Henry (4 page)

The French court went to Normandy. There, with Henry Tudor present alongside the French king, the provincial estates voted taxation to finance his conquest of England. Men and ships followed. On 1 August 1485 the little armada set sail from Honfleur for Milford Haven.

England, Henry Tudor hoped, would be taken through Wales; it would also have to be conquered by French troops, since Englishmen made up less than a fifth of his army of
two or three thousand. This too was lucky, for French infantry tactics were considerably ahead of English.

Henry Tudor came face to face with Richard III’s army at Bosworth in Leicestershire. Richard’s army was much bigger. But, inhibited by a justifiable fear of treachery, the king’s leadership had been uncharacteristically confused and indecisive. The night before the battle he was also troubled by dreadful dreams, and slept badly. As 22 August dawned, however, Richard III recovered himself: it was, he realized, all or nothing.

Twice Richard III launched his forces against Henry Tudor’s little army. In the first attack, the king’s vanguard broke against Henry Tudor’s front line which, stiffened by his seasoned French pikemen, had assumed a dense, wedge-shaped formation.

Richard III’s army was now on the back foot. But the king thought he saw a way to retrieve the situation. He caught sight of Henry Tudor with only a small detachment of troops and at some distance from the rest of his army. The chance was too good to miss, and Richard III decided to try to end the battle at a single stroke by felling his opponent in combat, man-to-man.

There followed the second assault, led by Richard III himself.

For the last time in England, a king in full armour and wearing his battle crown and surcoat of the royal arms charged at the head of his heavily-armed and mounted
household knights. The impact, psychological as well as physical, must have been terrifying. But, once again, Henry Tudor’s pikemen assumed a defensive position – this time in squares – and protected him against the first shock. How long they could have continued to do so is an open question.

At this moment of utmost need, fortune once again smiled on Henry Tudor. Lord Stanley and his brother Sir William had brought a substantial army of their own followers to the battle. Hitherto – torn between their allegiance to York and Stanley’s position as Lady Margaret Beaufort’s husband – their forces had held aloof. But now Sir William Stanley charged to rescue his nephew by marriage.

That carried the day. Richard III, despite overwhelming odds, fought on, cutting down Henry Tudor’s standard-bearer and coming within reach of Henry himself. But finally numbers told. Richard III was unhorsed, run through and hacked to death. His naked, muddy and mutilated body was slung across a horse and put on public display before receiving a hasty burial. Meantime, his battle crown, which had fallen off in the struggle and become caught in a hawthorn bush, was retrieved and put on the victor’s head by Lord Stanley.

Henry Tudor, the only surviving and improbably remote heir of Lancaster, was king.

Events now moved at breakneck speed. On 27 August 1485 Henry VII, as he now was, entered London and offered up his battle standards at St Paul’s, on 30 October he was
crowned, and a week later, on 7 November, he met parliament. Its first act was to confirm his title to the throne, though without going into awkward details about his exact hereditary claim, while its last, just before it was prorogued on 10 December, was to petition him to marry Elizabeth of York. ‘Which marriage,’ the speaker declared, ‘they hoped God would bless with a progency of the race of kings, to the great satisfaction of the whole realm.’
10

Five weeks later, the deed was done.

The story of how Henry Tudor survived against the odds, and won his throne and his bride against even greater odds, is one of the world’s great adventure stories. It made possible our Henry’s very existence. But, in the fullness of time, it would also present him with a problem. For his relations with his father were to be complex at best. Yet he could not deny the greatness of his achievement. Indeed, even forty years later he would take him as the yardstick against which to measure his own record.

As well he might. His father had won his throne in battle, in man-to-man combat with his rival. And he would defend it in battle twice more. It was the ultimate test of kingship – and of manhood.

Would Henry be able to do more? Would he be able to do as much?

T
HE WEDDING OF
H
ENRY’S PARENTS
was followed by scenes of popular rejoicing. ‘The people,’ Bernard André writes in his contemporary life of Henry VII, ‘constructed bonfires far and wide to show their gladness and the City of London was filled with dancing, singing and entertainment.’
1
At last, and after so long, it was possible to hope for peace.

But the marriage was only the first step to the union of the roses. To complete it, the royal couple needed children: the ‘progeny of the race of kings’ to which the speaker had looked forward in his petition of 10 December 1485.

And, bearing in mind the uncertainty of the times, they needed them quickly. Here again Henry VII’s extraordinary luck held. Among his immediate predecessors, Henry VI had
had to wait almost eight years for a son, and even the strapping Edward IV for six. Elizabeth of York, instead, gave Henry VII his son and heir within eight months.

He was named Arthur, and the king idolized him. Arthur was unique. Matchless. Perfect in body and mind. Nothing was too good for him, and no limit was placed on the hopes invested in him. He would be more honourably brought up than any king’s son in England before. And, in time, he would outdo them all. Never, in short, have so many eggs been placed in one basket.

In time, his father’s unapologetic favouritism towards his elder brother would be deeply invidious to Henry. But, in a backhanded way, it gave him space. He was never allowed to share Arthur’s glory. But equally, Arthur was never on his back either. Nor was his father. It was a
quid pro quo
that was to have profound effects for both Henry’s upbringing and his character.

All queens, of course, were expected to bear children: that – as many of Henry’s wives would find to their cost – was their job. But in 1486 the pressures on Elizabeth of York had been particularly intense, as André makes clear in his account: ‘Both men and women prayed to Almighty God that the king and queen would be favoured with offspring, and that eventually a child might be conceived and a new prince be born, so that they might heap up further joys upon their present delights.’

The prayers were answered. And sooner than anybody dared hope. For ‘the fairest queen’ became pregnant almost immediately:
non multis post diebus
(‘after only a few days’).

The celebrations for Elizabeth of York’s pregnancy were, André claims, almost greater than those for the wedding itself. Everyone, high and low, in court and country and church and state joined in:

For the queen, no doubt, the joy was mingled with relief. But Henry VII knew nothing of such modest emotions. Instead, his forthcoming fatherhood only opened up new prospects: greater, grander even than anything yet.

The birth of his first child, the king decided, would be no ordinary affair. It would take place at Winchester. And it would invoke the atmosphere of history and romance that hung around the place. For Winchester was believed to be the site of King Arthur’s castle and capital of Camelot. After all, as Caxton had just pointed out in his new edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s
Morte d’Arthur
, published only the month before Bosworth, the Round Table itself was still there to prove it.
3

Then, having been born in Arthur’s capital, the child would be christened Arthur too, and Britain’s golden age would be renewed.

It was a giddy prospect indeed. But it depended on one enormous assumption: that the child the queen was carrying was a son. Presumably the royal doctors and astrologers had declared this to be the case. And the king must have believed them. For if he were not confident that the child could be christened Arthur, what was the point of dragging the court, the heavily pregnant queen, and the whole bulky apparatus of royal ceremonial some sixty-odd miles to Winchester, over roads that had turned into muddy quagmires in the torrential autumn rains?
4

It was a tremendous gamble (imagine the shame and confusion if the child had turned out to be a girl!). Yet the gamble paid off, as Henry VII’s gambles always seemed to.

But only just. The court arrived at Winchester at the beginning of September. Less than three weeks later, Elizabeth of York went into labour and the child was born in the early hours of 20 September 1486, ‘afore one o’clock after midnight’, as Lady Margaret Beaufort noted in her book of hours.
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The birth was at least a month premature.

Perhaps the queen had been shaken by the journey, in her gaily decorated but springless carriage or, when the going got really rough, in her litter slung between two horses. Or perhaps it was merely the difficulties of a first pregnancy.

* * *

But at least the child was healthy, and – above all – it was the promised boy. The
Te Deum
was sung in the cathedral, bonfires lit in the streets and messengers sent off with the good news to the four corners of the kingdom.
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It remained only to get the ceremonies of his baptism – dislocated by his premature birth – back on track. The main problem was the whereabouts of the intended godfather, the earl of Oxford. He was still at Lavenham, the immensely rich cloth-making town that was the jewel in the crown of the de Vere family’s principal estates in Suffolk. Lavenham was over a hundred miles from Winchester, and the roads were getting slower by the hour as the rains continued. To give Oxford time to make the journey, the christening was put back to Sunday, 24 September.

On the day appointed, the other actors assembled: the prince’s procession formed in his mother’s apartments; while the clergy and his godmother, the queen dowager Elizabeth Woodville, who had been restored to the title and lands which had been forfeit under Richard III, prepared to receive the baby in the cathedral. The earl, they were then informed, was ‘within a mile’. It was decided to wait for him.

They kept on waiting. And waiting.

Finally, after ‘three hours largely and more’, and with still no sight of Oxford, Henry VII intervened. As protocol dictated, the king was out of sight. But he was never out of touch, and, losing patience at last, he ordered the ceremonies to begin. The prince was named and baptised with a substitute godparent, Thomas Stanley, the king’s stepfather, who
had been made earl of Derby as a reward for his family’s behaviour at Bosworth, as his sponsor.
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At this moment, Oxford entered. John de Vere, 13th earl of Oxford, was probably the most powerful man in England after the king; he was certainly the noblest, with an earldom going back to 1142. He had been a Lancastrian loyalist even in the dark days after the destruction of the house of Lancaster at Tewkesbury in 1471, and had been imprisoned by Edward IV. In 1484 he escaped and joined Henry Tudor in France. Almost all of his other supporters were tarnished with accommodation at the least with Edward IV; Oxford was unblemished and Henry, who trusted so few, felt he could trust him implicitly, as one ‘in whom he might repose his hope, and settle himself more safely than in any other’.
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It was a relationship that endured, and Oxford became both Henry VII’s most important military commander and – by virtue of his hereditary office of lord great chamberlain, to which he was restored – his leading courtier as well.

Oxford now assumed his intended role in the ceremonies. He ‘took the prince in his right arm’ – the arm that had fought so often for Lancaster – and presented him for his Confirmation. That done, another procession formed and the child was carried to the shrine of St Swithun, the patron saint of the cathedral, in whose honour more anthems were sung.

The adults then took refreshments – ‘spices and hypocras, with other sweet wines [in] great plenty’ – while the prince
was handed back to the Lady Cecily, the queen’s eldest sister, who carried him home in triumph with ‘all the torches burning’. The procession passed through the nursery, ‘the king’s trumpets and minstrels playing on their instruments’, and brought him at last to his father and mother, who gave him their blessing.

Arthur’s christening was the first of the many spectacular ceremonies that Henry VII used to mark each stage of the advance and consolidation of the Tudor dynasty. Like its successors, it was carefully planned, staged and recorded. It also showed Henry VII’s bold eye for theatre – and his willingness to take the risks that all great theatre involves.

Finally, and above all, its scale and ambition make clear why Henry’s own christening ceremonies at Greenwich, which were almost domestic in comparison, were so comprehensively ignored by contemporaries.

The court remained at Winchester for the next five or six weeks. Partly this was out of necessity. The queen was ill with an ‘ague’, which was almost certainly a
post-partum
fever following a difficult birth, and was taking time to recover. Indeed, she seems to have attributed her recovery and her child’s survival only to the attentions of Alice Massy, her
obstetrix
or midwife, whom she insisted on using for all her future births. There were also the formalities of her ‘churching’, or ceremonial purification from the pollution of childbirth, to go through. For most women, the church
would only perform the ceremony after sixty days had elapsed from the time of delivery. For the queen this was normally abbreviated to about forty, as indeed seems to have been the case on this occasion.
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The time appears to have been put to good use as well to finalize the details of Arthur’s upbringing during his infancy – and perhaps beyond.

The basic arrangements for the upbringing of the little prince were already in place. One of the ladies who had attended the christening was ‘my lady Darcy, lady mistress’. This was Elizabeth, Lady Darcy, the widow of Sir Robert Darcy. She was the best-qualified person possible for the job, since she had fulfilled the same function, which carried overall charge of the royal nursery, for Edward IV’s eldest son, Edward.
10
The substantial fee, of 40 marks, or
£
26.13
s
.4
d
a year, was commensurate with the responsibilities of the post.

Almost as well paid, with
£
20 per annum, was Arthur’s wet-nurse, Catherine Gibbs, who as was then customary suckled the boy on his mother’s behalf.
11
This was double the amount that would be paid to the nurses of subsequent royal children, including Henry himself, and it was a sum which the cash-strapped exchequer of these years frequently had difficulty in raising. But Catherine became expert at extorting it. On one occasion she resorted to a sob-story. The treasurer was instructed to pay the
£
10 outstanding on the nail as Catherine ‘is now in Our Lady’s bonds nigh the time of her deliverance’ – in other words, she too was pregnant
and near term. Assisting Catherine were Arthur’s two ‘rockers’, Agnes Butler and Evelyn Hobbes, whose job was to rock the prince in his cradle.
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No doubt Lady Darcy was
the
practical expert on the Yorkist nursery. But many others in Winchester for Arthur’s christening were well informed as well. Elizabeth Woodville, the queen dowager, had been instrumental in setting it up. Elizabeth of York had been on the receiving end as a conscientious eldest daughter. But most interesting is the role of John Alcock, bishop of Worcester, who had just christened Arthur ‘in pontificals’ or full priestly vestments.
13

Alcock belonged to the other elite of late medieval England. Aristocrats and gentlemen, like Oxford, supplied the brawn and (occasionally) the beauty and style in public life; the brains and organization came from university-educated clergymen like Alcock.

Their origins were from almost the opposite end of the social spectrum to Oxford: they owed their position to talent and education, not pedigree and breeding, and they wielded their authority by the pen, not the sword. But, despite its very different sources, their power was commensurate with that of the titled aristocracy. They had a virtual monopoly on the two greatest offices in the council, the positions of lord chancellor and lord privy seal; they even had comparable incomes, since the richest bishoprics, like Canterbury and Winchester, which enjoyed princely revenues, were generally reserved for them.