Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII (20 page)

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Authors: Robert Hutchinson

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But Henry had not finished with the joys of dressing up. He disappeared again and in a short while, there came in
drum and fife [players] apparelled in white damask [satin] and green bonnets [and] certain gentlemen followed with torches, apparelled in blue damask … fashioned like an alb
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and on their heads, hoods with … tippets.
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After them came a certain number … whereof the king was one, apparelled all in one suit of short garments … of blue and crimson velvet with long sleeves, all lined with cloth of gold.
Then followed ladies – one of whom was Princess Mary, Henry’s younger sister – gorgeously attired, some wearing headdresses ‘rounded … like the Egyptians. Their faces, necks, arms and hands, covered with black … so that the ladies seemed to be Negroes or Moors.’ All danced ‘a certain time’ before ‘they departed every one to his lodging’.
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Henry had put on a good show – the silks alone cost him £133 7s 5d and the bill for the gold plate on the tables was a further £451 12s 2d.
At the end of April 1510, a chapter of the Order of the Garter was held at Greenwich. During the second office of vespers, ‘the king in his stall and [the] other knights (including Buckingham and Northumberland) in theirs’, Bishop Ruthal sought nominations for the vacant stalls (gaps in membership). He was acting registrar of the Order, as one had not been chosen. Henry promptly named his new almoner, Thomas Wolsey, to discharge the office thereafter.
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Wolsey, his ‘head full of subtle wit and policy’, had caught the king’s eye and was rapidly gaining in favour at court. That year Henry gave him Empson’s house at Bridewell, off London’s Fleet Street.
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Some time early in 1510 Katherine miscarried of a baby girl at Greenwich. The dates are confused – some reports suggest the miscarriage occurred on 31 January, but warrants dated February and March authorised payments for preparations for the birth,
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and it seems likely her miscarriage occurred much later in the spring, perhaps at the end of April.
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On 27 May Katherine told her father that she had been delivered of a still-born daughter, ‘an event which in England is considered unlucky’, and therefore she had not written sooner. She begged him ‘not to be angry with her, for it has been the will of God’. Despite this tragedy, both she and her husband remained cheerful and Katherine ‘[thanked] God for a husband such as the King of England’.
The letter then contains a bizarre request from the queen. Whilst in the agony of labour, the queen vowed to present one of her most costly headdresses to St Peter the Martyr
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(a favourite saint of the Franciscan friars). Katherine gave it to one of her longest-serving servants of the chamber, a niece of Pedro Morales (her treasurer),
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to deliver to the prioress of the nunnery of the Virgin and St Francis, at Aldgate, on the eastern edge of the City of London.
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But Morales retained both the queen’s letter and the headdress and declared before a public notary that the latter belonged to his daughter. Katherine asked Ferdinand to reprimand her treasurer ‘for such want of respect’.
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Fernández, the queen’s confessor, reported that the queen had ‘brought forth prematurely a daughter without any pain except that one knee pained her the night before’. The matter had been kept a closely
guarded secret except for ‘the king, my lord, two Spanish women, a physician and I’. Even Caroz, the Spanish ambassador, had been forbidden by Katherine to speak of the matter.
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The most startling news followed: ‘The physician said that her highness remained pregnant of another child and it was believed and kept secret.’ The queen tried to conceal it but
… her belly became swollen so much as never was seen in a pregnant woman.
Her highness denies it to all the world and to the king but to me she has [said] she is since three months pregnant …
All the physicians know and affirm it and a Spanish woman who is in her private chamber told me the same thing from secret signs that they have.
Her highness is very healthy and is the most beautiful creature in the world with the greatest gaiety and contentment that ever was.
The king, my lord, adores her and her highness him.
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Then the swelling decreased – it was probably a post-natal infection of the womb – and Katherine’s menstrual periods resumed. Although the pretence of a new pregnancy was maintained for a while, these were false hopes, born of wishful thinking.
Now the lie of a fresh pregnancy – if lie it was – had to be confronted. Caroz complained bitterly about those who suggested
… that a menstruating woman was pregnant and … make her withdraw publicly for her delivery.
The privy councillors of the king are very vexed and angry at this mistake – as they have said to me – although from courtesy they give the blame to the bedchamber women who gave the queen to understand that she was pregnant when she was not.
I have asked them … [that] they and the king should comfort and console the queen who might perhaps be sad and disconsolate as she had desired to gladden the king and the people with a prince.
I know that many of the privy councillors and other persons are murmuring and they presume that since the queen is not pregnant, she is incapable of conceiving …
I have spoken with the king as to what we are to say of the queen’s confinement. They find the case so difficult that they do not know what to determine.
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Caroz was painfully aware of more bad news for Katherine, probably leaked to him by Francesca de Carceres, one of the queen’s former attendants.
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While she was sequestered in Greenwich for her confinement, her husband’s eye had begun to rove salaciously over the coquettish young women surrounding him at court.
Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, had two sisters who served as ladies-in-waiting to the queen. Elizabeth, the elder, was married to Robert Radcliffe, Lord Fitzwalter, and twenty-seven-year-old Anne was the newly-wed wife of George, Lord Hastings.
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‘The one of them,’ Caroz reported to Miguel de Almazan, First Secretary of State to Ferdinand, ‘is the favourite of the queen and the other … is much liked by the king,
who went after her
.’
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It is all too easy to speculate that Henry’s affair with Anne lay behind the decision to create her younger brother, Henry Lord Stafford, Earl of Wiltshire on 3 February.
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Another rumour circulating at court was that William Compton, who had happily recovered from his jousting accident, was involved in an illicit relationship with Lady Hastings. It seems more likely that as Henry’s close confidant, Compton’s liaison was merely a smokescreen to conceal the king’s own dalliance with the stunningly beautiful dark-haired girl. Unfortunately, her elder sister got wind of events and consulted both Buckingham and Anne’s husband as to the proper course of action – perhaps Elizabeth Fitzwalter also sneakily told Katherine of her husband’s infidelity. Caroz excitedly related its denouement:
Whilst the duke was in the private apartment of his sister who was suspected [of intriguing] with the king, Compton came there to talk with her.
[He] saw the duke, who intercepted him, quarrelled with him and the end of it was that he was severely reproached in many and very hard words.
Buckingham heatedly told the courtier: ‘Women of the Stafford family are no game for Comptons,’ and added tellingly: ‘no, nor for Tudors either!’ No doubt the duke’s angry words were backed up with his fists – such was his reputation for violent anger. Caroz takes up the story again:
The king was so offended at this that he reprimanded the duke angrily.
The same night the duke left the palace and did not enter or return there for some days.
At the same time, the husband of the lady went away, carried her off and placed her in a convent sixty miles [96.5 km] off that no one may see her.
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Henry was beside himself with fury – probably more than anything at almost getting caught in flagrante delicto – and immediately threw Elizabeth and her husband out of the palace precincts. He suspected there were some around him who had been spying on him on Katherine’s behalf and ‘the king would have liked to turn all of them out, only that it has appeared to him too great a scandal’.
It was Henry and Katherine’s first major marital row, with her reputedly weeping and ranting at her husband.
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Caroz declared that ‘almost all the court knew that the queen had been vexed with the king and the king with her and thus this storm went on between them’. She also frequently demonstrated her own fiery Iberian brand of ill-will towards Henry’s favourite William Compton.
Fernández, the queen’s confessor, steadfastly denied anything had happened and the ambassador branded him ‘stubborn’ and ‘deranged’. Moreover, ‘as the English ladies of this household, as well as the Spanish who are near the queen, are rather simple, I fear lest the queen should behave ill in this ado’.
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The sound and fury of that ‘ado’ may explain Henry’s half-hearted, if not somewhat callous, letter to Ferdinand after his wife’s miscarriage – written the same day as Katherine revealed to him her sad news. The king explained that he had not ‘written of late because nothing has happened worth telling’. He and his queen ‘are perfectly happy and his kingdom enjoys undisturbed tranquillity’. Henry wished ‘like a good son’ for more news from his ‘good father’ in Spain. It was composed
sulkily, out of duty, almost as a pro forma communication written by a guilty son to a stern father-in-law.
Katherine’s loss of her daughter came hard on the heels of a new treaty of alliance and friendship with France,
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which some saw as a double blow to Spain’s cause at the court of Henry VIII.
Caroz believed that the king’s ministers were in the pay of France and he begged Henry to tell him ‘which of them are the most trustworthy, because suspicions are rife in all quarters’. The king pondered for a moment and then replied: ‘Do not speak with anyone except with the Bishop of Winchester [Richard Fox, Lord Privy Seal] about French affairs.’
The Spaniard asked the king: ‘Do you confide in him?’ and Henry replied, ‘Yes, at my risk. Here in England they think he is a fox and such is his name.’
Caroz claimed that when the English learnt ‘how arrogantly the French had behaved … and how they threatened and boasted on account of the treaty they had concluded with England, they were offended’. But Henry’s ministers believed they had no choice but to sign the peace treaty with France ‘because the king being young and not having a son, it would have been dangerous to engage in a war with France’. However, court gossip suggested that the king was against signing the treaty, but that
some of his most intimate councillors insisted so much … that he at last gave way. The Duke of Buckingham and many others are mortal enemies of the French. It is due to their influence that the treaty was not concerted in a more offensive manner.
Caroz quickly sought a parallel alliance with Spain, asking Henry: ‘Sire, why do we not conclude a closer union … ?’ The king said he wished for nothing better and ordered ‘three or four’ councillors to be delegated to negotiate a new treaty.
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The envoy shrewdly observed that Henry ‘does not like to occupy himself much with business’. It was always difficult to capture and hold his attention in dealing with important state papers, unless they concerned an issue that interested him. The king’s preferred time for processing documents was during Mass, before the consecration of the
Host, and just before bed. Most were read out to him and decisions transacted by word of mouth. ‘The king,’ complained his counsellors, ‘is young and does not care to occupy himself with anything but the pleasures of his age. All other affairs he neglects.’
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The ambassador enlarged on this theme in a second dispatch to Spain, written immediately afterwards:
The king amuses himself almost every day of the week with running the ring, and with jousts and tournaments on foot, in which one single person fights with an appointed adversary.
Two days in the week are consecrated to this kind of tournament, which is to continue till the Feast of St John. The combatants are clad in breastplates, and wear a particular kind of helmet. They use lances of fourteen hands’-breadth[s] long, with blunt iron points.
They throw these lances at one another [
sic
] and fight afterwards with two-handed swords, each of the combatants dealing twelve strokes.
They are separated from one another by a barrier which reaches up to the girdle, in order to prevent them from seizing one another and wrestling.

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