Henry (25 page)

There was one item of business, however, that had not waited for Henry VII’s funeral. It was too important, and touched Henry too deeply.

It was his marriage.

No one was more surprised than the Spanish ambassador, Fuensalida. Back the previous autumn, he had noted Catherine of Aragon’s conviction that Henry would treat her better than his father. Fuensalida ‘hopes to God that this will be the case’. But he is none too optimistic: ‘because, speaking frankly, the prince is not considered to be a very genial person’.

Now this not ‘very genial person’ held Catherine’s fate in his hands. Catherine, for her part, seems to have worked hard at maintaining contact with the youth she persisted in
regarding as her husband, and she showered him with gifts of jewellery. On 1 January 1504, she gave him a gold collar enamelled with red and white roses; on 1 January 1506, a ring with a pointed diamond; and on 1 January 1507 ‘a goodly girdle [belt] of white satin’ with a gold buckle of Spanish work. Henry gave Catherine in turn ‘a ring with an emerald’ on 1 January 1506, and ‘a fair rose of rubies set in a rose white and green’ on 1 January 1508.

At first sight, the exchanges look touching. But this alas was hardly the stuff of true love, since both of Henry’s gifts to Catherine were recycled presents he had received from others. And he was just as unsentimental with Catherine’s own presents, no fewer than three of which he gave to his father as
his
New Year’s gift in 1507, 1508 and 1509.
12

There were apparently more substantial problems as well, and on 24 April Fuensalida reported that he had ‘been told that a member of the king’s council has said that [the marriage] is unlikely because from what they know of Henry it would burden his conscience to marry his brother’s widow’.
13

In the fullness of time, these phrases – about his conscience and his brother’s widow – were to become the leitmotifs of Henry’s case against his first marriage. But, for almost two decades, we hear nothing more of them.

Did Henry suppress his doubts? Had he forgotten them? Did he even utter them in the first place? Or were his views invented, or at any rate glossed, by a hostile councillor?

We do not know.

* * *

Three or four days later, however, the council put out feelers to the Spanish ambassador, and negotiations reopened in earnest. Throughout, the council – which was supposed to be devoting itself to the arrangements for the interment of the dead king – was careful to keep Fuensalida at a distance and transact business through individual councillors as intermediaries.

But the ruse was transparent, and on 1 May the king’s secretary Ruthall himself came to see Fuensalida. ‘Their conversation concluded,’ Fuensalida reported, ‘the king’s secretary returned to Henry VIII and his council and related the conversation back to them.’ Actually, what seems to have happened was that Ruthall, who had been attending Henry in the Tower, now travelled to Richmond to join the rest of the council. That same day, along with his fellow councillors and executors, he signed a warrant authorizing the issue of another
£
2,000 for Henry VII’s funeral expenses and led the discussion at the council board on Henry’s marriage.
14

The outcome (probably in the absence of Archbishop Warham, who seems to have been the most doubtful of the legality of the marriage) was favourable. This led to the dispatch of an even more powerful delegation, consisting of Lord Privy Seal Foxe as well as Ruthall, both of whom turned up at Fuensalida’s lodgings on 3 May. Foxe, as was his wont, took charge and cut through the fog of diplomacy. It was a new reign, he emphasized, with a new king who had none of the baggage of the old. They should take advantage of that and make a fresh start. Each side should be frank with
the other; put their cards on the table and aim for a quick agreement.

At this point Foxe became confidential. Fuensalida, he told the ambassador in secret, ‘should inform Ferdinand [of Aragon] that he was going to advise Henry that he should make up his mind to marry Catherine quickly and before people started to interfere in the matter and construct obstacles’. ‘The king’s council,’ Foxe added, ‘were currently in favour of the marriage.’ He left hanging in the air the thought that this might soon change.

Then he pressed the point home. ‘If Ferdinand
did
intend to agree to the marriage’, Foxe concluded, he should strike while the iron was hot.

On 8 May, just as Henry VII’s funeral ceremonies got under way, agreement was reached: negotiations that had dragged on for nearly seven years were settled in almost as many days.
15

The inwardness of what happened will probably never be known. But the issue of Henry’s adulthood must be an important part of the story. The council had taken away with one hand in the matter of patronage, where the reimposition of the old rules about signed bills treated Henry as a minor in tutelage. But, in railroading through Henry’s marriage, the council gave back with the other hand. And more. For a married king – and soon, no doubt, to be the father of an heir –
was
an adult king.

Who could doubt it?

Indeed, the symmetry is such that it almost looks as though Henry’s marriage was a
quid pro quo
for his acquiescence in the limitations on his patronage. Or perhaps – and what amounts to much the same thing – it was a diversionary tactic shrewdly calculated to stop Henry brooding too much on his real place in affairs of state – or the lack of it.

In either case, it’s clear why Bishop Foxe made himself the real author of the marriage, and what he thought he and his fellow councillors were going to get out of it.

In the short term at least he was not disappointed.

The inevitable delays in communications with Spain, where Ferdinand, who was normally so quick on the uptake, rather struggled to keep pace with the speed of events in England, meant that it took another month before the diplomatic niceties were complete. On 8 June Warham, whatever his private doubts, issued the necessary marriage licence. And three days later, on 11 June, Henry and Catherine were married at Greenwich. The ceremony took place in the queen’s closet or oratory, and was small-scale and private. The names of only two witnesses are known – Lord Steward Shrewsbury and William Thomas, groom of the privy chamber.

Thomas had previously served Henry’s elder brother Arthur in the same capacity, and had attended him when he went to sleep with Catherine.

What tales did he tell? Or did he observe a valet’s discretion?

H
ENRY WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE
to find those May days of 1509 intoxicating. William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, Henry’s companion of studies and the mentor of his teenage years, was perhaps the man who knew the young king best. He had been with him at Richmond when his father died; had accompanied him on that strange, half-secret ride to the Tower and thence, with relief, to Greenwich. He seems also to have been a party to the deadly factioneering in the last days of the old reign and the first of the new, and hinted darkly at his recent ‘many occupations and other special causes which I dared not commit to writing’. He was even – at the moment that Henry was tying the knot with Catherine of Aragon – courting one of her Spanish ladies, who was shortly to become his second wife.
1

But now, on 27 May 1509,
ex praetorio Grenuuici
(‘from the palace of Greenwich’), Mountjoy was sufficiently at leisure to write a long letter to his old teacher and friend, Erasmus, who was staying, not altogether happily, in Rome.

The letter is of course written in Latin. But an almost boyish enthusiasm and wonderment keep bursting through the rolling, grandiloquent phrases.

For Mountjoy had witnessed an epiphany.

‘
Our
prince’, Mountjoy writes proprietorially, as he is sure Erasmus has heard already, has ‘succeeded to his father’s throne’. He is
Henricus Octavus
(‘Henry the Eighth’), ‘whom we may well call our
Octavius
’ – that is, the first and greatest Roman emperor, who was afterwards surnamed Augustus.

Those, Mountjoy continues, like Erasmus himself, who knew Henry well, were already familiar with his ‘extraordinary and almost divine character’. But even they have been surprised by ‘what a hero he now shows himself, how wisely he behaves, what a lover he is of justice and goodness, what affection he bears to the learned’. ‘Oh my Erasmus,’ Mountjoy exclaims, ‘if you could see how all the world here is rejoicing in the possession of so great a prince, how his life is all their desire, you could not contain your tears for joy.’

Finally, as if all this were not enough, Mountjoy resorts to the language of prophecy and revelation: ‘The heavens laugh, the earth exults, all things are full of milk, of honey and of nectar! Avarice is expelled the country. Liberality
scatters wealth with bounteous hand. Our king does not desire gold or gems or precious metals, but virtue, glory, immortality.’
2

Virtue, glory, immortality
. It is easy to laugh. Or – bearing in mind what was to happen, not least to Mountjoy himself – to cry. But either reaction would be mistaken. For Mountjoy did not get Henry as wrong as all that. Henry’s youthful innocence, his burning desire to be good, might fade almost as quickly as a summer flower. But the ambition, the determination to be famous, to make a mark in the world – in a word, to be
great
– never altered.

From time to time, it was frustrated and diverted. It might change form. But the driving impulse remained:
he would be
famous
.

And in this at least he succeeded.

But all this was in the future. Back in 1509, Mountjoy had another, personal reason for feeling a little smug. His own father, John, the third baron, had been overwhelmed by the turmoil of the last tumultuous months of Richard III’s reign and had died a bitter and disillusioned man. ‘Live right-wisely,’ his will had enjoined William and his younger brother, ‘and never … take the state of baron upon them if they may lay it from them nor … desire to be great about princes, for it is dangerous.’
3

But the advice fell on deaf ears. William’s galaxy of family connexions had propelled him, almost inevitably, to the
court. He had become ‘great’ round Prince Henry. Indeed, he had helped mould him as much as any man.

Now, it seemed, he was vindicated.

‘I will give you an example,’ Mountjoy’s letter continued, as he reported a recent conversation with the king. ‘The other day [Henry] wished he was more learned. I said, “that is not what we expect of your grace, but that you will foster and encourage learned men”. “Yea surely”, said he, “for indeed without them we should scarcely exist at all!”’

‘What more splendid saying,’ Mountjoy exclaimed, ‘could fall from the lips of a prince?’

Or one, he quickly added, more encouraging to Erasmus. After all, Erasmus did not simply know Henry, but was also ‘intimate, having received from him (as few others have) a letter traced with his own fingers’.

‘Make up your mind,’ Mountjoy exhorted his old teacher, ‘that the last day of your wretchedness has dawned. You will come to a prince who will say: “Accept our wealth and be our great sage!”’

Over twenty years later, Erasmus commented ruefully on his decision: ‘I never made a more unlucky choice.’
4

At the time, however, he leapt at the opportunity and arrived in his friend Thomas More’s household only two months later, in August 1509.