Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII (7 page)

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Authors: Robert Hutchinson

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We have already met Henry’s grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, (Plate 3) fussing and fretting over the arcane arrangements for court ceremonial. She had been married three times: firstly to Edmund Tudor, First Earl of Richmond, whom she wed at the age of twelve; after his death in November 1456 she gave birth to her single child on 28 January 1457 – but only after a lonely and perilous confinement in which mother and baby son came close to death. Her second husband was her cousin, Sir Henry Stafford, son of Humphrey, First Duke of Buckingham. She married him in 1462 and enjoyed a happy and close union with him before he died from wounds sustained fighting for Edward IV at the Battle of Barnet on 14 April 1471. Lastly, at the age of thirty in June 1473, Margaret married Thomas Stanley, later First Earl of Derby, whose eleventh-hour intervention at Bosworth, together with his younger brother William (executed for treason in 1495), had won the day for Henry VII.
Margaret was famously pious. In 1499, with her husband’s permission, she swore a vow of chastity in the presence of Richard Fitzjames, Bishop of London, and retired to a separate establishment at Collyweston, Northamptonshire, three miles (4.83 km) south-west of Stamford,
Lincolnshire. It was an idyllic spot, on the south side of the valley of the River Welland, and she extended the existing early-fifteenth-century manor house originally built by Sir William Porter.
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Given her sacred vow, her husband was thoughtfully provided with separate rooms on the rare occasions when he visited, travelling down from his seat at Lathom Hall, near Ormskirk, West Lancashire.
Gradually the house at Collyweston was turned into a palace fit for a lady whose official title was ‘the King’s Mother’.
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By special permission of her son, she was allowed to sign herself ‘Margaret R’ – the ‘R’ for
Regina
, the feminine form of ‘
Rex
’ – and was also licensed to keep her own retainers, all wearing the silver and blue Beaufort livery and her portcullis badge on their chests. At one stage she had four hundred servants and dependants. Like the king, she employed spies and informers, and the string of castles and manor houses across England granted her by her son became operating bases for her agents, ever vigilant for treachery and treason.
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Lady Margaret also maintained a large London townhouse, granted by the king. Coldharbour, in Thames Street, was an ancient mansion with its own river frontage and a pleasant ‘summer house’ overlooking the water.
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Their letters testify to the close, loving relationship between the politically shrewd only son and equally guileful mother. One from Henry VII begins:
Madam, my most entirely well beloved Lady and mother, I recommend me unto you in the most humble and lowly ways that I can, beseeching you of your daily and continual blessings …
I shall be glad to please you as your heart can desire it and I know well that I am as much bounden so to do to any creature living for the great and singular motherly love and affection that it has pleased you at all times to bear towards me.
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Such filial love was gushingly reciprocated. A letter from mother to son, probably written in January 1501, begins:
My own sweet and most dear king and all my worldly joy, in as humble
manner as I can think I recommend me to your grace and most heartily beseech our Lord to bless you.
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Another starts with a fervent ‘My dearest and only desired joy in this world’ and refers to Henry VII in the text as ‘my dear heart’ and ‘my good king’. The same letter archly requests the king’s permission to reserve some of her tenants in north-west England to be ‘kept for my lord of York, your fair sweet son’ as his retainers.
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Portraits of Lady Margaret depict her in the drab, dark clothes of a vowess, her lean, high-cheekboned face staring out with hooded eyes from beneath a linen headdress with a white or grey coif and a wimple covering her head and throat like a nun. A pleated barbe stretches down from her chin onto her chest. She is invariably seen either on her knees devoutly praying, or holding an open missal in her hands. She was the principal patron behind the rebuilding of Great St Mary’s Church in Cambridge, and in 1505 she refounded the impoverished Godshouse there as Christ’s College;
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later she founded another Cambridge college, St John’s. She also established readerships (later professorships) in Divinity at Oxford and Cambridge Universities.
In about 1501, she appointed Dr John Fisher, Master of Michaelhouse, Cambridge, as her chaplain. Shortly afterwards he became her confessor.
Henry VII was impressed by Fisher and decided to make him Bishop of Rochester. He sought his mother’s permission to offer the appointment:
Madam: And [if] I thought I should not offend you, which I would never do, I am well minded to promote Master Fisher, your confessor, to a bishopric … for none other cause but for the great and singular virtue that I know and see in him.
Howbeit, without your pleasure known, I will not move him nor tempt him …
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She clearly agreed as Fisher was appointed by papal Bull on 14 October 1504.
He later described her daily ritual of piety:
In prayer every day at her uprising which commonly was not long after
five of the clock, she began certain devotions and so after them, with one of her gentlewomen, the matins of Our Lady. Then … she came into her closet, where with her chaplain she said also matins of the day.
After that [she] daily heard four or five Masses upon her knees, so continuing in her prayers and devotions unto the hour of dinner which was … often of the clock and upon a fasting day, eleven.
After dinner full truly she would go her stations to three altars daily [and] daily her dirges and commendations
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she would say and her evensongs before supper, both of the day and of Our Lady, besides many other prayers and psalters …
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Twelve poor or injured people lived under her roof whose wounds she regularly tenderly dressed with her own hands. She wore ‘lacerating garments of hair cloth’ next to her skin to mortify her flesh.
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But behind all that strait-laced sobriety and holiness, Lady Margaret had a lighter side. She kept a troupe of minstrels – Henry VII paid 10s to them on 18 February 1494 for performing before him – and her own fool, or jester, called ‘Skip’, who wore a pair of ‘start-ups’ or high-heeled shoes. There was also ‘Reginald the idiot’ to provide her with hours of innocent entertainment, if necessary. The vowess liked a little wager at times also, betting – like her son – on the outcome of games of chess. On one occasion, she dispatched a man from Buckden, Cambridgeshire, to deputise for her on a pilgrimage while she gambled at cards.
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Lady Margaret must have presented a grim, formidable figure to her grandchildren, but she was extremely fond of all of them, although her favourite was her godchild and namesake Margaret.
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Her imperious nature and very rigid views must have overawed all of them, particularly young Henry, who lived under her controlling influence, especially in regard to his behaviour and education. She certainly was a dominant mother-in-law: a Spanish envoy, the sub-prior of Santa Cruz, wrote in 1498 that Elizabeth of York – ‘a very noble woman’ – was ‘kept very much in subjection by the mother of the king’. He respectfully suggested to the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, that ‘it would be a good thing to write often to her and to show her a little love’.
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Henry, Duke of York, was now going to play a major role in a spectacular
and expensive show of pageantry, carefully stage-managed by his father as a showcase for the glamour and glory of the House of Tudor: the glittering wedding of the heir-apparent, Arthur, to Princess Katherine of Aragon (Plate 9).
Negotiations for the wedding match had been continuing for years, complicated by the frequent bitter bickering between the Spanish ambassadors in London
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and the complexities of the marriage settlement. There were endless niggling details to sort out. One Spanish envoy, Dr Roderigo de Puebla, reported in July 1498 that the queen, Elizabeth of York, and the king’s mother desired that Katherine
should always speak French with Princess Margaret who is now in Spain in order to learn the language and to be able to converse in it when she comes to England.
This is necessary because these ladies do not understand Latin, much less Spanish.
They also wish that the Princess of Wales [Katherine] should accustom herself to drink wine. The water of England is not drinkable and even if it were, the climate would not allow of it.
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Meanwhile Arthur and his intended bride could only write forlorn and studiously polite love letters to each other, delivered via the squabbling diplomats in London.
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At last in 1501, Katherine left Granada at the start of her long journey to England for the wedding, with a fifty-two-strong entourage, including a cook, a baker and even her own floor sweeper.
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She was delayed first by the unusually fierce heat of Spain and then by terrible weather off Ushant, including storms and hurricanes, forcing her ships to return to port. Henry VII was so worried that he sent one of his best captains, Stephen Butt, out into the Bay of Biscay to escort her to England. Katherine, he added, was ‘impatiently expected by me, the queen, by the Prince of Wales and by the whole nation’.
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At three in the afternoon of Saturday 2 October, the fleet carrying the bride finally entered Plymouth harbour to ‘great rejoicings, as if she had been the Saviour of the world’, one of her many Spanish gentlemen reported.
As soon as she left the boat, she went in procession to the church, where, it is to be hoped, God gave her the possession of all these realms for such a period as would last long enough to enable her to enjoy life and to leave heirs to the throne.
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As it would turn out, these words were more of a curse than a blessing. Lady Margaret Beaufort used far plainer words. As was her habit, in her
Book of Hours
she noted against the date: ‘This day my lady princess landed.’
Although very elaborate arrangements had been made for Katherine’s stately progress to London, after all those turgid and tedious years of negotiation, Henry VII could not wait for her to arrive in his capital city. Impulsively, he rode out from Richmond with Arthur to meet her and at about two or three o’clock on the afternoon of 4 November intercepted her cavalcade, which had arrived three hours before at a palace of the Bishop of Bath and Wells at Dogmersfield in Hampshire. Katherine was under firm instruction from her parents ‘not to converse with him or the Prince of Wales until the day of the solemnisation of her marriage’.
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Arthur was miserably left outside in the November rain as his father sought to meet his son’s bride. But the door of her lodgings remained firmly closed, with her attendants declaring that ‘the lady infanta has retired to her chamber’. Henry VII was not a king lightly brushed aside by maidenly inconvenience or incomprehensible Spanish conventions. He insisted that ‘if she were even in her bed, he meant to see and speak with her, for that was his mind and the whole intent of his coming’. Katherine therefore hurriedly dressed and prepared herself to meet her future father-in-law.
Neither could comprehend what the other was saying; Henry could not speak Spanish and Katherine not a word of English. Her carefully learnt Latin was fluent but her pronunciation was so bad that the king could not understand more than a few words that she uttered. The encounter was descending into pantomime. But interpreters assured them ‘there were the most goodly words uttered to each other … as to great joy and gladness as any persons conveniently might have’.
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After
half an hour, a dripping Arthur was admitted for his first glimpse of his bride.
She had probably remained veiled but now modestly lifted it with the assistance of her attendants. She curtsied low, a shy girlish smile flickering across her oval face. Katherine was six weeks off her sixteenth birthday. She was pink-cheeked with blue eyes and reddish-gold hair. Unkindly, it was noted that Katherine was slightly on the plump side and quite short, even tiny. Henry VII ‘much admired her beauty as well as her agreeable and dignified manners’. Arthur afterwards told her parents, Ferdinand and Isabella, that he ‘never felt such joy in his life as when he beheld the sweet face of his bride. No woman in the world could be more agreeable.’ Dutifully, he promised to be a good husband.
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What Katherine made of her fifteen-year-old groom is not recorded. He was half a head shorter than her, with a pallor to his face and lips. In appearance, he took after his father and grandmother, with hooded eyes, finely drawn features and a long nose. He did not look very healthy (Plate 4).
On 14 November 1501 their marriage took place in St Paul’s Cathedral. Ten-year-old Henry was granted the honour of giving the bride away. A wardrobe of new clothes had been ordered for him for the celebrations: six gowns, including one for riding; eight pairs of hose; five bonnets or hats; and new boots and spurs. Livery was also provided for his four footmen and two minstrels, and his lute-player and teacher D’Ewes was given sixteen yards (14.3 m) of black camlet
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for a new gown ‘for the solemnisation of the marriage of our dearest son’.
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