II
Whoso that wyll hymselff applye
To passe the tyme of youth joly,
Avaunce hym to the companye
Of lusty bloddys and chevalry.
Two years after the death of the New Year’s boy Henry VIII crossed the Channel and, at the head of a large army, rode to war against the French. He had long since ceased to mourn the tragedy of his son’s death. At twenty-one he was still under the tutelage of the councilors who had guided his government since the beginning of his reign, but more and more his own style was asserting itself. The expedition to France was clear evidence of this. No English army had invaded the continent within living memory, and it had been the considered policy of Henry’s father to gain his diplomatic ends without the expense and risk of war, Henry’s advisers urged the young king not to endanger England by subjecting himself to the hazards of battle, but their arguments were merely logical. Other persuasions touched Henry nearer his heart.
At the start of the sixteenth century the business of war was still central to the chivalric imagination. It was the nature of a great king to be a knight first and a statesman afterward; all of Henry’s most famous predecessors had proved that, from Edward I campaigning in Wales to Edward III and his sons in the Hundred Years’ War. The feudal society that produced the warrior aristocracy had disintegrated generations earlier, but the personal values of the knightly class—fearlessness and hardiness in combat, indomitability, generosity, courtesy to enemies and allies alike, fidelity to a strict code of honor—were all the more fiercely prized as the knights’ purely military usefulness waned. And models of individual valor were more plentiful now than at any time since the days of Richard Lionheart and Saladin. Chief among them was Henry’s older contem porary the Chevalier de Bayard, whose exploits in the Italian wars were well known at Henry’s court. On one occasion, it was said, he defended a bridge against an assault of two hundred Spanish soldiers, and another time he magnanimously refused a reward of twenty-five hundred ducats offered by a grateful nobleman whose wife and daughters Bayard had saved from dishonor. Until he had proved himself worthy of a similar reputation, Henry would not attain full stature as a monarch. And so, in the spring of 1513, he laid his plans for war.
By June the thousands of bowstaves, arrows, and barrels of flour and beer were assembled and loaded. Suits of armor had been ordered from the armaments factories of northern Italy, and hundreds of tents were sewn and folded for shipment. The larger tents had names: White Hart, Greyhound, Feather, Cup of Gold, Mountain, Gold Hynd, World, Flower de Lyce. The artillery pieces too—the minions, lizards and demi-culverins—had been christened Crown, Garter, Rose and Virago. One of the great curtows was called The Sun Arising. The serpentines bore the heraldic titles of Mermaid, Griffon, Olyvant and Antelope; the largest cannons of all, whose twenty-pound iron shot took so long to load they could only be fired thirty times in a day, were dubbed The Twelve Apostles.
The term was apt, for Henry’s campaign had the official status of a crusade. Julius II’s anger at the French king led him to issue a papal brief taking the kingdom away from Louis and giving it to Henry, to take effect as soon as Henry had made himself master of France by conquest. Late in July Henry’s men filed out of the English-held town of Calais, where they had landed three weeks earlier, and made their way southeastward in alternating rain and suffocating heat toward the town of Thérouanne. The ordnance was carried in the van, setting the pace for the entire force. Then came the king’s household guard, under the banner of the Trinity, the duke of Buckingham with his four hundred soldiers, and three ecclesiastical corps under the bishops of Durham and Winchester and Wolsey, the king’s almoner. Under Henry’s own banner was a picked guard of six hundred men, followed by the priests and singers of his chapel—a small army in themselves, 115 strong—his secretaries, kitchen staff, bedchamber attendants and his lutanist. In the rear marched another large force under the Lord Chamberlain and the earl of Northumberland.
Except for the misfortune of the elderly and sour-tempered bishop of Winchester, who was kicked by a mule en route, the army arrived without incident before the walls of Thérouanne. They set siege to the town, and were soon joined by a band of Burgundians under the Emperor Maximilian, which he offered to put at Henry’s disposal provided the English king paid them. With the arrival of his Hapsburg ally Henry’s siege force took on the character of a respectable international host which the French could not afford to ignore. It was at least worlds apart from the ill-fated expedition to Spain a year earlier, which had gained no military advantage whatever and threatened permanently to damage the prestige of English arms.
The design of this venture called for a force under the marquis of Dorset to sail to Spain, then move northward with the support of Ferdinand’s Spanish soldiers to retake the former English lands in Guienne. From the outset the undertaking was frustrated by incompetent planning and the notorious unreliability of Ferdinand. There were no tents, no beer, and few other provisions. The tropical weather enervated the English, and the high prices of local goods quickly drained their pockets. Ferdinand capriciously announced that he preferred to fight in Navarre rather than Guienne, and left the English to attack alone. Dorset was not the man to organize a campaign on his own, and like many of his soldiers he soon fell ill. A rebellion among the troops seeking higher pay was put down, but all semblance of military training ceased and a fair number of men deserted. By September quarrels among the commanders allowed the English fighting men to arrange their own affairs. They ordered ships, baked enough biscuit to get home on, and left. Henry was furious, but by the time the disobedient army reached England he had decided to pretend that the entire disgraceful episode never happened.
Now, however, he was in personal command of a loyal, well-provisioned and self-sufficient army, whose successes would atone for Dorset’s fiasco. In the third week of the siege of Thérouanne his first opportunity came. A body of French knights attempted to relieve the town by means of an assault on the besiegers. Driven back by Henry’s cannons, they retreated past a village called Guinegate, with the English knights close behind them. In their panic, the English boasted, the French lost their spurs, and the brief engagement was given the memorable name “Battle of the Spurs.” In fact the French lost several of their standards and a number of French knights were taken prisoner. Among them was the matchless Bayard himself, who graciously yielded his sword to an astonished English knight in acknowledgment of the English triumph. Henry, determined to outdo the gallant Bayard in magnanimity, released him after a brief imprisonment.
Other triumphs quickly followed. Thérouanne fell in a few days, and after taking possession of the town in a splendid ceremonial entry Henry handed it over to Maximilian, who ordered every building but the old church destroyed. The city of Tournai held out only eight days before the English siege, and this prize Henry kept for himself. With two towns taken and a shipload of valuable French prisoners whose ransoms, once paid by their anxious relatives, should repay much of the cost of the campaign, Henry took his army home. It had been a profitable and even a pleasant crusade—between sieges Henry had stopped for several weeks of feasting and entertainment at the court of the regent of Flanders, and did so again on his way back to Calais. More important, it had given Henry the military reputation he badly needed. The standards and spurs of the French were worthy spoils from a first campaign. His next venture might indeed imperil the French crown.
Paradoxically, the most decisive English military victory of 1513 came about in Henry’s absence, under the nominal command of Katherine. When he went abroad in June he had left her as head of his government and remaining military forces, knowing that his departure would be the signal for at least minor incursions by the Scots. As early as February Lord Dacre, guardian of the northern border, warned Henry that the Scots king James IV was mustering his men in preparation for an invasion. He had provided himself with up-to-date siege artillery, and narrowly missed harm when one of the newly cast guns he was trying out in Edinburgh Castle exploded on firing.1
James’ defiance, carried by Ross Herald, reached Henry in the midst of the siege of Thérouanne. He sent the bishop of Durham to London to oversee the organization of defense in the northern counties, but left the major responsibility with Katherine and the Lord Treasurer Surrey, Lieutenant General of the North. Katherine personally handled many of the administrative details, and set her women to sewing banners for the knightly contingents forming under Surrey’s command. A highly intelligent and capable woman, she enjoyed coordinating the enterprise. “My heart is very good to it,” she wrote to Henry. On September 9 the invading Scots met Surrey’s forces in the hills at Flodden just inside English territory, and within three hours they were beaten. The slaughter was terrible. The commanders—the earls, the great churchmen, the king himself—chose to fight to the death though conscious that they were giving ground hopelessly to the English. When the battle was over Flodden Field was strewn with noble corpses; among them was the disfigured body of King James, fallen near his banner. The bishop of Durham praised Surrey and his men, but attributed the victory to the protection of St. Cuthbert, under whose banner the men of Durham had fought. Katherine was overjoyed at the outcome, and sent the Scots king’s bloody shirt to her husband as a trophy.
A week after the carnage of Flodden Katherine gave birth to a stillborn son. A little over a year later she bore a living son who died within a few days. Her father, whose patience with her failures in childbirth had long since run out, sent a doctor and a Spanish midwife to England to ensure that future sons would survive. What their techniques were we don’t know, but common medical remedies for infertility included drinking the urine of pregnant goats and sheep and treating the cervix with steam, produced by a brass lamp and funneled into the vagina through a pessary. Folk remedies called for the woman to wear herbs and charms—dock seeds bound to the arm, magical or religious names written in amulets—and to suspend from a girdle worn under her clothing the fingers and anus of a deadborn child. To whatever cures her physicians advised Katherine undoubtedly added assiduous prayers for a son. And Henry, whose piety was less fervent than Katherine’s but no less sincere, prayed too for his long-desired heir.
The blame in all cases of childlessness fell by custom on the wife, but Henry could not overlook the evidence that there was weakness on his side of the family as well. He had been one of seven children, three boys and four girls. Three of the children had died in infancy, and a fourth, Prince Arthur, lived only into adolescence. Of course, many women lost half their children in infancy, but Katherine had so far lost them all. And she was nearing thirty.
Katherine’s pregnancy in 1515 was to all appearances normal. The child was expected in February of the following year, and news of the impending birth made the rounds of the diplomatic network. The new king of France, Francis I (Louis XII had just died), felt snubbed because Henry did not personally invite him to send a representative to stand as godfather to the child at the christening; instead he asked his brother-in-law Suffolk to give Francis the message. Francis announced he would send no one; Henry was bound to be very angry. The Venetian ambassador Giustinian, always anxious to preserve good relations between Henry and other monarchs, went to see Henry’s chief advisor Wolsey in an attempt to cushion the insult.
Katherine’s baby was born before dawn on Monday, February 18.2 It was a girl, but this disappointment was temporarily outweighed by the fact that it did not immediately die. Three days after her birth the child was christened in the friars’ church near the palace at Greenwich. The silver font reserved for royal christenings was brought to the church for the ceremony, but apart from the exalted status of the sponsors and godparents the event was unexceptional. The muddy ground was covered first with a thick layer of gravel and then with rushes, and scaffolding was set up along both sides of the path the christening procession was to take from the court gate to the porch of the church. The princess was carried by her godmother, and she was wrapped so tightly against the cold that not even her face was visible to the spectators. A low wooden archway had been built just in front of the church door and covered with tapestries. Under it the godparents stopped, and a priest blessed the child and gave her her name. She was called Mary, after Henry’s favorite sister, the beautiful Tudor Rose.
This part of the ceremony over, the company moved into the church itself for further rites. A group of gentlemen and lords filed past the needlework hangings studded with gems and pearls that lined the walls and walked to the high altar, where the accouterments of the christening—the basin, tapers, salt and chrism—were assembled. Four knights carried the gold canopy of estate above the princess, now held by the countess of Surrey. Her sponsors and godparents were of the blood royal or of ducal rank: Katherine Plantagenet, only surviving child of Edward IV, and Henry VIII’s aunt; Margaret Plantagenet, countess of Salisbury, Edward IV’s niece; Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, the baby’s uncle and husband of the Tudor Rose; and the duke and duchess of Norfolk. Immediately after the christening came the ceremony of “bishoping,” or confirmation. At its conclusion the heralds came together at the front of the church and loudly proclaimed Mary’s title and style:
God give good life and long unto the right high, right noble, and right excellent princess Mary, princess of England and daughter of our sovereign lord the king.
Giustinian took his time about congratulating the new father on behalf of the doge of Venice. “Had it been a son,” he wrote in a letter to the doge, “it would not have been fit to delay the compliment.”3 A daughter was another matter. Nearly a week after Mary’s birth the ambassador sought an audience with Henry and complimented him on the good health of his wife and daughter. At the same time he made it plain that the doge would have been happier with a prince, adding a carefully prepared series of sentiments to the effect that Henry himself would have been more contented with a son but that he ought to resign himself to the inscrutable will of God. Henry cut through this rhetorical lacework to remark that, since both he and his queen were young (an arguable point in Katherine’s case), there was no reason for resignation. “If it was a daughter this time, by the grace of God the sons will follow,” he concluded, and plunged without interruption into the more serious matter of stirring up Venetian worries about the maneuverings of France and the empire.4
Mary Tudor came into the world in a season of mourning. King Ferdinand, who had been in ill health for some time, died late in January, and the news reached England just before Katherine was delivered. Katherine was not told of her father’s death until after Mary was born, but she must have grieved then to think that he did not live to know of the princess’ birth. Katherine did not love her father: she had not seen him for twenty years, he had treated her more as a piece of merchandise than as a daughter, and in any case he was not a lovable man. But she felt a strong sense of duty toward him, and considerable fear. Besides, his death broke another of her ties to Spain, and to the cherished memory of her mother. Ferdinand’s last illness was too much a tragicomic affair to evoke deep grief, however. Several years earlier he had determined to obtain a son by his second wife, Germaine de Foix. As he was over sixty the task promised to be strenuous, and to give him extra strength his wife had a powerful aphrodisiac baked into his food. The potion gave him convulsions, and attacked his reason. After two years Germaine had had no children but Ferdinand was more or less continuously ill and insane. He still enjoyed his favorite sport of hunting, though, weakening what resistance he had left. Finally in January of 1516 “he expired,” the humanist Peter Martyr wrote, “of hunting and matrimony, either of which are fatal to most men at the age of sixty-three.”5
Ferdinand’s death marked the passing of the generation of Mary’s grandparents: she would not know any of them, though she bore their imprint strongly. Her Spanish grandparents were the more romantic and illustrious. Ferdinand, heir to the Mediterranean kingdom of Aragon, spent his youth fighting alongside his father in the civil war against the rebellious Catalans; after he married the heiress Isabella at eighteen he joined in her campaign to secure her right to the throne of Castile. Competent rather than brilliant as both a soldier and governor, Ferdinand was destined to be overshadowed by his admirable wife. Warrior, conqueror of the Moors, indefatigable administrator and self-taught patron of culture and exploration, Isabella of Castile had the mentality of a feudal knight. She embodied the most hallowed of Spanish ideals: the tradition of the crusade. When her brother, Henry IV, died leaving no legitimate children Isabella refused to recognize the claims of his niece, and fought doggedly for her own rights until she had driven her rival from the country. Her marriage to Ferdinand gave him no control over her kingdom, and she ruled there as an independent sovereign, contending with revolts, the restlessness of the proud Castilian nobility, and the everyday tedium of government. When she was not campaigning she received ambassadors, conferred with her councilors, and attended to matters of law and war from morning till evening, then spent most of the night dictating to her secretaries. She had not been educated to handle affairs of state, and her Latin was poor; in her spare time she studied until she mastered it. By no means a learned woman, Isabella respected knowledge—always provided it remained congruent with piety—and bought many manuscript books and endowed a convent library at Toledo.
Important as they were to Isabella these benefactions went unnoticed by the majority of her subjects, who knew her best as the armor-clad conqueror of the Moors. Since the middle ages the Christian kingdoms of Spain had defined themselves in opposition to the Moorish domination of the peninsula. One by one the territories of the Moors had been conquered, until in Isabella’s time only Granada remained. A decade of sieges and assaults under the queen’s banner, interrupted only when Isabella paused to give birth to her fourth child Katherine, culminated in the fall of Granada in 1492. By their marriage the “Catholic kings,” as Ferdinand and Isabella were called, had created a unified Spain. Now they had made it an entirely Catholic kingdom as well. Two more events rounded out their efforts at purification. They introduced the Inquisition to crush heresy and they expelled the Jews.
From a triumphant heroine Isabella sank in later life to a melancholic recluse. She became inactive and moody, and her tears of religious sentiment were indistinguishable from those she wept over Ferdinand’s infidelities. Over the coarse robes of a lay sister of the Franciscan Third Order she now wore only black gowns. Of her four daughters the eldest was dead, the youngest far away in England, the third at the distant court of Portugal. The fourth daughter, Joanna, the most beautiful and spirited of them all, would soon go mad.
Mary’s paternal grandfather Henry VII never spoke of Ferdinand and Isabella without touching his hat as a sign of respect.6 After Katherine and Arthur were married he liked to say that he and his wife were now “brother and sister” to Ferdinand and Isabella, and in the presence of the Spanish ambassador he solemnly swore, his hand on his heart, that if he heard any of his subjects speak against the Catholic kings “by the faith of his heart he would esteem him no longer.”7 Henry did not expect to be taken completely seriously in his extravagant admiration of Ferdinand and Isabella, but as the parvenu king of a minor country he did feel keenly the difference in their status.
When he seized the English throne in 1485 he was in fact an outlaw under the stigma of attainder—forfeiture of titles and lands. Through his mother he had a claim to the crown, but he was without money or supporters. The attainder drove him to the continent, where at twenty-eight he mustered an invasion force and fought and defeated the king, Richard
III, at Bosworth Field. Henry’s coronation nullified the attainder, and Parliament declared all those who had opposed him at Bosworth to be traitors, yet his title remained precarious. Preserving it meant overcoming the major threat of Perkin Warbeck, who persuaded most of the rulers of Europe that he was the younger of the two murdered sons of Edward
IV, and crushing a minor threat from the Irish pretender Lambert Simnel, who called himself Edward VI. It meant surviving occult intrigues like that of the conspirators who obtained from a Roman astrologer an ointment which, spread on the walls of a passageway in the palace, was supposed to bring about the king’s murder “by those who loved him best.”8 Above all it meant building a new image of the monarchy in England.
This Henry was well equipped to do. He was a handsome man of moderate height whose expression and bearing inspired confidence. He had the irreplaceable gift of winning the hearts of his soldiers, his councilors, and the ordinary people who crowded the roadways and gathered on rooftops to see him wherever he went. The chronicler Hall imagined him on the day of the battle of Bosworth, “his aspect cheerful and couragious, his hair yellow like the burnished gold, his eyes grey shining and quick.” And when he rode through York shortly after his coronation, “a great crowd of citizens” threw gifts of comfits and wheat in his path and shouted their delight at his accession: “King Henry! King Henry! Our Lord preserve that sweet and well favored face!”9 The way to a new image, Henry saw, was to surround himself with magnificence and with the symbols of royal power. Over fifteen hundred pounds was spent on the finery worn at his coronation, and twenty-one tailors and fifteen furriers were kept at their workbenches for three weeks fashioning the liveries for his knights and henchmen. As king Henry kept a personal bodyguard of archers in attendance at all times, and introduced at his court something of the elaborate ceremonial he had observed in France. By the end of his reign he had created an appearance of order and strong personal rule, and bequeathed these, along with a full treasury, to his son. For his audacity, popularity and skillful rule he was to be known in time as “a wonder for wise men.”
Henry VII’s wife, Elizabeth of York, lived the restricted life of a medieval queen, bearing children at regular intervals and adding the prestige of her Yorkist ancestry (she was the daughter of Edward IV) to her husband’s authority. At her splendid coronation she rode in a litter of cloth of gold, in rich robes and with a jeweled circlet crowning her “fair yellow hair hanging down full behind her back.” But afterward, taking as her motto the phrase “humble and reverent,” she retreated into a twilight of confinements and royal nurseries, and saw two of her children die in infancy. In giving birth to her last child, a weak little princess who lived less than a year, the queen herself died.
Of the children of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York the sturdiest and most boisterous was the second boy, the one known throughout his childhood as Prince Hal. A round-faced child with a ruddy complexion, he was given an array of titles before he was a year old—Warden of the Cinque Ports, Constable of Dover Castle—and at three he was created a Knight of the Bath and elected to the Order of the Garter. By the time he was four he could sit a horse well enough to ride in state to Westminster Abbey to be created duke of York, as Perkin Warbeck, who claimed the same title, was preparing his invasion on the continent. Erasmus, who met the young prince when he was eight, declared him to possess the qualities of dignity and courtesy in kingly proportion, and thought highly of his prospects. As a younger son Henry was free from the obligations and pressures placed on the heir to the throne, but at age ten and a half his brother’s death suddenly exalted him to the status of prince of Wales. From then on he began to acquire the chivalric skills and popular reputation of a future king. At sixteen Prince Hal was taller than his father, with “limbs of gigantic size.” The Spanish ambassador declared that there was “no finer youth in all the world than the Prince of Wales,” and another observer went even further. “If the names of all the princes who have been called handsome were to be collected,” he wrote, “that of Henry would stand first.”10 The people who had loved Henry VII worshiped his son. Popular ballads about Prince Hal told how he liked to put on rough clothing and seek out the company of common folk; invariably he would be discovered, recognized, and brought in honor to the palace again surrounded by his devoted subjects. The sturdy little boy became a vigorous and beloved youth, and gave every hope of becoming an able king.
Henry’s sisters, Mary’s aunts, could not have been more unlike one another. Margaret, two years older than Henry, was a robust and sharp-witted young girl of fourteen when her father married her to James IV of Scotland. James was twenty-eight, and a man of vast and unscrupulous experience with women. (While his marriage to Margaret Tudor was being negotiated, his beautiful mistress Lady Margaret Drummond died in unexplained circumstances.) Margaret endured her marriage, but not without complaint; homesick and humiliated by her husband, she wrote piteous letters to her father in England. James IV’s death at Flodden freed her from her unhappy marriage, but a second marriage to the earl of Angus led to further conflict and eventually to civil war. Margaret had by now become a heavy and somewhat mutton-faced matron, and a considerable woman of the world in her own right. While still married to Angus she took several lovers, including the man who became her third husband, her Lord Chancellor Henry Stewart.
If Margaret was ill-favored and unfortunate in her domestic life, Henry’s younger sister Mary was probably the most envied woman of her generation. Her portraits confirm the unanimous opinion of contemporaries that she was an extraordinary beauty. Her lovely high forehead and even, delicate features were set off by a complexion fair almost to the point of pallor. Unlike Henry she had dark hair and eyes, and a docile sweetness of expression. She was strong-willed, though, and the knowledge that she was among the most desirable princesses in Europe gave her confidence. She agreed to marry the elderly French king Louis XII (after an earlier betrothal to Charles of Castile, the future Charles V, was broken off) but made the stipulation that her next husband would be of her own choosing. It was well known that her choice would fall on Charles Brandon, Henry’s intimate companion, and when soon after the wedding Louis died, it was Brandon who was sent to France to console the widow. While he was there he and Mary were secretly married. Henry was furious, but was too fond of both Mary and Brandon not to let them return to court. His revenge was to seize Mary’s plate and jewels, and to force her to repay the cost of her expensive French wedding; she was still paying off the debt at the enormous rate of a thousand pounds a year when she died.
Princess Mary’s English and Spanish ancestry was rich in enterprising, combative, courageous and independent men and women. She too would carry those traits, and though raised as an Englishwoman she was also taught to honor her Spanish blood and acknowledge it proudly. She was after all cared for by a mother whose English was never really fluent, and who continued to pray in Spanish all her life. In personality and spirit Mary would most resemble her grandmother Isabella. She would show Isabella’s tenacity, her bravery, her taste for long working hours, her tendency to melancholy. Mary shared something of Isabella’s desire to purify religious belief as well, but in circumstances so different from those of fifteenth-century Spain as to defy comparison. Had she lived amid the archaic honor, piety and religious idealism of medieval Spain Mary might have been a heroine as splendid as her grandmother; amid the crisis-ridden climate of treachery, doubt and religious revolution of Tudor England she was to find obstacles even Isabella could not have conquered.