Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners (4 page)

As she grew older and more and more immersed in her various charitable and business affairs, my lady the King's mother was seen less often at Court, but she seldom missed any big family occasion. Certainly she was in town in November 1501 for the wedding of Arthur, Prince of Wales, and the Spanish Princess Catherine of Aragon. Once again she 'wept marvellously' throughout the splendid ceremony in St. Paul's Cathedral, but this time, unhappily, Lady Margaret's perennial dread that adversity would follow triumph proved well founded, for within six months Arthur was dead at the age of fifteen.

The loss of their precious elder son and heir came as a terrible blow to his parents, and we have a poignant glimpse of Queen Elizabeth attempting to comfort her husband, reminding him that his mother 'had never no more children but him only and that God had ever preserved him and brought him where he was'. They still had a fair prince and two fair princesses, and there might yet be more. 'We are both young enough', said Elizabeth gallantly. She was now in her thirty-eighth year and after seven pregnancies could reasonably have felt she had more than done her duty in this respect, but it seems that for Henry's sake she was ready to begin all over again if necessary - a gesture which in itself suggests a bond of tender affection, if not real love between them.

Meanwhile the three surviving children were growing up, and January 1502 had seen the betrothal of Margaret, elder of the two fair princesses, to King James IV of Scotland. The ceremony took place at Richmond Palace, Patrick, Earl of Bothwell, acting as James's proxy, and in the presence of her parents, her brother and sister and a notable assemblage of bishops, lords and ladies, Margaret, 'wittingly and of deliberate mind, having twelve years complete in age in the month of November last past', solemnly plighted her troth, vowing to take 'the said James, King of Scotland, unto and for my husband and spouse, and all other for him forsake during his and mine lives natural'. The trumpeters blew a fanfare, the minstrels struck up 'in the best and most joyfullest manner', and the Queen took her daughter by the hand and led her to the place of honour at a banquet laid out in the royal apartments in recognition of her altered status.

Margaret was now officially regarded as a married woman and addressed in public as Queen of Scotland, but another eighteen months were to pass before she left home, and during that time tragedy struck again at the royal family. In February 1503 Elizabeth of York was brought to bed of her eighth child, a girl christened Katherine, but it killed her, and the baby for whom she had given her life 'tarried but a small season after her mother'.

The Queen had always been a popular figure - 'one of the most gracious and best beloved princesses in the world in her time being' - and she was genuinely mourned. She never took any active part in politics and probably never wanted to, but in her own sphere her influence seems to have been entirely benign. To her contemporaries she embodied all the most admired female virtues, being a chaste, fruitful and submissive wife, a loving mother, a dutiful daughter, an affectionate sister and a pious, charitable Christian. She is said to have been beautiful, and probably she was a pretty woman - the Yorkists were a handsome family, and Elizabeth Woodville must certainly have possessed considerable physical attractions. Fortunately, though, her daughter inherited none of the dowager's less admirable characteristics and, from the scanty personal information available, a picture emerges of what is usually described as a very feminine woman - placid, warm-hearted, sweet-tempered and generous, but naturally indolent, totally without ambition, happy to let others take the lead (and the responsibility) and perfectly content in her own small family world. In the often still dangerously tense political atmosphere, this was precisely what the new dynasty needed, and by her negative as well as her positive qualities Elizabeth of York undoubtedly helped to provide a stabilizing element.

Henry honoured his wife with a splendid state funeral. She was buried in Westminster Abbey, with her sister, Lady Katherine Courtenay, acting as chief mourner, while the King 'departed to a solitary place to pass his sorrow'. The Queen's death, says one account, 'was as heavy and dolorous to the King's highness as hath been seen or heard of, but Henry could not afford the luxury of mourning for long. The daily grind of government had to go on, and that summer the young Queen of Scotland was due to travel north to begin her married life. The King escorted his daughter as far as his mother's house at Collyweston in Northamptonshire, where Margaret Beaufort now spent most of her time, and here the goodbyes were said. The bride was to make the rest of her wedding journey in the charge of the Earl and Countess of Surrey, who would be responsible for handing her over to her husband.

There was no sentimental cult of youth in the sixteenth-century world - life was altogether too short and too uncertain - and few concessions were made to immaturity. Margaret, still three months short of her fourteenth birthday, was admittedly young to be married and a queen, but by no means exceptionally so. Her father, and society at large, regarded her as an adult and expected her to behave as one.

The marriage was, of course, entirely a matter of political convenience, intended to seal a treaty of alliance which, it was hoped, would end the ancient feud between England and her nearest neighbour, loosen the almost equally ancient Franco-Scottish connection - always a source of trouble and danger to England - and secure the vulnerable northern frontier. Henry had been negotiating this treaty for a number of years and regarded its completion as something of a triumph. Such considerations as those that his daughter had never seen her future husband, that he was at least fifteen years older and known to be keeping a mistress, were not felt to be relevant. The King of Scotland was a gentleman, and there was no reason to suppose that he would not treat his wife with proper courtesy and respect. As for Margaret, she was making an honourable marriage, a career for which she had been trained from babyhood, and now it was up to her to make a success of it.

The time, indeed, was approaching when the second generation of royal Tudors would have to take over the family business. The King never really recovered from the shock of losing his elder son and his wife within the space of ten months. He aged visibly after the Queen's death, and his health began to fail. He lived for another six years, but when he died, in April 1509, 'of a consuming sickness', at the age of fifty-two, he was already an old man.

His mother did not long survive her own 'sweet and most dear king' and all her worldly joy. Margaret Beaufort was now in her sixty-sixth year, a considerable age by contemporary standards, but her health, even in her last years, seems to have been better than her son's, for she was still active and kept all her faculties to the end. She came up to London to see her eighteen-year-old grandson crowned, staying in the Abbot's House at Westminster for the occasion, and there, at the beginning of July, she died. Her death, coming in the midst of a hectic round of post-coronation festivities, attracted comparatively little attention, though she was, of course, buried with all proper respect alongside her son and daughter-in-law in Henry VII's Chapel in the Abbey, the new Queen, Catherine of Aragon, seeing to most of the arrangements, and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, preaching the funeral sermon at a solemn Requiem Mass.

Fisher did full justice to his old friend's memory. 'She had in a manner all that is praisable in a woman, either in soul or body,' he declared; 'she was of singular wisdom and a holding memory; a ready wit she had to conceive all things, albeit they were right dark. In favour, in words, in gesture, in every demeanour of herself, so great nobleness did appear that whatever she spoke or did, it marvellously became her.' Fisher went on to speak of her generosity, her kindliness and her unfailing good manners. 'Of marvellous gentleness she was unto all folk, but specially unto her own, whom she loved and trusted right tenderly.... Merciful also and piteous she was unto such as were grieved or wrongfully troubled, and to them that were in poverty or any other misery.' The Bishop felt that the whole country had reason to mourn her passing:

the poor creatures that were wont to receive her alms ...; the students of both the Universities, to whom she was as a mother; all the learned men of England, to whom she was a very patroness; all the virtuous and devout persons, to whom she was as a loving sister; ... all good priests and clerics, to whom she was a true defendress; all the noble men and women, to whom she was a mirror, an example of honour; all the common people of this realm, for whom she was in their causes a common mediatrix, and took right great pleasure for them.

Fisher, of course, was prejudiced, but even so there is no doubt that my lady the King's mother was a great lady in the best sense; deeply conscious of the duties and responsibilities attached to wealth and high position, and tirelessly conscientious in discharging them. Dignified, gracious and good, there is no doubt that by her life and work she did much to establish popular respect and esteem for the royal House she had founded.

The one thing pretty well everyone knows about Henry VIII is that he had six wives - admittedly an unusual achievement for any man and unique among English kings. What is not so often known or remembered is that his first marriage lasted very nearly twenty years and that the other five, none of which lasted longer than three years and two only a matter of months, were all squeezed into the last fourteen years of his life.

Almost the first thing the new King did was to get married, taking as his bride his brother's widow, the Spanish Princess Catherine. Some people, so it was said later, had their doubts about the validity of this marriage between brother and sister-in-law from the beginning, but no one apparently felt strongly enough to register a formal protest. The Pope had, after all, issued the necessary dispensations, and Catherine had been officially betrothed to Henry in the summer of 1503 in order to repair the Anglo-Spanish link broken by Arthur's untimely death. The marriage should have taken place in 1505, as soon as Henry had entered his fifteenth year, but the financial and other difficulties which prevented Catherine's father, Ferdinand of Aragon, from delivering the second half of her dowry, and the general deterioration of relations between England and Spain, had combined to postpone the wedding, it seemed indefinitely.

For Catherine the results of this delay were unhappy. One of the conditions of her second marriage contract had been a renunciation of her dower rights as Arthur's widow. Under English law a widow was normally automatically entitled to a third of her late husband's estate, and, as Dowager Princess of Wales, Catherine should have received a third of the revenues of the principality and also of the duchy of Cornwall and earldom of Chester. As matters stood, however, she had been left financially dependent on her father-in-law until her second marriage took place and, as Henry VII's dislike and suspicion of the slippery Ferdinand grew, her position became progressively more uncomfortable. In 1505 Henry cut off the not very generous allowance he had been making her and closed Durham House, where she had been living with her Spanish household. Henceforward the Princess was obliged to live like a poor relation on the fringes of the Court, pawning her plate and selling off bits of jewellery in order to clothe herself and feed her remaining Spaniards, forced to put up with insolence and neglect from the royal servants, cold-shouldered by the family and growing ever more deeply in debt to the London goldsmiths.

But even in her teens Catherine of Aragon was no nonentity to be intimidated by rudeness or dismayed by loneliness and penury. If the King had been hoping that she would beg to go home and thus give him an excuse for breaking off her engagement, he was disappointed. Courageous, stubborn and proud, Catherine bore a strong resemblance to her dead mother, that redoubtable warrior Queen Isabella of Castile, and like a good soldier she stayed grimly at her post. The English, she told her father, could not break her spirit, and she would rather die than return rejected to Spain.

In 1508, a new Spanish ambassador, shocked and disgusted by the way she was being treated and bogged down in a pettifogging wrangle with the King's Council over whether or not the Princess's remaining plate and jewels could be counted against the unpaid portion of her dowry, believed there was nothing for it but to admit defeat. When Catherine heard about this, she was furious. The ambassador, she wrote home energetically, was a traitor who should at once be recalled and punished.

What would have happened if Henry VII had lived another year is anybody's guess - the course of English history might well have taken a very different direction. But old Henry died, and young Henry, imperiously thrusting aside all the boring financial obstacles in the way of his marriage, made it plain that he wanted no more delay. Although he had scarcely seen his fiancée since their betrothal, the new King, a lusty, full-blooded and, by all accounts, divinely handsome teenager, was impatient to prove his manhood and his mettle in the nuptial bed. This, at least, is the generally accepted explanation for the sudden, dramatic transformation of Catherine's prospects.

Since the King had set his heart on being crowned with the Queen at his side, there was no time to be lost. The wedding took place quietly on 11 June at the Franciscan church close by Greenwich Palace, and ten days later the Court moved to the Tower to prepare for the recognition procession through the City to Westminster and the coronation.

To Catherine, borne through the cheering crowds in a litter draped with cloth of gold slung between two white palfreys, and wearing one of her new trousseau dresses of white embroidered satin, it must surely have seemed that her troubles were over at last. The handsome prince had come riding to her rescue in the best fairy-tale tradition; patience and virtue had been rewarded, and all she had to do now was live happily ever after.

Certainly, in June 1509, everything appeared to be set fair for the young couple. Catherine, to her credit, had not allowed her recent experiences to embitter her. On the contrary, she had learned some valuable lessons in discretion, self-reliance and self-control and had matured into a serene, thoughtful young woman of much dignity and charm. The five-and-a-half year difference in age - Catherine had been twenty-three the previous December, Henry would not be eighteen until the end of the month - seemed unimportant. It might even be all to the good. The ebullient young King, with his passion for violent sports, for lavishly expensive parties and banquets, for dressing up and showing off, could only benefit from the gently restraining influence of a slightly older wife, and during the early years of the reign the Queen's influence - both personal and political - was a factor to be reckoned with.