It can be a lonely old business writing books, but I am very lucky to have made many friends amongst Tudor historians. In particular I spoke regularly to Eric Ives. While I was doing my biography of the Grey sisters he was doing a biography of Jane and we were in occasional contact then. There was a lot we didn’t agree on, but we became good friends, and with this book, if I had a flash of inspiration or was puzzled about something, I would immediately call him (we still didn’t always agree). I have missed him very much since his death in 2012.
The knights in shining armour who very generously agreed to read drafts of this book in Eric’s place were Peter Marshall and Tom Freeman. Tom is one of the most brilliant people I know and has been extremely busy researching his own work as well as teaching some lucky students, so I am truly grateful that he found time to give me his advice on parts of an early draft and especially for sending me his as yet unpublished essay on Foxe and Katherine Parr. Peter read a later and full draft while working on his own forthcoming book on the Reformation. I really cannot properly express my appreciation of his incredible generosity with his time and his knowledge.
Many historians, archivists and librarians have been very helpful answering queries and helping in other ways. I would like to thank in particular, John Guy (who drew my attention to vital MSS concerning Thomas Bishop after I discussed my suspicions that there had never been a quarrel between Margaret and Henry VIII), Cliff Davies, Ralph Griffiths, Rosemary Horrox, Sean Cunningham, James Carley, Julia Fox, Susan Doran, Michael Questier, Stephan Edwards, Claire Ridgway, Andrea Clarke and Kathleen Doyle at the British Library, Mark Bateson at Canterbury Cathedral archives, Christine Reynolds at Westminster Abbey Muniments, Clare Rider and Eleanor Cracknell at St George’s Chapel Archives and Chapter Library, Windsor, Anne Burge at Little Malvern Priory Archives, Carlotta Benedetti at the Vatican Archives, and Peter Foden at the Belvoir archives. I would also like to thank the staff at the wonderful London Library and especially Gosia Lawik in the Country Orders department.
I very much appreciate the guidance of my friends Henrietta Joy and Dominic Pierce, and I hope Henrietta notices I begin Chapter 1 as she instructed. Thank you also to Zia Soothill for patiently listening to my weekly rants and massaging my aching hands. I would like to thank my new editor at Chatto, Becky Hardie, whose razor-sharp efficiency I much appreciate, and also the contributions of Juliet Brooke. Finally I have the best agent in the world in Georgina Capel: it is worth becoming a writer just so you can have someone like Georgina in your life.
NOTES
Abbreviations
ASV
Archivum Secretum Vaticanum
CSPD
Calendar of State Papers, Domestic
CSPF
Calendar of State Papers, Foreign
CSP, Milan
Calendar of State Papers relating to Milan
CSPS
Calendar of State Papers relating to Spain 1485–1558
CSP, Scotland
Calendar of State Papers relating to Scotland
CSPS Simancas
Calendar of State Papers relating to Spain (Simancas) 1558–1603
CSP, Venice
Calendar of State Papers relating to Venice
HMC
Historical Manuscripts Commission
L&P
Letters & Papers Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII
PRO
Public Records Office
Introduction
1.P. S. Lewis, ‘Two Pieces of Fifteenth-Century Political Iconography’ in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964), pp. 317–20.
2.Edward Hall, Chronicle (1809), p. 231.
3.In several inspiring essays by Cliff Davies.
4.As, indeed, Cliff Davies acknowledges – at least after Henry VIII!
5.For the latest research on this, see Jason Scott-Warren, ‘Was Elizabeth I Richard II?: The Authenticity of Lambarde’s “Conversation”’ in Review of English Studies (first published online 14 July 2012).
Part One
THE COMING OF THE TUDORS: A MOTHER’S LOVE
1An Ordinary Man
1.Cloth of gold consists of gold either beaten or worked into long strips and wound around a core (such as silk). This thread is used in weaving a very rich fabric, which is relatively stiff, heavy, and expensive. The gold thread would be woven with a different colour in order to give it a red or gold tinge (in much the same way that one can blend pure gold, e.g. with copper to give it a red sheen). Thanks to Richard Walker from Watts and Co., London, for his advice.
2.Westminster Abbey Muniments MS 19678; Philip Lindley, ‘The Funeral and Tomb Effigies of Queen Catherine of Valois and Henry V’ in Journal of the British Archaeological Association 160 (2007), pp. 165–77.
3.Henry V’s tomb had a wooden effigy with a head and regalia all of silver, and plates of silver covering the trunk. Little care, however, seems to have been taken of it by the later Yorkist king Edward IV. By 1479 the angels at his head, lions at his feet, a silver gilt antelope and two sceptres had vanished. The rest of the silver was stolen in January 1546 when thieves broke into the abbey during the night. Since Henry VIII’s agents were stripping churches up and down the country of their goods, the thieves seemed to have joined in the free-for-all. Henry V was left headless, prompting questions from tourists in centuries to come. In 1971 a new head, hands and a crown for the effigy were modelled in polyester resin by Louisa Bolt, the features following a contemporary description of the king and the earliest portrait of him.
4.The earliest known reference to Owen as a servant in Queen Katherine’s chamber is in John Rylands Library, Latin MS 113 (a chronicle roll of c.1484).
5.The statute is printed in R. A. Griffiths, ‘Queen Katherine of Valois and a Missing Statute of the Realm’ in Law Quarterly Review 93 (1977), pp. 248–58; Elis Gruffudd and the Giles Chronicle, Incerti Scriptoris Chronicon Angliae, etc. (ed J. A. Giles) (1848), Pt IV, p. 17; Hall, Chronicle, p. 185).
6.Incerti Scriptoris Chronicon Angliae, Pt IV, p. 17.
7.Polydore Vergil, Three Books of Polydore Vergil’s English History (ed. H. Ellis), Camden Society Old Series, Vol. 29 (1844), p. 62.
8.A story favoured by the Welshman Elis Gruffudd.
9.The story seems to be recalled in Owen Tudor’s last words. See Chapter 3, p. 25.
10.Michael Drayton, ‘England’s Heroicall Epistles’ (1597).
11.His name suggests his godfather may have been the king’s cousin, Edmund Beaufort, who had been close to Catherine before she married Owen. Children were then named by their godparents, and often given the name of the godparent. There is no evidence that Edmund was Beaufort’s child, as is sometimes claimed.
12.The early seventeenth-century historian referred to here was Giovanni Francesco Biondi. R. S. Thomas, ‘The political career, estates and “connection” of Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke and duke of Bedford (d.1495)’, PhD diss., Swansea (1971), p. 22.
13.The theory, inherited from the ancient Greeks, was that wombs were cold and needed to be filled constantly with hot sperm if women were to be happy and healthy. The Greek word ‘hyster’ refers to the womb, and the term ‘hysteria’ is born from the assumption that women’s wombs cause them to have uncontrollable emotions.
14.Croyland Chronicle, Cliff Davies, ‘Information, disinformation and political knowledge under Henry VII and early Henry VIII’ in Historical Research 85, issue 228 (May 2012), pp. 228–53.
15.Sir John Wynn of Gwydir, The History of the Gwydir Family (ed John Ballinger) (1927), p. 26.
16.In romantic tales of the period a nobleman raised as a peasant would reveal his hidden ancestry by his prowess at the joust, and a fake prince expose his humble origins by seducing a princess and making love to her on the floor.
17.Sir John Wynn of Gwydir, The History of the Gwydir Family, p. 26.
18.As she said in her will.
19.Sir Francis Palgrave, The Ancient Kalendars and Inventories of His Majesty’s Exchequer, Vo
l. 2 (1836), pp. 172–5.
20.Maurice Keen, English Society in the Later Middle Ages (1990), pp. 109, 110.
21.Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England (ed Sir Harris Nicolas) (7 vols, 1834–7), Vol. 5, p. 48; Thomas, PhD diss., op. cit., p. 25.
22.No comparable wooden female saint effigy survived the Reformation. Anthony Harvey and Richard Mortimer, The Funeral Effigies of Westminster Abbey (1994), p. 42; Westminster Abbey Muniments MS 19678.
23.Rotuli Parliamentorum, Vol. 3 (1783), p. 423.
24.Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council, Vol. 5, p. 48; Chancery Warrants for the Great Seal, 708/3839 (15 July 1437).
25.In 1436 Thomas Knolles, a grocer, charitably provided the cost of laying leaden pipes to the prison from the cistern which served St Bartholomew’s Hospital.
26.Margery Bassett, ‘Newgate Prison in the Middle Ages’ in Speculum 18, No. 2 (April 1943), pp. 239, 240.
27.The monk Owen Tudor is said to have died between 1498 and 1501. Catherine died earlier, when ‘young’: Hall, Chronicle, p. 185. At Barking the Tudors were placed in the care of Katherine de la Pole, the sister of the Duke of Suffolk and Abbess of Barking. It is possible that another daughter existed called Tacina (d. 1469), who was married to Reginald de Grey, 7th Baron Grey of Wilton, but Tacina, or Thomasine, is also sometimes described as an illegitimate daughter of John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset.
28.His skeleton measured five feet ten inches. R. A. Griffiths, The Reign of Henry VI (1981), p. 241.
29.John Blakman, Henry the Sixth (ed M. R. James) (1919), pp. 8, 9.
30.Thomas, PhD diss., op. cit., p. 34. The final ceremony took place at the Tower of London on the feast of the Epiphany, 6 January. Edmund Tudor was resident at the magnificent Baynard’s Castle on the Thames in March 1453. Griffiths, The Reign of Henry VI, p. 299.
31.Margaret was the niece of Catherine of Valois’ old friend Edmund Beaufort, who had since inherited his brother’s title, Duke of Somerset.
2A Child Bride
1.Margaret Beaufort was born on 31 May 1443, and her father died in May 1444, a probable suicide. He had been unlucky since youth. Captured on campaign in France aged sixteen, he was held captive for seventeen years – longer than any other nobleman during the Hundred Years War. When he was eventually released he had a huge ransom to pay and no chance of making a lucrative marriage. Instead of a prized virgin from a noble family he had made do with the daughter of a gentleman, Margaret Beauchamp of Bletsoe, who was also the widow of one Oliver St John. Somerset had hoped to restore his tarnished honour by returning to France, but the money he made there was outweighed in the eyes of Henry VI by the costs incurred to the English crown. It led to him being banished from court. The chronicler of Crowland Abbey recorded the rumour that he killed himself shortly afterwards. His daughter later joined the confraternity of the abbey with her mother, and so she knew the place well. Her mother’s third marriage was to Lionel, Lord Welles.
2.She was living at this time at Maxey Castle in Northamptonshire.
3.Anthony Emery, Greater Medieval Houses of England and Wales, 1300–1500: Volume 3, Southern England (2006) p. 242.
4.Richard, Duke of York, was descended from Edward III’s fifth son, Edmund of Langley.
5.They had later been legitimised in royal letters patent (1397 and this was confirmed in 1407). Crucially, however, the letters specific ally excluded the Beauforts from any claim to the throne.
6.HMC Third Report, Appendix p. 280. Thomas, PhD diss., op. cit., p. 36.
7.John de la Pole, son of William, Duke of Suffolk. Suffolk, who was Steward of the King’s Household, and was assassinated in 1450, was blamed for the government’s failures at home and abroad. Suffolk’s sister had raised Edmund and Jasper Tudor from 1437–42.
8.Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood, The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (1992), p. 38. There is a small mistake here. Margaret’s arrival at court during Shrovetide must have been before 14 February, as this was Ash Wednesday that year. Thanks to Eric Ives for this detail.
9.Bishop Russell in 1483.
10.Prayer at coronation of James I; Leanda de Lisle, After Elizabeth (2005), p. 311 and note.
11.Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, existing in the Archives and Collections of Milan, 1385–1618, London HMSO (1912), pp. 18–19. The queen would be twenty-three in March.
12.PRO E404/69/145.
13.According to legend, the fourth-century saint had provided a poor father with dowries for his daughters by secretly throwing bags of gold into his house, where they landed in stockings hanging by the fire (and, of course, he became, in modern times, Father Christmas, a name from old English folk stories).
14.English Works of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester (1469–1535): Sermons and Other Writings, 1520–1535 (ed Cecilia A. Hatt), p. 9; Caroline Halsted, Life of Margaret Beaufort (1839), p. 11.
15.Jones and Underwood, The King’s Mother, p. 38.
16.Isabella, the daughter of Philip IV of France.
17.From whom George III was descended. Lindsay C. Hurst, ‘Porphyria Revisited’ in Medical History 26 (1982), pp. 179–82.
18.The queen named him after the saint and king, Edward the Confessor. This information is later mentioned in the main text. I have not done so here in an effort to reduce the blinding effect of a storm of names.
19.The abbot was called John Whethamstede. Peter Burley, Michael Elliott and Harvey Watson, The Battles of St Albans (2007), p. 35.
20.Probably inspired by Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part I. In the relevant scene Richard, Duke of York, quarrels with Margaret Beaufort’s uncle, Edmund Beaufort, 2nd Duke of Somerset. The two men ask others to show their respective positions by picking a rose – red for Somerset and white for York. The ‘quarrel of the two roses’ was first mentioned in 1646; see Michael Hicks, The Wars of the Roses (2010), p. 13. Walter Scott coined the term ‘Wars of the Roses’ in his 1829 novel Anne of Geierstein.
21.The earliest association with the House of Lancaster that I have found is the painting of the pavilion of Henry Bolingbroke, for the (cancelled) trial by combat he was to have with Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, in 1398. According to the French chronicle Traison et Mort it was covered with ‘rouge fleurs’; Dan Jones, Plantagenets (2012), p. 573. It was thanks to the Tudors that by the time Shakespeare wrote Henry VI Part I, the red rose was as indelibly associated with Lancaster as the white rose was with York.
22.The white rose associated with York was not used, as far as is known, as a badge by Richard, Duke of York. It has been suggested, however, that his ancestors the Earls of March may have done so. This seems very possible given the family’s importance in subsequent Yorkist claims to the throne. His son Edward IV, his daughter Margaret of Burgundy, and his other son Richard III all used the white-rose badge.
23.Sir William Cary of Cookington, who fought at the battle of Tewkesbury on the Lancastrian side in 1471, had white roses on his coat of arms. See Davies, ‘Information, disinformation . . .’ , op. cit., n. 75.
24.Galar y Beirdd: Marwnadau Plant / Poets’ Grief: Medieval Welsh Elegies for Children (ed and tr. Dafydd Johnston) (1993), pp. 53–5.
25.Plague was recorded in England and Wales in eleven of the eighteen years between 1442 and 1459.
26.Henry VII built his father a modest Purbeck-marble tomb in the Franciscan monastery church and invested a few pounds for prayers and Masses to be said for his soul. It was erected in 1503, when Henry VII had been king for eighteen years, and he invested £8 a year towards a chantry for his father. See Cliff Davies, ‘Representation, Repute, Reality’ in English Historical Review 124, issue 511 (December 2009), pp. 1,432–47. The tomb was destroyed during the dissolution of the monasteries in the reign of Edmund’s grandson Henry VIII, and Edmund’s body was moved to St David’s Cathedral. Today the site of the ancient monastery is a shopping precinct. Although it was originally named Greyfriars after the monastery, the precinc
t was rebranded in 2010 as Merlin’s Walk. Local councillors argue that legend sells better than the town’s actual history.
27.As she recorded later to John Fisher; Jones and Underwood, The King’s Mother, p. 40.
28.Eighty years later a visitor to the castle was to be shown a new chimney piece being built in the same room overlooking the river. It was carved with the heraldic badges and arms of the first Tudor monarch and was built to commemorate his birth. The Itinerary in Wales of John Leland (ed Lucy Toulmin Smith) (1906), p. 116.
29.Henry Stafford’s elder brother (who died later that year) was already married to a Beaufort cousin, who had borne a son. Also called Margaret, she was the daughter of the 2nd Duke of Somerset killed at St Albans.
30.This is taken from John Fisher’s obituary sermon for Margaret; see English Works of John Fisher, op. cit.
31.Margaret’s mealtime routine was very similar to that of Cecily, Duchess of York.
32.No one was certain what triggered the rebellion, but it was said to have occurred when God revealed to the angels that His son was to be born a man, in Christ, and that the angels would worship him.
33.Brut Chronicle, quoted in Keen, English Society, p. 194.
34.Dominic Mancini, The Usurpation of Richard the Third (ed C. A. J. Armstrong) (1969), pp. 100, 101.
3A Prisoner, Honourably Brought up
1.The duke looked back to the time of Henry VI’s grandfather. Henry Bolingbroke (later Henry IV) had overthrown the failing king, Richard II, and taken the throne as Richard’s heir. York claimed that his ancestor, Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, had been the rightful claimant. He was the senior heir in the female line of Edward III’s granddaughter, Philippa. But Edward III had entailed the crown through the male line and Henry VI was descended from his fourth son, John of Gaunt, founder of the House of Lancaster (and father of Henry IV); Richard, Duke of York from the fifth son, Edmund of Langley. York soon found he had little support for his claims. It was an argument that would nevertheless persist long after his death.
Tudor_Passion. Manipulation. Murder. the Story of England's Most Notorious Royal Family Page 44