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Jones & Underwood,
The King’s Mother
, p.154. By 1506, the house had its own chapel and vestry, a library, great hall, parlour and Margaret’s own rooms, including a chamber of presence and accommodation for her household. It had its own jewel house and even its own prison.

Jones & Underwood,
The King’s Mother
, p.81.

Coldharbour is first mentioned as being used by William de Hereford, goldsmith and mayor of London in 1287. It was the London home of the dukes of Exeter in the fifteenth century and was granted by Richard III to the College of Heralds in 1483. Henry VII cancelled this grant early in his reign and spent £88 in reparations to the building before giving it to his mother in March 1487. On 4 July 1509, his son Henry VIII granted Coldharbour to George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, for life. The building was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666 but the foundations and the footings of its stairs survived until 1843. Up to the end of the nineteenth-century, its name was preserved in Coldharbour Lane. The site is now occupied by an office block at 89 Upper Thames Street (Kingsford, pp.94 – 5, 97 and 99).

BL Harley 7,039, f.34.

BL Cotton MS,
Vespasian F XIII
, f.60, reprinted in Ellis,
Original Letters
… vol. 1, 1st ser, pp.46 – 8 and Pollard,
Reign of Henry VII
…, vol. 1, p.217.

Pollard,
Reign of Henry VII
…, vol. 1, p.219.

On 27 June 2009, the college celebrated the 500th anniversary of the death of its foundress.

Halsted,
Life of Margaret Beaufort
, p.221.

Prayers for the dead, sick and poor.

Cooper,
Memorials of Margaret Beaufort
, p.75. Giovanni de’ Gigli, Bishop of Worcester, presented Lady Margaret with a slim volume, written in Italy, of the lives of the Saints. On the flyleaf (f.20), is a ten-line mournful poem written by the bishop who died the following year. See BL Add. MS 33,772.

Halsted,
Life of Margaret Beaufort
, p.196.

Jones & Underwood,
The King’s Mother
, pp.157 – 8.

In April 1496 Lady Margaret wrote to the Earl of Ormond, the queen’s chamberlain, to thank him for the gift of a pair of French gloves which were ‘right good, save they were too much [too big] for my hand … Blessed be God, the king, the queen and all our sweet children be in good health. The queen has been a little crazed [sick or infirm] but she is now well, God be thanked.’ Halsted,
Life of Margaret Beaufort
, p.190.

CSP Spain
, vol. 1, p.164.

Dr Roderigo de Puebla said in July 1498 that it was ‘scandalous’ that Don Pedro Ayala had delayed his departure from London and there was no hope of him leaving ‘if his officers and servants were not implicated in so many street fights and scuffles. A short time ago, Don Pedro himself received a blow from a brick on his arm in a fight of his servants. Last week the servants … attacked some Englishmen, one of whom has since died. [I] went to see the corpse buried. The police [
sic
] arrested one … if the king had not interceded the man would most probably have been hanged. Afterwards the chaplain of Don Pedro, a Scotchman, was arrested for killing an Englishman and sent back to Scotland’ (
CSP Spain
, vol. 1, p.155).

De Puebla was himself accused by Friar Thomas de Matienzo, sub-prior of Santa Cruz, of living ‘meanly … in the house of a mason who keeps dishonest women. His landlord robs men who come to his house and the ambassador protects him in his dishonest trade against the [authorities]’ (
CSP Spain
, vol. 1, p. 166). Furthermore, another diplomat claimed he was ‘avaricious and a notorious usurer, an enemy of truth, full of lies, a calumniator of all honest men, vain glorious and ostentatious … When the court is staying in the country, he dines every day in the palace of the king and begs wine and bread for his supper and for his servants … It would require all the paper in London to describe the character of the man’ (
CSP Spain
, vol. 1, p. 167). De Puebla certainly had a reputation for scrounging free meals. In 1498, an unnamed courtier wondered aloud why the envoy had turned up unexpectedly at court. ‘To eat’ another exclaimed and Henry VII laughed at the riposte. Gunn, ‘Courtiers’, p.39.

CSP Spain
, vol. 1, p.156.

Such as the two stilted letters written by Arthur from Ludlow Castle in October and November 1499. See BL Egerton MS 616, article 5.

CSP Spain
, vol. 1, pp.246 – 7.

Letter from Henry VII to the Archbishop of Santiago, 25 September 1501 (
CSP Spain
, vol. 1, pp.261 – 2).

CSP Spain
, vol. 1, p.262.

CSP Spain
, vol. 1, p.263.

Kipling,
Receyt of the Ladie Kateryne
, p.7 and Strickland,
Queens of England
, vol. 2, pp.101 – 2.

CSP Spain
, vol. 1, p.264 and p.265.

A ribbed cloth made of silk, wool, mohair or camel hair.

Hayward,
Dress at the Court of Henry VIII
, p.90.

Strickland,
Queens of England
, vol. 2, p.103.

LP Henry VII
, p.411.

Hall,
Chronicles
, p.493.

‘More Correspondence’, p.4.

LP Henry VII
, p.413. The cost of the wedding and for escorting Katherine from Exeter to London amounted to £10,512 18s 1¼d. BL Royal MS 14 B XXXIX.

Kipling,
Receyt of the Ladie Kateryne
, p.43.

Thomas & Thornley,
Great Chronicle
, p.31; Kipling,
Receyt of the Ladie Kateryne
, pp.57 – 8.

Strickland,
Queens of England
, vol. 2, p.106.

CHAPTER 3: PRINCE OF WALES

CSP Spain
, vol. 1, p.439.

There had been four days of wrangling within the royal household over whether or not Katherine should go with Arthur to Wales, with the princess’s confessor Alexsandro Geraldini firmly opposed to the move. Henry VII, however, urged the bridegroom to persuade her ‘to say that she preferred rather to go than to stay’. This she refused to do and ‘the king, making a show of great sorrow’ according to the Spanish ambassador Don Pedro de Ayala, decided himself on her departure to Ludlow. The envoy complained that Henry had given ‘nothing at all’ to furnish the newly-weds’ apartments in the castle, ‘nor any table service – nor does he intend to give, but, on the contrary, he has ordered that they must live together and take their meals together’. With unintentional irony, de Ayala reported in another section of his dispatch that the king was ‘afraid to be thought a miser’ (
CSP Spain
, Supplement to vols. 1 and 2, pp.1 – 5). John Wint was paid ten shillings for carriage of Katherine’s baggage from Plymouth to Ludlow Castle on 18 February 1502 (Bentley, p.127).

CSP Spain
, vol. 1, p.167.

Ibid., p.176.

Leland, vol. 4, p.261.

Ibid., p.260.

PPE Elizabeth of York, p.2. Goor had been given half a mark for performing in front of Henry VII in August 1501 and 3s 4d again the following February. On each occasion, he was named only as ‘the Duke of York’s fool’ (Southworth, pp.63 – 4). On 26 October 1501 John Goor was granted a coat ‘with our son’s colours’, four pairs of shoes, two shirts and two pairs of hose (TNA E 101/415/7 no.76). The queen had her own fool or jester, called William, who was looked after by William Worthy.

The corporation of New Romney, one of the Cinque Ports, recorded payments in 1505 and 1508 to the ‘minstrels of the lord Prince’ (
Fifth Report of the Royal Historical Manuscripts Commission
, London, 1876, pt. 1, pp.549 and 552).

PPE Elizabeth of York, p.52.

TNA E 101/415/7 nos. 15 and 83.

Kipling, p.79.

BL Egerton MS 2,642, f.174v.

Hayward, p.88.

It was set up in the private chapel of the Abbot of Waltham at Copt Hall, near Epping, Essex, before being removed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In 1758 the window was purchased for four hundred guineas by the parishioners of St Margaret Westminster and inserted in the east window of the church, where it remains today. See Walter Thornbury,
Old and New London
, vol. 3, London, 1878, pp.569 – 70 and
Transactions of St Paul’s Ecclesiological Society
, vol. 2 (1888 – 90), pp.108 – 9.

The Tudors may have had a predisposition for contracting tuberculosis (MacNalty, p.25). Henry VII was to die from tuberculosis, as did Henry VIII’s illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, on 23 July 1536, and Edward VI, on 6 July 1553 – although the latter’s condition was complicated by an attack of measles and the unspeakable medicines administered secretly by a wise woman who probably did for him.

Clifford Brewer, p.109.

Shortly after Henry’s triumphal arrival in London on 28 August 1485, following his victory at Bosworth, there was a serious epidemic of the sweating sickness in the capital, which caused great mortality.

Caius, fol.9.

Taviner et al., p.96. See also G. Thwaites, M. Taviner and V. Grant, ‘The English Sweating Sickness’,
New England Journal of Medicine
, vol. 336 (1997), pp.580 – 2.

See Paul Slack,
The Impact of the Plague in Tudor and Stuart England
, London, 1985, pp.65 and 75. The inhabitants of Worcester were forbidden from making pious offerings at Arthur’s funeral there ‘because of the sickness that reigned amongst them’ (see Leland, vol. 5, p.380).

In 1499, 20,000 died from bubonic plague in London (Vergil, p.119), although Hall (p.401) estimates the death toll then was 30,000. Henry VII and Elizabeth of York fled to Calais to avoid the disease and stayed there for about a month.

BL Cotton MS Vitellius B xii, f.85.

Bacon, p.205.

Hall, p.494. Although Katherine would have learnt a few words and phrases in English, the couple’s lingua franca would have been Latin – hardly the most romantic language in the world (Strickland,
Queens of England
, vol. 2, p.109).

Shrove Tuesday fell on 8 February in 1502.

BL Cotton Appendix xxvii, f.145.

J. S. Brewer, vol. 2, p.303.

Kipling, p.80.

‘Towardly’ – willing to learn and promising.

Kipling, p.81.

Katherine is said to have ‘foretold the wretched outcome of the marriage’. The storm that buffeted her ship en route to England convinced her and her entourage that ‘the tempest portended some calamity’ (Vergil, p.125).

Kipling, p.82.

A long delay between a royal death and the funeral was customary at this time, to allow arrangements for the complicated ceremonial to be made (see BL Egerton MS 2,642, f.174v.

BL Add. MS 45,131, ff.37 – 41; Leland, vol. 5, p.377.

Gunn & Monkton, p.167 and Sandford, p.476. A re-enactment of the funeral was staged in Worcester in May 2002. This took a total of 666 days to organise, compared with the twenty-one for that in 1502 (see Gunn & Monkton, pp.167 – 79).

It originally had a brass marginal inscription, probably ripped off during the reign of Edward VI. A painted inscription, free of any precatory prayer, replaced this later
in the sixteenth century, which was recorded by the royalist officer Richard Symonds in 1644 during his military service in the English Civil War: ‘Here lyeth buryed Prince Arthur the first begotten son of the right renowned king henry the seventhe, which Noble Prynce departed oute of this transitori lyfe in the Castle of Ludlowe in the seventeenth yere of his fathers rayne and in the yere of our Lord God on [
sic
] thousand five hundred and two’ (BL Harley MS 965 f.41v and Sandford, p.477).

TNA LC 2/1/1 ff.4r – 4v.

CSP Spain
, vol. 1, p.267. Ferdinand and Isabella to Ferdinand, Duke de Estrada, Toledo, 10 May 1502.

Ibid., pp.267 – 8. Ferdinand and Isabella to de Puebla, Toledo, 12 May 1502.

A London tailor, John Cope, was paid five shillings for providing the cloth and lining and covering Katherine’s litter (PPE Elizabeth of York, p.103).

He was paid 8d for his pains (PPE Elizabeth of York, p.14).

CPR Henry VII
, vol. 2, p.258.

Henry Roper, Page of the Queen’s Beds, was paid 16d for two days’ work preparing her lodgings at the Tower (PPE Elizabeth of York, p.98).

PPE Elizabeth of York, p.78.

The Bruton girdle later fell into the grasping hands of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s Chief Minister during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. His visitor Dr Richard Layton wrote to him on 24 August 1535: ‘I send also Our Lady’s girdle of Bruton, red silk, and Mary Magdalene’s girdle, covered with white, sent to women “travailing” which last the Empress Matilda, founder of Ferley, gave them, as saith the holy father of Ferley’ (see BL Cotton MS
Cleopatra E IV,
f.249).

Some claim that the executions of Warbeck and Warwick followed one of Parron’s prognostications. The first Privy Purse payment to Parron was on 6 February 1498: ‘To Master William Parron, an astronomer, £1’ (Bentley, p.121).

Ironically, before Parron worked for Henry VII he was employed by Edward Frank, a notorious Yorkist conspirator, between his release from the Tower in November 1487 and his re-arrest for treason two years later. Parron claimed to have warned Frank to behave himself and predicted his ‘bad end’, which was fulfilled by his execution in 1490 (Carlin, p.861).

The sixty-three-page
Liber de optimo fato nobilissimi domini Henrici Eboraci ducis ac optimorum ipsius parentum
(BL Royal MS 12 B. VI) has a prefatory letter of sympathy on the death of Prince Arthur. The initial letter on f.2 contains a small miniature of Henry VII enthroned with the royal arms in the border of the page. Another astrological work by Parron,
De astroruim ui fatali . .
. , dedicated to Henry VII, is in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Selden MS Supra 77), with a miniature of the king and his court on f.4. See Armstrong, pp.451 – 3 and Hilary Carey,
Courting Disaster: Astrology at the English Court and University
, Basingstoke & London, 1992, p.219. Astrology loomed large in Henry VII’s court: a monk at the house of Bonhommes at Edlington, Wiltshire, wrote a treatise on the portents of the marriage between Arthur and Katherine in 1501 (BL Add. MS 4,822).

Pollard,
Henry VII
, vol. 1, p.231. This was Candlemas Day. A doe deer had been sent especially for the queen’s dinner that day (PPE Elizabeth of York, p.97).

PPE Elizabeth of York, pp.96 – 7.

Her unnamed dry nurse was also paid £3 6s 8d in reward (Bentley, p.130).

It was bought from Robert Lanston at the rate of twelve pence the yard (PPE Elizabeth of York, p.94).

Henry may also have had an illegitimate son, born during his exile in Brittany. The bastard was reputedly Roland de Velville, born in 1474, who was knighted in 1497 and became Constable of Beaumaris Castle on Anglesey, off North Wales, in 1509. If he was the king’s illegitimate son, he was generously provided for. Henry VII lent him money in 1492 because he could not afford to arm and equip himself to take part in the English invasion of France (TNA E 404/86/3). His standard of living appears to have depended on royal annuities of £46 13s 4d granted in 1493 and three years later. Chamber accounts suggest he was involved in falconry while at court (Gunn, ‘Courtiers’, p.36). Roland de Velville died on 25 June 1535. See also S. B. Chrimes, ‘Sir Roland de Velville’,
Welsh History Review
, vol. 3 (1967), pp.287 – 9 and W. R. Robinson, ‘Sir Roland de Velville and the Tudor Dynasty: A Reassessment’,
Welsh History Review
, vol. 15 (1991), pp.351 – 67.

Cavendish, pp.52 – 3.

Crawford, p.156;
Antiquarian Repertory
, vol. 4, p.655.

BL Add. MS 45,131, ff.41v – 47v. There is a drawing of her funeral procession on ff.41v – 42r. See also BL Stowe MS 583 ff.27 – 33v (with further pen-and-ink drawings of the procession) and Sandford, p.470.

Chapter 19, verse 21. Fitzjames took the service because the newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry Deane, died unexpectedly on 15 February.

Antiquarian Repertory
, vol. 4, p.662. After the funeral, a ‘great dole’ of groats (fourpenny pieces) was given to every man and woman watching in the abbey, and alms provided to ‘bed-ridden folks, lazars [diseased people] blind folks and others’, and every community of Friars Observant was given five marks (£3 6s 8d ) together with twenty heraldic escutcheons used in Elizabeth’s funeral.

Wroe, p.453. His later career is unknown but he died in or after 1503 (Carlin, p.862).

R. S. Sylvester,
King Richard III
, vol. 2, pp.119 – 23.

Byrne, pp.4 – 5.

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