Henry (29 page)

Henry had had enough of fathers, ancient or otherwise, and he carried on regardless: ‘yet, for all these doubts, the lusty prince proceeded to his challenge’. And to the next. And the next.
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There was no stopping him now.

Compton’s rise quickly attracted attention. ‘I have written to you … the credit that one named Compton has with the king of England,’ the French ambassador informed his government back home. ‘It is he of this kingdom who has the most [credit] for the moment and to whom [Henry] speaks the most about his affair [s].’
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Others were less sure. Indeed, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, a seventeenth-century scholar-nobleman and Henry’s first biographer, saw him as rising without trace. Compton, he notes, was next in the king’s favour to the two giants of the council, Foxe and Surrey. But, he claims, he could be discounted since he was ‘more atten
tive to his profit than public affairs’. That is not quite, however, what Herbert’s source, Polydore Vergil, says:

Vergil, as usual, gets it about right. But, in a personal monarchy, ‘things of an intimate nature’ are not unimportant. Compton’s role, as Jeeves to Henry’s Wooster, helped the boy to begin to find himself as a man and a king. Most important was their incognito appearance in the Richmond tournament. It might look like a schoolboy prank, but it was also Henry’s first challenge to the near paternal authority of his council. And it would not have happened without Compton.

Moreover, once tasted, Henry found that getting his own way became addictive. And there would be others – more forceful and ambitious than Compton – who realized this and determined to give him what he wanted.

They were not, of course, altruistic. For giving Henry his head would also give them what
they
wanted: power.

‘C
HOOSE A WIFE FOR YOURSELF
and always love her only,’ Skelton had advised his young charge eight years previously in the
Speculum principis
which he had presented to Henry at Eltham in 1501. Eight years are a long time in the life of a young man – long enough, indeed, to forget not only the advice but its giver. And that, evidently, is what Skelton feared had happened. He had written and despatched a set of congratulatory verses on Henry’s accession, entitled ‘A laud and praise made for our sovereign lord the king’:

But no messenger had arrived to summon him back to court from his fenny exile in Diss. So he tried again. This time he sought to revive youthful memories of those days at Eltham by sending Henry a second copy of his
Speculum
, topped and tailed by other occasional verses and ending with a passionate complaint about the way Henry was neglecting his old tutor:

For the time being, however, Henry remained impervious to his pleas.

But if Henry had apparently forgotten Skelton, he had taken his advice to heart. For Henry really does seem to have chosen Catherine for himself. And he was – or at least he persuaded himself that he was – seriously in love with her. ‘As for that entire love which we bear to [Catherine]’, he wrote to her father, Ferdinand of Aragon, it is such that ‘even
if we were still free, it is she … we would choose for our wife before all other’. That was in July 1509, a month after their wedding and in the first flush marital happiness.
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But would he love her ‘always’ as Skelton enjoined? Would he even love her very long?

Such thoughts were far from everyone’s mind when another Anglo–Spanish marriage took place, between Henry’s old mentor, Lord Mountjoy, and Ines de Veñegas, one of Catherine’s Spanish ladies. This was the second Spanish marriage in the Mountjoy family. A century previously, one of Mountjoy’s ancestors had married a lady-in-waiting of Constance of Castile, second wife to John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, and Mountjoy bore in his arms the two wolves sable of the house of Ayala to prove it. This second marriage, in strikingly similar circumstances to the first, had Henry’s enthusiastic backing. ‘[He] thinks’, he wrote to his father-in-law, Ferdinand of Aragon, ‘it very desirable that Spanish and English families should be united by family ties.’ Henry warmly endorsed Mountjoy himself as ‘one of his barons, whom he holds in high esteem’, and he sought Ferdinand’s support for the new Lady Mountjoy’s attempts to recover money she was owed in Spain.

And Henry did all this in a letter, written in Latin and in his own hand – which, as he hated the business of writing, was always a sign of real commitment.
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* * *

A day or two after writing the letter on 30 July, Henry and Catherine set out on their first summer progress. It took the form of a complete circuit round London, through the parks and pleasure grounds that then ringed the capital. Many were familiar to Henry from his childhood and youth: Woking, which death had redelivered him from the grasping hands of his grandmother; Farnham, where his deceased brother Arthur had spent the first months of his short life; and Hanworth and Wanstead, his father’s
maisons de retraite
, where Henry had lived in enforced proximity to the old king in the last years of his reign. En route, Henry diverted himself, as he informed Ferdinand, with ‘birding, hunting, and other innocent and honest pastimes, also in visiting different parts of his kingdom’. He ‘does not’, Henry added hastily, ‘on that account neglect affairs of state’.
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Perhaps. But, then as now, there was rarely much going on in the summer months. Instead, Henry and Catherine were free to begin to discover England – and each other. It is clear they liked what they found.

The progress ended in late October at Greenwich. This was Henry’s own birthplace, Henry and Catherine had been married there, and, they decided, it would be where their first child was born as well.

For Catherine was pregnant. Henry informed Ferdinand of the news at the beginning of November. ‘Your daughter’, he wrote, ‘with the favour of heaven has conceived in her womb a living child, and is right heavy herewith, which we
signify to your majesty for the great joy thereof that we take and the exultation of our whole realm.’
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By then, if the later calculations about the date of the delivery are to be believed, Catherine was about five months pregnant. The fact cast Henry’s behaviour over Christmas in a darker light. With his wife ‘right heavy’, the schoolboy antics of riding incognito in the joust on 12 January now look like wilful self-indulgence. And worse was to come. On 18 January, ‘suddenly in a morning’, Henry and twelve companions burst into the queen’s chamber, all dressed in Kendal Green like Robin Hood and his Merry Men, and complete with a woman got up as Maid Marian.
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It was supposed to be done ‘for a gladness to the queen’s grace’. In fact it seems to have given her a nasty surprise: ‘the queen’, Hall reports, ‘the ladies and all other there were abashed, as well for the strange sight, as also for their sudden coming’. A few perfunctory steps were danced, then Henry and his fellow revellers withdrew – perhaps a little abashed in their turn.

Was Henry’s boisterous adolescent behaviour starting to become a strain for Catherine? Or was it all part of the charm?

Whatever Catherine’s feelings about her husband, all at least seemed to be going well with her pregnancy. The couple paid a brief visit to Greenwich in mid-January to get the preparations for her lying-in under way. The court then returned to Westminster for Henry’s first parliament.

And at Westminster on the morning of 31 January Catherine suddenly miscarried of a baby girl. According to her confessor, she had experienced no discomfort or other symptoms, ‘except that one knee pained her the night before’. The miscarriage was kept secret, the confessor continued, so that ‘no one knew about it … except the king … two Spanish women, a physician and I’. Instead of diminishing, however, Catherine’s belly remained swollen and, if anything, got bigger. This was probably the result of infection, but her physician persuaded himself that she remained pregnant with a second foetus. And, despite Catherine’s own doubts and the fact that her periods resumed, he was believed.
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The ceremonious machinery of a royal birth now moved inexorably into gear. In mid-February the Venetian ambassador ‘congratulated the king on the queen’s pregnancy’ and on the twenty-sixth a warrant was issued for the materials needed to refurbish ‘our nursery, God willing’. This was probably the very nursery in which Henry himself had been suckled. The ‘cradle of estate’, where he had once lain, was to be re-covered in crimson cloth-of-gold and the royal arms ‘amended if need be’. The customary generous supplies of pillows, sheets, counterpanes and swaddling bands were to be provided, together with beds for the wet-nurse and the two rockers, and hangings for the chamber of the lady mistress.
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Even the lady mistress was the same Elizabeth Denton who had ruled Henry’s infancy with a rod of iron – always
tempered, it would seem, for her beguiling charge. For Henry retained the fondest memories of her. Many people from Henry’s youth had done well out of his accession, including his wet-nurse, Anne Lock. But few did as well as Mrs Denton. In quick succession she had been given an income, accommodation and a lifetime’s supply of wine. All were on a lavish scale: an annuity of
£
50, the keepership of The Coldharbour – formerly Lady Margaret Beaufort’s London residence, where Henry and his mother had first taken refuge from the threat of the Cornish rebels in 1497 – and a tun of Gascon wine a year.
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Now Henry was about to trust his first-born to her as well.

As Catherine’s due date approached, Henry became all solicitude. On 28 February, shortly before she was due to begin her formal confinement by ‘taking to her chamber’, Henry laid on a banquet in the parliament chamber at Westminster for all the foreign ambassadors then resident in his court. He led Catherine into the chamber and placed her, to all appearances in the final stages of pregnancy, on the royal throne to preside over the proceedings. Nor did his condescension stop there, as he acted every role in the lexicon of hospitality. He served as his own master of ceremonies, directing the ambassadors and ladies to their seats in person. And he revelled in playing the good host as, refusing to sit himself, he ‘walked from place to place, making cheer to the queen and the strangers’.
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No one, then or subsequently, could be more charming than Henry when he felt so inclined – or felt he had to be.

Soon after the banquet the court moved to Greenwich and the queen began her formal confinement. It was now only a matter of weeks before Catherine was due to go into labour and Henry – like many expectant fathers – flung himself into a welter of preparations. First he turned his mind to the important business of the christening. The precedents of Henry’s own birth and those of his siblings were pored over and
The Ryalle Book
consulted. For
his
child was to have an entry into the world as grand as any of his or her royal predecessors. He signed the necessary warrant on 12 March. This ordered the supply of red cloth to cover the steps of the font and ‘cypress’ to line it, just as had been done for his own christening. The font itself was to be the great silver font of Canterbury, in which the baby Henry had been plunged by Bishop Foxe, who was now his own chief minister. Finally, and with that eye for detail which was already pronounced, he ordered another six ells (seven and a half yards) of good quality linen to make ‘aprons and napkins for four gentlemen [-in-waiting] … according to the old use and custom in that case heretofore used’.
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He or one of his assistants also noticed that an item had been forgotten for the nursery. This was the canopy ‘to hang over the cradle of estate in our nursery’. Another warrant was drawn up for the delivery of the necessary materials to one of the yeomen ushers of ‘our dearest wife the queen’. It
was dated at Greenwich in ‘the first year of our reign’. But the day – that all important day when Catherine would be delivered – was left blank.
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That day never came. It was not for want of waiting. For of course calculations in these matters were never precise. Thus, probably, Henry consoled himself as Catherine remained in her courtly purdah for March. And April. And on into May.

But then he snapped. He had not had sex with Catherine since she entered her darkened, tapestry hung chamber in early March and his patience was exhausted. Moreover, inside the birthing chamber – impenetrable to men – the truth was gradually dawning on the queen’s terrified entourage.

For her ‘right heavy belly’ began to go down of its own accord. Or, as her confessor (who
was
allowed into her chamber) put it sententiously: ‘it has pleased our Lord to be her physician in such a way that the swelling decreased’. It was no thanks to her actual physician, whose false diagnosis of a continued pregnancy after her miscarriage in January had started the whole sorry business. Or to her women, who had refused to draw the obvious conclusion from her resumed periods. Or, indeed, to Catherine herself, who had let herself be persuaded, it would seem, against her own better judgment.

Wise after the event, the newly arrived Spanish ambassador, Luis Caroz, railed at the folly of supposed experts who
would ‘affirm that a menstruating woman was pregnant and … make her withdraw publicly for her delivery’.
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But that did not solve the problem of how to break the news to Henry. Finally it was probably Catherine herself who plucked up the courage. Her pregnancy had been a false one. The preparations, the warrants had been in vain. The ambassadorial congratulations rang hollow.

Henry had been misled into taking part in a very public and humiliating farce.

The preparations were stood down. The great silver font was returned to its custodians at Canterbury. And Henry was left with his thoughts.

We do not know his real reactions. His councillors may have spoken for him when they made plain they were ‘very vexed and angry’ – though, from courtesy, they protested they blamed Catherine’s women rather than the queen herself. More darkly, they also began to draw dangerous conclusions about Catherine’s infertility: murmuring that ‘since the queen is not pregnant, she is incapable of conceiving’.