month. With Catherine, aged twelve, still in Spain, the corpulent Spanish ambassador Rodrigo de Puebla had stood in for her. Prince Arthur himself was a year younger but, thought Soncino, tall for his age and of ‘singular beauty and grace’. While his father spoke little, the prince was eloquent, ‘very ready’ in speaking Latin in front of the assembled dignitaries – ‘a distinguished son-in-law’ for the Catholic monarchs, Soncino opined.7
Following the exchange of orations and diplomatic compliments, the ambassadors kissed the hands of Henry and the prince. After dining in state – with ‘four lords’, said Trevisano, impressed – they were led further into the house, to a smaller, more private room for a confidential chat with the king, servants hovering discreetly in the background. The king talked with deliberation in clear, fluent French, fully in control. As the conversation progressed, the ambassadors, who had come to brief him on Italian affairs, were astonished. He seemed to know all the news even before they had told him: indeed, Soncino reported to his master Sforza that Henry spoke about him as if with the knowledge of an old, familiar friend – except that the two had never met. The ambassadors concurred that the king was wise, ‘gracious’ and ‘grave’ with a ‘wonderful presence’, everything a king should be. ‘He evidently has’, Soncino concluded, ‘a most quiet spirit.’
Before their departure, the ambassadors had time to pay their respects to the queen, Elizabeth. They found her in a small hall, surrounded by ladies and gentlewomen, dressed in cloth-of-gold that offset her mass of strawberry-blonde hair – ‘a handsome woman’, Trevisano remarked. At her side were the king’s mother Lady Margaret Beaufort, a diminutive, sharp-eyed presence, and a six-year-old boy. That Henry and Elizabeth’s second son merited barely a footnote in the ambassadors’ dispatches was hardly surprising. After all, they could hardly have foreseen the events that would eventually lead him to the English throne.
The Italians were whisked away back to Oxford, where they were ‘lavishly entertained’ at the king’s personal command, and then to London, to await the court’s return later that autumn. The whole visit had gone smoothly, and the ambassadors had been flattered, charmed and impressed. The only sign that anything was untoward was the uncharacteristic brevity of their visit to Woodstock.
In fact, the rumours heard by the ambassadors had been true. Fourteen ninety-seven was proving a terrible year for Henry VII. Two months before, thousands of Cornishmen, in protest against swingeing taxation and corrupt officialdom, had swarmed through southern England and had almost reached London’s gates, before being defeated at Blackheath. Now, Henry was preparing for what he hoped would be the endgame to another, far more protracted episode. Massing in the grounds at Woodstock, out of sight of the ambassadors’ diplomatic visit, were thousands of troops, men and materiel. Throughout his summer hunting and hawking, Henry had been waiting for this spectre to make his rumoured appearance, and indeed, a week after the ambassadors had returned to London, news arrived from the far southwest. A ship bearing the youth who claimed to be Richard duke of York had landed in Cornwall, and he was now marching towards Henry to claim his throne. It was twelve years, almost to the day, since Henry had won his kingdom, and he had barely had a moment’s peace.8
At Westminster in autumn 1485, the new regime was moving in. An army of craftsmen set about carving and painting its badges and arms on walls and roofs, moulding them on ceilings and glazing scutcheons in windows. In London, Lady Margaret renovated the sprawling Thamesside house of Coldharbour, which her son had presented to her. In it, she installed the eighteen-year-old Elizabeth of York, the daughter of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, whose impending marriage to Henry lay at the heart of England’s new political settlement. As Henry courted his future wife – chaperoned by her future mother-in-law – he set about creating his government.9
Henry was determined to do things by the book. He would follow rigidly the ‘due course and order of his laws’, which would allow him to impose his authority swiftly and decisively, to snuff out potential trouble before it could snowball into civil conflict; and also to define and gather the ‘rights and revenues’ due him, in order to avoid the disaster of having to levy taxes in peacetime. He would reach for the symbols of his royal authority, from proclamations, statutes and newly minted coinage, to the pope’s sanction and blessing of his reign, and the papal anathemas that rained down on his enemies. And he would maintain a magnificent household.
The royal household was the regime in microcosm, its beating heart. Below stairs it functioned unseen, a well-oiled machine. Above stairs, awe-inspiring in its spectacular, minutely ordered opulence, was its public face: the hall, and the chamber, with its procession of lobbies, antechambers, closets and galleries. The members of the household were the king’s men, their loyalties to him overriding any knotty affinities to noblemen. That, at least, was the theory. During Henry VI’s disastrous reign, people had seen in his dysfunctional, spendthrift, faction-riven household all that was rotten about his rule. But the Yorkists had put their house in order and Henry was determined to do the same, while adding some touches of his own. One of his first acts was to create a new French-style security force, three hundred strong: the yeomen of the guard.
At the core of his government, Henry installed his small band of loyalists, those who had proved themselves in exile, from lawyer-clergymen like the experienced Morton and the narrow-eyed Richard Fox – a visiting scholar at the University of Paris when he met Henry, who instantly saw something in him – to the veteran Lancastrian military commander John de Vere, earl of Oxford. But Henry could not rely solely on partisan political loyalties: that way disaster lay, as Richard III’s rule had shown. Henry’s ‘new foundation’ had to accommodate everybody: his Stanley relations, whose last-minute arrival at Bosworth had been crucial; those of Richard’s men prepared to accept pardons; and the Woodville Yorkists. These last presented a particular problem for Henry. As their support for him rested on their loyalties to his wife-to-be – who, as Edward IV’s daughter, had her own claim to the throne – their backing contained a potential threat. If Henry’s claim depended on that of his wife, he could effectively be held to ransom. And he had no intention of letting that happen.
That November at Westminster, Henry’s first parliament held all these strands in delicate balance. He had extended pardons to all prepared to acknowledge his rule and, at his coronation the previous month, had sworn the usual oaths to be a just king. Now, in parliament, Henry backdated his reign to the day before Bosworth. At a stroke, he had rewritten history: when the battle was fought, Henry was the king and Richard III the usurper; all those who had backed Richard were by definition traitors. If this sent a palpable tremor of unease through the commons, so too did Henry’s assertion of his own claim to the throne – in which he sidestepped the delicate issues of blood and lineage and made no mention of the right of his future wife. Woodville supporters found the whole thing overcooked. Rather than citing ‘many titles’ in support of his claim, wrote one, surely Henry could simply find whatever ‘appeared to be missing’ – rather a lot, was the implication – in the person of Elizabeth of York, whom the commons petitioned him to marry.10 Having confirmed the illegitimacy of Richard’s reign, however unconvincingly, Henry married Elizabeth the following January. Days after the wedding, ‘great enjoyment filled the queen’. She had fallen pregnant.11
Henry, it seems, always knew the child would be a son. Invoking the mythical British king from whom both Lancaster and York had liked to trace their descent – the prophet Merlin, no less, had described King Arthur as the fruit of the union of a red king and a white queen – Henry would call his son Arthur, and he would be born in Winchester, the legendary seat of Camelot.12 In Winchester Castle, at 1 a.m. on 20 September 1486, a squally, windswept night, Elizabeth gave birth. Her son was a month premature – but he was healthy. A
The baby Arthur was the new dynasty incorporated. ‘Joyed may we be’, minstrels sang, ‘Our prince to see, and roses three’: red for Lancaster, white for York, and a new rose in which the two colours were intermingled, a rose both red and white.13
As the dynasty took its first, uncertain steps, conspiracy had already seeded itself. The signs of instability had come soon after Henry’s arrival in London. That September, the sweating sickness, a strange and virulent disease causing ‘pain as never was suffered before’ – and brought, it was widely believed, by the new king’s army – had decimated the city’s population. Rumour and ill portents were rife. As one correspondent, writing to his master from court in the wake of Henry’s first parliament, noted anxiously, there was ‘much running among the lords, but no-one knows what it is. It is said that all is not well among them.’14 In spring 1486, news came from the heartlands of the old king’s support in the north – ‘whence all evil spreads’, noted a Woodvillite chronicler with a southerner’s mixture of contempt and fear – and of noble retinues assembling and arming. But as the caravan of the royal household progressed north, the rebels melted away in the face of overwhelming royal force. It was to be in the following year that Richard III’s loyalists found their figurehead.15
John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln, was a Plantagenet. His mother was sister to both Edward IV and Richard III, and Richard had apparently named him his heir – and then Bosworth happened. Lincoln remained unreconciled to the new regime. Early in 1487, he fled to the Low Countries, to the Flemish town of Malines and the court of his
