Tudor (12 page)

The last Plantagenet king continued to be stripped until, with ‘his body despoiled to the skin, and nought being left about him, so much as would cover his privy member', he was tied on to a horse like ‘an hog or another vile beast'. In this manner, and with his hair dangling down, Richard was taken to Leicester behind a junior officer of arms called Norrey. Just ‘as gloriously as he by the morning departed from that town, so as irreverently he was that afternoon brought into that town', a chronicler recalled.
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One of the further injuries discovered on the Leicester bones indicates that he was stabbed through the buttocks, into the pelvis, most likely while he was tied to the horse. His corpse, caked in mud and blood, was to be left exposed to public view for two days, then covered from the waist down with a ‘black cloth of poor quality'.
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Notably, his face had been left largely unmarked.

The killings of the Wars of the Roses spared no one's dignity. Descriptions of Richard III's death resemble those of Warwick the Kingmaker: fighting in the midst of his enemies, suggestions of a blocked escape, and a stripped corpse. That Richard's body was beaten and stabbed after death is also not untypical of the period. The excavated bones of the soldiers killed at Towton in 1461 have revealed similar levels of brutality with skulls shattered and limbs smashed in an orgy of violence. Richard was buried without ceremony at the church of the Greyfriars, where excavations in 2012 uncovered his body. Sir William Stanley was given his pick of
Richard's possessions and chose tapestries from the royal tent. Henry made a more personal choice for his mother: Richard's beautifully illuminated Book of Hours. The dead king had adapted an early fifteenth-century prayer to beg Christ ‘to free me thy servant King Richard from all the tribulations, grief and anguish in which I am held, and from all the snares of my enemies'.
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It seemed God had turned His back on Richard. But Henry's position was still far from secure.

In York, the capital of the north, they mourned King Richard, ‘piteously slain and murdered to the great heaviness of this city'.
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In Coventry the City Annals also record with disgust how ‘King Richard . . . was shamefully carried to Leicester.'
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They were obliged to welcome Henry Tudor that night, nevertheless. He stayed at the house of the mayor, who saw to it that Henry received a gift from the city merchants of £100, and that his men had the provisions they demanded. Over a hundred gallons of red wine were consumed during the celebrations of Henry's army, but notably only about four and a half gallons of ale. Henry had been raised with a preference for claret over English beer, as had many of the foreign troops with him. He was a stranger in this country, at the head of an invading army, with no experience even of managing a nobleman's estate, let alone the kingdom he now held.

9

THE ROSE AND THE PASSION

O
N THE BANKS OF THE
T
HAMES, VAST WOODEN CRANES UNLOADED
merchandise from the arriving ships, while London's streets jostled with people of every rank.
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One described England's capital as a town of sharp eyes, silver tongues and barely suppressed violence.
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When the news that Richard III was dead reached London two days after the battle, the mayor feared it could trigger a free-for-all in the settling of scores. He promptly instituted a curfew while a proclamation threatened immediate jail for those who broke it, or committed any other offence. Plans also began to be laid for the official welcome for England's new ruler.

During twenty-five years of turmoil Londoners had become accustomed to preparing a welcome for the victor of the latest struggle, whoever it was. Yet never had a victor been so obscure. A merchant from Danzig, who regularly visited England, learned that he was called ‘King Richmond', and was somehow ‘related to Harry' VI.
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Others knew his name was Tudor only because Richard III had described him as the grandchild of one ‘Owen Tudor, bastard born'. Obscurity had its advantages, however. The dubious nature of Henry's Lancastrian claim and the help his invasion had enjoyed from the hated French were potentially embarrassing. He did not want such details exposed now the adventures of his youth were over and the hard business of holding on to power had begun.

Henry's mother sent him the appropriate velvets and silks for his official entry into London and when he arrived with his army north of the City at Shoreditch in early September he was richly dressed, as Edward V had been as he entered London two years earlier.
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As then, too, hundreds of London's official representatives were waiting, splendidly arrayed in scarlet gowns, and others of tawny and the bright purple-red called ‘murrey'. The Spanish merchants in the city reported that the strain of Henry's exile was etched on his face, and he looked older than his twenty-eight years. Nevertheless he was judged ‘of pleasing countenance and physique'.
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Henry listened as Latin verses were read celebrating his return to the city he had not seen since he was thirteen. The man who delivered them was French and it is probable he was hand-picked for the task: Henry still didn't like surprises. The waiting officials then gave Henry a bag of gold raised from local taxes and he thanked them before riding on with his army, trumpets blowing, and the spoils of battle displayed. At the great medieval church of St Paul's Henry offered his three standards at the altar: the Cross of St George, the Red Dragon Dreadful, and the Dun Cow. He gave thanks to God and the Virgin for his victory and the great hymn of thanks, the ‘Te Deum', was sung:

                    
To thee all Angels cry aloud:

                        
the Heavens, and all the Powers therein.

                    
To thee Cherubim and Seraphim:

                        
continually do cry,

                    
Holy, Holy, Holy:

                        
Lord God of Sabaoth;

                    
Heaven and earth are full of the Majesty:

                        
of thy glory.

Henry's mother, who had only spent weeks with her son since he was five, was reunited joyfully with him while he rested in the house of the Bishop of London.
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But they were not to stay in the capital for
long. The sense of uncertainty and danger following the killing of Richard III was heightened by the sudden outbreak of a new, virulent disease. It struck only two weeks after Henry entered the city, and was probably brought by his army. It came to be known as the ‘sweating sickness'. Like the Spanish flu that swept the world in 1918, ‘the sweat' could take the life of a healthy adult in a single day. Victims would develop cold shivers, giddiness, headache and severe pains in the neck, shoulders and limbs. Later came heat and sweating, headache, delirium, a rapid pulse and intense thirst. Palpitations and pains in the heart ended in exhaustion and death. The sweat killed the mayor only a month after Henry's arrival, and a week after that the mayor's replacement had also succumbed.
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Henry and Margaret left London for her house at Woking where they had last been together before Henry's exile. Henry loved its gardens and orchards but there was little time that September for reflection and relaxation. He had to take practical measures to secure his position and he needed his mother's advice on a kingdom he knew little about. One of Henry's first actions was to grant Margaret the Palace of Coldharbour in London. There she was to take care of Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, the ten-year-old son of the executed Duke of Clarence. Even before Henry left the Midlands for London, he had ensured that this boy, the last male Plantagenet, was under lock and key in the Tower. Little Edward Plantagenet must have been in fear for his life. Not only had his father died there, drowned in that infamous barrel of Malmsey wine, the fate of the princes in the Tower still remained a mystery, and one it was evident Henry was in no hurry to solve.

It is possible Henry feared that an investigation into the disappearance of the princes would draw attention to the role of his former ally, Buckingham, or someone else close to his cause. What is certain, however, is that like Richard III, Henry had good reasons for wishing to forestall a cult of the princes. It would not have been wise to allow Yorkist royal saints to compete with the memory of Henry VI, whose
cult the Tudor king wished to encourage. Any focus on the princes would also inevitably remind people of the continued strength of the Yorkist claim to the throne represented by Edward Plantagenet and Edward IV's daughters. Nothing was to be said of the princes' disappearance, beyond the vague accusation in Parliament later that autumn that Richard III was guilty of ‘treasons, homicides and murders in shedding of infants' blood'.
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Henry ordered that Edward Plantagenet should be moved from the Tower to Margaret Beaufort's custody, hoping that eventually the boy would be married to a close ally or relative, as his sister would be. Margaret Beaufort was also to care for Henry's future bride, Elizabeth of York. In order to accommodate them in suitably grand style, Margaret began alterations on Coldharbour almost immediately, with some of the best rooms being made ready for the princess. Henry was in no hurry, however, to fulfil his promise to the Yorkists to marry her. He feared being seen as a mere king consort, and intended to be crowned alone to make it clear that he was king in his own right, as his Lancastrian allies had suggested to him in France. Henry had the perfect excuse for the delay: he needed a papal dispensation to marry the princess since she was a kinswoman. This would take months to arrive, and the coronation ceremonies were planned for October.

Margaret was determined her son's coronation would match, or even surpass, the splendour of that of Richard III. The sudden appearance of a mysterious epidemic had not been a good omen and Henry would need to reassure the country that he was God's chosen ruler. Any speculation on the possible meaning or significance of the sweating sickness was therefore banned, and symbols were chosen that would project the appropriate chivalric values. Amongst them, the most significant was the red rose.

If Henry only wished to associate himself more closely with his half-uncle Henry VI, he could have chosen a more favoured Lancastrian device: Henry VI had used variously a spotted panther, an antelope,
and ostrich feathers. Henry Tudor preferred the rarely-used red rose because it was a powerful religious symbol, representing Christ's Passion – his suffering on the Cross for the sins of mankind – the five petals of the heraldic rose corresponding to the five wounds on Christ's crucified body.
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Twenty-four years later, when the dying Henry ordered thousands of Masses to be said for his soul, he asked for a quarter of them to be dedicated to the Five Wounds.
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With the coronation preparations well under way, seven yards of scarlet velvet in dragons and red roses were commissioned, as well as four yards of white cloth of gold with a border of red roses for the ornamental covering, or trapping, for horses. A further couple of hundred roses were ordered in fine lace made of pure gold thread, and the arms of Cadwaladr embroidered, while the footmen were to have jackets in the Tudor colours, of white and green: the colours of purity and renewal.
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The coronation began, at last, on 28 October with Henry taking formal possession of the Tower. The next day he was processed to Westminster before the London crowds. Heralds, sergeants-at-arms, trumpeters, esquires, the mayor, aldermen, and nobles, preceded the king dressed in their rich liveries, amongst them the seven-year-old Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, whose father had rebelled against Richard III in 1483. Mindful perhaps of the fate of her nephews, the princes in the Tower, the boy's mother, Katherine Woodville, had hidden him from Richard, shaving his head and dressing him as a girl. With £1,000 on his head he had fled across country from Wales to a family friend in Hereford, riding side-saddle behind a servant.
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Today he rode astride as a boy once more, dressed in crimson velvet, with a saddle to match his clothes. Henry VII would give his mother Buckingham's wardship the following year, so that any future threat he might pose could be contained, along with that of her other charges.
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The king rode under a canopy fringed with twenty-eight ounces of gold and silk, carried by four knights on foot. He was bare-headed,
his light brown hair reaching his shoulders, a rich belt slung across his chest, and a long gown of purple velvet furred with ermine on his back. Behind Henry was Jasper Tudor, the newly created Duke of Bedford. He was to be married to the young Duke of Buckingham's mother, Katherine Woodville.
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Alongside Jasper rode another significant figure: John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, husband of Elizabeth Plantagenet, a sister of Edward IV and Richard III. It was said that Richard III had named de la Pole's eldest son, the Earl of Lincoln, as his heir, but Henry was inviting the de la Pole family into the fold, to support him as the true king.
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On Sunday 30 October Henry was crowned and anointed at Westminster Abbey, its walls hung with the fine wool cloth known as scarlet. Margaret Beaufort's superior right was overlooked. What power she had would be wielded behind the throne, but it would be very real nonetheless. This was as much her moment of triumph as Henry's, and ‘when the king her son was crowned in all that great triumph and glory, she wept marvellously'.
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Her tears were not of joy alone, however. She was as anxious as her son about the future.