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Authors: Robert Hutchinson
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The bishop was to set out on his journey ‘within a few days’.
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But Henry VII had grown tired of waiting. He needed to put pressure on the Spanish to speed payment of the second instalment of Katherine’s marriage dowry. Perhaps William Warham, the new Archbishop of Canterbury and the king’s Lord Chancellor, who harboured serious doubts about the wisdom of the marriage, suggested a dramatic new tactic. The king, after his customary cautious consideration, issued a new command to his son and heir.
On 27 June 1505, the eve of his fourteenth birthday, his son made his ‘protestation’ – his firm renouncement – of his marriage with Katherine. It was very much a covert, hole-in-the-corner affair. The prince swore a statement before Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester and Lord Privy Seal; Giles, Lord Daubeny, Lord Chamberlain;
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Thomas Ruthal, the king’s secretary; and James Read, a public notary, in a bizarre formal ceremony hidden away in a cellar below the eastern end of Richmond Palace. After he appended his signature in Latin – ‘Henricum Walliæ Principeu’ – he read out the document, declaring that
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Thomas Ruthal, the king’s secretary; and James Read, a public notary, in a bizarre formal ceremony hidden away in a cellar below the eastern end of Richmond Palace. After he appended his signature in Latin – ‘Henricum Walliæ Principeu’ – he read out the document, declaring that
… whereas I being under age was married to the Princess Katherine, yet now coming to be of age, I do not confirm that marriage but retract and
annul it and will not proceed in it, but intend in full form of law to void it and break it off which I do freely and without compulsion.
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annul it and will not proceed in it, but intend in full form of law to void it and break it off which I do freely and without compulsion.
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Katherine, penniless, lonely and frequently ill, knew nothing of this repudiation by her husband-to-be. In November, Henry VII stopped paying her the parsimonious monthly allowance of £100 for her frugal existence at Durham House.
Her fate seemed entirely hopeless.
KING IN WAITING
‘It is quite wonderful how much the King likes the Prince of Wales. He has good reason to do so, for the prince deserves all love. It is not only from love that the king takes the prince with him: he wishes to improve him.’
Ferdinand, Duke de Estrada, to Queen Isabella, London, 10 August 1504.
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With just one healthy heir left alive, the old distressing doubts about the future of the Tudor dynasty crept back to dog Henry VII and haunt his every waking hour. He had fought off so many challenges to his possession of the English crown. Now, in the evening of his troubled reign, would his hopes and dreams come to naught?
The widower king had two clear courses of action open to him to finally banish his fears.
He could marry again and produce more sons, as an insurance against Prince Henry dying and thus snuffing out the precious and precarious Tudor succession. Time was moving rapidly against him: the average life expectancy of a male in England in the early sixteenth century was only about forty. The king was already in his mid-forties and not enjoying the rudest health.
Henry VII should also neutralise the outstanding Yorkist pretender, Edmund de la Pole, Sixth Earl of Suffolk,
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and a ‘cunning’ nobleman who was ‘bold, impetuous and readily roused to anger’.
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Suffolk’s elder brother John, Earl of Lincoln, was killed in open rebellion at the Battle of Stoke Field in 1487 and his cousin Edward, Earl of Warwick, had
been executed twelve years later by Henry VII. Suffolk, resentful and aggrieved, posed a disquieting dormant threat to the Tudors as the thorny ‘White Rose of York’, around whom disaffected subjects might rally.
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and a ‘cunning’ nobleman who was ‘bold, impetuous and readily roused to anger’.
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Suffolk’s elder brother John, Earl of Lincoln, was killed in open rebellion at the Battle of Stoke Field in 1487 and his cousin Edward, Earl of Warwick, had
been executed twelve years later by Henry VII. Suffolk, resentful and aggrieved, posed a disquieting dormant threat to the Tudors as the thorny ‘White Rose of York’, around whom disaffected subjects might rally.
Suffolk had fled England in July 1499 after he killed a commoner in a mad moment of passion during a brawl and was accused of homicide.
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But the earl had returned voluntarily, was fined £1,000 in exchange for a pardon and then attempted to claw his way back into royal favour. He witnessed the king’s confirmation of the marriage treaty of Arthur and Katherine at Canterbury on 5 May 1500 and was due to take a starring role in the celebratory jousts that followed their carefully planned wedding in November 1501. Having heard that the Emperor Maximilian, King of the Romans, was no friend of Henry VII’s, Suffolk again quit the shores of England that August, heavily in debt, but intent on seeking imperial assistance in reclaiming the throne for the Yorkist cause. The earl was accompanied in his flight by his younger brother Richard, but oddly left behind in London another sibling, William. The king ‘was greatly disturbed [and] regretted that he had spared him on the first occasion and began to fear fresh upheavals’, according to Vergil.
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But the earl had returned voluntarily, was fined £1,000 in exchange for a pardon and then attempted to claw his way back into royal favour. He witnessed the king’s confirmation of the marriage treaty of Arthur and Katherine at Canterbury on 5 May 1500 and was due to take a starring role in the celebratory jousts that followed their carefully planned wedding in November 1501. Having heard that the Emperor Maximilian, King of the Romans, was no friend of Henry VII’s, Suffolk again quit the shores of England that August, heavily in debt, but intent on seeking imperial assistance in reclaiming the throne for the Yorkist cause. The earl was accompanied in his flight by his younger brother Richard, but oddly left behind in London another sibling, William. The king ‘was greatly disturbed [and] regretted that he had spared him on the first occasion and began to fear fresh upheavals’, according to Vergil.
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A round-up of Yorkist sympathisers was not a comfortable option whilst the celebrations of the Prince of Wales’ marriage were being so sumptuously staged in London to showcase the Tudor dynasty. So Henry VII, fighting back his eagerness to act, had to wait until the first Sunday in Lent, 13 February 1502, to arrest Suffolk’s near relations and friends. Heading the list of the usual suspects was, naturally, William de la Pole. But they also included the courtier Sir William Courtenay, eldest son of the Earl of Devonshire, and Sir John Wyndham, who fought for Henry at Stoke Field and had been knighted afterwards for his loyalty. All were charged with complicity in Suffolk’s treason and held in the Tower in the custody of the ambitious Welshman Sir Hugh Vaughan, who was responsible for the detention of royal prisoners there.
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Already imprisoned behind its walls was Sir James Tyrell, governor of the castle of Guisnes in the English territory (or ‘pale’) in the hinterland of Calais, who had unwisely sheltered Suffolk on his first panicky excursion abroad and had been tricked into returning to London. Tyrell
was a man of evil repute: he was the knight who supposedly had been ordered by Richard III to murder the two princes in the Tower in 1483.
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His death – and eternal silence – would be doubly expedient to Henry VII, who may have known more about the ramifications of the princes’ disappearance than was politically safe. Tyrell and Wyndham were executed on 6 May – the former suspiciously not being allowed to speak on the Tower Hill scaffold – and the two Williams, de la Pole and Courtenay, were imprisoned at the king’s pleasure.
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was a man of evil repute: he was the knight who supposedly had been ordered by Richard III to murder the two princes in the Tower in 1483.
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His death – and eternal silence – would be doubly expedient to Henry VII, who may have known more about the ramifications of the princes’ disappearance than was politically safe. Tyrell and Wyndham were executed on 6 May – the former suspiciously not being allowed to speak on the Tower Hill scaffold – and the two Williams, de la Pole and Courtenay, were imprisoned at the king’s pleasure.
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Suffolk himself, aside from being outlawed on 26 December 1502, was seemingly beyond Henry’s vengeful reach in Aix-la-Chapelle (present-day Aachen in Germany), although the king managed to convince Pope Alexander VI to place the errant earl under the fearsome papal ban of anathema, which included all who supported his cause.
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However, Maximilian proved less than a loyal and dependable ally to Suffolk. Instead of the pledged assistance to overthrow the Tudors, his bellicosity towards Henry VII had melted away at the first whiff of a generous bribe. The spendthrift and always penniless King of the Romans promised that July no longer to harbour any English rebels; a guarantee made in return for £10,000 of Henry’s precious English gold. In modern spending terms, this is equivalent to £4.5 million – suggestive of just how much the king wanted Suffolk safely in his clutches.
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However, Maximilian proved less than a loyal and dependable ally to Suffolk. Instead of the pledged assistance to overthrow the Tudors, his bellicosity towards Henry VII had melted away at the first whiff of a generous bribe. The spendthrift and always penniless King of the Romans promised that July no longer to harbour any English rebels; a guarantee made in return for £10,000 of Henry’s precious English gold. In modern spending terms, this is equivalent to £4.5 million – suggestive of just how much the king wanted Suffolk safely in his clutches.
Despite this generous enticement, the earl was left unmolested to plan his increasingly unlikely invasion of England, at the same time building up substantial debts. Just before Easter 1504, Suffolk and his followers left Aix, leaving his brother Richard as a hostage to his creditors. While en route to Friesland and the hoped-for protection of the irascible George ‘the Bearded’, Duke of Saxony, the earl was imprisoned in Hattem Castle, near Roermond (in today’s Netherlands), by Charles of Egmont, Duke of Gueldres. Back in Westminster, an overjoyed English king began negotiations with Archduke Philip of Burgundy, who held sway over the Low Countries, to return the traitor Suffolk to his power.
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Henry VII meanwhile also turned his attention to finding himself a new bedmate. After the shameful, half-hearted suggestion of marrying his daughter-in-law Katherine, the king’s prime choice was the recently
widowed Queen Joan of Naples, the twenty-seven-year-old niece of Ferdinand of Spain.
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He sent three trusty envoys to Valencia in 1505, armed with detailed, if not prurient, questions about her physical appearance and – being thrifty, if not sometimes niggardly – detailed instructions to assess her financial prospects. Even today, many of the twenty-four questions posed by Henry VII appear breathtakingly impertinent, if not injudicious, and the ambassadors’ answers equally forthright:
widowed Queen Joan of Naples, the twenty-seven-year-old niece of Ferdinand of Spain.
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He sent three trusty envoys to Valencia in 1505, armed with detailed, if not prurient, questions about her physical appearance and – being thrifty, if not sometimes niggardly – detailed instructions to assess her financial prospects. Even today, many of the twenty-four questions posed by Henry VII appear breathtakingly impertinent, if not injudicious, and the ambassadors’ answers equally forthright:
Note well her eyes, brows, teeth and lips –
The eyes of the queen be of colour brown, somewhat greyish and her brows of a brown hair and very small like a wire of hair …
The eyes of the queen be of colour brown, somewhat greyish and her brows of a brown hair and very small like a wire of hair …
Mark her breasts, whether they be big or small –
The queen’s breasts be somewhat great and full [but] they were trussed … high, which causes her grace to seem much the fuller.
The queen’s breasts be somewhat great and full [but] they were trussed … high, which causes her grace to seem much the fuller.
Mark whether there appear any hair about her lips or not –
As far as we can perceive and see, the queen has no hair about her lips or mouth.
As far as we can perceive and see, the queen has no hair about her lips or mouth.
Approach as near to her mouth as they honestly may
…
that they may feel the condition of her breath, whether it be sweet or not –
We could feel no savour of any spices … and we think by her complexion and of her mouth that the queen is like to be of a sweet savour and well aired.
…
that they may feel the condition of her breath, whether it be sweet or not –
We could feel no savour of any spices … and we think by her complexion and of her mouth that the queen is like to be of a sweet savour and well aired.
If all this smacks of being something of a cattle market, this was what the royal marriage stakes were like in sixteenth-century Europe. As far as Joan was concerned, it was a case of so far, so good. The brown-haired queen was attractive, physically well endowed and happily entirely free of halitosis. Furthermore, she did not pig herself at mealtimes with food or even alcohol, so she might even retain her voluptuous figure. But was all this enough to capture the capricious fancy of the aging English king?
In potential royal wedlock, as in politics and the all-important state of his exchequer, Henry VII was as careful and cautious as ever. Despite
the favourable replies and enthusiasm of his envoys, he swiftly abandoned Joan as a potential wife
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after he discovered that her marriage jointure
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in Naples, worth 30,000 ducats (about £14,000) had been summarily confiscated. Moreover, Ferdinand had married Germaine de Foix, the red-haired niece of the French king, Louis XII, in 1505, so his erstwhile friend had become a trifle suspect.
the favourable replies and enthusiasm of his envoys, he swiftly abandoned Joan as a potential wife
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after he discovered that her marriage jointure
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in Naples, worth 30,000 ducats (about £14,000) had been summarily confiscated. Moreover, Ferdinand had married Germaine de Foix, the red-haired niece of the French king, Louis XII, in 1505, so his erstwhile friend had become a trifle suspect.
Marriages were much on Henry VII’s agenda. At long last, his delicate eldest daughter Margaret, now aged just over thirteen, was judged mature and fit enough to travel to Scotland and have her marriage to James IV solemnised and then consummated. In preparation for her new life, Henry ordered ‘certain jewels, plate and other stuff for the Queen of Scots as well as for the king’s own use’, paying out the very large sum of £16,000 (more than £7 million at today’s prices) on 23 June 1503.
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Escorted by a huge retinue of English lords and ladies, led by Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, the Lord Treasurer, Margaret left Richmond Palace on 2 July for the slow, stately progress to Edinburgh, via her grandmother’s house at Collyweston. Prince Henry may have been secretly pleased to see his elder sister depart out of his life: some claimed he threw a raucous tantrum after his discovery that as Queen of Scots, Margaret would enjoy precedence over him during court ceremonies.
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Escorted by a huge retinue of English lords and ladies, led by Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, the Lord Treasurer, Margaret left Richmond Palace on 2 July for the slow, stately progress to Edinburgh, via her grandmother’s house at Collyweston. Prince Henry may have been secretly pleased to see his elder sister depart out of his life: some claimed he threw a raucous tantrum after his discovery that as Queen of Scots, Margaret would enjoy precedence over him during court ceremonies.
After crossing the Scottish border at Berwick, she was met by her husband ‘and the flower of Scotland’ at the small village of Lamberton Kirk and formally delivered up to James IV by the gorgeously dressed Algernon Percy, Fifth Earl of Northumberland.
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Margaret was married on 8 August in the chapel of Holyrood House, Edinburgh, with Surrey giving away the bride who was stunningly dressed in a gown of cloth of gold.
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Margaret was married on 8 August in the chapel of Holyrood House, Edinburgh, with Surrey giving away the bride who was stunningly dressed in a gown of cloth of gold.
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Her first letter written to Henry VII after her marriage betrays just a hint of understandable homesickness. It also contains a flash of that very same Tudor teenage temper shared by her brother over the attention lavished on Surrey by her new bridegroom, who was paying scant regard to her charms:
Sir, as for news I have none to send, but that my lord of Surrey is in [such]
great favour with the King here that he cannot forbear the company of him [at] no time of the day …
great favour with the King here that he cannot forbear the company of him [at] no time of the day …
For God’s sake, Sir, hold me excused that I write not myself to your Grace, for I have no leisure this time, but with a wish I would I were with your Grace now, and many times more, when I would answer.
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Meanwhile, what of Prince Henry? With his father’s fears for the succession still unabated, his life had changed markedly. Henry was now kept close to his father, above all for security reasons but also to learn the ways of kingship. In August 1504, the ingratiating Duke de Estrada reported:
The Prince of Wales is with the king. Formerly the king did not like to take the Prince … with him, in order not to interrupt his studies.
It is quite wonderful to see how much the king likes the Prince of Wales. He has good reason to do so, for the Prince deserves all love. But it is not only from love that the King takes the Prince with him: he wishes to improve him.
Certainly there could be no better school in the world than the society of such a father as Henry VII.
He is so wise and attentive to everything – nothing escapes his attention. There is no doubt the Prince has an excellent governor and steward in his father.
The ambassador ended this litany of sycophancy with the comment: ‘If he lives ten years longer he will leave the Prince furnished with good habits and with immense riches and in as happy circumstances as man can be.’
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Behind these fawning words that paint a picture of familial harmony lay indecision and uncertainty about Prince Henry’s future. What was happening with his stuttering, syncopated progress towards married life with Katherine? Solemnisation in church of their nuptials was still firmly on hold until the missing half of her marriage portion arrived from Spain. Henry’s formal dissent from the contract for the marriage was obviously a mere gambit, played out in his father’s mystifying game of diplomatic chess. Therein lies something of a mystery.
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Behind these fawning words that paint a picture of familial harmony lay indecision and uncertainty about Prince Henry’s future. What was happening with his stuttering, syncopated progress towards married life with Katherine? Solemnisation in church of their nuptials was still firmly on hold until the missing half of her marriage portion arrived from Spain. Henry’s formal dissent from the contract for the marriage was obviously a mere gambit, played out in his father’s mystifying game of diplomatic chess. Therein lies something of a mystery.
A few months before Henry’s repudiation of the marriage with Katherine was signed, a concerned letter was apparently dispatched to Rome, either by Henry VII or his heir, about Katherine’s fervent piety and its sapping impact upon her physical wellbeing. Pope Julius II wrote that although the Spanish princess commendably sought a spiritual life of fasting, prayer, abstinence and pilgrimage, this was without her spouse’s permission. He therefore granted his full authority to restrain her from ‘excessive religious observances which are injurious to her health’. Such religious zeal, emphasised Julius, could harm her body, jeopardise the
maritalis consuetudo
(marital intimacy or intercourse) and imperil her ability to have children. As Christian tenets taught that procreation was one of the most important purposes of marriage, the Pope would allow the prince to forbid Katherine from taking such devout vows and she should now be encouraged to engage in less arduous acts of piety as her confessor might suggest.
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maritalis consuetudo
(marital intimacy or intercourse) and imperil her ability to have children. As Christian tenets taught that procreation was one of the most important purposes of marriage, the Pope would allow the prince to forbid Katherine from taking such devout vows and she should now be encouraged to engage in less arduous acts of piety as her confessor might suggest.
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