Henry VII did not understand and continued to keep his daughter-in-law in straitened circumstances. The following month, Katherine told her father that she was obliged to sell off her plate to raise money and her ‘officers and servants walk about in rags and live in misery’. She beseeched him to send her money.50 In another letter, which followed hard on the heels of the earlier note, Katherine showed symptoms of desperation and emotional desolation. Her greatest complaint, she said, was ‘the cruelty of permitting her so seldom to see the Prince of Wales, although he lived in the same house as her’. She had not seen him for four months and now Henry VII had told her ‘very positively that he no longer regards himself and the Prince of Wales as bound by the marriage treaty because the marriage portion has not been paid’.51 Katherine asked for a new ambassador to be sent to London as she had lost confidence in de Puebla, who was ‘more a vassal of the King of England than a servant of your highness’, she told Ferdinand.
To modern eyes, the king’s behaviour towards Katherine seems heartless and cruel. After the death of Elizabeth of York, there was a dark change in Henry VII’s character. He became dour, hard-faced and more rapacious, oppressing heavily the luckless people of England and Wales through taxes and the imposition of penal recognisances. Perhaps his callous treatment of the Spanish princess was part of the character of this new, unyielding monarch.
Aside from the loss of his beloved wife and eldest son, one factor behind this transformation in character might have been the death on 5 August 1503 of the righteous and just Sir Reginald Bray, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.52 According to the Italian chronicler Polydore Vergil, when the king fell into error Bray ‘was bold enough moderately to admonish and reprove him’.53 That restraining hand was now gone and Henry felt free to squeeze his subjects until their very pips squeaked.
Paradoxically, as he grew older, Henry VII was also growing more pious. After his victory over the Yorkist rebels at Stoke Field in 1487, the king donated a votive statue of himself to the Shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham and throughout his reign he visited that of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury, as a humble pilgrim.54 As early as 1499, the king was reported to be growing ‘very devout’. The Spanish ambassador Don Pedro de Ayala said he had heard ‘a sermon every day during Lent and had continued his devotions during the rest of the day’.55 Lenten fasting at court was scrupulously observed, which even the sanctimonious Katherine found harsh and oppressive. ‘In the house of the King,’ she told her father in March 1509, ‘they would not give meat to any one, even if he were dying, and they look upon them who eat it as heretics.’56 One of the king’s favourite saints was St George, the patron of England. The French king Louis XII found a skeletal leg, said to be a relic of the saint, amongst the loot of his wars in northern Italy and sent it on to London as a gift for Henry. On St George’s Day, 23 April 1505, the king took part in a procession and veneration of the relic in St Paul’s Cathedral, where it remained on public display for pilgrims.57
The foundation stone of Henry’s impressive new chapel at Westminster was laid in 1500 and the following year work began on his grand tomb, initially planned to be erected in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, but later switched to Westminster. An indenture between the king and John Islip, Abbot of St Peter’s Monastery,58 describes in banal detail the daily prayers and Masses the monks should sing ‘devoutly … on their knees’ for him, Elizabeth of York and his mother. New almshouses at Westminster would also shelter thirteen poor men, one ‘an unbeneficed priest, a good grammarian aged over forty-five’ (and ‘the others having no wives’) to pray ‘for the king’s good estate and afterwards his soul’.59 A badge of a red Tudor rose beneath a crown would be embroidered below the left shoulder on their black gowns.
Henry VII founded six houses in 1499 for his favourite order of friars – the Observant branch of the Franciscan Order – including establishments at Southampton, Newcastle and Canterbury, and alongside his palace at Sheen. In addition, in 1505 he set up the Savoy Hospital, off The Strand in London, dedicated to the honour of ‘the Blessed Jesus, the Virgin Mary and St John the Baptist’ to feed and house one hundred poor people.60
His household accounts reveal a decline in the number of entertainments staged at court after 1504, particularly in the employment of fools or jesters. Perhaps, with all his family tragedies, responsibilities and advancing years, the king’s appetite for a joke or a merry quip had faded away.61 What is more, there are no ‘disguisings’ or early masques recorded after 1502 until Christmas 1507 when Master Wentworth wrote a ‘disguising for a morris dance’.
His son expanded his own household, which still retained a strong feminine element: thirteen gentlewomen are listed, including Frideswide Puttenham, his former royal rocker, and Elizabeth Bayley, Jane Chace and Avice Skidmore, three ladies who had served in the nursery at Eltham Palace.62 There were five Esquires of the Body, led by Edward Hungerford and Henry Guildford, cup-bearer, carver and waiter to the prince.63 John Skelton, his tutor and chaplain, departed64 and was replaced by a professional educator, John Holt of Chichester, West Sussex, tutor and friend of Thomas More, and the author of a schoolboy textbook on Latin grammar.65 Holt died in 1504 and was succeeded by another schoolmaster in Latin, William Hone, who like Holt was a product of Magdalen College, Oxford. With Mountjoy also coaching him, Henry’s proficiency in Latin is not surprising. He was fluent in French, understood Italian, and later on, probably from Katherine of Aragon, acquired some knowledge of Spanish. The prince also displayed ‘a remarkable docility [facility] for mathematics’.66
Music was considered an important constituent of the new humanist education. Henry now had his own small troupe of trumpeters to greet his regal entrances and exits and himself became an expert performer on the lute, the organ and the keyboard virginals, as well as wind instruments (taught by ‘Guillam’, the ‘schoolmaster at pipes’). Giles D’Ewes, who tutored Henry in the lute, also served as keeper of ‘le prince’s wardrobe’ and later as his librarian, when he became king.67 The prince was also an accomplished singer. This love of music was to stand him in good stead throughout his life and Henry became a composer of both sacred and secular music in his own right, although some of his scores were arrangements of existing melodies.68
In July 1504, the Prince of Wales finally moved to his father’s court. That January, Henry Wyatt, master of the king’s jewel house, listed the jewellery issued for thirteen-year-old Henry’s use, including a cross set with five cut diamonds, valued at £13 6s 8d, or more than £6,000 at today’s values. This inventory totalled forty-seven items by mid-1509, many of which were to remain in Henry’s possession for years to come. A list of his jewellery in 1528 included ‘diverse brooches and aglets [metal pendants] which were the king’s when his grace was prince’ and a jewelled collar from the same period.69 Edmund Dudley, one of the king’s notorious revenue collectors, fawningly gave the prince a ring with red and black enamel, decorated with a pointed diamond, but this was soon after lost by Henry in September 1507 at Langley, near Woodstock in Oxfordshire.70
Now he was of an age when he could enjoy more manly pursuits. As well as hunting and hawking, the prince became adept at wrestling, archery, casting the bar71 and fighting on foot with the quarterstaff.72 But his mind must have frequently returned to the thrilling spectacle of the joust after his creation as Duke of York in 1494, and the teenager yearned to emulate the panache of those chivalrous and noble challengers. In February 1505, a black satin arming doublet was purchased for the prince to wear beneath his armour, together with a pair of arming spurs and shoes. But the king, fearful about the succession to the throne and knowing too well the dangers of the tiltyard, limited his heir to mere practice sessions: ‘running at the ring’, where the rider’s lance tip has to catch a suspended circle of metal. Difficult, but hardly dashing.
His grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, was perhaps more indulgent than her son. In March 1506, she bought the Prince of Wales a horse costing £6 13s 4d, together w
ith a shiny new saddle costing 10d, and harness, made of stool work bordered by black velvet and decorated with gilt flowers, priced at 10s. In 1508, she sent him a generous present after he had ‘run at the ring’.73
Henry was also taught how to fight on foot in armour: his household included Thomas Simpson, the ‘master of axes’, who must have schooled him in the use of the short but deadly poll-axes in hand-to-hand combat.74 One of the prince’s new dashing companions, the wastrel Richard Grey, Earl of Kent, broke his arm teaching Henry how to fight on foot with swords in June 1508.75 Another was Charles Brandon, the raffish son of Henry VII’s standard bearer Sir William who was killed by Richard III himself at Bosworth. Brandon, in his early twenties, was something of a youthful roué; he had wed Margaret Mortimer before 1506 but this marriage was annulled a year later. In 1508 he married Anne Browne after she gave birth to his illegitimate daughter.
It is hardly surprising that the king so carefully protected his sole surviving heir. After the terror of the royal family in the blaze that destroyed Sheen at Christmas 1497, there was another narrow escape in July 1506 in the newly built palace at Richmond. Late one night, both Henry VII and his son were walking in a new wooden gallery near the royal bedrooms. At midnight, less than an hour later, the gallery dramatically and noisily collapsed.76
With divine intervention so obviously protecting him, the prince was very committed in his religious faith. A roll of prayers, written on a thin strip of parchment just over thirteen feet (4 m) long, used by Henry was purchased by the British Library in 2010 – for £485,000 (Plate 7). Two badges of Tudor roses and the ostrich plume of the Prince of Wales decorate the top of this ‘bede’ roll, together with the sheaf-of-arrows emblem of Katherine of Aragon. In the centre are a series of illustrations of the Holy Trinity, Christ’s Passion and the Crucifixion with appropriate prayers in Latin alongside. Explanations in English detail the spiritual benefits of such devotion. Under the image of Christ being placed in the sepulchre is this generous promise, written in red ink:
To all them that before this image of pity devoutly say five Paternosters, five Ave Maria[s] and one Credo, shall have 3,712 years and forty days of pardon granted by St Gregory and other holy men.
For praying to the portrayal of the Crucifixion, the supplicant was guaranteed that
No evil spirit [shall] have power of you on land or on water, nor with thunder or lightning [will you] be hurt, nor die in deadly sin without confession, nor with fire burnt, nor water be drowned.
And it shall break your enemy’s power and increase your worldly goods and if a woman be in travail of child, lay this on her body and she shall be delivered without peril.
Munificent and comforting promises indeed and Henry obviously devoutly believed them. Under the image of Christ crucified, he wrote: ‘William Thomas, I pray you pray for me, your loving master: Prince Henry.’ Thomas, one of Arthur’s servants, became Groom of Henry’s Privy Chamber after his arrival at court, and must have become very close to the royal heir to be given this roll which had been specially written for Henry.77
The prince had grown into a strong-limbed youth, fit, hale and hearty. Doubtless he possessed all the frustrations and impatience of a teenager governed by an aging, often ill father, whilst sometimes living together in the same house, although in different apartments.
In contrast to that Spanish ambassador’s gushing description of August 1504, perhaps in the final years of Henry VII’s reign, father and son did not get on. Many years later in 1538, the prince’s cousin Henry Pole, Lord Montague, was to claim rashly in a private conversation with his brother Sir Geoffrey that the king ‘had no affection nor fancy unto’ his heir. He paid for this with his head.78
A new Spanish ambassador, with a grand name and title – Gutierre Gomez de Fuensalida, Knight-Commander of Membrilla – replaced de Puebla in London in mid-1508, charged with rescuing Katherine’s quiescent marriage.79 Fuensalida tried to meet the Prince of Wales, but was denied access. He reported back on young Henry’s seemingly sequestered life:
He is never permitted to go out of the palace, except for exercise through a private door leading to the park.
At these times he is surrounded by those persons especially appointed by the king as his tutors and companions and no one else, on his life, dared approach him.
He takes his meals alone and spends most of his day in his own room, which has no other entrance than through the king’s bedchamber.
He is in complete subjection to his father and grandmother and never opens his mouth in public except to answer a question from one of them.80
It was, he wrote, more like the sheltered life of a young girl than that of a healthy young prince bulging with teenage testosterone. If this bleak picture of his disciplined and regimented life were not enough, Fuensalida alleged that the king once ‘sought to kill’ his heir during a quarrel and also attacked his younger daughter Mary after becoming angered by the contents of a mystery letter he had just received. Unfortunately no other details of this incident have come down to us.
Here, of course, the ambassador was probably reporting possibly unreliable gossip he picked up at court and elsewhere. As a newcomer on the diplomatic circuit, he had not yet had time to establish who his dependable sources were and who would tell him merely what he wanted to hear in exchange for a suitable reward. In addition, he needed an explanation to send to Spain for his failure to discuss the marriage with Katherine’s intended husband. Yet his report of the prince’s lifestyle has a ring of truth about it, given Henry’s obsession with the security of his heir. Despite his association with the squanderer Earl of Kent and rakish Charles Brandon, it is likely that this close monitoring of his life ensured that Prince Henry regretfully retained his virginity.
His father’s health began to break down from around 1497, probably with respiratory problems. The king was reported to be ‘very ill’ at his newly purchased hunting lodge at Wanstead, Essex, in 1503 – 4.81 His eyesight was also beginning to fail about this time – a particularly irksome condition for a sovereign who liked perusing state papers, especially his own exchequer accounts. Various lotions, made from fennel, celandine and rose-water, were employed as eye-baths, but with little beneficial effect. The king was also losing weight despite a healthy appetite, although the bad state of his teeth – Vergil brusquely describes them as ‘few, poor and blackish’ – would not have helped his eating. His red hair had become thin and white.82
In 1504, a year after the death of his docile and reverent wife Elizabeth and two years after the demise of Arthur, Henry fell dangerously ill at Eltham Palace. His poor health inevitably led him to ponder deeply on matters religious. He vowed to appoint only devout men as bishops – the first being John Fisher, as Bishop of Rochester – but recovery (as it does) quickly put paid to his fears of mortality.83
There seems little doubt that Henry VII was suffering from a chronic tubercular infection, as he developed a bad cough in the spring, especially in the years 1507 and 1508.84 His rich diet and consumption of alcohol may also have caused an excess of uric acid in his bloodstream, triggering a mild dose of painful gout in 1507, as later described by Bacon:
The king … began to be troubled with the gout. But the defluxion [phlegm] taking also in his breast, wasted his lungs so that thrice in a year ( … especially in the spring) he had great fits and labours of the tissic [wheezy, or asthmatic problems]. Nevertheless, he continued to attend business with as great diligence as before in his health.85
His breath now smelt sour and stale because of the tuberculosis affecting his lungs. Henry VII recovered well from his attack in 1507, and in October that year, the Spanish ambassador reported him out every day riding, hunting deer and hawking in forests and parks. According to de Puebla:
The king of England has never enjoyed, during the last twenty years, such perfect health and never been so strong and robust as now. It is wonderful to see how his long illness has given him twice as good a constitution as he had
formerly.86
The ambassador was ever the optimist. Despite this recovery, Henry VII was ill again in February 1508, and after rallying was seriously ill again that July, with what his physicians called ‘consumption’ – in their terms, a severe wasting disease, in ours, pulmonary tuberculosis. On 17 August, the Venetian Senate heard reports from Milan that the king of England ‘was very ill and in extremis’.87 Yet again, Henry bounced back. Ferdinand wrote of his pleasure at hearing of his convalescence: ‘The news of your illnesses has caused me much anxiety.’88
But the insidious disease was to finally claim him eight months later.
As was customary, Christmas was spent at Greenwich and Richmond, before the king moved on in mid-January to one of his smaller houses at Hanworth, Middlesex, six miles (9.66 km) away.
Quite suddenly, Henry VII felt the menacing, looming presence of Death very near and his conscience was troubling him.
On Ash Wednesday, 21 February 1509, the king called his confessor – ‘a man of singular wisdom, learning and virtue’ – to him. After making his confession ‘with great repentance’ he told the surprised and doubtless delighted confessor of three promises he had made to God. The first was ‘a true reformation of all of them that were officers and ministers of his laws’ and that ‘justice from hence forward truly and indifferently might be executed in all causes’. Secondly, church appointments would now go to ‘able men, such as were virtuous and well learned’. Finally, because of legal injustices committed in the past, he would ‘grant a general pardon [to] all his people’.
Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII Page 11