In Bed with the Tudors: The Sex Lives of a Dynasty from Elizabeth of York to Elizabeth I (2 page)

1485–1486

The First Tudor Heir

I tell you, masters, without lett
When the red rose so fair of hew
And young Bessy together mett
It was great joy, I say to you.
A bishopp them married with a ringe,
The two bloods of great renown.
Bessy said ‘now may we sing,
Wee two bloods are made all one.’
¹

On 18 January 1486, a wedding was celebrated in London’s Westminster Abbey. The bride, not yet twenty, was tall and slender and blonde. Her pink-and-white Plantagenet beauty would become legendary, celebrated in art and sculpture, verse and prose: chroniclers of the present and future would define her by her long flowing golden locks and regular features. The eldest child of notoriously good-looking parents, she would set the standard of beauty for an age. As Elizabeth of York approached the altar, feeling all eyes on her, she may have wondered about the man with whom her future lay: a man she scarcely knew; a man who had spent most of his adult life in exile, technically her enemy, who was about to become her husband. She knew it was no love match. If she was lucky, mutual respect might develop into something deeper. Despite her beauty, Elizabeth’s attraction lay in her identity, her family line; she was fully aware of her role as a dynastic tool and this was the most important day of her young life so far. Perhaps she was proud, even triumphant that her family’s reputation was being reinstated and their continuing position assured. Perhaps she was nervous, as she headed into a life she understood to be full of difficulties and suffering, beside the privilege of status and wealth; after all, she had witnessed her own mother’s tumultuous ride as queen and knew that much depended upon the vagaries of fate and the disposition of her husband. He was a king, yet he was still also a man, whose personal, intimate rule over her would be complete.

Waiting at the altar, the groom was ten years her senior, with pale blue watchful eyes and dark hair crisply curled in the European fashion. Together they made an impressive pair: England’s newly anointed king and the daughter of the popular Plantagenet Edward IV, uniting the country after decades of bloody civil war. Only six months before, Henry Tudor had been a nobody, waiting for the tide of fortune to turn in his favour on the battlefield, a thorn in the side of the ruling Yorkists. He was a man stained by the mud, sweat and blood of battle: a man who had gambled and taken the ultimate prize. Now he was Henry VII. History would record him as the progenitor of a remarkable dynasty, a wise and prudent figure who ruthlessly squashed his enemies, bringing a long-lasting peace to the nation; yet all this lay in the future. Elizabeth cannot have known the character, abilities or ambitions of her new husband, nor he hers. They were virtually strangers to each other and the directions of their lives were still to be determined. Nevertheless, their significance could not be underestimated: on this marriage rode the fortunes of their people. Around them blazed hundreds of torches, illuminating the rich tapestries and hopeful faces of the nation’s decimated nobility. One contemporary foreign commentator wrote of the match that ‘everyone considers (it) advantageous for the kingdom’ and ‘all things appear[ed] disposed towards peace’.
²
Later chronicles termed it a ‘long expected and so much desired marriage’
³
and recalled that harmony ‘was thought to discende oute of heaven into England’ when these ‘two bodyes one heyre might succeed’.
⁴
Yet hindsight can confer many such poetic turns of phrase. At the time, Henry’s reign was in its infancy and Bosworth’s truce could still prove fragile. There was no guarantee that the turbulent decades were, in fact, over; no neat historical line was drawn in the sand at Bosworth indicating the end of the Wars of the Roses; Henry’s end could prove as swift and bloody as his predecessor’s. Yet the new king knew better than to rest on his laurels: soon the first rumours of rebellion would threaten his delicate position and they would not be the last. His own family was small; as an only child he had relied on the support of his stepfather Thomas Stanley, Earl of Derby, as well as the country’s disaffected magnates, in order to seize power but such alliances could prove infamously fickle. Henry needed to establish his family line. The rapid production of heirs would be seen by the world as a mirror for the health of his claim to the throne: a son would confirm God’s approval of the match and the new Tudor monarchy.

No descriptions survive of the actual wedding but accounts of Henry and Elizabeth’s separate coronations offer a taste of the day’s finery. From the start, the new regime was characterised by an understanding of the importance of impressing the people with numbers, pageantry and ceremony. Appearances were critical. Royalty should look the part, to elevate them above their subjects and display the divine and earthly power at their disposal. The bride would have looked striking, with her rich clothes, jewellery and golden hair. White wedding gowns were not the Tudor norm: Henry IV’s daughter Philippa had worn one back in 1406, for her marriage to Eric of Pomerania, but it was as a favoured colour rather than a tradition. Elizabeth’s wardrobe of the late 1480s did contain kirtles and mantles in white cloth-of-gold of damask, trimmed with powdered ermine, but she was equally likely to have chosen velvet, in rich tawny, blue, purple or crimson. Her garments would have been designed well in advance and worked by hundreds of seamstresses, embroiderers, furriers and jewellers. The choice of fabric was as significant as the style of dress: sumptuary laws dating back to the 1360s had confined the wearing of cloth-of-gold and purple silk to women of royalty, another important distinction of status at a time when upstarts jostled for power. Elizabeth’s wedding dress was an opportunity to reinforce her legitimacy through colour, material, design and decoration; it was not just a pretty dress, its sumptuousness sent a barely coded message. No doubt it would have been studded with precious gems, embroidered with thread of gold, set with intricate lace and brocade, delicate filigree tissue and silk ribbons. For the Tudors, simplicity and elegance did not equate – as ornamentation was a measure of status, the more the better: descriptions of their clothing can make the modern reader wonder just how all these elements were combined in one outfit! The bride’s golden hair might have hung loose, as befitted a maiden, or else been caught up in a net dotted with pearls and gold tassels. Perhaps the bridegroom put aside his habitual black velvet jacket, furred with the skins of black lambs, in favour of the purple cloth-of-gold tissue, shirt of crimson sarcanet (soft silk) and satin doublet worn during his coronation. One unused plan for that event imagined him dressed in the Tudor colours of green and white: ‘a doblet of gren or white cloth-of-gold satyn, a long goune of purpur velwet, furred with ermys poudred, open at the sides and puffed with ermyn.’ Later during the proceedings, he was to wear a shirt laced with silver and gilt, a velvet belt, hose laced with ribbons, a cap of crimson garnished with gold and a surcoat with gold ribbons at the collar and cuffs.
⁵
Whatever choices they made on the day, the dazzling appearances of Henry and Elizabeth distinguished them as the personifications of divine majesty and temporal wealth.

The royal pair were married by the ageing Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bourchier. It was an appropriate role for a man whose long, distinguished career had placed him at the very heart of the country’s shifting fortunes. Himself a grandson of Edward III, he had initially been a reconciling figure in the wars, before siding firmly with the Yorkists and officiating at the coronations of Elizabeth’s parents. More recently, he had crowned Richard III, witnessed a dramatic turn in that ruler’s fortunes and anointed his conqueror as England’s new king. The wedding ring Bourchier blessed that January was a solid gold band, costing 23
s
4
d
and weighing two-thirds of an ounce, making it a ‘hefty’ size in comparison with its modern equivalents.
⁶
It had been ordered in advance, arriving at court at New Year, when preparations for the wedding day were well underway. Several English gold rings in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum suggest its appearance and possible decorations: one cast gold band made around 1500, as part of a group of popular medieval poesie rings, was engraved ‘God joins us together’, followed by the dates and initials of the owner’s wedding. Another bore the message ‘observe wedlock’ on the outside, with the warning ‘
memento mori
’ carved within, while a third was decorated with hearts and floral sprigs around its engraving ‘think of me’. It was traditional for brides to wear a blessed ring since the eleventh century, and by the medieval period custom dictated that it would be worn on the ring finger of the left hand. Popular belief stated that so long as it was worn, the ring would protect against unkindness and discord. If he wore one, Henry’s ring may have been similar to the museum’s dazzling gold band made around 1450, encrusted with a natural diamond crystal and spinel rubies from Afghanistan or one of the signet rings engraved with religious or heraldic symbols. Other signet rings in the collection are decorated with trees, domestic animals such as tethered dogs and even a cradle, perhaps in anticipation of the union bearing fruit; one impressive fifteenth-century example includes a red spinel gem, carved with a crowned head and engraved ‘there is none like him’. As he blessed the rings and heard the couple repeat their vows, Bourchier was fulfilling his final duty to the state: he would die that March at Knole, his Kent home, at the grand old age of eighty.

The couple had something of a chequered history. Still in her teens, Elizabeth’s archetypal golden beauty, virtue and lineage made her a focus of popular sympathy, yet her position at Henry’s side had by no means been guaranteed. She was the product of a secret, controversial marriage and the quirks of civil war had seen her childhood ricochet between luxury and exile. Her father had married her mother for love; a beautiful widow with two sons, who had refused to become his mistress and so, controversially, became his queen. When Elizabeth arrived, in 1466, conceived a year after the marriage, she was the first of three girls born to the couple in rapid succession. Then, their fortunes turned. The princess’s life changed dramatically as dissident nobles captured and dethroned her father, forcing her mother into sanctuary and accusing her grandmother of witchcraft. The unstable Henry VI was reinstated as king and the Yorkist family’s future was uncertain. Elizabeth was offered as a significant pawn in the 1470 peace negotiations, her hand offered in marriage to the rebel Earl of Warwick’s heir but the realm’s truce was short-lived. With her father forced to flee to the Netherlands, the little girl accompanied her mother to the safety of Westminster Abbey, where the heavily pregnant queen was delivered of a son, the future unfortunate Edward V.

Only after the bloodshed of Barnet and Tewkesbury in 1471, followed by the murder of Henry VI, had the Yorkist line regained control. Elizabeth was offered again as a marital bargain, at the age of eight, in a betrothal to Prince Charles of France and after that, her position remained relatively secure until 1483. By the age of seventeen, she had grown accustomed to the impersonal nature of national and international politics, aware that she and her siblings were instruments of family advancement and that the personal aspect of her life was always secondary to duty. Then, unexpectedly, everything changed. At only forty-one, the charismatic and capable king’s health deteriorated unexpectedly, variously reported to be the result of poison, excess, typhoid or pneumonia. His death in April left his children and his wife’s unpopular family vulnerable. Edward was succeeded by his twelve-year-old son, the baby who had been born in Westminster Abbey amid the civil turmoil. The Protectorship of the boy was given to his uncle Richard but the little king and his ten-year-old brother were incarcerated in the Tower of London that summer and never seen again. Following the executions and murders of Elizabeth’s other remaining male relatives, Richard III proclaimed his niece illegitimate, fuelling reports of the invalidity of her parent’s union and her father’s paternity. However, as the Yorkist heir, Elizabeth retained the best claim to the throne and in spite of her reduced status, Richard considered strengthening his title by making her his wife.

It was rumours of this intended marriage that had crossed the channel and spurred Henry, Earl of Richmond, into action. His claim to the throne was tenuous in the least, through the female, illegitimate line, dating back to John of Gaunt, while his father had been the child of Henry V’s queen, Catherine of Valois, by her Welsh page. Separated from his mother as a small boy and having spent the last fourteen years in exile, a marriage with his guardian’s daughter Maud Herbert and a relatively quiet life had, until recently, seemed more likely. Edward IV offered a significant ransom for the capture of ‘the imp’, as he called Henry, who after his death, moved to Paris and collected a group of rebels about him. One failed attempt at invasion had already sent him back across the channel with his tail between his legs and in the summer of 1485, he had been the rank outsider at the Battle of Bosworth, mounting a challenge to the established Yorkist king. Yet things had gone Henry’s way that August and his shrewdness and political cunning were already marking him out as a monarch to be reckoned with.

The royal pair may have only met for the first time that autumn. Henry’s enforced exile for fourteen years meant any previous meeting would have taken place when Elizabeth was a small child. The match had been suggested by the two mothers, Elizabeth Wydeville and Margaret Beaufort, having both suffered at the hands of Richard III. Despite her declared illegitimacy, Henry was determined to have Elizabeth as his wife, swearing an oath to that effect at Rennes Cathedral on Christmas day 1483 and acquiring papal dispensations early in 1484 and again in January 1486, just two days before the ceremony. As soon as his reign was established, he summoned his bride to London and established her at Coldharbour, his mother’s house on the banks of the Thames. An ancient building originally named La Tour, comprising two linked fortified town houses, it had previously lodged Alice Perrers, mistress of Edward III and more recently, Elizabeth’s aunt, Margaret of Burgundy. Repairs made during 1484–5 listed a number of chambers or suites of rooms within its tower, as well as a Great Hall on the river side. It was here that Henry and Elizabeth’s first meeting probably took place.