Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII

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Authors: Robert Hutchinson

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YOUNG HENRY
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Robert Hutchinson
 
 
 
 
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For Ciss and Eva
This book could not have been written without the very willing help of my dear wife Sally who, like me, has come to lead almost a double existence, immersed in the conspiracies and intrigues of Tudor life.
Like my other books on the period, much of the material for this work has been drawn from contemporary documents and other sources, where possible employing the written or spoken words used by those living in those tumultuous, dangerous times.
A great number of friends and colleagues have kindly given invaluable support and help in tracking down manuscripts and rare books. In particular, I would like to thank Robin Harcourt Williams, Librarian and Archivist to the Marquis of Salisbury at Hatfield House for his help with the Cecil Papers. Dr Andrea Clarke, curator of Early Modern Historical Manuscripts in the British Library, and Jessamy Sykes of the National Archives were very helpful in locating a manuscript once in the library of Wrest Park, Bedfordshire.
My thanks also go to Heather Rowland, head of library and collections, and Adrian James, assistant librarian, at the Society of Antiquaries of London; Kay Walters and her team at the incomparable library at the Athenæum in Pall Mall; the ever-willing staff at the University of Sussex library at Falmer and the always helpful teams at the National Archives and in the Rare Books, Humanities and Manuscripts reading rooms of the British Library at Euston. I am also very grateful for help given by my good friends the Revd Jerome Bertram, on Latin translation, and Dr Richard Robinson on forensic medicine issues. At Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Alan Samson has been encouraging and helpful, as has Lucinda McNeile, and I would like to thank Lisa Rogers my editor and Christopher Phipps for the index.
I must point out, however, that any errors are entirely my responsibility.
 
ROBERT HUTCHINSON
West Sussex, 2010
THE UNCERTAIN CROWN
 
 
‘What … should be if his grace departed … who should have the rule in England then? Some spoke of my lord of Buckingham [and] said that he would be a royal ruler … others spoke of the traitor Edmund de la Pole but none of them spoke of my lord prince.’
Sir Hugh Conway, Treasurer of Calais, [later than] 1503.
1
 
 
After audaciously seizing the crown of England, Henry VII told his first Parliament on 9 November 1485 that his inalienable right to the throne was based not only on his lawful inheritance but on the dreadful judgement of God – delivered decisively in battle less than three months before.
2
But behind the bold, confident words of the victor of Bosworth Field that rang around the Painted Chamber at Westminster that winter’s day lurked deep, dark fears in Henry’s heart about the future, both of his own fledgling sovereignty and of the glorious dynasty of Tudor monarchs he intended to establish.
The new king muttered a profound and fervent ‘amen’ to the dutiful, diligent appeal made to the peers, bishops and commoners by the Lord Chancellor, John Alcock, Bishop of Worcester, to humbly pray on their knees for a long, happy and fertile reign.
3
Shakespeare’s brisk line ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown’
4
is grimly appropriate to the dysfunctional House of Tudor that went on to rule England for more than a century.
Insecurity always beleaguered Henry VII and his imperious descendants, who all faced rebellions during their lifetimes – some of which
came close to toppling them from an often precarious throne. Ruthless and brutal suppression of such opposition was part of the inherited Tudor genes.
5
Moreover, there were always hard questions about who would succeed them when omnipotent death finally knocked on the doors of the royal apartments within their opulent palaces. Frequently, only the copious shedding of noble English blood decided the issue.
Insecurity especially haunted Henry’s second son who, as Henry VIII, slaughtered those who held latent claims to the throne as well as the many unfortunates trapped by his new catch-all treason laws. Above all, he agonised for decades over his inability to sire a legitimate male heir.
Henry VII had spent fourteen embittered years exiled in Brittany after the Yorkist defeat of the Lancastrian cause in the Wars of the Roses at the Battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury in 1471. His questionable, certainly tenuous, claim to the English throne was founded on the descent of his formidable mother Lady Margaret Beaufort from John of Gaunt, son of Edward III, and Katherine Swynford, his mistress of twenty-five years and later his third wife.
6
Their children were legitimised by Act of Parliament in 1397 but were barred from inheriting the throne in an order of dubious legality made by Henry IV a decade later.
The king’s claim to the crown on his father’s side was even more fragile. Edmund Tudor, First Earl of Richmond, was half-brother to Henry VI, born of an illicit union between Katherine of Valois, widow of the great English hero-king Henry V, and Owen Tudor,
7
her Welsh-born Keeper of the Wardrobe. Owen was beheaded in 1461 after Lancastrian forces were defeated at Mortimer’s Cross, near Wigmore, Herefordshire.
Edmund died of the plague in November 1456 after being imprisoned by the Yorkists in Carmarthen Castle in South Wales. Henry, his only child, was born at Pembroke Castle in 1457, three months after his death, following a difficult confinement for his fourteen-year-old mother.
Claims by descent can always be challenged. But winning the throne by right of conquest was an undeniable fact of realpolitik. Henry triumphantly wore Richard III’s regal circlet of gold after just two hours of intense fighting at Bosworth on 22 August 1485. The defeated king’s bloody and mired body, stripped stark naked, was contemptuously
thrown over a horse and carried off the battlefield ‘trussed like a hog or calf’
8
to an ignominious burial in an unmarked grave two days later in the Church of the Greyfriars, Leicester.
9
In thanks for his victory, Henry offered up his red Welsh dragon standard at the high altar of St Paul’s Cathedral in London and on Sunday 30 October was crowned at Westminster by the same archbishop who two years earlier had performed precisely the same role in Richard III’s coronation.
Now Henry wanted to quash Richard’s earlier scornful charge that he was ‘descended of bastard blood, both [on his] father’s side and mother’s side … [so] no title can, nor may, [be] in him’.
10
He therefore immediately introduced two Bills into Parliament. The first set out the king’s style and title as ‘King of England and France and Lord of Ireland’.
11
Expediently, it offered no explanation as to how Henry acquired it and contained the convenient legal canard that his reign began twenty-four hours
before
the Battle of Bosworth. Thus, all who fought against him that day were automatically deemed traitors and their lives and goods liable to be forfeit under attainder for treason.
The second repealed the notorious
Titulus Regius
statute of 1483 that ratified a petition bastardising Edward IV’s children on the grounds that his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was legally invalid.
12
The couple’s children included the so-called ‘Princes in the Tower’, Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York, and this instrument effectively declared Richard III the true and lawful king.
13
The two boys disappeared mysteriously after passing through the gates of the Tower of London in June 1483, never to be seen again.
In this instance, foul murder did not shriek out. It was presumed they were either killed in the Tower or died from disease or privation behind its grim battlements. Whether Richard III himself was responsible for their deaths has been thoroughly clouded by clever Tudor propaganda and is still debated heatedly to this day. The puzzling ramification of Henry VII’s repealing of the
Titulus Regius
was that he must have been certain sure that the two princes were already dead. Henry would have known that by re-legitimising Edward IV’s children, he was also restoring the lost princes’ birthrights to the succession. The risks to the new
king’s chances of survival would have been vastly increased if they were still living.
The real reason behind the Act was that Henry needed to buttress his battered kingdom after the destruction and division of the thirty-two years of the Wars of the Roses. To achieve that, he planned to marry Elizabeth of York, the eldest daughter of Edward IV, now deftly re-legitimised by his legislation, to finally unite the houses of York and Lancaster.
14
On 10 December 1485, immediately before it was prorogued, Parliament humbly petitioned him to fulfil his oath to marry her, sworn in the great cathedral of Rennes, in eastern Brittany, on Christmas Day 1483. The new Speaker Sir Thomas Lovell
15
hoped that God would bless the marriage ‘with progeny of the race of kings to the great satisfaction of the whole world’.
16
Henry intended to rule England in his own right as king-conqueror, rather than merely relying on his queen consort’s own lineage to secure the throne. A papal dispensation for the marriage was granted on 16 January 1486 to end ‘the long and grievous variance, contentions and debates’ between England’s warring factions. The Bull underlined Henry’s legal claim to the crown – should Elizabeth die childless, the issue of any future marriage would inherit the throne – and furthermore threatened excommunication to any who should rebel against him or his lawful heirs.
17
It was printed and read out from church pulpits up and down the realm, in one of the earliest uses of the printing press to distribute government propaganda to the masses.
18
Two days afterwards Henry and Elizabeth were married by Thomas Bourchier, the eighty-two-year-old Archbishop of Canterbury
19
at Westminster Abbey. Henry was ten days away from his twenty-ninth birthday; Elizabeth was aged almost twenty. Bernard André, the blind French poet of Henry’s court, reported that the king’s subjects ‘constructed bonfires far and wide to show their gladness and the City of London was filled with dancing, singing and entertainment’ in celebration of the wedding.
20
More soberly, the chronicler Edward Hall wrote that:
By reason of which marriage, peace was thought to descend out of heaven into England, considering that the lines of Lancaster and York … were
now brought into one knot and connected together, of whose two bodies one heir might succeed, which after their time should peaceably rule and enjoy the whole monarchy and realm of England.
21
The theme of divine intervention on behalf of Henry VII was deliberately promoted and widely believed. In Rome an English envoy delivered an elegant oration in breathless Latin to the Pope and cardinals, acknowledging Henry’s great debt to God for His divine assistance in recovering the throne of his ancestors. He declared that the new king had agreed to marry the daughter of Edward IV ‘to end all civil strife in England’.
22
Subsequent events were to prove this expectation rather premature.
Throughout history, the first imperative for any monarch has always been to establish a male line of succession as early as possible in their reign. Henry VII was quick off the mark, as Elizabeth soon found herself pregnant, and preparations were made for her confinement and the delivery of the hoped-for prince at Winchester, the ancient capital of England, where the king was enjoying the local deer hunting after a gruelling royal progress in the west of England.
The king’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, jotted down the time of the birth in her devotional
Book of Hours
23
as ‘in the morning afore one o’clock after midnight’ on 19/20 September 1486 – St Eustace’s Day.
24
The child was a healthy boy, despite being born at least a month prematurely, and was promptly named Arthur.
25
In thanks for her safe delivery, Elizabeth founded a chapel dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary in Winchester Cathedral bearing her arms, surmounted by the jubilantly pious words
In Gloriam Dei
.
26
There has been much learned debate about Henry’s intentions behind this choice of name for his first-born son and heir.
27
The seventeenth-century historian Francis Bacon believed the king’s objective was to bind his dynasty to ‘that ancient worthy king of the Britons, in whose acts there is truth enough to make him famous, beside that which is fabulous [legendary]’.
28
Edward Hall considered that the name carried mythical potency before which ‘Englishmen … rejoiced … and foreign princes trembled and quaked, so much was that name to all nations
terrible and formidable’.
29
However, ‘Arthur’ was not a name regarded as especially significant by earlier English kings – Edward IV gave it to one of his bastard sons, Arthur Plantagenet, later Viscount Lisle – and in Henry VII’s reign, there was no attempt to create a popular cult of King Arthur
30
other than the poetic conceits written at court, intended only to massage the greedy ego of Henry himself.
31
The king might now have his heir, but threats to his crown from the defeated Yorkists had not vanished. As early as February 1486, his uncle Jasper Tudor
32
was sent into Wales ‘to see to that country’
33
and the following month there were brief but violent riots in Westminster and north London apparently aimed at deposing Henry. Later that spring abortive rebellions sprang up in Yorkshire, Warwickshire and the West Midlands – the city of Worcester was briefly held against the king – but these minor insurrections fizzled out harmlessly, although sporadic sedition continued to simmer in the Thames Valley area.
34
A more serious threat emerged in bizarre circumstances in 1487. After Bosworth, Henry VII had swiftly locked up the closest Yorkist claimant to the throne, ten-year-old Edward Plantagenet, Seventeenth Earl of Warwick,
35
in the Tower, but now a counterfeit Warwick appeared in Dublin. Lambert Simnel was the ten-year-old son of an Oxford joiner who had a passing resemblance to the imprisoned earl and had been schooled in the ways of the nobility by Richard Simons, a wily scholar-priest of Oxford. With rumours abounding that Warwick had escaped custody, Henry was forced to bring him out of the Tower and parade him in St Paul’s for all to see, in a vain attempt to scotch the dangerous treasonous talk.
Another Yorkist nobleman, John de la Pole, First Earl of Lincoln, had taken part in the ceremonial of the christening of Prince Arthur on 24 September 1486 at Winchester. He now fled the court and crossed the English Channel to Burgundy, seeking support and tangible assistance from Margaret of York, dowager Duchess of Burgundy and sister to both Edward IV and Richard III. Lincoln raised a force of 2,000 German mercenaries – a highly disciplined brigade of
Landsknechte
armed with tall pikes, ably commanded by the swaggering Martin Schwarz
36
– and shipped them over to Ireland, arriving on 5 May. His defection was
particularly dangerous to Henry Tudor, as his maternal uncle Richard III had named him as his legal heir to the throne of England.

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