The House of Tudor (8 page)

Just enough doubt remains about Perkin Warbeck’s origins to give him a faint aura of romantic mystery. Some people have felt that he would never have received so much royal recognition unless he was actually of royal blood, and have wondered if perhaps he might have been Richard Plantagenet back from the dead. It is possible that he was an illegitimate son of Margaret of Burgundy (this suggestion was current at the time), but it is much more likely that Perkin was, as he said in his confession, the son of respectable parents, John Osbeck and Catherine de Faro his wife, both convert Jews domiciled in Tournai.

He survived for another two years as Henry’s prisoner and when his end came in November 1499 he took the Earl of Warwick with him. In Francis Bacon’s vivid phrase, ‘it was ordained that this winding-ivy of a Plantagenet should kill the true tree itself. There had been another abortive attempt to impersonate Warwick at the beginning of the year, and Henry seems at last to have come to the conclusion that there would be no real security for himself or his children as long as the last Plantagenet in the direct male line remained alive. There is some evidence that Perkin was deliberately used as bait to trap Warwick into joining a plan for an escape to Flanders. Certainly, no sooner had this plot been hatched than it was conveniently ‘discovered’ and the conspirators brought to trial. Perkin, who was hanged on 23 November, probably got no more than he deserved but there was universal sympathy for poor young Warwick, beheaded five days later on Tower Hill, and little pretence that he had died for any other crime than that of being a Plantagenet, ‘a race often dipped in their own blood’.

The first Henry Tudor, despite his reputation, was a humane man with no relish for shedding blood, guilty or innocent, and Warwick’s death upset him - he became noticeably more devout and looked ill. All the same, once the sad corpse of Edward Plantagenet had been carried up-river to Bisham Abbey (at Henry’s expense) to be buried among his Montague ancestors, the King could turn to planning the future of his own young family with a good deal more confidence.

The Tudor nursery had been filling up over the past ten years. In November 1489 Queen Elizabeth had given birth to her second child, a daughter christened Margaret after her grandmother who stood gossip, or godmother, and produced a useful present of a silver and gilt chest full of gold pieces. Eighteen months later, on 28 June 1491, came another son, Henry, born at Greenwich, and in 1492 another daughter, Elizabeth, who lived only three years. A third daughter, Mary, appeared in March 1495, and a third son, Edmund, in February 1499.

The younger members of the family spent a lot of their time at Eltham Palace in Kent, and in 1499 Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam records how he walked over from Lord Mountjoy’s house with his friend Thomas More to see the royal children. While the company was at dinner Prince Henry, a self-confident eight-year-old who already had ‘something of royalty in his demeanour’, sent Erasmus a note ‘to challenge something from his pen’, and that renowned scholar was rather annoyed with More for not having warned him to come prepared.

As the year drew to a close, the House of Tudor faced the new century with confidence. It had survived some determined attempts to dislodge it and its enemies were in disarray - Margaret of Burgundy had been obliged to apologize to Henry. There would be no more apparitions of ghostly Plantagenet princes and already the feuding of York and Lancaster was fading into history. The Tudor King could feel secure on his throne. A new generation was growing up, ready to take over his work. In only fifteen years it was an achievement of which to be proud.

3: A WONDER FOR WISE MEN

To speake againe of Henries praise,
His princely liberal hand
Gave gifts and graces many waies
Unto this famous land:
For which the Lord him blessings sent,
And multiplied his store;
In that he left more wealth to us
Than any king before.

The year 1500 brought sorrow to the royal family when, on 19 June, Prince Edmund died at Hatfield at the age of sixteen months. The pathetic little coffin was brought to London on the following Monday and given a state funeral in Westminster Abbey at a cost of £242 11s 8d with the Duke of Buckingham officiating as chief mourner.

Apart from the fact that it was terrifying, no one knows the exact rate of infant mortality among ordinary people in the early sixteenth century but even in families where the best care was available, parents could think themselves lucky if they reared three babies out of five. The Tudor nurseries were under the direct supervision of the King’s mother, who had drawn up detailed instructions to be followed by the officials in charge. There was to be a Lady Governor to oversee the nursery nurse; the wet nurse’s food and drink was to be carefully ‘assayed’ (that is, tasted) at all times while ‘shee giveth the child sucke’; and there was to be a physician always on duty to stand over the nurse at every meal to make sure she was feeding the child properly.

In spite of these and other precautions, only four out of Queen Elizabeth’s seven children (there had been another boy who died at birth) had survived their first, most perilous years. It was not a particularly good average, but neither was it unusually low. The King and Queen, like so many other bereaved parents, stoically accepted the will of God, and turned to the more cheerful business of preparing for the arrival of their first daughter-in-law.

Negotiations for a marriage between the King of England’s eldest son and the Infanta Catalina, youngest daughter of the Catholic Kings of Spain - Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile - had begun as long ago as the spring of 1488, when Arthur was eighteen months old and the Spanish princess Catherine was two and a bit. Ferdinand wanted an English alliance to secure his rear while he pursued a vendetta with France over the disputed territories of Italy - the Franco-Spanish power struggle was to dominate the international scene for more than half a century. Henry wanted friends abroad and a prestigious foreign bride for his son. Neither Henry nor Ferdinand wanted to pay more than he had to and being both, as Francis Bacon later wrote, ‘princes of great policy and profound judgement, I they) stood a great time looking upon another’s fortunes, how they would go’. But eventually, after a good deal of hard bargaining on both sides, satisfactory terms were hammered out and the marriage treaty was concluded in October 1496.

It had been agreed that the princess should come to England as soon as Arthur was fourteen, but at the last moment there were more delays and it was May 1501 before Catherine left the palace at Granada on the first stage of her long journey north, the end of September before she finally sailed from the port of Laredo on the Basque coast. It was not the best time of year to embark on a voyage across the Bay of Biscay, and the fleet ran into a succession of violent squalls which carried away spars and rigging and wrenched masts out of their sockets. The princess’s soaked and seasick retinue huddled miserably below decks convinced that their last hour had come. It seemed the worst possible omen for the future. But after five hideous days the Spaniards limped into the shelter of Plymouth Sound and anchored safely off the Hoe on the afternoon of 2 October. The bruised and exhausted passengers were able to get into dry clothes. The sun came out and everybody cheered up.

King Henry had originally intended to welcome his new daughter when she arrived at Lambeth on the southern outskirts of London, but early in November he suddenly became impatient and decided after all to go out and meet her. He left his smart new Thames-side residence at Richmond with a large company, stopping at the Berkshire village of Easthampstead to pick up Prince Arthur, who was coming south from Ludlow. Father and son then travelled on together.

News of their approach started something of a flutter in the Spanish dovecote, and before the two parties could converge an emissary arrived in the person of Don Pedro de Ayala, papal protonotary and Bishop of the Canaries. Don Pedro had the rather tricky assignment of explaining to the King of England that, according to Spanish etiquette, the princess could not receive her future father-in-law and could on no account be seen by her future husband until the marriage ceremony itself Henry was not pleased to be instructed in his own kingdom by a parcel of foreigners and, turning his horse into a convenient field, he called an impromptu council meeting. After solemnly debating the point, the lords spiritual and temporal in his train gave it as their considered opinion that since the princess of Spain was now in England she had become the King’s subject, and he had a perfect right to see her whenever he chose.

The King wasted no more time. Leaving Arthur to follow at a more decorous pace, he spurred on towards Dogmersfield, the small Hampshire village which Catherine and her entourage had reached a couple of hours earlier. When he arrived, at about half-past two in the afternoon, he was told that the princess was resting and could see no one - Catherine’s duenna, the formidable Doña Elvira Manuel, was not giving in without a struggle. But Henry Tudor meant to be master in his own house. He had come to see the princess, he said bluntly, and he was going to see her even if she was in her bed. So the princess of Spain gave the King of England ‘an honourable meeting in her third chamber’ under Doña Elvira’s disapproving eye. As Catherine spoke no English and Henry no Spanish, communication was effectively limited to smiles and bows, but when the King withdrew to change out of his muddy riding clothes he had seen all he wanted to see - a sturdy, well-grown, well-formed girl, with clear grey eyes, a fresh complexion and a quantity of auburn hair; a girl who, God willing, would be able to give him healthy grandchildren.

As soon as Arthur had ridden in, father and son paid the princess another visit. This time the occasion was more formal. The bridal couple were, of course, already legally contracted by proxy. Now they joined hands and went through a solemn betrothal ceremony in person before an impressive audience of bishops, both English and Spanish.

What the two young people thought of one another is not recorded, but when Catherine first set eyes on the Prince of Wales her spirits must surely have risen. The short November afternoon was drawing to a close and in the torchlight she saw a slender youth with a thatch of blond hair and skin as delicately pink and white as a girl’s.

Next day the princess resumed her journey, going by way of Chertsey, Kingston and Croydon, while Henry and Arthur went back to Richmond to be ready to row-down the river in state with the Queen. By the time Catherine had reached the archbishop’s palace at Lambeth, the Court was installed at Baynard’s Castle and London was packed to the rafters. All the world and his wife and his servants had come to town for the wedding; all the great nobles were keeping open house and every stable, every lodging, every spare room in the capital was full. The streets resounded with hammering as crush barriers were put up and carpenters added the finishing touches to triumphal arches and built stages for the elaborate tableaux and pageants which were to greet the bride’s procession to St. Paul’s. Inside the cathedral a sort of cat-walk, the height of a man’s head, had been erected, stretching the length of the nave from the west door to the choir and ending in a raised platform large enough to accommodate the King and the royal family on one side and the Lord Mayor and the city dignitaries on the other, with a space in the middle where the marriage ceremony would be performed - the whole complicated structure being lavishly draped in fine red worsted cloth. Henry was really splashing out on his son’s wedding, and while it was no doubt in large part a gesture of calculated extravagance designed to proclaim to the outside world that the new English royal house must now be regarded as standing on fully equal terms with the other ruling families of Europe, perhaps Henry was also allowing himself a certain flourish of personal triumph and of pride in the handsome boy who was his heir.

On 12 November Catherine and her retinue left their quarters at Lambeth Palace and were met on the adjacent St. George’s Field by a glittering escort of English lords, both spiritual and temporal, with their attendant knights and squires. The procession formed up and moved off along the south bank of the river to Southwark. Here, at the entrance to London Bridge, the princess was welcomed to the city by St. Katherine and St. Ursula, who were surrounded with ‘a great multitude of virgins right goodly dressed and arrayed’ and seated in a two-storey ‘tabernacle’ surmounted by a picture of the Trinity and draped with red and blue curtains.

Across the bridge, in the widest part of Gracious Street, stood a most realistic-looking castle, but actually constructed, the chronicler is careful to explain, of timber covered with painted canvas. Its battlements were decorated with red and white roses, with gold fleur de lys, peacocks, greyhounds, white harts and other heraldic devices. Over the entrance hung a large portcullis ‘and in every joint of the portcullis a red rose’. This was topped by the royal arms painted on a shield of mock stone, and ‘on the highest of all the whole pageant, a red dreadful dragon, holding a staff of iron and on the staff a great crown of gold’. In Cornhill there was an astrological pageant, displaying the moon and other celestial bodies, with the angel Raphael waiting to remind the princess that marriage was ordained for love, with virtue and reverence and the procreation of children, and not for sensual lust and appetite. By the great conduit in Cheapside was a pageant of the sun, with a figure intended to symbolize Prince Arthur standing in a gilded chariot. By the standard in Cheapside, on a raised platform profusely embellished with red roses, greyhounds, lions and dragons, stood a great throne surrounded by burning tapers in gold candlesticks and ‘innumerable angels singing full harmoniously’. Here was seated no less a person than God the Father, ready to exhort the princess to the love of God and of Holy Church in several stanzas of rather doubtful verse.

‘Look ye’, he declared, ‘walk in my precepts and obey them well. 
And here I give you that same blessing that I 
Gave my well-beloved children of Israel; 
Blessed be the fruit of your belly.’