The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (35 page)

Once the battle of Bosworth was won, Henry Tudor thanked God, clambered up the nearest hillside and addressed the men who stood exhausted before him on the battlefield. He thanked the nobles and gentlemen who had fought beside him, commanded the wounded to be cared for and the dead to be buried, and then received the acclaim of his soldiers, who bellowed ‘God save King Henry!’ at the tops of their voices. Lord Stanley, standing close by, saw his moment. Richard III’s battered crown, dislodged along with his helmet in the mêlée, had been found ‘among the spoil in the field’. As kingmaker, Stanley exercised his right to place the hollow crown on Henry Tudor’s head, ‘as though he had been already by commandment of the people
proclaimed king’. Then the victorious party left the field, making their slow and regal way towards London.

Henry VII officially dated his reign from Sunday 21 August, the day before the battle of Bosworth – a novelty that allowed him to present victory as divine sanction for his kingship. Accordingly, since Henry’s reign had been approved by God, he had been ‘crowned’ (in the most informal manner) by Stanley and his rival Richard III was dead (quite a luxury for a usurper) he was prepared to delay his official coronation by more than two months. Partly this was for safety, since London in the late summer of 1485 was plagued with a ‘sweating sickness, whereof died much people suddenly’.
13
The date for Henry’s crowning was therefore set for Sunday 30 October 1485, which allowed enough time for the epidemic to depart and a splendid ceremony to be prepared. Henry realised that he was a political unknown, whose reign demanded brilliant public spectacle in order to demonstrate that he was no interloper, but rather a worthy successor to both Henry VI and Edward IV. In that sense, extravagance was a political necessity.

Accounts of the coronation were drawn up by Sir Robert Willoughby, and they spoke of a flurry of activity among the goldsmiths, cloth merchants, embroiderers, silkwomen, tailors, labourers, boatmen and saddlers of London. Instructions went out for yards of velvet, satin and silk in royal purple, crimson and black, which were then run up into beautiful jackets, hose, hats, robes, wall hangings, cushions and curtains. Henry’s henchmen were ordered hats plumed with ostrich feathers, boots made from fine Spanish leather and striking costumes of black and crimson.
14
Even the horses were smartly dressed: their stirrups were covered in red velvet, while tassels and silk buttons adorned their halters. More than £50 was spent commissioning 105 silver and gilt portcullises – the family symbol of Margaret Beaufort – for distribution to favoured guests. This was far more than was spent
even on the four ceremonial swords carried in Henry’s procession: two with sharpened points and two blunt. In total, more than £1,500 was spent on the solemnities and celebrations.
15

From the embroiderers of London the new king purchased great decorative trappings and hangings – presenting most clearly the symbols of the new reign. One item in the royal accounts for the coronation stands out: £4 13s 4d paid ‘to John Smith, broderer for embroidering of a trappour of blue velvet with red roses with gold of Venice and dragons feet’. Many emblems were displayed at the coronation. Some were traditionally English, like the arms of St Edmund and St Edward the Confessor; others were generically chivalric, such as the ‘trappour with falcons’ which was embroidered by one Hugh Wright. But several were particular to the new Tudor king and his family. The arms of Cadwaladr advertised Henry’s connection with the ancient British-Welsh kings of Arthurian lore. (That claim had also been made by the Yorkists, who proudly traced their ancient roots through the Mortimer line.) A similar lineage was suggested by the many images of red, fiery dragons and their feet. But the greatest sums were spent commissioning red roses detailed with gold. The image of the rose was far from new: the white rose had been one of the chief badges favoured by the house of York, along with the golden sun, with which it was often combined. It was true that red roses had occasionally been associated with Lancastrian kings since Henry IV’s lifetime, while the Welsh poet Robin Ddu had associated the Tudors with the symbol, hankering for the time when ‘red roses will rule in splendour’.
16
But never had a king of England so consciously or prominently adopted the red rose as his most visible emblem.

The coronation went off with appropriate pomp, with the most prominent roles taken by the small group of English nobles whom Henry could count as his intimates. These included his uncle Jasper Tudor, now duke of Bedford, his stepfather Thomas,
Lord Stanley, who became earl of Derby, and Sir Edward Courtenay, another of the Breton exiles, who was awarded his ancestors’ old title of earl of Devon. All three played important parts in the pageantry, as did John de Vere, earl of Oxford, whose loyalty was rewarded at the coronation feast, where he placed the crown on the king’s head. All had been well rewarded for their long suffering and faith in the Tudor cause. But none was so well rewarded as Margaret Beaufort, the king’s mother: according to her late-life confessor John Fisher, she ‘wept marvellously’ at the moment the crown was placed on her son’s head.

Margaret held the title of countess of Richmond, and was given back the lands that had been placed in her husband’s name by Richard III. She was declared
femme sole
, a special legal status that gave her total independence, and given a beautiful Thames-side mansion at Coldharbour, which served as her main London residence. But the sight of her son, the boy who had been torn devastatingly from her womb in a cold, plague-ridden Welsh castle when she was just thirteen years old, being crowned king was surely the greatest reward that a mother could desire. Throughout Henry’s reign Margaret was treated as a sort of demi-queen – allowed to dress in the manner of a consort and (in her later years) to sign herself ‘Margaret R’, an explicitly royal style. Her son consulted her in virtually all matters, from foreign policy to legal affairs and internal security. Her manor of Collyweston in Northamptonshire would be palatially refurbished and would serve as a base for the crown in the east midlands. She was entrusted with queenly status and authority, and she exercised it with relish.

She was not, of course, the queen. Henry VII had sworn a solemn oath in 1483 that he would marry Elizabeth of York. Now he was king, he was bound to make good on his word. On 10 December, at Henry’s first parliament, the Speaker, Thomas Lovell, requested that the king’s ‘royal highness should take to
himself that illustrious lady Elizabeth, daughter of King Edward IV, as his wife and consort; whereby, by God’s grace, many hope to see the propagation of offspring from the stock of kings, to comfort the whole realm’.
17
The king, sitting enthroned before the whole gathering, told parliament that he was ‘content to proceed according to their desire and request’. The wedding was to be held on 18 January 1486.

Henry’s marriage to Elizabeth was not simply a matter of his word or of popular opinion. It was vital to his whole royal manifesto. It was no secret that his claim in blood as a Lancastrian king was weak; he was not a sufficiently obvious heir to Henry VI to be accepted wholeheartedly for who he was. In large part Henry had been made king because he was a candidate for those seeking a replacement for Edward IV: marrying Edward’s eldest daughter was essential to holding that support and trying to restore some stability to the English royal line. It should be noted that Henry ensured he had been crowned and acclaimed as king in his own right, by the judgement of God, before he went about marrying Elizabeth – he could not afford to be seen as purely the puppet of the Yorkists, still less of ruling by right of his wife. (As a group of English ambassadors were instructed to tell the pope in 1486, Henry had won ‘the throne of his ancestors’ by ‘divine aid’. He was marrying Elizabeth to ‘put an end to civil war’.
18
) Nevertheless, he used the marriage to project a subtle and effective political message, summed up in a striking visual motif. His marriage was represented by another rose. This time it was not the famous old white rose of York or the rather hastily adopted red rose of Lancaster, but a perfect blend of the two: the Tudor rose, white superimposed upon red to form a visual emblem of union, instantly comprehensible to even the dullest mind. The Tudor double rose expressed an instant analysis both of the cause of the wars that had torn England to pieces during the troubled fifteenth century, and of their solution. Everything, the rose said,
was down to the split between the houses of Lancaster and York. Everything, the rose also said, was now solved by the two houses’ binding union. Or, as the contemporary writer and court poet Bernard André wrote, ‘It was decreed by harmonious consent that one house would be made from two families that had once striven in mortal hatred.’
19
This was a simplistic reading of history, to say the least. But it was one that would endure for centuries.

The wedding was celebrated in the customary fashion, with ‘wedding torches, marriage bed and other suitable decorations’, followed by ‘great magnificence … at the royal nuptials and the queen’s coronation. Gifts flowed freely on all sides and were showered on everyone, while feasts, dances and tournaments were celebrated with liberal generosity to … magnify the joyful occasion …’
20
The new queen fell pregnant on or soon after her wedding night and the royal couple departed on progress to the north in March 1486, to demonstrate to the kingdom at large the power and good fortune of the new king. They encountered a few minor disturbances as they went, but largely the countryside was peaceful. And at York, heartland of the former regime, the first city pageant that greeted the new king was a mechanical device displaying a gigantic red rose, which merged with a white rose before other bountiful flowers emerged (‘showing the rose to be the principal of all flowers’). Finally a crown descended from a cloud to cover the whole scene.
21
The message was clear.

Queen Elizabeth went into labour in September 1486, in St Swithun’s Priory, Winchester. It was no random setting. The former capital of England had close connections to King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table, and the queen’s lying-in was deliberately located there, in the hope that she would bear a son and heir whose life and reign would rekindle the glorious past.
22
Ever since the earliest days of the Plantagenets there had been
a taste among the rich and educated English elite for national histories that began with the deeds of Brutus, Cadwaladr and Arthur. The fashion was as strong as ever. In 1485 Thomas Malory’s
Morte D’Arthur
had been printed by Caxton, providing a new compendium of tales from the days of Camelot. The origins and ideals of English kingship lay in these long-distant histories of the island, and Henry VII had made it his business to be closely associated with them.
23
That extended explicitly to attempting to produce his own heir to the crown in a place with as much historical significance as possible.

In this pageant of dynastic creation Elizabeth played her part perfectly. On 20 September she gave birth to a healthy son who was christened, inevitably, Arthur. ‘Let the priests chant fitting hymns with great praise and entreat blessed spirits to favour the boy, that he may magnify the splendid deeds of his parent and exceed his ancestors in piety and arms,’ fawned Bernard André.
24

Arthur was very quickly invested with all the trappings of princely status: at his birth he became duke of Cornwall; when he was three years old he was created prince of Wales and earl of Chester and made a knight of the Bath. When he was still not quite five, he became a knight of the Garter, taking the Garter stall at Windsor that had lain vacant since the disappearance of Edward V. He was appointed as warden of the north, with his practical duties carried out by Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey. He was named as the king’s lieutenant when Henry VII travelled out of England. After infancy the boy was tutored by the same Bernard André who had written such exaltations on the occasion of his birth; André reported that his student was vigorous, quick to learn and well versed in the classics. Henry wished to establish his son in exactly the same role as the young Edward V: setting up a prince’s council at Ludlow to deploy royal rule over Wales and the marches. Just as Edward V’s council had been run by a trusted uncle, Earl Rivers, so Prince Arthur’s authority was
wielded by his great-uncle, Jasper Tudor, duke of Bedford, a man who was in many ways the most loyal of them all.

Prince Arthur was soon joined by a sister, Margaret, born at Westminster on 28 November 1489. A brother, Prince Henry, was born on 28 June 1491 and a second sister, Mary, on 18 March 1496. In the case of the second prince, Henry VII once again followed the protocol of Edward IV’s time: little Henry was made warden of the Cinque Ports and marshal of England at around the time of his first birthday, and the boy was given the important and evocative title of duke of York. Wild celebrations attended his official investiture on All Hallows’ Day, 1 November 1494. The king laid on a grand three-day tournament with glittering prizes including heavy gold rings set with rubies, emeralds and diamonds, great feasts and dances were held, twenty noble sons were knighted and virtually the entire political community of the realm attended a solemn service in the parliament chamber at Westminster, where the little boy was paraded in his finery alongside his parents, both of them wearing their crowns. The story of Henry VII’s reign, played out in a series of pageants and state occasions, was a simple one: through his family he was healing the kingdom.

Yet for all King Henry and Queen Elizabeth’s success in producing heirs, publicising their union and plastering the country with joined roses, there remained – inevitably – those who wished that the turmoil and violence that had tormented England for so long could somehow be rekindled: that another usurper family could be overthrown and yet another king placed beneath the crown. And indeed, Prince Henry’s creation as duke of York when he was aged just three was a direct response to a very specific plot against his father. Three generations of English history had made it inevitable that anyone with even the slightest trace of old royal blood in their veins could be a plausible candidate for kingship: a fact that seemed to be true whether that person was alive – or dead.