Henry (19 page)

H
ENRY, THANKS TO HIS WIDE READING
of history and chronicles, in which he had been encouraged by all his teachers, was familiar with many different styles of kingship. But they were in the past. As far as the present was concerned, he had seen only one contemporary monarch in action: his own father, Henry VII.

At the beginning of 1506, however, chance introduced Henry to another ruler, the Archduke Philip of Burgundy. Philip presented the greatest possible contrast to Henry’s father: he was young, dashing and sports-mad.

Henry found Philip immensely attractive. He became a sort of elder brother to him, and in time a model for his own kingship.

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Philip’s involuntary visit to England was another consequence of the revolution in foreign affairs which had followed the death of Catherine of Aragon’s mother, Queen Isabella of Castile. Immediately after her death, Philip claimed Castile in the right of his wife Juana, and proclaimed himself king. Then, in January 1506, he set sail from the Netherlands, with virtually his whole court, to go to Spain and make his claim good.

The voyage began well, making record time down the Channel with favourable winds. It was a royal progress by sea: passing ‘before Calais by night, shooting guns, having great torches lit … trumpets and minstrels playing and singing’. But as the Burgundians cleared the Channel, the pomp and pageantry turned to near-tragedy. The fleet was suddenly becalmed, and then hit by a furious storm that drove the ships back towards England, scattering them as they went. Most put in at Falmouth in Cornwall, but the king and queen were carried further to the east, and made land at Melcombe Regis in the lee of the Isle of Portland.

Once ashore, the royal party was lured further inland, on the pretext that supplies would be more plentiful there. Philip, understanding that he was effectively a prisoner, decided to put a brave face on things (as indeed he had during the storm), and sent his secretary to Henry VII to announce his arrival and request that he and his wife might be allowed to visit him. Henry welcomed him with open arms: never has a spider invited a fly to step into a more gilded parlour.

In all the lavish hospitality, Prince Henry acted as co-host with his father. It was a training in outward graciousness; it might also have been a lesson in how to make sure that the bill was paid – promptly and in full. For Henry VII was determined to exact a heavy price for Philip’s entertainment.

It was decided that the meeting between the two kings would take place at Windsor. Sir Thomas Brandon, the master of the horse, was sent to the west country with horses and litters to act as Philip’s escort. En route, the party stopped at Winchester, where Philip was entertained by the bishop, Richard Foxe, who was also lord privy seal and the king’s principal minister.
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That same evening, Henry himself arrived, ‘with a large and noble company’. The prince and king greeted each other warmly, so much so that ‘on seeing them together you would have thought that they were brother and good friends’. Brothers, or at least brothers-in-law, they were indeed formally, in view of Henry’s on-off marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Juana’s sister. And they may well have become friends too, in the course of the visit.

The following day Philip and Henry left for Windsor, where on 31 January they were met over a mile outside the town by Henry VII himself. He welcomed Philip in his perfect, if rather over-enthusiastic, French, protesting that he was as dear to him ‘as my own son who is here present’. There then followed a competition in elaborate courtesy. It was resolved by all three riding abreast, with Philip in the
middle between Henry senior on his right hand and Henry junior on his left. In the castle Philip was lodged in King Henry’s own apartments, while the king stayed in the intercommunicating set of rooms which had belonged to Queen Elizabeth of York.

Sessions of hard negotiation now alternated with entertainment. This ranged from the savagery of horse-baiting to the almost Victorian domesticity of the late-afternoon entertainment laid on by Catherine of Aragon and her sister-in-law, Princess Mary. First Catherine and one of her ladies, both in Spanish dress, danced, and then Mary and one of her English attendants. The atmosphere turned suddenly sour when Catherine asked Philip, who was engrossed in conversation with Henry VII, to dance. He excused himself. When she pressed him he replied brusquely that he was a mariner, ‘And yet ye would cause me to dance’ – and continued talking to the king. Mary offered Catherine sisterly consolation by going to sit with her on the edge of the carpet under the cloth of estate. Finally Mary took the floor with a display of the Tudor musical talent, playing on the lute and the clavichord. ‘Who played very well, and she was of all folks there greatly praised that of her youth [she was not yet ten] in everything she behaved herself so well.’

On 9 February the seal was set on the visit with the formal signing of a peace treaty and an exchange of orders of chivalry: Philip was made a knight of the Garter, and Prince
Henry a knight of the Golden Fleece. Henry VII put the Garter round Philip’s leg, and Prince Henry ‘buckled it and made it fast’. Then the treaties were signed, the
Te Deum
was sung and the trumpets blew. Finally, Philip, having changed into the robes of his own order, made Prince Henry a knight of the Golden Fleece. The Prince read the oath ‘himself in French’.

On returning from mass, the two kings and the prince dined together ‘in a little chamber, because they did not want to have many witnesses’. The room was in fact the secret or inmost chamber of the suite assigned to Philip. There Henry VII spoke freely of his feelings at the day’s events. ‘You have seen at Winchester,’ he said to Philip, ‘the Round Table hanging in the Church.’ That was a subject of romance and history, because it was supposedly King Arthur’s. ‘But I hope,’ the king continued, ‘that people will also talk of this table, and that they will say, long after our deaths, that at this table was sealed the true and perpetual friendship between the empire of Rome, the kingdom of Castile, Flanders, Brabant and the kingdom of England.’ The table would, he promised, be put on display, inscribed with the date and the noble company that had eaten on it.

Henry VII’s place in history was one of his central concerns; his other was to guarantee the survival of his dynasty. And that meant ensuring the succession of his son, Prince Henry. The king now turned to his son and spoke to him bluntly: ‘My son of Wales, you see that I am old; soon you will have need of your good friends.’

And Philip was to be the foremost, whose interests he was to put before his own.

It was Prince Henry’s first summit conference, and it established a lasting taste for the genre – as well it might, for the sense of occasion was overpowering: the pageantry, the food and wine, his father’s words, now heady now solemn, and above all the fact that he was sitting as an equal with two kings and disposing of the fate of Europe. For the occasion was not only designed to cement the friendship of the Habsburgs and the Tudors, it would also, as Henry VII put it with a delicious, intimate bluntness, ‘hardly please our enemies’.

‘Our enemies’ were the French.

The conversation continued far into the evening. Even as they talked, word came of the arrival of a French embassy. The entertainment of the ambassador was left to the prince. It would be an opportunity to show what he felt. Among other pastimes, Henry showed off his skills with the bow: he killed a deer and drew several other good shots, on which the ambassador congratulated him. The prince replied, with studied ambiguity, that ‘They were good for a Frenchman.’

His meaning was that he would like to have had a Frenchman as his target; his guest, happily, understood him to say that he had shot well enough to be compared with the best French archers.

* * *

On Tuesday, 10 February this clubby atmosphere of male bonding and competition was interrupted by a disturbing female presence: Queen Juana arrived at Windsor. History knows her as ‘the Mad’. It would be fairer to say at this stage that she was neurotic. The principal symptom was a jealous possessiveness about her husband. A year previously she had dismissed most of her women, retaining only a single elderly lady. On this voyage she tried, with sulks and tantrums, to force the removal of even this improbable source of temptation.
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The threat of shipwreck had been an opportunity for another extravagant show of passion. As her husband sat lamenting that he was to be the occasion of such loss of life, she had crouched between his legs, twining herself about him so that death itself should not part them. But safe on land the old tensions had surfaced, and they had made their separate ways to Windsor, his fast, hers slow. Fearful perhaps of embarrassments, the English royal family received her privately: not at the public entrance to the king’s apartments, but at the privy or back stairs which gave on to the park. There she was greeted by Henry VII, her sister Catherine of Aragon, and Princess Mary.

The three women seem to have spent the rest of the day together. The following day Catherine and Mary went to Richmond. There they were soon joined by King Henry, who was anxious to make sure that his new palace looked its best for his royal visitors. Meantime, Philip and Juana remained at Windsor until the weekend. Then they separated again.
Philip rode to Richmond, hunting and hawking on the way, while Juana made straight for the west country to rejoin her ships. The pains of the journey – and of the separation from her husband – were eased by the loan of the late Queen Elizabeth’s ‘rich litters and chairs’.

Later, Catherine of Aragon recalled her joy at meeting the sister she had last seen ten years previously and would never see again – and ‘the distress which filled my heart, a few hours afterwards, on account of your hasty and sudden departure’.
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Henry VII allegedly shared Catherine’s feelings, but decided that it was unwise to interfere between husband and wife. But Catherine herself was probably the real reason for Juana’s enforced departure. Philip seems to have feared that she might encourage her sister to take a more independent line about her inheritance – which is why he had snubbed Catherine a few days before, and curtailed her meeting with Juana now.

Whatever feelings she aroused, neither Juana’s arrival nor her sudden departure was allowed to spoil things. Philip, who was as good a guest as Henry VII was a host, was now approaching Richmond. Even before he was met by the king, he stopped to admire the fantastic silhouette of the new palace, with its clustering onion-domed turrets rising straight from the Thames. If he ever returned to Brussels, he said, Richmond ‘should be a pattern unto him’.

It was the ultimate accolade for the upstart Tudors. Richmond, architectural historians argue, was modelled on the
continental castle-palaces that Henry VII had seen on his travels. Now the owner of some of Europe’s most sumptuous residences was proclaiming that Richmond would be a model for his future building. No wonder that Henry too would be a great builder.

At this point, both the contemporary narratives of the visit seem to have suffered from a surfeit of splendour: the Burgundian gives up, and the English turns into a series of jotted notes.

The probability is that Henry VII took his visitor over the palace himself – just as he had Catherine and her entourage when she was the newly-wedded wife of his eldest son Arthur. Then he showed off the gardens and pleasure grounds, with their facilities for every form of sport and amusement; the chapel, with its images of the sainted kings of England; the library, ‘with many goodly pleasant books of works full delightful, sage, merry and also right cunning, both in Latin and in English’; and above all the hall.

Like the chapel, the hall was decorated with statues of kings. But these were the warriors, not the saints. Here were Brute and Arthur, Hengist the Dane, and Normans and Plantagenets: William, Richard, Edward, Henry ‘and many other of that name’. They were shown armed and in armour, and underneath each there was a written account of their ‘deeds and acts’ as set out in the chronicles. But one stood out:

Henry VII had given himself pride of place.

King Henry’s son listened and watched. It was a familiar story. Skelton had made sure he had read the chronicles as a boy. And Skelton and almost everybody else had dinned into him that his father was the very model of a modern monarch. But Prince Henry now had two models in front of him: his father and his father’s guest. King Henry was old (or at least rapidly ageing), and perhaps too polite, too garrulous, too obviously cunning; King Philip, on the other hand, was not yet thirty, and was called ‘the Fair’.

According to Polydore Vergil, who was probably an eyewitness of his English visit, he more than lived up to his sobriquet: ‘He was of medium height, handsome of face, and heavily built; he was talented, generous and gentlemanly.’
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Save for his middling stature, it could have been a description of the young man Henry was soon to be.