The Tudors (7 page)

But as the twentieth anniversary of his coronation approached, Henry found himself up against a problem that had nothing to do with money and that he could not possibly ignore because it was entirely of his choosing. It would become the defining challenge of his life and his reign—would come to be known, with good reason, as “the king’s great matter.” There were two elements to it, and there is no way for us to know which came first. One was the sad fact that Queen Catherine had become a rather dumpy little middle-aged woman whose childbearing years were clearly behind her. The other was Henry’s passionate infatuation, obvious to the entire court as early as the spring of 1526, with the dark-eyed, swan-necked young Anne Boleyn, whose years as a lady-in-waiting at the court of the French king had given her an elegance and self-assurance that not even the grandest noble ladies of England could rival. Soon Henry was confiding to certain intimates, and then to anyone who might prove helpful, that his conscience—his regal and therefore exquisitely sensitive conscience—was suffering painful doubts about whether Catherine was actually his wife. Perhaps these doubts first entered his head because he wanted Anne and she, having seen her own sister become the king’s mistress only to be discarded, would not give herself to him. But it is not impossible that Henry’s doubts came first, and that they were not in fact doubts at all but a growing conviction that he had no queen and therefore was free to choose one. At which point he would have looked around until his attention settled on his former mistress’s sister, now lady-in-waiting to his wife and as bright a jewel as his court had ever contained.

However it began, Henry’s struggle with his conscience soon ended in what was, by his reckoning, a victory for truth and justice. What settled his mind was what Leviticus said in the Old Testament: “If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an impurity: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness: they shall be childless.” That seemed conclusive: Henry’s marriage to Catherine had violated the law of God, and ever since the two of them had been paying the price. If not precisely childless, they were certainly sonless. God was displeased not because of any wrong that Henry had consciously committed but because in the innocence
of childhood (he had been thirteen when his father arranged his betrothal to Catherine) he had been made the victim of others’ mistakes. It was not his right but his duty to put Catherine away. She could remain a member of the royal family as Dowager Princess of Wales, honored and comfortable and freed from the horrors of incest with her loving brother Henry. If their daughter became thereby a bastard ineligible to inherit the throne and possibly unmarriageable—well, such an unfortunate situation was bound to have regrettable consequences. The important thing was that he had uncovered the truth while there was still time to put things right.

Certain formalities had to be attended to first. Henry’s marriage to Catherine had been made possible by a dispensation issued by Julius II. Everything would be resolved if the current pope, Clement VII, declared the marriage null. There seemed no reason to expect difficulties; relations between the English and the papal courts had long been excellent, and annulments of royal marriages were, if not exactly common, far from unheard of. Wolsey, when he turned his attention to the situation, focused on the prospect of marrying his master to a French princess—on the part that such a union could play in achieving the great pan-European peace that had long been the overriding objective of his diplomacy. On a more personal level, Wolsey had reason to want to be rid of Queen Catherine. She had long criticized his grandiose style of living—palaces more immense than those of the royal family, platoons of uniformed retainers, pomp and ceremony everywhere he went—as so inappropriate to his clerical state as to constitute scandal.

Inevitably, and for all we know to his complete satisfaction, Wolsey set about to make it happen.

WHY HAD HENRY VIII FOUND IT ADVISABLE, BEFORE GOING off to make war in France, to pull his cousin Edmund de la Pole out of prison and have his head cut off?

Because de la Pole had royal blood, obviously. And because his claim to the throne was quite good enough to rival Henry’s. (He was the grandson of the Elizabeth of York who had been Edward IV’s sister, whereas Henry was the son of Edward’s daughter of the same name.) But could Henry, with his mountainous self-assurance, really have been
that
insecure about his hold on the throne? Could his bluster have been a mask behind which a very ordinary and frightened man was keeping himself hidden?

If it is perhaps a little too easy to say so, it is also not impossible. Especially if Henry knew the story of the strange path by which his father had come to the throne, as he certainly must have.

One of the threads out of which that story is woven goes back to 1422 and the premature death, of natural causes, of one of the most brilliantly successful of all the Plantagenet kings, Henry V. He was the second king in the so-called Lancastrian branch of the Plantagenet dynasty—his father, Henry IV, had overthrown their cousin Richard II—and in nine years on the throne he had risen to the heights of achievement and prestige. The most famous of his triumphs, the one that put him among England’s immortals, came at Agincourt, where his outnumbered invasion force defeated the armies of France so conclusively that the French king acknowledged him as his heir and gave him his daughter, Catherine of Valois, in marriage. All this became the seedbed for decades of tragedy when, at age thirty-four, Henry suddenly died, leaving a beautiful widow with all the normal appetites of a healthy twenty-one-year-old woman and a son who, at the age of nine months, became King Henry VI.

This is where Wales becomes part of the story and the Tudors enter
English history. Wales was, at this time, less an integral part of the kingdom than a conquered territory—a remote, alien, somewhat mysterious, and definitely distrusted province. Only those few Welshmen whom the English occupiers deemed to be sufficiently loyal were allowed to hold office, carry weapons, or even live in towns. In the years before his father’s death, while holding the title of Prince of Wales and spending time there, the future Henry V had seen that this state of affairs could not continue. He began to take selected Welshmen into the royal service. Among those so favored, we know not why, was the young squire Owain ap Meredudd ap Tudur—Owen son of Meredith son of Tudor. The word
squire
indicates that he was regarded as being of gentle origin, which in fact he was, his family having been important in North Wales until its participation in a failed rebellion brought it to ruin. Almost nothing is known of the early manhood of this Owain, who might have been expected to take the anglicized surname Meredith but somehow became Owen Tudor instead. It is possible though not proved that he served with Henry V in France and even fought in Greece. After the king’s death he was kept on as a member of Queen Catherine’s household staff, and what happened from that point forward makes clear that his was an adventuresome spirit.

The paternal uncles of the infant Henry VI, governing in his name, decided that allowing the nubile dowager queen to remarry was out of the question. If she took a husband of inferior rank, the dignity of the House of Lancaster would be compromised. Any bridegroom from the higher nobility, on the other hand, might become dangerously powerful simply by virtue of being Catherine’s husband and therefore stepfather to the king. And so they decreed that any man who dared to marry Catherine before her son was old enough to give informed consent would be deprived of his lands. This removed from contention all those members of the nobility who might have been pleased to take the queen to their beds, but not at such a price. The field was left open to contenders as obscure as Owen Tudor, who owned no land and therefore had nothing to lose. By the late 1420s he was a member of the queen’s inner circle, holding the suggestive title of keeper of the wardrobe. His position must have made him a familiar, if unimportant, face at court.

No one knows how it happened, but at some point around 1430, when both were about thirty years old, Owen and Catherine married.
Their union was kept secret, at least from the powerful men who dominated the boy-king’s Council, until Catherine’s death in 1437. (The cause of death was described in Catherine’s will as a “long grievous malady, in the which I have been long, and yet am, troubled and vexed by the visitation of God.” One cannot but wonder if this mysterious affliction, so ambiguously but intriguingly described, may have been the mental illness that had figured importantly in the life of her father, King Charles VI of France, and would recur in her son Henry VI). By the time of Catherine’s death, she and Tudor had had four children. One was a daughter who died young, her name unknown to history. Another was a boy who bore his father’s name, entered the church at an early age, and would live and die in deep obscurity as a member of Westminster Abbey’s community of Benedictine monks. The two other sons, the eldest, were named Edmund and Jasper.

The widowed Owen had to flee when he was discovered to have broken the law by marrying the queen. He was captured and incarcerated in Windsor Castle, but after a year he was released and a comfortable place was found for him at court. Obviously there were no hard feelings on the part of his stepson the king.

Rather astonishingly, Henry VI’s uncles now had in their care two boys who on their father’s side were Welsh commoners, on their mother’s were related to the royal family of France, and were also, and more important, half-brothers of England’s king. The pair had no inheritance, no place in the world in spite of their lofty connections, and the council must have had some difficulty deciding what to do with them. For five years after their mother’s death they were raised in a convent whose abbess was a member of the de la Pole family. Then, at about the time when they must have been entering adolescence, they were brought to court, where they continued to receive the kind of training and education appropriate to the elite. What happened next pivoted on the fact that Henry VI, himself a young adult now, was a remarkably sweet-natured individual (a saint in the opinion of some) who had grown up without siblings or a father and throughout childhood had seen little of his mother. He embraced the Tudors as brothers and made himself their patron. Eventually he did more than that. In 1552, as they were coming of age, Edmund and Jasper became the first Welshmen to be raised to noble rank in England. The former became Earl of Richmond,
the latter Earl of Pembroke. Extensive holdings of land and castles came to them with their titles.

King Henry’s next gift to his brothers would prove to be even more momentous. He gave them—and that is not putting the matter too bluntly—the girl Margaret Beaufort, still a child, an orphan of royal blood and the richest heiress in the kingdom. Like her cousin the king, the little Lady Margaret was a great-grandchild of that John of Gaunt who had been one of the numerous sons of King Edward III, bore the title Duke of Lancaster, and became the progenitor of the Lancastrian Plantagenets when his son usurped the throne and became Henry IV. In addition to a succession of wives, John of Gaunt had a mistress, Catherine Swynford, with whom he produced a litter of bastards called the Beauforts after the castle in which the first of them had been born. After being widowed, Gaunt married Catherine. Their children were legitimized by King Richard II, whom Henry IV would one day dispossess, imprison, and probably murder (most likely by starving him to death). The Beauforts, though specifically barred by Richard from ever inheriting the throne, made good use of their lofty antecedents: the only daughter became the wife of an earl, one of the sons became a cardinal of the church and for a time the most powerful man in the kingdom, and the offspring of another son would include a queen of Scotland, the dukes of Somerset, and (the only child of one of those dukes) Lady Margaret Beaufort.

Among the brutish aspects of life among the English nobility in the Middle Ages was the practice, hallowed by custom, according to which the minor heirs of deceased nobles became wards of the Crown. In theory this was a way of protecting orphaned children and preserving their inheritance until they came of age. In practice it was an opportunity for plunder. Kings could keep all the income from their wards’ estates, which almost inevitably, the kings being chronically short of money, led them to maximize short-term revenues and do nothing to maintain the value of the property in question. Alternatively, kings could sell or give wardships to third parties, who would likewise be motivated to squeeze as much money out of them as quickly as possible. Worst of all, wardship brought with it the right to give—which often meant to sell—an heir or heiress in marriage.

Her enormous inherited wealth made an extremely valuable commercial
asset of Lady Margaret, who was not quite one year old when her father died, a probable suicide. When only a few years old she was “married” to John de la Pole, the almost equally young son of the powerful Marquess of Suffolk. Suffolk was later accused of plotting to put his son and Margaret on the throne—striking evidence of just how potent and dangerous a possession the child could be. He was murdered in consequence of this, and the marriage was annulled when Margaret was nine. Some two years later the king made her the ward of Edmund and Jasper Tudor jointly. Rather than merely looting her estate or selling her off to the highest bidder, the brothers quickly made maximum use of this opportunity, and of the king’s friendship. Margaret became Edmund’s wife. (Her onetime fiancé de la Pole went on to marry a daughter of the House of York, with tragic consequences for his descendants.) The wedding took place no later than 1455, the year of Margaret’s twelfth birthday. Rather horribly, she was pregnant by the middle of 1456.

Because Henry VI was not only weak, passive, and inept but at times deep in the grip of psychosis (for months at a time he would speak to no one and have to be carried from place to place), the young Tudor earls had little opportunity to enjoy their good fortune. The king had a Plantagenet cousin, Richard, Duke of York, the descendant of yet another son of Edward III, who was the richest and most powerful magnate in the country, ambitious, aggressive, suspicious, and easily offended. This cousin clashed not with the king (it appears to have been nearly impossible to rouse Henry out of his serene indifference even during his periods of sanity) but with Henry’s French queen, Margaret of Anjou, a tigress every bit as ferocious as York himself. They fought not for the crown, which York never claimed for himself until the final weeks of his life, but for custody of the king’s person and therefore control of policy. Their struggle sparked the long conflict that Walter Scott would, centuries later, name the Wars of the Roses (the red rose being a symbol of the House of Lancaster, the white rose representing York). By the standards of history it was not a terrible conflict. Towns were not destroyed and only rarely pillaged, the countryside was not ravaged or the economy greatly disrupted, and most of the population was left entirely undisturbed. Though the fighting went on for decades it was only intermittent, with far more days of peace than of war, and though there were savagely bloody battles they were usually limited in scope. But it was a
time when barons and dukes and even kings were still expected to lead men into battle, to kill and be killed. All the branches of the royal family were inexorably drawn in, along with the nobility, and the toll on their numbers was cumulatively painful. Ultimately the great Plantagenet dynasty would annihilate itself in a long orgy of fratricide.