Tudor_Passion. Manipulation. Murder. the Story of England's Most Notorious Royal Family

by Leanda de Lisle

  Many courtiers feared they faced the imminent prospect of either a Spanish invasion in favour of Arbella, or one by Scotland in favour of James. But the Spanish council was not yet ready for an invasion, and James was willing to wait for Robert Cecil and the Privy Council to deliver him the crown. What concerned these councillors most was the possibility of a revolution by the long-suffering poor. To pre-empt any social unrest on Elizabeth’s death, the council was convened in perpetual session at Richmond on 15 March, and the guards were doubled at the royal palace. Peers were summoned to court, and potential troublemakers were impressed into the army or locked up.

  Elizabeth was still not sleeping. It was reported she was weak, but otherwise she had no obvious symptoms ‘except that a slight swelling of the glands under the jaw burst of itself, with a discharge of a small amount of matter’.15 Two days later she was described as sitting on her cushions, staring at the ground, her finger in her mouth. She remained sitting on them on Saturday 19 March, when she gave an audience to Sir Robert Carey, the youngest grandson of her late aunt, Mary Boleyn. Elizabeth wrung Carey’s hand hard and told him sadly, ‘Robin I am not well.’ He tried to raise her spirits but found her ‘melancholy humour . . . was too deep rooted in her heart’. The French had informed Elizabeth that several members of her court were in secret contact with James. Happily she did not know that Carey was amongst them, but he wrote to King James that night telling him Elizabeth was dying and promising to deliver the news of her death in person. His sister, Lady Scrope, who served in Elizabeth’s bedchamber, had a blue ring James wanted as confirmation.

  The next day Elizabeth did not appear in the royal chapel for the Sunday morning service. Instead she remained on her cushions in the Privy Chamber, and there she stayed, refusing to move, for a further two nights and two days, while frightened Londoners shut themselves in their houses. On the Tuesday, Elizabeth was, at last, lifted up from her cushions and walked to her bed. She had not written a will and the council were aware that her father’s will therefore remained extant. Under its terms the crown passed from Elizabeth to the descendants of Frances Brandon (Katherine Grey’s children and grandchildren) and in default of them, to the descendants of Eleanor Brandon; James was only to be king if these were excluded. A decision was therefore made to ask the dying queen to name her heir one last time. On the Wednesday afternoon Elizabeth responded and called for them.

  Lying in her bed Elizabeth asked for liquid to ease her sore throat so that she could speak. The councillors suggested that instead she raise a finger when they named the successor ‘whom she liked’.16 Reports differ on what occurred next. Some claimed that when James was named Elizabeth raised her hand to her head, others that she never moved. But as one court servant noted, it made no difference which reports were true. The Privy Council was set on James and the alternative candidates lacked the power to oppose their decision. At six o’clock that evening the Archbishop of Canterbury and Elizabeth’s other chaplains went to pray with her. Hours later, Elizabeth was left alone with her ladies, and it was with them that she died, sometime before two o’clock the following morning of 24 March 1603, ‘easily like a ripe apple from the tree’. By 10 a.m Carey was galloping north to Scotland carrying the blue ring his sister had given him, as confirmation of the queen’s death.

  The iconic image of Elizabeth as Gloriana was, a contemporary noted, ‘a painted face without a shadow to give it life’. The real, flesh-and-blood Elizabeth had been a more vulnerable figure. On her accession the Spanish ambassador Feria had noted that Elizabeth was determined to be governed by no one, and that she issued orders as commandingly as her father had. But Elizabeth’s Protestant supporters – men like William Cecil – believed that a ‘rightful’ queen only ruled in accordance with the counsel of godly (that is Protestant) men. The truth was, Elizabeth could not impose her will as her father Henry VIII had done. What she could do was stall, not agree. She did not trust the elite, best represented in the nobility, any more than her grandfather had. There were fifty-seven peers at her accession and fifty-five at her death – as with Henry VII she had reduced their numbers. Where he had looked to professional servants who owed him everything, Elizabeth had also relied on the ordinary people who had flocked to support Mary in 1553. She owed her crown to them, she had told Feria, and nobody else.

  Elizabeth found, however, that it was not only she who could appeal to public opinion. Essex had noticed that Elizabeth ‘could be brought to nothing except by a kind of necessity’, and there had been an increasing propensity to force her hand by seeking the support of a wide constituency. Such had been the motivation of the pamphlet campaigns promoted by Elizabeth’s own councillors in favour of the succession candidates they had backed in the 1560s, and the campaigns waged to bounce her into killing Norfolk and Mary, Queen of Scots. This conspiracy-centred public posturing and spin, to convince the queen and others of a Catholic threat, had been taken up subsequently by those outside the council and shut out from power – Catholics and Puritans – and it left a dangerous legacy for Elizabeth’s successor.

  ‘A hapless kind of life is this I wear’, Elizabeth had once observed; ‘I serve the rout [rabble], and all their follies bear/To others’ will my life is all addressed/and no way so as might content me best.’17 Elizabeth’s survival had, however, blessed England with a long period of stability. It was uncertain that this would now continue.

  As Sir Robert Carey galloped north to Scotland, Elizabeth’s councillors emerged nervously from Whitehall on to the green, and the diminutive figure of Robert Cecil read the proclamation that named James VI of Scots, King of England. The proclamation ignored the terms of Henry VIII’s will, and other legal objections to James’ claim; instead it listed his private virtues, claiming he had the ‘rarest gifts of mind and body’ and recorded his blood descent ‘from the body of Margaret, daughter to the High and Renowned Prince, Henry the seventh . . . and of Elizabeth of York’. As the witnesses to the proclamation ran off to spread news of what they had heard, the Garter and heralds led the procession to Ludgate and then to the High Cross at Cheapside. By eleven o’clock a large crowd was gathered, ‘of gallant knights and brave gentlemen of note well mounted, besides the huge number of common persons’.18

  Cecil reread the proclamation loudly and clearly. When he had finished they all cried ‘God save the king’. But one witness described the mood as ‘flat’ and the Venetian ambassador deduced ‘that there was evidently neither sorrow for the death of the queen, nor joy for the succession of the king’. Fear was the dominant emotion and the price of basic foodstuffs rose sharply all day. Yet when night fell, a Londoner noted in his diary that there was ‘no tumult, no contradiction, no disorder in the city; every man went about his business as readily, as peaceably, as securely as if there had been no change, nor any news ever heard of competitors’.19

  Relief and joy were unbounded. As bonfires were lit from hill to hill, a courtier recorded in his journal ‘the people both in City and Country finding the just fear of forty years, for want of a known successor, dissolved in a minute did so rejoice, as few wished the queen alive again’.20 One after another, England’s towns and cities filled with the sound of bells. After a mere three generations, the Renaissance romance and gothic horror of the age of Tudor kings and queens was over. The new age of the Stuarts, of gunpowder plots, of civil war and of revolution, had begun. ‘How daintily it did so e’er compose, the beauty of the white and scarlet rose/The Flower is parched, the silken leaf is blasted’, a poet wrote. ‘The rose decay’d, and all the glory wasted.’21

  EPILOGUE

  Take but degree away, untune that string,

  And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets

  In mere oppugnancy . . .

  Power into will, will into appetite;

  And appetite, an universal wolf,

  So doubly seconded with will and power,

  Must make perforce an universal prey,

  And last eat up himself. />
  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, ACT 1, SCENE 3

  IN SEPTEMBER 2012, RICHARD III’S REMAINS WERE FOUND UNDER A Leicester car park. The monastery where he was buried had occupied that spot, and had been destroyed during the Reformation period, along with medieval libraries, art and music. One consequence of this cultural terrorism is that our sympathy with this past is cauterised: because it was destroyed it is unfamiliar, and so we try to make it fit what is familiar, viewing it through our own lenses. To understand the Tudors we must remember their context, which was shaped by their fifteenth-century past, not the post-Reformation, post-Enlightenment era which informs our view.

  The fact that Richard’s world could be brutal is evident in the broken bones that were dug out of the ground where his body lay. They bring a sense of immediacy, even to us, of the very real violence of the late fifteenth century: Richard’s skull was smashed and his brain exposed by a soldier of the Tudor army, a blade thrust into his buttocks. Here are echoes of the desecration of the corpse of that ‘noble knight’ Warwick the Kingmaker in 1471, and of the shattered bones of the thousands killed at Towton in 1461. They are also evidence of Richard’s failure as a king, for ensuring peace and harmony was a vital duty of kingship. It would become the very raison d’être of his Tudor successors, symbolised in the striking image of the union rose, a visual representation of national reconciliation and redemption.

  Today we aim to establish peace and harmony by other means, through the workings of democracy. We have learned to trust that elected governments will rule for all – not just the majority – and in accordance with established law. This is not true in other areas of the world, and was not true for our ancestors. For people of the Tudor age the king was seen as a protector, a bulwark against anarchy. We are fortunate that nowadays we are given only rare insights into the horrors of disorder. As Baghdad was looted in 2003, Donald Rumsfeld commented breezily that ‘freedom’s untidy . . . and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things’. Fifteenth-century Englishmen would have recognised immediately the seriousness of what was happening in Baghdad: it was not freedom but licence, the strong taking what they want from the weak according to their appetite – Shakespeare’s ‘universal wolf’. And for them, law and order went well beyond modern associations with courtrooms and policemen.

  The law was revered, for its origins were divine. They lay in an ordered, rational and interconnected universe in which God had ranked everything from grasses to trees, from peasants to princes. This great chain of being did not fix a person’s status at birth, however. It was part of the duty of care of higher ranks to advance chosen men through patronage. God’s intervention on earth – divine providence – might also raise a man up. At the apex of the earthly hierarchy, the king stood over everyone, divinely ordained down the ages to rule above personal interest or tribal quarrels, and above those with the sharpest elbows or most grasping hands. What we might call human rights – justice – lay in each man being given his due, while the sin of ambition lay in taking what was not due to you. For the ambitious to take a crown, or for the disgruntled to rebel against a rightful king, was akin to the revolt of Lucifer. It risked opening the gates of hell, and releasing chaos into the world. That was why the enemies of Henry VI and Edward V described them as ‘false kings’. To do so justified their overthrow. It is also why subsequent monarchs had to demonstrate to the people that they were ‘true’ kings. In this respect the most obvious quality was royal blood, but true kingship was also reflected in a king’s abilities as a ruler. To ensure peace and harmony a king ruled justly, fought his kingdom’s battles, and also founded future stability on a secure succession. Instead of men vying for the chance to rule, kingship was settled in advance, so that when a king died, power passed to his heir. These issues – ‘true’ kingship, the securing of national stability and the need for a clear succession – were to be played out repeatedly during the Tudor period. Indeed the era began with them. This is why it is so important to look at the Tudor family story.

  When Richard was crowned in the summer of 1483, not everyone accepted his contention that the overthrown twelve-year-old Edward V was a false king. In their eyes, while Edward V and his younger brother were alive, Richard was a usurper. This gives Richard a strong motive for removing the princes as a focus of opposition. Unfortunately for Richard, when their rumoured deaths were followed by rebellion that October it signalled continued national disharmony. The death of Richard’s son and heir the following year appeared to offer further evidence that Richard was a usurper, cursed by God, a verdict confirmed by his death at Bosworth in 1485. Henry VII’s victory allowed him to argue his reign was the result of divine intervention. His Lancastrian blood claim, drawn through his mother, was extremely weak and so he had taken on the mantle of the ‘fair unknown’, the ‘true’ prince who emerges from obscurity to claim his rightful throne, just as the mythical King Arthur had once done. In support of this he had offered the story that the ‘saint’ Henry VI had prophesied his reign.

  While his victory at Bosworth offered the crucial evidence that he was indeed blessed by God, a fact then accepted by Parliament, he still had to rule as a ‘true’ king, establishing national unity and a secure succession. His marriage to Elizabeth of York in 1486 was meant to reconcile Yorkists to his rule and within nine months they had a son: a living embodiment of the union rose and peace between the houses of Lancaster and York. Despite this union, it was crucial for Henry to claim his right independent of his marriage, otherwise his right was dependent on his wife’s life, the claims of his children by her would be stronger than his own, and any children by subsequent wives would not be accepted as ‘true’ heirs. He therefore continued to project his kingship as providential, a new beginning that drew on a royal past, while promising something better, a hope expressed by naming his son Arthur.

  Nevertheless, his disgruntled subjects never forgot the princes who had vanished in the Tower and whose royal blood was so much more impressive than Henry’s. The modern debate over whether Richard III or Henry VII was responsible for the deaths of the princes has obscured how much the two kings had in common on this issue. Neither was wholly accepted as the princes’ replacement. Neither gave the princes a public burial or requiem – and this is key to shedding light on this perennially fascinating mystery.

  After 500 years, modern detective work is not going to prove that the butler murdered the princes with the candlestick in the Tower. Nor does it tell us anything when modern forensic psychologists assure us that Richard III was not a psychopath. You did not need to be a psychopath to do away with competing claimants to your throne, especially when maintaining stability was a king’s duty.1 The mystery of the princes comes down to the absolute importance of remembering the context of the lost world that lies beneath the Leicester car park.

  In England we have no equivalent today to the shrine at Lourdes in France, visited every year by thousands of pilgrims looking for healing or spiritual renewal, but we can remember the vast crowds outside Buckingham Palace after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Imagine that feeling and enthusiasm in pilgrims visiting the relics and the tomb of two innocent child princes, greatly magnified by the closeness people then felt with the dead. A cult of the princes would have been immensely damaging for Richard III, who had taken their throne, and for Henry VII, who was fearful of being regarded as a mere king consort to his wife, the sister and heir to the princes. This is why the princes were simply ‘disappeared’, why they were given no tomb, and why they were nowhere officially remembered. Yet the ghosts of the princes – whom Henry VII never laid to rest – haunted the rest of his reign, and when his son Arthur Tudor died it seemed that, like Richard III, Henry too was cursed. But he survived, ruling with an iron hand and helped, crucially, by the fact he had a family, including a surviving son.

  On Henry VIII’s accession in 1509 it seemed England had a ‘true’ king again: he was the the senior male relat
ive of the lost princes, and it was his resemblance to his glorious grandfather, Edward IV – not his father Henry VII – that made Henry VIII ‘the more acclaimed and approved of’. For twenty years thereafter Henry VIII represented an ideal of chivalric kingship that his father had never achieved. Henry VIII’s royal blood, his glamour, his martial qualities, charm and piety, together carried the most tremendous force. In Flanders it was said that the young Henry VIII’s ‘great nobleness and fame’ was ‘greater than any prince since King Arthur’.

  The myth of the convivial ‘bluff King Hal’ lived on in national memory into the next century. Samuel Rowley’s Jacobean play, When You See Me You Know Me, which helped inspire Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, depicted a king going out in disguise to mingle with his subjects, getting into brawls and even being arrested. It is impossible to imagine such a play being written about Henry VII. Even today, we still prefer to remember the young and virile Henry VIII to the old, impotent tyrant. The trigger for Henry’s tyranny was – naturally – his anxieties concerning his inability to have a son with Katherine of Aragon. ‘We think all our doings in our lifetime are clearly defaced and worthy of no memory, if we leave you in trouble at the time of our death’, Henry once commented. Certain he was a ‘true’ king, he believed that his marriage must be false, and therefore cursed. After all, having no son was not only a personal blow, it also meant a possible future struggle for the crown, with his sisters and their heirs gaining a new importance in the future of the succession. These were the defining issues of Henry’s reign and the key influences on his rule: the nature of a true king, the importance of securing national concord and a stable future in blood heirs. Of course, sons required not only a king to sire them but also a queen to bear them – and Henry VIII is remembered today, perhaps most of all, for his queens.