Henry (15 page)

What was Henry to be when his elder brother Arthur succeeded as king? Duke of York and the premier noble of England? Or, as one authority claims, archbishop of Canterbury and prince of the church?

At first sight, there seems little doubt: his father had not only created Henry duke of York, but had also given him a substantial landed endowment as such. And he was adding to this as late as 21 July 1501, when the king finally reached agreement with Lord Grey’s executors for the purchase of Codnor Castle. Six months earlier, Lady Margaret Beaufort – who was privy to the king her son’s inmost thoughts – showed herself similarly confident about Henry’s long-term future as a great landed magnate. Her tenants in the north
west, she suggested to the king, should all be made ‘retainers’ – that is, sworn followers in peace and war – to ‘my lord of York, your fair sweet son’.

‘The which,’ she added, ‘shall not after be long undone.’
8

But did the coincidence of Suffolk’s flight and Arthur’s marriage force Henry VII to rethink, perhaps even to change his mind? Was it really wise, he may have wondered, to saddle the future King Arthur with Henry, duke of York? After all, the duke would be rich in land and men; Yorkist blood flowed in his veins; he bore the magic name; he even, as was already clear,
looked
Yorkist. Why, Henry VII may have concluded, spend twenty bitter years suppressing the ancient enmity of Lancaster and York only to sow the seeds of its revival in the next generation by his own voluntary act?

All this is possible – though there is not a scrap of direct contemporary evidence that Henry VII harboured any such doubts. But there
is
the otherwise strange assertion of Henry VIII’s first, seventeenth-century biographer, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, that Henry was ‘destined to the archbishopric of Canterbury, during the life of his elder brother Prince Arthur’. Their father, Henry VII’s supposed intention was twofold: to save money and to get control of the church for the crown, on the one hand, and on the other to leave his second son scope to carve out a great career for himself in a sphere where he would complement, rather than rival, his elder brother.
9

Herbert’s statement has been repeated, more or less respectfully, by almost all subsequent writers. But what is the evidence for it? Herbert himself describes his source as ‘a credible author’, whom he cites in the first edition of 1649 by a heavily abbreviated marginal note: ‘Concil. Trid. I i’. This, it turns out, is a reference to Paolo Sarpi’s sensational, anti-papalist
Historia del Concilio Tridentino
(History of the Council of Trent), which was first published in 1619 in London and dedicated to James I and VI. An English translation appeared the following year, in which the relevant passage, in Volume 1 Chapter 1, was rendered as follows:

Herbert, it is clear, has merely glossed and elaborated Sarpi. But where did Sarpi, an Italian who was born five years after Henry’s death and never left Italy, get his information from? As he cites no reference, we cannot be sure. But we can guess.

The link, I suspect, was a fellow Italian. His name was anglicised as William Parron, and for many years he acted as Henry VII’s semi-official astrologer.

Parron operated both at court and in the marketplace. Every 24 December (to catch the Christmas market) he published a cheaply printed ‘prognostication’ or almanack for the forthcoming year; and on the ensuing 1 January he presented the king with a more esoteric manuscript treatise as a New Year’s Day gift for his personal enlightenment.
11

One of these royal gifts was entitled
Liber de optimo fato
Henrici Eboraci ducis
(‘Book of the good fortune of Henry, duke of York’). In the form that it has come down to us, it was compiled between April 1502 and February 1503. But it incorporates material which seems to have been written earlier, probably in late 1501.

This reused material, it has been pointed out, places ‘frequent emphasis on the religious qualities of … Henry’s future career’. One remark in particular stands out. ‘
Indubitanter
,’ Parron claims, ‘
devotus erit et bonus ecclesiasticus
.’ ‘Undoubtedly [Henry] will be devout and a good cleric [
ecclesiasticus
].’ There is, it is true, a slight ambiguity in
ecclesiasticus
, since it could, at a pinch, mean ‘churchman’ in the sense of ‘a supporter of the church’.
12
But ‘cleric’ is by far the most common usage.

What did Parron know that others, including Henry’s own grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, did not? Here it should be noted that Parron had form. Back in 1499 he had composed an earlier treatise for presentation to Henry VII,
De astrorum vi fatali
(‘Of the fatal power of the stars’). This was finished on 15 October. But it contains a transparent justification for the executions of Warbeck and Warwick,
which did not take place till five and six weeks later, at the end of November:

Was Parron similarly jumping the gun in 1501 with fears about Henry, duke of York’s role as a potential incendiary? And was he proposing his consecration as a churchman as a way out of the problem?

Even, curiously, the succession to Canterbury was a topical hot potato at the time. Cardinal-archbishop Morton, Henry VII’s long-serving minister and Thomas More’s patron, had died in September 1500. His nominated successor was Thomas Langton. But Langton too died within three weeks of being translated from Winchester in January 1501. Finally Henry Deane, bishop of Salisbury, was promoted to the archbishopric, and took up office in the summer of 1501.

All this meant that there had been three archbishops in six months. And was Deane, Henry VII’s ‘faithful councillor’, intended only to keep the throne of St Augustine warm until Henry had reached the canonical age for consecration?
14

It is possible. But Parron’s scheme – and Parron himself – was overtaken by events.

A
FTER THE DEPARTURE OF HIS BROTHER
and sister-in-law for Ludlow, Henry remained at court to spend Christmas with his parents at Richmond. The king was in an expansive mood: he had married his eldest son and inaugurated his new palace. Nothing was too good for his second son either, and he gave Henry
£
3.6
s
.8
d
with which ‘to play at dice’.
1

This was a huge sum (at least
£
1,000 in today’s money). No doubt Henry enjoyed himself, rolling the dice, calling the numbers and counting out his winnings and losses.

But he was to pay the price by developing a taste for heavy gambling.

Three weeks later, Henry was an important guest at another wedding. This was the marriage by proxy (that is, in the groom’s absence) of his elder sister Margaret to James IV of
Scotland. Relations between England and Scotland had come a long way since James IV’s enthusiastic support for Warbeck. The Spanish, who were allies of both countries, worked hard at reconciliation; James, mercurial as ever, had lost interest in border raiding, while Henry VII was also dreaming dreams of a greater Britain. The treaties of marriage and alliance were agreed on 24 January 1502; the following day the proxy wedding was celebrated with much ceremony at Richmond.

First there was mass in the splendid new chapel royal of the palace, after which a ‘notable sermon’ was preached by Richard Fitzjames, bishop of Rochester, in the presence of ‘the king and queen with their noble children, except the prince’. The party then processed to the queen’s great chamber for the proxy wedding, with Henry ‘duke of York, the king’s second son’ heading the list of the distinguished company.

Immediately after the ceremony Queen Elizabeth took her daughter ‘by the hand’. It was a gesture of motherly affection; it was also a recognition of the fact that Margaret, as queen of Scots, was now her equal in status. The two dined at the same table, eating from the same dishes and both having covered cups as a mark of their sovereign status.
2

But there was as yet no question of sending Margaret to Scotland. She was deemed to be too young – and too underdeveloped for her age – for the reality of marriage with a bridegroom who was more than double her age, and notoriously fond of the ladies. Instead the treaties provided for a
year-and-a-half delay, specifying that she should be handed over to her husband-to-be no later than 1 September 1503.
3

Meanwhile Henry’s brother and new sister-in-law had arrived at the great marcher castle of Ludlow. There they were intended to gain experience in the business of government and in the equally serious business of living with each other and getting a family. Arthur apparently took to his marital duties with gusto. One of his most intimate body servants, William Thomas, later testified: ‘[I] made the said prince ready to bed and with other conducted him clad in his night-gown unto the princess’s bed-chamber door often and sundry times whereinto he entered and there continued all night.’

Indeed, Arthur’s enthusiasm for sex alarmed some of his household. Maurice St John told an unknown informant that ‘Arthur, after he had lain with the Lady Catherine, at Shrove-tide after his marriage, began to decay … which St John said was because he lay with the Lady Catherine’.
4

Shrove (Pancake) Tuesday fell on 8 February in 1502; on Saturday, 2 April, Arthur was dead.

The information reached the court three days later, on the night of the fourth. The council decided to break the terrible news to the king through his father confessor. Henry VII’s first thought was to send for Elizabeth of York, so they could ‘take the painful sorrows together’. The queen comforted her grief-stricken husband ‘with full great and constant comfort
able words’, before returning to her own apartments and breaking down in turn.

Both parents probably felt guilt as well as grief: Henry for inducting his beloved son too early into life as a married man; Elizabeth of York for having seen so very little of him since the moment she had parted from him as a baby at Farnham.

Now she would never see him again – not even the body, for Arthur, married in the heart of the kingdom at St Paul’s, was buried on its fringes in a plague-ridden Worcester.

No one can read the account of the reaction of Arthur’s parents to his death and doubt for a moment the reality of their feelings. But, even as they plumbed the depths, the dynastic imperative was not forgotten. ‘God,’ Elizabeth of York reminded her husband, ‘had lent them yet a fair goodly prince; two fair princesses; and that ever God is where he was.’
5

And that ‘fair goodly prince’, Henry, was now heir.

Or rather, he was heir providing Catherine was not carrying Arthur’s child. Catherine, her parents learned later, was ‘suffering’ – from what is unclear. It could have been grief, or physical illness, or depression brought on by the weather of that wretched marcher spring. Or it could have been a symptom of pregnancy.

Best to take no risks. Catherine was brought back from Ludlow to London by easy stages in a black velvet horse-
litter provided by the queen. By late May she had reached Croydon, where Elizabeth of York sent one of the pages of her chamber to her. We do not know the nature of his message. But one thing at least was now clear: Catherine was
not
pregnant; Henry was indeed the heir. And on 22 June, as ‘Henry, prince of Wales’, he was given the office of keeper and chief justice of Galtres Forest, where a few years before his tutor, John Skelton, had been invested – yet again – with the garland of laurel by the ladies of the household of Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey.

But was Henry enough? As Arthur’s wholly unlooked-for death had shown, it was dangerous to leave the future of the Tudor dynasty hanging by a single life – even of a boy as healthy as Henry. It was also unnecessary. For, as Elizabeth of York had reminded her husband at the climax of their grief, ‘we [are] both young enough’ to have more children.

The couple were prompt to act, and Elizabeth became pregnant within a couple of months of Arthur’s death. On the occasion of her most recent pregnancy, when she had carried her short-lived son Edmund, there had been fears for her life. They were renewed this time. Her prayers on the feast of the conception of the Blessed Virgin, when she made offerings on both the eve of the feast and the feast day itself, 8 December, were likely to have been especially fervent. On the thirteenth, she rewarded a monk who brought ‘Our Lady [’s] girdle to the queen’.
6
This was the relic, kept at
Westminster Abbey, ‘which women with child were wont to girdle with’ to help them through the travails of pregnancy.
7

Her confinement was due to take place in the Tower. The queen went there to inspect the arrangements, which featured ‘a rich bed’ made for the occasion and trimmed with red and white roses and clouds. The embroiderers had laboured at it seven weeks, often working by candlelight to get it finished in time. She then travelled by boat to Richmond for the Christmas festivities. On Christmas Day she heard a new setting of a carol by William Cornish, the leading composer of the chapel royal; and on New Year’s Day she gave and received the accustomed gifts, including one from Lady Margaret Beaufort.
8

One of the more brazen gifts presented at court that day came from the Italian William Parron, Henry VII’s semiofficial astrologer.

This was the worked-up version of his
Liber de optimo fato
Henrici Eboraci ducis
. It had been written, Parron complains, against the clock, and indeed it shows signs of haste and last-minute revision. The first section, which pointed to an ecclesiastical career for Henry, remained. But new sections offered an astrological explanation for Arthur’s death, declared that Henry would enjoy a triumphant reign and father many sons, and finally predicted that his mother, Elizabeth of York, would live until she was eighty.

Parron was so proud of his work that he had a second copy made, complete with a new dedication to ‘Prince Henry’ and a
careful explanation for the boy of the illustrated frontispiece, which showed: ‘First a picture of the sky at the creation of the world with the signs and planets in their houses and positions following the opinion of prophets, astrologers and theologians …’
9
It was only the second work to be dedicated to Henry, and one imagines that he devoured it eagerly.

More’s the pity.

A month after Parron’s confident prophecy, Elizabeth of York ‘took to her chamber’ in the Tower on 26 January. Only days later, on the night of 2 February, the feast of the purification of the Blessed Virgin, to whom she had prayed so fervently, ‘the queen travailed of a child suddenly’. The queen’s midwife, Alice Massy, who seems to have assisted at the births of all her children, beginning with Prince Arthur and including Henry himself, successfully handled the emergency and delivered a baby girl.
10
She was christened Catherine, after her aunt, the wife of Lord William Courtenay, and perhaps after Catherine of Aragon also. Ten days later, on 12 February, four yards of flannel were bought for the baby.
11

Elizabeth was frequently ill after labour. But this time her condition deteriorated alarmingly, and the king sent James Nattrass post-haste to fetch a physician, Dr Halesworth, from Kent. He travelled day and night.
12
But neither Halesworth, if he arrived in time, nor the queen’s ‘dry nurse’ could save her, and on the morning of Saturday, 11 February 1503, ‘died that most gracious and virtuous princess the queen’.
13

It was her thirty-seventh birthday. And Henry, her surviving son, was not yet twelve.

The funeral took place on 23 February, when the funeral sermon was preached, once again, by Fitzjames, bishop of Rochester. He took his text from the Book of Job: ‘Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends, for the hand of God hath touched me.’ ‘He spake these words,’ the reporting herald writes, ‘in the name of England.’
14

England was indeed mourning a popular and beloved queen. But there was more: death had walked abroad in the land. Prince Arthur had died, and then the queen, and while the queen was still lying in state in the Tower, Henry Deane, the newly appointed archbishop of Canterbury, died too.

The unspoken questions in the Abbey must have been: ‘Who next?’ and ‘What next?’

Henry was not present at Fitzjames’s sermon. Nor had he walked, a white-faced boy, among the throngs of black-robed mourners in his mother’s funeral procession. For at that time royalty did not see death, even of its nearest and dearest.

But did Henry feel it?

We know nothing of his reaction to Arthur’s death. But it is unlikely to have been profound, as the two brothers had never been close enough physically to become close emotionally. His mother’s death was a different matter. News of ‘the death of my dearest mother’, Henry wrote some years later
to Erasmus, had been ‘hateful intelligence’. This seems clear enough. But the letter was in Latin, in reply to one in the same language from Erasmus. And, as was usual with such Latin compositions (at least in hands less suavely expert than those of Erasmus), Henry had not much to say and said it very well.
15

Still, I am inclined to take this phrase at least at face value. Henry had been close to his mother as a child. She had taught him to read, supervised his upbringing and come to the rescue when danger threatened. More recently, after her unusually long absence on progress to Wales in the late summer and autumn of 1502, Henry had sent a messenger to her on her return.

We can guess what he felt about her permanent absence.

Perhaps once again it was Henry’s friend Thomas More, writing this time in English, who came nearest to expressing Henry’s real feelings. Soon after the event, More wrote
A Rueful Lamentation of the Death of Queen Elizabeth
. It takes the conventional form of ‘a dramatic soliloquy by the dead queen, bidding farewell to all her earthly belongings’ – her children, her palaces, everything. But if the form is conventional, the tone is not. Instead, More offers a warmly sympathetic and sharply observed portrait of a woman whom he had known well and to whom he was deeply attached.
16

He also gives vent to his (and no doubt Henry’s) indignation at Parron’s bungled prophecy:

But the central verse of the
Lamentation
deals with the queen’s feelings about her ‘own dear spouse’. She bids farewell to

And begs her husband to bestow all his love on their children: