Tudor (60 page)

On Henry VIII's accession in 1509 it seemed England had a ‘true' king again: he was the the senior male relative 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.

It was not just his wives who were important, however, in the matter of the succession. The second part of this book opens with the battle of Flodden, as seen through the eyes of two queens: Henry's sister Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots, whose husband James IV was killed, as well as Katherine of Aragon, Captain General of the English army that killed him. It was a shattering defeat for Scotland, but having children was more important for the succession than winning battles. It was the losing side, in the shape of Queen Margaret, who was destined to carry the Tudor bloodline forward through her son, James V of Scots, and her daughter Lady Margaret Douglas – a long-overlooked figure, and highly significant as the grandmother of the future heir to the Tudors, James VI and I. Seventeen years after Flodden, the teenage Margaret Douglas arrived at her uncle Henry VIII's court. It was the eve of the break with Rome, the annulment of Henry's marriage to the aging Katherine and the coronation of his new queen, Anne
Boleyn, from whom Henry hoped to a have son. Margaret Douglas witnessed these events, as well as Anne's fall, and the unravelling of the Tudor Camelot, with Anne, beheaded with a sword, the symbol of King Arthur, betrayed by his Queen Guinevere. Henry VIII still did not have a son and Margaret Douglas was to experience at first hand that summer of 1536 Henry's attacks on the rights of his sisters' heirs as he sought to establish the succession via the potential rights of his now illegitimised daughters.

Beyond the walls of the Tower, peace and harmony were also breaking down in spectacular style with Henry VIII facing the greatest rebellion England had seen for 150 years. The old divisions of the Wars of the Roses had come to be replaced by religious strife. The rebellion failed, but the shock to Henry's ego was tremendous. His subsequent dissolution of the monasteries, and the execution of religious conservatives and reformers alike, were an attempt to forge a new religious unity and national harmony that he intended would lie within a nationalist, Henrician, Catholic Church.

In this he failed – but what he did succeed in doing in 1537 was to give England a prince in his son, tellingly named Edward. When Henry VIII died Edward VI was, however, younger even than the princes in the Tower had been when they disappeared. The Tudors always looked back for examples and warnings. Determined there would be no new Richard III, Henry VIII's will had placed his trust in former servants, while at the same time ensuring that Edward's heirs in the wider Tudor family were too weak to be a threat. What happened next – a coup led by Edward VI's senior maternal uncle, who became the Protector Somerset – acts as a valuable reminder of a past that might have been. Edward VI ended up living out the exact fate that Richard III had feared for his nephew Edward V: that of being dominated by non-royal relations, with dangerous consequences for any members of the royal family who threatened their power. In the end Edward VI's maternal family, the Seymours, did not benefit from his rule. But when Edward died he ignored his Tudor sisters and bequeathed the throne to his
Protestant cousin, Lady Jane Grey, a descendant of Elizabeth Woodville's marriage to her first husband. Richard III's fear of the upstart Woodvilles had become a reality for a Tudor.

Mary I's subsequent victory over Jane in 1553 was the victory of the once-scorned Tudor name, and the reaction of a deeply hierarchical society to the offence of having, in Guildford Dudley, a man of no royal blood as king. Mary had also proved herself personally well qualified to become England's first ruling queen. The popular image of Mary I has been greatly influenced by later sexual and religious prejudice. She is often depicted as weak and with little political skill, yet she had raised military and popular support and divided her enemies with stunning success. Advertising her intention to scapegoat Jane Grey's father-in-law, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, and offering mercy to almost everyone else, Mary promised to deliver the peace and harmony Jane's regime had failed to do. Mary hoped that by encouraging leading Protestants to go into exile she would be able to go on to restore a united Catholic country, in communion once again with Rome, but with a humanist-reformed vision.

It was a devastating blow when, only six months later, Mary was confronted by the Protestant-led rebellion that became known as the Wyatt revolt. As she faced these rebels, she gave a speech on the nature of her ‘true' kingship. If she had been crowned ‘by the Grace of God only', so they would owe her, she said, ‘respect and due obedience solely on account of the holy unction' of the ceremony. Yet she had also won the crown on the battlefield, and was in addition queen ‘by rightful law of succession, confirmed by your unanimous acclimations and votes' in Parliament. Yet after she defeated the rebels she knew she had to prove her right further, by gaining the peace that still eluded her.

If it is difficult to believe that Richard III might have been a good king and a religious man, and nevertheless ordered the deaths of two children in pursuit of national unity, it is worth considering what followed: Mary executed the sixteen-year-old Jane and the youthful
Guildford, simply because they remained a potential inspiration for further Protestant opposition, which would of course threaten stability. As Mary continued to face Protestant treason she became even more ruthless, with the infamous burnings intended to eliminate what she perceived as a stubborn and destabilising minority. In our context we see Mary's actions as those of a fanatic. In her context she was eliminating fanatics, and of the most dangerous kind, incorrigible rebels against God and queen. But Mary also had to work positively, to build a future, and this unravelled in the face of her infertility and declining health. She failed in her ultimate duty to produce a child and this meant, once again, that the wider family was key to the future. Mary's preferred choice as her heir, Margaret Douglas, could not compete with the claims of Henry VIII's second daughter and, as Elizabeth took note, it was the knowledge that she would succeed her sister that fuelled the disorder and rebellion against Mary.

With the loss of Calais in the last year of Mary's life it would be easy for her enemies to paint the young, Protestant Elizabeth's accession as a brilliant new dawn. It is as such that it is still projected. Mary remains associated with her late seventeenth-century sobriquet ‘Bloody Mary', and an infamous recent advertisement for the London Dungeon depicted her face transforming into a demon-zombie. Elizabeth, by contrast, has been played in films by a series of beautiful actresses: Elizabeth is ever Cate Blanchett, fairy queen, to Mary's bitter, grey-faced Kathy Burke. Yet these sisters were neither simple heroines nor villains. Both were rulers of their time and we can only understand Elizabeth if we see, as she did, what the Tudor sisters had in common and how she could learn from Mary's example.
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Most significant for Elizabeth was the fact that Mary's Protestant enemies had sought to redefine the nature of a ‘true' king. They argued that religion was more important than blood, or victory in battles – a true king was Protestant – and that all women were by nature unsuited to rule over men. Elizabeth's response was to offer to her ordinary subjects a theatrical representation of herself as a ‘true' ruler: the seeds of which had been
sown by Mary herself in her speech during the Wyatt revolt, in which she is a mother who loves her subjects as if they were her children. Here was a female authority figure accepted as part of the divine order.

Elizabeth also sought to establish tranquility. Her conservatism and pragmatism have seen her described as a religious moderate, in contrast to the ‘fanatical' Mary; but as the new Protestant queen of a largely conservative country Elizabeth was necessarily moderate, and as her reign grew longer, she proved that, like Mary, she could be utterly ruthless when faced by a threat. The executions of hundreds of villagers following the Northern rebellion far exceeded anything her predecessors had done in similar circumstances, while her later persecution of Catholics was relentless and cruel.

Where Elizabeth was strikingly original was on the matter of the succession. For her subjects the provision of heirs remained central to the monarch's duty to provide future security. But Elizabeth took her own path, having learned from the experiences of Mary I and Jane Grey. Elizabeth explained in 1561 that it was from fear of provoking unrest that she had thus far ‘forborne to match with any husband'. That held true thereafter, with Elizabeth further bolstering her position by ensuring that she had ‘no certain successor'. The royal family was, for Elizabeth, not a source of future stability, but of immediate threat.

Elizabeth imprisoned her cousins, Protestant and Catholic, from Katherine and Mary Grey, to Margaret Douglas and Mary, Queen of Scots, from Margaret Clifford to Arbella Stuart. She bastardised their children, or sought their murder, she drove them to despair and even madness, so she could die a natural death, as queen, in her bed. And unlike the childless Richard II, to whom she was compared by her enemies, Elizabeth achieved that aim. The last of the Tudors was buried in the same vault as her grandparents Henry VII and Elizabeth of York in Westminster Abbey. Three years later, however, she was reburied in her sister's vault in the north aisle of the Lady Chapel. She was granted an effigy, but King James built his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, a far more magnificent tomb in the south aisle, flanked
by the tombs of those other mothers of kings, Margaret Beaufort and Margaret Douglas.
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Elizabeth had had Mary, Queen of Scots executed, but together the Tudor sisters represented only a dynastic dead end, and for England the future lay with the new royal family. James intended to be buried in the vault Elizabeth had chosen for herself, positioning himself as the true heir to Henry VII and Elizabeth of York.
⁴

After a few years of King James' extravagance, however, and when his passion for male favourites became a matter of political significance, people began to look back wistfully to the reign of their parsimonious, spinster Tudor queen. Above all they missed the Elizabethan theatre of reciprocal love. In 1607 a Venetian reported people complaining bitterly that King James did ‘not caress the people'. Rather, ‘this king manifests no taste for them but rather contempt and dislike. The result is he is despised and almost hated.' The glorification of Elizabeth's memory soon became a popular means of criticising her successor. Indeed, the birth of the reputation of the Tudors as our great national dynasty would owe much to further Stuart failings. For hundreds of years English kings had had to earn obedience freely given and, as we have seen, this was at the heart of much that the Tudors did. James' son Charles I would discover he could not rule without it. But despite a civil war, the beheading of King Charles, and the overthrow of the last Stuart king, James II, a monarchy part elective and part hereditary has endured, passing through junior descendants of Henry VII, and of his grandparents, Owen Tudor and Catherine of Valois.

Tudor history is more popular than ever and, as always, contentious. We see echoes of the Reformation struggle in the polarised writing and thinking about the new global resurgence of religion, with the demonised Catholic Church used as a surrogate for expressing fears of Islamism. This is bounced back again into depictions of the Tudor period, notably in Shekhar Kapur's film
Elizabeth
, which depicts Philip II as a Catholic-Islamist. So fixed is this construction of an irreconcilable and dangerous religious ‘other' that while
the inferior place of women in the royal succession is set to be changed by the current coalition government, Catholics are to remain excluded by law.

The effigy that lay on Catherine of Valois' coffin at her funeral can still be seen in Westminster Abbey, dressed in her red painted shift, while her body lies under the altar in Henry V's chantry.
⁵
Sadly, however, Owen Tudor, with whom this story also began, is nowhere remembered. After the monastery of the Hereford Greyfriars was dissolved in 1538, his tomb vanished. The ancestor of all the Tudor monarchs, and every British monarch since, now lies in a grave beneath a 1970s housing estate. Perhaps, like Richard III, he will find someone willing to find him a more dignified place.
⁶
For those who lived under the Tudor kings and queens, what mattered was not the Welsh origins of the Tudors, but the royal marriage of the union rose to which James was proclaimed heir in 1603: the symbol of peace, harmony and stability. For us, however, the name of the rose is Tudor, and the family story that began with Owen ends with a salute to the memory of the clumsy servant who, with a pirouette and a trip, fell into the lap of English royal history.