Henry (6 page)

The following morning, Arthur was created prince of Wales in the parliament chamber, and immediately afterwards his sister was baptised in the adjacent church of St
Margaret’s Westminster. She was named Margaret after Lady Margaret Beaufort, who stood as her godmother.

After the christening, the infant Margaret was carried back in triumph to the palace, ‘with noise of trumpets … [and] with Christ’s blessing’.
22
And indeed God (or the stars) seemed to be on the side of the Tudors: the double family event was a powerful signal of their strengthening grip on the throne; it also meant that the first two pieces on the dynastic chessboard were in place.

It remained to be seen how much room there would be for the third child, Henry, whose entry into the world – so understated in comparison with the ceremonies for Arthur and Margaret – followed eighteen months later in June 1491.

I
MMEDIATELY AFTER HIS BIRTH AND CHRISTENING
, Henry, like his elder siblings and indeed almost all elite children from the dawn of time to the beginning of the twentieth century, was handed over to be suckled by his wet-nurse. Her name was Anne Uxbridge, and for the first two years or so of his life she was the person closest to Henry. She would have acted as his surrogate mother emotionally as well as physically, and his very survival depended on her good health and assiduity.

Unfortunately, despite her importance to Henry, almost nothing is known about her. We are even ignorant of her maiden name. She had married into a family of minor Sussex gentry, and within a few years would be widowed and remarried to Walter Luke. Assisting Anne were Henry’s two ‘rockers’, Margaret Draughton and Frideswide Puttenham.
Theirs was a merely menial duty, and they were paid only a third as much as Anne Uxbridge:
£
3.6
s
.8
d
a year as against
£
10 for Henry’s nurse.
1

But, menial or not, at least one of them was to remain around long enough to become a fixture in Henry’s boyhood and youth.

These staffing arrangements were more or less identical to those for Henry’s elder siblings, Arthur and Margaret. And much the same physical provisions would have been made for Henry as well. These are described in great detail in
The
Ryalle Book
.
2
The royal child was to have a nursery apartment consisting of two main interconnecting rooms – an inner or sleeping chamber and an outer or receiving chamber – and smaller service rooms. Dominating both principal chambers were Henry’s cradles, known respectively as the ‘great’ and ‘little’ cradles.

The ‘little cradle’ stood in the inner or sleeping chamber of Henry’s two-room apartment. It was made of painted and gilded wood, and was just under four feet long. There were four silver-gilt pommels, one at each corner, and two similar pommels on top of the U-shaped frame in which the body of the cradle swung. The bedding consisted of a mattress, sheets, pillows and a rich counterpane of cloth-of-gold furred with ermine. Sensibly, two sets of each were provided. There were also five ‘swathing’ bands, each with its silver buckle, to hold the child in place and, it was thought, encourage him to grow straight and strong. Over the cradle hung a ‘sparver’
or canopy, while a traverse, or curtain, could be drawn round it.

And that was the little cradle! The ‘great cradle of estate’, which stood in the outer or receiving chamber, more than lived up to its name. It was a third larger than the other, and covered in cloth-of-gold: the royal arms were placed at its head, rich carpets surrounded it on the floor and its cloth-of-gold canopy was fringed in silk and suspended from a silver-gilt boss.

These features – the cloth-of-gold, canopy and carpets – were the essential elements of the chair of estate, or throne, which stood in the Presence Chamber of Henry’s father and mother. Even when empty, etiquette dictated that the chair be treated with the same respect as though the sovereign or consort sat in it. The same went for Henry’s cradle of estate: gentlemen doffed their hats and bowed; ladies curtsied. And when Henry lay there the bows and curtsies would have been extra deep. Henry might not have been born to a throne. But he was swaddled in the infant equivalent of one.

The equipment of the smaller service rooms of the nursery apartment was more practical, and took account of the fact that the occupant of the nursery was a baby as well as a prince, with the mundane need of all babies for washing, bathing and feeding. There were ‘two great basins of pewter for the laundry in the nursery’, a ‘chafer’ (to heat water) and a brass basin in which to wash the child, and a liquid-and
stain-proof ‘cushion of leather, made like a carving cushion, for the nurse’, on which Anne Uxbridge sat while breast-feeding Henry.
3

Such an infancy – with its wet-nurse and rockers, its cloth-of-gold and ermine, its rituals and deference – seems almost impossibly strange. But then it was par for the royal course: it was neither peculiar to Henry, nor can it have contributed much to what would make him distinctive.

For that we need to look elsewhere, to aspects of Henry’s upbringing that were less bound by rules and conventions. Should he, for instance, be brought up with his elder brother? Or his sister? The choice was a real one, since separate establishments already existed for the two older children.

Arthur, as we have seen, had had his own independent princely household from the earliest days of his infancy. For the first two years or more of his life, it had been based at the bishop of Winchester’s castle-palace at Farnham, Surrey. A year or two later, by the time of Arthur’s creation as prince of Wales, it seems to have moved a score or two miles east and to have been situated in or near Ashford in Kent.
4

Even less is known about the location of Margaret’s much smaller nursery establishment. But it seems a safe bet that it moved from palace to palace with her mother, Elizabeth of York, who normally followed a much less hectic itinerary than her husband, the king. This meant that Margaret was
living at Greenwich at the time of her little brother Henry’s birth elsewhere in the palace. As she was only eighteen months old herself, she still had her wet-nurse, Alice Davy, as well as her rockers, Ann Mayland, Margery Gower and Alice Bywymble.
5

At some point in the latter half of 1491, Margaret was weaned and her nurse, Alice Davy, paid off. This still left her with her three rockers, who were duly paid their half-year wages of
£
1.13
s
.4
d
on 31 December. But the ‘warrant’, or instruction to pay their wages, also lists Henry’s own nursery establishment, headed by Nurse Uxbridge. A similar joint warrant for both Henry and Margaret’s servants was issued a half-year later, in July 1492.
6

What was going on? Henry, it seems clear, had been moved in at birth with his sister Margaret. They always kept their separate rooms and, to begin with, their staffs also retained their distinct identities. But the move towards a collective nursery had begun.

It accelerated in the course of the year. By early July 1492 Henry had a younger sister as well. His mother began her fourth confinement at Sheen (which Henry’s father was later to rename Richmond) in early June. Shortly after, Henry’s maternal grandmother, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, who had been forced into a discontented retirement at Bermondsey Abbey in 1487, died on 8 June. Because of her condition, Elizabeth of York was unable to attend the funeral. Her new daughter, born on 2 July, was christened Elizabeth, after
both her mother and her grandmother. She also seems to have inherited the Woodville good looks.
7

Elizabeth joined Henry and Margaret in the new collective nursery, and a warrant was issued to pay the salaries of all three groups of attendants. First to be named was Cecily Burbage, ‘nurse to our right dearly beloved daughter the Lady Elizabeth’, who enjoyed the accustomed
£
10 per annum; then came the remaining ‘servants attending upon our right dearly well-beloved children, the Lord Henry and the Ladies Margaret and Elizabeth’.
8

Henry, as the male, came first. But he was outnumbered, as he was to remain for all his boyhood, by his sisters.

The name of one royal child is, of course, conspicuous by its absence from these warrants: Henry’s elder brother, Arthur, prince of Wales. He, it seems clear, was still being brought up elsewhere and alone. Quite where at this point we have no idea. But the uncertainty vanishes with the other great event of 1492: Henry VII’s campaign against France.

To go to war with France was the natural destiny for a late medieval English king. When it came Henry’s own turn, he would embrace it with enthusiasm. His father, however, did so hesitantly and reluctantly. He knew the reality of war in a way his son never would – and, as a usurper who had won his crown on the field, he was all too aware of the risks of battle as well. Go, however, Henry VII finally did, though
he put off embarking till October, when the campaigning season had at most only a few more weeks to run.

Henry, who was barely eighteen months old, was of course far too young to understand anything of this. But he could not escape its consequences. Indeed, the war and its aftermath turned out to be the dominant event of his childhood, creating a poisonous web of intrigue and danger of which he found himself the unwitting centre.

The more immediate effect of the campaign, however, fell on the already overburdened shoulders of Henry’s elder brother, Arthur. When, seventeen years earlier, Henry’s grandfather Edward IV had invaded France in a similarly brief and inglorious campaign, he had made his eldest son Edward, prince of Wales, lieutenant and governor of the realm (that is, regent) during his absence. Predictably, Henry VII did the same, and Regent Arthur, aged six, found himself holding the same resounding powers as Regent Edward, aged five, had done. He was sent to Westminster, perhaps to preside over meetings of the council and certainly to ‘attest’ or give formal sanction to certain of its acts.
9

Arthur’s regency lasted only a few weeks, until his father’s return to England on 17 December automatically brought it to an end. But it had evidently been deemed a success, and it emboldened Henry VII to take the next and crucial step in his son and heir’s career. Edward, prince of Wales had been only three when he was sent to receive his academic and political education as head of a devolved administration in
the Welsh Marches. Now, in the course of 1493, Arthur, aged six, followed in his wake and, wherever possible, in his footsteps. He too took up residence at Ludlow, the great castle which Edward IV had rebuilt for his eldest son; the powers of Arthur’s council were closely modelled on those of Edward’s, and some of the personnel were the same. The boys even shared the same physician, Dr Argentine, who was the last person known to have seen the dethroned Edward V, as he then was, alive in the Tower.
10

Arthur’s departure for the Welsh Marches was also the turning point in his relations (or rather lack of them) with his younger brother. Henry was now developing fast. In the summer of 1493 he was weaned, and bade farewell to his wet-nurse Anne Uxbridge, who was described as ‘late’ nurse to Henry early the following year. In 1494 he learned to ride and (less confidently) to walk.
11

But Arthur was not there to see it. Instead, he became the brother that Henry scarcely knew. They met only on high days and holidays at their parents’ court. There is no evidence that they ever exchanged letters or even tokens.

Did they, I wonder, spend more than a few weeks in each other’s company?

Instead, Henry’s world was shaped by his sisters, his mother and her women. And it was as feminine as Arthur’s was male: cloth and bedding was brought for Henry and his sisters; linen was purchased to make shirts for him and smocks for them.
12

Once again, the war of 1492 was pivotal in defining this separation between the experiences of the two boys. Just before his departure for France on 2 October, the king, Bernard André reports, spoke feelingly about his family to the lords of the council, and ‘carefully provided for his most noble queen and most illustrious children’. Arthur, we know, he had made regent. But he entrusted Henry and his sisters to their mother, who remained with them at Eltham, near Greenwich, for the duration of the war. Thence she bombarded her husband with letters, and, André claims, her ‘tender, frequent and loving lines’ played a part in his decision to return home speedily.
13

Elizabeth of York’s feelings we should take at face value; her husband’s reaction to them with a grain of salt. But, more importantly, how are we to take André’s statement about Henry VII’s provision for his family? My guess is that it represented a fairly formal settlement. And at all events, it became so over the next year or two.

Hitherto contemporaries had applied the name ‘nursery’ only to Arthur’s youthful establishment, which, as we have seen, had followed Yorkist precedent and was run by ex-Yorkist personnel, like the ‘lady mistress’ or head officer of the nursery, Dame Elizabeth Darcy. Arthur’s departure for the Welsh Marches and the public stage left this royal nursery empty. It was soon taken over by Henry and his sisters. Their little establishment was first called ‘our nursery’ in 1494, and within a couple of years the term became common form.
14
At about the same time, a head
officer, the ‘lady mistress of our nursery’, was appointed. But it was not Dame Elizabeth Darcy. Instead, one of the queen’s ladies, Elizabeth Denton, got the job. Moreover, Mrs Denton continued to serve and be paid as one of Elizabeth of York’s attendants even after her appointment as lady mistress.
15

This would point to the closest possible connexions between Henry’s nursery and his mother’s household; it also suggests that the two were usually physically close as well. Which is perhaps why Eltham, where Elizabeth had stayed with her younger children during her husband’s absence in France, seems to have been the principal site of Henry’s upbringing. It was next door to his birthplace and Elizabeth’s favourite residence of Greenwich, and conveniently close to London. The short journey was safe for the youngest royal infant, and ladies of the queen’s household could come and go at will. As could the queen herself.