The House of Tudor (13 page)

Looking at portraits of the young Henry it is not easy to equate them with modern standards of male beauty, but his contemporaries were unanimous in their opinion that Nature could not have done more for the King. ‘His Majesty’, wrote the Venetian Piero Pasqualigo, ‘is the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on; above the usual height, with an extremely fine calf to his leg; his complexion fair and bright, with auburn hair combed straight and short in the French fashion, and a round face so very beautiful that it would become a pretty woman, his throat being rather long and thick.’ Ten years after his accession, Henry was still being described as ‘much handsomer than any other sovereign in Christendom...very fair and his whole frame admirably proportioned’.

This splendid red-headed young giant, with his round baby face and glowing pink and white skin had inherited more than good looks from his Yorkist grandfather. Edward IV had been a very popular king with the knack of making himself agreeable in all sorts of company. According to Polydore Vergil, he ‘would use himself more familiarly among private persons than the honour of his majesty required’ but Edward had known instinctively that popularity is often more valuable to a king - especially an English king - than majesty and his Tudor grandson knew it too, just as he knew how easily and cheaply it could be acquired. Henry VIII possessed the precious gift of personal magnetism which Henry VII had lacked and his charm, when he chose to exert it, was irresistible. Thomas More, an acute observer of human nature, put his finger on the secret when he wrote: ‘The King has a way of making every man feel that he is enjoying his special favour, just as the London wives pray before the image of Our Lady by the Tower till each of them believes it is smiling upon
her
.’

The new King had also inherited the abundant energy of his Plantagenet forbears and he made tireless use of his superb athlete’s body. He was a capital horseman, reported the Venetians, passionately addicted to hunting, who wore out eight or ten horses in a single day. He ‘jousted marvellously’, was a keen tennis player and could draw the bow with greater strength than any man in England. He loved hawking, was a good dancer and a crack shot who, at archery practice, surpassed the archers of his guard. In all the popular forms of mock combat and trials of strength - in wrestling and tilting, running at the ring and casting of the bar, in throwing a twelve foot spear and wielding a heavy, two-handed sword - the King soon proved himself more than a match for his competitors. He was, in fact, a first-rate, all-round sportsman and nothing could have been better calculated to endear him to a nation which idolized physical courage and physical prowess; which cared little for politics but a great deal for sport.

At the same time, there was more to Henry than a well-coordinated hunk of brawn and muscle. He had a good brain and had been given a good education. He liked to display his own learning and enjoyed the company of scholars, so that the intellectuals were as excited as everyone else over the appearance of ‘this new and auspicious star’, this lover of justice and goodness. Lord Mountjoy in particular could hardly contain himself. He wrote to his protégé in May 1509:

Oh my Erasmus, if you could see how all the world here is rejoicing in the possession of so great a Prince, how his life is all their desire, you could not contain your tears for joy...Our King does not desire gold or gems or precious metals, but virtue, glory, immortality. I will give you an example. The other day he wished he was more learned. I said: ‘That is not what we expect of your Grace, but that you will foster and encourage learned men.’ ‘Yes, surely’, said he, ‘for indeed without them we should scarcely exist at all.’

No more splendid saying, thought Mountjoy, could have fallen from the lips of a prince.

There really seemed no end to the gifts and graces of this marvellous youth and it is hardly surprising that a great wave of optimism should have swept the country. In the spring of 1509 many people genuinely believed that a new era, ‘called then the golden world’, was dawning and that under the beneficent rule of an apparently ideal Christian monarch the bad old days of faction, suspicion and heavy taxes would be gone forever.

Almost the first act of the ideal Christian monarch was to get married, and after all it was the despised and neglected Spanish princess who carried off the prize. The reasons behind this startling 
volte-face
 remain a little obscure. The bridegroom’s own explanation, given in a letter to Margaret of Austria, was that his father, as he lay on his death-bed, had expressly commanded him to fulfil his obligations to the Lady Catherine and as a dutiful son he had no choice but to obey. Another account of the old King’s last hours maintains that he expressly assured his son he was free to marry whom he chose and Don Gutierre Gomez de Fuensalida, the Spanish envoy who had been sent to England on a fence-mending mission, attributed the dramatic transformation of Catherine’s affairs entirely to the direct, personal intervention of the new King, who imperiously swept aside all the pettifogging obstacles which had been holding up the marriage for so long and ordered Fuensalida to complete the financial arrangements as quickly as possible - something that much-tried individual had been trying his best to do for the past year.

Henry had seen very little of his fiancée for some time, so it is not likely that any tender feelings were involved. It looks very much as if he was simply impatient to prove his manhood by taking a wife, and the quickest and easiest way to achieve that was to marry the girl he was already engaged to, who was on the spot and patiently waiting his pleasure. Fortunately, King Ferdinand was now in a position to produce the second half of Catherine’s dowry and Catherine, who had been at her wits’ end to find the wherewithal to clothe herself and feed her servants, was caught up almost overnight in a whirl of wedding preparations, with nothing more serious to worry about than ordering a new trousseau.

As the King had set his heart on having his Queen crowned beside him, there was no time to be lost. On 10 May Henry VII was buried with all due ceremony in Westminster Abbey, to dwell ‘more richly dead than he did alive’, and as soon as the funeral was over Henry VIII bore his bride off to Greenwich. They were married very quietly in the church of the Observant Friars by the palace wall and although (at least so it was said later) the Archbishop of Canterbury had his doubts about the legality of this marriage of brother and sister-in-law, any scruples he may have felt were not strong enough to prevent him from performing the ceremony.

The coronation had been fixed for 24 June, four days before the King’s eighteenth birthday. London was filling up with people who had come to town to see their monarch ‘in the full bloom of his youth and high birth’ and the City, which had not been
en fête
since Prince Arthur’s wedding eight years before, was busy sweeping and sanding the streets and hanging out streamers and banners of tapestry and cloth of gold; while tailors, embroiderers and goldsmiths worked round the clock to fill orders for furred robes, new liveries, coats of arms and elaborate horse trappings.

On 23 June, the King made his ritual journey from the Tower to Westminster- a resplendent figure in crimson and gold, flashing with diamonds, rubies and emeralds and with a great golden baldrick slung round his neck. As for his retinue, Edward Hall, that indefatigable chronicler of Tudor pageantry, declares ‘there was no lack or scarcity of cloth of tissue, cloth of gold, cloth of silver, broderie or of goldsmiths’ works: but in more plenty and abundance than hath been seen or read of at any time before’. The Queen’s procession followed, with Catherine sitting in a litter draped with white cloth of gold and carried between two white palfreys trapped with the same material. She wore embroidered white satin and had a coronet ‘set with many rich orient stones’ on her head. Her marvellous russet-coloured hair hung loose down her back and Hall specially noticed that it was ‘of a very great length, beautiful and goodly to behold’.

The next day Henry and his Queen were anointed and crowned by Archbishop Warham ‘according to the sacred observance and ancient custom’, and afterwards all the quality crowded into Westminster Hall for a banquet ‘greater than any Caesar had known’. A grand tournament had been organized ‘for the more honour and ennobling of this triumphant Coronation’ and the next few days were given over to jousting, feasting and dancing.

The celebrations were brought to a temporary halt by the sudden death of the King’s grandmother. Margaret Beaufort had been staying in the Abbot’s house at Westminster for the coronation and she died there on 29 June at the age of sixty-six. The death of the foundress of the royal Tudor family broke another link with the past which everyone was now so busy forgetting and although she was given a suitably grand funeral and buried, according to her wish, beside her son and daughter-in-law in the Henry VII Chapel, the new King did not allow her passing to interfere with his pleasures any longer than was decently necessary.

Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby, is remembered for her piety, for her generosity in almsgiving, for her patronage of learning and as the founder of St. John’s College, Cambridge. It is possible, though, that her grandson’s memories of this formidably virtuous
grande dame
were not particularly cheerful ones. Lady Margaret had always played an active part in the upbringing and education of her grandchildren and she would certainly have been associated in the King’s mind with the last few years of his father’s reign when, at least according to Fuensalida, the teenage Henry had been guarded as strictly as a young girl. He spent most of his time studying in a room leading off his father’s chamber; he was only allowed out to exercise through a private door into the park and was surrounded by attendants chosen by his father. No outsider, wrote the ambassador, could approach or speak to him and he scarcely opened his mouth in public.

Fuensalida may well have been exaggerating the case but it is certainly true that the old King never permitted the Prince of Wales to take even the most minor independent share in government and made sure that, as he began to grow up, he stayed well out of the limelight. Whether this was simply because Henry VII considered his only surviving son too precious an asset to be let out of his sight, whether he doubted the boy’s readiness to cope with independence or whether he was increasingly afraid of being outshone by his handsome, athletic heir we have no means of knowing. The fact remains that the future Henry VIII was kept a schoolboy under the constant surveillance of either his father or his grandmother until the moment of his accession. The prince seems to have borne this stultifying regime with exemplary patience, but it is hardly surprising that the moment he was free he should have thrown off all restraint - stating his intentions with engaging frankness.

Pastance with good company

I love and shall until I die

Grudge who will, but none deny.

So God be pleased this life will I

For my pastance,

Hunt, sing, and dance,

My heart is set;

All goodly sport

To my comfort

Who shall me let?

Who indeed? Here was a young man with the world at his feet, his father’s money to spend and a good deal of boredom to make up for. He meant to enjoy himself and enjoy himself he did. For the rest of that first carefree summer the Court settled into a round of ‘continual festival’, with revels, tilts and tourneys, pageants, banquets and ‘disguisings’ following one another in an endless, glittering and expensive stream, and with the King always in the thick of the fun.

Henry had an insatiable passion for dressing up, and for charades. On one occasion, he and a bunch of cronies burst unannounced into the Queen’s chamber ‘all appareled in short coats of Kentish Kendal, with hoods on their heads and hosen of the same, every one of them [with] his bow and arrows and a sword and buckler, like outlaws or Robin Hood’s men’. The Queen and her ladies, though ‘abashed’ by this invasion, knew what was expected of them and danced politely with the strangers. Another time the King suddenly vanished in the middle of a banquet, to reappear ‘appareled after Turkey fashion’ in a gold turban and hung round with scimitars. His companions were dressed up as Russians and the torch-bearers had their faces blacked ‘like Moriscos’.

The Queen’s part in these merry pranks was to provide an admiring audience and she never failed to play up - to be suitably astonished and appreciative of the joke when Robin Hood, or the Saracen, or the mysterious Muscovite revealed himself as her husband. The King was delighted with her and, after less than two months of marriage, wrote to his father-in-law in elegant Latin, assuring him of ‘that entire love which we bear to the most serene Queen, our consort’. When, on 1 November 1509 he was able to tell Ferdinand that ‘the Queen, our dearest consort, with the favour of heaven, had conceived in her womb a living child and is right heavy therewith’, the young couple’s happiness seemed complete.

Catherine was twenty-three now - a very different being from the shy, homesick child who had landed at Plymouth in 1501. During the seven lean years of her widowhood she had learnt some hard but useful lessons in patience, discretion, self-reliance and self-control and she had matured into a responsible, serious-minded and capable young woman. In the early years of their marriage Henry was not only devoted to her, he relied heavily on her judgement and experience, he respected her opinions and listened to her advice. It seemed an ideal match. Husband and wife shared many interests, both loved music and dancing, both had intellectual tastes, both were deeply religious. In addition, Catherine’s good breeding and perfect natural dignity made an excellent foil for Henry’s exuberance and her gently restraining influence saved the Court from any taint of vulgarity - attracting members of the older aristocratic families (some of whom became her special friends) who might otherwise have been repelled by the rollicking young men who flocked round the King.

But admirable creature though the Queen might be - and no one denied her many good qualities - her real business was to bear children, the sooner the better. No thinking man could forget that all the splendour and prosperity and high hopes of the new reign rested on the fragile foundation of one life. If the King were to have an accident in the tiltyard or the hunting field; if he were to fall victim to the sweating sickness, which notoriously attacked the upper classes; then the whole Tudor achievement would collapse overnight and the country revert into an anarchy far worse than any it had known under the faction fights of the rival Roses.