Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII (17 page)

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Authors: Robert Hutchinson

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The wedding took place just three days after Warham’s licence was issued – on 11 June in the oratory of the Friar Observants’ church, just outside Greenwich Palace, where Henry had been christened a few days after his birth. It was a private and very quiet affair, probably because of the speed with which it was arranged; Henry wanted his queen crowned with him at Westminster on Midsummer Day, in less than two weeks’ time. Only two witnesses are known to have attended: George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, the Lord Steward, and William Thomas, a Groom of the king’s Privy Chamber and the servant mentioned in Henry’s bede roll.
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Katherine wore a dress of shimmering white satin and her reddish-gold hair hung long and loose, as befitted the virgin bride she firmly asserted herself to be.
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Ironically, it was Warham who officiated at the short, intimate ceremony. He demanded of Henry:
Most illustrious Prince, is it your will to fulfil the treaty of marriage concluded by your father, the late King of England, and the parents of the Princess of Wales, the King and Queen of Spain, and, as the Pope has dispensed with this marriage, to take the Princess who is here present for your lawful wife?
The king answered firmly: ‘I will.’ Warham, in full pontificals and mitre, then turned to Katherine and asked her a similar question, beginning, ‘Most illustrious Princess …’ She, in turn, replied: ‘I will.’
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They spent their wedding night in Greenwich Palace. Henry afterwards bragged that he found his wife a virgin, but in later years, after his taste in women had markedly changed, angrily claimed this had been ‘spoken in jest, as a man, jesting and feasting, says many things which are not true’. But Katherine had many living witnesses who had heard him say it.
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She came to the marriage almost six years older than her bridegroom, at twenty-three, petite, pink-cheeked, somewhat plump but still beautiful. However, the years of fiscal and mental persecution by Henry VII and her continual hardship at Durham House had instilled an iron will inside that innocent and demure exterior. She also matched her husband’s depth of learning – those lonely, isolated years had provided her with the opportunity to read widely, building on the foundations of her humanist education laid long before in Spain.
On 16 June, the king signed his receipt for 50,000 crowns (worth 4s 2d each), the last instalment of the marriage portion handed over to him by Fuensalida.
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In turn, Henry settled on his wife a handsome jointure. Its eight pages of parchment detail more than £750 in income from annual rents, plus the gift of ninety-nine lordships and manors in at least eleven counties and other benefits, including the rights to ‘drag mussels’ in the River Thames at ‘Tilbury Hope, Essex’.
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Planning for the joint coronation of Henry and Katherine was now in full swing. The king proclaimed ‘that all who claim to do services on Coronation Day should be in the White Hall at Westminster Palace’ by 20 June. A team of nobles, led by the Earl of Surrey, the Lord Treasurer of England, and the Earl of Oxford would determine whether their claims were justified. Henry ordered twenty-six ‘honourable persons’ to come to the Tower two days later to serve him at dinner in preparation for their creation as Knights of the Bath on 23 June. They included William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, his old companion in Latin studies; Sir Thomas Knyvet, one of his youthful jousting friends; Sir Henry
Clifford, who had been with him since he was made Duke of York; and Sir Thomas Boleyn, a rising star at court.
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It is traditional for the king to hold a solemn vigil before his coronation. For Henry’s nocturnal watch, at the Tower on Friday 22 June, he wore a doublet of cloth of gold and damask satin under a long gown of purple velvet, furred with ermine.
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On Saturday 23 June at about four o’clock in the afternoon a glittering mounted procession trotted out of the Tower, en route to Westminster. The London thoroughfares had been sumptuously decorated for the coronation, the houses and shops hung with tapestry and cloth of arras, and on the south side of Cheapside, with costly cloth of gold. The cobbled streets were railed to keep the huge crowds back from the passage of the riders.
Determined to obtain a good view of proceedings, Lady Margaret Beaufort hired a house in Cheapside for the day, at a rent of 2s 10d, which overlooked the route taken by Henry and Katherine as they processed in triumph. Not for her the crush and stench of the unwashed hoi polloi Londoners in the streets below. She watched the pageant pass by below with Henry’s younger sister Princess Mary from behind a latticed window. Moreover, Henry’s proud grandmother had surprisingly cast off her everyday drab black and white vowess robes for the occasion, to wear – like her ladies – specially ordered dresses of tawny-brown silk and damask with black velvet bonnets.
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Despite this frivolous exterior, dark forebodings lurked in Lady Margaret’s saintly heart. Bishop Fisher recalled later that the coronation provided great joy to her ‘yet she let not to say that some adversity would follow’.
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At the head of the dazzling cavalcade rode the newly created Knights of the Bath, wearing blue gowns. Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, claimed his hereditary role of Constable of England and carried a small silver baton as mark of his office as he rode ahead of the king. The duke wore a long gown ‘wrought of right costly needlework and … about his neck a broad and flat close chain … with great rubies and other stones of great value’.
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Significantly, the Letters Patent conferring this office on Buckingham had stipulated: ‘to be Great Constable on
23 June only
, namely the day preceding the Coronation’.
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Henry, all too aware of
the duke’s vaunting ambition, had personally imposed strict limits on Buckingham’s vanity and status.
The volume of noise in those narrow streets, overhung with houses, rose to a babbling, shrieking crescendo as the new king appeared amid his household, riding a horse trapped with gold damask and ermine, beneath a golden canopy held aloft by the Barons of the Cinque Ports, exercising a traditional right. Henry wore robes of crimson velvet trimmed with ermine over a gold jacket covered with a breathtaking array of sparkling diamonds, rubies, emeralds and pearls. Around his neck was a collar of huge violet-rose ‘ballas rubies’ from north Afghanistan.
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Hall, an enthralled spectator in the crowds, was so beside himself with admiration that his descriptive powers began to fail him:
The features of his body, his goodly personage, his amiable visage, princely countenance, with the noble qualities of his royal estate, to every man known, needs no rehearsal, considering that for lack of cunning, I cannot express the gifts of grace and of nature that God has endowed him with.
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Behind Henry straggled a long column of lords spiritual and temporal and many knights and esquires. Then came Sir Thomas Brandon, Master of the King’s Horse, wearing a golden collar like his sovereign (but less showy) and a doublet embroidered with roses of fine gold. He led, by a silken rein, the king’s spare charger, with a harness ‘curiously wrought’ in bullion by goldsmiths.
Katherine’s procession followed. She sat in a litter ‘born[e] by two white palfreys, trapped in white cloth of gold’. She was resplendent in embroidered white satin, ‘her hair hanging down her back of very great length, beautiful and goodly to behold and on her head, a coronet
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set with many rich orient stones’ as Edward Hall enthusiastically reported.
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Behind were chariots carrying her ladies and the wives of the peers of the realm, wearing gorgeously coloured silks.
Bringing up the rear were three hundred of the king’s guard still wearing ‘jackets of the old king’s livery’, some armed with bows and arrows, others with the harquebus (or hackbut), a muzzle-loading gun fired from the shoulder.
As Katherine’s litter passed a tavern on the north side of Lombard Street displaying a board with a painted cardinal’s hat hanging over its doorway
such a sudden shower there came and fell with such force and thickness that the canopy borne over her was not sufficient to defend her from wetting of her mantle and fur of powdered ermines … But she was … conveyed under the hovel of a draper’s stall till the showers were passed over which was not long.
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In the future, there would be some Londoners of long memory who remembered Katherine being drenched by that inopportune shower and pondered whether the location of the incident was an evil portent.
Henry and Katherine slept that night in the Painted Chamber of Westminster Palace beneath the huge mural, commissioned by Henry III, of the coronation of St Edward the Confessor in 1042.
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The next morning, Sunday 24 June 1509, Henry and Katherine left the palace at about eight o’clock and walked through Westminster Hall into the abbey church, escorted by thirty-eight bishops and abbots.
The cloth merchants had been frantically busy, supplying 1,641 yards (1,500 m) of scarlet cloth and 2,040 yards (1,865 m) of red cloth, costing all together £1,307 11s 3
1/2
d, for everyone’s coronation robes. Around 480 yards (440 m) of cloth in the Tudor livery were also used for the uniforms of one hundred and sixty personnel from the King’s Bench and Marshalsea Prisons, who carried tipped staves at the ceremony and may have acted as ushers. The total bill for the silks and cloth amounted to £4,781 6s 3d. On top of this was the £1,749 8s 4d for the king and queen’s own robes.
The abbey was packed not only with the great, the good and the merely curious but also with some of the hundreds of retainers who daily attended the royal couple in their separate households. Pip, the Keeper of the King’s fool Merten (who received special clothes for the coronation), ended the long, long list of courtiers and servants in Henry’s household and Privy Chamber.
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Amongst the invited spectators were two from Henry’s childhood – ‘Mrs Anne Luke, the king’s nurse’ and his old French master ‘Giles D’Ewes and three of his fellows’.
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Lady Margaret watched, fondly and proudly, from her privileged seat in the choir as Archbishop Warham formally presented the new king to his subjects. A thousand voices replied with four deafening, resounding shouts of
Vivat, Vivat Rex –
‘Long live the King!’
The coronation oath sworn by Henry that Midsummer’s Day included his pledge, made before Richard Fitzjames, Bishop of London, that
With good will and devout soul, I promise … I shall keep the privilege of the law canon and of holy church … and I shall … by God’s grace defend you and every each of you, bishops and abbots, through my realm and all these churches to you and them committed; all these things … I Henry, King of England promise and confirm to keep and observe, so help me God and by these holy evangelists by me bodily touched upon this holy altar.
The king stood up from Edward I’s Coronation Chair
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and moved to the abbey’s high altar to make ‘a solemn oath upon the sacrament laid upon the altar, in the sight of all the people’.
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He was anointed with holy oil nine times – on the palms of his hands, his chest, back, on each shoulder and elbow and finally upon his head, each time with the sign of the cross. Henry was then handed the royal regalia of gold orb and sceptre and the crown of St Edward the Confessor was slowly and reverently lowered upon his head as he again sat resplendent in the great chair.
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Another record of the oath has him swearing to maintain the rights and liberties of ‘holy church’, and this has been amended, in Henry’s own hand, to read ‘of the holy church of England not prey to his jurisdiction and dignity royal’.
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Some have claimed this was the oath administered on that august day, but it seems likely it was personally amended by the king in the 1530s, in a mischievous attempt to rewrite history when the religious break with Rome was underway.
Homage was paid to Henry by his nobility, led by the senior peer Buckingham, who knelt before his sovereign and pledged his loyalty and fealty:
I Edward Stafford become your liegeman
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of life and limb and of earthly worship and faith and truth I shall bear unto you, to live and die against all manner of folk, so God help me and his saints.
The duke’s homage was followed by that of the four earls and twenty-one barons present.
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It was then Katherine’s turn. After all those bleak years of solitary despair, fading or thwarted dreams, and the cruel treatment at the grasping hands of her scheming father-in-law, her day of glory had finally arrived. She was radiant, wearing a kirtle furred with miniver (from the white stoat or ermine) and a mantle with a train of white cloth of gold with gold and white tassels.
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The archbishop gently placed a crown of gold upon her head, the border set with sapphires and pearls, and handed her a golden sceptre with the image of a tiny dove on top.
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She had become queen of England at last, although she could never forget her bitter past.

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