But what is this now to him but fumus [smoke] and umbra [shadow]; nor shall I praise him for it.52
Margaret Beaufort was so impressed by Fisher’s hour-long homily that she asked for it to be printed and widely distributed – which it was, by Wynkyn de Worde, in a unique example of royal funerary publication in sixteenth-century England.53
At about one o’clock, the royal corpse began its last journey to Westminster for burial. Alms totalling £102 were distributed to the poor living between the two great churches in an attempt to persuade them to include the dead king in their prayers that day. More alms were distributed to prisoners in the Clink Prison in Southwark54 and to thirty-nine miscreants freed from Newgate Gaol and other prisons in the City of London. After further requiems, Henry VII’s wax effigy was taken into St Edward’s Shrine and his coffin, with a cross of white satin laid on top, was lowered into the vault, to lie alongside that of his wife, Elizabeth of York. In the customary ritual of closure, the great officers of state snapped their white wands of office in half and threw the fragments down on top of the coffin. Thomas Wriothesley, Garter King of Arms, stepped forwards and shouted in a loud voice: Le noble Roy, Henri le Septieme est mort (‘the noble King Henry VII is dead’) and – after a momentary pause – Vive le noble Roy Henri le Huitiesme (‘God send the noble King Henry VIII long life!’). His cry echoed around the great abbey church, amid the clouds of incense.55 The funeral was over and so was Henry VII’s rapacious and turbulent reign. The mourners, now with healthy appetites, ‘departed to [Westminster] Palace where they had a great and sumptuous feast’.56
The king is dead. Long live the king. As usual in this period, this new king did not attend his father’s funeral: the chief mourner was Buckingham. Henry VIII had other matters to occupy his mind – including the organisation of a tournament – and granting rewards to those who had eased his passage into power, as well as to those who enjoyed his special favour.
For example, Richard Weston – the Groom of the Privy Chamber who wore that ‘smiling countenance’ during the charade of normality at Richmond – was appointed Captain ‘for life’ of the Channel Islands of Guernsey, Alderney, Sark and Herm. He was also given the lucrative posts of Keeper of Hanworth Park and Steward of the Lordships of Marlow, Buckinghamshire and Cookham, Stratfield Mortimer and Bray, Berkshire.57 Another Groom of the Chamber, William Tyler, was made Ranger of Groveley Forest in Wiltshire,58 and granted the ‘corrodies’ of the Benedictine Abbey of Hyde, near Winchester, and the Franciscan friars’ house at Chichester, Sussex.59 Less pleasant was the exemption from the general pardon of Thomas Roberts, who had murdered Robert ap Jankin, one of the gentlemen ushers to the late king, and John ap Robert, ‘the king’s servant’ in Usk, Monmouthshire, in the Welsh Marches. Fifteen other ‘murderers’ involved in the same incident were exempted from regal mercy, in a document signed by the king in three places.60
Sir Henry Marney, who had been dubbed a Knight of the Bath with Henry back in 1494, was now made Captain of the Guard and Vice-Chamberlain of the Household on 12 May, in place of Thomas, Lord Darcy.61 Marney was then swiftly appointed Steward of the Duchy of Cornwall and finally Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the latter post left vacant by the imprisoned Empson. The appointment of the experienced old soldier Marney, at fifty-two hardly a young thruster, probably came through the influence of Lady Margaret Beaufort, as he was one of her favourites.62
George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, already Lord Steward, was appointed one of the two Chamberlains of the Exchequer on 13 May.63 John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was made Lord Admiral of England, Ireland and Aquitaine two days later64 and a raft of other preferments given to him earlier by Henry VII were confirmed – including the Keepership of the lions, lionesses and leopards in the royal menagerie within the Tower, at twelve pence a day, plus an allowance of an extra five pence for every beast. The firebrand Sir Edward Howard, a crony of Henry’s, was appointed Royal Standard Bearer of England, with an annual payment of £40.65
On 19 May, Henry granted the royal house and manor of Woking in Surrey to his grandmother, which she had surrendered to his father in 1503 in exchange for an estate at Hunsdon in Hertfordshire. Large-scale improvements had been made to this moated house, attractively surrounded by verdant gardens and orchards, which had been one of Henry VII’s favourite homes. Now the property was returned to its original owner by a dutiful grandson.
There remained the vexed question of Katherine of Aragon.
On 1 May, while Henry stayed within the security of the Tower, the king’s council was closeted at Richmond. On their agenda were progress reports on the arrangements for Henry VII’s funeral and the fulfilment of the provisions of the old king’s lengthy will. The marriage issue was also raised, as the ministers were fully aware not only of the muddle of unfinished business and the importance of an alliance with Spain, but also the overarching need to secure the Tudor dynasty by the procreation of healthy, lusty male heirs.
A decision was taken during those discussions to resurrect the dormant, stultified marriage with the Spanish princess.
Two days later, Richard Fox, Lord Privy Seal, and the king’s secretary, Thomas Ruthal (appointed Bishop of Durham earlier in 1509), summoned Fuensalida to a private meeting. The Spanish ambassador, despite Ferdinand’s urgent instructions to secure the match, had already advised Katherine that her marriage was over – indeed he had begun to ship her few paltry possessions to Bruges in the Low Countries. He was unquestionably astonished at the counsellors’ news. The Lord Privy Seal told him:
You must remember now that the king is king and not prince. One must speak in a different way than when he was prince … Until now, things were discussed with his father and now one must treat with him who is king.
Fox added that he intended to advise Henry to ‘make up his mind to marry Katherine quickly’, before people began to build obstacles. ‘The king’s council,’ he added, ‘were currently in favour of the marriage.’66 Here was a strong hint that things could change again for the worse as far as Katherine was concerned. Fox was making a veiled allusion to Archbishop William Warham’s strong belief that this would be a legally unsound marriage. The Lord Chancellor had not attended the Richmond Palace council meeting and throughout had opposed the marriage because of serious doubts about the validity of the six-year-old papal Bull of dispensation. He had also publicly disagreed with Fox about the issue.67
Henry, as we have seen, had been given his dying father’s instructions to marry Katherine. Perhaps his grandmother added her formidable weight to the political arguments in favour of the match. We do not know whether his own doubts about marrying his elder brother’s widow had surfaced in discussions with his ministers – or whether he had to be persuaded. In any event, willingly or not, he agreed of his own free will that the wedding should go ahead.
Despite his qualms about the wisdom of the affair, on 8 June Archbishop Warham issued a licence permitting the marriage to be solemnised in any church or chapel. The document, in just nine lines of elegant Latin, scrapped the legal prerequisite for three readings of the marriage banns and required them to be published only once.68
Ferdinand was cock-a-hoop at the news from London. On 18 May he wrote to Katherine expressing his thanks to God that the wedding would now go ahead. He told her he had always loved her more than any of his five other children and that she had always been ‘a dutiful and obedient daughter … Your marriage is a very grand and [a] very honourable one. Besides, there was no possibility in the whole world of marrying anyone but your husband.’ Like all fathers before and since, great as his joy was, it would be greater when he heard that the ceremony had actually taken place. ‘It would then be known in England what I am capable of doing for your sake and you will be much honoured in England.’
Ferdinand had finally agreed to pay the marriage portion entirely in coin and urged his daughter – who had fallen out with Fuensalida – to treat the ambassador with courtesy until after the wedding, when
he would be recalled to Spain and a replacement appointed ‘who will be obedient to her in all things’. Katherine, emboldened by the news of her forthcoming nuptials, must have shown some fiery Spanish spirit, for she was also urged to be polite to the banker Francisco de Grimaldi – ‘as he is to pay her dowry’.69
The wedding took place just three days after Warham’s licence was issued – on 11 June in the oratory of the Friar Observants’ church, just outside Greenwich Palace, where Henry had been christened a few days after his birth. It was a private and very quiet affair, probably because of the speed with which it was arranged; Henry wanted his queen crowned with him at Westminster on Midsummer Day, in less than two weeks’ time. Only two witnesses are known to have attended: George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, the Lord Steward, and William Thomas, a Groom of the king’s Privy Chamber and the servant mentioned in Henry’s bede roll.70 Katherine wore a dress of shimmering white satin and her reddish-gold hair hung long and loose, as befitted the virgin bride she firmly asserted herself to be.71
Ironically, it was Warham who officiated at the short, intimate ceremony. He demanded of Henry:
Most illustrious Prince, is it your will to fulfil the treaty of marriage concluded by your father, the late King of England, and the parents of the Princess of Wales, the King and Queen of Spain, and, as the Pope has dispensed with this marriage, to take the Princess who is here present for your lawful wife?
The king answered firmly: ‘I will.’ Warham, in full pontificals and mitre, then turned to Katherine and asked her a similar question, beginning, ‘Most illustrious Princess …’ She, in turn, replied: ‘I will.’72
They spent their wedding night in Greenwich Palace. Henry afterwards bragged that he found his wife a virgin, but in later years, after his taste in women had markedly changed, angrily claimed this had been ‘spoken in jest, as a man, jesting and feasting, says many things which are not true’. But Katherine had many living witnesses who had heard him say it.73
She came to the marriage almost six years older than her bridegroom, at twenty-three, petite, pink-cheeked, somewhat plump but still beautiful. However, the years of fiscal and mental persecution by Henry VII and her continual hardship at Durham House had instilled an iron will inside that innocent and demure exterior. She also matched her husband’s depth of learning – those lonely, isolated years had provided her with the opportunity to read widely, building on the foundations of her humanist education laid long before in Spain.
On 16 June, the king signed his receipt for 50,000 crowns (worth 4s 2d each), the last instalment of the marriage portion handed over to him by Fuensalida.74 In turn, Henry settled on his wife a handsome jointure. Its eight pages of parchment detail more than £750 in income from annual rents, plus the gift of ninety-nine lordships and manors in at least eleven counties and other benefits, including the rights to ‘drag mussels’ in the River Thames at ‘Tilbury Hope, Essex’.75
Planning for the joint coronation of Henry and Katherine was now in full swing. The king proclaimed ‘that all who claim to do services on Coronation Day should be in the White Hall at Westminster Palace’ by 20 June. A team of nobles, led by the Earl of Surrey, the Lord Treasurer of England, and the Earl of Oxford would determine whether their claims were justified. Henry ordered twenty-six ‘honourable persons’ to come to the Tower two days later to serve him at dinner in preparation for their creation as Knights of the Bath on 23 June. They included William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, his old companion in Latin studies; Sir Thomas Knyvet, one of his youthful jousting friends; Sir Henry Clifford, who had been with him since he was made Duke of York; and Sir Thomas Boleyn, a rising star at court.76
It is traditional for the king to hold a solemn vigil before his coronation. For Henry’s nocturnal watch, at the Tower on Friday 22 June, he wore a doublet of cloth of gold and damask satin under a long gown of purple velvet, furred with ermine.77
On Saturday 23 June at about four o’clock in the afternoon a glittering mounted procession trotted out of the Tower, en route to Westminster. The London thoroughfares had been sumptuously decorated for the coronation, the houses and shops hung with tapestry and cloth of arras, and on the south side of Cheapside, with costly cloth of gold. The cobbled streets were railed to keep the huge crowds back from the passage of the riders.
Determined to obtain a good view of proceedings, Lady Margaret Beaufort hired a house in Cheapside for the day, at a rent of 2s 10d, which overlooked the route taken by Henry and Katherine as they processed in triumph. Not for her the crush and stench of the unwashed hoi polloi Londoners in the streets below. She watched the pageant pass by below with Henry’s younger sister Princess Mary from behind a latticed window. Moreover, Henry’s proud grandmother had surprisingly cast off her everyday drab black and white vowess robes for the occasion, to wear – like her ladies – specially ordered dresses of tawny-brown silk and damask with black velvet bonnets.78 Despite this frivolous exterior, dark forebodings lurked in Lady Margaret’s saintly heart. Bishop Fisher recalled later that the coronation provided great joy to her ‘yet she let not to say that some adversity would follow’.79
At the head of the dazzling cavalcade rode the newly created Knights of the Bath, wearing blue gowns. Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, claimed his hereditary role of Constable of England and carried a small silver baton as mark of his office as he rode ahead of the king. The duke wore a long gown ‘wrought of right costly needlework and … about his neck a broad and flat close chain … with great rubies and other stones of great value’.80 Significantly, the Letters Patent conferring this office on Buckingham had stipulated: ‘to be Great Constable on 23 June only, namely the day preceding the Coronation’.81 Henry, all too aware of the duke’s vaunting ambition, had personally imposed strict limits on Buckingham’s vanity and status.
The volume of noise in those narrow streets, overhung with houses, rose to a babbling, shrieking crescendo as the new king appeared amid his household, riding a horse trapped with gold damask and ermine, beneath a golden canopy held aloft by the Barons of the Cinque Ports, exercising a traditional right. Henry wore robes of crimson velvet trimmed with ermine over a gold jacket covered with a breathtaking array of sparkling diamonds, rubies, emeralds and pearls. Around his neck was a collar of huge violet-rose ‘ballas rubies’ from north Afghanistan. 82 Hall, an enthralled spectator in the crowds, was so beside himself with admiration that his descriptive powers began to fail him:
The features of his body, his goodly personage, his amiable visage, princely countenance, with the noble qualities of his royal estate, to every man known, needs no rehearsal, considering that for lack of cunning, I cannot express the gifts of grace and of nature that God has endowed him with.83
Behind Henry straggled a long column of lords spiritual and temporal and many knights and esquires. Then came Sir Thomas Brandon, Master of the King’s Horse, wearing a golden collar like his sovereign (but less showy) and a doublet embroidered with roses of fine gold. He led, by a silken rein, the king’s spare charger, with a harness ‘curiously wrought’ in bullion by goldsmiths.
Katherine’s procession followed. She sat in a litter ‘born[e] by two white palfreys, trapped in white cloth of gold’. She was resplendent in embroidered white satin, ‘her hair hanging down her back of very great length, beautiful and goodly to behold and on her head, a coronet84 set with many rich orient stones’ as Edward Hall enthusiastically reported.85 Behind were chariots carrying her ladies and the wives of the peers of the realm, wearing gorgeously coloured silks.
Bringing up the rear were three hundred of the king’s guard still wearing ‘jackets of the old king’s livery’, some armed with bows and arrows, others with the harquebus (or hackbut), a muzzle-loading gun fired from the shoulder.
As Katherine’s litter passed a tavern on the north side of Lombard Street displaying a board with a painted cardinal’s hat hanging over its doorway
such a sudden shower there came and fell with such force and thickness th
at the canopy borne over her was not sufficient to defend her from wetting of her mantle and fur of powdered ermines … But she was … conveyed under the hovel of a draper’s stall till the showers were passed over which was not long.86
In the future, there would be some Londoners of long memory who remembered Katherine being drenched by that inopportune shower and pondered whether the location of the incident was an evil portent.
Henry and Katherine slept that night in the Painted Chamber of Westminster Palace beneath the huge mural, commissioned by Henry III, of the coronation of St Edward the Confessor in 1042.87 The next morning, Sunday 24 June 1509, Henry and Katherine left the palace at about eight o’clock and walked through Westminster Hall into the abbey church, escorted by thirty-eight bishops and abbots.
The cloth merchants had been frantically busy, supplying 1,641 yards (1,500 m) of scarlet cloth and 2,040 yards (1,865 m) of red cloth, costing all together £1,307 11s 31/2d, for everyone’s coronation robes. Around 480 yards (440 m) of cloth in the Tudor livery were also used for the uniforms of one hundred and sixty personnel from the King’s Bench and Marshalsea Prisons, who carried tipped staves at the ceremony and may have acted as ushers. The total bill for the silks and cloth amounted to £4,781 6s 3d. On top of this was the £1,749 8s 4d for the king and queen’s own robes.
The abbey was packed not only with the great, the good and the merely curious but also with some of the hundreds of retainers who daily attended the royal couple in their separate households. Pip, the Keeper of the King’s fool Merten (who received special clothes for the coronation), ended the long, long list of courtiers and servants in Henry’s household and Privy Chamber.88
Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII Page 14