A new Christian had entered the world, and a new royal prince was ready to take his place in the firmament. Trumpets sounded, the attendants lit their torches, the heralds put on their gold-embroidered tabards and Henry, wrapped in a mantle of cloth-of-gold furred with ermine and clutching a decorated and lighted candle in his hands, was carried in triumph in a burst of light and sound.
Henry had come into the world on a stage; he would live on one and die on one.
Not, it must be admitted, that anybody at the time took much notice.
No chronicler, herald or contemporary historian gave the event more than a passing – and usually retrospective – mention. None of his father’s poets laureate was inspired to commemorative verse. Even his grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, only noted the bare details of his birth in the calendar of the book of hours which she used as a sort of family chronicle.4
How did it come to pass that the Tudor who would make most noise in the world should enter it so quietly and almost unobserved? Partly it was a matter of accident: Henry happened to be born at the wrong time and in the wrong place. It was high summer, and most people who mattered were about to leave stinking, plague-ridden London for the country delights of the Long Vacation. Nor did Greenwich help. Still officially known as Placentia or ‘Pleasure’ in medieval Latin, it was a semi-private riverside retreat, more the queen’s than the king’s and emphatically off the beaten track.
Nevertheless, intention came into it as well. That Greenwich was used for Elizabeth of York’s confinement in the first place suggests that a decision had already been taken to downplay the event. For Henry was the wrong baby to attract attention anyway. In the fullness of time he would be a royal star, effortlessly drawing all eyes and becoming the prime mover of the political cosmos and the axis round which English history turns. Then, he was only the spare and not the heir.
And the spare did not matter – or, at least, did not matter very much.
But there is a paradox, as there will be so often in Henry’s story. What made Henry relatively unimportant to others, including his own parents, was supremely important to him. For his status as second son was to condition almost everything about his first dozen years: his upbringing, his education, his relationship with his parents and his siblings, his attitude to women, even where he was brought up.
In short, in so far as the Henry we know was a product of nurture rather than nature, that nurture was determined by his also-ran place in the family pecking order.
On the other hand, of course, all this matters – to us and indeed to Henry – only because in circumstances unimaginable, or at least unimagined, at the time of his birth, Henry was to become the eldest surviving son.
And that changed everything – for England as well as for Henry.
Notes - CHAPTER 1: ENTRY INTO THE WORLD
1. LP IV iii, 5791.
2. K. Staniland, ‘The Royal Entry into the World’, in D. Williams, ed., England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxton Symposium (Woodbridge, 1987), 299, n. 8; AR I, 304–6, 333–8. Collectanea IV, 179–84. The Ryalle Book itself is discussed by D. Starkey, ‘Henry VI’s Old Blue Gown: The English Court under the Lancastrians and Yorkists’, The Court Historian 4 (1999), 1–28.
3. TNA: E 404/81/1 (1 September 1491).
4. For instance, in The Great Chronicle, 248, the entry concerning Henry’s birth is not only an insertion, made long after the event (‘This year on Saint Peter’s Day in June was borne Henry, duke of York, the king’s second son which reigned after him’), it also appears under the wrong year. The ‘Beaufort Hours’, 279, notes Henry’s birth only with the bare date; in contrast, for both Arthur and Margaret, the place and the exact hour of birth are given as well.
2
ANCESTORS
AMONG HENRY’S EARLIEST MEMORIES were stories of his own turbulent family history. Some probably came from the horse’s mouth of his parents and relations, and especially his mother; others formed a staple of the teaching of his first boyhood tutor, the poet John Skelton.
Henry, Skelton reminded him in the written materials he prepared for his pupil’s instruction, was of ‘noble’ – that is, royal – blood on his mother’s side as much as his father’s. This was unusual. But then so was the whole of Henry’s family story. For not only were his parents both royal; they both had a claim to the throne. Henry’s mother, Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Edward IV, was heiress of the house of York; his father, Henry VII was, much more remotely, heir of the house of Lancaster. And the two claims, of course, were incompatible.
* * *
For the last few decades, their – and Henry’s – ancestors had struggled for possession of the crown in a conflict known, after their respective emblems – the red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York – as ‘The Wars of the Roses’. Four kings, two princes and a dozen royal dukes had met violent deaths; others, of similar status, had been imprisoned, dispossessed or driven into exile. As well, there were the women who mourned their menfolk, or, at great risk to themselves, plotted and schemed on their behalf. All were Henry’s relations: his father, mother, uncles, grandfather, grandmothers, great-grandfather and cousins innumerable.
And if present comfort and prosperity tempted him to forget, men like Skelton were on hand to remind him. ‘Although you are of a famous family, nonetheless remember,’ he admonished the boy, ‘that ruin and exile are no more impossible for you than similar fates were for your fathers.’ He then listed the perils of sovereignty in a series of crashing rhymes: vulnera funerea miserabilia, suspecta tempora formidabilia, occulta odia instimabilia … miserable deadly injury, formidable uncertain times, inestimable hidden hatreds’.1
There must have been moments when Henry felt that his tutor had come near to rubbing his nose in it.
Now, of course, the victory of Henry’s father at Bosworth and the subsequent marriage of his parents was supposed to put an end to all this. But passions were too entrenched for there to be any such swift and easy conclusion. Instead the aftershocks continued through Henry’s childhood and youth, and provided the other great theme in his upbringing.
They determined the why and when of his entry into public life, of the offices he held and the titles he bore. They shaped his extended family and with it his own developing sense of identity and political affiliation. They even helped him choose between his parents: he would incline to his mother rather than to his father and, as a young man at least, preferred York to Lancaster.
It was a rebalancing which, more than anything else, would allow the union of York and Lancaster – sketched only imperfectly under his fiercely partisan father – finally to flourish and become a reality.
Henry’s father and mother were a striking couple on their wedding day on 18 January 1486. Aged nineteen going on twenty, Elizabeth of York was one of the beauties of the age: tall, statuesque, with blonde hair, blue eyes, fair skin and pure, regular features. She was singularly attractive as a character too, and in a royal family of strident and assertive personalities, she was a healer and reconciler. King Henry VII, though nine years older, was in the prime of life. He too was well above average height, slim, even spare, but strong and with a full head of brown hair, worn rather long, a brilliant eye and a mobile, expressive face. He had also just shown many of the key qualities of kingship: bravery, decisiveness and the ability to master men and events.
Above all, he had had luck. And he had had it time and time again.
* * *
For really nothing was less likely than that this homeless, penniless, long-exiled adventurer, of dubious blood on both sides, more Welsh than English and more French than either, should become heir of Lancaster, king of England and marry the heiress of York.
Henry Tudor was lucky, in the first place, even to have survived the dire circumstances of his birth. This took place on 28 January 1457 at Pembroke Castle on the extreme south-west coast of Wales. His father, Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond, had died of the plague thre
e months earlier. His mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, was only thirteen and had taken refuge with her brother-in-law, Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke. With her youth and diminutive stature, the birth was evidently a difficult one. At any rate, despite two further marriages, she would have no other children. And it was the depths of winter and the plague still raged.
But, out of these dreadful experiences, the closest bond was forged between Margaret and her only child. Even decades later, their correspondence reads more like the letters of two lovers than of mother and son.
Both of Henry Tudor’s parents belonged to satellite families of the house of Lancaster. His father was the issue of a scandalous (and dangerous) liaison between the queen dowager, Catherine of France, mother of Henry VI and widow of Henry V, and a handsome young Welsh squire of her household, Owen Tudor. His mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, descended from John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster’s equally scandalous relationship with his long-term mistress and eventual third wife, Catherine Swynford. Their many children were legitimated; given the surname Beaufort and promoted first to the earldom and later the dukedom of Somerset.
But they were deliberately excluded from the succession.
Fifty years later, however, their cousin, Henry VI, was having second thoughts. Henry VI was the third king of the house of Lancaster. In 1399, Henry ‘of Bolingbroke’, eldest son of Duke John of Gaunt by his first marriage to Blanche of Lancaster, had dethroned his childless cousin, Richard II and made himself king as Henry IV. Henry IV’s reputation never recovered from the taint of the usurpation and subsequent murder of Richard II. But he did manage to hang on to the throne.
Any remaining doubts about Lancastrian legitimacy were swept aside under his son, Henry V. Henry V was the greatest general to have sat on the throne of England, and arguably her greatest king. He won a second kingdom by his victories in France, compelling the French king to give him his daughter, Catherine, in marriage and recognize him as heir to his kingdom.
Our Henry rejoiced to bear the name of his all-conquering predecessor. Almost a century later, tales of Henry V’s exploits, passed on by his mother’s aged lord chamberlain, filled his ears as a boy and gave him his ideal of kingship: he too, he resolved, would conquer France and make the name of the king of England the most feared in Europe.
France, alas, eluded him; feared, however, he became indeed – for reasons good and bad.
At his moment of triumph, Henry V died, leaving as heir to both his kingdoms a six-month-old son, Henry VI. Henry VI turned out to be utterly unworthy of his inheritance: he was peace-loving, morbidly religious, and inherited a streak of madness from his French grandfather, Charles VI. Despite eight years of marriage to Queen Margaret of Anjou, he had even failed to produce an heir.
This left the house of Lancaster dangerously exposed, since none of Henry VI’s uncles had had legitimate children either. In these circumstances, he had decided to bolster the dynasty by brokering the marriage between his cousin Margaret Beaufort and his half-brother, Edmund Tudor.
Was Henry VI really thinking of establishing a strengthened junior branch of the royal line? It is possible. Of course Edmund – despite his close relationship to the king – had no English royal blood at all, and Margaret’s was tainted. But – in the absence of anything better – their offspring might be half-plausible Lancastrian heirs in the event of the failure of the senior line.
The arrangements for the marriage were completed in March 1453. By then, it transpired, Margaret of Anjou was already pregnant with the longed-for prince of Wales, Edward, who was born on 13 October 1453. But that did not save his father. Henry VI had already lost most of France; now his incompetence and occasional madness were threatening to cost him England as well. Leader of his increasingly disloyal opposition was Richard, duke of York.
Richard descended twice over from Edward III. Edward III, as he rather smugly informed parliament in 1362, had been blessed ‘in many ways and especially in the engendering of sons who are come to manhood’.2 There were five of them in all. Edward III endowed them with vast estates and borrowed the quasi-royal title of ‘duke’ from France to distinguish them from the rest of the nobility. Through his father, Duke Richard sprang from Edward III’s fourth son, Edmund, duke of York. But through his mother he descended from his second son, Lionel, duke of Clarence. This, since the Lancastrian kings only descended from Edward III’s third son, John of Gaunt, arguably gave him a better title to the throne than Henry VI himself.
And argue it Duke Richard did. From about 1448 he adopted the royal surname ‘Plantagenet’, and in 1460 he claimed the throne itself.3 Six months later, however, he was dead and his severed head – derisively crowned with a paper crown – was displayed over the gates of York.
But Duke Richard’s son, Edward, earl of March, succeeded where his father had failed. He dethroned and imprisoned Henry VI in 1461 and, reigning as Edward IV, made himself first king of the house of York.
Edward IV, who was only eighteen when he won the throne in battle, was a natural leader of men. He was six feet three inches tall and broad in proportion, with reddish-brown hair, a pink-and-white complexion and a broad, handsome, albeit flattish face. He was charming, too, especially to women, who found him irresistible. But the sunny mood could turn without warning to terrifying violence: he even, the all-too-plausible story goes, held a knife to the woman who would become his queen. He was a great builder, lived luxuriously and maintained a magnificent court as a matter of both policy and personal preference. This lover of life also loved his food, and he became grossly fat in his declining years.
No one, in short, since Edward III had looked or behaved more like a king. And no one looked more like his future grandson, Henry VIII.
He even married for love.
His bride was a young widow, Elizabeth Woodville, whom he wed secretly in 1464, after a whirlwind courtship. She was bold, beautiful and came from famously fertile stock. Eighteen months later she presented Edward IV with a daughter, who was named Elizabeth after her mother and would become our Henry’s mother in turn. Two more daughters followed.
But the marriage was controversial from the start. Elizabeth Woodville, as a subject and a widow, was wholly unsuitable as a royal bride. And she was personally contentious as well. Arrogant, low-born and grasping – with eleven brothers and sisters to provide for as well as the two sons of her first marriage – she went out of her way to alienate powerful Yorkist supporters, including the king’s mother and brothers.
The result was that in 1470, affronted Yorkists joined with renegade Lancastrians to drive Edward IV into exile and restore Henry VI to the throne.
The ‘readeption’ of Henry VI, as it was known, turned the world upside down – not least for our Henry’s future parents. For his father, Henry Tudor, then in his early teens, it meant a return to quasi-royal status. Back in 1461, with his powerful Lancastrian connexions, he had been part of the spoils of Yorkist victory, and had been made the ward of the Herbert family of Raglan Castle. They were the Tudors’ Yorkist rivals in south Wales. But, paradoxically, his years at Raglan Castle were the most stable of Henry Tudor’s youth: the Herberts looked after him well, brought him up carefully and intended him to become their son-in-law as husband of their eldest daughter.
But, as the Yorkist following started to splinter in the late 1460s, Henry Tudor’s guardian was among the first to be killed in the struggle. The boy was rescued by his uncle, Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke, who escorted him to London to have an audience with his other uncle, the restored King Henry VI. The audience took place on 27 October 1470. And it was then, if later Tudor accounts are to be believed, that Henry VI prophesied that ‘This … is he unto whom both we and our adversaries must yield and give over the dominion.’4
* * *
For Henry’s future mother, on the other hand, the ‘readeption’ spelt humiliation and disaster. Probably, as she was then aged four, it was among her earliest memories. She had been with her mother, Elizabeth
Woodville, and two younger sisters in the Tower of London, where the queen was getting ready for the elaborate ceremonies of her fourth confinement. But on 1 October 1470 news came of her father’s flight into exile. Immediately, vicious rioting broke out, and not even the Tower seemed safe. That night, the queen, with Elizabeth and her two sisters, ‘secretly’ took boat to Westminster ‘and there registered her and such as her belonged as sanctuary folk’.
Elizabeth and her mother had begun the day as queen and princess of England; they ended it as refugees. But as York sank, Lancaster rose. On 3 October, Henry VI was released from his prison, where he had not been ‘so cleanly kept as should seem such a prince’, and was ceremoniously conducted to ‘the king’s lodgings where the queen before lay’.5
No doubt he slept in her very bed.
Meanwhile, in the sanctuary, Elizabeth and her mother found themselves dependent on the charity of friends and foes alike. A London butcher, William Gould, gave them out of ‘great kindness and true heart’ the carcasses of half a cow and two sheep to feed their household each week; Thomas Millyng, the abbot of Westminster, went out of his way to befriend them; even Henry VI’s government provided (and paid for) the services of Elizabeth, Lady Scrope of Bolton, as the queen’s lady-in-waiting.6
A month later, on 2 November, Elizabeth Woodville was safely delivered of a son. Her own doctor and midwife were in attendance. But, since she was a mere ex-queen, there was no ceremony. There was ‘little pomp’ either when the child was christened in the Abbey, with Millyng and the prior as godfathers and Lady Scrope as godmother.7
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