A Journey Through Tudor England (7 page)

Into this female world came the poet John Skelton, who was Henry’s tutor from the mid-1490s to 1502. Under his influence, Henry became an accomplished musician and linguist. He learnt to play the lute, virginals and organ, to sing well, and to speak and write a number of languages, including Latin. When the renowned humanist Desiderius Erasmus visited the young Duke of York with Thomas More in 1499 [see L
INCOLN
’
S
I
NN
], he was so impressed that he later noted ‘when the King was no more than a child … he had a vivid and active mind, above measure to execute whatever tasks he undertook’. ‘You would say,’ he added, ‘that he was a universal genius.’ Skelton also entrusted Henry with a dedicated book of advice,
Speculum Principis
, or
The Mirror of Princes
, in which he exhorted him to ‘pick a wife for yourself and love but her alone’ — advice that Henry imperfectly followed on a total of six occasions.

In these seminal years of education and female affection, Henry would have walked under the spectacular oak hammer-beam ceiling of Eltham’s Great Hall, erected by Edward IV and still there today. In Henry VIII’s youth, it would have been partly gilded and we know it had an impact on the young Henry, because he recreated it at his pleasure palace of Hampton Court thirty years later. He would also have known the medieval stone bay windows in the Great Hall, but little else would have been exactly as it is now. The timber screen at the dais end with the carved beasts is a good guess — it is based on a fifteenth-century rood screen — but it was added by the architects John Seely and Paul Paget in the 1930s, while the stained glass in the windows dates from 1936.

Henry’s world changed when he was ten years old. In the first of several losses, his brother Arthur died before Henry turned eleven. Less than a year later, his mother died on 11 February 1503, on her thirty-seventh birthday and, four months after that, his elder sister, Margaret, moved to Edinburgh to marry James IV. Henry never saw her again. In the place of relatives came further titles — Duke of Cornwall, Prince of Wales, Earl of Chester.

The spate of deaths in the family — including five infant mortalities — in so short a time also rocked Henry’s father. He responded by sheltering his remaining son from danger. Unlike Arthur, who had been sent to the Welsh Marches (the part of England bordering Wales) as a training for kingship, Henry was to receive no such apprenticeship. In early 1508, a Spanish envoy called Gutierre Gomez de Fuensalida visited England and reported that ‘the Prince of Wales was kept under such strict supervision that he might have been a young girl’ and was ‘so subjected that he does not speak a word except in response to what the King asks him’. It is not wild to speculate about a link between his sheltered and repressed childhood and his extravagant adulthood, or the excessive masculinity
he displayed as a grown man compared with his upbringing ‘like a young girl’.

Henry continued to prize Eltham as a young man, extending and remodelling the palace during 1519—22. It was at Eltham that Cardinal Thomas Wolsey formulated a famous set of rules to regulate the royal household and court in 1526: the Eltham Ordinances. But Henry VIII was the last monarch to spend any considerable time at the palace, drawn back, no doubt, to his place of childhood abandon.

It is particularly regrettable then, that after the early sixteenth century, the palace was allowed to fall into decay. By the seventeenth century, parts of the palace had collapsed. During the eighteenth century, the ruined palace became a farm, and the Great Hall was used as a barn. Today, only the ragstone Great Hall, three fifteenth-century gables and the foundations of the royal apartments remain from the grand palace of Henry’s boyhood. Eltham may be famous now as a quintessentially art deco house but, with a little imagination, we can picture the place as the formative boyhood home of England’s most notorious monarch.

‘Upon each side of this goodly court … there are galleries with many windows full lightsome and commodious.’

A
ll that remains of Henry VII’s great palace at Richmond is the red-brick palace gatehouse on Richmond Green (now in a road called The Wardrobe, testament to the buildings that once stood there) and the outer courtyard, now known as Old Palace Yard. As you look around you’ll see several signs marking the area where the palace once stood. Much of it was torn down during Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth and, in the eighteenth century, new buildings such as Trumpeter’s House were constructed out of the surviving Tudor materials. Yet, it is possible to get a sense of what this grand palace must have been like and see a glimpse of the character of the King whose coat of arms — the red dragon of Wales and the greyhound of Richmond — is still above the gate.

Henry VII became King at the Battle of Bosworth [see B
OSWORTH
] in 1485 at the age of just twenty-eight. He is chiefly remembered, when he is remembered at all, for his miserly avarice, secretive nature and sombre court, but these are qualities that should be more fairly associated with him only in the last few years
of his life when, suffering from a recurrent illness, he grieved the loss of his wife, his firstborn son and many of his infant children, and feared greatly for the succession. Founding a dynasty is not without its anxieties.

Consider his position in 1485: having grown up in Wales, he had only once briefly been to England; he had no experience of governing, or training as a prince; he had spent fourteen years as a captive in exile in Brittany; and he had neither wealth nor land. Yet, this usurper rallied people around him and, once King, made prudent and effective decisions to consolidate his rule. He must have been a natural leader: confident, capable and charismatic enough to inspire support, and clever enough to maintain it. Sixteenth-century historian Polydore Vergil tells us that his ‘mind was brave and resolute’, that he was gracious and kind, and generous in hospitality, but severe with those who failed him. His appearance helped, as he was above average height (a Tudor trait), slender but strong and was ‘remarkably attractive’ with a cheerful face and small, blue eyes, though his teeth were ‘few, poor and blackish’.

One of his wise decisions was to marry Elizabeth of York, Edward IV’s eldest daughter, four months after Bosworth: in one stroke he finally managed to unite the warring houses of York and Lancaster. Eight months after their wedding, Elizabeth gave birth to the first of their eight children: Prince Arthur, born 19 September 1486.

But a king needs an heir
and
a spare, and Henry still faced threats to his throne. He established a 200-strong armed bodyguard for himself (the forerunners to the Yeomen of the Guard), as he was acutely aware that his claim to the throne was weaker than that of the Yorkist pretenders who would emerge during his reign.

The first was Lambert Simnel, who claimed to be Edward, Earl of Warwick, the son of Edward IV’s brother George, Duke of
Clarence. Simnel was supported by John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, and was crowned King of England in Dublin in May 1487, before landing on the Cumbrian coast with 2,000 Dutch mercenaries in June. But, when it came to battle at Stoke, Simnel’s army was squarely defeated. What was more, Henry could demonstrate that he had the real Warwick in the Tower of London!

Another pretender to the throne, on the other hand, was not so easily dispatched. The curious case of Perkin Warbeck is shrouded in mystery to this day, and we will probably never know for sure whether he was in fact Richard, Duke of York — or Richard IV — the younger brother of Edward V, one of the ‘Princes in the Tower’ who had miraculously escaped, or simply a rank imposter. Certainly, it is true that Warbeck managed to convince Charles VIII, King of France; Margaret of York, who welcomed him as her nephew; Isabella of Spain; and Maximilian, the new Holy Roman Emperor, that he was the rightful king of England.

This foreign support created great instability for the new Tudor King, and it was a threat that rumbled on and on. Henry decided to act ruthlessly. In early 1495, he arrested and beheaded those he suspected of plotting Warbeck’s usurpation, including Sir William Stanley, his step-uncle who had courageously defected from Yorkist ranks in order to help him at Bosworth.

The destruction of local support meant that when Warbeck finally landed at Deal, Kent, in July 1495, his troops were quickly obliterated. And when — despite having the support of the Irish Earl of Desmond and James IV of Scotland — Warbeck’s second attempt to invade at Land’s End in 1497 with 8,000 men was met by the full force of Henry’s army, James IV saw the error of his ways. Warbeck’s troops were crushed, and he was finally executed in November 1499.

These had been troubling times and coupled with a Cornish insurrection (defeated in battle on Blackheath) and one final
pretender, Ralph Wilford, the majority of Henry VII’s reign was marked by uncertainty and constant danger.

Henry cleverly used the marriages of his children to strengthen the new dynasty: Prince Arthur was betrothed to Katherine of Aragon in 1497 and they were married with great pomp in 1501. Subsequently, Princess Margaret married James IV of Scotland in August 1503. Nevertheless, despite the elimination of claimants to his throne, after 1500 the succession became more precarious: Henry’s third son died as an infant in June, and two years later his eldest son, Arthur, followed, leaving only Prince Henry as a male heir. Henry and Elizabeth comforted themselves with the prospect of more children: a daughter was born ten months after Arthur’s death, but both the baby and her mother died just days after the birth. Henry was plunged into years of grief and anxiety, during which he searched unsuccessfully for a new wife (even considering Katherine of Aragon’s sister, the unpromising-sounding Joanna the Mad), while his health steadily declined.

Richmond Palace, however, was a product of the rare period of his reign when Henry was most secure and contented. There had been a royal manor at Sheen since the twelfth century: Edward III had built a palace there, and died in it in 1377; Henry V had rebuilt it in 1413—1422, but the palace had burned down during Christmas 1497. This is when Henry VII decided to rebuild it, naming it after the title he held before he became King: Earl of Richmond.

Henry retained the shell of Henry V’s stone moated keep and added red-brick lodgings that went to three storeys high, with an enchanting series of four-storey turrets topped with gilded domes and pinnacles. Inside, the rooms were richly decorated with tapestries, painted ceilings and walls decked with gold roses and portcullises. Henry added, naturally, a Great Hall, chapel, fountains and a large outer courtyard. A visitor in 1501 noted that ‘upon each side of this goodly court … there are galleries with many
windows full lightsome and commodious’. Such extravagant use of glass was rare — and expensive. Set in a deer park and surrounded by ‘most fair and pleasant’ gardens, Richmond cost Henry £20,000 (around £6 million today). Some of the oaks in the present-day Richmond Park are old enough to have been seen by Henry VII, and he might even have hunted some of the ancestors of the deer that still roam here.

The palace was a way of signalling Henry’s magnificence and invulnerability. Like his constant warfare against pretenders, it depended on his creative brilliance in finding new ways to extract revenue from his subjects: such brilliance that, by the end of his reign, many felt him to be, in fact, greedy and rapacious. It was not for nothing that Lord Mountjoy wrote on Henry VIII’s accession, ‘Avarice is expelled from the country.’ How wrong Mountjoy’s proclamation would prove to be by the time Henry VIII was finished with the throne!

Henry VII died late at night on Saturday 21 April 1509 at Richmond Palace. It was also at Richmond that his granddaughter, Elizabeth I, died in 1603. But while Elizabeth is remembered, Henry VII, like Richmond Palace itself, was quickly forgotten. This incomplete monument reminds us of the Tudor we have neglected: Henry VII, the first monarch of the dynasty.

‘Hampton Court is a Royal Palace, magnificently built with brick … consisting of noble edifices in very beautiful work.’
Paul Hentzner, visiting German tourist, 1598