The House of Tudor

by Alison Plowden

  Philip, on his side, wanted English support, both moral and financial, in establishing his claims to Castile, and on 9 February 1506, he and Henry put their signatures to the Treaty of Windsor. Before the end of the month the Venetian, Vincenzo Quirini, who had sailed with the fleet from Zeeland and was now marooned at Falmouth - ‘a very wild place which no human being ever visits’ as he mournfully remarked - had nevertheless heard that ‘the Kings of England and Castile have concluded and proclaimed a new and very close alliance, which was ratified and sworn to at the altar’. On 16 March Edmund de la Pole was brought under escort to Calais and handed over to Henry’s representatives. A fortnight later the White Rose had been safely deposited in the Tower.

  Marriage, the usual cement for binding political treaties, was also discussed during those weeks at Windsor. In this case, three marriages - Henry’s own to Philip’s sister Margaret (the Queen of Naples had been discarded, not because she had bad breath but because it turned out she had no money), little Mary Tudor to Philip’s son Charles, and (‘very secretly’ this one) the Prince of Wales to Philip’s daughter Eleanor. When the King and Queen of Castile finally resumed their interrupted journey, matters seemed in a fair way to being settled and the result, so Henry sincerely hoped, would be the discomfiture of the King of Aragon.

  In fact, the person who suffered most from this realignment of European power blocs was Ferdinand’s unhappy daughter. When the contract for her second marriage was signed in the summer of 1503, Catherine had been required to renounce all claim to her dower rights as Arthur’s widow - a renunciation which left her financially dependent on her father-in-law and very much at his mercy. At first Henry was not ungenerous, making the princess an allowance of a hundred pounds a month - enough, just, to support the establishment at Durham House. But later, as relations between England and Spain deteriorated and Ferdinand showed no sign of fulfilling his obligations, Henry had a means of retaliation ready to hand. Catherine’s allowance was cut off and Durham House closed. Robbed of even the illusion of independence, forced to live on the fringes of the Court in whatever accommodation might be assigned to her, cold-shouldered by the English, her servants unpaid and mutinous, heavily in debt - though not, she assured her father pathetically, for extravagant things - the Spanish princess learned the hard way just what it could mean to be a pawn in the political chess game. Even such rare interludes as the visit to Windsor brought their own problems and Catherine had to sell some bracelets to pay for a new dress.

  She got no help from Spain. God alone, wrote Ferdinand, knew the sadness of his heart whenever he thought of her miserable life, but he did nothing about paying over the rest of her dowry. The King of Aragon was, in fact, having something of a struggle to keep his head above water and he chose to blame his daughter’s predicament on the evil machinations of the King of Castile - although Philip had died in somewhat suspicious circumstances soon after arriving in Spain. Ferdinand, a talented and experienced practitioner of the art of survival, sent a fluent stream of regrets, excuses and promises to England, but meanwhile the Prince of Wales’s fourteenth birthday had come and gone and his fiancée remained in limbo - lonely, humiliated and, so it seemed, betrayed.

  It is hard not to blame Henry VII for the undoubted meanness with which he treated Catherine and this picture of a cold-hearted skinflint is the one that has come down to us. Like all such traditions, there is a grain of truth in it, but it is by no means the whole picture. The King was certainly very interested in money and skilful in amassing it, but he also knew how to spend it - witness the glorious chapel in Westminster Abbey which bears his name. Nor was his court the grim and joyless place It is sometimes painted. It was well regulated - Margaret Beaufort saw to that -and drunkenness, wasteful extravagance and anything which might be classed as ‘goings on’ were certainly discouraged; but there is plenty of evidence that the King’s household was cheerful, comfortable and always suitably magnificent with, at least until 1503, a happy family life at its core. When the ancient royal manor of Sheen was destroyed by fire in 1497, a handsome new palace, built of brick and stone in the latest architectural style and surrounded by gardens and pleasure grounds, rose on the site, re-christened Richmond by Henry in memory of his own and his father’s earldom. Improvements were also put in hand at Baynard’s Castle and Greenwich.

  The popular image of a killjoy King, spending every spare moment poring over his account books, is largely the creation of Francis Bacon, whose classic biography of Henry was published in the 1620s. ‘For his pleasures’, wrote Bacon, ‘there is no news of them’ but there is, in fact, quite a lot of news to be found in the Privy Purse accounts - enough at any rate to show that the King took his pleasures from a wide range of leisure activities: from hunting and hawking, tennis, archery, cards and dice; that he was fond of music, rewards to singers and musicians occur frequently; that, considering his many other preoccupations, he played a perfectly normal part in the busy social life of the Court. The account books also show that he was ready to be amused in a variety of ways - there are payments to ‘a Welsh rhymer’, to ‘the blind poet’, to ‘a little maiden that danceth’, to ‘the children of the King’s Chapel for singing of Gloria in excelsis’, to ‘a piper on the bagpipe’, to ‘a Spaniard that played the fool’ and that is only a small, random selection. There is less evidence of interest in cultural matters. Henry himself was no intellectual and too conventionally-minded to feel much sympathy with the rising tide of intellectual excitement beginning to surge through the universities; but he respected learning in principle, saw to it that his children received the best possible education and encouraged his mother in her zeal for founding colleges. He was a pious man, neglecting none of his religious duties and giving special patronage to the Franciscan order of Observant Friars, but always a moderate man, he had none of his mother’s religious fervour.

  The last years of the King’s life were marked by a noticeable deterioration in his health and by increasing loneliness. As early as 1501 he was complaining to his mother of failing eyesight - it sounds like cataract - and apologizing for the fact that it had taken him three days to write her a letter in his own hand. Probably he never really recovered from the shock of losing his elder son and his wife within a year of one another. He was seriously ill soon afterwards and by 1504 or 1505 it was being whispered that ‘the King’s grace is but a weak and sickly man, not likely to be a long-lived man’. By this time, too, there were many gaps in his small circle of intimate friends. Jasper Tudor had died back in 1495. John Morton had gone and so had Reginald Bray, two of his closest and most trusted confidants. It was a long time now since the glorious adventure of Bosworth and there were very few people left who remembered the fair-headed young Welshman who had landed at Milford Haven all those years ago.

  None of the King’s plans for a second marriage ever materialized. Margaret of Austria, a strong-minded lady already twice a widow, had declined the honour and his third choice, despite a most pertinacious pursuit, also proved to be beyond his reach. Henry Tudor’s abortive courtship of the widowed Queen of Castile is the one bizarre episode in an otherwise unexceptional private life - not just because, as Catherine of Aragon’s sister, she was closely related to him by marriage but because she was, at least according to her own family, hopelessly insane.

  Henry had met Juana briefly in 1506 (she had spent less than a week at Windsor) but in view of what followed it is tempting to believe that during those few days the sober, prudent King had fallen head over heels in love with another man’s wife. After Philip’s death Juana, a Queen in her own right, naturally became a great matrimonial prize but this alone scarcely accounts for Henry’s uncharacteristic, almost obsessive eagerness. He paid no attention to Ferdinand’s hints and evasions, even stories that Juana had refused to allow Philip to be buried and was carrying his coffin about with her failed to discourage him. He continued to press his suit by every diplomatic means open to him, using every persuasion he could think
of Dr. de Puebla was instructed to tell the King of Aragon that in different surroundings and under the care of an affectionate husband, the Queen of Castile might recover her wits; even Catherine was pushed into writing to her sister to commend the match. But all Henry could get out of Ferdinand was a vague promise that if Juana married anyone it should certainly be the King of England. As the King of England’s disappointment and frustration increased, his temper got worse and Catherine, as his hostage, got the full benefit of it.

  There is a certain amount of mystery attached to the question of whether the tragic Juana really was insane, or whether Ferdinand was deliberately exaggerating her undoubted mental instability for reasons of his own. Henry told a Spanish envoy in 1508 that when he had seen the Queen himself two years previously, she had spoken and acted rationally and with great dignity and grace. He had thought her sane then and he thought her sane now. He was receiving reports from Spain which said she was perfectly normal but that Ferdinand was keeping her shut up and spreading false rumours about her. If Henry believed these reports, and his intelligence service was usually reliable, then it would explain a good deal of his loathing of Ferdinand. It might also explain why the Prince of Wales, now a strapping young man taller than his father, was still unmarried - a fact which, considering the acute shortage of male Tudors, was worrying several members of the Council. But in spite of the obvious dangers inherent in such a delay, it seems that the King was using his son’s marriage as bait, stubbornly hoping to catch his own fish on the hook.

  Matters were still at this impasse when Henry died ‘of a consuming sickness’ on 21 April 1509. He was fifty-two years old and had ruled England for twenty-three years and eight months. Of his public abilities as king and statesman there can be Little question and few people have disputed Bacon’s judgement that he was one of the best sort of wonders - ‘a wonder for wise men’. ‘His spirit’, wrote Polydore Vergil, ‘was distinguished, wise and prudent; his mind was brave and resolute and never, even at moments of the greatest danger, deserted him. ‘John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, making the King’s funeral oration, declared that: ‘His politic wisdom in governance was singular, his wit always quick and ready, his reason pithy and substantial, his memory fresh and holding, his experience notable, his counsels fortunate and taken by wise deliberation.’ It is also worth remembering that Henry was a humane man. For a king with his problems the number of political prisoners executed during the reign was remarkably small.

  As for the accusations of avarice and rapacity levelled against him both by his contemporaries and by succeeding generations, it is perfectly true that Henry had evolved some extremely efficient methods of soaking the rich. Nobody enjoys being parted from his money. Henry’s victims, most of whom came from an articulate, influential section of the community, complained loudly and bitterly, and no doubt some injustices were done. But for the King, whose one over-riding aim had always been to increase the authority of the Crown while strengthening his family’s hold on it, money equalled power and power equalled security. As he grew older and more secure, paradoxically the urge to salt away just a little more and then a little more of the substance of power seems to have grown, until at the last it was threatening to overwhelm him and, as Polydore Vergil put it, to distort ‘those qualities of trustfulness, justice and integrity by which the State must be governed’.

  To his mother, who loved him, Henry was ‘my own sweet and most dear king and all my worldly joy’ - ‘my good and gracious prince, king and only beloved son’. His subjects admired, feared and respected him, but there is little to suggest that they ever loved him. His was not an out-going personality. He never courted popularity and does not appear to have either wanted or expected it. The most he asked of the English people was that they should remain loyal and passive while he got on with the business of ruling them. And he ruled them well, leaving the country prosperous and at peace, the monarchy stronger and richer than it had been for generations. More than that, by his patient, unspectacular hard work, his unremitting attention to detail, the first Henry Tudor laid the foundations which alone made possible the achievements of his son and his grand-daughter.

  4: THE RENAISSANCE PRINCE

  The Rose both white and rede

  In one Rose now doth grow;

  Thus thorow every stede

  Thereof the fame doth blow:

  Grace the sede did sow:

  England now gather flowers,

  Exclude now all dolours.

  The new King of England was seventeen years old and the whole country promptly went wild with delight over ‘our natural, young, lusty and courageous prince and sovereign lord, King Harry the Eighth’. Foreign diplomats sat down to write glowing reports of his magnificence and liberality, while John Skelton, the Poet Laureate, who had been the prince’s first tutor - ‘the honour of England I learned to spell’ - hurried into enthusiastic verse.

  Noble Henry the eight

  Thy loving sovereine lorde,

  Of Kingis line moost streight.

  His titille dothe recorde:

  In whome dothe wele acorde

  Alexis yonge of age,

  Adrastus wise and sage.

  Adonis of fresh colour,

  Of youthe the godely flower.

  Our prince of high honour,

  Our paves [shield], our succour.

  Our king, our emperour.

  Our Friamus of Troy,

  Our welth, our worldly joy.

  Noble ‘Henry the eight’ certainly seemed to have every advantage. Thanks to his father’s statesmanship and careful housekeeping, he had succeeded unopposed to a secure and solvent throne - and that was something which had not happened to an English king for a long time. The second Henry Tudor was also of ‘truly royal stock’, embodying as he did the celebrated union of the red and white roses. But there was nothing of the pale, ascetic Lancastrian about Henry VIII. In him the Yorkist genes predominated and as a physical type he strongly resembled his maternal grandfather, Edward IV, who had been ‘very tall of personage, exceeding the stature almost of all others...of visage lovely, of body mighty, strong and clean-made. Howbeit in his latter days, with over-liberal diet, somewhat corpulent and burly...’

  Looking at portraits of the young Henry it is not easy to equate them with modern standards of male beauty, but his contemporaries were unanimous in their opinion that Nature could not have done more for the King. ‘His Majesty’, wrote the Venetian Piero Pasqualigo, ‘is the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on; above the usual height, with an extremely fine calf to his leg; his complexion fair and bright, with auburn hair combed straight and short in the French fashion, and a round face so very beautiful that it would become a pretty woman, his throat being rather long and thick.’ Ten years after his accession, Henry was still being described as ‘much handsomer than any other sovereign in Christendom...very fair and his whole frame admirably proportioned’.

  This splendid red-headed young giant, with his round baby face and glowing pink and white skin had inherited more than good looks from his Yorkist grandfather. Edward IV had been a very popular king with the knack of making himself agreeable in all sorts of company. According to Polydore Vergil, he ‘would use himself more familiarly among private persons than the honour of his majesty required’ but Edward had known instinctively that popularity is often more valuable to a king - especially an English king - than majesty and his Tudor grandson knew it too, just as he knew how easily and cheaply it could be acquired. Henry VIII possessed the precious gift of personal magnetism which Henry VII had lacked and his charm, when he chose to exert it, was irresistible. Thomas More, an acute observer of human nature, put his finger on the secret when he wrote: ‘The King has a way of making every man feel that he is enjoying his special favour, just as the London wives pray before the image of Our Lady by the Tower till each of them believes it is smiling upon her.’

  The new King had also inherited the abundant energy of his Plantagenet f
orbears and he made tireless use of his superb athlete’s body. He was a capital horseman, reported the Venetians, passionately addicted to hunting, who wore out eight or ten horses in a single day. He ‘jousted marvellously’, was a keen tennis player and could draw the bow with greater strength than any man in England. He loved hawking, was a good dancer and a crack shot who, at archery practice, surpassed the archers of his guard. In all the popular forms of mock combat and trials of strength - in wrestling and tilting, running at the ring and casting of the bar, in throwing a twelve foot spear and wielding a heavy, two-handed sword - the King soon proved himself more than a match for his competitors. He was, in fact, a first-rate, all-round sportsman and nothing could have been better calculated to endear him to a nation which idolized physical courage and physical prowess; which cared little for politics but a great deal for sport.

  At the same time, there was more to Henry than a well-coordinated hunk of brawn and muscle. He had a good brain and had been given a good education. He liked to display his own learning and enjoyed the company of scholars, so that the intellectuals were as excited as everyone else over the appearance of ‘this new and auspicious star’, this lover of justice and goodness. Lord Mountjoy in particular could hardly contain himself. He wrote to his protégé in May 1509: