To speake againe of Henries praise,
His princely liberal hand
Gave gifts and graces many waies
Unto this famous land:
For which the Lord him blessings sent,
And multiplied his store;
In that he left more wealth to us
Than any king before.
The year 1500 brought sorrow to the royal family when, on 19 June, Prince Edmund died at Hatfield at the age of sixteen months. The pathetic little coffin was brought to London on the following Monday and given a state funeral in Westminster Abbey at a cost of £242 11s 8d with the Duke of Buckingham officiating as chief mourner.
Apart from the fact that it was terrifying, no one knows the exact rate of infant mortality among ordinary people in the early sixteenth century but even in families where the best care was available, parents could think themselves lucky if they reared three babies out of five. The Tudor nurseries were under the direct supervision of the King’s mother, who had drawn up detailed instructions to be followed by the officials in charge. There was to be a Lady Governor to oversee the nursery nurse; the wet nurse’s food and drink was to be carefully ‘assayed’ (that is, tasted) at all times while ‘shee giveth the child sucke’; and there was to be a physician always on duty to stand over the nurse at every meal to make sure she was feeding the child properly.
In spite of these and other precautions, only four out of Queen Elizabeth’s seven children (there had been another boy who died at birth) had survived their first, most perilous years. It was not a particularly good average, but neither was it unusually low. The King and Queen, like so many other bereaved parents, stoically accepted the will of God, and turned to the more cheerful business of preparing for the arrival of their first daughter-in-law.
Negotiations for a marriage between the King of England’s eldest son and the Infanta Catalina, youngest daughter of the Catholic Kings of Spain – Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile – had begun as long ago as the spring of 1488, when Arthur was eighteen months old and the Spanish princess Catherine was two and a bit. Ferdinand wanted an English alliance to secure his rear while he pursued a vendetta with France over the disputed territories of Italy – the Franco-Spanish power struggle was to dominate the international scene for more than half a century. Henry wanted friends abroad and a prestigious foreign bride for his son. Neither Henry nor Ferdinand wanted to pay more than he had to and being both, as Francis Bacon later wrote, ‘princes of great policy and profound judgement, [they] stood a great time looking upon another’s fortunes, how they would go’. But eventually, after a good deal of hard bargaining on both sides, satisfactory terms were hammered out and the marriage treaty was concluded in October 1496.
It had been agreed that the princess should come to England as soon as Arthur was fourteen, but at the last moment there were more delays and it was May 1501 before Catherine left the palace at Granada on the first stage of her long journey north, the end of September before she finally sailed from the port of Laredo on the Basque coast. It was not the best time of year to embark on a voyage across the Bay of Biscay, and the fleet ran into a succession of violent squalls which carried away spars and rigging and wrenched masts out of their sockets. The princess’s soaked and seasick retinue huddled miserably below decks convinced that their last hour had come. It seemed the worst possible omen for the future. But after five hideous days the Spaniards limped into the shelter of Plymouth Sound and anchored safely off the Hoe on the afternoon of 2 October. The bruised and exhausted passengers were able to get into dry clothes. The sun came out and everybody cheered up.
The journey to London had been carefully planned in easy stages and all along the way the princess was given an enthusiastic welcome. At Plymouth the waterfront had been lined with cheering crowds and at Exeter there had been bells and banners and bonfires. At the West Country villages of Honiton and Crewkerne, the great abbeys of Sherborne and Shaftesbury, and the little market towns of Amesbury and Andover, housewives and shop-keepers and farm labourers gathered to wave and cry blessings from the roadside, while the local gentry – self-confident, well-fed country squires and their wives – came riding in to greet the new arrival and swell the ranks of her escort.
Apart from the fact that everyone enjoyed a break from routine and an excuse to dress up and have a party, everyone was pleased that prestigious foreign royalty had been willing to marry their daughter in England. More than anything else it was a sign that the troubles were over at last, and there would be no more tiresome squabbling over who should wear the crown. Catherine brought good royal blood that would add to the status of the new dynasty – was she not remotely descended from John of Gaunt? – and seemed a pretty, well-behaved child who would do the country credit. The English had an international reputation for being violently and unpredictably fickle, but during those first few weeks they took Catherine of Aragon to their hearts and they were to love and respect her to the end.
King Henry had originally intended to welcome his new daughter when she arrived at Lambeth on the southern outskirts of London, but early in November he suddenly became impatient and decided after all to go out and meet her. He left his smart new Thames-side residence at Richmond with a large company, stopping at the Berkshire village of Easthampstead to pick up Prince Arthur, who was coming south from Ludlow. Father and son then travelled on together.
News of their approach started something of a flutter in the Spanish dovecote, and before the two parties could converge an emissary arrived in the person of Don Pedro de Ayala, papal protonotary and Bishop of the Canaries. Don Pedro had the rather tricky assignment of explaining to the King of England that, according to Spanish etiquette, the princess could not receive her future father-in-law and could on no account be seen by her future husband until the marriage ceremony itself. Henry was not pleased to be instructed in his own kingdom by a parcel of foreigners and, turning his horse into a convenient field, he called an impromptu council meeting. After solemnly debating the point, the lords spiritual and temporal in his train gave it as their considered opinion that since the princess of Spain was now in England she had become the King’s subject, and he had a perfect right to see her whenever he chose.
The King wasted no more time. Leaving Arthur to follow at a more decorous pace, he spurred on towards Dogmersfield, the small Hampshire village that Catherine and her entourage had reached a couple of hours earlier. When he arrived, at about half-past two in the afternoon, he was told that the princess was resting and could see no one – Catherine’s duenna, the formidable Doña Elvira Manuel, was not giving in without a struggle. But Henry Tudor meant to be master in his own house. He had come to see the princess, he said bluntly, and he was going to see her even if she was in her bed. So the princess of Spain gave the King of England ‘an honourable meeting in her third chamber’ under Doña Elvira’s disapproving eye. As Catherine spoke no English and Henry no Spanish, communication was effectively limited to smiles and bows, but when the King withdrew to change out of his muddy riding clothes he had seen all he wanted to see – a sturdy, well-grown, well-formed girl, with clear grey eyes, a fresh complexion and a quantity of auburn hair; a girl who, God willing, would be able to give him healthy grandchildren.
As soon as Arthur had ridden in, father and son paid the princess another visit. This time the occasion was more formal. The bridal couple were, of course, already legally contracted by proxy. Now they joined hands and went through a solemn betrothal ceremony in person before an impressive audience of bishops, both English and Spanish.
What the two young people thought of one another is not recorded, but when Catherine first set eyes on the Prince of Wales her spirits must surely have risen. The short November afternoon was drawing to a close and in the torchlight she saw a slender youth with a thatch of blond hair and skin as delicately pink and white as a girl’s.
Next day the princess resumed her journey, going by way of Chertsey, Kingston and Croydon, while Henry and Arthur went back to Richmond to be ready to row down the river in state with the Queen. By the time Catherine had reached the archbishop’s palace at Lambeth, the Court was installed at Baynard’s Castle and London was packed to the rafters. All the world and his wife and his servants had come to town for the wedding; all the great nobles were keeping open house and every stable, every lodging, every spare room in the capital was full. The streets resounded with hammering as crush barriers were put up and carpenters added the finishing touches to triumphal arches and built stages for the elaborate tableaux and pageants which were to greet the bride’s procession to St Paul’s. Inside the cathedral a sort of cat-walk, the height of a man’s head, had been erected, stretching the length of the nave from the west door to the choir and ending in a raised platform large enough to accommodate the King and the royal family on one side and the Lord Mayor and the city dignitaries on the other, with a space in the middle where the marriage ceremony would be performed – the whole complicated structure being lavishly draped in fine red worsted cloth. Henry was really splashing out on his son’s wedding, and while it was no doubt in large part a gesture of calculated extravagance designed to proclaim to the outside world that the new English royal house must now be regarded as standing on fully equal terms with the other ruling families of Europe, perhaps Henry was also allowing himself a certain flourish of personal triumph and of pride in the handsome boy who was his heir.
On 12 November Catherine and her retinue left their quarters at Lambeth Palace and were met on the adjacent St George’s Field by a glittering escort of English lords, both spiritual and temporal, with their attendant knights and squires. The procession formed up and moved off along the south bank of the river to Southwark. Here, at the entrance to London Bridge, the princess was welcomed to the city by St Katherine and St Ursula, who were surrounded with ‘a great multitude of virgins right goodly dressed and arrayed’ and seated in a two-storey ‘tabernacle’ surmounted by a picture of the Trinity and draped with red and blue curtains.
The Spanish marriage was especially popular among the business community. Spain was already a good customer for English wool and tin, and under the terms of the treaty of alliance English merchants trading in Spanish ports were to be accorded special privileges. So, encouraged by the prospect of increased profits, the city had gone out of its way to put on a really good show for the Spanish bride.
Across the bridge, in the widest part of Gracious Street, stood a most realistic-looking castle, but actually constructed, the chronicler is careful to explain, of timber covered with painted canvas. Its battlements were decorated with red and white roses, with gold fleur de lys, peacocks, greyhounds, white harts and other heraldic devices. Over the entrance hung a large portcullis ‘and in every joint of the portcullis a red rose’. This was topped by the royal arms painted on a shield of mock stone, and ‘on the highest of all the whole pageant, a red dreadful dragon, holding a staff of iron and on the staff a great crown of gold’. In Cornhill there was an astrological pageant, displaying the moon and other celestial bodies, with the angel Raphael waiting to remind the princess that marriage was ordained for love, with virtue and reverence and the procreation of children, and not for sensual lust and appetite. By the great conduit in Cheapside was a pageant of the sun, with a figure intended to symbolize Prince Arthur standing in a gilded chariot. By the standard in Cheapside, on a raised platform profusely embellished with red roses, greyhounds, lions and dragons, stood a great throne surrounded by burning tapers in gold candlesticks and ‘innumerable angels singing full harmoniously’. Here was seated no less a person than God the Father, ready to exhort the princess to the love of God and of Holy Church in several stanzas of rather doubtful verse.
‘Look ye’, he declared, ‘walk in my precepts and obey them well,
And here I give you that same blessing that I
Gave my well-beloved children of Israel;
Blessed be the fruit of your belly.’
No one, least of all the Almighty’s anonymous scriptwriter, could have guessed how bitterly ironical his words would turn out to be.
The Spaniards, of course, were accustomed to religious shows and processions, but they had never seen anything quite on this scale before and they rode wide-eyed behind the scarlet-robed Lord Mayor and aldermen through a fairy-tale city, with the trumpets braying and the Tower cannon booming in their ears. ‘The princess’, exclaimed the Licentiate Alcares, ‘could not have been received with greater joy had she been the saviour of the world.’
The Londoners packing the streets and hanging out of every window along the route were regrettably inclined to laugh at the outlandish appearance of the foreigners, but for the princess herself there was nothing but praise. Catherine, in rich Spanish apparel, was riding a gorgeously trapped mule and wore ‘a little hat fashioned like a cardinal’s hat … with a lace of gold at this hat to stay it, her hair hanging down about her shoulders’. She must have made a charmingly exotic picture and young Thomas More, a law student at Lincoln’s Inn, declared enthusiastically ‘there is nothing wanting in her that the most beautiful girl should have’. The royal family, who were watching the show from a merchant’s house in Cheapside, had every reason to be pleased, and for the King and Queen there was the added satisfaction of seeing ten-year-old Prince Henry carrying out his first important public engagement with perfect aplomb, as he rode through the crowded streets at his new sister’s right hand.
The procession ended with a final pageant at the entrance to St Paul’s Churchyard, and Catherine and her retinue were installed in the Bishop of London’s palace which adjoined the west door of the cathedral. Next day, the eve of the wedding, there was a state reception for the Spanish dignitaries in the great hall of Baynard’s Castle, the King sitting under a cloth of estate with his two sons on either side of him. In the afternoon the princess paid a ceremonial visit to the Queen and afterwards there was more dancing and merrymaking, so that it was quite late in the evening before she returned by torchlight to her lodging. ‘Thus’, remarks the chronicler, ‘with honour and mirth this Saturday was expired and done.’
Prince Arthur arrived at St Paul’s between nine and ten o’clock on the morning of Sunday, 14 November escorted by the Earls of Oxford and Shrewsbury, and shortly afterwards the bride emerged from the bishop’s palace. She was met at the west door of the cathedral by the Archbishop of Canterbury, supported by eighteen other bishops and abbots mitred, and led down the six-hundred-foot length of the great church to the choir, Prince Henry giving her his right hand and Cecily of York bearing her train. Bride and groom were both dressed in white satin, Catherine’s gown being made very wide ‘with many pleats, much like unto men’s clothing’ and worn over a Spanish hooped farthingale, while a white silk veil bordered with pearls and precious stones covered her face.
After the marriage service conducted by the Archbishop, which lasted more than three hours, the newly-wedded pair went hand in hand towards the high altar, turning to the south and north so that ‘the present multitude of people might see and behold their persons’. Trumpets, shawns and sackbuts sounded, and a great shout went up inside the cathedral, ‘some crying King Henry, some in likewise crying Prince Arthur’. Outside, the bells crashed, the conduits ran with wine and the waiting crowds cheered themselves hoarse.
As soon as the long-drawn-out religious ceremonies were over, the wedding guests trooped across the churchyard to the bishop’s palace, where a feast of ‘the most delicate dainties and curious meats that might be purveyed and gotten within the whole realm of England’ was laid out for them.
That day of pageantry, piety, emotion and over-eating ended with the customary ceremonious bedding of bride and groom, the prince being conducted by his lords and gentlemen (few of them entirely sober by this time) to the bridal chamber ‘wherein the princess before his coming was reverently laid and disposed’. The marriage bed was blessed by the assembled bishops and at last the young couple were left alone. A quarter of a century later, the details of that public bedding were to be as publicly re-hashed – even Arthur’s boyish boast of the following morning was produced in evidence. He had called for a drink, remembered someone, saying he had been that night in Spain and found it thirsty work.
The celebrations lasted a full fortnight. On Monday, while the princess rested in her apartments, the Spanish visitors were entertained to dinner and supper by the King’s mother and her husband, Lord Derby. On Tuesday, the King and all the quality went in state to hear mass at St Paul’s and on Wednesday a number of new Knights of the Bath were created. On Thursday the Court moved to Westminster, where a tiltyard had been set up on the open space in front of Westminster Hall for a grand tournament in honour of the wedding – the champions vying with one another over the magnificence of their turn-out. On Friday, there was a state banquet inside the Hall with the new Princess of Wales seated on the King’s right hand. There was more ‘disguising’: a castle set on wheels with ladies looking out of the windows and singing boys warbling on the turrets was drawn in by a team of prototype pantomime horses – four heraldic beasts painted gold and silver and each containing two men, ‘one in the forepart and another in the hindpart’. This wonder was followed by a ship in full sail and finally by a third pageant ‘in likeness of a great hill … in which were enclosed eight goodly knights with their banners spread and displayed, naming themselves the Knights of the Mount of Love’. When these set pieces had been exclaimed over and towed away, the musicians struck up for dancing. The younger members of the royal family took the floor and Prince Henry, energetically partnering his sister Margaret, ‘perceiving himself to be accumbered by his clothes’, threw off his gown and danced in his jacket, much to the amusement of his parents.
It was the end of November before the party began to break up. Catherine was to keep a permanent staff of about sixty Spanish attendants, but dignitaries such as the Count of Cabra, the Archbishops of Toledo and Santiago, and the Bishops of Malaga and Majorca had only come to see her safely married and now, surfeited with hospitality and laden with expensive presents, they were ready to leave for Southampton to face another sea crossing. When the moment of parting came, the little bride (she was not yet sixteen) shed some tears, and we have a glimpse of the King taking a rather woebegone princess into his library at Richmond and showing her ‘many goodly pleasant books’ in an attempt to cheer her up. The next few months were bound to be a difficult period of adjustment for the Spanish girl and, before the royal family returned to its normal routine, a decision had to be taken about her immediate future.
Arthur must go back to Ludlow where, as Prince of Wales, he represented his father on the Welsh Marches and where he was learning the business of government under the guidance of a small but carefully chosen band of advisers. The question which now arose was, should his wife go with him? Some people doubted whether, at barely fifteen, the prince was old enough or strong enough to undertake the duties of a husband. They also questioned the wisdom of exposing the newly arrived princess to the rigours of life on the north-west frontier, especially in the dead of winter. Surely it would be better to leave her at Court for a while, where the Queen could keep an eye on her and teach her something of English ways? This would certainly seem to have been the most humane and prudent course, but the King hesitated. Whether he was thinking about the expense of maintaining a separate establishment for his daughter-in-law, whether he was worried about possible difficulties with Spain if she was kept apart from her husband, or whether he simply felt that the two young people should be given a chance to get to know each other away from the distractions of the Court is nowhere recorded; but whatever considerations influenced his decision, when Arthur left for Shropshire in December, Catherine and her Spanish household went too.
They took the journey slowly, going by way of Abingdon, Oxford (where they spent Christmas, probably as guests of Magdalen College) and then north to Kenilworth. Here they turned westward, crossing the Severn at Bewdley and reaching the gloomy, medieval fortress of Ludlow Castle early in the New Year. We know very little of their life together but Arthur, who is said to have been ‘very studious and learned beyond his years’, would be kept busy working with his tutor, attending meetings of his council to listen while they debated points of local law and administration, and riding out on hunting expeditions when the weather was fine. Perhaps Catherine went with him sometimes, otherwise she would have had little to do but read or sit sewing with her ladies. There is nothing to suggest that she and Arthur ever succeeded in establishing any sort of close relationship. The prince was a quiet, shy boy, apparently content to stay in the background even at his own wedding, and the fact that they had no common language, apart from Latin and some schoolroom French, cannot have helped to break the ice. Catherine did not complain – she had been trained from babyhood to accept that her destiny would lie with strangers in a strange land – but it is hard to believe that she was happy.
There were some diversions, of course. The Welsh chieftains, led by that old friend of the family Rhys ap Thomas, came in to pay their respects and Rhys left his son Griffith to serve the Prince and Princess of Wales. Catherine made another friend at Ludlow – Margaret Plantagenet, now married to Sir Richard Pole (not to be confused with the de la Poles incidentally), chamberlain of Arthur’s household. Margaret, tall, elegant and aristocratic, was the sister of the Earl of Warwick whose death had helped to make England safe for the Tudors, and for Catherine of Aragon. One might imagine that this would have created an impassable barrier between the two young women, but such situations were not uncommon in great families and the survivors learned to accept them with well-bred stoicism.
In January 1500 Dr de Puebla, the little Jewish lawyer who was King Ferdinand’s resident ambassador at Henry’s Court, had written triumphantly to his master that since Warwick’s execution England had never been so tranquil or so obedient, and that not a drop of doubtful royal blood remained. De Puebla was being rather more optimistic than accurate. There was still quite enough doubtful, that is, Plantagenet, royal blood in circulation to cause Henry Tudor intermittent anxiety, and during the summer of 1501 disaffection centring round the remaining de la Pole brothers had been simmering under the surface of the wedding preparations. Some time in July or August, the eldest, Edmund, an arrogant and irresponsible young man who had nevertheless been treated with a good deal of forbearance by the King, fled to the Continent taking his next brother, Richard, with him. Richard sensibly adopted a career as a professional soldier and caused no further trouble to anyone, but Edmund, self-styled Duke of Suffolk and since 1499 the authentic White Rose, was taken up in a rather desultory way by the volatile Emperor Maximilian. Although Edmund de la Pole never looked like becoming a serious threat to the Tudor peace, Henry could not be quite comfortable in his mind while there was a Plantagenet on the loose in Europe.
Apart from this familiar vexation, in the spring of 1502 Henry was at peace with his neighbours and could congratulate himself on the fact that, after many months of patient negotiation, he had finally succeeded in signing a treaty of friendship with Scotland – soon to be sealed by another marriage, between his daughter Margaret and the Scottish king. So when tragedy struck early in April, it came out of a comparatively clear sky.
We are never likely to know exactly what Arthur died of. ‘A consumption’ say some authorities, but although the prince was almost certainly tubercular it wasn’t that alone which killed him. Some accounts blame the sweating sickness and if they are right Fate could scarcely have played a crueller joke on the House of Tudor, for this disease – a violent malarial type of fever, often fatal within twenty-four hours – had first appeared in England in 1485, brought over by the Norman mercenaries who landed at Milford Haven with Henry and Jasper. Of course, Arthur may equally well have picked up some respiratory infection which an already consumptive adolescent had been unable to withstand. Whatever the cause, on 2 April the Rosebush of England, embodiment of all his father’s hopes and dreams, was dead at the age of fifteen.
Richard Pole’s courier found the Court at Greenwich in the early hours of the following Tuesday. The King’s confessor undertook to break the news but it was the Queen who supported her husband through the first raging storm of his grief and shock, reminding him that his mother ‘had never no more children but him only and that God had ever preserved him and brought him where he was’. They still had a fair prince and two fair princesses, and there might yet be more children. ‘God is where he was and we are both young enough’, said Elizabeth gallantly – she was thirty-six now and Henry forty-five.
Later, though, back in her own apartments, the Queen’s brave front collapsed. ‘Natural and motherly remembrance of that great loss smote her so sorrowful to the heart’, says the chronicler, ‘that those about her were fain to send for the King to comfort her; and then his Grace, of true gentle and faithful love, in good haste came and relieved her, and showed her how wise counsel she had given him before and he, for his part, would thank God for his sons, and would she should do in like wise’.
While the King and Queen clung together in their sorrow, struggling to come to terms with the will of a deity who could take their precious elder son on the very threshold of his manhood, and solemn dirges were sung in all the London churches, Arthur’s body lay in his own room at Ludlow, the black-draped coffin surrounded by candles burning day and night. On St George’s Day it was carried in procession to the parish church, with Griffith ap Rhys walking in front bearing the banner of the prince’s arms and ‘fourscore poor men in black mourning habits holding fourscore torches, besides all the torches of the town’ bringing up the rear. Two days later the cortège set out for Worcester, the nearest cathedral, in the sort of weather which only an English April can produce – wild, wet and bitterly cold. The wind tore at the banners and trappings, pouring rain soaked the robes and hoods of the mourners and turned the road into a quagmire, so that at one stage oxen had to be used to draw the hearse. But the day of the funeral itself was mercifully fine and no detail of pomp or ceremony was omitted. The Earl of Surrey was chief mourner, supported by the Earls of Shrewsbury and Kent, and four bishops waited to conduct the service. ‘He would have had a hard heart that wept not’, remarked one eyewitness of the scene inside the cathedral and when the time came for the prince’s household officers to break their staves and cast them into the open grave, everyone was in tears.
But in spite of disappointment and heartbreak, life and politics had to go on. Prince Henry, on whose health and well-being everything now depended, must be trained to take his brother’s place, and the future of the widowed Princess of Wales must be settled. When the news of Arthur’s death reached Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella’s immediate reaction had been to ask for the return of their daughter. ‘We cannot endure that a daughter whom we love should be so far away from us in her trouble’, wrote Isabella. They also demanded that Henry should put the princess in possession of her widow’s jointure – one-third of the revenues of Wales, Cornwall and Chester – and repay the first instalment of her dowry – 100,000 gold crowns. All this, though, was no more than the opening move in a fresh round of diplomatic bargaining intended to repair the broken link.
The House of Tudor was not alone in its recent misfortune. The Spanish king and queen had lost three heirs in quick succession – their only son, their eldest daughter, Isabella of Portugal, and Isabella’s son, Dom Miguel. The kingdoms of Aragon and Castile would now pass to their next daughter, Juana, wife of Philip von Hapsburg, Duke of Burgundy and son of the Emperor Maximilian. Juana’s marriage, like Catherine’s, had originally been a part of the general policy of containing France in a ring of pro-Spanish alliances, but by the early 1500s it had assumed a special significance; for it was Juana’s son, Charles of Ghent, who would eventually inherit not only the rich Burgundian Netherlands and the Austrian domains of the Hapsburg family, but the crowns of Spain as well.
To see why the English alliance had become so important to the rulers of Spain, it is only necessary to look at the map. An unfriendly England or, worse, an unfriendly England allied with France, would be able to bar the Straits of Dover any time she pleased and thus effectively cut the future Spanish Empire in half. So when Hernan Duque, special envoy of the Catholic kings, arrived in London that summer, he brought with him full powers to negotiate a second marriage for Catherine – a marriage with her brother-in-law, ‘the Prince of Wales who now is’.
The King of England received the proposal courteously, but was in no hurry to commit himself. Henry had no wish to break with Spain, whose friendship could only work to his advantage – especially bearing in mind that the Netherlands were far and away England’s most valuable trading partners; but he was in a much stronger bargaining position now than he had been ten years ago. He had not forgotten the way Ferdinand had made him wait on Spanish pleasure during their previous dealings, making it humiliatingly clear that Spain was conferring a favour on his house. Now Ferdinand was the suitor and Henry would enjoy playing hard to get.
No one, it seems, thought of asking for Catherine’s views on the subject, but there was one point on which she, or a senior member of her household, would have to be consulted. The princess had been ill, probably with the same infection that had killed Arthur, and it was several weeks before she was fit enough to leave Ludlow and travel slowly south in a black-curtained litter; but as soon as she reached London and had been installed at Durham House in the Strand to complete her period of strict mourning, Dr de Puebla began to make some discreet enquiries on a rather delicate matter. To put no finer point on it, he needed to know whether or not the Princess of Wales was still a virgin.
Of course, the mere fact that she had been through a church ceremony with Prince Arthur had created a canonical obstacle to her projected union with Prince Arthur’s brother. If that first marriage had been consummated, then, under canon law, she and Prince Henry would be related in the first degree of affinity, a rather more serious impediment. In either case the Pope could issue the appropriate dispensation – it was simply a question of being sure of one’s facts before approaching the Vatican.
De Puebla, therefore, had a quiet word with Don Alessandro Geraldini, Catherine’s chaplain and confessor. Don Alessandro, possibly with the idea of being helpful, was quite definite. Certainly the marriage had been consummated, he declared, there might even be issue. Well, of course, if Catherine was by any chance pregnant, if she were to bear a posthumous child and that child were to be a boy, then the whole situation changed. But while de Puebla was digesting the implications of this interesting information, he heard a very different story from Doña Elvira Manuel. Doña Elvira was furious. How dared the chaplain and the ambassador gossip about the princess behind her back? The marriage had not been consummated. Doña Elvira and all the matrons of their lady’s household were prepared to swear a solemn oath that, of their personal knowledge, the princess was still virgo intacta – an assertion which could, if necessary, be easily verified. And having reduced de Puebla to an apologetic jelly, the duenna swept off to write her version to Queen Isabella. De Puebla believed her, and so did the Queen. ‘It is already known for a certainty that the said Princess of Wales, our daughter, remains as she was here’, she wrote to Hernan Duque in July 1502.
All the same, after a full discussion between the King, his council and the Spanish envoys, it was decided – presumably on the principle that it was better to be safe than sorry – to proceed on the assumption that the marriage had ‘perhaps’ been consummated, and the Pope was asked to dispense accordingly.
Some months before matters reached this advanced stage, the English royal family suffered its second bereavement within a year. By the late summer of 1502 Elizabeth of York had begun her eighth pregnancy and on 2 February 1503, while the Court was paying a visit to the City, she went into premature labour at the Tower of London. (The Queen had intended to be delivered at the comfortable, modern palace of Richmond and it was normal practice for a royal mother-to-be to retire from public gaze at least a month before the expected date of her confinement.) The baby, born ‘upon Candlemas Day, in the night following the day’, was a girl, christened Katherine; but Elizabeth, exhausted by successive childbearing, died a week later, on or about her thirty-eighth birthday, and the infant princess ‘tarried but a small season after her mother’.
There was general and sincere mourning for the Queen who had always been popular. ‘She was a woman of such a character’, says Polydore Vergil, ‘that it would be hard to judge whether she displayed more of majesty and dignity in her life than wisdom and moderation.’ Everyone who knew her seems to agree that she was beautiful, noble, gentle and wise – a loving wife and mother, a dutiful daughter and a generous and affectionate sister. After allowing for the usual excesses of post mortem panegyric, a picture emerges of a placid, sweet-tempered, warm-hearted woman, conventionally pious and naturally indolent, content to let others take the lead. Some foreign observers hinted that the Queen was deliberately kept in the background by her mother-in-law and resented the older woman’s dominating influence. Very possibly Elizabeth found the constant, busy presence of Margaret Beaufort something of a trial but she seems to have been willing enough to let ‘my lady the King’s mother’ take over such tedious chores as drawing up rules of court etiquette and keeping an eye on the servants. As for her relationship with her husband, we know little enough about the private life of the first Tudor King and his consort but there is really no evidence to support the contention, first put forward by Francis Bacon, that Henry treated her with cold indifference. On the contrary, such evidence as does exist indicates that theirs was a good marriage, based on mutual tenderness and respect.
Elizabeth was given an elaborate and expensive funeral. On 22 February the coffin, resting on an open chariot draped with black velvet and followed by the officers of the household and representatives of the peerage, the judiciary and the church, was drawn by six horses through streets lined with torch-bearers to Westminster. Next day the Queen was buried in the Abbey, her sister Katherine Courtenay officiating as chief mourner. The King, according to custom, was not present. He had ‘departed to a solitary place to pass his sorrow, and would no man should resort to him but those whom he had appointed.’
The fact that Henry began almost immediately to think of re-marriage need in no way detract from the sincerity of his grief. He was intensely conscious that the future of the dynasty, of everything he had worked and struggled for, everything he had built up over the past twenty years hung on the life of an eleven-year-old boy. Personal feelings set aside, it was the King’s clear duty to his house and to his people to take another wife and beget more sons while there was still time.
Henry’s first choice, which so horrified his nineteenth-century biographers, fell on his daughter-in-law Catherine of Aragon. By contemporary standards, though, there was nothing particularly shocking about this idea and, from Henry’s point of view, it had a good deal to recommend it. Catherine was seventeen now, fully old enough for childbearing; she was ready at hand and no protracted negotiations would be necessary. It is true that her parents rejected the proposal indignantly, but they are more likely to have been motivated by political than by moral considerations. The Spanish monarchs were interested in providing for the next generation. They had no intention of wasting a young and nubile princess on a man old enough to be her grandfather. Henry, perhaps fortunately for his reputation, did not press the point and when Ferdinand offered his niece, the widowed Queen of Naples, as a more suitable candidate for the position of Queen of England, the King at once despatched an embassy with instructions to inspect the lady and report in detail on her physical and financial potentialities. Among a long list of items, the envoys were to notice whether or not she painted her face, ‘to mark her breasts and paps, whether they be big or small’, and, if possible, get close enough to smell her breath. There were a number of hidden hazards attached to long-distance courtship and Henry, always a prudent man, was guarding against as many as he could think of.
Meanwhile, the terms of the marriage contract between Catherine and young Henry were being finalized. Their betrothal was solemnized at the Bishop of Salisbury’s house in Fleet Street on 25 June 1503, three days before the prince’s twelfth birthday, and it was agreed that the wedding day should be set as soon as he had completed his fourteenth year – conditional on the necessary dispensation being forthcoming from Rome and on Spain being able to prove that the second half of the bride’s dowry was in London ready for payment.
Marriage was in the air that summer. Two days after seeing his son betrothed, the King set out from Richmond to escort his eldest daughter, thirteen-year-old Margaret, on the first stage of her journey to the Scottish Border. As father and daughter travelled north through those long-ago June days they naturally had no conception of the far-reaching consequences which were to flow from the marriage of Margaret Tudor and James IV of Scotland; nor could they have foreseen that exactly one hundred years later Margaret’s great-grandson would be making his journey south to be crowned at Westminster. It is true that when the Scottish marriage project was first being discussed at the council table, some councillors had put the case that ‘if God should take the King’s two sons without issue, then the kingdom of England would fall to the King of Scotland, which might prejudice the monarchy of England’; but Henry had replied that if such a thing were to happen, ‘Scotland would be but an accession to England, and not England to Scotland, for the greater would draw the less.’ This prescient piece of political wisdom ‘passed as an oracle’, at least according to Francis Bacon, and seems to have silenced any further criticism. In any case, the solid advantages of an alliance which would break the long-standing bond between England’s ancestral enemies, Scotland and France, and secure her vulnerable land frontier, as well as put an end to the costly and destructive nuisance of organized Border raiding, obviously outweighed future imponderables and must be welcomed by all sensible men. The King, long-sighted though he was, could scarcely have envisaged the political complications or the personal tragedies which this union of ‘the thistle and the rose’ would inflict on his immediate descendants.
Henry accompanied the bridal party as far as his mother’s house at Collyweston, which lay just south of Stamford, conveniently close to the Great North Road. Here the family goodbyes were said and young Margaret was handed over to the charge of the Earl and Countess of Surrey who would be responsible for delivering her safely to her husband. The King was sending his daughter off in style (apart from anything else, this was an excellent opportunity to show the Tudor flag in the seldom visited North Country) and as well as the Surreys and their train, ‘there was appointed many great lords, nobles, knights, ladies, squires, gentlewomen and others for to convey her from place to place’. In addition to the regular escort, ‘the nobles of the country, governors of towns, other officers of the lordships, mayors, sheriffs, aldermen, burgesses, and citizens of the towns through which she should pass’ came out to greet the princess and ‘make her all honour and reverence’. It was only to be expected, of course, that the county magnates, royal officers and civic dignitaries would be meticulous in paying their respects, but everywhere along the route the ordinary people left their harvesting to crowd the roadside to see the noble company, bringing ‘great vessels full of drink’ which they pressed on the thirsty travellers in a spontaneous gesture of hospitality. In every town and village the church bells pealed a welcome as soon as the cavalcade, in its cloud of summer dust, was sighted on the road; the royal trumpeters would answer with a fanfare, while ‘Johannes and his company, minstrels of musick’ struck up a tune on their instruments.
The English crossed the Border at Berwick on 1 August and were met by the Scots at Lamberton. King James, now a mature and experienced man in his late twenties, was known to be keeping a mistress – all the same, he was noticeably kind and attentive to his little bride, and taking every opportunity to kiss her and show her special courtesies in public.
The wedding took place at Edinburgh on 8 August, but although Margaret played her part gracefully enough in the various ceremonials and festivities, she was not happy. A plump, round-faced child, her somewhat stolid exterior concealed a passionate, headstrong nature, with a ‘great twang’ of the Tudor, or rather of the Plantagenet temper, and a sharp eye for a grievance. She felt that King James was taking altogether too much notice of the Earl of Surrey – ‘he cannot forbear the company of him no time of the day’ – also that Surrey was ganging up with the Scots against her, and she wrote querulously and rather incoherently to her father: ‘He [Surrey] and the Bishop of Murray order everything as nigh as they can to the King’s pleasure. I pray God it may be for my poor heart’s ease in time to come … God send me comfort to His pleasure and that I and mine that be left here with me be well entreated such ways as they have taken.’ The letter ended, rather pathetically, with a wish that ‘I would I were with your Grace now, and many times more.’
Henry was probably not unsympathetic over his daughter’s difficulties in finding her feet and adjusting to her new surroundings, but Margaret was on her own now – a Queen and a married woman – she would have to conquer her homesickness as best she could. In any case, the King was occupied that autumn getting to know his son and heir. There had, of course, been no question of sending this Prince of Wales away to Ludlow or anywhere else, he was far too precious, and Hernan Duque reported to Queen Isabella in January 1504 that the prince was now often in the King’s company. Duque, after commenting approvingly on the affectionate relationship which existed between father and son, remarked that in his opinion the prince could have no better school than the society of such a wise and careful governor. Isabella, although no doubt pleased to hear about the satisfactory progress of her daughter’s fiancé’s education, was even more gratified by the information that he was growing into a big, strong youth and giving every promise that he would reach maturity.
Isabella did not live to see that maturity (perhaps it was just as well). She died in the following November and at once the European scene changed. Juana, Duchess of Burgundy and Archduchess of Austria, succeeded her mother as Queen of Castile and it began to look very much as if the unity of the Spanish peninsula – which had been founded on the union between Isabella and Ferdinand – might now collapse. Isabella had left instructions in her will that Ferdinand should continue to govern Castile in Juana’s name, but not unnaturally Juana’s husband had his own ideas on that subject. If Philip von Hapsburg could find a viable way of removing Castile from the King of Aragon’s grasp, he would certainly use it. Meanwhile, the King of England, who disliked and distrusted Ferdinand, was thinking seriously of strengthening his ties with the Hapsburg family.
Henry wanted a personal meeting with Philip but did not achieve his objective until the beginning of 1506, and then only by a stroke of luck. On 7 January a fleet carrying Philip (now given the courtesy title of King of Castile), the Queen his wife, and a large retinue of Dutch and Flemish nobility sailed from Zeeland for Spain – though whether it went in peace or war nobody seemed very certain. As things turned out, it very nearly did not go at all. Gales in the Channel – the same ‘tempest of wind’ which in London blew down trees and tiles and the great weather-vane on St Paul’s Cathedral – scattered the ships and forced them to seek refuge in ports all along the south coast from Rye to Falmouth. Philip’s own vessel, battered, leaking and with one of its masts snapped off, staggered into Melcombe near Weymouth.
As soon as the news reached London, the King sent Sir Thomas Brandon to escort these unexpected but welcome visitors to Windsor and Philip found himself enveloped in a bear hug of Tudor hospitality. An English eyewitness of the splendid show, laid on at not much more than a week’s notice, wrote complacently: ‘I suppose few or none that were there ever saw castle or other lodgings in all things so well and richly appointed, and the great continual fair open household, so many noblemen so well appointed, and with so short warning as I think hath not been seen.’
If Philip chafed at the delay, he gave no sign of it. A large, fair, good-natured, rather slow-witted young man, he seems to have thoroughly enjoyed the entertainment provided for him – the hunting and hawking, the unlimited food and drink, the pageantry and display were all just what he liked. The other members of the royal family had also been summoned to Windsor, and on a non-hunting day Philip was invited ‘for pastime’ to watch the ladies dancing. His sister-in-law, Catherine of Aragon, showed off some of her Spanish dances, but Philip resisted her attempts to persuade him to take the floor himself. ‘I am a mariner’, he protested jovially, ‘and yet ye would cause me to dance!’ Catherine was followed by my lady Mary, the King’s younger daughter, nearly eleven now and the beauty of the family. Mary performed her party pieces with great self-possession, dancing and then playing on the lute and virginals, ‘and she was of all folks there greatly praised that of her youth in everything she behaved herself so very well.’
There was, of course, a purpose underlying all this jollity. Henry meant to take full advantage of a literally heaven-sent opportunity and the gay, relatively informal house-party atmosphere he had been at pains to create provided a useful screen behind which he and Philip could retire to talk business. There was plenty to talk about as the two Kings dined privately together in Henry’s secret chamber or sat apart ‘communing’ while the rest of the company played cards or danced and made music. Henry wanted a new commercial treaty with the Netherlands, giving England most favoured nation treatment. He wanted a general alliance with the Hapsburgs. But most of all he wanted Edmund de la Pole, still at large in Flanders under the Duke of Burgundy’s protection. The King had no illusions as to what might follow if he were to die before his heir was of full age – already reports of some disturbing gossip about ‘the world that should be after him if his grace happened to depart’ had reached his ears. The names of several possible successors had been mentioned, among them the Duke of Buckingham and Edmund de la Pole, but no one, ominously enough, had spoken of ‘my lord prince’.
Philip, on his side, wanted English support, both moral and financial, in establishing his claims to Castile, and on 9 February 1506, he and Henry put their signatures to the Treaty of Windsor. Before the end of the month the Venetian, Vincenzo Quirini, who had sailed with the fleet from Zeeland and was now marooned at Falmouth – ‘a very wild place which no human being ever visits’ as he mournfully remarked – had nevertheless heard that ‘the Kings of England and Castile have concluded and proclaimed a new and very close alliance, which was ratified and sworn at the altar’. On 16 March Edmund de la Pole was brought under escort to Calais and handed over to Henry’s representatives. A fortnight later the White Rose had been safely deposited in the Tower.
Marriage, the usual cement for binding political treaties, was also discussed during those weeks at Windsor. In this case, three marriages – Henry’s own to Philip’s sister Margaret (the Queen of Naples had been discarded, not because she had bad breath but because it turned out she had no money), little Mary Tudor to Philip’s son Charles, and (‘very secretly’ this one) the Prince of Wales to Philip’s daughter Eleanor. When the King and Queen of Castile finally resumed their interrupted journey, matters seemed in a fair way to being settled and the result, so Henry sincerely hoped, would be the discomfiture of the King of Aragon.
In fact, the person who suffered most from the realignment of European power blocs was Ferdinand’s unhappy daughter. When the contract for her second marriage was signed in the summer of 1503, Catherine had been required to renounce all claim to her dower rights as Arthur’s widow – a renunciation which left her financially dependent on her father-in-law and very much at his mercy. At first Henry was not ungenerous, making the princess an allowance of a hundred pounds a month – enough, just, to support the establishment at Durham House. But later, as relations between England and Spain deteriorated and Ferdinand showed no sign of fulfilling his obligations, Henry had a means of retaliation ready to hand. Catherine’s allowance was cut off and Durham House closed. Robbed of even the illusion of independence, forced to live on the fringes of the Court in whatever accommodation might be assigned to her, cold-shouldered by the English, her servants unpaid and mutinous, heavily in debt – though not, she assured her father pathetically, for extravagant things – the Spanish princess learned the hard way just what it could mean to be a pawn in the political chess game. Even such rare interludes as the visit to Windsor brought their own problems and Catherine had to sell some bracelets to pay for a new dress.
She got no help from Spain. God alone, wrote Ferdinand, knew the sadness of his heart whenever he thought of her miserable life, but he did nothing about paying over the rest of her dowry. The King of Aragon was, in fact, having something of a struggle to keep his own head above water and he chose to blame his daughter’s predicament on the evil machinations of the King of Castile – although Philip had died in somewhat suspicious circumstances soon after arriving in Spain. Ferdinand, a talented and experienced practitioner of the art of survival, sent a fluent stream of regrets, excuses and promises to England, but meanwhile the Prince of Wales’s fourteenth birthday had come and gone and his fiancée remained in limbo – lonely, humiliated and, so it seemed, betrayed.
It is hard not to blame Henry VII for the undoubted meanness with which he treated Catherine and this picture of a cold-hearted skinflint is the one that has come down to us. Like all such traditions, there is a grain of truth in it, but it is by no means the whole picture. The King was certainly very interested in money and skilful in amassing it, but he also knew how to spend it – witness the glorious chapel in Westminster Abbey which bears his name. Nor was his court the grim and joyless place it is sometimes painted. It was well regulated – Margaret Beaufort saw to that – and drunkenness, wasteful extravagance and anything which might be classed as ‘goings on’ were certainly discouraged; but there is plenty of evidence that the King’s household was cheerful, comfortable and always suitably magnificent with, at least until 1503, a happy family life at its core. When the ancient royal manor of Sheen was destroyed by fire, a handsome new palace, built of brick and stone in the latest architectural style and surrounded by gardens and pleasure grounds, rose on the site, re-christened Richmond by Henry in memory of his own and his father’s earldom. Improvements were also put in hand at Baynard’s Castle and Greenwich.
The popular image of a killjoy King, spending every spare moment poring over his account books, is largely the creation of Francis Bacon, whose classic biography of Henry was published in the 1620s. ‘For his pleasures’, wrote Bacon, ‘there is no news of them’ but there is, in fact, quite a lot of news to be found in the Privy Purse accounts – enough at any rate to show that the King took his pleasures from a wide range of leisure activities: from hunting and hawking, tennis, archery, cards and dice; that he was fond of music, rewards to singers and musicians occur frequently; that, considering his many other preoccupations, he played a perfectly normal part in the busy social life of the Court. The account books also show that he was ready to be amused in a variety of ways – there are payments to ‘a Welsh rhymer’, to ‘the blind poet’, to ‘a little maiden that danceth’, to ‘the children of the King’s Chapel for singing of Gloria in excelsis’, to ‘a piper on the bagpipe’, to ‘a Spaniard that played the fool’ and that is only a small, random selection. There is less evidence of interest in cultural matters. Henry himself was no intellectual and too conventionally-minded to feel much sympathy with the rising tide of intellectual excitement beginning to surge through the universities; but he respected learning in principle, saw to it that his children received the best possible education and encouraged his mother in her zeal for founding colleges. He was a pious man, neglecting none of his religious duties and giving special patronage to the Franciscan order of Observant Friars, but always a moderate man, he had none of his mother’s religious fervour.
The last years of the King’s life were marked by a noticeable deterioration in his health and by increasing loneliness. As early as 1501 he was complaining to his mother of failing eyesight – it sounds like cataract – and apologizing for the fact that it had taken him three days to write her a letter in his own hand. Probably he never really recovered from the shock of losing his elder son and his wife within a year of one another. He was seriously ill soon afterwards and by 1504 or 1505 it was being whispered that ‘the King’s grace is but a weak and sickly man, not likely to be a long-lived man’. By this time, too, there were many gaps in his small circle of intimate friends. Jasper Tudor had died back in 1495. John Morton had gone and so had Reginald Bray, two of his closest and most trusted confidants. It was a long time now since the glorious adventure of Bosworth and there were very few people left who remembered the fair-headed young Welshman who had landed at Milford Haven all those years ago.
None of the King’s plans for a second marriage ever materialized. Margaret of Austria, a strong-minded lady already twice a widow, had declined the honour and his third choice, despite a most pertinacious pursuit, also proved to be beyond his reach. Henry Tudor’s abortive courtship of the widowed Queen of Castile is the one bizarre episode in an otherwise unexceptional private life – not just because, as Catherine of Aragon’s sister, she was closely related to him by marriage, but because she was, at least according to her own family, hopelessly insane.
Henry had met Juana briefly in 1506 (she had spent less than a week at Windsor) but in view of what followed it is tempting to believe that during those few days the sober, prudent King had fallen in love with another man’s wife. After Philip’s death Juana, a Queen in her own right, naturally became a great matrimonial prize but this alone scarcely accounts for Henry’s uncharacteristic, almost obsessive eagerness. He paid no attention to Ferdinand’s hints and evasions, even stories that Juana had refused to allow Philip to be buried and was carrying his coffin about with her failed to discourage him. He continued to press his suit by every diplomatic means open to him, using every persuasion he could think of. Dr de Puebla was instructed to tell the King of Aragon that in different surroundings and under the care of an affectionate husband, the Queen of Castile might recover her wits; even Catherine was pushed into writing to her sister to commend the match. But all Henry could get out of Ferdinand was a vague promise that if Juana married anyone it should certainly be the King of England. As the King of England’s disappointment and frustration increased, his temper got worse and Catherine, as his hostage, got the full benefit of it.
There is a certain amount of mystery attached to the question of whether the tragic Juana really was insane, or whether Ferdinand was deliberately exaggerating her undoubted mental instability for reasons of his own. Henry told a Spanish envoy in 1508 that when he had seen the Queen himself two years previously, she had spoken and acted rationally and with great dignity and grace. He had thought her sane then and he thought her sane now. He was receiving reports from Spain which said she was perfectly normal but that Ferdinand was keeping her shut up and spreading false rumours about her. If Henry believed these reports, and his intelligence service was usually reliable, then it would explain a good deal of his loathing of Ferdinand. It might also explain why the Prince of Wales, now a strapping young man taller than his father, was still unmarried – a fact which, considering the acute shortage of male Tudors, was worrying several members of the Council. But in spite of the obvious dangers inherent in such a delay, it seems that the King was using his son’s marriage as bait, stubbornly hoping to catch his own fish on the hook.
Matters were still at this impasse when Henry died ‘of a consuming sickness’ on 21 April 1509. He was fifty-two years old and had ruled England for twenty-three years and eight months. Of his public abilities as King and statesman there can be little question and few people have disputed Bacon’s judgement that he was one of the best sort of wonders – ‘a wonder for wise men’. ‘His spirit’, wrote Polydore Vergil, ‘was distinguished, wise and prudent; his mind was brave and resolute and never, even at moments of the greatest danger, deserted him.’ John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, making the King’s funeral oration, declared that: ‘His politic wisdom in governance was singular, his wit always quick and ready, his reason pithy and substantial, his memory fresh and holding, his experience notable, his counsels fortunate and taken by wise deliberation.’ It is also worth remembering that Henry was a humane man. For a king with his problems the number of political prisoners executed during the reign was remarkably small.
As for the accusations of avarice and rapacity levelled against him both by his contemporaries and by succeeding generations, it is perfectly true that Henry had evolved some extremely efficient methods of soaking the rich. Nobody enjoys being parted from his money. Henry’s victims, most of whom came from an articulate, influential section of the community, complained loudly and bitterly, and no doubt some injustices were done. But for the King, whose one overriding aim had always been to increase the authority of the Crown while strengthening his family’s hold on it, money equalled power and power equalled security. As he grew older and more secure, paradoxically the urge to salt away just a little more and then a little more of the substance of power seems to have grown, until at the last it was threatening to overwhelm him and, as Polydore Vergil put it, to distort ‘those qualities of trustfulness, justice and integrity by which the State must be governed’.
To his mother, who loved him, Henry was ‘my own sweet and most dear king and all my worldly joy’ – ‘my good and gracious prince, king and only beloved son’. His subjects admired, feared and respected him, but there is little to suggest that they ever loved him. His was not an out-going personality. He never courted popularity and does not appear to have either wanted or expected it. The most he asked of the English people was that they should remain loyal and passive while he got on with the business of ruling them. And he ruled them well, leaving the country prosperous and at peace, the monarchy stronger and richer than it had been for generations. More than that, by his patient, unspectacular hard work, his unremitting attention to detail, the first Henry Tudor laid the foundations which alone made possible the achievements of his son and his grand-daughter.