convenient outcome for Henry.
In 1674, long after the passing of the Tudor dynasty, two skeletons were recovered in the Tower, in a place that resembled More’s description of their first burial place. Charles II had them interred at Westminster Abbey. In 1933 they were removed and examined by two doctors. Broken and incomplete, the skeletons were judged to be two children aged between seven and eleven and between eleven and thirteen. These bones were returned to their urn in the abbey where they remain. If these are the bodies of the princes, and if Henry VII knew where the bodies were, it is shameful that he left them in that miserable hole. It did him no good during his reign; nor would it thereafter.
14
EXIT MARGARET BEAUFORT
STANDING ALONGSIDE HENRY VIII, WITH THE PRIEST SPEAKING THE words of the marriage ceremony, Katherine of Aragon was happier than she had ever been. She had remained in England since Arthur’s death, living in a kind of limbo. For nearly seven years she had waited for her father and father-in-law to make up their minds over whether or not she should marry Arthur’s younger brother. In 1504, two years after Arthur died, she had been betrothed to Henry. The following year, as the tides of foreign affairs shifted, the betrothal was repudiated. By the time Henry VII lay dying at Richmond in March 1509 Katherine had despaired that the on-off marriage would ever take place. This situation was transformed, however, on the king’s death. Even before his father was buried Henry VIII had told his council he wished to marry Katherine, and now the ceremony was being performed, on a glorious June day at Greenwich.
Henry VIII was a young king who needed to prove himself and was anxious to do so. As a discussion on government observed, ‘the office of a king is to fight the battles of his people’, and second, ‘to judge them rightfully’. Henry VII had won the crown of England from the ‘usurper’ Richard III; Henry VIII intended to win the crown of France – rightfully England’s since the reign of Edward III – from the usurper Louis XII. He had read all he could on Henry V’s victories and the chivalric tales they inspired. But he needed allies. His marriage to Katherine was intended to gain him the friendship of her father, King Ferdinand, and the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian whose son had married her sister. Yet marrying Katherine was not about securing military alliances alone. It also held romantic appeal. A beautiful princess, for years in distress, lonely, yet unobtainable while her marriage prospects were being negotiated, Katherine was the heroine to match the hero Henry so badly wanted to be. He felt he was now rescuing her, and so it also seemed to Katherine, who was passionately in love with him.
Henry was extremely handsome. Tall and well built with clear skin, he was the image of his Yorkist grandfather, Edward IV, who had once been described as ‘amongst the handsomest people in the world’. He also shared Edward’s energy, conviviality and athleticism. This resemblance made Henry ‘the more acclaimed and approved of’, Vergil noted, for if royal status was transferable through the female line then Henry VIII, the son of Edward IV’s daughter, had a better right to be king than had his father, Henry VII, whose mother was only of illegitimate royal descent. No one – least of all Katherine – seems to have considered that if Henry resembled the golden young King Edward for the better, he might come to resemble the older, bloated and brutal King Edward for the worse. She was as star-struck as the rest of the court.
The ceremony at Greenwich, in front of a handful of witnesses, was far less spectacular than Katherine’s first wedding, but this one promised to be a true marriage, which she claimed her first had never been. Katherine had always maintained that she and Arthur had never had sexual intercourse. The long days of entertainments following the St Paul’s wedding and Arthur’s subsequent sickness meant the couple had spent no more than seven nights in the same bed, and during those nights the marriage was never consummated. It may be that, since men valued virginity, Katherine was now pretending that she had kept hers. It is also quite possible, however, that Katherine was telling the truth. Any number of diseases can cause impotence or lower the libido, including testicular cancer and tuberculosis, which are often cited as illnesses to which Arthur may have succumbed.1 And there are other possible explanations that have yet to be considered: the sickly fifteen-year-old may have been a little uncertain how to consummate a marriage, or was overcome by anxiety that he should not carry out his duty in a sinful manner.
Henry VII had always maintained the highest standards of sexual behaviour at court, to distance his reign from the immorality with which Richard III had tarred Edward IV’s later years, and which Richard had used as a tool in his usurpation of Edward V. Equally he had been keen to promote national admiration for the less than virile Henry VI. It had taken Henry VI eight years to conceive a child, during which time he had carefully policed the chastity of Edmund and Jasper Tudor, keeping ‘careful watch’ for flirtatious women ‘through hidden windows of his chamber’. A biography of the ‘saint’ published in 1500 claimed that when in bed with his queen, Henry VI had never ‘used her unseemly’ ‘but with all conjugal honesty and gravity’, and that he was distressed at the sight of nudity.2 It would not be surprising if all this had cultivated a prim atmosphere around Arthur, the future king of a new Camelot. In Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, it is sexual immorality that leads to the destruction of Camelot as well as Arthur’s death. Anxiety to behave chastely around the prince could well have left his sexual education somewhat limited.
Unsurprisingly, Henry VII was angered by Katherine’s claims, which not only cast aspersions on his son’s manhood, but also may have been taken as a criticism of the way Arthur was raised. T
he papal dispensation permitting Katherine’s marriage to Henry VIII (who as her brother-in-law was within the forbidden degrees of kinship) tactfully observed that the marriage to Arthur at least ‘may’ have been consummated. For Henry VIII the consummation of his marriage that night proved to him Katherine was indeed a virgin – or so he believed at the time. Tellingly, perhaps, he would later claim that his own sexual inexperience and ignorance had not made him a competent judge. In all other respects the young couple were also proving a good match. Katherine could discuss foreign affairs with her husband while being conventional enough to treat Henry with the respect he desired as her king. She shared his energy, his love of hunting, and her good-natured seriousness proved a foil for Henry’s boisterous romanticism. ‘The king my lord adores her, and her highness him’, Katherine’s confessor reported happily to her parents.3
A fortnight after the wedding Henry and Katherine were crowned together as king and queen. The ceremony lasted four days and began on 21 June with Henry VIII taking formal possession of the Tower. There, the following night, he created his Knights of the Bath. This ceremony, which only took place on the eve of a coronation, involved the new knights bathing in a symbol of purification, before a vigil spent in prayer until dawn. The next day the knights led the newly-weds on the eve of coronation procession to Westminster through streets hung with tapestries. Henry was mounted on a princely horse in a jewelled costume, while Katherine, dressed in white, was carried in a litter pulled by white horses.4 Her long auburn hair ‘beautiful and goodly to behold’ hung loose under a golden circlet of six crosses and six fleurs-de-lys, studded with precious stones and ‘new made’ for her. When a summer rainstorm broke Katherine was forced to take refuge under the awning of a draper’s stall. But it passed as quickly as it had arrived and the happy procession continued in front of the cheering crowds. The next day Henry and Katherine were crowned at Westminster Abbey and Margaret Beaufort wept as many tears as she had at her son’s coronation. She remained fearful, John Fisher recalled, ‘that some adversity would follow’.5
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