Henry (8 page)

Warbeck is also why Henry VII decided to do more than simply slip Henry into Richard of Shrewsbury’s shoes. Richard of Shrewsbury’s accumulation of titles, offices and honours was impressive. But it had also been random and piecemeal. Henry VII would go one better:
his
second son would be inducted into his inheritance in a single, coherent programme of ceremony. There is evidence as well of unusually thorough preparation. Who was responsible for the detail we do not know. But there is no doubt that the inspiration came directly from the king. He kept a watchful eye
throughout, and when anything threatened to go wrong, intervened swiftly and decisively himself.

He had to. For he was not only seeking to outdo the Yorkist court, he was also competing directly with the Burgundian. In the last half-century or so, the Burgundian court had reinvented court ceremony and chivalric display as political weapons. Now, with the Burgundian support for Warbeck, these weapons had been turned against Henry VII. Time after time in the summer of 1494, as Maximilian had given Warbeck an honoured place at an
entrée
or an oath-taking ceremony, he had increased Warbeck’s standing in the eyes of Europe and diminished Henry Tudor’s.

It was now time to strike back, and Henry’s creation as duke of York provided the means.

The decision had been taken in the late summer. At that point the royal household split into two: part remained with the king at Woodstock; part joined Henry at Eltham.
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This sort of division frequently happened under Henry VII. The king could not, of course, be in more than one place at a time. But his household could be. And that was the next best thing. For the household did more than look after the king’s domestic arrangements and royal ceremony. It was also a sort of ministry of all the talents, and the department of everything else. This meant that it was fast, responsive and able to tackle the king’s principal concern of the moment – whatever and wherever it might be.

And in the autumn of 1494, that meant Henry’s creation as duke of York.

The household with the king at Woodstock was in overall charge. It was there, for instance, that ‘letters missives’ and ‘writs’ were directed to those who had been chosen ‘to give their attendance upon our dearest second son the Lord Henry for to take with and under him the noble order of knight of the Bath’. On 2 October the writs were forwarded in a batch to Robert Lytton, the under-treasurer of the exchequer and himself one of those nominated, together with a covering letter under the ‘signet’, the smallest and most personal of the royal seals. This instructed Lytton to ‘send [the writs] forth in the haste ye goodly may’ to the addressees. But first he was to keep a formal record of the writs ‘for our interest in case any of them do default in that behalf’.
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The king’s ‘interest’ lay in the fines that would be due from any of those nominated who refused to take up the order of knighthood at the king’s command. At first, this sounds like a typical piece of money-grubbing by the notoriously tight-fisted Henry VII. But, most likely, his intention was to secure not the largest amount in fines, but the best possible turnout for his son. And he succeeded: twenty-two of those chosen answered the summons; the remainder ‘were pardoned or at their fines’. The number and quality of the knights attracted attention, as was also intended, and Sir John Paston’s London agent sent him a full list, headed by ‘My Lord Harry, duke of York’.
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* * *

There is no such documentation for the activities of the household at Eltham. But it seems clear that it had two principal tasks. The first was to turn Eltham from a staging-post for the royal nursery into the seat of a new royal dukedom. The second was to prepare Henry himself for his forthcoming creation. And there was plenty to do. After all, it was little more than a year since he had been weaned. Now he had to ride, to walk, to bow, and to stand still; to memorize and repeat a strange oath; to wear robes, coronet and sword; and, most difficult of all perhaps, to remain awake through days of interminable ceremony.

And he had to be confident enough to do all this in public, under the relentless scrutiny of thousands of pairs of eyes. Henry’s every move would be watched by the city chroniclers, the recording heralds, the man in the street and – no one quite knew where or who or how many – Warbeck’s adherents.

The ceremonies had been timed to coincide with the great feast of All Saints on 1 November. This was one of the four crown-wearing days at court, when royal ceremony was at its most splendid and the court at its fullest. It would be all the fuller for Henry.

On 10 October, Henry’s father, mother and grandmother left Woodstock and began a slow and stately return to the capital. They took a week, with halts of a day or two at Notley Abbey near Thame, High Wycombe and Windsor. On the seventeenth, they reached Henry VII’s favourite residence at Sheen. Here they stayed for another ten days before
leaving by boat early in the morning of the twenty-seventh, arriving at Westminster in time for dinner.

Forty-eight hours later, on the twenty-ninth, the king sent formally to summons his second son from Eltham. Henry’s initiation into public life had begun.
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He began by making his formal
entrée
into London. The day for this had also been chosen to coincide with an occasion of major pageantry in the civic calendar, since on 29 October each year the newly elected lord mayor of London went in state to Westminster to be sworn in before the barons of the exchequer. The swearing-in took place in the morning. This left the ‘mayor, the aldermen and all the crafts in their liveries’ plenty of time to return to the City and get themselves in place to welcome Henry.

He arrived at 3 o’clock. He was accompanied by many ‘great estates’ or high-ranking noblemen, while the city in turn received him ‘with great honour [and] triumph’.

One would expect no less, since the City then, like the City now, knew how to put on a show. But, case-hardened to spectacle though he was, the author of the
Great Chronicle of
London
was impressed. It was not the pageantry that caught his eye, however, despite the many attendant ‘lords and gentlemen’. It was Henry.

As the chronicler noted with surprise, Henry rode through the City ‘sitting alone upon a courser’. Henry was always to be an excellent horseman, and his royal studs played an important part in improving the quality of English
horseflesh. But in this first public display he excelled himself. For the boy riding by himself on the great warhorse, through narrow, potholed streets and between cheering crowds was not ‘four years or thereabouts’, as the chronicler thought. He was scarcely three years and four months old.
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Henry continued his solo display by riding along Fleet Street, through Temple Bar, the gateway which marked the limit of the City boundaries, into The Strand and King Street before crossing the large open space of New Palace Yard to reach Westminster. It was here, in this supreme theatre of royal ceremony, that his brother Arthur had been created prince of Wales and his sister Margaret christened. Now it was Henry’s turn.

First came his introduction to the ceremonies of the court. At dinner on 30 October Henry, together with the most important of those who were to be knighted with him, performed the honorific services for the king at table. One ‘took the assay’ or tasted the king’s food; a second carried his soup; then, when the meal was done and the king was ready to wash his hands, a third bore the water and a fourth the basin. Finally, Henry gave his father the towel on which to dry himself.

By a happy coincidence, this was both the most honourable and the lightest task. Even so, he must have practised hard during the preceding weeks at Eltham: to hold the elaborately folded linen on his arm, to bow, to
proffer it, to receive it again, to back away from the royal presence – and to do it all in the right order and with due decorum.

This moment in the king’s chamber at Westminster was, of course, only the start of Henry’s training in protocol. But he was a fast learner, and soon knew the rules as well as any gentleman usher. On the other hand – unlike many princes – he never became their victim.

Etiquette, he thought, existed for him; not he for etiquette.

As the short, early-winter day drew to an end and night fell, it was time for the rituals proper of Henry’s knighthood to begin. First came the eponymous ceremony of the bath. Twenty-three baths, one for each postulant knight, together with their adjacent beds, had been set up in and around the Parliament Chamber. Henry was undressed and placed in his bath, which consisted of a barrel-like wooden tub, lined and draped with fine linen. Then the earl of Oxford as lord great chamberlain ‘read the advertisement’ or formal admonition of knighthood to him: be strong in the faith of Holy Church; protect all widows and oppressed maidens; and, ‘above all earthly things love the king thy sovereign lord and his right defend unto thy power’.

When Oxford had finished reading the solemn text, Henry’s father dipped his hand in the water, made a sign of the cross on his son’s shoulder and kissed it. It was a second, and perhaps higher baptism.

The same ritual was repeated with the other postulant knights. Meanwhile, Henry had been lifted from his bath into his bed and there dried. Then he was dressed in a rough hermit’s gown, and accompanied by his twenty-two companions in similar attire, led in procession to St Stephen’s Chapel on the east or river side of the palace. There, amidst its marble columns, gilded carving and superbly painted walls, Henry and the rest kept vigil till the small hours, before confessing, receiving absolution and hearing mass. They then returned to their beds and slept till daybreak.

When Henry was roused, he found Oxford, two earls and the lord treasurer by his bed. They proffered him his clothes and helped him dress, as they did with his companions. The knights-to-be then made their way through the private passages on the east side of the palace to New Palace Yard.

There the postulants, headed as always by Henry, took horse and rode across the yard into Westminster Hall. The hall still stands much as Henry saw it. Its vast interior is like the apotheosis of the railway station. Compared to it, the hall at Eltham must have seemed as small as his own chamber. At the foot of the dais, he dismounted. Clearly he found riding easier than walking, especially when encumbered with elaborate robes, for, with the lesser or White Hall still to traverse, he was carried by Sir William Sandys into the king’s presence. At Henry VII’s command, the duke of Buckingham put
on his son’s right spur and the marquess of Dorset his left. The king himself girded him with the sword and dubbed him knight ‘in manner accustomed’.

Then he picked him up ‘and set him upon the table’. Was it fatherly pride? Or only a determination that everybody could see?

What, if anything, did the three-and-a-half-year-old Henry understand of all this, let alone remember? The higher symbolism – of physical cleansing, spiritual purification, sleep and awakening as a (re) new (ed) man – would have been beyond him, as indeed it was probably beyond most of his adult fellow-postulants as well. Perhaps instead the event lingered in his memory as a series of intense sensory experiences: cold and heat; wetting and being towelled dry; the scratchy fabric of his hermit’s gown; the mysterious gloom of the chapel in the small hours and the weariness of staying up later than he’d ever done before; and, in the morning, the exhilaration of showing, once more, that he could ride all by himself.

Or maybe there
was
more. Maybe he even understood, more or less, what was going on. For in fact he had heard it all before, so many times, in the tales told by his nurse, his lady mistress and his women: of knights, of oaths, of maidens in distress, of vigils, watches, disguises and transformations; of hermits, monsters and kings. It was the world of romance and chivalry that he had inhabited already in his imagination and dreams. Now he was part of it indeed.

He was a knight! He had sworn the oath. Kept vigil in the church. Ridden the horse. Been touched by the sword. He was a knight! He would be athlete, hero, icon.

He was a knight!

The next day was 1 November, All Hallows’ Day, and the day of high festival which had been chosen for Henry’s creation as duke of York. After hearing matins, the king came robed and crowned into the Parliament Chamber and took up his position on the dais under the cloth of estate. He was surrounded by the lords spiritual, headed by John Morton, the cardinal-archbishop of Canterbury, and the lords temporal, including two dukes, four earls, and ‘the substance of all the barons of this realm’. The assembled dignitaries also included the judges, the master of the rolls, the lord mayor and aldermen of London and a ‘great press’ of knights and esquires.

The place and the personnel (apart from the representatives of the City) were the same as for a parliament; the author of the ‘Black Book of the Garter’, a near contemporary, even mistook it for one,
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which was exactly what was intended. Richard of Shrewsbury had been created duke of York during a parliamentary session; Henry must at least appear to have been.

For the first of so many times, Henry was to meet the political elite of England. His procession formed in St Stephen’s Cloister, marched through the gallery and entered at the
lower end of the Parliament Chamber. First came the heralds, with Garter king of arms carrying the letters patent of creation. Then followed three earls in their crimson parliament robes: the earl of Suffolk, bearing a rich sword pommel upwards, the earl of Northumberland a rod of gold, and the earl of Derby a cap of estate and a coronet. Behind them walked the earl of Shrewsbury, again robed, carrying Henry. When Henry came into the Parliament Chamber he was conducted to the king by the marquess of Dorset and the earl of Arundel, who were also robed. After they had all bowed to the king, Oliver King, the royal secretary, read the patent which created Henry duke of York, ‘with the gift of a thousand pound by year’. The king then invested his son with the sword, the rod, the cap and the coronet, and the whole company adjourned to St Stephen’s for a solemn mass celebrated by the cardinal-archbishop in cope and mitre, assisted by eight bishops and yet more abbots, also in pontificals.