At this point Foxe became confidential. Fuensalida, he told the ambassador in secret, ‘should inform Ferdinand [of Aragon] that he was going to advise Henry that he should make up his mind to marry Catherine quickly and before people started to interfere in the matter and construct obstacles’. ‘The king’s council,’ Foxe added, ‘were currently in favour of the marriage.’ He left hanging in the air the thought that this might soon change.
Then he pressed the point home. ‘If Ferdinand did intend to agree to the marriage’, Foxe concluded, he should strike while the iron was hot.
On 8 May, just as Henry VII’s funeral ceremonies got under way, agreement was reached: negotiations that had dragged on for nearly seven years were settled in almost as many days.15
The inwardness of what happened will probably never be known. But the issue of Henry’s adulthood must be an important part of the story. The council had taken away with one hand in the matter of patronage, where the reimposition of the old rules about signed bills treated Henry as a minor in tutelage. But, in railroading through Henry’s marriage, the council gave back with the other hand. And more. For a married king – and soon, no doubt, to be the father of an heir – was an adult king.
Who could doubt it?
Indeed, the symmetry is such that it almost looks as though Henry’s marriage was a quid pro quo for his acquiescence in the limitations on his patronage. Or perhaps – and what amounts to much the same thing – it was a diversionary tactic shrewdly calculated to stop Henry brooding too much on his real place in affairs of state – or the lack of it.
In either case, it’s clear why Bishop Foxe made himself the real author of the marriage, and what he thought he and his fellow councillors were going to get out of it.
In the short term at least he was not disappointed.
The inevitable delays in communications with Spain, where Ferdinand, who was normally so quick on the uptake, rather struggled to keep pace with the speed of events in England, meant that it took another month before the diplomatic niceties were complete. On 8 June Warham, whatever his private doubts, issued the necessary marriage licence. And three days later, on 11 June, Henry and Catherine were married at Greenwich. The ceremony took place in the queen’s closet or oratory, and was small-scale and private. The names of only two witnesses are known – Lord Steward Shrewsbury and William Thomas, groom of the privy chamber.
Thomas had previously served Henry’s elder brother Arthur in the same capacity, and had attended him when he went to sleep with Catherine.
What tales did he tell? Or did he observe a valet’s discretion?
Notes - CHAPTER 19: FIRST STEPS
1. Byrne, Letters of King Henry VIII, 152; Vergil B, 6, 122.
2. Gairdner, Paston Letters VI, 151.
3. TNA: LC2/1/1, fo. 73; CSP Sp. I (1485–1509), 359; Palgrave, Antient Kalendars III, 397–8, items 37, 40.
4. Jones and Underwood, King’s Mother, 288.
5. CSP Ven. III (1520–26), 658; TNA: OBS/1419.
6. LP I i, 37, 94/53, 64–9, 77; GEC IV, 73–4; XII ii, 846–9; Allen, Letters of Fox, 43–4.
7. LP I i, 54/10, 11–14, 21–4, 34; HKW IV, 344–5.
8. LP I i, 54/69–71.
9. Allen, Letters of Fox, 43–4.
10. LP I i, 725, 731/41.
11. C. Coleman and D. Starkey, eds, Revolution Reassessed: revisions in the history of Tudor government and administration (Oxford, 1986), 47–9, 63 and n. 11.
12. Correspondencia de Fuensalida, 484; Palgrave, Antient Kalendars III, 397–8, items 6, 11, 19, 27, 30, 35.
13. Correspondencia de Fuensalida, 516.
14. Correspondencia de Fuensalida, 518; LP I i, 19 (warrant 1 May 1509).
15. Correspondencia de Fuensalida, 519–20.
20
‘VIRTUE, GLORY, IMMORTALITY’
HENRY WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE to find those May days of 1509 intoxicating. William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, Henry’s companion of studies and the mentor of his teenage years, was perhaps the man who knew the young king best. He had been with him at Richmond when his father died; had accompanied him on that strange, half-secret ride to the Tower and thence, with relief, to Greenwich. He seems also to have been a party to the deadly factioneering in the last days of the old reign and the first of the new, and hinted darkly at his recent ‘many occupations and other special causes which I dared not commit to writing’. He was even – at the moment that Henry was tying the knot with Catherine of Aragon – courting one of her Spanish ladies, who was shortly to become his second wife.1
But now, on 27 May 1509, ex praetorio Grenuuici (‘from the palace of Greenwich’), Mountjoy was sufficiently at leisure to write a long letter to his old teacher and friend, Erasmus, who was staying, not altogether happily, in Rome.
The letter is of course written in Latin. But an almost boyish enthusiasm and wonderment keep bursting through the rolling, grandiloquent phrases.
For Mountjoy had witnessed an epiphany.
‘Our prince’, Mountjoy writes proprietorially, as he is sure Erasmus has heard already, has ‘succeeded to his father’s throne’. He is Henricus Octavus (‘Henry the Eighth’), ‘whom we may well call our Octavius’ – that is, the first and greatest Roman emperor, who was afterwards surnamed Augustus.
Those, Mountjoy continues, like Erasmus himself, who knew Henry well, were already familiar with his ‘extraordinary and almost divine character’. But even they have been surprised by ‘what a hero he now shows himself, how wisely he behaves, what a lover he is of justice and goodness, what affection he bears to the learned’. ‘Oh my Erasmus,’ Mountjoy exclaims, ‘if you could see how all the world here is rejoicing in the possession of so great a prince, how his life is all their desire, you could not contain your tears for joy.’
Finally, as if all this were not enough, Mountjoy resorts to the language of prophecy and revelation: ‘The heavens laugh, the earth exults, all things are full of milk, of honey and of nectar! Avarice is expelled the country. Liberality scatters wealth with bounteous hand. Our king does not desire gold or gems or precious metals, but virtue, glory, immortality.’2
Virtue, glory, immortality. It is easy to laugh. Or – bearing in mind what was to happen, not least to Mountjoy himself – to cry. But either reaction would be mistaken. For Mountjoy did not get Henry as wrong as all that. Henry’s youthful innocence, his burning desire to be good, might fade almost as quickly as a summer flower. But the ambition, the determination to be famous, to make a mark in the world – in a word, to be great – never altered.
From time to time, it was frustrated and diverted. It might change form. But the driving impulse remained: he would be famous.
And in this at least he succeeded.
But all this was in the future. Back in 1509, Mountjoy had another, personal reason for feeling a little smug. His own father, John, the third baron, had been overwhelmed by the turmoil of the last tumultuous months of Richard III’s reign and had died a bitter and disillusioned man. ‘Live right-wisely,’ his will had enjoined William and his younger brother, ‘and never … take the state of baron upon them if they may lay it from them nor … desire to be great about princes, for it is dangerous.’3
But the advice fell on deaf ears. William’s galaxy of family connexions had propelled him, almost inevitably, to the court. He had become ‘great’ round Prince Henry. Indeed, he had helped mould him as much as any man.
Now, it seemed, he was vindicated.
‘I will give you an example,’ Mountjoy’s letter continued, as he reported a recent conversation with the king. ‘The other day [Henry] wished he was more learned. I said, “that is not what we expect of your grace, but that you will foster and encourage learned men”. “Yea surely”, said he, “for indeed without them we should scarcely exist at all!”’
‘What more splendid saying,’ Mountjoy exclaimed, ‘could fall from the lips of a prince?’
Or one, he quickly added, more encouraging to Erasmus. After all, Eras
mus did not simply know Henry, but was also ‘intimate, having received from him (as few others have) a letter traced with his own fingers’.
‘Make up your mind,’ Mountjoy exhorted his old teacher, ‘that the last day of your wretchedness has dawned. You will come to a prince who will say: “Accept our wealth and be our great sage!”’
Over twenty years later, Erasmus commented ruefully on his decision: ‘I never made a more unlucky choice.’4
At the time, however, he leapt at the opportunity and arrived in his friend Thomas More’s household only two months later, in August 1509.
Notes - CHAPTER 20: ‘VIRTUE, GLORY, IMMORTALITY’
1. Nichols, The Epistles of Erasmus I, 459; GEC IX, 340.
2. Nichols, Epistles of Erasmus I, 457.
3. GEC IX, 338 and n.f.
4. Nichols, Epistles of Erasmus I, 457–8; 463.
21
CORONATION
ON 11 JUNE, THE DAY OF HENRY’S WEDDING to Catherine of Aragon, the formal preparations for his coronation also began with the issuing of a commission to Surrey, Shrewsbury and the chief justice to convene the ‘court of claims’ to decide on who had the right to offer the king honorific services at his coronation. Since the government did not wish to be bothered with the course of the seals for its own business, the commission was warranted by a signed bill. But, as was the new practice, the bill was counter-signed by a powerful trio of councillors: Privy Seal Foxe, Lord Chamberlain Herbert, and Sir Thomas Lovell.1
Did Henry reflect, a little wryly, that he could not even initiate his coronation on his own authority?
* * *
In point of fact, the real business of organizing the ceremony had begun some weeks earlier with the drawing up of a briefing paper known as the ‘device for the manner and order of the coronation’ of King Henry VIII and Queen Catherine. The ‘device’ was closely modelled on the similarly titled paper for Henry VII’s coronation in 1485 and, even more closely (since that too was a double coronation), on the ‘device’ for the coronation of Richard III and Queen Anne in 1483.2 And, like those earlier papers, Henry’s ‘device’ provided for an entirely traditional ceremony.
The celebrations proper got under way on 21 June, when Henry came on horseback from Greenwich and entered the Tower via London Bridge and Gracechurch Street. The following night, the ceremonies of the creation of knights of the Bath began. Fifteen years earlier, Henry himself had been one of the postulant knights. Now he stood in his father’s shoes. He made the sign of the cross on each knight’s shoulder and kissed it. Many of the knights had close personal ties with the young king. Sir Thomas Knyvet was his jousting hero. Sir Henry Clifford, who was only two years younger than Henry, had been brought up with him as both duke of York and prince, ‘which ingrafted such a love in the said prince towards him, that it continued to the very end’.3 But closest of all was Mountjoy.
Did Henry’s kiss linger a little longer on his friend and mentor’s shoulder?
* * *
The eve-of-coronation procession, from the Tower, through the City and thence to Westminster, did not set off till almost 4 o’clock on Saturday, 23 June. But no matter, for it was brilliant sunshine and the long summer evening stretched ahead. First rode the newly created knights of the Bath, in long blue gowns with white laces on their left shoulders. These they were supposed to wear until a noble lady removed them after they had undertaken a feat of arms. Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham and the greatest and richest noble in the land, preceded the king. In 1501 he had been touted as a possible candidate for the throne. Now he wore a long gown of needlework, ‘right costly and rich’, and carried a little silver baton in token of the fact that he was constable of England. The duke claimed this – the most ancient and powerful surviving great office of state – by hereditary right, and never ceased to press his entitlement to it.
But letters patent conferred the office on Buckingham for a single day, and even then in carefully circumscribed terms: ‘on 23 June only, viz., the day preceding the coronation’. Henry signed this bill alone: even without the countersignature of his councillors he knew when it was dangerous to be indiscriminately generous.4
Then came Henry. He wore his parliament robe of red velvet furred with ermine over a coat of cloth-of-gold, thickly set with precious stones and surmounted with a collar of great ballas rubies. His horse was trapped with cloth-of-gold and ermine, and a canopy, also of cloth-of-gold, was held over his head by four barons of the Cinque Ports.
Henry, now almost fully grown and approaching six feet in height, cut an impressive figure. And it was intensified by his dress and the magic of his royal status.
But – perhaps ominously – the London chronicler seems to have had eyes only for Buckingham.
Henry was followed by mounted attendants wearing surcoats of arms. In pride of place came the arms of England’s royal saints – St Edward, St Edmund and St George – and then the arms of England and France.5
Henry, who was as conventionally religious as he was royal, was, at this supreme moment, invoking the intercession of his saintly predecessors in governing England and – it soon became clear – in reclaiming France.
Then came another of Henry’s boyhood heroes: Sir Thomas Brandon, the master of the horse, who had kept the torch of chivalry burning in the last years of Henry VII’s reign. He led the king’s richly caparisoned charger and wore ‘traverse his body a great baldric of gold, great and massy’, which he had been given by Henry’s father a year previously as a recognition of ‘his loyalty and prowess in feats of arms’ (propter fidem ac ipsius in duellando dexteritatem).6
After this triumphant display of royal chivalry, the cavalcade took on a different character with the queen’s procession. Catherine of Aragon reclined alone in a horse litter. She was dressed in a ‘rich mantle of cloth of tissue’; her hair, a lustrous dark auburn, was let down (as was also traditional) and hung round her shoulders, and on her head she wore a simple ‘circlet of silk, gold and pearl’.
She had already won the hearts of Londoners at Arthur’s wedding. Now she confirmed her hold. And – whatever the vicissitudes of her life – she never lost it.
In her train was the woman who had been the key figure in her husband’s early life: Anne Luke, Henry’s wet-nurse. Did Anne’s heart swell with pride as she saw the child she had suckled as man and king?
Her purse certainly did, since Henry confirmed and augmented the ample grants she had received from his father.7
The queen’s procession had just reached The Cardinal’s Hat, a well-known tavern on the north side of Lombard Street, when a sudden, violent shower broke out of a seemingly clear sky. The downpour was so heavy that it threatened to overwhelm the decorative canopy that was carried over the queen. Instead, with all her finery, she had to take shelter under the awning of a humble draper’s stall.
It was the only blemish on an otherwise perfect day. And, in any case, the summer shower passed as quickly as it came and the procession, only a little ruffled, continued its stately progress to Westminster.
The next day, the twenty-fourth, was Midsummer’s Day, and the day chosen for the coronation itself. It was a day of rejoicing and mystery: bonfires burned on Midsummer’s Eve and the fairies were abroad. And Henry and Catherine, as they processed on foot through the great hall towards the Abbey church, seemed indeed to be another Oberon and Titania: their magic spell would knit up old wounds and end ancient hatreds, and all, all would live happily ever after.
Or so it seemed at eight o’clock on that brilliant summer morning as, preceded by no fewer than twenty-eight bishops in copes and mitres, the couple set out for the solemn ceremony. For hour after hour, Archbishop Warham’s voice echoed round the crossing or coronation theatre of the Abbey, in solemn invocation and admonition. First he presented Henry to his people, who acclaimed him four times with cries of Vivat, vivat rex, Long live the king! Then Henry swore the traditional oaths of an English king. He was anointed nine-fold with the holy oi
ls of chrism. He was invested with the regalia and crowned and acclaimed. Finally the process was repeated for Catherine.
Henry was now king indeed. Beside the magic and the mystery of the ceremony, his earlier creations, as duke of York and prince of Wales, must have faded into nothing.
Two aspects of the service in particular seem to have made a powerful impression on him: the oath-taking and the anointing. Theologically, the anointing, not the crowning, was the heart of the ritual. This is clearer in French, where the service is known as le sacre or ‘consecration’. At its most elevated, the anointing could be seen as a sacrament – a unique eighth sacrament by which kings were called to serve God and were marked out, indelibly, from the rest of creation.
There is no doubt, it seems to me, that, with all the switchbacks of Henry’s religious belief, he held firmly to this high view of the royal station. Indeed, as other certainties lapsed, this loomed larger and larger in his mind until it filled it with an overweening sense of his own importance and manifest destiny.
But there was more to it even than that. For the oil lay at the heart of the foundation legend of Henry’s own Lancastrian dynasty. According to this, the Virgin had revealed herself to St Thomas Becket in a vision; handed him the holy oils in an ampulla in the form of a golden eagle; and instructed him that this was to be the coronation unction of the kings of England. ‘But not those wicked ones who now reign,’ she warned. ‘But kings of the English,’ she went on to promise, ‘shall arise who will be anointed with this oil … the first to be anointed with this oil … shall recover by force the land lost by his forefathers, that is to say, Normandy and Acquitaine.’8
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