A Journey Through Tudor England (25 page)

A series of draconian new laws from 1571 to 1593 clamped down on this potential fifth column. In 1585, it became treason for any Catholic priest, ordained by the Pope’s authority, to enter England, and for any person to give him aid or shelter. Yet, Catholicism remained strong in some quarters, especially among sections of the nobility and gentry who had the resources and wherewithal to hide priests from the eyes of the authorities. Humphrey Packington was one such man.

Like many others, Packington engaged the services of the master craftsman and Oxford carpenter Nicholas Owen to construct an elaborate series of concealed hiding places, or priest’s holes, to provide safe haven during raids by priest hunters, known as the Pursuivants. The first hide you’ll see at Harvington is to the left of the fireplace in the Withdrawing Room. It retains its original ladder (now in the alcove on the other side of the fireplace) and creates a hide above the bread oven in the kitchen. In the Great Chamber, there is a primitive hiding place above the ceiling to the north-west corner of the chamber, accessed from the Great Staircase. Two of the five stairs that lead down from the Nine
Worthies Passage to the staircase can be raised (they’re very heavy!) to reveal the large inner hiding place, with a spyhole into the Great Chamber itself.

One of Owen’s most ingenious hides is in Dr Dodd’s library: so ingenious, it remained hidden for centuries and was only discovered in 1894. Five feet from the floor, once behind a book cupboard, it is hidden behind a beam that hangs on a pivot: once the lower end is pressed, the beam releases to swing up revealing a hole big enough — eight feet long, two feet wide and six feet high — to conceal several priests. The bottom of the beam could then be bolted from the inside and the books replaced, concealing the hiders in the very walls of the building.

In the chapel, used from 1590, you can pick up the floorboards to reveal a ‘secret corner’: not big enough for a man but sufficient to hide the ‘Massing stuff’ of the forbidden Catholic Mass, while in the Marble Room, the entire fireplace is fake — even to the point of smoke-blackened bricks — and designed as a bolt-hole up into a large hiding place in the roof.

We don’t know whether Owen’s handicraft was ever needed; there is no evidence of a raid at Harvington, but elsewhere the hides were lifesavers. Baddesley Clinton in Warwickshire was searched in 1591 when priests John Gerard, Robert Southwell and Henry Garnet were concealed there. The Pursuivants left unsatisfied, and John Gerard, who later made a daring escape from the Tower of London, lived to tell the tale.

This was not, however, always the case. Edmund Campion and two other priests were at the home of the Yate family at Lyford Grange near Wantage when it was raided in July 1581. They hid but, by chance, one among the searchers ‘espied a chink in the wall of boards’ above the stairwell, and when it was found to be hollow, the Pursuivants broke in. Campion was escorted to the Tower, where he was repeatedly racked and had all his nails pulled out. In
November 1581, he was hanged, drawn and quartered before the crowds at Tyburn.

Campion was not the only one to be caught, as carvings in the Tower of London make clear. In fact, 129 priests and 36 laymen were executed for treason between 1577 and 1603. Nicholas Owen himself would later be arrested and tortured to death in the Tower. In light of this, Elizabeth’s reputation for religious toleration must be considered an exaggeration.

‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’

I
t all began on 22 August 1485: the day the Tudor dynasty was founded (although for political reasons — so that those who fought against him could be declared traitors — Henry VII would later date the commencement of his reign to 21 August). But it was on 22 August that Richard III was killed in battle, and Henry Tudor became Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch.

Historians have argued over the exact location of the battlefield, which was somewhere in the vicinity of Ambion Hill, less than two miles south of Market Bosworth in Leicestershire. In 2009, the Heritage Lottery Fund funded a metal detection project to unearth the site. The results of this work suggested it was near Fenn Hill Farm on private land, about two miles away from the previously identified spot. Sadly, it is also therefore two miles away from the Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre and not accessible to the public. Yet one field can look very much like another and this award-winning, child-friendly museum and heritage trail best commemorate the event, telling the story and, most importantly, displaying objects found on the battlefield from the day that Henry Tudor ended 331 years of Plantagenet rule.

Our impression of Bosworth, and the events leading up to it, has been significantly shaped by Shakespeare’s
Richard III
, a version of events written to please the victorious Tudor dynasty. In it, Richard III emerges as a ‘deformed’ villain, whose last, lamenting speech — ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ — is renowned. The truth is that Henry Tudor had only the feeblest of claims to the throne, and was certainly no more entitled to the throne than Richard himself.

Henry Tudor was born in Wales to Edmund Tudor, first Earl of Richmond (son of Owen Tudor and Catherine de Valois) and Margaret Beaufort. It is through his mother that Henry derived his claim to the Crown: she was the great-great-granddaughter of Edward III. The Beauforts had been legitimised by Act of Parliament under Richard II, but both this act and Henry VI’s declaration of 1407 made it clear that this legitimisation did not extend to inheriting the throne — a fact that Henry Tudor conveniently ignored when the time was right.

We know of Henry’s early life only in fragments. He never met his father, who died three months before his birth at Pembroke Castle on 28 January 1457. He spent the first four years of his life at Pembroke, before his mother married again, at which point Henry went to Raglan Castle, in Wales, as the ward of William, Lord Herbert. In 1470, Henry made one visit to England before his fight for its Crown, and had an audience with Henry VI. When Edward IV won back the throne in 1471 in the Wars of the Roses, Henry Tudor fled the country with his uncle, Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke. They landed in the duchy of Brittany, where they remained for thirteen years, first as asylum seekers and later under virtual house arrest. So far, so inauspicious, for a future king of England.

Meanwhile, in April 1483, Edward IV died suddenly. His eldest son and heir — Edward V — was still a child, and his uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, quickly acted to put the young King and his
brother, Richard, Duke of York, in the Tower of London. (For years their fate was unknown, until the bones of young boys were found in the Tower in 1674.) Gloucester, in a transparent display of self-aggrandisement, declared that the boys were illegitimate and that therefore he was the rightful heir to the Crown. He was crowned on 6 July.

Richard’s actions provoked an outcry from various quarters, especially after the young boys mysteriously failed to be seen in public. In an atmosphere of near-open rebellion, Henry Tudor sensed his moment. Inspired by his resourceful mother (whose own claims to the Crown were overlooked), with support in England and with Francis, Duke of Brittany’s help, Henry declared that he would fight Richard for the throne. He also swore, in Rennes Cathedral on Christmas Day 1483, that as soon as he became king, he would marry Elizabeth, Edward IV’s eldest daughter, thereby uniting the Wars of the Roses’ two feuding families.

In April 1484, Richard III’s son and heir, Prince Edward, died at the age of seven. Knowing that this put him in greater danger, and capitalising on the illness of the Duke of Brittany, Richard reached an agreement with Peter Landois, the treasurer of Brittany, in which Landois would surrender Henry Tudor to him. But Henry caught wind of the plot and managed to escape, using the classic ploy of dressing as a servant. He assembled his English followers and on 1 August 1485, having raised an army of some 4,000 men, he set sail from the Seine, bound for Milford Haven. Once he had landed, he marched east, collecting rebel troops along the way. The King mustered an army of at least 10,000, and by Sunday 21 August both sides had set up camp near Ambion Hill, ready for the battle that would follow.

The story of the clash is told to dramatic effect at Bosworth today. King Richard, with his superior numbers and cannon, looked set to conquer the rebel forces under the leadership of the Earl of Oxford. But a combination of Henry’s superior strategic
formation, and the reluctance of Richard’s men (namely the Earl of Northumberland and the Stanley family) to commit to his cause, thwarted Richard’s assured victory.

With divine confidence, Richard decided to take matters into his own hands, and bravely charged across the battlefield to engage directly with Henry’s own vanguard. He cut down and killed Henry’s standard-bearer, to come within feet of Henry himself. Henry’s saviour came in the form of Sir William Stanley, who at that moment traitorously threw in his lot with the rebels and raced into the battlefield with his men to engage Richard’s troops. In doing so, he rescued Henry from sure defeat and disaster.

Fighting boldly to the last, Richard was cornered, unhorsed and swiftly demolished. Henry was proclaimed king: legend has it that Reginald Bray, finding Richard’s gold circlet in a nearby thorn bush, crowned Henry on the battlefield. In a little less than two hours, the fight was over; the Tudor had won. To this day, Richard remains the last English king to have died in battle, and the only one to do so on English soil since Harold was (or was not) shot through the eye by William the Conqueror’s archers at Hastings.

At Bosworth’s Heritage Centre, they have a collection of objects found at the battlefield, which together evocatively conjure up that eventful day: from shot to belt buckles, coins to horse harness pendants. The crucial object, however, is a silver gilt badge depicting a boar: Richard III’s badge, lost for years under the soil where he met his unhappy end.

This was the decisive day. Henry Tudor had become King Henry VII. When, towards the end of his life, he built his chapel at Westminster Abbey, Henry envisaged that the moment would be forever commemorated atop the shrine of Edward the Confessor by a gold-plated statue of him kneeling in full armour and holding aloft the crown he had received that day. The statue was never made, but the dynasty that Henry established that Monday in August 1485 has never been forgotten.

‘There is no Lady in this land that I better love and like.’

S
itting atop a hill, stunning in its symmetry and glinting in the sun, Hardwick Hall is one of the most spectacular buildings of the Elizabethan age. It was built by the most remarkable non-royal woman of the long Tudor century: Bess of Hardwick.

Bess was born in a manor farmhouse at the Old Hall at Hardwick in 1527, her humble origins as the daughter of minor gentry not betraying the fact that she would one day become the richest and most powerful woman in England after the Queen. Her father died before she was seven months old and, aged twelve, Bess was sent to learn noble ways from the Zouche family of Codnor Castle in Derbyshire. Here, before she turned sixteen, she had met and married Robert Barlow, the first of her four husbands. However, before the couple had ‘bedded together’, Barlow died and the young Bess began the first of many fights for her rights — in this case, her widow’s dower of £30 a year.