In Bed with the Tudors: The Sex Lives of a Dynasty from Elizabeth of York to Elizabeth I

by Amy Licence

  The future Henry VIII was born at Greenwich, in the old manor house of Placentia, begun by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and developed by Henry VI and Edward IV. As such, it was a smaller and less significant royal property, more of a country retreat than the symbolic locations chosen for the arrival of Arthur and Margaret. Within a few years, all that remained of Henry’s birth place would be completely demolished to make way for a grand new programme of building in the Burgundian style. Its positioning may have afforded the heavily pregnant queen a greater degree of privacy and quiet than she would have found at Westminster; apparently it was her favourite house. Assuming the physicians’ calculations had been correct, Elizabeth would have taken to her chamber early in June, to await the birth at the end of that month. The usual mechanism of preparations would have ensured all was ready for her enclosure in her chamber, from the yards of cloth and hangings about her bed, to the tapestries on the walls, cradles, pallet bed, all in the richest colours and fabrics as well as the indispensable reliquary. It was her first summer confinement; perhaps in the heat she requested that the one uncovered window might be left open, so she could look out down to the river and watch the distant craft sailing past in the long days of waiting. Finally, on 28 June 1491, the ordeal came to an end; she was delivered of a sturdy, golden-haired son.

  A child’s safe arrival triggered the next phase in the frenzy of activity of the birth chamber. While Elizabeth lay back and rested, exhausted after her ordeal, the focus of her attendants shifted to the child, to secure its safety and establish the all-important gender and state of health. Superstition continued to govern this element of the procedure. While some gossips remained to comfort and congratulate the mother, it was the midwife’s next job to cut the umbilical cord; a task of immense significance, as a child’s navel was believed to hold the key to future fertility: if it was wrinkled, the mother would bear more babies, if smooth, her child-bearing days were over. The cord also had magical qualities of protection: some people carried a dried piece of it around as a charm to fend off witches, which was a very real fear for pregnant and labouring mothers, illustrated by a case of July 1582, when the Kent assizes found Elizabeth Johnson, a spinster of Kemsing, not guilty of having bewitched one Elizabeth Fremlynge so that she gave birth to a stillborn child. The caul and placenta were removed from the child and left to dry, thought to bring great fortune and an indicator of baby’s future health, although as superstition became increasingly frowned upon, midwives were directed to bury them. As usual, the child’s navel was dusted with powder of aloe and frankincense to speed recovery, while the midwife examined the new arrival carefully, checking his breathing and wiping his ears, eyes and nostrils. Cases of jaundice were treated with tree bark boiled in barley water or clarified whey. Then the little prince was washed gently in any of a number of substances; wine, milk, mallow, rue, sweet butter, myrrh, linseed and barley water, or rubbed with oil of acorns – supposedly another preventative measure against the perils of death before baptism – before being swaddled and laid in the cradle. Alternative methods of care included swathing them in roses ground up with salt to absorb moisture from their limbs and the mouth and gums cleansed with a finger dipped in honey. As she looked on the face of her sleeping newborn baby, Elizabeth cannot have predicted what the future would hold for him. As a second son, Prince Henry was the necessary ‘spare heir’, significant as a safe-guard but not expected to rule. His arrival was celebrated but few records were made of the event. His birth was a comparatively quiet business: it is symbolic that Margaret Beaufort only briefly mentioned his arrival in her Book of Hours, writing over a correction, whilst his elder brother and sister’s exact time of arrival had been noted. He was baptised in the nearby church of the Friars Observant, which had been decorated for the purpose with tapestries, cypress linen, cloth-of-gold and damask, around a temporary wooden stage on which stood the Canterbury silver font. Wrapped in a mantle of cloth-of-gold trimmed with ermine, he was anointed and blessed by Richard Fox, the Bishop of Exeter. Soon, this tiny prince would be sent away to join his sister at her Eltham nursery where he would be brought up among women and quickly learned to ‘rule the roost’.

  Between 1491 and 1501, Elizabeth bore four, possibly five, more children. She conceived again only three months after the birth of Henry and went into confinement shortly before his first birthday. Whilst awaiting the delivery, she was brought news of the death of her own mother Elizabeth Wydeville, who for the first time had declined to assist her during labour. When a second daughter arrived on 2 July 1492, the queen named her Elizabeth. The little girl was the first of the royal children to die in infancy, taken by an ‘atrophy’ or wasting disease at the age of three, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Regular, unpredictable infant mortality was a sad fact of Tudor deliveries and was no respecter of rank; in many families, rates of survival could be as low as 50 per cent, although some families suffered fewer losses. Those dying at birth or within a week were known as ‘chrisom children’, still wearing the white baptismal cloth, while those surviving the dangerous first months could still be prey to all manner of dangers. It is impossible to know, across time, exactly what factors contributed to specific deaths but undeniably traumatic deliveries, illness, poor hygiene, malnutrition, cot death, accidents and imperfect understanding of child care were contributing factors. In spite of their grief, Henry and Elizabeth knew their daughter had been in receipt of the best available care. In addition, Elizabeth was three months pregnant again. Princess Mary was born at Richmond on 18 March 1496.

  Elizabeth’s childbearing record and advancing age, by the standards of the time, may have affected her fertility. She did not conceive again for over two years. Perhaps the pilgrimage to Walsingham she undertook in the summer of 1497 was related to conception; it had certainly been a difficult period with the presence of the pretender Perkin Warbeck at court and the great fire that had razed Sheen Palace to the ground that Christmas. Payments made by Henry to Elizabeth’s physician Master Lewis and her surgeon Robert Taylor in 1498 may have been related to a pregnancy or birth: certainly by May that year, she had fallen pregnant again. At the relatively advanced age, in Tudor terms, of thirty-three, she went into confinement for the sixth time at Greenwich in February 1499. Although this pregnancy went to term and the little prince Edmund was apparently healthy, something had caused concern in those attending the queen. The Spanish ambassador reported that there had been ‘much fear for her life’ but in the end, the delivery proved straightforward. Perhaps she had experienced a more difficult pregnancy or her age and general health provoked doubts: she had just passed her thirtieth birthday when she delivered Mary back in 1496 and those three extra years may have been considered significant. Possibly these fears combined with political and dynastic dangers: her confinement coincided with the culmination of years of threat from pretender to the throne Perkin Warbeck. In the event, however, the delivery proved comparatively easy and another male heir was welcomed and celebrated. Sadly though, the little prince died at fifteen months and was buried at Westminster: perhaps he was weak or underweight from the start, or Elizabeth’s unrecorded complications during the pregnancy gave grounds for concern at the time. Alternatively he may have fallen prey to any one of the infantile illnesses of the age, unpredictable and often untreatable with contemporary medicine. His death may have coincided with the conception of the mysterious Edward, putting this child’s delivery date somewhere in the summer of 1501; alternatively he pre-dated his brother in birth and death, arriving in 1497 or 1498. Perhaps the very closeness of these pregnancies lay behind the concerns for the queen’s health.

  In late 1501, Elizabeth witnessed the arrival of the Spanish infanta Catherine of Aragon, whose marriage with Prince Arthur, just turned fifteen, had been planned since their early years. The queen’s eldest son had grown into a tall, slender, serious young man, much in the mould of his father; contemporary portraits show him thin-faced and delicate-looking with a certain tenderness ab
out the eyes and mouth. His bride was to be the beautiful, golden-haired daughter of King Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, an extraordinary pair of joint rulers renowned for their warlike nature and ruthless, separate control of their individual territories. Catherine had arrived that October in Plymouth after an apparently smooth and uneventful crossing: they were married almost six weeks later. London turned out in its finery to watch the event. According to the chronicler Hall, the bride was conducted to St Paul’s through streets decked with beautiful pageants, wise devises and prudent speeches, with ballads and instruments making ‘heauenly noyes’. The city officials lined up to welcome her, dressed in ‘costly apparel both of goldsmythes work and embraudery, ryche iewelles, massy cheynes’ upon horses with glittering trappings, hung with gold spangles and bells. She was led into the church by the already charismatic ten-year-old Henry, Prince of Wales. A 6-foot wooden platform had been erected inside, covered in fine red worsted, making a sort of stage above the heads of the crowd. Here, Elizabeth and Henry watched as their son was married, both bride and groom dressed – unusually – all in white and being ‘both lusty and amorous’. This was followed by a four-course feast in the Bishop’s Palace, using plates from four cupboards, with dancing and ‘costly disguising’, before the formal bedding ceremony of the couple at Baynard’s Castle, much unchanged since Elizabeth’s day, for what was to become the most controversial wedding night in Tudor history.

  One issue would later come to dominate Catherine of Aragon’s life. The question of what the two teenagers did in bed over the course of the next four and a half months would irrevocably determine the course of British history and the development of the Church of England. It is, by now, a familiar question; perhaps the overriding question of the dynasty, dividing man and wife, parents and children, monarch and subject, and continuing to divide historical interpretation to the present day. So, during their short-lived marriage, did Catherine and Arthur sleep together? Did they consummate their union in the full sense, or was it, as Catherine was to later insist, a slow, cautious, innocent connection between two children who had no reason not to believe they had time on their sides? Did their failure to connect on their wedding night preclude any subsequent relations? Catherine later claimed they shared a bed on seven occasions but that full consummation had not taken place. Her waiting women and Arthur’s gentlemen were divided on the issue; some even suggested that the force of their sexual passion had weakened the frail young man, paralleling the accusations levelled at the death of Catherine’s brother Juan and his supposedly ‘over-passionate’ wife Margaret, in 1497. Their ceremonial bedding was public enough, with Arthur cheered along by his fellows, with dancing, pleasure and mirth, as well as trumpets sounding, as their friends witnessed the young groom climb into bed beside his wife and receive the blessing of a priest, that they should be protected from ‘phantasies and illusions of devils’. After that, only Arthur and Catherine knew exactly what had passed between them. Hall’s chronicle would later insist that ‘this lusty prince and his beautiful bride were brought and joined together in one bed naked and there did that act, which to the performance and full consummation of matrimony was most requisite and expedient’ but he was three at the time of the wedding and writing in the early 1540s, when it was expedient to believe in the union’s success. Later, when the matter became of national importance, the expressions and testimonies of servants would become crucial and the events of that November night and following morning would be analysed and debated. In the autumn of 1501, however, there was no foreshadowing of the immense consequences of the teenager’s courtship and the series of jousts, pageants and feasts continued unabated. The king and queen watched their newly wedded son and his bride enjoying tournaments on the newly sanded tilt-yard by the river and lavish Burgundian-style disguisings in Westminster Hall. Ironically, one of these pageants included eight ‘goodly’ knights overcoming the resistance of eight ‘goodly and fresh’ ladies, who yielded to the forces of love. The subtext for Arthur and Catherine couldn’t have been clearer.

  However, tragedy awaited the newly-weds. Barely six months later, terrible news reached Elizabeth and Henry in London. After the wedding ceremonies, the young couple had departed for Ludlow, where they had settled into the imposing defensive borders castle. The location was remote and the weather extreme, exacerbating the damp and dirt: a local outbreak of the sweating sickness took hold in the late spring, a painful disease that would dispatch most sufferers within days. Both Arthur and Catherine fell ill. While she survived, he succumbed on 2 April 1502 and the sixteen-year-old Spaniard became a widow after only four and a half months of marriage. The sweat may have been to blame, or else the tuberculosis assumed by nineteenth-century historians. The official record of his funeral related that a long term disease may have been the underlying cause: ‘a pitiful disease and sickness’ of ‘deadly corruption did utterly vanquish and overcome the (healthy) blood’. It is possible that this was testicular tuberculosis, which can cause increased libido but dampen performance, which may provide answers to the lingering questions of Arthur’s marriage and death. The London messengers were afraid to break the news to the king, delaying until the following morning. Devastated by their loss, the king and queen consoled each other as best they could, with Elizabeth telling Henry they still had a ‘fair, goodly’ son and were young enough to have more children. This was no idle promise. Within weeks, she had conceived again.

  The fears that had surfaced during Elizabeth’s previous pregnancy were ominous for the advent of her final child in the winter of 1503. That July at Woodstock, she had been unwell and in September her apothecary was paid for delivering ‘certain stuff’ for the use of the queen. The fact that she had conceived so quickly after consoling Henry with the idea of a new child, suggests she was still fertile but that the couple may have previously decided to limit their family due to her ill health. As she prepared for her confinement, two nurses visited her in November, the start of her final trimester, which may have been routine but may equally have indicated that something was amiss. On the fourteenth, a Mistress Harcourt saw her at Westminster and twelve days later she was attended by a French woman at Baynard’s castle. New bedding and curtains were ordered, accounts for the delivery of bed linen were settled and the girdle of Our Lady of Westminster was delivered mid-December. Right up until the end, Elizabeth was on the move. At the end of January, she travelled from Richmond to the Tower of London where she gave birth to a daughter a week later. This was in itself unusual: previous retirements to her chamber had occurred three or more weeks before labour began, allowing for misdiagnosis, preparation and the long hours of ‘travail’. Elizabeth had barely settled herself into her Tower lodgings before she was seized by violent contractions and she gave birth to a daughter, Catherine, on Candlemas day, 2 February 1503. Perhaps the child was born prematurely or else the date had been miscalculated: contemporaries recorded that she had intended to lie-in at Richmond and was delivered ‘suddenly’, which must have been a surprise after her previous pregnancies. Soon after the birth it became apparent that Elizabeth was seriously ill; possibly puerperal fever had set in or heavy bleeding; perhaps she had sustained an injury during the delivery. A messenger was sent into Kent to try and locate a Dr Aylsworth or Hallysworth but nine days later the queen was dead.

  Most Tudor mothers did not die during childbirth. Surprisingly, the odds of survival were fairly good, providing there were no complications. Roger Schofield6 estimates the likelihood of maternal mortality at 1 per cent per pregnancy and between 6 and 7 per cent across a woman’s childbearing years, giving them a similar chance of dying of non-birth-related causes. Another case study, of sixteenth-century Aldgate, suggests the figure was more like 2.35 per cent7, as crowded and insanitary as urban areas undoubtedly were. Then, as now, complications arose that were met with varying degrees of response according to the skill and experience of the age. Difficult deliveries and breech births, without preventative action
being taken, could lead to maternal and infant death. One 1513 work contained images of sixteen unnatural birth presentations and advice to the midwife to oil her hands, apply butter to the cervix and try to turn the baby, using all her ‘diligence and pain’. If this state continued, brute force was needed to expel a reluctant foetus. There were no forceps during this time, being invented by the Chamberlain family in the late Elizabethan period but not made public until over a century later. One or two famous contemporary cases of Caesareans were carried out in Europe but these were not used in England and certainly not on a live mother; maternal death inevitably ensued and live children were cut from dead mothers using damaging metal hooks. In the event of failure, religious help was sought. One miracle of St Thomas of Canterbury recorded how an infant arrived arm first; the midwives pushed it back, hoping the child would turn, whereupon it began to swell. The normal procedure would be to then cut off the arm in order to save the mother but prayers were offered and saintly intervention supposedly resulted in a successful birth. In many cases though, practical interference, contemporary wisdom and prayer were not enough. The more babies a mother bore, the greater her risk of death and resulting illness, with the increased physical toll on her body and advancing age. For some, birth complications made their very first pregnancy fatal whilst others bore in excess of ten children and survived into comparative old age. Significantly more women did die young though, of illnesses resulting from delivery, poor hygiene and contemporary lack of anatomical understanding. Pregnant Elizabethan women in particular, had their portraits painted in case their forthcoming confinement was to end in tragedy.

  The interval between Elizabeth’s delivery and death suggest the birth itself was a success but that a subsequent fever took hold or internal damage later caused a haemorrhage. Status, wealth, provision, duty, love, attention and experience were still not sufficient to save the queen’s life; it proved that bearing a child involved as great a risk for royalty as for her female subjects. In addition to the dynastic importance of Elizabeth’s life, the intimate association of Catholic ritual, prayer and famous relics during her confinements transcended the bodily event of her deliveries, advocating a personal relationship with the saints. Clasping the holy girdle, with her chest of relics and the Canterbury font on hand to christen England’s heir, it must have seemed to those around that higher authorities were blessing and witnessing the union and its offspring. It was also significant for the superstitious Tudors that she had given birth at Candlemas, the day of the Virgin’s purification, suggestive of the queen’s eternal rebirth and spotless purity. Elizabeth was the metaphoric and literal mother of the nation, bearer of heirs: in popular memory, she would be elevated to a saintly maternal figure, devoted to her religion and her family.