Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

administrators. Henry, typically, had little use for both men in government, but as enthusiastic jousters they could add to the lustre of his court and learn loyalty to his son – more to the point, he could keep an eye on them. That same month, the celebrations of the feast of St George, the patron saint of the Order of the Garter, were particularly emphatic. The king processed through London to St Paul’s. Before him, the bishop of Chester bore a relic of considerable status: the leg of St George himself, encased in parcel gilt, a recent gift from the Emperor Maximilian. Following behind in their heavy, ermine-bordered robes of crimson velvet came the assembled members of the order, at their head ‘my lord prince’. But perhaps the most significant change came in the tiltyard itself.

In the years following Arthur’s death, the summer jousts seemed to have been performed with a certain listlessness. They were, at least, unremarkable enough to go unmentioned in the chronicles that documented every event at court in meticulous detail; neither was there any sign that the king attended them at all. But by the summer of 1505, the mood had changed. Infused with new blood, the jousting set at court went about its work with renewed vigour, and at the jousts held at Richmond that July Henry was back in his accustomed role as arbiter, distributing gold rings to the combatants. For the jousters, in particular the king’s spears and new Garter knights, there was somebody new to impress: the prince who, dressed in his arming clothes, ate, drank and slept chivalry.³³

As Prince Henry settled into life in the royal household, he appeared the very model of a young prince. Charismatic, gifted, devout, he stuck dutifully to his educational programme: studying with William Hone; sitting in on meetings of his council in the rooms above the exchequer of receipt in Westminster Palace; listening deferentially to his father’s disquisitions on government and statecraft. He was being moulded in his father’s own image. But for a rapidly growing boy, emerging into the world and settling into his new role, it was a restricted, confined environment, one in which his movements were constantly monitored, in which he was gently but firmly told what he could not do. Conscious of all that he needed to be and, increasingly, of what he had not yet achieved, he would come to challenge his father’s way of doing things. What was more, he would find the means to do so in the apparently controlled, secure world that had been built around him: that of schoolroom and tiltyard. A gap was opening up between what his father wanted him to be, and what he would become.³⁴

Null and Void

Towards the end of summer 1504 the dean of St Paul’s, Robert Sherborne, arrived in London from Rome. The man nominated by Julius II to bring to England the papal dispensation for Prince Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon had made the long journey over the Alps, down the Rhine, through the Netherlands and across the English Channel in terrible health. And he had come empty-handed.¹ On 28 November, the king fired off a letter whose courteous formalities could not mask his distinctly irritable tone. Despite the pope’s promises – and Henry’s lavish palm-greasing, which included a ?4,000 donation to the ‘crusade’, or papal slush fund – it appeared that ‘nothing at all has been done in Rome in this matter’. Actually, Henry was wrong. Julius had finally been persuaded to dispatch the bull – but to Spain, which, as one of the major players in Italy, was, after all, rather more important than England. He had sent it, ‘under seal of secrecy’, as a ‘consolation’ to Queen Isabella, who was seriously ill. What Isabella read did not improve her health. Contrary to what she had heard from Catherine’s duenna, Dona Elvira, the bull clearly stated that her daughter’s previous marriage had been consummated. Catherine, it proclaimed loud and clear, was no virgin.

Behind Isabella’s spluttering moral indignation lay a more calculated financial objection. A payment of 100,000 scudos to Henry VII hung on the question of Catherine’s virginity, and on this wording the money was his. When the final draft of the bull was prepared, there was a small but highly significant alteration, presumably to silence the mutterings emanating from Medina del Campo. Inserted into the opening sentence of the document, which stated that Catherine had contracted a marriage with Arthur ‘and that this marriage had been consummated’, was the word forsan: ‘perhaps’. Julius had contrived a phrasing that would suit the interpretation of both England and Spain, and washed his hands of the affair. In the event, it was a formula that satisfied neither Henry VII nor Ferdinand. Some quarter-century later, its ambiguity would be bitterly contested as Henry VIII sought to detach himself from his wife and from the Church of Rome.²

Meanwhile, at a wintry Richmond, Catherine was miserable. On 26 November, she had written two letters in quick succession to her parents, and had given them to de Puebla to include in his diplomatic bag. The letters speak volumes for Catherine’s sense of isolation amid the stream of dispatches flowing between England, Rome and Spain. She had, she wrote, hardly any news from them – indeed, she had not received a single message from Ferdinand ‘for a whole year’ – but rumours were circulating at Richmond that her mother was very ill indeed. For once, the rumours were no exaggeration. That day, the bedridden Isabella had died at Medina del Campo. Her death would change the face of Europe. It would also turn Catherine’s world upside-down.³

With Isabella’s death, the question of the Spanish succession suddenly came into sharp focus. Queen of Castile, her marriage to Ferdinand had created a united Spain; now, her demise threatened to pull it apart, and to wreck Catherine’s prospects in the process. The heir to Castile was Catherine’s older sister Juana, wife to the Habsburg ruler of the Low Countries, Emperor Maximilian’s son Archduke Philip of Burgundy. The fruit of Philip and Juana’s tempestuous marriage, their infant son Charles of Ghent, stood to inherit a sprawling empire that spanned much of eastern and central Europe, the Low Countries, Castile, and – unless Ferdinand could remarry and produce a male heir – the rest of Spain and Spanish Italy. Hearing the news of Isabella’s death, Archduke Philip was determined to lay claim to Castile on his wife’s behalf.⁴

A marriage alliance with Aragon, rather than with a united Spain, was a very different and far less attractive proposition. Ferdinand knew it. On the very day of Isabella’s death, he sent a letter informing Henry of the ‘greatest affliction’ that had befallen him and emphasizing that Isabella’s dying wish was that he, Ferdinand, should rule Castile on their daughter Juana’s behalf. On this view, Philip of Burgundy’s ambitions were on ice. But as Ferdinand probably knew, it was asking a lot to expect Henry to accept this version of events. Henry knew exactly what it was like to lose a wife on whose inheritance his dynasty and his kingdom depended, and the precariousness which resulted.⁵ Moreover, he had other irons in the fire. The Habsburg family, which, with its imperial pretensions, its financial and mercantile powerhouse of the Netherlands and its potential for European expansion through its Spanish claims, looked an increasingly attractive proposition for a dynastic alliance. Besides which, the Habsburgs still controlled the earl of Suffolk.

Even before Isabella’s death, animosity between the Castilian and Aragonese factions had always simmered. Earlier that year, the tensions had manifested themselves among Spanish diplomats at the Burgundian court over Suffolk, still kicking his heels in Aachen and waiting for Maximilian and Philip to provide him with funds and men. Ferdinand and Isabella had been trying to get hold of him – ostensibly to help Henry; in reality to get hold of a bargaining chip in their negotiations with England – and in February 1504, they had come within a hair’s breadth of getting him extradited to Spanish-controlled territories in Naples. Suffolk, however, had been tipped off.

Leaving behind his younger brother Richard as surety for the debts he had piled up with the city’s merchants, Suffolk fled to the nearby principality of Guelders, whose duke, ringed by hostile Habsburg-Burgundian territory, was an ally of France. Suffolk’s informant, it transpired, had been none other than the Spanish ambassador resident at the court of Philip of Burgundy. Don Juan Manuel was an outstanding diplomat. He was also, if reports are to be believed, a Castilian loyalist whose allegiances stood as much with Philip – and with his wife Juana of Castile and their infant son Charles, Castile’s heir – as with Ferdinand and Isabella. And Don Manuel’s sister was Dona Elvira, who ran Catherine’s household at Durham House on the Strand.

The effects of Catherine’s cloistered upbringing had been exacerbated by her increasingly uncertain isolation in England. She remained ingenuous and her English was poor; beneath a fragile self-confidence, she remained desperate for affection. This, as de Puebla had delicately remarked to Ferdinand and Isabella, was a recipe for disaster in Catherine’s disordered household. She was, he wrote, impressionable, and a soft touch, ‘very liberal’ with her wealth. There were plenty of people hanging around Durham House who were looking for every opportunity to ‘strip her of her gold and silver’. Henry, too, was concerned. As her prospective father-in-law, he paid Catherine a monthly stipend of ?100, a generous sum designed to keep her and her household in a manner befitting a future queen of England; she could, he said, keep whatever was left over after having paid her expenses. But it proved nowhere near enough. Her wardrobe keeper, Juan de Cuero, who watched over the collection of jewels and plate that formed part of her contested dowry, complained that pieces would mysteriously go missing, pawned to pay for Catherine’s lavish lifestyle, or given away as gifts.

With its runaway expenditure and its servants involved in open infighting, Catherine’s household was out of