Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World (65 page)

Elizabeth seems also to have regarded Hampton Court as a place of spiritual refuge, one to which she could retreat at times of trial, for it still retained aspects of its monastic past. Daubeney was required by the Knights Hospitalers to appoint a priest to “sing and minister divine service” in the chapel on their behalf (the bell from the chapel tower is probably the one that survives today in Hampton Court’s inner gatehouse). In 1503, Elizabeth would retreat into a cell at Hampton for eight days, the word “cell” then meaning a room in the monastic sense. It is likely that she went for the same purpose in 1502, so she could pray for her son’s restoration to health.

During her stay, Elizabeth received visitors, and rewarded a poor woman who gave her some almond butter,
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a gift given during Lent, when animal fats were eschewed by the devout.
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She left Hampton Court on April 2, when Lewis Walter, her bargeman, rowed her to Greenwich. Even at this anxious time Elizabeth was thinking of others. On Friday, April 4, she sent John Duffin, her groom of the chamber, to the Duchess of Norfolk “to warn her to receive [Margaret Scrope] the wife of Edmund de la Pole, late Earl of Suffolk.” She also sent her barge to collect her gentlewoman, Elyn Brent, from Hampton Court, and row her to London. Possibly Mrs. Brent had remained behind to pack up some of the Queen’s stuff. On May 12 payment was made to two men sent from Richmond to Hampton Court
to collect Mrs. Brent, which took two days.
²⁹
This suggests that more of the Queen’s belongings remained to be fetched. The delay is accounted for by the dreadful news that arrived during the night of April 4.

“In all the devices and conceits of the triumphs of [Prince Arthur’s] marriage,” there had been “a great deal of astronomy,” with jubilant predictions that the prince would emulate his illustrious forebear, “King Arthur the Briton. But,” reflected Bacon, “it is not good to fetch fortune from the stars,” for between six and seven o’clock on April 2,
³⁰
Arthur’s “lively spirits finally mortified,” and “the young prince that drew upon him the hopes and affections of his country” commended “with most fervent devotion his spirit and soul to the pleasure and hands of Almighty God,” aged fifteen years and seven months. “His celebrated virtue equaled, if not surpassed, the fame of all former princes,” lamented Bernard André. “If only the Fates had granted him a longer stay in this world.”

It was said that Arthur expired “of a malign vapor that proceeded from the constitution of the air.” A Spanish contemporary, Andres Bernaldez, curate of Los Palacios, wrote in his manuscript chronicle of the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella that “Prince Arthur died of the plague a little while after his nuptials, at a place they call Pudlo [
sic
]. In this house was Doña Catalina left a widow, when she had been married scarcely six months.” Arthur had not mentioned his wife in the will drawn up just before he died, in which he left all his robes and household stuff to his sister Margaret. This suggests that he and Katherine were never close.

The contemporary herald’s account in
The Receyt of the Lady Katherine
describes the prince as suffering from “the most pitiful disease and sickness that with so sore and great violence had battled and driven in the singular parts of him inward; that cruel and fervent enemy of nature, the deadly corruption, did utterly vanquish and overcome the pure and friendful blood, without all manner of physical help and remedy.”

In favor of the plague theory is the fact that Katherine fell ill too at
this time, although she later recovered. But if Arthur had died of the plague, or the rarer but equally feared “sweating sickness,” there would surely be other reports of it.

In 1502 there are references to an epidemic in some parts of the country, but it is unlikely that this was the dreaded sweating sickness, because people regarded that as distinct from plague. The sweating sickness was a highly virulent disease that manifested itself in England in a series of epidemics between 1485 and 1551. The cause of it is still uncertain, but its onset was sudden and dramatic, unlike Arthur’s illness, and it struck with deadly force: it was said that anyone who survived the first twenty-four hours would recover. Usually death occurred within hours; one could be “merry at dinner and dead at supper.”
³¹

But Arthur was ill for over seven weeks, and had been ailing for up to two months before that; there had been concerns about his frailty as far back as July 1500. Even without that new evidence, modern writers who state that his illness was sudden and brief have overlooked the testimony of Suffolk and St. John in 1529, that the prince had fallen sick at Shrovetide after sharing a bed with Katherine, and the account in
The Receyt
that he was in decline since Christmas. All were quite specific, and Suffolk and St. John’s evidence could have been corroborated—or disputed—by other witnesses who remembered Arthur’s death. The prince’s capacity to bed his bride might have been exaggerated in 1529, but Suffolk had no reason to lie about the long duration of his final illness—rather the opposite, for it was in his, and his master Henry VIII’s, interests to show that Arthur was romping in bed with Katherine throughout the five months of his marriage.

There was no epidemic of the sweating sickness in 1502, but there was a “great sickness” in the Ludlow area,
³²
thought by some historians to have been plague. Although the great plague of 1499–1500 was over, evidence from local wills shows that, between harvest 1501 and harvest 1502, mortality was above average in the diocese of Hereford, with the most deaths—fifteen—occurring at Ludlow; the figures are even higher for the following year.
³³

The onset of the plague was sudden too. There were three types: bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic. The latter two developed rapidly and invariably proved fatal. Few recovered from the commonest
form, bubonic plague, either: untreated, its victims usually died within five days; even today, eighty percent of patients who do not receive antibiotics die within eight days. It was caused by the bite of an infected flea, or by contact with another sufferer. A disease of the lymphatic system, it first manifested itself by a headache, weakness, high fever, confusion, aches, and chills. By the third day the lymph nodes in the neck and armpit would swell painfully, ooze pus, and bleed. This was followed by gangrene of the fingers, toes, nose, and lips, which turned black; it was this that gave bubonic plague its more common name, “the Black Death.” The victim suffered pain, muscle cramps, seizures, and lung infections, which might cause them to vomit blood incessantly; in the final stages, they lapsed into delirium and a coma as the nervous system collapsed. Death often occurred with terrifying suddenness.

There was no effective treatment. All the doctors could do was helplessly prescribe rest, good diet, and a move to cleaner air. A fortunate few did survive; if they lived past the tenth day, they had a good chance of recovering. Nonfatal cases could last up to a month. There is one documented case of a fourteenth-century physician, Guy de Chauliac, suffering an attack of plague that lasted six weeks,
³⁴
but he recovered, so for much of that period he would have been convalescent.

Arthur doesn’t fit the pattern. His illness began with a decline, not a sudden escalation of symptoms like plague. Plague was a disease that manifested itself in warm weather and was largely absent in the winter months. We know that as late as April 1502, the weather was cold and windy. Thus plague is unlikely.

Possibly it was an influenza-type virus that raged in the region and proved fatal to the prince, especially if he was already ailing. The herald who wrote an account of his funeral states that very few citizens were present in Worcester Cathedral because of the great sickness that prevailed in those parts.
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The fact that Arthur’s body was buried at Worcester, and not taken back to London for burial in Westminster Abbey, strongly suggests that he was thought to have died of something contagious and that it was felt his body should be buried as soon as possible.

The most convincing theory is that Arthur had “a consumption,” or tuberculosis, perhaps contracted from his father, who would die of it at the age of fifty-two. In the nineteenth century there evolved the perception that this disease was the scourge of three young Tudor males; almost certainly it killed Arthur’s nephew Edward VI, who was also fifteen when he died in 1553. But it did not kill another nephew, Henry VIII’s bastard son Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, who was evidently quite healthy until an acute pulmonary infection carried him off in 1536, aged seventeen.

Katherine’s physician, Dr. Alcaraz, later explained that she was still a virgin because “the prince had been denied the strength necessary to know a woman, as if he was a cold piece of stone, because he was in the final stages of phthisis [consumption]. Dr. Alcaraz said his limbs were weak and that he had never seen a man whose legs and other bits of his body were so thin.”
³⁶

This might explain Henry VII’s anxiety about allowing the couple to live together. Yet if Arthur had then been in such a decline, and so obviously weak and emaciated, it is surprising that no one else commented on it, and that the marriage was allowed to go ahead. Had he been in that state before his departure for Ludlow, it is unlikely the King would have allowed him to go so far from London, and equally unlikely that the Spanish ambassadors would not have known about his condition, or failed to warn the Spanish sovereigns about it.

The symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis include coughing bloody sputum, breathing difficulties, fatigue, loss of appetite and weight, night sweats, and chest pain. There was no treatment because antibiotics had yet to be invented. In the late medieval period the disease was common and Dr. Alcaraz would easily have recognized it, so his diagnosis is almost certainly reliable. It is often contracted in childhood, from prolonged exposure to people with active tuberculosis, and symptoms may not appear for some years, if at all; but statistics show that once symptoms do manifest themselves, death occurs after about three years in untreated cases. The disease can also spread rapidly through both lungs and prove fatal, accounting for the short duration of Arthur’s last illness, which might have been exacerbated by making the long journey from London in the depths of winter. Dr. Alcaraz’s
report probably relates to the period between Christmas and April, when the prince’s decline would have been most evident. He must have known that Arthur and Katherine had not consummated their marriage prior to arriving at Ludlow, and it was probably obvious afterward that Arthur was already too ill to play the husband.

An interesting theory has been put forward that he died of a less common form of the disease, testicular tuberculosis, which causes a fibrous mass that can mimic a cancerous tumor. The disease increases libido but inhibits sexual performance, which would explain why he was unable to consummate his marriage.
³⁷
That Arthur’s illness affected his testicles has been inferred from the description of his sickness affecting “the singular parts of him inward”—which could mean any organ, however—and it has also been suggested that he died of testicular cancer, which can spread quickly in young victims.
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Diabetes, asthma, or pneumonia are other theories.
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The weight of evidence favors tuberculosis. The chances are that Arthur, a premature baby, had a weak constitution from birth, which made him susceptible to infection. Henry VII was already anxious about his health when he sent him to Ludlow, but maybe he did not suspect the nature of what ailed his heir; maybe he was in denial; probably Arthur did not show any alarming symptoms or lose weight so dramatically until he was at Ludlow.

According to an anonymous herald’s account preserved by John Leland, “immediately after [Arthur’s] death, Sir Richard Pole, his chamberlain, wrote and sent letters to the King and council at Greenwich, where His Grace and the Queen lay, and certified him of the prince’s departure.” The Privy Council received the terrible news first, during the night, and “discreetly sent for the King’s ghostly father” and confessor, an Observant Friar, “to whom they showed this most sorrowful and heavy tidings, and desired him in his best manner” to break it to their master. In the morning, the friar went to the King, arriving “before the time accustomed,” and knocked on the door of his chamber. On being admitted, he asked for everyone in attendance to be dismissed, and when he was alone with Henry, “after due salutation,” he gently quoted Job in Latin:
Si bona de manu Dei suscipimus, mala autem
quare non sustineamus?
(“If we receive good things at the hands of God, why may we not endure evil things?”) Then he “showed His Grace that his dearest son was departed to God.”

For the stricken father, this was a devastating blow, and Henry VII must have struggled to confront the fact that his dream of a new Arthurian age lay in ruins. “When the King understood these sorrowful, heavy tidings, he sent for the Queen, saying that he and his wife would take their powerful sorrow together.” Thus it was that Elizabeth heard the shattering news every parent dreads to hear, that her child was dead in the flower of his youth.

It is on this occasion that we are afforded a rare and touching glimpse of the private relationship between Henry and Elizabeth. The matrimonial career of Henry VIII had not yet made royal marriages legitimate objects of intense diplomatic interest, and information about the private lives of earlier kings and queens is often sparse. This account of the royal couple sharing their grief and striving to comfort each other gives one of the best insights into their relationship and shows them, after sixteen years of marriage, to have been loving, caring, and mutually supportive. It shows Elizabeth taking the initiative in intimate matters and being quite firm with her husband, although even in private she still addressed him formally. And it reveals that she drew on an inner strength that enabled her selflessly to put his needs first, even at such a time. She would have been painfully aware that he had lost not just his son but also his heir and all the hopes he had invested in him, and that only one young life now stood between him and the loss of everything he had striven so carefully to build. Henry was now forty-five, well into middle age by Tudor standards, and may have feared he would not live to see his remaining heir grow to maturity, let alone a son born now, and he and Elizabeth had good reason for anxiety about the future, for no one knew better what could happen to child kings. And so, setting aside her own grief, Elizabeth hastened to comfort him.