by Amy Licence
The royal pair were married by the ageing Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bourchier. It was an appropriate role for a man whose long, distinguished career had placed him at the very heart of the country’s shifting fortunes. Himself a grandson of Edward III, he had initially been a reconciling figure in the wars, before siding firmly with the Yorkists and officiating at the coronations of Elizabeth’s parents. More recently, he had crowned Richard III, witnessed a dramatic turn in that ruler’s fortunes and anointed his conqueror as England’s new king. The wedding ring Bourchier blessed that January was a solid gold band, costing 23s 4d and weighing two-thirds of an ounce, making it a ‘hefty’ size in comparison with its modern equivalents.6 It had been ordered in advance, arriving at court at New Year, when preparations for the wedding day were well underway. Several English gold rings in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum suggest its appearance and possible decorations: one cast gold band made around 1500, as part of a group of popular medieval poesie rings, was engraved ‘God joins us together’, followed by the dates and initials of the owner’s wedding. Another bore the message ‘observe wedlock’ on the outside, with the warning ‘memento mori’ carved within, while a third was decorated with hearts and floral sprigs around its engraving ‘think of me’. It was traditional for brides to wear a blessed ring since the eleventh century, and by the medieval period custom dictated that it would be worn on the ring finger of the left hand. Popular belief stated that so long as it was worn, the ring would protect against unkindness and discord. If he wore one, Henry’s ring may have been similar to the museum’s dazzling gold band made around 1450, encrusted with a natural diamond crystal and spinel rubies from Afghanistan or one of the signet rings engraved with religious or heraldic symbols. Other signet rings in the collection are decorated with trees, domestic animals such as tethered dogs and even a cradle, perhaps in anticipation of the union bearing fruit; one impressive fifteenth-century example includes a red spinel gem, carved with a crowned head and engraved ‘there is none like him’. As he blessed the rings and heard the couple repeat their vows, Bourchier was fulfilling his final duty to the state: he would die that March at Knole, his Kent home, at the grand old age of eighty.
The couple had something of a chequered history. Still in her teens, Elizabeth’s archetypal golden beauty, virtue and lineage made her a focus of popular sympathy, yet her position at Henry’s side had by no means been guaranteed. She was the product of a secret, controversial marriage and the quirks of civil war had seen her childhood ricochet between luxury and exile. Her father had married her mother for love; a beautiful widow with two sons, who had refused to become his mistress and so, controversially, became his queen. When Elizabeth arrived, in 1466, conceived a year after the marriage, she was the first of three girls born to the couple in rapid succession. Then, their fortunes turned. The princess’s life changed dramatically as dissident nobles captured and dethroned her father, forcing her mother into sanctuary and accusing her grandmother of witchcraft. The unstable Henry VI was reinstated as king and the Yorkist family’s future was uncertain. Elizabeth was offered as a significant pawn in the 1470 peace negotiations, her hand offered in marriage to the rebel Earl of Warwick’s heir but the realm’s truce was short-lived. With her father forced to flee to the Netherlands, the little girl accompanied her mother to the safety of Westminster Abbey, where the heavily pregnant queen was delivered of a son, the future unfortunate Edward V.
Only after the bloodshed of Barnet and Tewkesbury in 1471, followed by the murder of Henry VI, had the Yorkist line regained control. Elizabeth was offered again as a marital bargain, at the age of eight, in a betrothal to Prince Charles of France and after that, her position remained relatively secure until 1483. By the age of seventeen, she had grown accustomed to the impersonal nature of national and international politics, aware that she and her siblings were instruments of family advancement and that the personal aspect of her life was always secondary to duty. Then, unexpectedly, everything changed. At only forty-one, the charismatic and capable king’s health deteriorated unexpectedly, variously reported to be the result of poison, excess, typhoid or pneumonia. His death in April left his children and his wife’s unpopular family vulnerable. Edward was succeeded by his twelve-year-old son, the baby who had been born in Westminster Abbey amid the civil turmoil. The Protectorship of the boy was given to his uncle Richard but the little king and his ten-year-old brother were incarcerated in the Tower of London that summer and never seen again. Following the executions and murders of Elizabeth’s other remaining male relatives, Richard III proclaimed his niece illegitimate, fuelling reports of the invalidity of her parent’s union and her father’s paternity. However, as the Yorkist heir, Elizabeth retained the best claim to the throne and in spite of her reduced status, Richard considered strengthening his title by making her his wife.
It was rumours of this intended marriage that had crossed the channel and spurred Henry, Earl of Richmond, into action. His claim to the throne was tenuous in the least, through the female, illegitimate line, dating back to John of Gaunt, while his father had been the child of Henry V’s queen, Catherine of Valois, by her Welsh page. Separated from his mother as a small boy and having spent the last fourteen years in exile, a marriage with his guardian’s daughter Maud Herbert and a relatively quiet life had, until recently, seemed more likely. Edward IV offered a significant ransom for the capture of ‘the imp’, as he called Henry, who after his death, moved to Paris and collected a group of rebels about him. One failed attempt at invasion had already sent him back across the channel with his tail between his legs and in the summer of 1485, he had been the rank outsider at the Battle of Bosworth, mounting a challenge to the established Yorkist king. Yet things had gone Henry’s way that August and his shrewdness and political cunning were already marking him out as a monarch to be reckoned with.
The royal pair may have only met for the first time that autumn. Henry’s enforced exile for fourteen years meant any previous meeting would have taken place when Elizabeth was a small child. The match had been suggested by the two mothers, Elizabeth Wydeville and Margaret Beaufort, having both suffered at the hands of Richard III. Despite her declared illegitimacy, Henry was determined to have Elizabeth as his wife, swearing an oath to that effect at Rennes Cathedral on Christmas day 1483 and acquiring papal dispensations early in 1484 and again in January 1486, just two days before the ceremony. As soon as his reign was established, he summoned his bride to London and established her at Coldharbour, his mother’s house on the banks of the Thames. An ancient building originally named La Tour, comprising two linked fortified town houses, it had previously lodged Alice Perrers, mistress of Edward III and more recently, Elizabeth’s aunt, Margaret of Burgundy. Repairs made during 1484–5 listed a number of chambers or suites of rooms within its tower, as well as a Great Hall on the river side. It was here that Henry and Elizabeth’s first meeting probably took place.
Once the marriage ceremony was concluded, the couple processed the short distance from Westminster Abbey to the Palace. Founded by Edward the Confessor, it was close to, but not within, the city of London, then much smaller than today and centred around the modern ‘square mile’. Subsequent kings had extended and enlarged the site; in the twelfth century, the Exchequer and Treasury had been incorporated, combining the king’s official residence with the administrative heart of the country. For Elizabeth, it was familiar territory; she had been born there and would have spent a large portion of her childhood in the palace. Until it was destroyed in a fire in 1513, Westminster was the most frequently used and expensive of the Crown’s establishments, the only one of Henry’s many possessions to be referred to as a ‘palace’. The huge Norman Great Hall, the largest in Europe, was often considered too large and impractical for use, with the smaller twelfth-century White Hall being more frequently in use and directly adjoining the king’s private chambers. However, it is not impossible that for a royal wedding feast, the vast scale of
the former, with its 6-foot-thick walls, may have been considered more suitable: a map of 1520 shows it to have been about four times the size of the White Hall. One surviving plan for Henry’s succession describes the ceremonious procession from Abbey to Palace, with the king followed by his bishops and chamberlain, cardinals, lords, Knights of the Bath, nobles, heralds, officers, trumpeters and minstrels. Upon arrival, he retired to his chamber, before ‘when he had pleasur sumwhat rested hym, in the same estate, with those nobles, he may retourne in to the said hall, ther royally to be serued as is according to the fest’.7 In January 1486, Henry and Elizabeth would have processed in state, surrounded by their witnesses, the short distance that took them down towards the river and into the palace, where they paused for a brief respite, perhaps a rest and change of clothes, before entering the Hall for their wedding banquet. Traditionally called a ‘wedding breakfast’, in pre-Reformation days, this would literally break the fast of the bride and groom: sometimes it referred to the Mass itself and the wine and spices served immediately afterwards. In this Catholic era, no one would receive the sacrament unless they had fasted all day, so the ‘break-fast’ might equally relate to afternoon or evening.
Every aspect of the celebratory meal would have been sumptuous and splendid. The preparation and service of food was a highly-skilled process, employing an army of specialist staff in Westminster’s kitchens and creating further opportunities to demonstrate the new regime’s power and wealth. Strict protocol on seating and service were followed; the tables set with damask cloth, scattered with flowers and herbs and set with the best cutlery and plate, surrounding the ceremonial silver and symbolic nef, the usually ship-shaped vessel carrying salt or spices. Such pieces were intended to mark status; seating positions ‘above’ the nef were infinitely preferable to those below and nobles may have brought their own impressive utensils to reinforce their rank against that of their neighbours. One surviving set of Henry VIII’s knives were set with a multitude of precious gems and drinking vessels were of silver and gold. Carvers, sewers (serving drinks), cupbearers, pantlers (bread bearer), ewerers (linen and hand-washing) and waiters were choreographed by the Master of the Hall, prominently placed to announce their arrival. The food was offered first to the king and queen, after having been tasted to ensure it contained no poison; it can hardly have been more than tepid as it approached the end of its long journey but presentation was almost more important than taste. Like their clothing, the feast was an important signal of their status. The dishes chosen for a wedding table would have combined the best ingredients with colourful and inventive display.
Attached to the late fourteenth-century cookbook the Forme of Cury, a feast menu of three courses suggests a list of dishes comparable to that of the 1486 wedding banquet. Among the richest delicacies were larded boar’s heads, baked teals, pheasants and curlew, partridge and lark, duck and rabbit, almond and chicken pottage in white wine and saffron, pork and cheese tarts with ground figs and pastry points, stuffed chicken and mawmenny, a pottage of shredded pheasant with fried pine nuts and dates, coloured red with sandalwood. All was washed down with spiced wine sweetened with honey, ginger and saffron, thickened with flour and egg yolk. Each course was followed by a subtlety; a fabulous allegorical creation, sculpted out of marchpane (marzipan) or spun sugar and painted or covered in gold leaf. Subtleties might take the forms of crowned birds or beasts, castles, battles, religious scenes or ships, designed to be showcases for a master artisan’s skill and the king’s purse. In 1487, the first course alone of Elizabeth’s coronation feast comprised wild boar, deer, swan, pheasant, capon, crane, pike, broth, heron, kid, lampreys and rabbit, all heavily spiced, in sauces or gelatin, served with raisins and dates. This was followed by various sweet dishes containing baked cream, fruits, nuts, custard tarts and a subtlety. The first Tudor wedding feast must have been equally sumptuous. The existence of aphrodisiacs and association of culinary and sexual appetite had been long established; chestnuts, pistachios and pine nuts were used as folk remedies to excite the libido and the consumption of meat was considered beneficial for potential parents, likewise phallic-shaped foods like asparagus and those on which sexual puns could be made, like the ‘apricock’, which arrived in the 1520s. All these delicacies were a mere prelude to the intimate event that would follow: after a long afternoon of feasting and entertainment, husband and wife were ready for bed.
The formal bedding of a newly-wed couple was a matter of ritual and significance at all levels of society: even after a church service had been concluded, a marriage was not considered binding and could still be dissolved, until consummation had taken place. For royalty, the implications for sexual failure went beyond mere embarrassment, with consequences that could spark dynastic wars and political or religious change. With many aristocratic marriages arranged in their participants’ infancy, consummation was usually delayed until the onset of physical maturity, considered to be the age of twelve in girls, fourteen in boys. Henry’s own mother had delivered him at the age of thirteen but even at the time this was considered too young, as the resulting damage to her fertility proved. Although Henry and Elizabeth were well past this age, it is unlikely either had much sexual experience. Despite the upheavals of her childhood, Elizabeth had been closely guarded during her father’s reign; recent theories regarding her amorous intentions towards her uncle Richard, based on a dubiously interpreted letter by seventeenth-century historian George Buck, find little tangible evidence to support a physical relationship or romantic understanding between the two. A royal bride’s most powerful bargaining point was her virtue; as the mother of future heirs to the throne, her morals must be beyond reproach. It seems almost unthinkable that Elizabeth’s virginity was not intact before her first encounter with Henry. However, for a man approaching thirty, living a secular life, whose regal and marital ambitions had only recently been clarified, abstinence was far less likely. Henry’s exile in Brittany was concurrent with his sexual maturation and he would have had little reason to resist casual affairs; culturally, it may even have been expected. However, no reports of such behaviour survive. In the absence of evidence either way, it must remain within the realms of possibility.
Henry and Elizabeth most likely spent their wedding night in Westminster’s painted chamber, the Palace’s most luxurious apartment containing bed, fireplace and chapel, richly decorated as its name suggests. A 1520 map of London shows a complex of smaller buildings overlooking narrow gardens leading to the river, with a view over to Lambeth Palace and the surrounding marshes. Two visiting fourteenth-century monks recorded that on the chamber’s walls ‘all the warlike stories of the Bible are painted with wonderful skill’ and the bed’s canopy contained the famous image of the coronation of Edward the Confessor, attributed to Walter of Durham.8 This was habitually Henry’s chamber, dominated by a four poster bed that required preparation by ten attendants who would search the straw mattress with daggers to discover any potential dangers, before the ritual laying down of sheets, blankets and coverlets. Some truly sumptuous beds had been created long before then; perhaps that of Joane, Lady Bergavenny, in 1434, with its black and red silk hangings embroidered with silver woodbine, represented the sort of luxury Elizabeth and Henry would have enjoyed.9 As the ceremonial ‘bed of state’, the couple may have passed the night here, after which the queen would be established in her own chambers and afterwards visited there by her husband. They would not normally share a bed except for the occasions when intercourse took place. Wherever they slept, Henry and Elizabeth’s official marital bedding would have been an important stage of the day’s proceedings. The protocol followed on the wedding of Prince Arthur and Catherine of Aragon in 1501 gives some indication of the formalised, public nature of this most intimate aspect of their union. At around eight in the evening, the royal bride was escorted to her chamber by her ladies, undressed and put to bed; the groom followed, dressed only in his shirt, accompanied by his gentlemen, musicians, priests and bishops who pronou
nced their blessings before wine and spices were served. The void or voidee was a mixture of expensive sweet and sharp spices considered to have beneficial medicinal and digestive effects, as well as sweetening the breath, warming the constitution and engendering strength and courage. Almost a secular alternative to the Mass, it was an integral part of the marriage celebrations and would be intended to fortify bride and groom before their night together. Sometimes, before they left, onlookers required the naked legs of a couple to touch, in order to leave satisfied, as in the case of Princess Mary Rose, whose marriage to Louis XII of France in 1514 was considered consummated when her bare leg touched that of his proxy. Even as late as the seventeenth century, royal newly-weds could expect to be observed embracing and kissing before a group of onlookers. This served as a crude reminder that with the privileges of royalty came the loss of personal identity and autonomy over one’s body, the functions of which were of valid interest to the state.