Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (12 page)

That afternoon, an armada of forty barges conveyed the royal party and London’s civic dignitaries some two miles downstream to Westminster Palace. Abutting the abbey, from whose sanctuary it was separated by a high wall, and the seething lanes of its cramped satellite town, the palace was prepared for a week-long programme of sporting and dramatic entertainment. Security details had searched all the tenements within the abbey grounds and Canon Row, the narrow lane whose houses gave on to the palace yard’s north wall, submitting a written report of their findings; their inhabitants had all been ordered to clean and decorate their homes. Open to the river at its southern end, the expanse of the yard had been gravelled and sanded for the sure footing of the horses; in it had been erected a temporary stadium, ready for a series of jousts. The low-slung bulk of Westminster Hall, in term-time swarming with the business of London’s law courts, stood decorated, prepared to receive the wedding party.
⁵⁷

A torrential downpour having finally abated, expectant crowds thronged the palace yard. Londoners filed in, mingling with lawyers and students from the nearby inns of court, many of whom had been ordered to attend on pain of royal displeasure – and to pay a hefty 12d entrance fee into the bargain. Onlookers craned out of the overlooking houses, so many ‘that unto sight and perceiving was no thing to the eye but only visages and faces without appearance of their bodies’, straining to catch a glimpse of the Spanish princess as the royal party, some hundreds strong, took their seats in a purpose-built gallery.
⁵⁸
The atmosphere built to fever pitch. Trumpets announced the chief challenger, Buckingham, who emerged from Westminster Hall, fully armoured and on horseback, inside a white-and-green satin pavilion on wheels, scattered with red roses. Followed by his team, he circled the yard slowly, milking the thunderous applause, before doing obeisance to the king. Half an hour later, the five ‘defenders’ appeared through the opposite entrance: Lord William Courtenay, in blood-red plate armour, riding a red dragon led by a giant carrying a tree; the team captain, the marquis of Dorset, in a suit of coal-black armour, horsed, in a pavilion of cloth-of-gold. One of the ‘answerers’ on the opposing team, Lord Rivers, topped the lot, arriving in a ship firing cannon, ‘which made a great and an huge noise’. The Rich Mount made another appearance, this time on wheels as the earl of Essex’s ‘pavilion’; sitting atop it was a young woman in white, hair flowing around her shoulders. Such entrances, said an eyewitness, had not been seen ‘in very long remembrance’.
⁵⁹

Poring through his big book of jousts, bought from the widow of Edward IV’s king-of-arms, Garter herald John Writhe had devised an elaborate world of stylized violence to rival the famed tournaments of the Yorkists and which bore comparison with the matchless displays of Burgundian chivalry.
⁶⁰
At Calais the year before, Writhe and Henry VII’s tournament-planner, Sir Richard Guildford, had been close and interested observers of Archduke Philip and his knights. Now, conjuring up a world of chivalric make-believe, dream landscapes, damsels in distress, wildmen and unicorns, the pair had created a supreme articulation of political loyalty to Henry VII. In a last-minute adjustment to the Tree of Chivalry standing in one corner of the palace yard, both teams’ escutcheons hung together in a solid expression of unity. The previous arrangement, in which the shields of the teams led by Buckingham and Suffolk were to have faced each other in aggressive opposition, would have sent out entirely the wrong signals. The inconvenient fact of Suffolk’s rebellion had been thoroughly effaced.

Fantasy heroes within a securely Tudor universe, the combatants thundered together, ‘striking, cutting and lashing at each other … Some of their swords were broken of 2 pieces, and some other their harness [armour] was hewn off from their body.’ Guildford, the experienced referee, ensured that the violence stayed within reasonable limits; Writhe kept score. In the grandstand, Henry sat like a Solomon, watching and judging, leaning forward with an aficionado’s keenness, conversing with Guildford and sending messages of encouragement and approbation out to the nobles who jousted in his honour. Following each round, the jousters trotted up, dismounted and climbed the pavilion stairs to do obeisance. At the end of the week, in a prize-giving ceremony, the king’s blue eyes searched the faces of the participants as he congratulated them and distributed precious stones, tokens of his favour. Buckingham received a diamond of ‘great virtue and price’. Dorset, the opposing captain, was presented with a rose made of rubies inset with a diamond: the red-and-white rose was, Henry seemed to say, a highly appropriate prize for the loyal jousting of Suffolk’s replacement.
⁶¹

By night, the focus shifted to Westminster Hall, its walls hung with tapestries and at its western end a cupboard, seven shelves high, on which quantities of gold plate winked and glittered in the torchlight. In front of this display, on a raised dais, Henry and Elizabeth sat enthroned under their cloth of estate. Surrounded by the newlyweds, the royal family and the assembled court and household, they watched, enrapt, as William Cornish’s disguisings unfolded before them. One night, a succession of wheeled pageant cars, some eighteen feet high, swayed and creaked out of the gloom of the hall’s eastern end and ground to a halt before the royal company.
⁶²
In one scene, actors played out an allegory of Arthur’s wooing of Catherine, in which two English ambassadors descended from a ship, fully rigged and crewed, to pay court to ladies peering from the windows of a Spanish castle. After the performers had come together in a sequence of intricately choreographed dances, the assembled company looked on as the bride and groom danced in succession. Then, last of all, Prince Henry descended from the dais with his fourteen-year-old sister Margaret. They performed two slow bass dances, as the others had done. But the heavy formality of it all chafed at the ten-year-old prince who, feeling weighed down by his clothes, ‘suddenly cast off his gown and danced in his jacket’. In one stroke, he had shattered the gravitas. And everybody loved it, including the king and queen, to whom it gave ‘right great and singular pleasure’. He had stolen the show.
⁶³

After the week-long revelry at Westminster, Friday 26 November was, as the official chronicler put it, a day of business and pleasure. The royal household packed itself up with practised efficiency as it prepared to move some eight miles upriver to Henry VII’s house at Richmond for the final stage in the festivities. Tapestries were rolled up, plate and furnishings were loaded into myriad ‘great and huge standards, coffers, chests, cloth sacks, with all other vessels of conveyance’, then heaved onto carts and wagons, boats and wherries. After lunch, the wedding party emerged from Westminster Palace and crossed the palace yard to Westminster Bridge, the broad landing stage that extended far out into the river. There, the Thames was thick with some sixty boats waiting to transport the dignitaries, festooned with pennants, flags and tapestries, many ‘rowing and skimming’ as they waited their turn to dock. The wedding party boarded the barges that were the royal family’s usual method of transport through London and the flotilla moved off upstream, in its midst the king’s barge with its red dragon prow, accompanied by the ‘most goodly and pleasant mirth of trumpets, clarions, shawms, tabors, recorders, and other diverse instruments, to whose noise upon the water hath not been heard the like’. Landing several hours later at the small village of Mortlake, the party transferred to horseback and, ‘very late, in the silence of the evening’, rode into Richmond, their way lit by the yeomen of the guard carrying flaming brands.
⁶⁴

If the ‘Rich Mount’ in front of St Paul’s had figured forth the dynasty’s magnificence, Richmond was the real thing. Rising sheer from the Thames, the red-brick palace, with its onion-shaped domes, glass-filled bay windows, covered galleries and pleasure gardens, was an overwhelming testament to the new dynasty. Everything was light, clean and airy, designed after ‘the most new invention and craft’. Observers wondered at the plumbing, with its running water and taps ‘that at the will of the drawers of water openeth and is closed again’. Henry had scoured northern Europe for the finest in interior design. The hall was hung with tapestries of great battles; at intervals stood statues of the renowned English kings of history, in which, naturally, Henry’s likeness also appeared – though set somewhat higher than the others. The chapel royal dripped with plate, saints’ relics, jewels and cloth-of-gold. And everything, from the great cistern in the palace’s courtyard to the roof timbers, was scattered with red roses. A ‘paradise’, the ‘beauteous exemplar of all proper lodgings’, Richmond was an apotheosis.
⁶⁵

The party drifted through Richmond as if in a dream. The sculpted gardens contained topiaried mythical beasts and trees laden with exotic fruit. Everywhere was entertainment: chess, backgammon, cards, dice, billiards and a purpose-built sports complex – ‘bowling alleys, butts for archers and goodly tennis plays’ and ‘other goodly and pleasant disports for every person as they would choose and desire’. A Spanish acrobat performed on a tightrope forty feet in the air, juggling with iron chains and engaging in imaginary single combat with a sword and shield. Late on the final evening, as the customary ‘void’ – spiced wine and sweetmeats – was served, more elaborate disguisings in the great hall culminated in the release of a flock of white doves.

Finally, on Monday 29 November, the party was over. Catherine had, as negotiated, been allowed to keep some of her Spanish retinue; the rest, laden with gifts, left to begin the long journey home. The young princess felt their departure keenly, ‘annoyed and pensive of their said miss and absence’. The reaction of her new father-in-law displayed genuine sensitivity – empathy, even. Henry took Catherine and her ladies on a tour of the library with which he had equipped Richmond, showing her ‘many goodly pleasant books of works full delightful, sage, merry, and also right cunning’. Catherine would hardly have noticed, in the bulky, intricately illuminated manuscripts, the inherited Yorkist volumes overpainted with sprays of blooming red-and-white roses and emblems. Then Henry produced his trump card: a collection of rings made specifically for the occasion, ‘desiring her to oversee them and behold them well, and after that to choose of them one such as she liked best.’
⁶⁶

In recent times, Henry had rarely seemed so relaxed, so attentive. To his new daughter-in-law he had indeed shown the ‘love’ that Catherine’s mother had so earnestly desired. The festivities had gone as smoothly as could possibly have been hoped, and the new princess of Wales, becoming accustomed ‘unto the manner, guise and usages of England’, would with her ‘most dear and loving husband’ set the reign on a new dynastic footing. Arthur, for his part, wrote to his new in-laws that he had ‘never felt so much joy in his life as when he beheld the sweet face of his bride’. Some days later the couple left for Arthur’s distant seat of Ludlow, in the Welsh Marches. Abandoning his initial plans to keep Arthur and Catherine with him at court during the first year of their marriage, the king had been enthusiastic, and adamant in the face of protests from Catherine’s parents, that the couple should go.
⁶⁷
It was a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Late in the evening of Monday 4 April 1502, a boat docked at the landing stage at Greenwich, where Henry, Elizabeth and the royal household were in residence. It carried a messenger with urgent dispatches from Ludlow, under the seal of Prince Arthur’s chamberlain, Richard Pole. Henry had retired for the night and the house was quiet; close counsellors opened the letters. The news was devastating. The prince of Wales had died forty-eight hours previously, in his chamber at Ludlow Castle. He had been taken ill nearly two months before, at Shrovetide, but his decline, when it came, had been swift and brutal. The likely cause, a ‘pitiful disease’ that ‘with so sore and great violence had battled and driven, in the singular part of him inward’ was the sweating sickness, the lethal flu-like virus whose symptoms included a raging temperature, convulsing intestinal pain, asphyxiation and acute kidney failure.
¹
The counsellors summoned Henry VII’s confessor, one of the severe, grey-habited friars at the adjoining convent of Franciscan Observants. The following morning, ‘somewhat before the time accustomed’, he knocked discreetly on the door of Henry’s privy chamber. Entering, he told all the servants present to leave, then turned to the king and broke the news: his dearest son was departed to God.
²

Henry’s first instinct was to send for Elizabeth who, seeing her husband in ‘natural and painful sorrow’, comforted him. Her response was reassuring and rational. Henry should, she said, remember that he still had a ‘fair and goodly’ prince, and two fair princesses. Besides which, he still had her, and they could have more children: ‘we are both young enough’. Finally calming, Henry thanked his wife, who returned with her ladies to her own apartments, where she broke down. The scene was replayed in reverse: now, it was Henry who came to console Elizabeth in ‘good haste’, out of ‘true, gentle and faithful love’, and who reminded her of the advice she had just given him.
³

Prince Arthur’s death was as unexpected as it was shattering. Life was precarious, and death close, but familiarity did not desensitize. In an exercise book written a few months before Arthur’s death, an Oxford schoolboy described how for a long time after the death of his brother, ‘my mother was wont to sit weeping every day’. There was, the boy added, ‘nobody which would not be sorry if he had seen her weeping’. Henry and Elizabeth’s reaction to the loss of their beloved son was deeply human. But there was no mistaking, too, the disastrous political impact of Arthur’s death.
⁴