Arthur was an unusual choice of name for an English prince. The one precedent was unfortunate: the twelfth-century Arthur I, Duke of Brittany, had been named heir by one of his uncles, Richard the Lionheart, only to be brutally killed by his other uncle, King John, after a period of captivity. It was not this historical figure that Henry VII wished to associate with his son, but another, legendary Arthur, the most popular romantic and action hero of medieval romance. After a tradition which had lasted centuries, from Chretien de Troyes to Thomas Malory, the story of King Arthur of Camelot reached its cultural apogee just months before his namesake was born. It was quite a legacy for the first Tudor prince’s slender shoulders.
One of Henry VII’s first acts as king was to lay the foundations for his marriage to Elizabeth of York. The 19-year-old princess was the eldest daughter of Edward IV, sister of the Princes in the Tower. Although Henry had claimed the crown by right of conquest, the beautiful Elizabeth had always been part of his plan, dating back to the Christmas Day oath he swore in Rennes Cathedral following the failure of his first invasion attempt. Immediately after his victory at Bosworth in August 1485, Henry summoned Elizabeth under escort from Sheriff Hutton to London. Then he set about repealing Titulus Regis, the act passed by Richard III to justify his disinheritance of the Yorkist royal children, ordering that all copies were to be ‘cancelled, destroyed … burnt and utterly destroyed’. Parliament approved the marriage on 10 December and Henry went ahead and ordered the wedding rings, which arrived at court at New Year. He had already obtained one papal dispensation in March 1484 on account of his affinity with Elizabeth – they were third cousins – but Henry was taking no chances and applied for a second, which he received on 16 January. The ceremony went ahead two days later in Westminster Abbey. Eight months after the wedding, Elizabeth was ready to give birth. It was no coincidence that she left London to deliver her child in Winchester.
The great hall is all that remains today of Winchester’s once-imposing Norman castle. Hanging on its east wall, high out of reach, is a round table, reputed to have been the original used by King Arthur and his knights, when visiting the city. Freshly retouched, its bright coloured imagery include a seated king, a central union rose and radiating spokes in the Tudor colours of green and white, with places set for twenty-four knights. Modern radiocarbon dating has exposed the true age of the wood, placing in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, so the table is likely to have been created by Edward I or Edward III, both of whom held Arthurian-themed celebrations there. Prior to this discovery, the table’s uncertain provenance contributed to the myth of Winchester’s royal past, which was already well established by the time the Tudors arrived.
From the twelfth century, authors like Geoffrey of Monmouth, William of Malmesbury, Chretien de Troyes and Marie de France established Arthur as the hero of romances that were among the most widely read by the literate English aristocracy. Edward III’s Order of the Garter, founded in 1348, was inspired by the round table oath and Henry VII’s father-in-law, Edward IV, had felt a special affinity with King Arthur, aspiring to a chivalric court of jousting knights, a romance tale made real. Soon after claiming the throne in 1461, Edward IV commissioned genealogical trees tracing his descent back to ‘Arthur returned from Avalon, the red dragon revived’, and distributed them among his nobility. Hardyng’s chronicle of 1463 located the scene of the king’s adventures at Winchester, which he identified as a possible site of Camelot, writing that ‘The rounde table at Wynchestere beganne, and ther it ende, and ther it hangeth yet.’ Two decades later, John Lydgate’s posthumously published The Fall of Princes included the prophecy that Arthur would return ‘out of fayrye’ and reign again, and William Caxton printed Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, bringing Merlin’s prophecy of the red king and white queen to the fore again. It was a story that suited England’s monarchs in the late fifteenth century, and Henry VII allied it to his personal use of the Welsh red dragon in order to establish an ancestral authenticity for the new dynasty. As England’s ancient capital, the reputed site of the fabled Camelot, Winchester was a romantic bastion of popular culture. In 1486, the city was carefully selected as a symbolic location to realign the new dynasty with its Welsh heritage and recreate a context for the iconography of the new regime. Henry wanted to endow his first-born son, the hope of his fledgling dynasty, with the strength and riches of national myth. It also provided continuity with the imagery of the Edwardian regime, as did the marriage to Elizabeth, which went some way to placate the Yorkists who had sided with Henry at Bosworth or had reconciled to his regime since.
By 1486, Winchester Castle was considered old and draughty, so Elizabeth was settled at the Prior’s House, now renamed the Deanery, at St Swithin’s Priory. This three-storey stone building, with its arched entrance portico, was used to house distinguished guests separately from the pilgrims lodged in the usual guest house. Winchester lay on one of the major highways of medieval England, and was a centre for pilgrimage housing around thirty Benedictine monks in 1500, who kept open house for visitors under the new Prior Thomas Silkested. There, Elizabeth’s ladies would have gone about the business of readying a chamber for her lying-in, against a backdrop of monastic business, punctuated by bells and the sound of voices raised in prayer and chant. Among the women gathered to perform this office in September 1486 were the two grandmothers, Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth Woodville who had arranged the match, as well as Elizabeth’s sisters Anne and Cecily, whose youth would have limited their involvement. It is possible that Elizabeth was attended by her mother’s favourite midwife, Marjory Cobbe, who had attended Elizabeth Woodville’s final confinement only six years before. During the months of her pregnancy, the queen would have been attended by doctors and physicians, such as the Walter Lemster, to whom Henry granted £40 a year for life that February. Margaret Beaufort was responsible for arranging the details of the lying-in chamber, drawing up a set of ordinances that enshrined this intimate aspect of royal protocol. She was impressively thorough, from the number and colour of cushions in the room, to the ranks and duties of the women in assistance.
Prince Arthur was born between midnight and one in the morning on 20 September. His gender would have come as a relief to his parents, representing not just the arrival of an heir to the throne but the justification of their use of the myth. He was formally given his auspicious name four days later in Winchester Cathedral, to the sounds of celebratory gunshots and the ringing of bells. Prominent Yorkists were involved in the ceremony, the queen’s sisters Cecily and Anne carrying the baby and the baptismal cloth respectively, and long-standing allies and servants like Lord Neville of Raby and Sir Richard Croft from Ludlow. Thomas Stanley was one of the godfathers and the dowager queen, Elizabeth Woodville, stood as godmother. John, Earl of Lincoln was definitely present and it is likely that Edward, Earl of Warwick was too. Later chroniclers stated that the child was named to ‘honour the British race’, describing the people ‘rejoicing’ in reaction to the child’s name, whose choice made foreign princes ‘tremble and quake’, appearing to them ‘terrible and formidable’. He was given the title of Duke of Cornwall and there were no indications that he was anything other than a strong, healthy baby.
On 26 October, the court arrived at Farnham in Surrey, where Arthur’s household was to be established. Home to the bishops of Winchester and part of the Beaufort family inheritance, the palace sat alongside the castle, behind an imposing newly built red-brick gatehouse and was equipped with modern living quarters. The last bishop, William Waynflete, had died that August, allowing for the appointment of a new incumbent, Peter Courtenay, who agreed to relinquish his claim on the palace in favour of the prince. One thousand marks were allocated for the employment of a lady governess of the nursery, assisted by a dry nurse, wet nurse and various yeomen, grooms and others who saw to the practical running of the house. Elizabeth Darcy was appointed governess, with Elizabeth Gibbs as wet nurse and Alice Bywymbe, Agnes Hobbes and Evelyn Hobbes as rockers.1 Most of those employed came from the Eltham Palace royal nursery of Edward’s reign, which was continuing to cater for the needs of his younger children, three of his daughters being still under the age of 10. Similar rules and hours to those at Eltham and Ludlow would have been used, to ensure the security and smooth running of the establishment and the good behaviour of those connected with it. The king and queen left Arthur in his nursery and proceeded to Westminster.
To the modern reader, it seems brutal to separate a mother and child just weeks after the birth. Yet there were sound reasons for this, following fifteenth-century notions of pedagogy. Elizabeth, in particular, would have been a frequent visitor to her son’s household, just as he would have been brought to court to see his parents at times of celebration and festivity. One interruption to his peaceful schedule came in March 1487, when news reached Henry of the imminent invasion of the Lincoln-Simnel forces. Fearful that his son and heir might prove a target for the rebels, the king sent word to Queen Elizabeth to collect Arthur and join him at Warwick Castle. The queen was then staying at Chertsey Abbey, around 20 miles away from her son, and hurried to the palace to collect him, arriving at Kenilworth on 29 May. From there, Henry set out to defeat the rebels, while Elizabeth waited with little Arthur. The little boy’s future may have been very different, probably involving flight and exile, had the Battle of Stoke not gone in Tudor’s favour. Once the threat had been crushed, Arthur would have returned to Farnham, although he may have been brought to Westminster to be part of the events surrounding his mother’s coronation that November, partly for his own entertainment, partly to serve as an important symbol of dynastic success.
On 29 November 1489, the day after his sister Margaret was born, Arthur was created Knight of the Bath. The following February, he travelled by barge down the Thames to Westminster Palace, where he was invested as Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester, the ceremony conducted by the Mayor of London and the Spanish ambassadors, as his future marriage with Catherine of Aragon was already under negotiation. The boy was only 3 but he had been well prepared to make an impression commensurate with his position, riding a horse in public up to the gates of Westminster Hall. It was a taste of the formal ceremony that would be a feature of his future, with one concession to his youth; the chair of state was piled with cushions, but under the canopy, the cap with the gold circlet and the sword, ring, sceptre and rod, and the minstrels playing were as expected. Then, on 8 May 1491, at the age of 4½, Arthur was at St George’s Chapel, in Windsor Castle, to be made a Knight of the Garter. Wardrobe accounts from this period indicate that he was dressed in satin, velvet, ermine and damask, and slept in a feather bed with a down-stuffed bolster and sheets of fine lawn and Holland cloth.2 Gradually he made the transition from the female-dominated nursery to a more male establishment. Arthur’s wet nurse was finally paid off in 1490, while Thomas Poyntz and Stephen Bereworth, the boy’s doctor, were given salaries of £40 each, John Whytyng became his sewer, or server at table, John Almor his sergeant-at-arms, Thomas Fisher was yeoman of the cellar and Richard Howell became Marshall of the Household.
Arthur’s formal education would have begun around the time he reached his fifth birthday, with a focus on the humanist tenets of classics, rhetoric, history, poetry, ethics, philosophy, music and science. His first tutor was John Rede, once a headmaster of Winchester College, then Bernard André, a blind French Augustinian friar, and finally the king’s physician Thomas Linacre. Arthur was fluent in Latin and French, proficient at the lute under the tutelage of Giles Duwes, a skilful dancer and would come to learn by heart a number of texts by Cicero, Ovid, Homer, Livy and Virgil. In 1490, William Caxton dedicated his version of the Aeneid to the little prince. He was also proficient in archery, receiving a gift of a long bow, as recorded in the privy purse accounts of January 1492. Arthur received the most fashionable education of his time, incorporating newly discovered texts and a range of subjects under the Italian concept of the uomo universale, the universal man, or scholar, who might master whatever he turned his hand to. The difference between the upbringing of the previous generation, that of late medieval thinkers, and this new, Renaissance model, was exactly what Arthur would need to prepare him for kingship in the sixteenth century.
Rede and André had connections with a circle of humanists who were patronised by Arthur’s grandmother, Margaret Beaufort. They included men who would shape English thinking at the turn of a new century: Thomas Linacre, who had been taught alongside the Medici children at Bologna; John Fisher, Margaret’s chaplain and doctor of sacred theology; William Grocyn, lecturer in Greek at Oxford; William Lily, the grammarian who had been on pilgrimage to Jerusalem; John Colet, lecturer at Oxford and later Dean of St Paul’s; and Thomas More, then a student at Lincoln’s Inn. Erasmus described them at the end of the century, delighted at the climate of intellectual debate he had found in England:
When I listen to my friend Colet, I seem to hear Plato himself. Who would not marvel at the perfection of encyclopaedic learning in Grocyn? What could be keener or nobler or nicer than Linacre’s judgement? It is marvellous how thick upon the ground the harvest of ancient literature is here everywhere flowering forth.3
Yet André seems to have guarded his position as the prince’s tutor jealously, openly criticising rivals like Linacre when he presented his latest work at court. Ultimately, the friar retained control over the prince until his majority. Although this was only possible with the permission of the king, the distance between Henry’s court and Arthur’s home meant that few other scholars were able to exert their influence. The friar collated and edited a number of texts for Arthur’s education, among them St Augustine’s City of God, and personally selected authors for his curriculum. André praised the intelligence of his pupil with a biblical comparison: ‘that famous utterance of the Apostle Paul has been proved true of me: Apollo planted, I watered, God has given the increase.’
The prince’s first exercises in power came in his rule over the Welsh Marches. He was created warden in May 1490, with the Earl of Surrey as his deputy and, from the following year, his name gave authority to peace commissions, to establish a greater sense of local allegiance to the future king. It was a nominal independence, with the boy as a figurehead of justice for the rule of his experienced servants, and all appointments were vetted in secret by his father, but it was a start. When Henry VII visited France in 1492, he followed the precedent set by Edward IV in 1475, and named his 5-year-old son as his Lieutenant and Keeper of England. In the spring of 1493, Arthur’s household moved from Farnham to Ludlow, on the Welsh Marches, in the footsteps of his grandfather Edward IV. From then, his time was divided between Ludlow Castle and Tickenhill Palace in Bewdley, two royal properties that were around 20 miles apart. Yet Arthur was not rooted completely in this area. Records indicate that his movements included visits to Shrewsbury in 1494 and 1495, Oxford a number of times after 1495, Coventry and London in 1498, Chester in 1499 and other nearby locations. Despite his youth, Arthur increasingly sat in sessions of the peace, making his first appearance at Hereford Castle in April 1493, where proceedings are described as taking place in the presence of ‘the most beloved first-born son of the said King, Arthur, Prince of Wales’.4 It was an essential part of his training for future kingship to witness the processes and application of justice, to develop empathy tempered with a working knowledge of the law.
By all contemporary accounts, Arthur was a healthy, good-looking child. In September 1497, the Milanese ambassador, Raimondo de Soncino, described meeting the English royal family, among whom was ‘the King’s eldest son Arthur, Prince of Wales, about 11 years of age, but taller than his years would warrant, of remarkable beauty and grace and very ready in speaking Latin’.5 Arthur also played a role in greeting the ambassador, engaging in a ‘brief and familiar talk’ with Soncino before they all went in to dinner. He was also present later, when the visitors met the queen, and they took formal leave of him before departing the court.6 A portrait painted around 1500 presents the prince with a long, thin face and dark eyes, sensitive mouth and fashionably cut dark hair. He poses with a white rose between his fingers, dressed in a gown of cloth of gold lined with fur, over a red doublet with gold edging, a jewelled pendant of black stones set in gold and a black hat and jewel, from which hang three pearls. Painted in oil with gold leaf on a wooden panel, it is the only surviving portrait painted during the boy’s lifetime, possibly commissioned in celebration of his marriage. An altarpiece depicting Henry’s family which was painted a couple of years after Arthur’s death, shows a youth with a somewhat generic face, the copy of his father’s long dark hair and eyes, wide mouth and strong nose. Other contemporary images, in a Guild Book of Ordinances and at prayer in a window at Great Malvern Priory, are similarly generic and lacking in personal detail, and were even touched up in later years. A final image of Arthur from the 1520s depicts a more mature face, with strong nose and small mouth, the subject wearing a gold chain of office and a red hat with a pilgrim badge, his empty right hand open before him, where the previous portrait had held a flower. From these images, it seems likely that the 15-year-old Arthur was dark in colouring, with a longish, slender face and nose, thin lips and a sensitive expression; a young king-in-waiting wearing his learning and legacy as visibly as the marks of his status.
Since 1487, negotiations had been flying back and forth between England and Spain for Arthur’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Finally, after the details had been arranged, a proxy wedding ceremony was held at nine in the morning on 19 May 1499 in the chapel at Tickenhill. Spanish ambassador de Puebla stood in for Catherine, repeating her vows and joining his right hand with that of Arthur, and accepted him as the princess’s husband. Arthur replied in a ‘loud and clear voice’ that ‘he was very much rejoiced to contract with Catherine … in indissoluble marriage, not only in obedience to the Pope and King Henry, but also for his deep and sincere love for the Princess, his wife.’ A papal dispensation had been acquired for Arthur to say his vows, as he was still four months off his thirteenth birthday. De Puebla was given a seat of honour at the banquet that followed and ate from the best dishes, to his great delight. From that moment forward, Catherine was officially styled ‘Princess of Wales’ but although she and Arthur were legally married, they were still in separate countries.
Promises might have been made, but there was still a possibility that the marriage would not take place. The threats posed by Perkin Warbeck and Edward, Earl of Warwick were sufficient for the Spanish to be concerned about the stability of the Tudor throne and the prince’s youth could provide an excuse for Ferdinand and Isabella to renege upon their agreement. Thus, after the two prisoners in the Tower had been executed in November 1499, and Arthur had reached his fourteenth birthday the following September, the entire process was repeated. De Puebla stood in again during a second ceremony held at Ludlow on 22 November 1500. All that remained was for Catherine to come to England. While they waited, the young pair wrote to each other enthusiastically, even passionately. Some of the terms of endearment may have been fairly formulaic, taken from the Latin texts taught to Arthur by André, but they were sincerely meant. There is something touching about the young man’s efforts to prove himself a lover. In October 1499, Arthur thanked Catherine for her ‘sweet letters’ in which he had ‘easily perceived your entire love for me’ and conveyed his own ‘urgent desire’ to see her. He complimented Catherine, saying that her letters ‘written by [her] very own hand evoked her presence and even her embrace’. Taking an even more intimate tone, he continued, ‘I cannot tell you what an earnest desire I feel to see your Highness, and how vexatious to me is this procrastination about your coming. Let it be hastened, that the love conceived between us and the wished-for joys may reap their proper fruit.’ Sadly, Catherine’s letters to Arthur have not survived.
Hindsight has created an imbalance when it comes to Arthur’s historical reputation. His premature death has placed particular focus on the intimate aspects of his brief marriage, eclipsing other aspects of his life and character, potential and education. The one thing that people tend to know about Arthur, if they know anything, is that he died young. Yet as he was anticipating his wedding, through the spring and summer of 1501, it would have seemed to the prince that he was about to embark on the next step in his life’s journey, encompassing parenthood, succession and kingship. Had it been so, the details of his wedding night with Catherine would never have been made public as they were in the late 1520s, with all the possibilities of their intimacy discussed in public. Instead, what happened between two teenagers became the subject of international debate and the cause of England’s break with Rome, bringing centuries of tradition to an end. There is no question that Arthur’s premature death had a huge impact upon the course of English history and redefinition of national identity in the sixteenth century.
In October 1501, Catherine finally landed in England. Henry and Arthur hurried to meet her, intercepting the Spaniards at Dogmersfield in Hampshire. At first, Catherine’s household resisted, as it went against protocol, but Henry insisted they were now in his country, subject to his rules. Communication was difficult as the princess spoke no English and her hosts spoke no Spanish but they made themselves understood as best they could with the help of translators and Latin pronounced with different accents. That evening, Henry retired to dine, leaving Arthur with Catherine while the Spanish minstrels played and the young pair danced, but not together. Arthur partnered Lady Guildford while Catherine took the floor with some of her ladies. While the Spanish were prepared to bow to the English king’s wishes and relax their rules over contact before the wedding ceremony, dancing together would not have been appropriate for the young couple, even though they were technically man and wife already. It may also have been that they did not yet know a dance they could perform together, that Catherine executed Spanish steps while Arthur performed an English favourite. There is every reason to suppose that Catherine and Arthur were pleased with each other. In fact, Arthur would write to Ferdinand and Isabella that he had ‘never felt so much joy’ in his entire life as when he ‘beheld the sweet face of his bride’ and that ‘no woman in the world could be more agreeable to him.’
Catherine’s entry into London a few days later was marked by magnificent pageantry that included the imagery of her own descent, coupled with that of her future husband. Arthur was positioned in Cheapside to watch her progress as she reached the fifth display, which was entitled ‘The Temple of God’, with the figure of the deity adorned in gems and pearls, seated on a throne surrounded by burning candles and singing angels. A huge red rose was borne aloft by heraldic beasts. Beside his father, mother and grandmother, Arthur watched his wife from ‘a howys wheryn that tyme dwelled Wylliam Geffrey, haberdasher’, standing in the windows, ‘not in very opyn sight … beholdynge the persones, their raise, ordre and behavynges of the hole companye, bothe of Englonde and of Spayne, as well of their apparell and horsis’.7 Arthur was also present when King Henry hosted the Spanish party at Baynard’s Castle the day before the wedding. This was a visit for business rather than pleasure, and Arthur sat and watched with his younger brother Henry as the Spanish presented the terms of the forthcoming match and gave the king Ferdinand’s assurances of his daughter’s virginity. The topic might be delicate, but it was also a matter of politics and state. The impression this made upon Arthur, aged 15, and Henry, aged 10, was one of an inescapable rite of passage. Women’s good reputations were indispensable and the act of marriage marked their transition between innocence and sexual experience. It was a very clear line in the sand, drawn and valued by men, and the princess was the commodity over which they were bargaining.
The following day, Sunday 14 November, Catherine and Arthur were married in St Paul’s Cathedral. Arthur had travelled there from his lodgings in the Great Wardrobe, just to the south of the cathedral and, dazzling in white satin, took his place at Catherine’s side to repeat their wedding vows before the congregation. Henry VII intended that the young couple should be seen, so a raised wooden platform had been erected along the entire 350ft from the choir to the west door, standing 4ft high and 12ft wide. Covered in red cloth, it was railed along each side to keep onlookers at bay. Catherine and Arthur were literally to be centre stage, elevated over the heads of Londoners, in something like the culminating pageant of the recent days, but in the flesh instead of in representation. The agreement between England and Spain was read aloud, after which the princess was endowed with the titles and lands which Henry had bestowed on her as her settlement as his daughter-in-law. After they were formally pronounced man and wife, the pair turned to acknowledge the crowd, ‘so the present multitude of people might see and behold their persons’, and walked along the length of the platform, hand in hand. One observer described them as a ‘lusty and amorous couple’. Catherine and Arthur then returned to the Archbishop’s Palace, where the wedding feast was to be served to over 100 guests. The theme for the feast was ‘all the delicacies, dainties and curious meats that might be purveyed or got within the whole realm of England’, which were served up in three courses, of twelve, fifteen then eighteen dishes. The feasting continued for four or five hours.
Before the end of the feast, Catherine’s ladies and the Earl of Oxford departed for Baynard’s Castle, to make the necessary arrangements for the wedding night. A normal part of the ritual, the ceremony combined elements of the public and private, and physical consummation was essential to consolidate the vows spoken earlier by the couple in the cathedral, marking the final stage of the ceremony. The bed was inspected and tested by the earl, who sat on each side to ensure it was comfortable and that no concealed blades had been smuggled into the chamber. Catherine and Arthur travelled from the Bishop’s Palace to the castle, where they were changed and prepared for bed, around eight in the evening. The princess was brought in first, dressed in her nightgown and laid ‘reverently’ in bed. Arthur stayed up longer, drinking and celebrating with his gentlemen, but finally they carried him in, singing and making merry, before, at last, the guests withdrew and the pair were left alone. They might have spent their entire lives being trained to endure the public gaze but, in private, how well equipped were they for the anticipated consummation of their marriage? To put it bluntly, the question that confounded England in the 1530s and has been wrangled over by historians ever since, is how likely is it that Catherine and Arthur had sex?
The next morning, Arthur appeared flushed and thirsty, ‘good and sanguine’, calling for a drink as he had spent the night ‘in the midst of Spain’ and that it was a ‘good pastime to have a wife’. These words have to be understood in the context of political and masculine expectations, from the pageantry references, to the proof of virginity at Baynard’s Castle, the bawdiness of his friends and the expectations on his shoulders that he would live up to his part in the most expensive and magnificent occasion of his life. Arthur’s role to that point had been kept to a minimum. He had met Catherine briefly, in private, but otherwise had taken a backseat, beside his father, or overlooking events while the princess took centre stage. The public gaze had fallen on her throughout, as a foreigner and guest of honour, and even Arthur’s presence at her side in St Paul’s and at the wedding feast was designed to complement her, in matching white satin, rather than to eclipse her. Still, despite all the various ceremonies they had been through, the marriage was incomplete. Only Arthur could claim his bride in the physical, binding sense that would ensure the full, undisputed union of England and Spain, rendering the match indissoluble in the eyes of the Church. The nuptial night was the first time that the lead was handed over to the prince. This was his moment, with this single act to perform, when the traditional gender roles dictated the submission of Spain to conquering England. There must have been considerable pressure on him to perform.
Then there was the additional need for Arthur to prove himself a man. As a future king of England, a youth verging on the threshold of manhood, he could not be seen to fail this test. His duty was to achieve intercourse and definitions of his masculinity, his prowess and fitness to rule, rested upon his success or failure. Robust heterosexuality was considered an essential component of masculine health and previous kings whose sexuality was dubious, such as Catherine’s great-uncle Henry IV of Spain, Edward II or the Lancastrians Richard II and Henry VI, had been perceived as weak and effeminate, unsuitable as monarchs. There was also the precedent of the prince’s own conception, which had taken place on his parents’ wedding night, or before, or soon afterwards. Arthur had absorbed the cult of his own identity, which his father had begun to weave since before his birth; the associations with the mythical warrior king, and by extension his advocate, the fecund Edward III; the symbols of fertility and flowering; the parallels with historical and biblical figures. His father had been an only child and the dynasty was in its infancy. Arthur had to complete the carefully constructed picture himself by passing the challenge of masculine sexuality, of successfully penetrating a woman and proving his ability to father sons. The marriage would not have gone ahead had he been too young, or weak, or if he had not yet undergone puberty, as some historians have speculated; it had already been delayed after the threshold age of 14 and Henry must have given the Spanish assurances of his son’s normal physical development. Delivered from the hands of the young bucks at court, with their bawdy words ringing in his ears, the 15-year-old Arthur knew it was his job to claim the virginity that had been guaranteed by his father-in-law of Aragon. In the morning, his friends would have been looking for confirmation that he had.
Was he successful? Later, Catherine swore that they didn’t have sex and she never wavered from this position all her life. The following morning, she was quiet and subdued, remaining with her ladies. In the depositions dating from the 1520s, the voice of Juan de Gamarra stands out. As a 12-year-old boy, he had slept in her antechamber on the wedding night, literally adjoining Catherine’s bedroom, and stated that ‘Prince Arthur got up very early, which surprised everyone a lot,’ perhaps even before the princess herself woke; when he went into her room, he found Catherine’s dresser and confidante, Francesca de Carceres, appearing sad and informing the others ‘that nothing had passed between Prince Arthur and his wife, which surprised everyone and made them laugh at him’.8 Hence the need for Arthur’s boast. Catherine’s first lady, Dona Elvira, was convinced that the princess was still as pure as she had been when she left her mother’s womb, and she imparted this belief to Ferdinand, who did not doubt her. In addition, Catherine’s doctor later deposed that Arthur had not been capable of the act, having been ‘denied the strength necessary to know a woman, as if he was a cold piece of stone, because he was in the final stages of phthisis [tuberculosis]’ and he had never before seen a man whose limbs were so thin. Convincing as this may sound, though, it is a testimony made in hindsight, by a man who treated the prince on his deathbed.
Arthur never stated implicitly that they had slept together, although his bawdy request for drink was designed to imply that consummation had taken place. This line could be taken at face value, or it might have been the bravado of a young man giving assurance that he had not failed in his duty, especially if he had failed, and could feel the disappointment of the Spaniards. His words must be taken in the context of political and gendered expectations. It was all part of the performance of the last few days, of the keeping-up of appearances and the appropriate behaviour of those who ruled. Arthur’s request for drink, even though it related to something intimate, was a function of his public identity and did not necessarily bear relation to private truths. If consummation had not taken place, this did not make his words a lie, as he did not explicitly state that penetration had taken place. His chosen phrase ‘in the midst of Spain’, with its obvious physical implication, could equally refer metaphorically to Catherine’s company, and her body as the symbolic representation of Spain. As the pageants had enforced, she was the embodiment and representative of Spain, as he was of England. The non-sexual experience of her physicality, including her appearance and clothing, her accent and language, was being used by Arthur as something of a metaphysical conceit, akin to those later used by John Donne, that had translated their bedchamber into a little enclave of Spain, where Arthur had to fulfil the role of diplomat. It implied sex but it also did not confirm it. Its bawdiness lay in its suggestion rather than its actuality. Arthur could hardly have behaved as Catherine did the following morning; he had to define himself differently, as polar opposite as masculinity was from femininity, as active rather than passive, as boastful and swaggering rather than quiet and subdued. If his gentlemen took his words to mean that Arthur had fulfilled his manly duties and confirmed his masculinity, then so much the better.
Between Catherine’s later denial and Arthur’s suggestion lies much grey area for interpretation. Of course, by the late 1520s, it was in Catherine’s interests to say that the marriage had not be consummated, but it was also crucial to her in the spring of 1502, when the question first arose in a formal context. In addition to the events of the wedding night, a complete lack of consummation meant the pair would have never achieved full sex during the entire four-and-a-half-month span of their marriage. Understandably, this scenario is less credible simply because of the greater opportunities afforded the couple once they were established in their own household, but Catherine still maintained that she had shared a bed with Arthur on only seven occasions and he had never ‘known’ her. Arthur’s gentleman Maurice St John contradicted this, claiming that they had slept together at Shrovetide, the day before Lent began, which fell on 19 February that year, after which ‘the prince began to decay and was never so lusty in body and courage until his death.’9 There was also the example of Catherine’s elder brother, Juan, Prince of Asturias. Having been married at the age of 18, his death nine months later was probably from tuberculosis, but was judged by many at the time to have resulted from over-exertion in the marital bed. He left his young bride pregnant but she miscarried three months after being widowed, leaving the joint Spanish thrones of Castile and Aragon without a male heir, so that the inheritance passed to their son-in-law Philip I, and became part of the Holy Roman Empire.
Regardless of all the views expressed later by various ‘witnesses’, there were only two people in the bedchamber of the Prince and Princess of Wales that night. Only those two people knew what had passed between them, although it is possible that the inexperienced teenagers had actually come to very different conclusions about their degree of success. But plenty of other people have formed an opinion on it, including the chronicler Edward Hall, who was 4 years old at the time, although still able to state in the 1540s that ‘this lusty prince and his beautifull bride were brought and ioyned together in one bed naked, and there dyd that acte, whiche to the performance and full consummacion of matrimony was moost requisite and expedient.’
So what really happened? It is not possible to know for certain, but nor is it necessary to accuse either the prince or princess of telling falsehoods. Historians have often reduced this delicate situation to two possible interpretations: either the couple did sleep together and Catherine lied about it, or they didn’t and Arthur’s boast was intended to mislead. However, a third option is possible. Amid the fumblings of two inexperienced but pressurised teenagers who did not share a common language, they might both have been right. Arthur may have believed that full intercourse had taken place while Catherine, arguing in the 1520s from a standpoint of sexual experience, knew that it had not. How might this have come about?
With the closing of the chamber door and the footsteps of the court receding, Catherine and Arthur were truly alone. Lying side by side in their perfumed sheets, with the fire burning in the grate, they both understood the significance of the occasion but, without hindsight, they also believed that there was no rush. They were still young and thought they had the next thirty or forty years together, hardly guessing that the metaphorical clock was already ticking for their short-lived union. Communication cannot have been easy; looks, smiles, touches and good will must have made up the shortfall of language between them. The exchange of words was not essential for intercourse to take place, but it would have helped establish an intimacy between two people who were virtual strangers. They must have been tired, and Arthur had been drinking, and they could not share what they had been through in the last few days and weeks. There is also a chance that as the date was a major saint’s day, and a Sunday, the couple behaved like the good Catholics they were raised to be, and abstained. However, given the pressure on Arthur, it would seem more likely that consummation was attempted.
Incredible as it may seem to a modern reader, Arthur may have believed that he had acted sufficiently to relieve his bride of her virginity. To address a sensitive question directly, just how far was penetration required in order to constitute a successful consummation? There may have been some form of foreplay, or else Arthur may have achieved some shallow degree of penetration that was not sufficient to rupture her hymen, leaving her technically a virgin. It is also possible that on what must have been his first sexual encounter, Arthur experienced premature ejaculation upon, or soon after, penetration. Catherine’s quietness the following morning might indicate the embarrassment and discomfort of a bungled effort at intercourse rather than complete non-consummation. In later years, when she was forced to defend her virgin state, she did so from a position of comparison with the robust lovemaking of her second husband. It is perfectly possible that Arthur thought he had experienced full sex, or at least taken his wife’s virginity, while she thought he had not. The court took it for granted that he had. Catherine had no way of knowing that the question would ever be raised again.
Following festivities at Westminster and Richmond, the question of Arthur and Catherine’s living arrangements had to be addressed. It was not the first time this issue had arisen, due to the youth of the couple. Back in 1500, before Catherine had come to England, Henry had decided that ‘the prince will know his wife sexually on the day of the wedding and then separate himself from her for two or three years because it is said in some way the prince is frail.’ This suggested a compromise, so that the match was legally binding but a full sexual relationship was delayed. ‘The King told me’, the Spanish ambassador wrote to Catherine’s parents, ‘that he wanted to have them [Arthur and Catherine] with him for the first three years so that the prince should mature in strength’.10 Contemporary medical opinion was divided when it came to sexual relations between young newly-weds. While a physical relationship was considered beneficial in physical and emotional terms, the denial of natural urges leading to health problems and temptation, the timing was critical. It was a common practice among aristocratic families for marriages to be made while the bride and groom were still underage, as Catherine and Arthur had experienced, but the exact moment of consummation could be delayed for several years after the pair had begun to live together. This contained risks, as the premature death of one of the parties prior to the physical act meant that the bereaved partner had no claim upon dowry payments or financial support. For weeks, the question of Arthur and Catherine’s married life hung in the air. Then, eventually, against the advice of the Spanish and much of his Council, the king ruled that Catherine would accompany Arthur into Wales at once. They departed for Ludlow on 21 December, five days after the princess turned 16.
Arthur’s business in the Welsh Marches must have been pressing indeed if the pair could not wait to celebrate Christmas in London, or for better weather to arrive. With Arthur riding on horseback and Catherine sitting in a litter, they spent three or four days covering the 130 miles to reach Bewdley, on the River Severn, described by Leland as ‘so comely a man cannot imagine a town better’. They passed Christmas at Tickenhill Manor, set on a ridge overlooking the town, where Catherine would have had the chance to see the chapel where she had been married to Arthur by proxy in 1499. No doubt they observed the holy day there and dined in the 100ft-long hall on the south side of the house, which had been given new doorways and stone-tile windows and repaired with local timber in recent years. Nothing now remains of the old palace, which was set amid extensive gardens and hunting grounds, although Catherine and Arthur were unlikely to have had much time, or enough clement weather, to take advantage of the park. Given their rate of travel, they would only have needed an additional day or two to cover the 20 miles due west to Ludlow. Depending on how long they remained at Tickenhill, the pair may have arrived at their destination around New Year.
There was little time to enjoy a ‘honeymoon’ period. Arthur resumed his duties, meeting his wife for meals, but otherwise the prince’s work required him to travel and undertake long days of work in the government of Wales. They did not have much time together to become acquainted, although Anthony Willoughby later remarked that they had slept together at Shrovetide, 19 February, and that he had frequently accompanied Arthur to his wife’s chamber door at night. This stands in direct opposition to Catherine’s affirmation that they shared a bed on only seven occasions throughout their four and a half months of marriage. At the end of March, Catherine and Arthur both fell ill. The prince’s last public engagement was during the celebrations for Maundy Thursday on 24 March. He may have been distributing money to the poor, or even assisting in the traditional foot washing. It seems more than coincidence that both husband and wife succumbed at the same time, suggesting that they contracted a virus, perhaps because Arthur came into close bodily contact with the people on this last occasion. Unfortunately, no evidence remains to confirm whether other members of their household were affected, which would have been a likely outcome of this scenario. At the time, it was recorded that a ‘great sickness’ was in the area, which may have been the plague, or possibly the sweating sickness, a particularly virulent and dramatic illness that had arrived in England in 1485 and was known to kill within hours.
On the evening of Saturday 2 April, Prince Arthur died while Catherine languished in bed. He was 15½. Examining the body, the Spanish Dr Alcarez diagnosed his condition as ‘tisis’ or ‘phthisis’, pulmonary tuberculosis, which was common during this period, especially among children, and could become severe very quickly. Some of the symptoms were indeed similar to those of the sweating sickness. Yet if Arthur had been suffering from tuberculosis on a long-term basis, his weakness should have surfaced before this point, and the king and queen would not have consented to his marriage or his return to Ludlow. According to modern understanding, the disease is spread in the air by bacteria when people who have the active form of tuberculosis cough and sneeze. Arthur might have come into contact with an infected person during his work in the Welsh Marches, or picked it up at court, perhaps even from his father, who would be claimed by the same illness seven years later. Only one in ten cases progresses from latent to acute, triggering symptoms of coughing, fever, weight loss and sweating. It can then kill very rapidly. Catherine and Arthur did not both have tuberculosis, but if the prince was entering an acute phase of illness, during which he had been losing weight, he would have been too weak to fight off any virus from which an otherwise healthy person might recover. Thus, when both young people were infected with a virulent strain of sickness that March, perhaps as a result of his work on Maundy Thursday, Catherine was able to fight it off, but Arthur’s recent decline left him too weak. This is a plausible explanation for their joint sickness and the difference in outcome, but there are no accounts of rapid decline in the boy in the spring months of 1502. To be fair, though, there are no surviving accounts of their time at Ludlow at all, so conclusive answers cannot be drawn. It is equally possible that the prince was suffering from some form of testicular cancer that also prevented him from consummating his marriage or an inherited illness that would also afflict his nephew Edward VI. All that can be stated with certainty is that Arthur died and Catherine survived.
The unknown author of The Receyt of the Ladie Kateryne, who had recently described all the vivid detail of the couple’s wedding pageantry, had not expected to follow it so soon with the account of a funeral. Yet, book four of five concludes Arthur’s brief moment in the spotlight with these details, enclosing his short life and ending a chapter of Catherine’s. It paints a picture of the boy’s last valiant battle, against ‘a moost petifull disease and sikeness, that with so soore and great violens hedde battilid and driven in the singler partise of him inward; that cruell and fervent enemye of nature, the dedly corupcion, did utterly venquysshe and overcome the pure and frendfull blood without almoner of phisicall help and remedy’. The news was broken to Henry by his confessor early the following morning, Tuesday 5 April, and the king sent for his wife, so that they might ‘take the Painefull sorrows together’.11 After comforting each other, Elizabeth concealed her pain long enough to remind Henry that they still had healthy children and were still young enough to have more.
An account by John Writhe, Garter King at Arms, describes the preparations of Arthur’s body in advance of his burial. First, the prince was seared and dressed in spices and other sweet stuff, so that his body would not leak, and was sewn into good black cloth with a white cross on top. Following Arthur’s instructions, his bowels were removed to be buried in the little round Ludlow chapel of St Mary Magdalene. Arthur lay in his chamber under a table that was covered over with rich cloth of gold and bearing a cross and silver candlesticks and wax tapers. Four other large tapers were set to burn in his room. Writhe mentions his alms folk, who sat about the corpse day and night, holding torches and keeping vigil, possibly those whom he had attended on Maundy Thursday. His body remained there for three whole weeks, until St George’s Day, 23 April, on the afternoon of which he was removed to the church. Arthur’s yeomen of the chamber carried him into the Hall at Ludlow, draped in black cloth of gold, with a cross of white cloth of gold, and rested him on a trestle, where three bishops censed the body and sprinkled it with holy water. Then noblemen came to pay their respects, including the principal mourners, Arthur’s chamberlain, and other members of his household. A canopy was carried over the corpse, with banners at every corner, depicting the Trinity, the Cross, Our Lady and St George, while a banner of Arthur’s own arms was carried before him by Sir Griffiths ap Rhys. Before them were two Spaniards ‘of the best degree’ from Catherine’s household, behind the pursuivants, who were officials from the College of Arms, then the churchmen, bishops, abbots and priors, parsons, priests and friars, flanked by eighty poor men in black mourning bearing torches.
Arthur was carried into the choir of the parish church of St Laurence, where he would lie for the next two nights. A dirge was sung for his soul and readings given by the bishops of Lincoln, Salisbury and Chester; the following day there were more masses, songs and offerings, then alms were given to the poor. Finally, Arthur was placed on a chariot drawn by six horses trapped in black cloth with escutcheons of gold. The vehicle was covered in black velvet, with a white cross of cloth of gold, banners at each corner and surrounded by mourners in black hoods. On St Mark’s Day, 25 April, the procession left Ludlow for Tickenhill, in Bewdley, but the weather was so terrible, battering them with wind and rain, that the horses were replaced by oxen, to drag the hearse through the rutted streets. From there, they proceeded to Worcester in better weather, being met at the city gates and drawn through the streets by fresh horses, with dignitaries and churchmen on either side. The Norman Worcester Cathedral, formerly a priory, had been designated by Henry as his son’s resting place. The following day, the ceremony proper began, with the Man at Arms riding a charger into the choir, carrying a poleaxe pointing downwards, followed by lords and officers who laid palls of cloth of gold tissue across the hearse. A sermon was read, more alms distributed, more incense waved and, amid much weeping, the members of Arthur’s household broke their staffs of office and cast them down into the grave.
Arthur’s chantry chapel lies on the south side of the high altar. It may have been completed as early as 1504, or as late as 1516, when it was blessed by the bishop. Inside it, his tomb was made from granite, and featured heraldic devices and overlooked by statues of saints and kings, including Henry VII and Edward IV under a fan ceiling and elaborate tracery. Now rubbed black with age, it would once have been painted and gilded and, perhaps, topped by an effigy of the young prince. The iconography inside the chantry highlights the purpose of such tombs to appeal to a wide loyalty base, prompted by allegiance to family badges, and thus encouraging prayer. Very few people along the Welsh Marches could have been ignorant of the meaning of the white rose of York or the ostrich feathers of the Prince of Wales. They would also have been moved by the French fleur de lys, the Beaufort portcullis and the Yorkist falcon and fetterlock, mixed in with new allegiances: the pomegranate of Catherine of Aragon and her mother Isabella’s sheaf of arrows.
Arthur’s household had been a court in waiting, anticipating a time when the youth would become king and they his leading men. From its small nucleus of regional loyalties and the Spanish marriage, an impressive individual should have emerged to rule England, educated along humanist lines and experienced in the ways of government, with a network of allegiances and a wife and children at his side. His death represented the loss of a future king and his reign, the loss of years of investment that had been made in his education, his guidance and in the prince as an individual. When Henry VII died, in April 1509, Arthur would have been 22 and married for eight years, potentially the father of several surviving children. The Tudor dynasty might have had a responsible, shrewd adult king and heirs to the throne devoted to the new learning and devout in their Catholicism. Arthur and Catherine would have been united by their shared destiny in steering England’s course through the challenges of the sixteenth century, perhaps for three or four decades to come. Instead, years of uncertainty, unhappiness and penury awaited the widow. If ever a death changed the course of history, it was that of Arthur Tudor, Prince of Wales, the king England never had. While the true impact of his loss would not be felt for years, the immediate result was that it was his younger brother, Henry VIII, who took the path, the life, that had been Arthur’s. It was Henry who succeeded their father in April 1509 and married his brother’s widow Catherine of Aragon that June. He would go on to become England’s most famous, and most notorious, king.
Arthur’s death heralded a new era of infectious disease in England. Along with the sweating sickness in 1485, England had seen a recurrence of the plague in 1479–80, reputedly the most virulent of the century. This was followed by another outbreak in 1499–1500 and again in 1509–1510. In January 1518, Henry VIII issued the first plague regulations. All infected homes had to be hung with a bale of hay, suspended beside the front door for at least forty days and those sufferers who dared to go out in public were to carry a white wand before them. A further peril emerged in 1514, with the first reference to smallpox in the country. Henry VIII had been ill that spring and, as Peter Martyr recorded in Spain, his physicians feared his fever would lead to an outbreak of ‘variolae’, derived from cow pox. Henry recovered but the disease still raged through London. On 30 June, Gerard de Pleine wrote from the city to Margaret of Savoy that it was responsible for the delay of the marriage between Princess Mary Tudor and Louis XII of France.12 It was 1518 when the king’s secretary Richard Pace told Wolsey that Henry was moving to Bisham Abbey to avoid the illness, ‘for they do die in these parts in every place, not only of the small pokkes and mezils but of the great sickness.’ Battles were no longer being fought on English soil but death was still a brutal reality, encountered in the streets and described in sermons or painted on the walls of churches. The sixteenth century was to see three great threats emerge to the health of England’s aristocratic families. They might no longer be called upon to bear arms against their cousins, on bloody battlefields that claimed the lives of thousands of men, but they were vulnerable to the onslaught of illness, low fertility and the temper of the king. There was to be one more unexpected royal death before the century was very old.
Not long after the loss of Prince Arthur, Queen Elizabeth of York died in childbirth. Having comforted her husband with the idea of producing a new heir, she conceived quickly and was preparing to take to her chamber at Richmond as the new year of 1503 arrived. Elizabeth was approaching her thirty-seventh birthday, which made her very old for motherhood by the standards of the time, although it was by no means uncommon for women to bear children even into their early forties. However, something went wrong. Either Elizabeth miscalculated the date or the child arrived prematurely, but she was overtaken with pain and delivered her child on 2 February while she was staying at the Tower of London. The baby, a girl named Katherine, lived for only eight days, and Elizabeth followed her to the grave on 11 February, probably as the result of a post-partum infection.
The dead may have featured often in church art, prayer books, myths and stories, but there are few depictions of the process of burial outside accounts of royal interments. It could be glimpsed as one of seven images sometimes chosen by medieval artists in a series known as the Acts or Works of Mercy: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, giving drink to the thirsty, sheltering travellers, freeing prisoners, comforting the sick and burying the dead. One interesting representation of the process of burial was created in a painted glass Acts of Mercy, in roundels in Leicester in around the year 1500. A body is shown, shrouded, tied at the legs, being lowered into a grave, with bones scattered around it. The priest stands by the grave, reading from a book held by another clergyman, sprinkling the body with holy water and touching it with the processional cross. A widow stands to watch the burial and a benefactor holds a rosary and a lit candle. Such funerals might still have been followed by bellringing to drive away devils, prayers and feasting. One wake described in the Stonor papers involved the feeding of poor mourners with bread and cheese, while the gentlemen and priests ate roast mutton, veal, chicken and lamb. Further up the social ladder, guests were given two courses, including geese, pheasants, roast pigeon and other meats cooked in expensive spices. The funeral feast of John Trevelyan in 1492 cost 935d, while 1,482d (£6 3s 6d) was spent in wax alone to light the funeral of Lord Lisle, illegitimate son of Edward IV, in 1542.13 A trend for aristocratic rites were set by the arrangements made for Elizabeth of York in 1503.
The first masses were said for the queen on 22 February in the little chapel of St Peter ad Vincula within the Tower walls. Then, her coffin was loaded onto a hearse fringed with black velvet, surmounted by a cross of white cloth of gold. Across the corners were laid white banners, to signify the nature of her death. It was topped by a carved effigy of the queen, dressed in robes of state over crimson satin, black and blue velvet, her long hair loose, her hands sparkling with gems, a rich crown upon her head and a sceptre in her hand. Preceded by 600 poor men, Elizabeth was carried in solemn estate from the Tower of London to Westminster Abbey, drawn by six horses in black velvet. Four gentlewomen ushers knelt on each corner of the hearse for the duration of the journey. The London streets were solemn, with local churches and landmarks wreathed in funeral colours. All along the route, the hearse was greeted and censed by leading dignitaries and prelates. Thirty-seven virgins, one for each year of her life, were dressed in white linen and wreaths of the Tudor colours, white and green, carrying lit candles, and the same number of torchbearers wore white hooded woollen gowns. More than 1,000 lights burned on the hearse, and the vaults, walls and furniture of the abbey was draped in black cloth and lit by more tapers. The guests were feasted afterwards in the queen’s great chamber in Westminster Palace, the menu reflecting the fact that it was a fish day in the calendar, before a night vigil was kept over the former queen. Elizabeth was then buried temporarily in one of the side chapels until she joined her husband in the completed Lady Chapel. Her funeral cost £2,832 7s 3d, one of the most expensive of her generation, even outstripping that of Henry himself.
Elizabeth’s death had been unexpected. It left her no time to make arrangements for her immortal soul. On 16 July 1504, Henry VII made an indenture to this effect with William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury; Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester; John Islip, Bishop of Westminster Abbey; and the dean and chapters at St Paul’s and of St Stephen’s chapel in Westminster. Daily masses were to be said for the soul of the queen and her dead children, and the anniversary of her death, which was also her birthday, was to be kept throughout the king’s lifetime. The entire religious community was to gather on 11 February in the choir at the abbey, or in the Lady Chapel once it was complete, where a requiem mass would be sung, bells would be rung to scare away the Devil and 100 tapers of new wax would be burned in her honour. Alms were to be distributed among the ‘blind, lame, impotent and most needy’. The chapel, which had only just been begun, is perhaps the most elaborate survival of all the pre-Reformation memorial chapels, as is the bronze and black marble Renaissance tomb of Henry and Elizabeth, completed by Pietro Torrigiano. With its bronze medallions in copper gilt and cherubs supporting coats of arms, its statues of the saints and heraldic devices, it marked a new style of funerary architecture. Four candles were to burn permanently around it, with nine-foot tapers lit on special occasions. The chapel was consecrated on 19 February 1516.
The wills of the aristocracy early in the new century show just how much purgatory and prayer still mattered. In 1500, Joan, Viscountess Lisle requested that twenty-two torches be burned at her funeral, 300 shirts be provided for the poor and two ‘honest and virtuous priests’ pray for her soul for the space of three years. Sir William Lyttleton paid for prayers for his entire family for seven years and the annual obit of his death was held at Halesowen Monastery. In 1506, Eleanor, Lady Wyndham left a pair of silver chalices to the Augustinian friars at Norwich to buy their prayers for her, and paid for alms to be distributed on the occasions of her burial, her month’s mind and year’s mind. Edward Hastings left nothing to chance in November of the same year, when he required a priest to daily say a ‘placebo, dirige and commendations, with mass of requiem, on the morrow … and other orisons and prayers as my executors shall appoint’.14
Katherine, Lady Hastings made her will on 22 November 1503. She was the daughter of Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury and the niece of Cecily Neville, Duchess of York. Her second husband, William Hastings, had been executed by Richard III in 1483, but he had fathered her six children, all but one of them sons. Three of the boys had died young, leaving the family title to pass to Edward Hastings, born in 1466, who had himself fathered two sons by the time of his mother’s death. Katherine would not live to see her grandson George marry Anne Stafford, a descendant of Humphrey and Anne Neville, but the pair produced eight children, five of whom were boys. Katherine’s dynasty was established, but she needed to turn her attention to her soul in the autumn of 1503, as she passed her sixty-first birthday. The words of her will, more than mere convention, give an insight into the approach taken to death in the first part of the sixteenth century. Given her husband’s unfortunate end, it is hardly surprising that she feared an unexpected death that would not allow her to prepare fully:
I Katherine Hastings, widow, late the wife of William, Lord Hastings, having perfect memory and whole mind, considering that nothing is more certain than death, and therefore at all times to be ready unto death, and to look for the time of the coming of the same, in such wise that death steal not upon unprepared; whereunto is required not only disposition ghostly but also of such goods as God of his immeasurable goodness hath leant me the use and disposition of, intending, through his special grace, so to pass by these temporals and momentary goods, that I shall not lose eternal, make, ordain and declare this is my testament and last will.15
Catherine left her soul to God, to the Virgin Mary ‘and to all the company of heaven’, and her body to be buried in the Lady Chapel of her parish church at Ashby-de-la-Zouche, with a priest aid to pay for her soul and those of her parents and husband. St Helen’s already had strong family connections, having been rebuilt from 1474 by Sir William, at the time that he was converting the nearby manor house into a castle. He may have intended to lie there himself, creating a special Hastings family chapel but, after his unexpected death, his body had been interred in St George’s, Windsor. Catherine also asked that he pray for ‘all Christian souls’ and ‘in special for those souls which I am most bounden to cause to be prayed for, for the space of three years next ensuing after my departing’. To the church in Ashby and the College at Newarke in Leicester, she left various vestments and religious artefacts, as well as lands and estates, in order to pay for a ‘yearly obit’ to be kept in the College for her immediate relatives ‘for ever’. After that, she bequeathed her worldly goods. She died between January and March 1504.16
A similar approach was taken by another survivor of the turbulent wars of the previous century. Henry VII’s stepfather Thomas, Lord Stanley, Earl of Derby had fathered eleven children but only seen three grow to maturity. He outlived his heir, George, who was reputedly the victim of a poisoning at a banquet, at the age of 43, which may have also claimed the life of his eldest son, so the Derby titles passed down to George’s second son. Having been the lead mourner at the funeral of Queen Elizabeth the year before, Lord Stanley’s health was rapidly failing by the time he came to write his will on 28 July 1504. He asked to be buried in the middle of the chapel, in the north aisle, in Burscough Priory in Lancashire, exercising as much power as he could, during life, to ensure that his plans were honoured after he had departed:
… of my ancestors foundation, where the bodies of my father, mother and other of my ancestors lay buried, having provided a tomb to be there placed, with the personages of myself and both my wives, for a perpetual remembrance to be prayed for, also I will that the personages which I have caused to be made for my father and mother, my grandfather and great-grandfather, shall be set in the arches within the chancel within that priory in the places provided for the same; and whereas I have before given to the said priory and convent great gifts of money, jewels and ornaments, and also done great reparations in the said priory, I nevertheless bequeath £20 to the intent that the said Prior and convent shall be bound by their deed, sealed with their common seal, to me and my heirs, to cause one of the canons thereof to say mass in the said chapel for my soul, and for the soul of my Lady, my wife, after her decease, and for the soul of Eleanor, late my wife, and for the souls of my father, mother, ancestors, children, brethren and sisters … also for the souls of them who died in my or my father’s service, and for the souls of all those I have in any wise offended, and for all Christian souls for evermore.17
Masses were to be said for Stanley in the parishes of Winwick and Werington for a year. He left bequests to various religious houses and paid 300 marks for the rent and toll of Werington Bridge, so it should be free for all people to cross it forever. Thomas Stanley died the day after signing his will. As with many of his peers, the elaborate instructions he left for the eternal commemoration of his soul only lasted as long as the monasteries; Burscough Priory was dissolved by his stepgrandson in 1536 and the Stanleys’ chantry and tombs were lost.
The death of Henry VII in April 1509 was marked by the expected level of pomp and ceremony of a Catholic king of England. His symptoms indicate that he was in the final stages of acute tuberculosis. Having experienced mixed health for years, he had suffered from a range of respiratory problems which usually manifest as bad coughs, worsening in the spring. He was ‘very ill’ at Wanstead in 1503 and the following year at Eltham, before becoming dangerously unwell in October 1507, with what seems to have been tubercular symptoms. He recovered, only to fall ill again the following February, his condition exacerbated by failing eyesight and gout. The Spanish ambassador had reported in July 1508 that he was ‘in the last stage of consumption’, with fevers and coughing. Yet again the king had rallied for a brief respite but by 29 March 1509 Henry was forced to recognise that he was ‘very ill and utterly without hope of recovery’, leading him to confide in his servants that if ‘it pleased God to send him a new life, they would find him a new changed man.’18 Henry completed his thirty-seven page will on the last day of March. On Easter Sunday, 8 April, he crawled from his bed into his privy closet to receive the sacrament and on 16th, he issued a general pardon, after which he went into rapid decline. Two weeks later Henry began his final struggle, which lasted a little over twenty-four hours. A sketch was made of him on his death bed by Sir Thomas Wriothesley, Garter Knight at Arms, who recorded those waiting around his canopied bed, including clerics and physicians and those of noble blood. He died late at night on 21 April.
The king’s magnificent Lady Chapel at Westminster was not finished at the time of his death, but this did not prevent Henry VII from being laid to rest there. His funeral took place on 9 May, when seven large horses in black velvet drew the chariot on which the coffin rested, covered with black cloth of gold. On top of it, Henry’s effigy lay on golden cushions, dressed in his parliamentary robes, wearing the crown and carrying the orb and sceptre in its hands. Six hundred torches were carried behind him on the journey from Richmond to St George’s Fields in Southwark. There, Henry’s body was met by the Lords, Commons and religious figures all dressed in black and the procession travelled through the streets of London, over the bridge to St Paul’s. First came the sword-bearer and vice chamberlain, followed by messengers, trumpeters and minstrels, then foreigners, ushers, chaplains and squires; after them were the aldermen and sheriffs, two heralds and Sir Edward Darrell, mounted on a horse trapped in black velvet, carrying the king’s standard. But this was just the beginning. Behind them were Knights of the Bath, deans, councillors, justices, friars, canons, lords and barons. Then three knights bearing the king’s helmet with crown, his harness and battle-axe, and his armour embroidered with the English arms; the Mayor of London carried his mace. Then came the hearse carrying the body, followed by the Duke of Buckingham and four earls, leading the Knights of the Garter, with Sir Thomas Brandon, Master of the Horse, leading the other gentlemen.
Henry’s body stayed at St Paul’s overnight, under a ‘stately hearse made of wax’ while sermons were read and masses performed, before heading along Fleet Street to Charing Cross, where it was censed, and on to Westminster. There, he was set in a hearse of lights as masses were said, after which the staves of office were broken and a ‘sumptuous entertainment’ was held in the palace. The portrait of Henry on Torrigiano’s bronze cast, probably taken from his death mask, shows a man with high cheek bones and a gaunt face, his brows rounded above smallish eyes, a firm chin and flowing shoulder-length hair. The imposing tomb is a celebration and an artistic statement, a sign that the ruler fathered a dynasty, established peace and moved England into the Renaissance, away from the old-style transi tombs with their memento mori juxtaposition of life and death. Henry VII’s final resting place marks the achievements of life, not the constant threat of death.