Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

Lady Margaret paraded her spirituality across the full spectrum of visible acts of piety – punctiliously observed daily rituals, devotion to cults of saints and any number of good works, from the giving of alms to the endowment of chantries – so too did Elizabeth. Early in the reign, Lady Margaret had commissioned the printer William Caxton to publish the romance Blanchardin and Eglantine, apparently in honour of the love-story that was Henry and Elizabeth’s marriage; later, Margaret and Elizabeth together commissioned from Caxton The Fifteen Oes, a highly popular prayer sequence whose fifteen prayers, each beginning ‘O blessed Jesu’ – hence the title – underscored their devotion to the fashionable cult of the Name of Jesus.

Henry, too, spoke of them in the same breath. When in 1498 he wrote to the Scottish king James IV to postpone the wedding between James and his daughter Margaret, then nine years old, he cited intensive lobbying by ‘the Queen and my mother’. When, in the run-up to Prince Arthur and Catherine’s wedding, Lady Margaret drew up a list of the queen’s attendants, there were spaces for names to be included – after discussion with Elizabeth.

Elizabeth was a discreet, persuasive lobbyist on her own account. London’s key politicians and merchants cultivated her assiduously; so too did foreign diplomats. They did so not because she was ‘powerless’, but quite the opposite. Beneath the emollience was a steeliness, glimpsed in the brisk letters she wrote intervening in legal affairs, and in petitioning her husband for favours on behalf of her servants. When Pope Alexander VI requested that his representative in England be given the vacant bishopric of Worcester, Henry wrote back apologetically, explaining that his queen had already bagged the post for her confessor. Elizabeth could, it seemed, put her foot down. During the preparations for Arthur and Catherine’s wedding, the Spanish ambassador de Puebla handed over letters in duplicate to the queen from Catherine of Aragon and from her parents. Henry wanted copies of each ‘to carry continually about him’. Elizabeth refused. One set, she said, was for Prince Arthur, and she ‘did not like to part with hers’; the resulting marital tiff was played out in front of Lady Margaret and the watching de Puebla.¹²

Elizabeth combined a strong sense of family loyalty – including a love for her siblings which was, according to Henry VII’s chronicler Bernard Andre, ‘ferme incredibilis’, truly extraordinary – with a strong awareness of the new political dispensation that she represented.¹³ In early 1495, in the face of Warbeck’s continued threat and the recent upheavals within the royal household, she had brokered and funded high-profile marriages for her younger sisters, Anne and Katherine, in the process binding two noble families further into the regime: Anne’s husband was the oldest son of Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey; Katherine, meanwhile, married Lord William Courtenay, son of the earl of Devon. As her extended family became entangled in the various crises of the reign, Elizabeth’s quietly emollient role continued to dovetail with Henry’s policies. After the flight of her cousin the earl of Suffolk in August 1501, she arranged accommodation for his unfortunate wife Margaret who, having been under surveillance for two years as a result of her husband’s intriguing, had her lands and revenues annexed by the crown – the proceeds flowed into Elizabeth’s own coffers. When in spring the following year Elizabeth’s brother-in-law William Courtenay was tainted by association with Suffolk and incarcerated in the Tower, she sent him a care package of clothes: shirts, a gown and a ‘night bonnet’. The Courtenay children, meanwhile, were securely looked after at the queen’s Essex house of Havering-at-Bower.¹⁴

Elizabeth’s household staff mirrored that of her husband. Among her gentlewomen were the wives of Henry’s counsellors and intimate servants, who were themselves regularly around, bringing messages and gifts from the king: in January 1503, the privy chamber servants Piers Barbour and James Braybroke were first on the queen’s list of New Year’s rewards. She also employed them on her own account. On one occasion she instructed the head of the privy chamber, Hugh Denys, to tip a foreigner who had brought her a pair of clavichords, the first set of keyboards known in England; on another, the urbane Richard Weston, travelling abroad on the king’s business, picked up a set of expensive, ornamented devotional girdles – fashionable pregnancy wear – on the queen’s orders.¹⁵ Entertainers and musicians, too, made their way between the two households: one man regularly in demand with both Elizabeth and Lady Margaret was Henry Glasebury, marshal of the king’s minstrels and a composer of entertaining doggerel verse. And her household had an engaged, enquiring openness about it – the kind of easiness that had attracted the king’s mother’s hawklike attention – which took its tone from Elizabeth herself.

One of Elizabeth’s last appointments seemed to sum up the tone of her household. By autumn 1501 her half-brother, Edward IV’s bastard son, had entered service as her cupbearer. With the distinctive auburn hair and bulky frame of his family, Arthur Plantagenet was solid, companionable and unaffected, with a fondness for jousting and fine wine; his easy-going nature led a friend later to describe him as ‘the pleasantest man in the world’. He was, too, a gifted correspondent: decades later, his letters from Calais as Viscount Lisle would prove one of the most enduring windows on to the world of 1530s England.¹⁶

The atmosphere of Elizabeth’s household permeated the small satellite establishment that its staff also served, that of Prince Henry and his sisters Margaret and Mary, at Eltham in the Kent countryside. A stone’s throw from Elizabeth’s favourite house of Greenwich, Eltham was especially prized by the children’s grandfather Edward IV. In 1480 he had built a glorious new great hall, whose balance and lightness made it one of the triumphs of English domestic architecture, its entrance surmounted by the Yorkist rose en soleil, carved in stone.¹⁷ The worlds of Elizabeth and her younger children were from their infancy intimately linked, their staff shuttling between the two households. In 1494 Elizabeth Denton, one of Elizabeth’s gentlewomen, was appointed head of the children’s nursery, looking after the three-year-old Prince Henry and his five-year-old sister Margaret, while continuing to draw a salary as one of the queen’s attendants. Later, Arthur Plantagenet’s appointment as Elizabeth’s cupbearer may well have been made with one eye on providing the young duke of York with suitable role models: Henry VIII would later recollect his uncle Arthur as ‘the gentlest heart living’.¹⁸ It was in this relaxed world that Prince Henry was exposed to formative influences that would remain with him all his life.

Henry and Elizabeth were highly ambitious for their children’s education. In combining a cutting-edge classical curriculum with physical training and the skills needed for a life of government, they borrowed heavily from the impressive programme of learning drawn up for Elizabeth’s own ill-fated brothers, Edward IV’s young princes. But in Prince Arthur’s case, Henry VII had made one crucial adaptation. The post of the prince’s ‘governor’, the overall supervisor of his education and mentor, had formerly been occupied by a high-level aristocrat, and it was a role that could quickly become politicized, with disastrous consequences. The young Edward V was reportedly traumatized following the summary execution of his governor, his charismatic, highly cultivated uncle Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, in one of the defining acts of Richard III’s usurpation. Henry, unsurprisingly, did away with the role completely.¹⁹

Prince Arthur, of course, had his own carefully vetted council and his own discrete household, headed by its chamberlain, the king’s cousin Sir Reginald Pole. In the absence of a governor, the status and influence of the grammar master who oversaw Arthur’s primary education rose accordingly. Chosen for him by his father and close advisers, John Rede, the former head of Winchester College, was no political animal but a solid, sober professional educator – just the kind of person who could be trusted around the heir to the throne.²⁰

The same went for Henry duke of York’s education. As in everything, it was his mother and Lady Margaret who, as he grew and his little household expanded, chose the people who moulded and shaped his world, from his ‘lady mistress’ Elizabeth Denton to childhood companions such as his cupbearer, the boisterous, quick-thinking Henry Guildford – son of the king’s close adviser Sir Richard Guildford and Elizabeth’s gentlewoman Anne – and his tutors. And the first grammar master they chose for him was poles apart from the expert, but perhaps rather worthy, John Rede. The man who exploded on to the young Henry’s consciousness in the late 1490s was no career schoolmaster, but a rhetorician and poet – and no ordinary poet at that. Swirling behind him his bay-green laureate’s cloak with the name ‘Calliope’, the muse of epic poetry, garishly picked out in gold embroidery, was the self-proclaimed genius of English letters, John Skelton.²¹

Then in his late thirties, Skelton was an irrepressible, unstoppable, creative force. A torrent of words – English, French, Latin, Castilian – poured out of him, a jumble of languages, in every possible form and combination: lyrics of courtly love and foul-mouthed humour, devotional verse, interludes, educational writings and religious treatises.

Skelton’s route to the young duke of York’s schoolroom at Eltham had been circuitous. On a visit to Oxford University in 1488, Henry VII had conferred on him a laureateship. This fashionable degree in classical Latin rhetoric, common in the avant-garde humanities departments of prestigious Italian and northern European universities, had never before been awarded in England. For Skelton, the first English poet laureate, it was the