The House of Tudor (6 page)

Henry Tudor reached the outskirts of this thriving emporium of trade and industry on 3 September, twelve days after Bosworth. He was met at Shoreditch by the Lord Mayor and the aldermen and conducted with suitable ceremony, trumpeters going before him, to St. Paul’s. In the past London had been on the whole Yorkist in sympathy, but Richard III’s forced loans had not made him popular with the mercantile community. Apart from that, the city fathers had a stronger interest than most in peace and stability. If Henry could put an end to the irritating, expensive and futile faction fighting which was not only bad for trade but was also beginning to breed undesirable habits of disrespect for law and order; if he could restore the authority and prestige of the Crown, and provide continuity and settled government, then he could count on the support of the business community and, indeed, of the population at large.

Not that the Yorkist cause was dead - far from it - and Henry, reviewing the serried ranks of his cousins, had no reason to feel complacent. Richard’s son had, providentially, predeceased him, but there were too many Yorkist males still very much alive for the peace of mind of the only surviving Lancastrian. There was the ten-year-old Earl of Warwick, son of Edward IV’s brother George; there were the de la Pole brothers, sons of Edward’s sister Elizabeth, and there was also the young Duke of Buckingham, son of the Duke executed in 1483 and a four-times great-grandson of Edward in. Then there were the girls, whose marriages and progeny could (and did) provide further complications. Henry’s fiancée, Elizabeth of York, had four sisters; the Earl of Warwick had a sister and so did the Duke of Buckingham.

Henry’s awareness of the danger is demonstrated by the fact that within hours of Bosworth a messenger was on his way from Leicester to the castle of Sheriff Hutton in Yorkshire, where both Warwick and Elizabeth had been lodged for safe-keeping by Richard. Both were now brought to London, the unhappy Warwick to the Tower and Elizabeth to be returned to her mother pending her marriage. Marriage, though, would have to wait a little - at any rate until the most pressing business of the new reign had been disposed of.

One thing which could not be postponed was the King’s coronation. Preparations for making this a truly memorable occasion were put in hand at once, and Sir Robert Willoughby, Steward of the Household, sent his staff round London to buy up all the scarlet cloth, crimson satin, purple velvet and cloth of gold they could lay hands on. Other items on Sir Robert’s shopping list included silk fringe for trumpet banners, silk tassels for trimming caps, ribbon of Venice gold for the King’s gloves, ostrich feathers and Spanish leather boots for the henchmen and footmen, seventy-one ounces of ‘hangyng spangels of silver and double gilt’ at eight shillings an ounce, quantities of powdered ermine and miniver for furred robes and mantles, harness and ceremonial trappings for the horses, four-and-three-quarter yards of fine russet cloth for the King’s confessor, twelve coats of arms for the heralds, ‘wrought in oyle colors with fyne gold’ and costing thirty shillings each, two pairs of gilt spurs for the King and a considerable number of assorted cushions of red and blue damask and cloth of gold. It was all meticulously entered in the wardrobe accounts, down to the last quarter pound of thread, the yard of buckram for lining the collars of the henchmen’s doublets and, fascinatingly, three-quarters of a yard of red velvet for dragons! It all cost a great deal of money, but Henry Tudor knew the value of putting on a good show - especially when it was a question of promoting public confidence.

The coronation date was set for the end of October and, while a small army of tailors and embroiderers, upholsterers and carpenters laboured to get everything ready, the King was quietly consolidating his position - appointing a Council from the hard core of his fellow exiles, reinforced by men like the Stanleys, Reginald Bray and, before the end of the year, John Morton; installing trusted supporters in strategic posts round the country; and issuing writs for the summoning of Parliament.

A few days before the coronation, the Court, following established practice, moved into the Tower and Henry marked the occasion by conferring the dukedom of Bedford on faithful uncle Jasper, without whom none of it would have been possible. Lord Stanley became Earl of Derby and William Courtenay, another of those stalwarts who had known exile with the Tudors, became Earl of Devonshire and was later further rewarded with a royal bride, the Yorkist princess Katherine. On 29 October came the traditional recognition procession through the city to Westminster, the King, wearing a long robe of purple velvet, riding bareheaded under a canopy of estate. The next day, Sunday, Henry Tudor was solemnly crowned in Westminster Abbey and ‘after that solemnization was finished, a royal and excellent feast with all circumstances to such a feast appertaining was holden within Westminster Hall’.

A week later the first Tudor Parliament met to deal, among other things, with certain anomalies arising out of recent events. Henry had won his kingdom by right of conquest; he had been crowned and anointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury; yet in law, by an Act of his predecessor, he was still attainted of treason - a proscribed person without rights or property. Henry knew that his hereditary title would not stand up to close examination, but he also knew that the country was not so much interested in his legal right to wear the crown as in his ability to hold on to it. He had not summoned Parliament to recognize him as King -he was King already and, in any case, only a true King could summon Parliament. It was a splendidly illogical situation and Henry sensibly resolved the whole tangle by ignoring it, taking his stand on accomplished fact - on his just title by inheritance’, on the judgement of God as delivered at Bosworth, and on the ruling of less exalted judges that his attainder had been automatically cancelled by his assumption of the throne. In order to regularize matters for the future and to satisfy the tidy-minded, a brief Act for the Confirmation of Henry VII was passed, declaring that ‘the inheritance of the crowns of the realms of England and France...be, rest, remain and abide in the most royal person of our now sovereign lord king Harry VII and in the heirs of his body lawfully come, perpetually with the grace of God so to endure, and in none other.’

The King was not the only person whose affairs had to be sorted out by this Parliament. Elizabeth Woodville, Henry’s prospective mother-in-law, had been stripped of her rank and dignity as Queen by Richard in and her children bastardized. These shameful injustices now had to be erased from the statute book and consigned to ‘perpetual oblivion’. The King’s own mother got back her estates which had been confiscated by Richard in 1483, and the Parliament of 1485 granted to Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby, all the rights and privileges of a ‘sole person, not wife nor covert of any husband’. She was, in fact, to have full and independent control over her very considerable property ‘in as large a form as any woman now may do within this realm’. ‘My lady the King’s mother’ was, therefore, not only an exceedingly rich woman - she also became an exceedingly important and influential woman. Indeed, to all intents and purposes she became honorary Queen Dowager, thus receiving tacit recognition for the vital part, political as well as biological, which she had played in founding the new dynasty.

The House of Commons now turned its attention to the future of the new dynasty and on 11 December the Speaker presented a petition to the King, earnestly requesting him to take to wife Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV, a request which was solemnly seconded by the lords spiritual and temporal. Henry is generally accused of deliberately delaying his marriage so that no one would have any excuse for saying he owed his throne to his wife. There is no question that Elizabeth’s right to be Queen was a good deal stronger than Henry’s to be King, but no one had ever suggested they should reign jointly. Henry’s title, such as it was, could not be strengthened by his wife’s - it was their children who would benefit from the union of ‘the two bloodes of highe renowne’. So, while the marriage was obviously very desirable politically, it was even more important from the dynastic point of view and that made it all the more essential that it should be an indisputably valid marriage. It would have been unwise for Henry to claim his bride while she was still officially a bastard and, apart from this, the couple were closely enough related to need a papal dispensation. This had now been applied for but in the end Henry did not wait for Rome. He received an authority to proceed from the Bishop of Imola, papal legate in England, and on 16 January 1486, he redeemed the pledge given two years before at Rennes and married Elizabeth, King Edward’s daughter.

Elizabeth of York was in her twenty-first year and generally agreed to be a pretty girl, with the silver-gilt fairness of the Plantagenets. Like her bridegroom, her childhood and adolescence had been disrupted by the civil war. She had twice been hurried into sanctuary with her mother and sisters, had suffered the grief of her brothers’ disappearance, faced at least the possibility of marriage with her uncle Richard as well as all the anxiety and insecurity attached to being her father’s heiress. Tradition, as embodied in the epic ballad
The Most Pleasant Song of Lady Bessy
, credits Elizabeth with much of the under-cover work leading up to Bosworth, and describes how she sent for Lord Stanley, ‘father Stanley’, telling him she would rather die - ‘with sharp swords I will me slay’ - than become her uncle’s leman, and begging his help for the exiled Henry.

You may recover him of his care,
If your heart and mind to him will gree:
Let him come home and claim his right, 
And let us cry him King Henry!

The Song of Lady Bessy
, which was probably written by Humphrey Brereton, a squire in the Stanleys’ service, contains some unmistakably authentic touches as well as a good deal of poetic license. Elizabeth may have been in touch with Henry at some point during the months before Bosworth and may have sent him a message of encouragement by one of the secret couriers going over to France. Although she had never seen her future husband, she would no doubt have heard much about him from Lady Stanley and, quite apart from any romantic considerations, the Yorkist heiress would certainly have realized by this time that the position of Henry Tudor’s consort offered the best prospect of a secure and honourable future - the best, that is, which she could reasonably hope for.

The wedding should normally have been followed by the Queen’s coronation, but this had to be put off for the best possible reason - the Queen was pregnant. The King spent the spring on a progress, going as far north as York to show himself to the people, but he was back in London by the beginning of June and not long afterwards set off with the Queen towards Winchester. It was there, at the ancient British capital, on 20 September 1486, that Elizabeth gave birth to a son - ‘the rosebush of England’ who would unite the warring factions. Winchester resounded to the pealing of bells and the singing of
Te Deum Laudamus
and as the ‘comfortable and good tidings’ spread round the country, bells were rung, bonfires lit in the streets and Te Deum sung in parish churches up and down the land as ‘every true Englishman’ rejoiced.

The infant prince was christened Arthur, a shrewd and imaginative choice, in Winchester Cathedral amid much pomp and ceremony, with three bishops officiating. The Earls of Oxford and Derby were godfathers. Queen Elizabeth Woodville godmother, and the baby was carried to and from the church by his aunt Cecily of York, supported by the Marquis of Dorset and the Earl of Lincoln, eldest of the de la Pole brothers. All the important relations from both sides of the family were present - although Lancastrians were heavily outnumbered by Yorkists. Everyone was on their best behaviour and in spite of the cold, rainy weather, the ceremony went off very smoothly. To an outsider it might have looked as if the ancient blood feud was over at last.

As soon as the Queen had been churched and had thrown off an attack of fever, the Court moved back to Greenwich to keep the solemn feast of All Hallows with more pomp and ceremony. Christmas was also spent at Greenwich. A quiet, family occasion this, at which, it is reasonable to assume, the new baby was the centre of attention. One way and another, the King could feel modestly pleased with his first sixteen months but, early in the New Year, the curious affair of Lambert Simnel provided an effective antidote to any incipient sense of false security.

Simnel, the son of an organ-maker from Oxford, turned up in Ireland, where he was being passed off as the Earl of Warwick, conveniently ‘escaped’ from the Tower. Henry took the obvious counter-measure of producing the real Warwick at High Mass in St. Paul’s, making sure that as many important people as possible saw him and spoke to him. Unfortunately, though, Ireland was a long way from St. Paul’s and the Irish chieftains had their own reasons for preferring to believe in Simnel.

A strong element of fantasy pervades the whole Simnel affair, but it soon became surprisingly dangerous - especially when it became clear that the unfortunate youth was being used as a stalking horse by more substantial personages. The Earl of Lincoln, who had absconded from his place at King Henry’s council table, reappeared in Ireland early in May, accompanied by a business-like force of German mercenaries, paid for by his aunt Margaret, widowed Duchess of Burgundy and another of Edward IV’s sisters. Thus encouraged, the Irish, with more enthusiasm than common-sense, proceeded to crown Lambert Simnel as Edward VI in Christ Church, Dublin, using a diadem borrowed from a handy statue of the Virgin. A month later, John de la Pole, his mercenaries reinforced by a hopeful contingent of ‘wild Irishmen’, landed at the Pile of Fouldry on the Lancashire coast.

Henry, meanwhile, had collected a sizeable army and set up his headquarters in the Midlands, just as Richard had done two years before. The confrontation came at Stoke on 16 June and the battle, which marked the real end of the Wars of the Roses, turned out to be an uncomfortably close-run thing. The Germans, conscientious professionals under their formidable commander Martin Schwartz, gave Margaret of Burgundy good value for her money. The half-naked Irish, too, ‘foughte hardely and stuck to it valyauntly’ - there would be much plunder for a victorious army in a rich country like England - but valour was no substitute for body-armour and they suffered heavy casualties.