Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (16 page)

Ferdinand and Isabella, meanwhile, sent a stream of urgent dispatches to Rodrigo de Puebla, varying wildly in tone from the assertive to the querulous. They ‘confidently’ expected that Henry would ‘fulfil his obligations’ to their daughter, which included giving Catherine her dower lands – the estates due to her as a widow – so that she could pay her household expenses. They were sure that the king of England would not break his word ‘at any time, and much less at present whilst the Princess is overwhelmed with grief’. This rather overemphatic confidence in Henry’s probity betrayed that they fully expected him not to keep his promise.

In fact, they had been alarmed to hear that people in England were already advising Catherine to borrow money against the gold, jewels and silver that she had brought with her as part of her marriage portion, because Henry was hardly going to provide for her. De Puebla was to instruct Juan de Cuero, Catherine’s wardrober, to keep the treasure secure, in case she started selling or pawning it. And Catherine herself, Ferdinand and Isabella commanded, should be sent straight home to Spain on the next available ship: ‘We cannot endure that a daughter whom we love should be so far from us when she is in affliction.’
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But as Ferdinand and Isabella wept crocodile tears, they were also playing a game of double bluff. Catherine remained a highly valuable commodity in the world of international politics, and now she was evidently not pregnant, she was free to marry again. Far from wanting their daughter shipped back, her parents were very keen indeed that she should wed the ‘Prince of Wales that now is’ – ‘without delay’.
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The Spanish monarchs, in fact, were more desperate than ever to have England onside. Back in 1499 the new French king, Louis XII, had picked up where his predecessor had left off. Re-invading and re-occupying swathes of northern Italy, his armies were once again on the warpath against Spanish-ruled Naples. Fearing complete French domination of the peninsula, Ferdinand and Isabella were now trying to hustle Henry into a new marriage alliance that would, again, force him to commit to war against France – or, at the very least, put quantities of his fabled wealth towards it. If, as they wrote to de Puebla that August, the new betrothal and its accompanying treaty could be arranged, ‘all our anxiety would cease, and we shall be able to seek the aid of England against France’.
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Eager to show they had a card to play, Ferdinand and Isabella offered to exert pressure on Maximilian to give up the earl of Suffolk. The Spanish monarchs had a strong presence at the court of the emperor’s son, Archduke Philip of Burgundy, who had married their daughter, Catherine’s sister Juana of Castile. The coterie of Castilian diplomats at the Burgundian court, they reasoned, might be able to pull some strings. It was a lame offer, and Henry knew it.
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Henry temporized. Here, at least, he was in a strong position to negotiate – and he was unwilling to rush into anything. By the autumn, the tone of Ferdinand and Isabella’s letters were subdued, far from the bullishness of earlier in the year. They told their ambassadors not to mention anything to Henry about France, in case it put him off the idea of a betrothal, adding plaintively that, were the betrothal to take place it ‘might chance’ that Henry’s friendship ‘might prove an advantage to us’. Once the paperwork was in place, they reasoned, they could continue lobbying Henry about military intervention.
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As 1502 wore on, changes were afoot at Eltham, as Prince Henry’s little household began to transform itself into an establishment fit for an heir. And Queen Elizabeth’s consoling words to Henry had been proved right. She was pregnant again.

On Christmas Day 1502, Henry made his customary procession, crowned and in a gown of purple velvet lined with sable, through Richmond’s public chambers and galleries to the Chapel Royal, surrounded by a thicket of lords temporal and spiritual dressed in their robes of estate, his way lined with halberd-bearing guards pushing back anybody ‘so hardy’ as to approach. There, before the high altar, as the choir’s voices soared upwards to the blue, star-flecked ceiling, Henry knelt and made his offering of a ‘noble in gold’, 6s 8d. After him, his eleven-year-old son stepped forward to make his offering of five shillings, not as the duke of York, but, for the first time, as ‘my lord prince’. At the centre of things, too, was the reassuring sight of Elizabeth. Cheeks flushed, heavily pregnant, she heard the children of the Chapel Royal sing William Cornish’s new setting of a carol, and on Boxing Day, she settled down to endless games of cards, gambling away a hundred shillings.
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As usual that Christmas, the solemn liturgies and crown-wearing processions were interwoven with the feasts, the endless processions of extravagantly dressed and spiced dishes borne out of the royal kitchens, the distribution of largesse to heralds and winter clothing to the household servants, and the entertainments: a succession of tumblers, singers, carollers and minstrels, interludes and plays. Weaving through the festivities on his hobby horse pranced the mocking master of ceremonies, the lord of misrule. Pursued by his band of gaudily dressed, painted fools, he supervised the programme of revels and ‘rarest pastimes to delight the beholders’, with its satirical upending of the established order – kitchen servants strutting around with the airs, graces and clothing of great men; household officers acting as menials – all to be done, of course, ‘without quarrel or offence’.
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Behind this temporary upside-down world lurked a sense of the fragility of things, that the lurching wheel of fortune which raised people up could as quickly overturn them. Riches, honour, wealth, and life, could disappear in an instant.

On New Year’s Day, servants queued to present the king and queen with gifts from their masters: large sums of money from Henry’s close counsellors and, from others, fine foods and exotic fruits – pomegranates, branches of oranges, figs – and a snarling leopard, with which Henry was clearly delighted, rewarding the giver liberally with £13 6s 8d.
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Among the gifts was a small Latin manuscript entitled ‘The Book of the Excellent Fortunes of Henry duke of York and his Parents’. The composer of this fulsome horoscope was William Parron, the Italian astrologer who had carved out for himself a role at court as a semi-official peddler of prognostications, which he combined with a sideline in cheap printed almanacks. The fashionable classical allusions which Parron sprinkled over his predictions may have given them a certain superficial authority, but he made sure to tell Henry what he wanted to hear: his most notorious moment to date had been his advocacy of the judicial murder of Edward earl of Warwick back in autumn 1499. Now, in the wake of Arthur’s death, Parron’s horoscope for 1503 predicted the glowing futures of Henry, Elizabeth and Prince Henry, who received his own personalized copy, dedicated to him in his new role as prince of Wales. This time, though, Parron had overreached himself. Elizabeth, he forecast, would live to the age of eighty.
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Late in January, the royal household moved downriver, to the Tower. Elizabeth was carefully ferried in her barge, reclining heavily on cushions and carpets, burning braziers filled with sweet herbs to mask the smells of the freezing Thames, her twenty-two oarsmen rowing with particular care. At the Tower, the rituals of childbirth began with a ceremonial mass in the chapel of St John the Evangelist, followed by a ‘void’ of spiced wine and sweetmeats. Then, surrounded by her ladies and gentlewomen, her mother-in-law Lady Margaret Beaufort at their head, Elizabeth went into confinement.

Following ordinances drawn up by Lady Margaret, the chamber in which Elizabeth would give birth had been meticulously well appointed. Above the heavily carpeted floor, the ceiling, walls, ‘windows and all’ were swathed in blue arras peppered with gold fleurs-de-lys, signifying kingship and that paradigm of motherhood, the Virgin Mary. One window only was left uncovered to admit light. The room had a cupboard gleaming with plate, two cradles standing in readiness and a ‘rich altar’ encrusted with relics of the saints. Below their velvet, gold and ermine canopies of estate worked with embroidered red-and-white roses stood the bed on which the queen was to give birth, and at its foot a pallet, half-throne, half day-bed, with furnishings of velvet and cloth-of-gold and counterpanes of ermine-fringed scarlet. In this opulent, womblike environment, in which the events crucial to the dynasty and the country would unfold, the queen’s status was exalted, almost sacred. The furnishings, too, were designed with tranquillity in mind, the simple patterns of the fleurs-de-lys preferred to more elaborately designed arras with ‘images’, so as not to overstimulate ‘women in such case’. And while Alice Massy, Elizabeth’s favoured midwife, was in attendance, there were as usual no physicians. The presence of men in this all-female environment was forbidden – besides which doctors, it was thought, only served to cause anxiety to women in labour.
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On 2 February, the household celebrated Candlemas. Of all the great feasts of estate, Candlemas was one of the most distinctive. Forty days after Christmas, its candles emphasized the light brought into the world by the new-born child. In the depth of winter they symbolized, too, rebirth and renewal, bringing a sense that the first faint signs of spring could not be too far away. On that day, barely a fortnight into a confinement intended to last a month, Elizabeth was convulsed by sudden and violent contractions.
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The traumatic and premature labour was badly handled, and Elizabeth became feverish. Soon, she had a raging temperature and was slipping in and out of consciousness. Waiting with mounting anxiety outside his wife’s apartments, Henry frenziedly sought medical advice. Messengers rode through the night into Kent and the west country to summon specialists. Nothing worked. On 11 February, her thirty-seventh birthday, Elizabeth died. Her sickly baby daughter, hastily christened Catherine, followed soon after.
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Nobody, those around Henry reported, had ever ‘seen or heard’ the king in such a state. Anguish ruptured the poised regality in which he had sublimated all his anxieties. Years before, in exile, rumours of Elizabeth’s betrothal to Richard III had ‘pinched him to the very stomach’; now, her death provoked in him a visceral response.

As his wife’s newly coffined body lay in the chapel of St John the Evangelist, bathed in the light of innumerable candles, and attended by her mourning gentlewomen and the ‘great estates’ of court, the king left the funeral ceremonies in the hands of Lady Margaret Beaufort, Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey and Sir Richard Guildford. Commanding six hundred masses to be sung in London’s churches, Henry, surrounded by a clutch of his close servants in mourning black, ‘privily departed to a solitary place to pass his sorrows and would no man should resort to him’. His barge slid away from the Tower and up the wintry Thames to Richmond. There, he disappeared, up flights of stairs, through the succession of public chambers and galleries into the building’s heart, his privy chamber, where he collapsed.
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On Wednesday 22 February Queen Elizabeth’s funeral procession snaked through London’s crowded, silent streets, from the Tower to her place of burial at Westminster Abbey. Bells tolled and priests stood in church doorways with swaying censers, the pungent smell of incense drifting over the cortège as it passed. With a vanguard of horsebacked lords, among them London’s mayor and Garter king-of-arms John Writhe, the hearse was drawn by eight warhorses caparisoned in black velvet. On it rested a painted, intricately modelled effigy of the late queen, clothed in her crown and robes of estate, bejewelled hands clutching her sceptre. The hearse was accompanied by two hundred poor men, their presence believed to be a powerful act of intercession with Christ, bearing lighted tapers. Following them came the queen’s gentlewomen, eight ladies of honour riding black palfreys, the rest in two carriages, each drawn by a team of six horses. Chaplains, squires, knights and aldermen rode alongside, black gowns draped behind, their mourning hoods pulled down obscuring their faces. The orders of friars patronized by Elizabeth, the Carmelites in their white habits and the Augustinians in black, joined the king’s chapel choir in the singing of ‘solemn anthems’. Then followed representatives of London’s guilds and the city’s foreign mercantile and banking communities: Spanish, French, Dutch and Germans, Venetians, Florentines, Lucchese and Genoese.

On that dark February day, the overwhelming impression made on the London chronicler was one of light. From the manor of Blanch Appleton on the city’s eastern edge to Temple Bar in the west, the city was illuminated. Over 4,000 flaming torches lit the streets through which the procession passed, while the main streets of Cornhill and Cheapside, ‘garnished thoroughly with new torches’, were lined with white-clad men holding burning brands. At Fenchurch Street and the top of Cheapside stood groups of thirty-seven virgins, one for each year of the late queen’s life, dressed in white, holding lighted tapers.
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Though founded on pragmatism, Henry and Elizabeth’s marriage had nevertheless blossomed throughout the uncertainty and upheaval of the previous eighteen years. This was a marriage of ‘faithful love’, of mutual attraction, affection and respect, from which the king seems to have drawn great strength – indeed, it was the kind of marriage that their second son, Prince Henry, would spend his whole life trying to find. With Elizabeth’s burial, the lights went out all over Henry VII’s court. The reign was plunged into crisis. Henry, shattered, would never be the same again. For his young, vulnerable son, so recently saddled with the burden of impending kingship, it was a traumatic loss.