In Bed with the Tudors: The Sex Lives of a Dynasty from Elizabeth of York to Elizabeth I (8 page)

One issue would later come to dominate Catherine of Aragon’s life. The question of what the two teenagers did in bed over the course of the next four and a half months would irrevocably determine the course of British history and the development of the Church of England. It is, by now, a familiar question; perhaps the overriding question of the dynasty, dividing man and wife, parents and children, monarch and subject, and continuing to divide historical interpretation to the present day. So, during their short-lived marriage, did Catherine and Arthur sleep together? Did they consummate their union in the full sense, or was it, as Catherine was to later insist, a slow, cautious, innocent connection between two children who had no reason not to believe they had time on their sides? Did their failure to connect on their wedding night preclude any subsequent relations? Catherine later claimed they shared a bed on seven occasions but that full consummation had not taken place. Her waiting women and Arthur’s gentlemen were divided on the issue; some even suggested that the force of their sexual passion had weakened the frail young man, paralleling the accusations levelled at the death of Catherine’s brother Juan and his supposedly ‘over-passionate’ wife Margaret, in 1497. Their ceremonial bedding was public enough, with Arthur cheered along by his fellows, with dancing, pleasure and mirth, as well as trumpets sounding, as their friends witnessed the young groom climb into bed beside his wife and receive the blessing of a priest, that they should be protected from ‘phantasies and illusions of devils’. After that, only Arthur and Catherine knew exactly what had passed between them. Hall’s chronicle would later insist that ‘this lusty prince and his beautiful bride were brought and joined together in one bed naked and there did that act, which to the performance and full consummation of matrimony was most requisite and expedient’ but he was three at the time of the wedding and writing in the early 1540s, when it was expedient to believe in the union’s success. Later, when the matter became of national importance, the expressions and testimonies of servants would become crucial and the events of that November night and following morning would be analysed and debated. In the autumn of 1501, however, there was no foreshadowing of the immense consequences of the teenager’s courtship and the series of jousts, pageants and feasts continued unabated. The king and queen watched their newly wedded son and his bride enjoying tournaments on the newly sanded tilt-yard by the river and lavish Burgundian-style disguisings in Westminster Hall. Ironically, one of these pageants included eight ‘goodly’ knights overcoming the resistance of eight ‘goodly and fresh’ ladies, who yielded to the forces of love. The subtext for Arthur and Catherine couldn’t have been clearer.

However, tragedy awaited the newly-weds. Barely six months later, terrible news reached Elizabeth and Henry in London. After the wedding ceremonies, the young couple had departed for Ludlow, where they had settled into the imposing defensive borders castle. The location was remote and the weather extreme, exacerbating the damp and dirt: a local outbreak of the sweating sickness took hold in the late spring, a painful disease that would dispatch most sufferers within days. Both Arthur and Catherine fell ill. While she survived, he succumbed on 2 April 1502 and the sixteen-year-old Spaniard became a widow after only four and a half months of marriage. The sweat may have been to blame, or else the tuberculosis assumed by nineteenth-century historians. The official record of his funeral related that a long term disease may have been the underlying cause: ‘a pitiful disease and sickness’ of ‘deadly corruption did utterly vanquish and overcome the (healthy) blood’. It is possible that this was testicular tuberculosis, which can cause increased libido but dampen performance, which may provide answers to the lingering questions of Arthur’s marriage and death. The London messengers were afraid to break the news to the king, delaying until the following morning. Devastated by their loss, the king and queen consoled each other as best they could, with Elizabeth telling Henry they still had a ‘fair, goodly’ son and were young enough to have more children. This was no idle promise. Within weeks, she had conceived again.

The fears that had surfaced during Elizabeth’s previous pregnancy were ominous for the advent of her final child in the winter of 1503. That July at Woodstock, she had been unwell and in September her apothecary was paid for delivering ‘certain stuff’ for the use of the queen. The fact that she had conceived so quickly after consoling Henry with the idea of a new child, suggests she was still fertile but that the couple may have previously decided to limit their family due to her ill health. As she prepared for her confinement, two nurses visited her in November, the start of her final trimester, which may have been routine but may equally have indicated that something was amiss. On the fourteenth, a Mistress Harcourt saw her at Westminster and twelve days later she was attended by a French woman at Baynard’s castle. New bedding and curtains were ordered, accounts for the delivery of bed linen were settled and the girdle of Our Lady of Westminster was delivered mid-December. Right up until the end, Elizabeth was on the move. At the end of January, she travelled from Richmond to the Tower of London where she gave birth to a daughter a week later. This was in itself unusual: previous retirements to her chamber had occurred three or more weeks before labour began, allowing for misdiagnosis, preparation and the long hours of ‘travail’. Elizabeth had barely settled herself into her Tower lodgings before she was seized by violent contractions and she gave birth to a daughter, Catherine, on Candlemas day, 2 February 1503. Perhaps the child was born prematurely or else the date had been miscalculated: contemporaries recorded that she had intended to lie-in at Richmond and was delivered ‘suddenly’, which must have been a surprise after her previous pregnancies. Soon after the birth it became apparent that Elizabeth was seriously ill; possibly puerperal fever had set in or heavy bleeding; perhaps she had sustained an injury during the delivery. A messenger was sent into Kent to try and locate a Dr Aylsworth or Hallysworth but nine days later the queen was dead.

Most Tudor mothers did not die during childbirth. Surprisingly, the odds of survival were fairly good, providing there were no complications. Roger Schofield
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estimates the likelihood of maternal mortality at 1 per cent per pregnancy and between 6 and 7 per cent across a woman’s childbearing years, giving them a similar chance of dying of non-birth-related causes. Another case study, of sixteenth-century Aldgate, suggests the figure was more like 2.35 per cent
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, as crowded and insanitary as urban areas undoubtedly were. Then, as now, complications arose that were met with varying degrees of response according to the skill and experience of the age. Difficult deliveries and breech births, without preventative action being taken, could lead to maternal and infant death. One 1513 work contained images of sixteen unnatural birth presentations and advice to the midwife to oil her hands, apply butter to the cervix and try to turn the baby, using all her ‘diligence and pain’. If this state continued, brute force was needed to expel a reluctant foetus. There were no forceps during this time, being invented by the Chamberlain family in the late Elizabethan period but not made public until over a century later. One or two famous contemporary cases of Caesareans were carried out in Europe but these were not used in England and certainly not on a live mother; maternal death inevitably ensued and live children were cut from dead mothers using damaging metal hooks. In the event of failure, religious help was sought. One miracle of St Thomas of Canterbury recorded how an infant arrived arm first; the midwives pushed it back, hoping the child would turn, whereupon it began to swell. The normal procedure would be to then cut off the arm in order to save the mother but prayers were offered and saintly intervention supposedly resulted in a successful birth. In many cases though, practical interference, contemporary wisdom and prayer were not enough. The more babies a mother bore, the greater her risk of death and resulting illness, with the increased physical toll on her body and advancing age. For some, birth complications made their very first pregnancy fatal whilst others bore in excess of ten children and survived into comparative old age. Significantly more women did die young though, of illnesses resulting from delivery, poor hygiene and contemporary lack of anatomical understanding. Pregnant Elizabethan women in particular, had their portraits painted in case their forthcoming confinement was to end in tragedy.

The interval between Elizabeth’s delivery and death suggest the birth itself was a success but that a subsequent fever took hold or internal damage later caused a haemorrhage. Status, wealth, provision, duty, love, attention and experience were still not sufficient to save the queen’s life; it proved that bearing a child involved as great a risk for royalty as for her female subjects. In addition to the dynastic importance of Elizabeth’s life, the intimate association of Catholic ritual, prayer and famous relics during her confinements transcended the bodily event of her deliveries, advocating a personal relationship with the saints. Clasping the holy girdle, with her chest of relics and the Canterbury font on hand to christen England’s heir, it must have seemed to those around that higher authorities were blessing and witnessing the union and its offspring. It was also significant for the superstitious Tudors that she had given birth at Candlemas, the day of the Virgin’s purification, suggestive of the queen’s eternal rebirth and spotless purity. Elizabeth was the metaphoric and literal mother of the nation, bearer of heirs: in popular memory, she would be elevated to a saintly maternal figure, devoted to her religion and her family.

The semi-deification of Elizabeth began at once, with the wail of church bells across the nation and the iconography of her funeral. Colour and light were carefully deployed to intensify her saintly sacrifice. Dramatic white banners were lain across the corners of her coffin, signifying the manner of her death, while the main body of it was draped with black velvet surmounted by a cross of white cloth-of-gold: two sets of thirty-seven virgins in white linen and Tudor wreaths of white and green lined her route to Westminster, carrying lighted candles and the torch-bearers wore white woollen hooded gowns. More than a thousand lights burned on the hearse and the vaults and cross of the cathedral were draped in black and lit by 273 large tapers. The coffin was spectacularly topped by a wax effigy of the queen, dressed in robes of estate, her hair loose under a rich crown, a sceptre in her hand and fingers adorned with fine rings. Icons of the Virgin at shrines across the country hardly deviated from this description. Before burial, the effigy, with its crown and rich robes, was removed and stored in secrecy at the shrine of Edward the Confessor; so this life-like, regal image of the queen was absorbed into a collection of holy relics and icons, interchangeable with the symbolic objects that assisted her during childbirth. Part of the effigy still exists in the museum at Westminster Abbey, its face, neck and chest painted white, its features regular and serene, unsmiling but beneficent. Elizabeth’s adult life had been devoted to producing the future heirs of the Tudor dynasty. Her children would reign in England, Scotland and France yet she had paid the ultimate price for serving her king and country.
The Monument of Matrons
, published during the reign of Elizabeth’s namesake and granddaughter, included a prayer for a mother who had not survived childbirth, thanking God for delivering ‘this woman our sister, out of the woeful miseries of this sinful world’.
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A seventeenth-century ballad recorded Elizabeth’s loss and Henry’s inconsolable grief:

The Queen that fair and Princely Dame
That mother meek and mild
To add more Number to her Joy
Again grew big with Child:

All which brought comfort to the King
Against which careful Hour
He lodg’d his dear kind hearted Queen
In London’s stately Tower.

That Tower that was so fatal once
To Princes of Degree
Proved fatal to this noble Queen
For therein died She.

In child-bed lost she her sweet Life;
Her life esteemed so dear
Which had been England’s loving Queen
Full many a happy year.

The King herewith possess’d with Grief
Spent many Months in Moan
And daily sigh’d and said that he
Like her could find out none:

Nor none could he in Fancy chuse,
To make his Wedded Wife
Wherefore a Widower would remain,
The Remnant of his Life.
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The anonymous seventeenth-century pamphleteer was only partly correct. There is no doubt that in the spring of 1503 Henry VII was prostrate with grief. He contained his sorrow long enough to organise his wife’s funeral before withdrawing from the public eye. It was not contemporary practice for husbands and wives to be present at their spouse’s internment. The loss of Arthur, compounded by the deaths of Elizabeth and their newborn daughter, represented a terrible blow for a still relatively young man. However, within two months, the State Papers of Spain record that he was already entering into negotiations to find another wife. Rapid remarriage was not uncommon at the time, even when unions had been affectionate and companionate; and particularly when they had not been. Parish records list burials followed only a few months later by remarriage among Henry’s subjects. A king needed a consort and a court needed a female head. His contemporaries would not have thought of him as callous; husbands often found new wives with what seems like indecent haste to the twenty-first-century eye but this should come as no surprise: for Tudor men and women, marriage was a safeguard against sin in the eyes of the church, a comfort and support as well as demarcating social standing and advancement. The romantic notion of a life-long union was rare and many marriages were contracted between widows and widowers: it was more a realistic reflection of the fragility and brevity of life and the need for comfort. Initially, Henry’s immediate family and fellow monarchs would have been sympathetic. Then, they heard his choice of bride.