Henry (13 page)

‘C
HOOSE A WIFE FOR YOURSELF
, and prize her always and uniquely,’ Skelton had solemnly enjoined the little Henry. Actually, royal children rarely had much choice in the matter. Serious marriage negotiations for Henry’s elder brother Arthur had begun when the lad was aged three; his sister Margaret had been offered to James IV of Scotland at the age of seven; now, it seemed, it was the turn of Henry and his little sister Mary.

The occasion was a one-day summit conference held at St Peter’s church outside the walls of Calais on 9 June 1500. Henry’s parents had first travelled to Calais a month earlier on 8 May, in a simple attempt to avoid an outbreak of epidemic disease which was playing havoc in London and the vicinity.
1
Contemporaries called the disease the ‘sweating
sickness’, after its principal symptom. It seems to have been a virulent form of influenza, with a mortality rate that matched that of the plague itself.
2
Despite its inauspicious beginnings, the royal visit to Calais soon blossomed into a considerable diplomatic event, which culminated in the summit conference between Henry and the Archduke Philip, ruler of the adjacent Netherlands and son of Maximilian.

For the meeting, which lasted only a few hours, the king transformed the interior of St Peter’s church into a palace from the Arabian Nights. Chambers were formed out of richly figured tapestry, and the floor was strewn with roses and lavender. The banquet included seven horseloads of cherries and a holocaust of kids (young goats).

The aim was to repair the damage done to Anglo– Burgundian relations by Habsburg support for the Yorkist cause. All seemed to go well. Philip, who had always been less infatuated with Warbeck than his father Maximilian or his aunt, the Dowager Duchess Margaret of York, acknowledged Henry VII as his ‘patron, father and protector’. And, to cement their good relationship, the two rulers discussed a double marriage alliance: between Henry, duke of York and Philip’s daughter Eleanor, and between Henry’s four-year-old sister Mary and Philip’s infant son Charles.
3

It might even be that his father let Henry know something of these plans. In late July, six weeks after Henry’s parents had returned from Calais, the king despatched Richard Weston, one of his most intimate body servants, to ride to
‘my lord of York’. Was the king, following the death of Henry’s short-lived brother Edmund, who had died during his parents’ absence in Calais, anxious about the wellbeing of his second son?
4
Or was he informing him of the wealthy bride that awaited him in the Netherlands?

At any rate, a month later the king sent the young duke a gift of
£
2, again by Weston’s hands. And it was Weston too who gave a reward of 10 shillings to the servant Henry sent to court to thank his father for his present.
5

But the marriages of Henry and Mary were far from the mind of the special Spanish envoy, Gutierre Gomez de Fuensalida, as he spurred his horse from Paris to the Channel. Word of the Anglo–Burgundian summit had quickly spread on the diplomatic grapevine, and Fuensalida was desperate to reach Calais to find out what was afoot.

Fuensalida, like his masters Ferdinand and Isabella, had heard worrying rumours. The real purpose of the Calais meeting, everybody in France told him, was to arrange
another
Tudor–Habsburg marriage: between Henry’s elder brother Arthur, prince of Wales, and Philip’s sister, the Archduchess Margaret.
6
And that, of course, would have meant breaking off the marriage which had already been contracted between Arthur and Catherine of Aragon, Ferdinand and Isabella’s youngest daughter.

In fact, Fuensalida’s worries were unnecessary. Henry VII, who was well aware of Spanish anxieties, might tease Spain’s
resident ambassador in London, De Puebla, with a deliberatively vague account of the Calais meeting with Philip. ‘It had,’ he claimed airily, ‘no other object than to show to the world their paternal and filial love, and to give something to guess at to their evil-wishers.’
7

But (as De Puebla well knew) Henry VII’s commitment to the Spanish match for his eldest son and heir was absolute.

Ferdinand, king of Aragon, and Isabella, queen regnant of Castile, had unified Spain by their marriage and carried it to the front rank of European powers by their prowess in diplomacy and war. Henry VII, who had achieved something similar in England – though on a much smaller scale – with his victory over Richard III and marriage to Elizabeth of York, had first put out feelers to the pair in 1487, only two years after Bosworth. The proposal took the usual form for the day, of an alliance to be cemented by a marriage – between his one-year-old son Arthur and Ferdinand and Isabella’s two-year-old daughter Catherine. Ferdinand and Isabella, still in the throes of the reconquest of the Islamic south of Spain and eager for allies against France, had responded favourably, and Henry VII sent an experienced embassy to Spain to conclude matters.

De Puebla was involved from the very beginning. He had been sent as ambassador to England in response to Henry VII’s original overtures, and had helped negotiate the treaty of Medina del Campo in 1489, which first committed the parties to the marriage. Six years later he returned to England as resident ambassador and brought England and
Spain, who had drifted apart in the interim, together once more to renew the treaty.

Thereafter, De Puebla had been indefatigable in bringing it to fruition. He sweated blood in line-by-line negotiations about the terms – especially the financial terms – sometimes with Henry VII’s councillors, often with the king himself. He performed with a rather ridiculous enthusiasm in the proxy weddings by which he sought to make the marriage contract unbreakable by even the most ingenious canon lawyer. And he spilled real blood too, when under his steady pressure Henry VII decided to smooth the way to Catherine’s arrival in England by executing the two most obvious threats to the Tudor throne: the pretender, Perkin Warbeck, who had been gaoled in the Tower since his surrender in October 1497, and the earl of Warwick, son of the duke of Clarence, who for the last sixteen years had been imprisoned by both Richard III and Henry VII.

The two birds were killed with one stone. Warbeck and Warwick were accused of plotting a joint escape from the Tower, and were tried and condemned in November 1499. Warbeck was hanged on 23 November and Warwick beheaded on the twenty-eighth.

In January 1500, De Puebla wrote exultantly home: following the executions, he crowed, ‘there does not remain a drop of doubtful Royal blood; the only Royal blood being the true blood of the king, the queen, and, above all, of the prince of Wales’.
8
Henry does not even get a look-in.

* * *

But still there were delays – this time on De Puebla’s own side. Ferdinand and Isabella were distracted by a major Islamic uprising, which took several months to put down. Still worse, there was a rebellion in Isabella’s own heart: having seen so many of her children and grandchildren die, sacrificed in similar dynastic marriages, she was understandably reluctant to let go of her last unmarried daughter.

But by the late spring of 1501 the excuses had run out. On 21 May Catherine made her final farewells to her parents in Granada and began her journey to her new kingdom. First she had to cross the torrid plains and mountains of Spain, then to brave the storms and treacherous currents of the Bay of Biscay and the Channel. It was August before she arrived at the coast. There was another delay while she went on pilgrimage to the shrine of Santiago de Compostella, and it was not till the seventeenth that she set sail. Three weeks later she was back in Spain, driven ashore by terrifying storms. In desperation, Henry VII sent one of his best captains to escort her to England. This time it was the Channel which nearly shipwrecked the fleet. It was supposed to land at Southampton; instead, battered and storm-tossed, it put in at Plymouth, the first available major harbour, 150 miles to the west.

‘This day [2 October]’, Lady Margaret Beaufort noted in the calendar of her book of hours, ‘my lady princess landed.’
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It took Catherine another month, travelling at most ten or twelve miles a day and with frequent halts, to reach the
environs of London. Everything about the journey – what route she should take, where she should stay, what she should travel in and who should meet and accompany her – had been worked out in advance in the minutest detail. But by the time she reached Dogmersfield near Fleet in Hampshire, Henry VII could contain his impatience no longer. Who was the woman to whom he had pledged the hope of his dynasty? What did she look like? He would interrupt Catherine’s carefully prepared itinerary and find out with his son Arthur.

Catherine sent word that the meeting was impossible, since Spanish custom and her father’s commands meant that she must not show herself to Arthur or his family till her wedding morn. Henry VII, invoking his authority as king and paterfamilias, overruled her, and threaten to confront her in bed if necessary.

Catherine yielded with good grace. First she met the king alone, and then together with the prince. As usual, a recording herald was present. But he says nothing about what either party thought of the other.

A week later, on Friday, 12 November, Catherine met Henry, who escorted her throughout her grand
entrée
into the city of London. It was the first encounter of two people who between them would change history.

Once again, a herald was present; once again he was silent about their thoughts.

But another observer used the decent obscurity of Latin to express himself very freely. This was Thomas More, whose genius for friendship was already ripening his acquaintance with Henry into something deeper. ‘Catherine,’ he wrote to another friend, the schoolmaster John Holt, ‘lately made her
entrée
into London amid a tremendous ovation; never, to my knowledge, has there been such a reception.’ ‘But,’ More exclaims, ‘the Spanish escort – good heavens! – what a sight! If you had seen it, I am afraid you would have burst with laughter; they were so ludicrous. Except for three, or at the most four, of them, they were just too much to look at: hunchback, undersized, barefoot Pygmies from Ethiopia. If you had been there, you would have thought they were refugees from hell.’

Then, suddenly, More’s mood changes as he contemplates Catherine herself: ‘Ah, but the lady!’ he sighs, ‘take my word for it, she thrilled the hearts of everyone: she possesses all those qualities that make for beauty in a very charming young girl. Everywhere she receives the highest of praises; but even that is inadequate.’
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More’s judgment of Catherine, at least, never wavered.

The wedding was held two days later, on Sunday, 14 November in old St Paul’s Cathedral. Isabella had already remonstrated with Henry VII about the excessive scale of the celebrations. In vain. For the king was determined to extract the maximum advantage from the marriage alliance between the Tudors and the most powerful dynasty in Europe.

And that required, in the first place, that as many people as possible should be able to see the ceremony. Hence the choice of St Paul’s, which was the largest building in what was by far England’s biggest and most populous city. And hence too the decision to take a leaf out of
The Ryalle Book
and copy the arrangements for the christenings of Henry and his siblings. As for these, a tall, many-tiered circular platform was built in the centre of the nave, on which the marriage itself would take place. But how to get the couple there, through the crowded church? The solution was to build a walkway at head-height the entire 450-foot length of the nave: from the west doors to the marriage platform, and again from the marriage platform to the steps of the choir screen.

This idea was inspired: the ceremony now became a series of sweeping processional movements, each accompanied by carefully cued musicians placed high up in the vaults to exploit the vast reverberations of the building.

The star of the processions was of course the bride, Catherine of Aragon. But accompanying her every move was Henry. He escorted her on her entry into the church: from the bishop’s palace, where she had been staying, across St Paul’s churchyard, through the west doors and along the elevated walkway to the wedding platform. Then, after the wedding, he led the other dignitaries to hear mass with the bridal couple in the choir. Finally, after the mass, as Arthur went privately to the bishop’s palace to greet Catherine at the threshold of the bridal chamber, Henry walked back with her
along the whole length of the walkway, from the altar steps to the west doors, out into the churchyard and into the palace.

There were cheers, fanfares and a sea of ten thousand upturned faces, all looking, it must have seemed, at him.

Henry’s role as escort ceased only at the door of the bridal chamber. Beyond was not a fit place for a ten-year-old boy. But no one, curiously, was to be more concerned about what happened within. Or, depending on whom you believe, did
not
happen. The following morning Arthur boasted that it had been hot work spending the night in Spain. This does not leave much to the imagination. Catherine, on the other hand, was to swear on her immortal soul that she remained as much a virgin as when she left her mother’s womb.