On 4 August 1515 Albany arrived at Stirling with an army seven thousand strong. His cannon included the infamous Mons Meg, a six-tonne muzzle-loading weapon capable of firing gunstones weighing 150 kilograms over a range of two miles.3 ‘Desolate’ at the sight, Queen Margaret had no intention of putting her tiny son in the firing line.4 Instead she agreed to surrender the castle and her children. In what time she had left with them she coached James V to ask for favour for himself, his brother and his stepfather. When the men came for him the little boy dutifully handed over the castle’s huge keys, and repeated the words his mother had taught him.5 Margaret was placed under guard as James and his infant brother were then taken from her. James was two years younger than his grandfather Henry VII had been when he was taken from his mother, Margaret Beaufort.
Queen Margaret now intended to flee Scotland for England. By the beginning of September she had gained Albany’s trust sufficiently for her to be allowed to travel to Linlithgow Palace, to prepare for the birth of Angus’ baby. A few days after her arrival at the palace she fled to Tantallon Castle, three miles east of North Berwick. She had only four or five servants, as well as her husband with her, but Albany soon discovered her departure. The duke needed to validate his claim that he ruled Scotland in the name of all. He could not do that with the queen in exile, and nor did he wish to risk her returning to Scotland with an English army at her back. He sent a message assuring her if she came back he would restore ‘everything’ to her within seven days; if she was now too near the birth to travel, she could send her husband as hostage, but as soon as the messenger arrived Margaret and Angus fled on, even leaving behind her baggage and jewels in their hurry.6
By the time the party had reached England Margaret was exhausted. Unable to ride as far as Lord Dacre’s house at Morpeth, they stopped at the remote military outpost of Harbottle Castle. Dacre reported to Henry that there, on 7 October, ‘the Queen of Scots your sister . . . was delivered and brought in bed of a fair young lady’. Henry’s niece was christened the following day, ‘with such convenient provisions as either could or might be had in this barren and wild country’.7 Like her namesakes and predecessors this child, Lady Margaret Douglas, was to be a key figure in the future of the Tudor and the Stuart royal lines. But her birth had almost killed her mother. The queen proved too weak to be moved even after the religious service that marked a mother’s re-entry into society three weeks later, known as churching. She could barely eat and suffered sciatica down her right leg.
It was only late in November that Queen Margaret was able to travel to Morpeth, carried in a litter borne by Dacre’s menservants. The house was hung with new tapestries, Dacre’s gilt plate was all put out in her honour, and she was still more pleased to discover how active her family had been on her behalf. Margaret’s sister, Mary, still called the French queen, knew the Duke of Albany from France, and had extracted public assurances from him on the safety of the princes. Henry had also sent clothes and other necessities as a public mark of his support.
Dacre was amazed by what appeared to be Margaret’s obsessive ‘love of apparel’. She had twenty-two gowns of cloth of gold and silks in his house, and sent to Edinburgh for more. She remained in such pain from her daughter’s birth that even sitting up in bed made her scream in agony, so she could not wear them. Instead she had them held in front of her to admire. For five days, Dacre reported, Queen Margaret spoke frequently about her dresses: how she was going to have one made up in purple velvet lined with cloth of gold and another in red velvet lined in ermine. It expressed, perhaps, a wish to return to the security she had known as Henry VII’s young daughter, and, later, as James IV’s wife. Tellingly the traumatised queen also spoke often of her infant son, the Duke of Ross, and what a good child he was. She spoke of him even more often than of her elder son, the king. Dacre feared that the news, brought by a Scottish delegation, that the baby had died from a fever, would kill her.8
It was March 1516 before Dacre told Margaret. She was so distressed that her husband Angus waited a further two weeks before telling her he had decided to come to an accommodation with Albany. He returned to Scotland in April. Dacre felt that Margaret was deeply saddened by what she saw as her husband’s desertion, but she was also anxious to be at court with her Tudor family, for a time at least.9 She had not seen them since she was thirteen, that long-ago girl who had enjoyed cards, dancing, and had listened to the fine new choir singing in her grandmother Margaret Beaufort’s chapel at Collyweston. Her excitement mounted as she travelled south, and from Stony Stratford she wrote to tell Henry ‘I am in right good heal, and as joyous of my said journey toward you as any woman may be in coming to her brother.’10
On 3 May Queen Margaret entered London ‘with a great company’ and rested at Baynard’s Castle. When the invitation to see Henry arrived, Queen Margaret found a vigorous young king very different to their old, careful, father. Where Henry VII had micromanaged state affairs, personally annotating Treasury accounts, Henry VIII delegated the daily grind, only intervening when and where he wanted.11 He would spend days ‘shooting, singing, dancing, wrestling, casting of the bar [a form of shot putting], playing at the recorders, flute and virginals’.12 He also loved the joust, which his father had never taken part in. One ambassador described him as ‘like St George on horseback’ when he performed; another claimed he had never seen ‘such a beautiful sight’.
The hours Henry VIII spent on such pleasures were never wasted. They lay at the heart of what it was to be a king, binding him to those who would help him win glory on the battlefield. His father had not been well loved, while the affability and largesse of Edward IV had won popular applause, and Henry VIII remained every inch his grandson. The scholar Erasmus thought Henry ‘a man of gentle friendliness’ who ‘acts more like a companion than a king’. He had transformed the personnel of the Privy Chamber, filling it with high-born favourites and boon companions in place of the humble servants his father had used. He also expanded the size of Privy Lodgings with his many building projects, so that he would walk freely with his friends in the Privy Gallery or talk in the Privy Gardens. Henry even wrote a song celebrating his pleasure in friendships:
Pastime with good company
I love and shall until I die
grudge who will but none deny
so God be pleased thus live will I
for my pastance
hunt, sing and dance.
Henry’s happiness and confidence had been recently boosted by fatherhood. The thirty-year-old Katherine of Aragon was the proud mother of a healthy baby: the three-month-old princess, Mary.13 Henry had been sure that ‘if it was a daughter this time, by the grace of God the sons will follow’ and the couple remained very happy in each other’s company.14 Erasmus noted Katherine was ‘astonishing well read, far beyond what would be surprising in a woman’. An important part of Henry’s kingship was reflected in Katherine’s resourcefulness and erudition, as well as her piety. Queen Margaret could see, however, that Katherine’s earlier losses to miscarriage and infant death had aged her (as similar losses had also aged Margaret). Even when Katherine was ‘richly attired’, and surrounded by a supporting cast of twenty-five ladies on white horses, wearing dresses slashed with gold, she was judged ‘rather ugly than otherwise’.15
Queen Margaret had chosen Henry’s most trusted councillor, Wolsey, to act as godfather to her daughter and, meeting him, she could not fail to be struck by his charisma. He was now Lord Chancellor and although already forty-five he looked younger, ‘very handsome, learned, extremely eloquent, of vast ability, and indefatigable’.16 Margaret must have been particularly pleased, however, to see her sister, the French queen, and have the opportunity to watch Brandon performing in the tournaments given in celebration of her arrival. The feasting went on for a month before Margaret settled in the closed area of large houses near Charing Cross where visiting Scottish dignitaries were usually billeted, and known as Little Scotland.17 She wanted to keep in touch
with developments in her son’s kingdom, and plan her return. The peace between France and England meant that, in due course, King Francis would recall the Duke of Albany from Scotland. Queen Margaret hoped again to be regent for her son, James V, or at least to see more of him.
By April the following year, 1517, Margaret had gained assurances that she could return to Scotland without fear of arrest, injury or impediment. In May she was ready to leave. Henry furnished her with more clothes, jewels, money and horses, and she bid farewell to her pregnant sister. A daughter, Lady Frances Brandon (named after King Francis) would be born in July.18 Queen Margaret and her own little daughter, Lady Margaret Douglas, were escorted across the border in June. She was destined never to see her Tudor family again, although her daughter would one day make a life in England, returning to a very different court.
A year after Margaret had said her goodbyes, Katherine of Aragon was pregnant again. Since sexual intercourse was considered dangerous for mothers-to-be, Henry had taken a mistress, the pretty nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Blount. She was at the celebrations following the betrothal that October of the two-year-old princess Mary to King Francis’ heir: the culmination of the pursuit of peace with France. The ceremonies took place at Wolsey’s bishopric palace, York Place near Westminster. Wolsey had a taste for the good things in life and the Venetian ambassador described the palace as ‘very fine’. You had to cross ‘eight rooms before reaching his audience chamber’, and each was ‘hung with tapestry, which was changed once a week’, while the sideboards were piled with silver worth an estimated 25,000 ducats. As for the cardinal (as Wolsey now was), his power had grown so much it seemed to the diplomat that he ruled ‘both the king and the entire kingdom’.19
Elizabeth Blount was one of a party of thirty-six masquers that night, each dressed in ‘fine green satin, all covered with cloth of gold’. She ‘excelled at singing, dancing, and in all goodly pastimes’, and demonstrated her skills, with the masquers dancing one at a time. When she had finished she cast off her mask to reveal her fresh young face.20 The glow came not just from her youth and natural beauty, however: the king’s mistress was in the early stage of pregnancy. A month later Katherine of Aragon delivered a stillborn daughter, ‘to the vexation of everyone’. To add insult to misery Elizabeth Blount’s child, born the following June, proved, ‘a goodly man child of beauty like to the father and mother’.21 He was named Henry Fitzroy, and Wolsey was once again called upon to be godfather. Elizabeth Blount was married off later that summer to a young man called Gilbert Tailboys, who was a ward of the Crown.22
Henry still talked of Katherine having a son, but she was now thirty-three and people began to speculate on who might become king if Henry were to die. Henry VII had hoped that in the absence of Tudor male heirs the English would look to his daughter, Queen Margaret, to provide them with a king. Having been raised in Wales and Brittany Henry VII did not share English prejudice against the Scots, or fears that having a Scottish king would result in a loss of sovereignty. Scotland, he is said to have observed, would become subsumed into England ‘since the less becomes subservient to the greater’. But Queen Margaret’s son, James V, was a mere seven years old and, as in 1501, when Henry VII was ill and his sons minors, many did not consider the young heirs of Tudor blood to be the best choice. In September 1519 the Venetian ambassador reported that one person who had been mentioned in 1501 as ‘a noble man [who] would be a royal ruler’ was again being mentioned as a future King of England: Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham.
A descendant of Edward III’s youngest son Thomas Woodstock, and of John of Gaunt, Buckingham lived like the royal ducal magnate he was. At the siege of Thérouanne in France he had caught attention dressed in a suit of purple satin embroidered with ‘antelopes and swans of fine gold bullion, and full of spangles and little bells of gold very costly and marvellous to behold’. He was currently in the process of building a vast pleasure palace at Thornbury in Gloucestershire. The ambassador noted that he was respected by the people, and ‘might easily obtain the crown’ if the king died without male heirs.23
Anxiously, Henry asked Wolsey to keep a watch on Buckingham, which the cardinal was more than happy to do.24 Buckingham hated the low-born cardinal as a ‘base fellow’ and despised his peace with France.25 In June 1520 Buckingham let it be known that he resented the expense of attending the feast of Anglo-French reconciliation Wolsey had organised near Calais. Such was the array of rich tents and pavilions that it became known as the ‘Field of Cloth of Gold’, but Buckingham declared the fabulous display, the tournaments and meetings, to be no more than a ‘spectacle of foolish speeches’ or a ‘conference of trivialities’.
In November Buckingham infuriated Henry by retaining a royal servant, who was seen wearing his livery. This suggested the servant had a dual loyalty, and Henry was reported to have bellowed angrily that ‘he would none of his servants should hang on another man’s sleeve’. Buckingham, fearing he might be sent to the Tower, blustered to his servants that he would rather kneel before the king in submission and then thrust him through with a dagger.26 Unfortunately a surveyor Buckingham had sacked then revealed these threats to Wolsey.
As the cardinal investigated further he discovered Buckingham believed that Henry VII’s execution of the last male Plantagenet in 1499 had cursed the Tudor line. He had told his servants ‘that God would punish it, by not suffering the king’s issue to prosper’.27 He also gloated to them that the prior of a Carthusian house at Hinton28 in north Somerset had prophesied that since Henry would have ‘no issue males of his body’, he would one day be king adding, ‘that all the king’s father did was wrong, and that he had always been dissatisfied with everything the king had done’. Henry VIII ‘gave fees and offices to boys rather than noblemen’, while Wolsey was ‘the king’s bawd, showing him [which w]omen were most wholesome, and best of complexion’.29 These complaints were reminiscent of Richard III’s attacks on the immorality of Edward IV. Such, at least, was the case for the prosecution.
On 13 May 1521 Buckingham was tried on a charge of high treason and found guilty by his fellow peers of compassing and imagining the death of the king. They did so with heavy hearts. It was all too reminiscent of earlier bloodletting within the royal house, and when the jury members came to read their verdicts, they were too moved to speak. Bravely Buckingham urged them on, saying he was content to accept the punishment, ‘not for the crime laid to his account, which is utterly false, but for his very great sins’.30 Four days later, on 17 May, two sheriffs and 500 infantrymen led Buckingham to the axe-man on Tower Hill. He died, the Venetian ambassador observed, ‘miserably, but with great courage’.31 It is a mark of how shocking Buckingham’s death was considered to be that a lawyer, drawing up the usually dry-as-dust yearbook of legal cases, noted beside the entry for Buckingham’s trial, ‘God in his love grant mercy, for he was a very noble, prudent prince, and the image of all that is courtly.’32 The great Stafford family was never again to attain the wealth and pre-eminence they had hitherto enjoyed. And Henry still did not have a son.
18
ENTER ANNE BOLEYN
HENRY WAS IN BED ON 9 MARCH 1525 WHEN A MESSENGER ARRIVED with urgent news. Wolsey’s efforts to keep Europe at peace had failed in the face of Franco-Imperial rivalry in Italy. Hoping to take advantage of this, Henry had allied with the twenty-five-year-old emperor, Charles V. His decision now seemed vindicated – King Francis had been defeated at the hands of the Imperial army at Pavia.1 His army was massacred, and the French nobility suffered their greatest slaughter since Agincourt. But Henry was also interested to learn from the messenger the fate of an Englishman amongst Francis’ commanders: Richard de la Pole, third son of Edward IV’s sister Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk, and the last ‘White Rose’.2 He had been killed in the battle. Less than four years after the execution of Buckingham, the last serious rival to Henry VII’s heirs was dead. ‘All the enemies of England are gone’, Henry cried out, and called for the messenger
to be given more wine.3
Secure in England, Henry VIII believed his dream of a coronation in Paris was now within his grasp. He hoped to persuade Charles V to divide France between them, and reminded Charles that if he married his daughter, Mary Tudor, then on his death Charles could add England to his empire. But Charles was now out of money, and his need for peace was more urgent than any future prospects concerning the inheritance of England. Henry could not hope to conquer France without him, and as Charles’ peace treaty with France was being signed, Henry realised bitterly that his achievements lacked the greatness he had sought. He was no Henry V. His situation more closely resembled that of Henry VI. England’s power in Europe was diminishing, and like Henry VI in 1453, with no legitimate sons, he needed to bolster his position by promoting what close male relatives he did have. Henry VI had created his non-royal half-brothers, Edmund and Jasper Tudor, England’s premier earls. Similarly, Henry VIII was to promote his illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy into the highest ranks of the nobility.
On 18 June the six-year-old Fitzroy left his mother, Elizabeth Blount, for good, and was brought by barge to the king’s newly rebuilt palace at Bridewell on the banks of the Fleet river. Henry’s former mistress would henceforth only have occasional contact with their son. After landing at the water-gate Fitzroy was conducted through a chamber hung with gold and silver hangings to a gallery where he was clothed in the robes of an earl. Fitzroy was a lively child, but this was an awe-inspiring ceremony and a crowd was gathering in the chamber below where King Henry awaited his son, standing under a cloth of estate. At last the ushers cleared a path through the court, and at a signal from the king, the trumpets blew. Fitzroy took his cue, entered and approached his proud father, who then hung a sword over his slight neck and one boyish shoulder. No sooner had the patent of the earldom been read than the next ceremony took place and Henry Fitzroy was granted the unprecedented honour of the double dukedoms of Somerset and Richmond.4 Only afterwards could the boy relax, and there were ‘great feasts and disguisings’ to celebrate his new rank.
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