by John Guy
It was not to be. With Arthur’s younger brother, Henry, Duke of York, still not quite 11 when his elder brother died, his father naturally feared for the dynasty’s security and the succession. Arthur’s death changed things for ever, for it would now be the younger Henry who would inherit the throne and make Katherine of Aragon his bride.
The royal couple did try almost immediately for another baby in the fervent hope that they could have a male heir in reserve, and within a couple of months Elizabeth was pregnant again. On 12 December, ahead of her accouchement at the Tower of London, she was rowed there along the Thames from Westminster in the royal barge for the day to oversee the preparation of her apartments.14
Returning to the Tower on 26 January 1503, the queen and her attendants first took wine and spices in the Presence Chamber before ceremonially processing to her lying-in chamber, which was hung from floor to ceiling with Flemish tapestries and equipped with a ‘rich bed’ with the finest embroidered coverlets and the most expensive linen sheets.15 At the door of the chamber, her attendant lords and councillors departed, leaving only the queen and her ladies to enter the room.
On 2 February, the Feast of Candlemas, in the middle of the night, Elizabeth ‘travailed of a child suddenly’.16 She was successfully delivered of a baby girl by the same midwife who had delivered Arthur, but the birth had been a difficult one, and shortly after dawn the child was hastily christened Katherine in the Church of St Peter ad Vincula at the Tower.17 Soon the queen herself became alarmingly ill and Henry sent for Dr Halesworth, a physician from Kent, who travelled night and day by road and river to reach her bedside.18 Whether he arrived in time is not recorded, but if he did, he was unable to save Elizabeth, who died on the morning of Saturday, 11 February, her thirty-seventh birthday.19 Her baby was still alive the next day, when four yards of flannel were purchased for her, but she died shortly afterwards.20
With both Arthur and Elizabeth gone, the king was an altered man. Always cautious to the point of obsession about money and his prerogative rights, he became increasingly suspicious, reclusive and rapacious. He withdrew into his Privy Chamber, where he put a ring of steel around himself, tormented by fears for his dynasty’s security and over-protective of his surviving son, whom he rarely allowed out of his sight.21 When information reached him that several ‘great personages’ considered other candidates more suitable to succeed him than Prince Henry, arrests were made and steps taken to counter the threat of rebellion and internal lawlessness by extreme and sometimes illegal methods.22 In readiness for a possible dynastic crisis, the king also spent liberally on improving the country’s defences, seeking to deter foreign powers from attempting to intervene in the succession.23
Henry was noticeably jumpy in July 1506, after one of the galleries closest to the royal apartments at his favourite palace at Richmond collapsed during major construction works less than an hour after he and Prince Henry had been walking in it. Fortunately no one was injured, but the carpenter responsible for the shoddy work was sent to prison.24
The king’s health, meanwhile, collapsed. His eyesight began to fail, he appears to have suffered a minor stroke and he found writing difficult. Not long after he became a widower, it was reported that ‘the king’s grace is but a weak man and sickly, not likely to be no long lived man’.25 He survived, but visiting him in late March 1507, another Spanish envoy, Dr Roderigo de Puebla, found him confined to bed, unable to eat or drink for six days and receiving almost no one. By then, he would regularly fall sick during the early months of each year, rallying in the summer. In 1507, his condition was complicated by ‘a quinsy’, an acute, pustular tonsillitis that made it painful to eat or speak.26
Henry VII died at 11 p.m. on Saturday, 21 April 1509. For two days, his trusted privy chamber servants kept the news a closely guarded secret while, Kremlin-style, they jockeyed for position in the new reign. Only on the afternoon of the 23rd were the king’s councillors informed. Later that same evening, the whole Court was told. Next day, while heralds proclaimed the accession of the younger Henry in the streets of London, two of the most hated of the old king’s ministers were arrested and sent to the Tower in a carefully planned putsch. At the same time, several illegally held prisoners were released from the Tower and other prisons.27
The atmosphere in these days was highly charged, for by no means was it a foregone conclusion that the transition would be smooth. The elder Henry had possessed the flimsiest of claims to the throne when, against all the odds, he defeated Richard III in battle. He had won the crown only because the lack of a fixed law of succession enabled him, by force of arms, to proclaim himself king and because Richard III had become so hated that even a man with Henry’s dubious claim was preferable.28
Henry VII had first arranged for his younger son’s betrothal to Katherine of Aragon in June 1503, and a year later the young prince was formally married to her after Pope Julius II issued a dispensation allowing him to wed his elder brother’s widow. Of course, this so-called ‘marriage’ had been just one move on the chessboard of the king’s diplomacy and was not consummated. Only 13 when he took his vows, the bridegroom was below the lawful age of marriage, and on the eve of his fourteenth birthday, he repudiated the wedding, as canon law entitled him to do, once more at his father’s behest.29
But after Henry VII’s death, the question of the marriage arose again. Clearly the new king, then approaching his eighteenth birthday, was in two minds about it, at one moment claiming (according to a report of one of his councillors) that ‘it would burden his conscience to marry his brother’s widow’, and at another professing that his dying father had ordered him to marry Katherine as soon as possible to consolidate the alliance with Spain.30
When, however, Henry VIII decided to do something, he did it with gusto and because he believed it to be right. So it was that, declaring himself to be deeply in love and sweeping aside the objection that his bride-to-be was nearly six years older than he was, he astonished his councillors by marrying Katherine for a second time on 11 June 1509 in his late mother’s oratory at Greenwich Palace. When he then ordered a magnificent joint coronation ceremony for himself and his wife to take place barely a fortnight later on Midsummer Day, it seemed as if the dynasty was indeed secure at last.
Not so. For in his final years, Henry VII had become deeply resented by his subjects for his summary justice and extortions, not least in London. By creating an atmosphere of fear and coercion, he had reopened dynastic wounds and would come to be regarded by many with old Yorkist allegiances as a false king and a usurper. To counter this, his son unashamedly set out to court popularity, to build a reputation for honour and magnificence and to usher in a new golden age. As a delighted courtier exclaimed, ‘Our king’s heart is set not upon gold or jewels or mines of ore, but upon virtue, reputation and eternal fame.’31
But monarchies and dynasties are not built on virtue or reputation alone. They are rooted in families, marriages and the birth of legitimate heirs and successors. Only when the new King Henry had fathered children of his own might it be said with any real confidence that the dynasty was stable. Nobody in 1509 understood this better than Thomas More, already rising fast in his career as a London lawyer. In a handwritten set of verses presented to Henry to celebrate his glorious coronation, More declared that, while the new king ‘has banished fear and oppression’ by his affirmations of respect for justice and the rule of law, and his determination to arrest and imprison informers and anyone else ‘who by plots or conspiracies has harmed the realm’, what really matters is that Katherine should become the ‘mother of kings’. ‘Fecund in male offspring’, More confidently avowed, ‘she will render your ship of state stable and enduring for all time.’32
It is quite possible that Henry, in his euphoria at becoming king and his first flush of love for Katherine, never bothered to read More’s verses before placing them on the shelves of the royal library. And yet, More, who was already a keen student of history and would shortly beco
me the author of an unpublished History of King Richard III, had grasped the essential point. A few years later, Henry would come to know it, and in due course More would himself become a casualty of the intense family drama that would ensue as the king struggled to produce a legitimate male heir.
The story of Henry VIII’s children, therefore, is not simply a tale of royal personalities and their foibles set apart from the grand narrative of political and social change. It is also the dynastic history of England.
CHAPTER 1
In the Beginning
CHRISTMAS 1510 was a time of joyous celebration for Henry VIII, his wife Katherine of Aragon and their Court. Not only would the second anniversary of their marriage and coronations soon be approaching, but more significantly Katherine was heavily pregnant.
Nothing mattered more in a dynastic monarchy than that the queen should give birth to a legitimate son and heir to settle the succession. So when, on the morning of New Year’s Day 1511, Henry VIII, not yet 20, heard the news that Katherine, who had celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday only a fortnight before, had been delivered of a healthy son at Richmond Palace, he was exultant. As the gunners of the Tower fired salvoes in salute, he ordered bonfires to be lit in the streets of London and free wine to be distributed to the citizens to drink his health and that of his wife and child.1
On Sunday, 5 January, the baby was christened Henry after his father and grandfather in the Franciscan friary church beside the privy garden at the palace. The ceremonies, similar to those at Henry’s own baptism, followed to the letter the handbook, first devised by the Lancastrian kings and handed down by the Yorkist Edward IV, known as the Royal Book. Wrapped in a tiny mantle of cloth of gold lined with ermine, the infant was carried by his godmother from the great hall of the palace to the friary church along a neatly gravelled path protected from the cold and rain by a covered walkway. Inside the church, the west door, walls and ceiling were draped with fine tapestries and cloth of gold, with carpets laid under foot. The heavy solid silver font, brought in specially from Canterbury on a cart, stood on a raised temporary platform, three steps high, that was overlaid with crimson fabric and hung about with cloth of gold. Suspended above it was a canopy of crimson satin fringed with gold. Beside it, concealed behind a screen, a brazier burned sweet-smelling herbs to purify the air. Along the side walls of the nave 200 esquires and yeomen stood holding torches, poised to light them as soon as the child was baptized.2
The next day was the Feast of the Epiphany, more colloquially known as Twelfth Night, the final climax of the Christmas festivities. Like his father before him, Henry put on his imperial crown and purple robes and sat in state in his Presence Chamber dressed almost exactly as he had been at his coronation with an orb and sceptre in his hands. Thus arrayed, he solemnly processed with his nobles and courtiers to the Chapel Royal, where he offered gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh like the Three Kings at the very first Epiphany, afterwards presiding at spectacular candlelit revels and a banquet in the great hall of the palace, surrounded by statues of eleven of his most revered ancestors.3
With the celebrations over, Henry went on a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Walsingham in Norfolk to give thanks for the birth of his son.4 On his return, he ordered a tournament to be held on 12–13 February in the tiltyard at the palace of Westminster, where he meant to put his jousting skills and masculinity on show as one of the four challengers. Katherine, rested and recovered from the ordeal of childbirth and attended by her ladies, presided serenely over this glittering and expensive piece of theatre from the vantage point of a newly constructed gallery.
Henry in his youth was the personification of monarchy, the fount of honour; his only flaw was his inability, like his father before him, to look people straight in the eye.5 Six feet two inches tall and with a thirty-five-inch waist, he was as lean as he was fit before gluttony caused him to bulge.6 Calling himself ‘Loyal Heart’, he and his companions first entered the lists at the Westminster tournament on horseback, hidden inside an elaborate mock forest resting on a huge chariot that was pulled by mules disguised as a lion and an antelope. When the chariot stopped before Katherine, actors dressed as foresters blew their horns, the signal for Henry and his fellow challengers to burst out of a golden castle at the centre of the forest, each brandishing a spear. When the jousting began, Henry hogged the limelight by running twenty-five courses, far more than anyone else.
Once the jousting was over on the second day of the tournament, Katherine presented the prizes, her prestige as the mother of an heir to the throne indicated by the fact that she did not have to declare her husband to be the champion.7
But on 23 February, joy turned to sorrow. Prince Henry, just seven weeks old, suddenly died.8 Katherine was distraught. As the chronicler Edward Hall records, ‘like a natural woman [she] made much lamentation’. Henry, it seemed at the time, was less troubled than he would be later, believing that since he and his wife were still young, they would have many more children together. According to Hall, he took the calamity ‘wondrous wisely’, selflessly hiding his pain in order to console his wife. Perhaps, but knowing Henry, it is more likely that Hall’s report is the equivalent of a modern press release, designed to portray the king as a model husband. What his private feelings were, we can only imagine.9
Swaddled in a pall of black velvet, the tiny coffin of the young prince was carried along the Thames from Richmond to Westminster Abbey in a cortege of three black-draped barges. By tradition, members of the royal family did not attend funerals, so neither Henry nor Katherine was present in the abbey to see their son interred in a tomb to the left-hand side of the high altar near to the shrine of the abbey’s founder, St Edward the Confessor. But if the dead prince’s parents were absent, the leading nobles and courtiers and more than 400 others were in the abbey, including a contingent of 180 poor men, clad in specially tailored black gowns and hoods. Later, the poor men, who were doubtless selected from among the occupants of the abbey’s almshouses or those who had received Maundy money, were handsomely rewarded for bearing wax torches in the funeral procession and praying for the child’s soul.10
This would be neither the first nor the last reproductive tragedy to befall Katherine. Her earliest known pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage on 31 January 1510, when she had ‘brought forth prematurely a daughter’.11 At the time it was routinely assumed that Henry and Katherine’s inability to have a living son was her fault. The stereotype was that if a woman failed repeatedly to produce living offspring, it was the result of her gynaecological or obstetrical difficulties.
Thus Andrew Boorde, an experienced physician who wrote several medical treatises and claimed to have attended Henry VIII, believed that a woman’s inability to conceive was the result of ‘too much humidity’ in the womb. The result was that when ‘the seed of man is sown’, ‘the woman cannot retain it’. She should avoid laxatives, declared Boorde, and try crushed mandrake apples mixed with rose water and sugar, eat plenty of peaches and (if she were fat) scatter pepper liberally on her food. If she had menstrual pains, she might ease them by taking the juice of St John’s wort mixed with red wine. In the ‘unlikely’ event that the man was at fault, he should eat only wholesome food, try such remedies as ‘a confection of ginger’ and avoid sex immediately after meals.12
Tudor medicine had scarcely advanced since the time of the ancient Greeks. Now modern experts argue that Katherine’s pregnancy mishaps fit the symptoms of haemolytic disease of the newborn caused by a genetic incompatibility between the blood groups of the parents. In this situation, a couple will rarely be able to produce successfully more than one living child. In other instances, the foetus or newborn infant will develop severe, often fatal anaemia, jaundice or heart failure caused by the destruction of its red blood cells. In a newborn child, death will typically occur within a few weeks.13
FIGURE 3 Lady Margaret Beaufort, Henry VIII’s grandmother, from a nineteenth-century engraving.
&nb
sp; Henry would have been responsible for the couple’s problems if he were positive for a blood group antigen known as Kell and his partner—like 90 per cent of Caucasian populations—was negative. In those circumstances, a high proportion of the foetuses he fathered would die because his partner would make antibodies to the foetal red blood cells. And the genetic mismatch, in Katherine’s case, would have been this way round, because her sisters, Juana of Castile and Maria of Portugal, each produced living children with consummate ease and are therefore likely to have been Kell negative.
In 1513 Katherine was pregnant again, but in September or October she was delivered of a premature son who died within hours. Another boy was stillborn in November or December 1514.
At last, and to the royal couple’s considerable relief, on Tuesday, 18 February 1516, at about 4 a.m., the queen produced a healthy daughter, who was christened Mary. Katherine doted on her and at first was eager to bring up and educate the child herself, but Henry was determined to follow royal protocol. As revised and updated by his grandmother Margaret Beaufort in 1493, this specified that—once the christening was past—the baby should be put in a royal nursery under the charge of a ‘lady mistress’ or governess, who was to be assisted by a nurse and four female chamber assistants known as ‘the rockers’, who took it in turn to rock the royal cradle. A physician was to be in regular attendance and was to supervise every aspect of the infant’s diet.