The House of Tudor (14 page)

In May 1510 Catherine was delivered of her first child. It was a girl, born dead. Within a matter almost of days she was pregnant again and at Richmond Palace on I January 1511 she gave birth to a boy, alive and apparently healthy. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. The Tower cannon fired a royal salute. Bells pealed and bonfires blazed in the streets of London. There were processions and Te Deums in the City churches and the authorities provided a ration of free wine for drinking the baby’s health, while the baby’s father dashed off impulsively to offer up his gratitude at the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.

As soon as the Queen had been churched, she came up to Westminster where there was to be an extra special tournament to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Wales. The proceedings opened with a pageant of quite spectacular ingenuity. A whole ‘mock forest’ complete with rocks, hills and dales, its trees and flowers cunningly constructed of green velvet and damask and coloured silks, with a castle made of gold in the middle and concealing four armed and mounted knights was drawn in says Hall, ‘as it were by strength of two great beasts: a lion and an antelope. The lion flourished all over with damask gold. The antelope was wrought all over with silver of damask, his beames and horns and tusks of gold.’

The King, not unlike some gorgeous heraldic beast himself in his gilded armour, entered the lists as Sir Loyal Heart. The royal pavilion of cloth of gold and purple velvet was lavishly decorated with the initials H and K embroidered in fine gold and, as a further compliment to the Queen, her badge, the pomegranate, was featured prominently among the display of Tudor roses.

The following night a great banquet was held in the White Hall during which Henry performed his famous vanishing act - reappearing with five companions and a chosen band of ladies in another pageant, this time ‘a garden of pleasure’. The ladies were in Tudor white and green, Sir Loyal Heart and his friends in slashed purple satin heavily encrusted with ornaments of solid gold. But when the King began to distribute these as souvenirs to certain favoured guests, the common people, watching the fun from a distance, broke in to demand their share. They snatched the gold lace and spangles off the pageant, despite the efforts of the Lord Steward and his officers to stop them, and stripped the King and his companions to their doublets and hose. Eventually the guard had to be called to put the intruders out, but there was no ill-feeling. Nothing could spoil such a happy occasion and by the time the Court sat down to supper ‘all these hurts were turned to laughing and game’.

The triumph at Westminster ended with ‘mirth and gladness’, but the gladness was pitifully short. On 22 February little Henry of Richmond was dead. He had lived just seven weeks. It was a dreadful blow, to the King and Queen and to the whole nation, but especially to the Queen. In the words of Hall’s
Chronicle
, Catherine, ‘like a natural woman, made much lamentation. Howbeit, by the King’s persuasion, she was comforted but not shortly.’ Henry’s own grief had been genuine and violent, while it lasted, but it was not in his nature to be despondent for long. There would, after all, be plenty of time to beget more sons. The cloud on the horizon was as yet no bigger than a man’s hand and the King quickly forgot his first serious disappointment in the thrill of preparing for his first war.

Henry VII had been a pre-eminently civilian monarch. His foreign policy had been concerned with drawing up commercial treaties and trade agreements, with forming useful and profitable alliances with other royal houses, and with keeping out of other people’s wars. No one expected his son to continue along these sensible but unexciting lines. A king was still, in practice as well as theory, the war leader of his people and a fine upstanding young king like the second Henry Tudor would have to prove himself in battle as a matter of honour.

The second Henry Tudor was only too anxious for a chance to prove his mettle, but when he came to the throne he had found himself boringly at peace with all his neighbours - even with France who remained the ancestral enemy to every right-thinking Englishman. This was a state of affairs which the new King meant to change as soon as he could. Young Henry’s head was stuffed with romantic dreams of the glorious past, dreams of Crécy and Agincourt and of reconquering England’s lost empire. He saw himself as another Henry V and in the first summer of his reign, to the acute embarrassment of his Council, had hurled defiance at a surprised French ambassador in a scene which had only needed a tun of tennis balls to be complete.

But, to the King’s irritation, France would not play. Louis XII was a middle-aged man intent on consolidating his recent territorial gains in Northern Italy. He was not in the least interested in the noisy challenges of a beardless boy or in becoming involved in a pointless war with England, and Henry was sulkily obliged to contain his impatience. Even he needed a
casus belli
, however slight. He also needed allies. Not even he was rash enough to take on an adversary twice his size singlehanded.

As it turned out, he did not have to wait very long for either of these two necessary adjuncts of military adventure. The Pope, becoming alarmed by the strength of the French armies on his doorstep, provided the first. The King of Aragon provided the second. Ferdinand had noted his son-in-law’s bellicosity and Franco-phobia with quiet satisfaction and was only waiting for a favourable opportunity to use them for his own advantage. By the summer of 1511 this opportunity seemed to be at hand. Franco-Papal relations had deteriorated sharply and in October a Holy League directed against the ‘schismatic’ King of France was signed in Rome. Henry could now go to war well buttressed by allies and when Ferdinand suggested they should make a start by mounting a joint invasion of Gascony from the south, he fell in eagerly and quite unsuspectingly with his father-in-law’s plans, though, oddly enough, he did not accompany the army which sailed from Southampton in April 1512.

From the Spanish point of view, the summer’s campaign went off very nicely indeed. While the presence of some ten thousand English archers kept the French pinned down in Bayonne, Ferdinand was able quietly to annexe the small neutral kingdom of Navarre on his north-western frontier. He showed no visible sign of being prepared to cross the frontier, and the English expeditionary force received neither the cooperation nor the supplies they had been expecting. Marooned in the neighbourhood of San Sebastian with no fighting to do, the climate, the food and the harsh local wine played predictable havoc with their tempers and their stomachs. By the end of August the men were openly mutinous. By September the army was on its way home, leaving two thousand dead from fever and dysentery and having achieved precisely nothing. Ferdinand, keeping a perfectly straight face, accused his ally of deserting him - and just as the main operation had been about to begin! Other people passed unkind remarks on the subject of the sad decay of English military virtues, and Henry smarted under a devastating public humiliation. Next year, though, it would be different. Next year he would take the field himself and then these insufferable foreigners would see what an English army could do.

That winter was spent in hectic preparation for the forthcoming campaign and in working out a new strategy. Henry had now acquired another ally in the person of the Emperor Maximilian who, after a good deal of dickering about, had finally declared himself ready to join the anti-French league in return, naturally, for a handsome subsidy; and it was agreed that while Ferdinand, also subsidized to the tune of a hundred thousand English crowns, crossed the Pyrenees to conquer the duchy of Guienne for his daughter’s husband, Henry and Max would make a joint assault on King Louis from the north. It was not until April 1513 that it came out that the King of Aragon had once again defaulted on his obligations by arranging a year’s truce with the enemy. This was treachery of the most blatant kind, but according to Ferdinand it had all been due to a most unfortunate misunderstanding -entirely the fault of his fool of an ambassador in London. Next year he would be only too pleased to help but just at the moment he was not at all well, in fact he had been practically at death’s door and his confessor had urged him to make peace with his enemies for the sake of his soul.

Henry was understandably disappointed and aggrieved but Catherine, always loyal to her father and to Spain, was at hand to help smooth over any unpleasantness. In any case, the King was determined to go ahead with his own plans for a landing in Northern France. The Emperor, at least, was still loyal, though, as he mournfully explained, his financial difficulties were such that he would not, after all, be in a position to provide the troop contingents he had promised. However, the King of England could have all the German and Burgundian mercenaries he cared to pay for, while Max himself would consider it an honour to fight under Henry’s banner and would charge only a mere trifle, say a hundred crowns a day, just to cover his expenses.

By late spring everything was ready, but before Henry could feel free to leave the country there was a piece of unfinished business to be dealt with and on 4 May Edmund de la Pole was brought out of the Tower to his execution. When Philip of Burgundy had surrendered the White Rose seven years before, Henry VII had guaranteed the prisoner’s life and had honoured his promise. His son was not so squeamish and information that Richard, the only remaining de la Pole still unaccounted for, was serving with the French army had sealed Edmund’s fate.

There was another danger threatening the King’s absence, and one a good deal more serious than the unhappy White Rose. Relations with Scotland had become increasingly strained during recent months and it seemed only too probable that, in spite of the treaty between the two countries, in spite of the fact that he was married to the King of England’s sister, James IV would follow traditional practice by leading his army across the Border as soon as the English were otherwise engaged. Henry left the seventy-year-old Earl of Surrey with orders to guard the North, but otherwise he paid little attention to the rumbling noises coming out of Scotland. Nothing was going to deflect him now from his long looked-forward-to adventure and the fulfilment of his burning ambition to emulate and, if possible, excel the rugged deeds of his ancestors.

The King set out from Greenwich on 15 June accompanied by the Queen, who was pregnant again, and a personal entourage which included a duke, two bishops and a score of noblemen, as well as minstrels, heralds, trumpeters, choristers, clerks and six hundred archers of the guard in new green and white liveries. The royal baggage-train contained suits of armour for every occasion, an enormous carved bed and enough gold-embroidered tents to accommodate the population of a small town. Henry never did anything by halves. This unwieldy, gorgeously dressed cavalcade made its way by easy stages to Dover, where the King created his wife Governor of the Realm and Captain General of the home forces before setting sail for Calais to join the main body of the army. Such a sight had not been seen since the days of the Hundred Years’ War and the bosoms of those gentlemen of England with enough sense to stay at home swelled with vicarious pride.

Henry had a perfectly splendid time in France and duly astonished everyone by his courage and endurance in the face of the enemy. It is true that the enemy proved disappointingly elusive and it was bad luck that the King should have missed the best bit of action - a scrambling cavalry skirmish near Guinegate, later dignified as The Battle of the Spurs - but on the whole it was a very nice little war. Henry, firing a cannon with his own hands, dubbing knights on the field of battle and riding round the camp at night in full armour, enjoyed himself so much that he quite failed to notice that the two fortified frontier towns of Therouanne and Tournai which, on Maximilian’s advice, the allied army besieged and captured, were of strategic value only to Maximilian - forming as they did two awkward salients jutting into Hapsburg territory. But the Emperor was gratifyingly deferential towards his young commander and the King spent a charming month in Lille being royally entertained by the Hapsburg family.

While Henry was playing soldiers in Picardy, events in England were taking their expected course. King James had discovered that his country’s ancient friendship with France carried more weight than any treaty with England and Catherine, left in charge with only a skeleton staff of councillors to help her, was soon ‘horribly busy’ organizing the defence of the northern counties and sewing badges and standards for the hastily mobilized home guard. She still found time, though, to worry about her husband, to send him supplies of clean shirts, to beg him not to ‘adventure himself too rashly, and to be sure and remember to change his clothes if he got wet or overheated. Henry, of course, was far too busy to write letters but Catherine received regular bulletins from his Almoner, Master Thomas Wolsey, and assured him in return that the King need not worry about the Scots. She and his subjects would deal with them gladly and ‘take it for a pastime’.

By the end of August a formidable Scottish army had crossed the Tweed and on the afternoon of Friday 9 September came face to face with the Earl of Surrey’s forces in the wild Border country at Flodden, a few miles south-east of Coldstream. The result, after some three hours of bloody fighting, was a shattering defeat for the Scots. James himself was killed ‘within a spear’s length’ of the English commander and with him died nearly a third of his army and the flower of the Scottish aristocracy.

In real terms, of course, the victory at Flodden, which crippled Scotland for a generation, was worth more than a dozen French towns - a fact which did not escape experienced observers of the political scene - but Catherine was careful not to crow. Writing to Henry on 16 September and sending him a piece of the Scottish King’s coat, she tactfully attributed ‘the great victory that our Lord hath sent your subjects in your absence’ entirely to the Lord, and, since Henry always took the deity’s personal interest in his affairs very much for granted, he had no hesitation in accepting the credit.