The Children of Henry VIII (3 page)

Barely was Arthur’s body cold than Sir Richard Pole, the lord chamberlain of the prince’s household, sent letters announcing his death to the king’s councillors at Greenwich Palace. As the messenger arrived during the night of Monday, 4 April, when the king was in bed, the councillors decided to break the news to him early the next morning through his confessor, a Franciscan friar.
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Knocking at Henry’s chamber door ‘somewhat before the time accustomed’, the friar was admitted and asked all the servants to leave. Once he and Henry were alone, the friar quoted a text from the Book of Job, using the version from the Latin Vulgate Bible. ‘If we have received good things from the hand of God’, he solemnly intoned, ‘why should we not endure bad things?’
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Henry knew instantly that he was about to receive a devastating blow. When the friar blurted out that his ‘dearest son was departed to God’, the king at once sent for his wife, Elizabeth of York, saying that ‘he and his queen would take the painful sorrows together’. As soon as she arrived ‘and saw the king her lord and husband in that natural and painful sorrow’, she—using ‘full, great and constant comfortable words’—besought him ‘that he would first, after God, remember the welfare of his own noble person, the comfort of his realm and of her.’ The living, said Elizabeth, had to take priority over the dead.

In a valiant effort to comfort the husband whom she seems genuinely to have loved, and for the moment concealing the true extent of her own grief, Elizabeth reminded him that his own mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort—married to King Henry VI’s half-brother, Edmund Tudor, at the age of 12—had been able to have only one child. Quickly made pregnant, she had been left with a serious gynaecological impairment after her son’s delivery. Despite this, Elizabeth recalled, Henry had survived through innumerable tribulations to manhood and won the crown. He also still had a healthy young son and two daughters. And she quickly added, were they themselves not still both young enough to have more children?
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It was not to be. With Arthur’s younger brother, Henry, Duke of York, still not quite 11 when his elder brother died, his father naturally feared for the dynasty’s security and the succession. Arthur’s death changed things for ever, for it would now be the younger Henry who would inherit the throne and make Katherine of Aragon his bride.

The royal couple did try almost immediately for another baby in the fervent hope that they could have a male heir in reserve, and
within a couple of months Elizabeth was pregnant again. On 12 December, ahead of her accouchement at the Tower of London, she was rowed there along the Thames from Westminster in the royal barge for the day to oversee the preparation of her apartments.
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Returning to the Tower on 26 January 1503, the queen and her attendants first took wine and spices in the Presence Chamber before ceremonially processing to her lying-in chamber, which was hung from floor to ceiling with Flemish tapestries and equipped with a ‘rich bed’ with the finest embroidered coverlets and the most expensive linen sheets.
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At the door of the chamber, her attendant lords and councillors departed, leaving only the queen and her ladies to enter the room.

On 2 February, the Feast of Candlemas, in the middle of the night, Elizabeth ‘travailed of a child suddenly’.
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She was successfully delivered of a baby girl by the same midwife who had delivered Arthur, but the birth had been a difficult one, and shortly after dawn the child was hastily christened Katherine in the Church of St Peter ad Vincula at the Tower.
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Soon the queen herself became alarmingly ill and Henry sent for Dr Halesworth, a physician from Kent, who travelled night and day by road and river to reach her bedside.
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Whether he arrived in time is not recorded, but if he did, he was unable to save Elizabeth, who died on the morning of Saturday, 11 February, her thirty-seventh birthday.
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Her baby was still alive the next day, when four yards of flannel were purchased for her, but she died shortly afterwards.
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With both Arthur and Elizabeth gone, the king was an altered man. Always cautious to the point of obsession about money and his prerogative rights, he became increasingly suspicious, reclusive and rapacious. He withdrew into his Privy Chamber,
where he put a ring of steel around himself, tormented by fears for his dynasty’s security and over-protective of his surviving son, whom he rarely allowed out of his sight.
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When information reached him that several ‘great personages’ considered other candidates more suitable to succeed him than Prince Henry, arrests were made and steps taken to counter the threat of rebellion and internal lawlessness by extreme and sometimes illegal methods.
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In readiness for a possible dynastic crisis, the king also spent liberally on improving the country’s defences, seeking to deter foreign powers from attempting to intervene in the succession.
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Henry was noticeably jumpy in July 1506, after one of the galleries closest to the royal apartments at his favourite palace at Richmond collapsed during major construction works less than an hour after he and Prince Henry had been walking in it. Fortunately no one was injured, but the carpenter responsible for the shoddy work was sent to prison.
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The king’s health, meanwhile, collapsed. His eyesight began to fail, he appears to have suffered a minor stroke and he found writing difficult. Not long after he became a widower, it was reported that ‘the king’s grace is but a weak man and sickly, not likely to be no long lived man’.
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He survived, but visiting him in late March 1507, another Spanish envoy, Dr Roderigo de Puebla, found him confined to bed, unable to eat or drink for six days and receiving almost no one. By then, he would regularly fall sick during the early months of each year, rallying in the summer. In 1507, his condition was complicated by ‘a quinsy’, an acute, pustular tonsillitis that made it painful to eat or speak.
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Henry VII died at 11 p.m. on Saturday, 21 April 1509. For two days, his trusted privy chamber servants kept the news a closely guarded secret while, Kremlin-style, they jockeyed for position in the new reign. Only on the afternoon of the 23rd were the king’s councillors informed. Later that same evening, the whole Court was told. Next day, while heralds proclaimed the accession of the younger Henry in the streets of London, two of the most hated of the old king’s ministers were arrested and sent to the Tower in a carefully planned
putsch.
At the same time, several illegally held prisoners were released from the Tower and other prisons.
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The atmosphere in these days was highly charged, for by no means was it a foregone conclusion that the transition would be smooth. The elder Henry had possessed the flimsiest of claims to the throne when, against all the odds, he defeated Richard III in battle. He had won the crown only because the lack of a fixed law of succession enabled him, by force of arms, to proclaim himself king and because Richard III had become so hated that even a man with Henry’s dubious claim was preferable.
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Henry VII had first arranged for his younger son’s betrothal to Katherine of Aragon in June 1503, and a year later the young prince was formally married to her after Pope Julius II issued a dispensation allowing him to wed his elder brother’s widow. Of course, this so-called ‘marriage’ had been just one move on the chessboard of the king’s diplomacy and was not consummated. Only 13 when he took his vows, the bridegroom was below the lawful age of marriage, and on the eve of his fourteenth birthday, he repudiated the wedding, as canon law entitled him to do, once more at his father’s behest.
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But after Henry VII’s death, the question of the marriage arose again. Clearly the new king, then approaching his eighteenth
birthday, was in two minds about it, at one moment claiming (according to a report of one of his councillors) that ‘it would burden his conscience to marry his brother’s widow’, and at another professing that his dying father had ordered him to marry Katherine as soon as possible to consolidate the alliance with Spain.
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When, however, Henry VIII decided to do something, he did it with gusto and because he believed it to be right. So it was that, declaring himself to be deeply in love and sweeping aside the objection that his bride-to-be was nearly six years older than he was, he astonished his councillors by marrying Katherine for a second time on 11 June 1509 in his late mother’s oratory at Greenwich Palace. When he then ordered a magnificent joint coronation ceremony for himself and his wife to take place barely a fortnight later on Midsummer Day, it seemed as if the dynasty was indeed secure at last.

Not so. For in his final years, Henry VII had become deeply resented by his subjects for his summary justice and extortions, not least in London. By creating an atmosphere of fear and coercion, he had reopened dynastic wounds and would come to be regarded by many with old Yorkist allegiances as a false king and a usurper. To counter this, his son unashamedly set out to court popularity, to build a reputation for honour and magnificence and to usher in a new golden age. As a delighted courtier exclaimed, ‘Our king’s heart is set not upon gold or jewels or mines of ore, but upon virtue, reputation and eternal fame.’
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But monarchies and dynasties are not built on virtue or reputation alone. They are rooted in families, marriages and the birth of legitimate heirs and successors. Only when the new King Henry had fathered children of his own might it be said with any real confidence that the dynasty was stable. Nobody in 1509 understood
this better than Thomas More, already rising fast in his career as a London lawyer. In a handwritten set of verses presented to Henry to celebrate his glorious coronation, More declared that, while the new king ‘has banished fear and oppression’ by his affirmations of respect for justice and the rule of law, and his determination to arrest and imprison informers and anyone else ‘who by plots or conspiracies has harmed the realm’, what really matters is that Katherine should become the ‘mother of kings’. ‘Fecund in male offspring’, More confidently avowed, ‘she will render your ship of state stable and enduring for all time.’
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It is quite possible that Henry, in his euphoria at becoming king and his first flush of love for Katherine, never bothered to read More’s verses before placing them on the shelves of the royal library. And yet, More, who was already a keen student of history and would shortly become the author of an unpublished
History of King Richard III
, had grasped the essential point. A few years later, Henry would come to know it, and in due course More would himself become a casualty of the intense family drama that would ensue as the king struggled to produce a legitimate male heir.

The story of Henry VIII’s children, therefore, is not simply a tale of royal personalities and their foibles set apart from the grand narrative of political and social change. It is also the dynastic history of England.