Tudor (19 page)

14

EXIT MARGARET BEAUFORT

S
TANDING ALONGSIDE
H
ENRY
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. The 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

A few days later, while staying at the abbot's house at Westminster, Margaret became ill. The cygnet she had eaten had upset her stomach. It was only two months since her son had died and Margaret did not have either the emotional or physical strength to recover. Fisher was present at her death, a mere five days after her grandson and his wife
were anointed king and queen.
⁶
Margaret Beaufort was buried in the Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey where her son had so recently been interred. She had decreed in her will that her Book of Hours, in which she had marked such key events as her son's victory at Bosworth and Henry VIII's birth, should be kept on display there.
⁷
Her black marble tomb was to be surmounted with a bronze effigy created by the Florentine sculptor Pietro Torrigiano. The face he cast expresses her forceful personality.

Margaret had survived the dangers of her son's birth. She had helped protect him during the years that followed, and risked her own life to conspire on his behalf against Richard III. In promoting her son as king, she had sacrificed her own superior claim to the throne. But although she accepted male authority she had wielded considerable influence. Margaret had used her experience of English court ceremony to place the Tudors firmly within royal tradition, drawing up the orders for future royal christenings and funerals. Her best servants became the king's, and he had continued to trust her judgement to the end. No wonder she came to sign herself in the regal style, Margaret R.

The obituary sermon Fisher gave her noted that Margaret would be greatly missed. Her female friends and relations, ‘whom she had loved so tenderly', her priests and servants, ‘to whom she was full dear', indeed, ‘all England for her death had cause for weeping'. Margaret had been an important patroness to the universities, especially Cambridge; she had also been generous to the poor, while her passion for chivalric virtues had, Fisher said, made her an ‘example of honour' to the nobility. It was her spirituality that he admired most, later commenting that although ‘she chose me as her director . . . I gladly confess that I learnt more from her great virtue than I ever taught her.' If Henry VII had had a good death, reconciled to God, Fisher believed Margaret had led a good life. In later generations, however, Margaret's reputation would fall victim to religious and sexual prejudice.

In the post-Reformation England of the seventeenth century Margaret's spirituality came to be judged mere superstition and her intelligence and toughness of character were regarded with equal suspicion. The antiquarian Sir George Buck condemned Margaret Beaufort as a ‘politic and subtle lady' who had killed the princes in the Tower with sorcery and poison to clear the way for her son. That Margaret was responsible for the princes' deaths is a theory becoming fashionable again and remains linked to cultural prejudices. Margaret's support for her son had been construed as those of an obsessively ambitious mother, yet for her generation she was fulfilling a duty. She was honour bound to help him regain his rightful inheritance, and later to help him restore the House of Lancaster, into which she had been born. Her strict religious devotions are, to modern sensibilities, strange, even fanatical, but amongst royal and noble women of her time they were commonplace: an effort to look beyond the vicious and ruthless political culture into which they were born, to understand humility, and the nobility of Christ's example.

The absence of portraits of Margaret Beaufort as an attractive young woman to counterbalance the images of her in old age have helped give credit to the sinister reputation she has gained. But the face that stands out from her story is not that of the widow with the hooded eyes, praying amidst the riches of a royal chapel and seen in her portraits, but a young girl, riding in the biting wet of a Welsh winter, to Pembroke Castle where she must deliver her child. Now it was for her grandchildren and great-grandchildren to continue the Tudor story.

Part Two

INHERITANCE: THE LEGACY OF ARTHUR

Avarice is expelled from the country. Liberality scatters wealth with bounteous hand. Our king does not desire gold of gems or precious metals, but virtue, glory, immortality.

WILLIAM BLOUNT, LORD MOUNTJOY, TO ERASMUS ON THE ACCESSION OF HENRY VIII

15

THE ELDER SISTER: MARGARET, QUEEN OF SCOTS

Q
UEEN
M
ARGARET BID HER HUSBAND
, J
AMES
IV,
FAREWELL AT
Linlithgow, the palace in West Lothian he had given her as a wedding present.
¹
It was here, in this towering palace by the loch, that their son James had been born on Easter Saturday the previous year. He was ‘a right fair child and large for his age', and by that summer of 1513 she was pregnant again.
²
Legend has it that she had begged her husband not to leave her, for he intended to go to war with her brother and she wished to prevent it. In reality, her chief concern was for James' life. It was only four years since Henry VII's death, but the twenty-three-year-old Tudor princess was now a ‘Scotswoman', as she often asserted. Under the blue painted ceiling of the Linlithgow Palace chapel, she would pray for James' victory, as well as for his safe return.