place and which created an effect ‘like unto a mountain’. Together with Queen Elizabeth, his mother Lady Margaret Beaufort and a number of his counsellors and servants, the king, who ‘would make no open show nor appearance that day’, had concealed himself in a closet adjoining the stage, reached by a door specially knocked through for the purpose. Barely visible behind the closet’s latticed windows, they stood ‘secretly to see and apperceive the form and manner of the ministration’.53
While all eyes were on Catherine and Prince Henry as they paraded slowly down the walkway, Arthur had appeared on the great stage. There, surrounded by the archbishop of Canterbury, eighteen bishops, and attendants dressed in coloured silks and cloth-of-gold, the three children met; Henry gave up the princess to his older brother. As the three-hour-long ceremony drew to a close, the brass section, positioned high above the west door of the cathedral, struck up. The newlyweds, hand in hand, turned to north and south, presenting themselves to the multitudes packed within the cathedral. In the middle of this sea of colour, the two slight figures in white satin saw ‘nothing but faces’.
Following a celebratory mass, and after wine and refreshments had been served, Arthur left as he had arrived: by a side entrance, to greet his new bride at the bishop of London’s palace. Catherine and Prince Henry retraced their steps down the walkway to the west door. Emerging, they were confronted by a green mountain covered in precious metals: the king’s towering monument to Tudor kingship, his contentious Rich Mount. On its summit stood three trees, against which were positioned three kings dressed in armour. In the middle, flanked by the monarchs of France – to which England, of course, still laid claim – and Spain, was King Arthur; from his tree, covered with red roses, sprang a snarling red dragon. As the couple watched, a constant stream of people filed through a gate in the surrounding picket fence to help themselves to the wine that flowed continuously and, it seemed, by magic, from a spring in the mountain’s core.54
The wedding feast was a suitably sumptuous affair, stretching on until five in the evening and followed by drinking and entertainments. At between seven and eight o’clock Arthur was dragged away from his companions and their ‘goodly disports’ by the earl of Oxford, overseer of the nuptial arrangements. Accompanied to the bedchamber by a group of clergy and courtiers, Arthur found Catherine, surrounded by her attendants, stretched out in the carefully prepared marriage bed. After he had lain down beside her, the pair and the bed were blessed, prayers offered up, censers wafted and holy water liberally sprinkled. Then all withdrew, and the just-married teenagers were left alone.55
The next day, Monday 15 November, everything was still. The bishop’s palace was ‘under silence’, and Catherine stayed in her chamber together with her ladies and gentlewomen; ‘no access utterly’ was to be had to her and the only person admitted was the earl of Oxford, bearing a loving note from Catherine’s new father-in-law. Earlier Arthur had, apparently, emerged from the bridal suite with a ‘good and sanguine complexion’ and an air of awkward bravado. He called one of his body servants, Anthony Willoughby, the son of Henry VII’s lord steward, to bring him a cup of ale, ‘for I have this night been in the midst of Spain’.56 On Tuesday, the 16th, Henry VII and his two sons, accompanied by five hundred members of the royal household and Catherine’s retinue, processed back to St Paul’s. The new bride was ‘secretly conveyed’ to the closet, high up in the cathedral, from where the king had scrutinized proceedings two days previously. Catherine stood alone, watching as Henry VII gave thanks that ‘this noble and excellent act’ had been brought to its most ‘laudable conclusion’.
That afternoon, an armada of forty barges conveyed the royal party and London’s civic dignitaries some two miles downstream to Westminster Palace. Abutting the abbey, from whose sanctuary it was separated by a high wall, and the seething lanes of its cramped satellite town, the palace was prepared for a week-long programme of sporting and dramatic entertainment. Security details had searched all the tenements within the abbey grounds and Canon Row, the narrow lane whose houses gave on to the palace yard’s north wall, submitting a written report of their findings; their inhabitants had all been ordered to clean and decorate their homes. Open to the river at its southern end, the expanse of the yard had been gravelled and sanded for the sure footing of the horses; in it had been erected a temporary stadium, ready for a series of jousts. The low-slung bulk of Westminster Hall, in term- time swarming with the business of London’s law courts, stood decorated, prepared to receive the wedding party.57
A torrential downpour having finally abated, expectant crowds thronged the palace yard. Londoners filed in, mingling with lawyers and students from the nearby inns of court, many of whom had been ordered to attend on pain of royal displeasure – and to pay a hefty 12d entrance fee into the bargain. Onlookers craned out of the overlooking houses, so many ‘that unto sight and perceiving was no thing to the eye but only visages and faces without appearance of their bodies’, straining to catch a glimpse of the Spanish princess as the royal party, some hundreds strong, took their seats in a purpose-built gallery.58 The atmosphere built to fever pitch. Trumpets announced the chief challenger, Buckingham, who emerged from Westminster Hall, fully armoured and on horseback, inside a white-and-green satin pavilion on wheels, scattered with red roses. Followed by his team, he circled the yard slowly, milking the thunderous applause, before doing obeisance to the king. Half an hour later, the five ‘defenders’ appeared through the opposite entrance: Lord William Courtenay, in blood-red plate armour, riding a red dragon led by a giant carrying a tree; the team captain, the marquis of Dorset, in a suit of coal-black armour, horsed, in a pavilion of cloth-of-gold. One of the ‘answerers’ on the opposing team, Lord Rivers, topped the lot, arriving in a ship firing cannon, ‘which made a great and an huge noise’. The Rich Mount made another appearance, this time on wheels as the earl of Essex’s ‘pavilion’; sitting atop it was a young woman in white, hair flowing around her shoulders. Such entrances, said an eyewitness, had not been seen ‘in very long remembrance’.59
Poring through his big book of jousts, bought from the widow of Edward IV’s king-of-arms, Garter herald John Writhe had devised an elaborate world of stylized violence to rival the famed tournaments of the Yorkists and which bore comparison with the matchless displays of Burgundian chivalry.60 At Calais the year before, Writhe and Henry VII’s tournament-planner, Sir Richard Guildford, had been close and interested observers of Archduke Philip and his knights. Now, conjuring up a world of chivalric make-believe, dream landscapes, damsels in distress, wildmen and unicorns, the pair had created a supreme articulation of political loyalty to Henry VII. In a last-minute adjustment to the Tree of Chivalry standing in one corner of the palace yard, both teams’ escutcheons hung together in a solid expression of unity. The previous arrangement, in which the shields of the teams led by Buckingham and Suffolk were to have faced each other in aggressive opposition, would have sent out entirely the wrong signals. The inconvenient fact of Suffolk’s rebellion had been thoroughly effaced.
Fantasy heroes within a securely Tudor universe, the combatants thundered together, ‘striking, cutting and lashing at each other … Some of their swords were broken of 2 pieces, and some other their harness [armour] was hewn off from their body.’ Guildford, the experienced referee, ensured that the violence stayed within reasonable limits; Writhe kept score. In the grandstand, Henry sat like a Solomon, watching and judging, leaning forward with an aficionado’s keenness, conversing with Guildford and sending messages of encouragement and approbation out to the nobles who jousted in his honour. Following each round, the jousters trotted up, dismounted and climbed the pavilion stairs to do obeisance. At the end of the week, in a prize-giving ceremony, the king’s blue eyes searched the faces of the participants as he congratulated them and distributed precious stones, tokens of his favour. Buckingham received a diamond of ‘great virtue and price’. Dorset, the opposing captain, was presented with a rose made of rubies inset with a diamond: the red-and-white rose was, Henry seemed to say, a highly appropriate prize for the loyal jousting of Suffolk’s replacement.61
By night, the focus shifted to Westminster Hall, its walls hung with tapestries and at its western end a cupboard, seven shelves high, on which quantities of gold plate winked and glittered in the torchlight. In front of this display, on a raised dais, Henry and Elizabeth sat enthroned under their cloth of estate. Surrounded by the newlyweds, the royal family and the assembled court and household, they watched, enrapt, as William Cornish’s disguisings unfolded before them. One night, a succession of wheeled pageant cars, some eighteen feet high, swayed and creaked out of the gloom of the hall’s eastern end and ground to a halt before the royal company.62 In one scene, actors played out an allegory of Arthur’s wooing of Catherine, in which two English ambassadors descended from a ship, fully rigged and crewed, to pay court to ladies peering from the windows of a Spanish castle. After the performers had come together in a sequence of intricately choreographed dances, the assembled company looked on as the bride and groom danced in succession. Then, last of all, Prince Henry descended from the dais with his fourteen-year-old sister Margaret. They performed two slow bass dances, as the others had done. But the heavy formality of it all chafed at the ten-year-old prince who, feeling weighed down by his clothes, ‘suddenly cast off his gown and danced in his jacket’. In one stroke, he had shattered the gravitas. And everybody loved it, including the king and queen, to whom it gave ‘right great and singular pleasure’.
