A Journey Through Tudor England (22 page)

‘He had never felt so much joy in his life as when he beheld the sweet face of his bride.’

I
n the eleventh century, a number of Norman castles were erected in the Welsh Marches to control the borderlands of the still fragile kingdom of England. Ludlow Castle was one of them, and parts of the original castle survive. At the turn of the fourteenth century, Peter de Geneville and Roger Mortimer — who helped depose Edward II in 1326 — transformed the castle into an outstanding palace-fortress. In 1461, Ludlow Castle became Crown property and, soon after, Edward IV sent his son Edward to be brought up here. Henry VII did likewise in 1492 with his heir apparent, Arthur, and it was in this rugged fortress on a hilltop above the River Teme that history was made, and the course of the Tudors decided.

At the centre of Ludlow, a pretty town with many a Tudor timber-framed building, the castle remains an impressive sight. Although ruined and uninhabitable, its walls are well preserved, and it is a strangely evocative place to explore. It has a sense of
significance and serenity, perhaps partly because it is the place where Arthur, Prince of Wales, eldest son of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, died in 1502.

Arthur was born on 19 September 1486, and christened at Winchester Cathedral with a name that evoked the glory days of Camelot. As the son of a king, his titles and responsibilities came quickly. In November 1489, when he had just turned three, he was created a Knight of the Bath, Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester; a year later, he was made warden over the Scottish Marches, and in 1492, while his father was in France, Arthur nominally became Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England and the King’s lieutenant.

He was already betrothed. At the age of two, his father had promised him in marriage to Katherine of Aragon, the daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. It was quite a coup for Henry VII, representing a diplomatic vote of confidence for the brand new Tudor dynasty.

In the interim years, between engagement and marriage, Arthur was in intensive training to become king. In 1492, at the age of six, he arrived at Ludlow Castle to learn his craft. He received an excellent education: by the time he married, the studious Arthur was particularly accomplished at Latin.

His wedding to Katherine took place on Sunday 14 November 1501 in sumptuous style at St Paul’s Cathedral. Arthur must have been astonished to see his bride as she processed towards him in a white silk veil and a stunning white satin dress that billowed out under the waist in a bell-shape, caused by the farthingale (hooped skirt) she worn beneath her dress, as the fashion was entirely new to English onlookers. Certainly, a fortnight later, Arthur would write to Katherine’s parents that he ‘had never felt so much joy in his life as when he beheld the sweet face of his bride. No woman in the world could be more agreeable to him.’ He promised to be a ‘true and loving husband’ to her. He was just fifteen.

Just how loving would become a question that would rock Christendom. Katherine would later swear, when her marriage to Arthur’s brother, Henry, was contested, that her first marriage had never been consummated, but an English witness maintained that the morning after the wedding, Prince Arthur swaggered, with a teenage boy’s typical braggadocio: ‘I have this night been in the midst of Spain.’

In late December, the couple moved back to Ludlow Castle. They lodged in the Solar Wing, to the east of the Great Hall, living on the top floor of the three-storey building. The wooden floors have long crumbled away but you can see where they would have been, and spot the fireplace that Arthur and Katherine would have sat before in the chill of winter, along with the arched windows that gave them a magnificent view over the town. The Great Chamber, on the other side of the Great Hall, retains its hooded fireplace with carved heads that, though now eroding away, must have been a fine decorative feature when Arthur and his teenage bride lived in the castle. They would have also worshipped in the Norman chapel of St Mary Magdalene: its circular nave, with carved arches of alternate designs, remains a beautiful piece of architecture. Did they climb the steep spiral stairs of the Great Tower or explore the dark nooks and crannies of the castle? One dark corner they must have visited is the Garderobe Tower (lavatories): with its unglazed windows, it must have been perilously cold in the midst of January.

Their stay was brief, for Tudor lives were never long without tragedy. Less than five months after the wedding, on Easter Day, Arthur fell sick. Within a week, he was dead. The cause of his death is unknown: it was perhaps pneumonia, the deadly sweating sickness that scourged England in the early sixteenth century, or consumption (pulmonary tuberculosis). Arthur’s body was disembowelled, embalmed and filled with spices, and laid out in his
chamber at Ludlow for three weeks before being buried at Worcester Cathedral.

The death of this young lad was extraordinarily significant in the course of history, as it made his younger brother, Henry, heir to the English throne.

It was not the last time the Tudors were to use Ludlow Castle: Mary I spent three winters here between 1525 and 1528 as the head of the Council of the Marches, and the castle’s role as the council’s home — and therefore effectively the capital of Wales — meant that there was much building here during the 1550s and 1580s. The current shop is in what used to be the porter’s lodge, built in 1552; the Judges’ Lodgings were built by Sir Henry Sidney in 1581 (his arms can be seen on the outside); and the Tudor Lodgings give away their date of construction by the red-brick, star-shaped chimneys on their roof, similar to ones at Thornbury and Framlingham castles.

Next to Ludlow Castle is Castle Lodge, probably constructed in the late fifteenth century. Although much of the authenticity of the interiors is uncertain, it is worth visiting. It has extraordinary linenfold panelling, intricately carved fireplaces (with the Prince of Wales’s heraldic badge of three white feathers bound by a gold coronet) and a plasterwork ceiling of fleurs-de-lis, rams and Tudor roses, said to date from the sixteenth century. Perhaps because it dearly needs some care and restoration, there is something ineffably sad about it.

‘Exposed to all the winds and injuries of heaven …’

T
he forbidding ruined Tutbury Castle, high on a windswept hill at Tutbury in Staffordshire, is a suitably dramatic place to remember the tragic tale of Mary, Queen of Scots. She was confined here most miserably during her eighteen years of imprisonment in England, before her execution in 1587. If you’re lucky, you might also catch the curator, Lesley Smith, who has leased the castle from the Crown (as the Earl of Shrewsbury did in Mary’s day), magnificently portraying the Queen in historic dress.

The story of Mary Stewart (Mary would later adopt the French spelling ‘Stuart’), who became Queen of the Scots only six days after her birth on 8 December 1542, is the stuff of romantic novels. Scottish born, she moved to France at the age of six after her engagement to the Dauphin, later Francis II, and became almost wholly French including, crucially, converting to Roman Catholicism. She ruled next to her husband as Queen of France from April 1558 until his premature death just eighteen months later. The
young widowed Queen returned to Scotland, already famous for her unusual beauty, her great height (she was six feet tall) and her gregarious and charismatic demeanour. Unsurprisingly, many men fell for her.

She made a rather foolish choice of second husband, marrying Henry, Lord Darnley in July 1561. It was a troublesome union from the start, and Mary soon became involved in a close liaison with her secretary, David Riccio. Darnley was suspicious enough of Riccio’s influence on Mary to arrange to have him murdered in her presence. Less than a year later, in 1567, Darnley himself was also assassinated. Within three months, Mary married the Earl of Bothwell, the prime suspect for Darnley’s murder. As a result, the Scottish nobles fomented a rebellion, and Mary was imprisoned at Lochleven Castle. On the evidence of the ‘Casket Letters’ (which historians now mostly believe to have been damning forged pages inserted into genuine letters), Mary was linked to her former husband’s murder. Her illegitimate half-brother, the Earl of Moray, secured her abdication in favour of her one-year-old son, James VI, and, escaping her prison in May 1568, Mary fled to England.

It was out of the frying pan and into the fire. Mary had not endeared herself to Elizabeth in her claims for the English throne (she had argued that, as an illegitimate Protestant, Elizabeth I had no right to reign), and Elizabeth’s councillors feared that Mary would become the focus of discontent for English Catholics. Unable to send her back to Scotland, unwilling to send her to France, Elizabeth decided that Mary should be imprisoned — with all the luxury befitting her status as a queen. The Earl of Shrewsbury, husband of Bess of Hardwick [see H
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], was soon made her custodian.

In early 1568, Mary was moved to the hunting lodge within the grounds of Tutbury. Chosen mainly for its secure fortifications and its location far from northern Catholics and from London, it was
dark, dank, dismal and dilapidated. In a letter to the French ambassador, Mary described it as: ‘exposed to all the winds and injuries of heaven … situated so low … that the sun can never shine upon it … nor any fresh air come into it … In short the greater part of it is rather like a dungeon for base and abject criminals.’ The timber-framed lodge is no longer standing, but its position can be clearly seen. Before long, Mary was complaining of rheumatism, fever and of the bitter cold, and was moved elsewhere in April 1568.

Unfortunately, she was returned to the loathed Tutbury after an uprising by northern Catholic nobles in late 1569. By May, she was petitioning again to move, protesting that the drains at Tutbury smelt dreadful. She stayed at Chatsworth and Sheffield, before again being transferred back to Tutbury for the spring and summer of 1571.

After years of being moved from one prison to another, and a couple of botched plots to rescue her, it was decided in 1584 that she would be removed from the care of Shrewsbury, who, it was thought, had grown slightly too fond of the beautiful Queen. Like many others, he was alleged to have fallen prey to what the Queen’s servant, Nicholas White, described as Mary’s ‘alluring grace, pretty Scottish accent and searching wit’. Furthermore, Shrewsbury had been almost bankrupted by the costs of housing the Scottish Queen.

Under the custody of Sir Amias Paulet, in January 1585 Mary was confined again to the damp and smelly Tutbury. It was only at the end of 1585, when the dung heaps of Tutbury had become so rank and noxious that they were unsanitary, that Paulet allowed Mary to relocate to Chartley Castle in Staffordshire. Alas, Mary’s health had already declined as a result of the conditions at Tutbury and when she arrived at Chartley, she was bedridden for two months.

Elizabeth’s councillors, especially William Cecil, Lord Burghley had long fretted about the constant threat that Mary’s very existence
posed to England. In 1586, Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, found a way to catch Mary red-handed. Mary had devised a system of smuggling letters out of the castle in small, watertight containers placed into beer barrels. The local brewer (who had also supplied Mary at Tutbury) received the letters and sent them on. But he was a double agent working for Walsingham, passing the letters to a code-breaker, who deciphered and copied them before dispatching them, so that Mary suspected nothing. The letters confirmed Walsingham’s worst fears: Anthony Babington, an English Catholic, was weaving an elaborate plot involving a Catholic rebellion aided by the Spanish to assassinate Elizabeth and rescue Mary, the so-called Babington Plot.