Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII

by Robert Hutchinson

  Henry VII immediately began construction of a huge new palace on the site, renamed Richmond (after the family earldom), alongside the Thames – finishing the major phase by 1501. The royal apartments, rebuilt and refurbished, were still within the largely undamaged fifteenth-century donjon or keep, moated and battlemented. Evidently Henry continued to prize his security. Its opulence – it had a bowling alley and tennis courts – and the splendour of its furnishings led it to be popularly nicknamed ‘Rich Mount’ by his more truculent citizens downstream in London.41

  In the same period, Henry rebuilt Baynard’s Castle at the confluence of the Rivers Fleet and Thames on the western edge of the City of London,42 constructed a fine new brick courtyard house at Greenwich Palace43 and undertook building projects at Windsor Castle and the Tower of London. The delight of designing and raising palaces was clearly part of the Tudor inheritance, as Henry VIII also became a prolific builder, first completing his father’s works at Hanworth, Middlesex; Woking, Surrey; Wanstead, Essex; Ditton, Buckinghamshire; and Leeds Castle in Kent, before embarking on his own grandiose schemes, beginning at Bridewell, off Fleet Street in London, Eltham Palace and Beaulieu in Essex. Many more were to follow.

  Some of those around Henry VII, such as Bishop Richard Fox, had been his comrades in exile and these, together with gentry from the king’s native Wales, found favour at his court. Fox, having been at Bosworth, was appointed Lord Privy Seal in February 1487. He was notoriously loyal to his master. Thomas More was told later that to serve the king, Fox ‘would not stick [fail] to agree to his own father’s head [being struck off]’.

  Yet Henry remained a secretive, chronically suspicious king, frequently making notes during his conversations with courtiers, counsellors and diplomats and writing private aides-memoires to himself. One day his favourite pet, a spider monkey that lived in his library, ‘tore his principal notebook all to pieces. Whereat the court (which liked not these pensive accounts) was almost tickled with sport.’44

  Aside from his shrewd, if not wily, administration of the realm, the king was not the dour, glum or dreary monarch that many have been taught to believe him to be. Far from it: he loved hunting, gambling and, from 1494, playing real tennis within a closed court. In June of that year, a payment of £4 was made to a ‘Spaniard, the tennis player’ who may have been the king’s private coach.45 (Tennis was to become another favourite sport of his second son, although like his father, his first passion was hunting.) In May 1499, the Milanese ambassador complained ruefully that Henry VII ‘attends to nothing but pleasure and the enjoyment of the infinite treasure he has accumulated and continues to pile up’.46 In September 1507, the king was reported to be out ‘every day to hunt deer and other game in forests and in parks. Besides, he often went out hawking.’47

  Three months earlier, perhaps because of his deteriorating eyesight, he shot a farmyard cock in error with his crossbow at Chesterford, Essex, and had to pay four shillings to an aggrieved farmer named Whiting.48 The compensation culture, unfortunately all too familiar today, is nothing new. For example, in October 1496, Henry’s Privy Purse had to pay a man called Rede four shillings to replace his colt ‘that was slain by the greyhounds’, and in August 1505, 3s 4d was paid to a ‘poor man that had his corn eaten by the king’s deer’ near the hunting lodge at Woking, Surrey.49

  But Henry VII’s hard fiscal heart did have some capacity for generosity. When one of his Esquires of the Body remained unpaid because he was absent due to his ‘great diseases’, the king ordered the annuities to be reimbursed immediately because of the courtier’s ‘long continued s[er]vice done unto us to our singular good pleas [u]r[e]’.50 Loyalty in that most turbulent of reigns was a virtue always worth rewarding as it sometimes seemed in such short supply.

  In September 1495 he must have suffered an attack of conscience – or, more cynically, made an attempt to appease or assuage continuing Yorkist resentment. Henry VII commissioned a tomb costing £10 from the Nottingham mason James Keyley51 to hold the mortal remains of Richard III. The alabaster effigy and tomb-chest were duly set up in Greyfriars, Leicester, where the deposed king was so contemptuously buried in the aftermath of Bosworth.52

  During the evenings and idle moments, Henry VII gambled at chess, cards and dice – a favourite amusement also inherited by Henry VIII – and bet on the potential winner of archery contests and tennis matches. Whatever the pastime, he seems to have enjoyed poor luck and rarely won.53 Card games of the period have especially intimidatory names: Plunder, Pillage, Triumph, Condemnation, Cuckolding and Torment. There was also a game called Totem Nihil (‘All or Nothing’) in which a four-sided object was spun to determine the winner.54

  The royal accounts from 1500 onwards record the king’s losses at gambling: for example, the 8s 4d paid in August of that year to [Richard] ‘Weston’, a Groom of the Chamber; the 24s 4d given to James Braybroke ‘for the king’s play’; and an additional forty shillings for the lucky Weston in September 1502 after losing at ‘gleek’, a three-handed card game played with a forty-four-card pack.55 Henry VII even lost 6s 8d at cards to seven-year-old Prince Henry on 23 May 1498.56 No wonder the child was depicted with a broad grin! Was this the king’s customary bad luck – or was this a doting father allowing his young son to win? One can almost hear young Henry’s boyish squeals of delight as the cards were dealt and turned over by a chuckling king. A total of 66s 8d was also paid ‘to my lord of York to play at dice’ in January 1502, but perhaps this was funding games over a length of time, as the considerable sum – equivalent to around £1,500 in today’s monetary values – might have annoyed the financially careful king if this represented his son’s gambling losses at a single session.57

  We have already met Henry’s grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, (Plate 3) fussing and fretting over the arcane arrangements for court ceremonial. She had been married three times: firstly to Edmund Tudor, First Earl of Richmond, whom she wed at the age of twelve; after his death in November 1456 she gave birth to her single child on 28 January 1457 – but only after a lonely and perilous confinement in which mother and baby son came close to death. Her second husband was her cousin, Sir Henry Stafford, son of Humphrey, First Duke of Buckingham. She married him in 1462 and enjoyed a happy and close union with him before he died from wounds sustained fighting for Edward IV at the Battle of Barnet on 14 April 1471. Lastly, at the age of thirty in June 1473, Margaret married Thomas Stanley, later First Earl of Derby, whose eleventh-hour intervention at Bosworth, together with his younger brother William (executed for treason in 1495), had won the day for Henry VII.

  Margaret was famously pious. In 1499, with her husband’s permission, she swore a vow of chastity in the presence of Richard Fitzjames, Bishop of London, and retired to a separate establishment at Collyweston, Northamptonshire, three miles (4.83 km) south-west of Stamford, Lincolnshire. It was an idyllic spot, on the south side of the valley of the River Welland, and she extended the existing early-fifteenth-century manor house originally built by Sir William Porter.58 Given her sacred vow, her husband was thoughtfully provided with separate rooms on the rare occasions when he visited, travelling down from his seat at Lathom Hall, near Ormskirk, West Lancashire.

  Gradually the house at Collyweston was turned into a palace fit for a lady whose official title was ‘the King’s Mother’.59 By special permission of her son, she was allowed to sign herself ‘Margaret R’ – the ‘R’ for Regina, the feminine form of ‘Rex’ – and was also licensed to keep her own retainers, all wearing the silver and blue Beaufort livery and her portcullis badge on their chests. At one stage she had four hundred servants and dependants. Like the king, she employed spies and informers, and the string of castles and manor houses across England granted her by her son became operating bases for her agents, ever vigilant for treachery and treason.60

  Lady Margaret also maintained a large London townhouse, granted by the king. Coldharbour, in Thames Street, was an ancient mansion with its own river frontage and a pleasa
nt ‘summer house’ overlooking the water.61

  Their letters testify to the close, loving relationship between the politically shrewd only son and equally guileful mother. One from Henry VII begins:

  Madam, my most entirely well beloved Lady and mother, I recommend me unto you in the most humble and lowly ways that I can, beseeching you of your daily and continual blessings …

  I shall be glad to please you as your heart can desire it and I know well that I am as much bounden so to do to any creature living for the great and singular motherly love and affection that it has pleased you at all times to bear towards me.62

  Such filial love was gushingly reciprocated. A letter from mother to son, probably written in January 1501, begins:

  My own sweet and most dear king and all my worldly joy, in as humble manner as I can think I recommend me to your grace and most heartily beseech our Lord to bless you.63

  Another starts with a fervent ‘My dearest and only desired joy in this world’ and refers to Henry VII in the text as ‘my dear heart’ and ‘my good king’. The same letter archly requests the king’s permission to reserve some of her tenants in north-west England to be ‘kept for my lord of York, your fair sweet son’ as his retainers.64

  Portraits of Lady Margaret depict her in the drab, dark clothes of a vowess, her lean, high-cheekboned face staring out with hooded eyes from beneath a linen headdress with a white or grey coif and a wimple covering her head and throat like a nun. A pleated barbe stretches down from her chin onto her chest. She is invariably seen either on her knees devoutly praying, or holding an open missal in her hands. She was the principal patron behind the rebuilding of Great St Mary’s Church in Cambridge, and in 1505 she refounded the impoverished Godshouse there as Christ’s College;65 later she founded another Cambridge college, St John’s. She also established readerships (later professorships) in Divinity at Oxford and Cambridge Universities.

  In about 1501, she appointed Dr John Fisher, Master of Michaelhouse, Cambridge, as her chaplain. Shortly afterwards he became her confessor.

  Henry VII was impressed by Fisher and decided to make him Bishop of Rochester. He sought his mother’s permission to offer the appointment:

  Madam: And [if] I thought I should not offend you, which I would never do, I am well minded to promote Master Fisher, your confessor, to a bishopric … for none other cause but for the great and singular virtue that I know and see in him.

  Howbeit, without your pleasure known, I will not move him nor tempt him … 66

  She clearly agreed as Fisher was appointed by papal Bull on 14 October 1504.

  He later described her daily ritual of piety:

  In prayer every day at her uprising which commonly was not long after five of the clock, she began certain devotions and so after them, with one of her gentlewomen, the matins of Our Lady. Then … she came into her closet, where with her chaplain she said also matins of the day.

  After that [she] daily heard four or five Masses upon her knees, so continuing in her prayers and devotions unto the hour of dinner which was … often of the clock and upon a fasting day, eleven.

  After dinner full truly she would go her stations to three altars daily [and] daily her dirges and commendations67 she would say and her evensongs before supper, both of the day and of Our Lady, besides many other prayers and psalters … 68

  Twelve poor or injured people lived under her roof whose wounds she regularly tenderly dressed with her own hands. She wore ‘lacerating garments of hair cloth’ next to her skin to mortify her flesh.69

  But behind all that strait-laced sobriety and holiness, Lady Margaret had a lighter side. She kept a troupe of minstrels – Henry VII paid 10s to them on 18 February 1494 for performing before him – and her own fool, or jester, called ‘Skip’, who wore a pair of ‘start-ups’ or high-heeled shoes. There was also ‘Reginald the idiot’ to provide her with hours of innocent entertainment, if necessary. The vowess liked a little wager at times also, betting – like her son – on the outcome of games of chess. On one occasion, she dispatched a man from Buckden, Cambridgeshire, to deputise for her on a pilgrimage while she gambled at cards.70

  Lady Margaret must have presented a grim, formidable figure to her grandchildren, but she was extremely fond of all of them, although her favourite was her godchild and namesake Margaret.71 Her imperious nature and very rigid views must have overawed all of them, particularly young Henry, who lived under her controlling influence, especially in regard to his behaviour and education. She certainly was a dominant mother-in-law: a Spanish envoy, the sub-prior of Santa Cruz, wrote in 1498 that Elizabeth of York – ‘a very noble woman’ – was ‘kept very much in subjection by the mother of the king’. He respectfully suggested to the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, that ‘it would be a good thing to write often to her and to show her a little love’.72

  Henry, Duke of York, was now going to play a major role in a spectacular and expensive show of pageantry, carefully stage-managed by his father as a showcase for the glamour and glory of the House of Tudor: the glittering wedding of the heir-apparent, Arthur, to Princess Katherine of Aragon (Plate 9).

  Negotiations for the wedding match had been continuing for years, complicated by the frequent bitter bickering between the Spanish ambassadors in London73 and the complexities of the marriage settlement. There were endless niggling details to sort out. One Spanish envoy, Dr Roderigo de Puebla, reported in July 1498 that the queen, Elizabeth of York, and the king’s mother desired that Katherine

  should always speak French with Princess Margaret who is now in Spain in order to learn the language and to be able to converse in it when she comes to England.

  This is necessary because these ladies do not understand Latin, much less Spanish.

  They also wish that the Princess of Wales [Katherine] should accustom herself to drink wine. The water of England is not drinkable and even if it were, the climate would not allow of it.74

  Meanwhile Arthur and his intended bride could only write forlorn and studiously polite love letters to each other, delivered via the squabbling diplomats in London.75

  At last in 1501, Katherine left Granada at the start of her long journey to England for the wedding, with a fifty-two-strong entourage, including a cook, a baker and even her own floor sweeper.76 She was delayed first by the unusually fierce heat of Spain and then by terrible weather off Ushant, including storms and hurricanes, forcing her ships to return to port. Henry VII was so worried that he sent one of his best captains, Stephen Butt, out into the Bay of Biscay to escort her to England. Katherine, he added, was ‘impatiently expected by me, the queen, by the Prince of Wales and by the whole nation’.77

  At three in the afternoon of Saturday 2 October, the fleet carrying the bride finally entered Plymouth harbour to ‘great rejoicings, as if she had been the Saviour of the world’, one of her many Spanish gentlemen reported.

  As soon as she left the boat, she went in procession to the church, where, it is to be hoped, God gave her the possession of all these realms for such a period as would last long enough to enable her to enjoy life and to leave heirs to the throne.78

  As it would turn out, these words were more of a curse than a blessing. Lady Margaret Beaufort used far plainer words. As was her habit, in her Book of Hours she noted against the date: ‘This day my lady princess landed.’

  Although very elaborate arrangements had been made for Katherine’s stately progress to London, after all those turgid and tedious years of negotiation, Henry VII could not wait for her to arrive in his capital city. Impulsively, he rode out from Richmond with Arthur to meet her and at about two or three o’clock on the afternoon of 4 November intercepted her cavalcade, which had arrived three hours before at a palace of the Bishop of Bath and Wells at Dogmersfield in Hampshire. Katherine was under firm instruction from her parents ‘not to converse with him or the Prince of Wales until the day of the solemnisation of her marriage’.79

  Arthur was miserably left outside in th
e November rain as his father sought to meet his son’s bride. But the door of her lodgings remained firmly closed, with her attendants declaring that ‘the lady infanta has retired to her chamber’. Henry VII was not a king lightly brushed aside by maidenly inconvenience or incomprehensible Spanish conventions. He insisted that ‘if she were even in her bed, he meant to see and speak with her, for that was his mind and the whole intent of his coming’. Katherine therefore hurriedly dressed and prepared herself to meet her future father-in-law.

  Neither could comprehend what the other was saying; Henry could not speak Spanish and Katherine not a word of English. Her carefully learnt Latin was fluent but her pronunciation was so bad that the king could not understand more than a few words that she uttered. The encounter was descending into pantomime. But interpreters assured them ‘there were the most goodly words uttered to each other … as to great joy and gladness as any persons conveniently might have’.80 After half an hour, a dripping Arthur was admitted for his first glimpse of his bride.

  She had probably remained veiled but now modestly lifted it with the assistance of her attendants. She curtsied low, a shy girlish smile flickering across her oval face. Katherine was six weeks off her sixteenth birthday. She was pink-cheeked with blue eyes and reddish-gold hair. Unkindly, it was noted that Katherine was slightly on the plump side and quite short, even tiny. Henry VII ‘much admired her beauty as well as her agreeable and dignified manners’. Arthur afterwards told her parents, Ferdinand and Isabella, that he ‘never felt such joy in his life as when he beheld the sweet face of his bride. No woman in the world could be more agreeable.’ Dutifully, he promised to be a good husband.81