Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII (10 page)

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Authors: Robert Hutchinson

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His mother’s death was another matter. She had taught him to read and write, and most of his formative years had been spent very close to her at Eltham. Much later, in an elegant letter written in Latin to Erasmus in 1507, Henry wrote of his thoughts at the death of the King of Castile, but recalled his great grief at the loss of Elizabeth of York:
For never, since the death of my dearest mother has there come to me more hateful intelligence.
Your letter … seemed to tear open again the wound to which time had brought insensibility.
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Although Henry did not attend her funeral, he was kitted out with a mourning suit of black cloth, furred with lambskin, with a riding gown in the same material and a cloak bordered by black velvet. Twelve pairs of hose and twelve pairs of shoes and gloves were also provided.
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Aside from fulfilling the established formalities of mourning a lost queen and mother, the all-important Tudor dynasty had to be safeguarded. One week after his mother’s death, on 18 February, Henry was created Prince of Wales, and Earl of Chester and Flintshire. And he was approaching the age when it would be imperative to choose a wife for a future King of England. Two years earlier, in 1501, Henry VII had made cautious enquiries about the prospects of marrying off his second son to Eleanor, the daughter of Philip, Duke of Burgundy, who was also the niece of Katherine of Aragon, whom Arthur was then about to wed.
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This idea was abandoned on Arthur’s death as the Spanish suggestion of a re-match between Henry and Katherine looked diplomatically more inviting. But the present wearer of the crown also had ideas to remarry
in the hope of siring more sons. He may have been deranged by the death of his beloved wife, but two months afterwards, he briefly considered marrying his eighteen-year-old widowed daughter-in-law.
Some scholars have questioned whether Henry VII was truly serious in this choice of potential bride
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but Queen Isabella of Spain was incandescent at the scandalous suggestion:
This would be a very evil thing – one never before seen and the mere mention of which offends our ears.
We would not for anything in the world that it should take place.
She instructed her ambassador in London: ‘If anything be said to you about it, speak of it as a thing not to be endured. You must likewise say very decidedly that on no account would we allow it, or even hear it mentioned.’ She repeated her demand for the return of Katherine to Spain:
Now the Queen of England is dead, in whose society … the Princess might honourably have remained as with a mother and the king being the man he is … it would not be right that the Princess should stay in England.
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In the face of such parental opposition, Henry VII speedily dropped any lustful claim on Katherine, and the marriage treaty of Henry, Prince of Wales, and the Spanish princess was signed on 23 June 1503,
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with a formal betrothal two days later at the London mansion of Edmund Audley, Bishop of Salisbury, off Fleet Street, on the western edge of the city.
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Katherine discarded her mourning black to appear at the ceremony dressed in a virginal white dress.
The new Prince of Wales’ reaction to the prospect of marrying his brother’s widow can only be guessed at. He hardly knew her – having seen her only during the brief few weeks between personally escorting the princess during her official welcome to London on 12 November 1501 and the couple’s departure to freezing Ludlow Castle the following January. Having lived in Arthur’s shadow for so long, Henry may have been more than a little piqued at now having to wed his hand-me-down wife after already being given much of his brother’s wardrobe.
Doubtless, in the taciturn way of royal fathers, Henry VII pointed out that his son had little or no choice in the matter. It was only much later that his patriotic duty for England burgeoned into true love.
As far as Katherine was concerned, the betrothal probably came as a respite in her uncertain life: it had her parents’ blessing and was a happy harbinger of the future in an alien existence in a foreign land, amid a host of strangers with unfamiliar customs and language.
There were still some obstacles to jump before Katherine’s marriage to Henry could go ahead, which was planned to take place before the prince’s fourteenth birthday in June 1505. Whether or not Arthur had consummated his marriage with Katherine, she was still Henry’s sister-in-law – and this unnatural relationship, or affinity, had to be legally swept aside by a special dispensation from Pope Alexander VI. Ferdinand of Spain wrote to his ambassador in Rome:
In the clause of the treaty which mentions the dispensation of the Pope, it is stated that the Princess Katherine
consummated her marriage with Prince Arthur
.
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The fact, however, is that although they were wedded, Prince Arthur and the Princess … never consummated the marriage.
It is well known in England that the Princess is still a virgin.
But as the English are much disposed to cavill [quibble], it has seemed to be more prudent to provide for the case as though the marriage had been consummated and the dispensation of the Pope must be in perfect keeping with the said clause of the treaty.
The right of succession depends on the undoubted legitimacy of the marriage.
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It was a complicated process, even more thorny than the English and Spanish sovereigns feared, mainly because the Pope unexpectedly and inconveniently died in the Vatican. Alexander VI, one of the most corrupt of those who ever wore the papal triple tiara, expired on 18 August, aged seventy-two, after days of suffering convulsive fevers and intestinal bleeding, probably as a result of poisoning. Not for nothing was he a member of the notorious Borgia family. His last words were a plaintive, ‘Wait a minute,’ as if he was frantically fending off the hand of Death, and his passing triggered an unseemly scramble to secure
the papal treasure. The frail and gout-ridden Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini of Siena was then consecrated as Pius III on 8 October 1503. He only lasted twenty-six days on the throne of St Peter before dying – supposedly from the effects of a leg ulcer, but in reality probably from poison. Finally, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere was elected by a near-unanimous vote of the conclave of cardinals on 31 October to become Julius II.
Eventually the new Pope got around to the question of Henry and Katherine’s marriage and dictated a one-page aide-memoire immediately after Christmas 1503 summarising his initial reactions:
We have been informed that the Princess Katherine of Spain had contracted a marriage with Arthur, late Prince of Wales, and that this marriage has, perhaps, been consummated.
Notwithstanding this, in his quality as the Head of the Church, [the Pope] authorises Henry Prince of Wales and the Princess Katherine to contract a lawful marriage.
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In the sixteenth century, the Vatican’s civil service was notorious for its snail-like progress in processing paperwork, or indeed arriving at any kind of decision. To the clerks, bureaucracy was a creed almost as fervently followed as their devotion to the Catholic faith. The all-important process of unhurried ‘mature consideration’ was always the order of the day. The long-desired formal dispensation, with its weighty lead papal seal, or
bulla
, was frustratingly slow to arrive in both England and Spain. The following year, on 6 July, Julius wrote to Henry VII, regretting the delay.
We never intended to withhold the dispensation and all that has been said to the contrary is an invention of ill-intentioned persons.
It is true [there have been delays] to dispense with the obstacles to the marriage … but this was done only from the wish to consider the case more maturely.
The document was to be handed over to Robert Sherborne, Dean of St Paul’s and the English ambassador to the papal court:
There could not be a safer person to whom to entrust it and at the same time the life of that excellent man would be preserved by a journey to England, for a longer stay in Rome would prove fatal to him.
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Julius pointed out, a little primly, that there was absolutely no need to thank him ‘as the Pope cannot be otherwise than gracious and benevolent’.
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Despite these august promises, nothing arrived.
Ferdinand, Duke de Estrada, the Spanish ambassador in London, was in abject despair: ‘I had expected the brief of the Pope containing the dispensation would have come a long while ago,’ he told Isabella. ‘As it has not come, doubts have arisen whether the dispensation will be given and a [papal] brief even seems to confirm these doubts.’ He told the English king that if it did not arrive by the end of August 1504, ‘it would be clear that the Pope did not like to give it’.
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On 28 November, Henry VII wrote to Julius, expressing some barely restrained exasperation:
We had written to Pope Alexander VI and Pope Pius III, asking them to grant the dispensation necessary for the marriage …
Both these Popes, your immediate predecessors, had received our demands so favourably that the dispensation would have been given long ago if they had not so suddenly died.
We have repeated our demands afterwards, very often, in our letters and by our ambassadors.
Julius, Henry reminded the Pope, had promised ‘in different letters and by word of mouth’ to send the dispensation to England with Robert Sherborne, but the envoy had returned empty-handed. ‘It seems,’ added the king with some asperity, ‘as if nothing at all has been done in Rome in this matter.’ He repeated his earnest prayers that permission for the marriage be granted ‘as soon as possible’ and the papal Bull be delivered ‘at once to the English ambassadors who are remaining at Rome’.
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Back in London, Katherine meanwhile had fallen ill, suffering from a malarial fever and frequent stomach cramps. Whether her constitution
had been weakened by worries over the Vatican’s procrastination and her own future must remain a matter for conjecture. On 4 August 1504, Henry VII wrote to her in oily tones:
As you were not well when we left Greenwich, the time which will have passed before we receive good news from you will in any case seem too long.
We love you as our own daughter.
We send one of our most trusty servants not only to visit you but also to do anything for you that may be desirable with respect to your health or that may give you some pleasure.
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After a brief improvement, Katherine suffered a relapse. The Spanish ambassador reported to Queen Isabella that the illness
seems sometimes serious, for the Princess has no appetite and her complexion has changed completely … [She] has had at intervals a bad cold and cough. The physicians have twice purged her and twice attempted to bleed her [in the arm and in the ankle] but no blood came. She desires very much that the operation be repeated, being persuaded that if she were bled, she would be well directly.
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It is likely that Katherine was not only suffering from anaemia but was also born with fragile veins, which went into spasm as the surgeon wielded his scalpel – hence the lack of blood.
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To compound all her troubles, there were quarrels within her largely Spanish household at her lonely home in the Bishop of Ely’s residence, Durham House off The Strand, between the City of London and Westminster.
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Henry VII was now her paymaster, having refused to refund the first portion of her dowry for her marriage with Arthur. She had become a pawn in his diplomatic games, granting her money for her living expenses only when he needed Spanish political support. He brusquely rejected her pleas to settle the strife amongst her servants, pointing out that they were beyond his jurisdiction.
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In Spain, her mother Isabella was dying. A copy of the dispensation was delivered to her on her deathbed, as some kind of papal send-off on
her journey to heaven. It arrived just in time: on 24 November 1504 she was dead. Her eldest surviving daughter Juana, as heir-apparent, became Queen of Castile. She was the wife of Archduke Philip, Duke of Burgundy, the son of Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor. Unfortunately, she was also mad – she suffered from schizophrenia – and Ferdinand moved swiftly to retain control.
At last, in March 1505, Henry VII heard that the original dispensation was on its way to England. Silvestro de’ Gigli, Bishop of Worcester, reported from Rome that it had
pleased his Holiness to command him to go to England with the original Bull of the dispensation for the marriage.
It had grieved his Holiness to learn that copies had been sent from Spain to England of the Bull, which under seal of secrecy, had been sent to Queen Isabella only for her consolation when on her deathbed.

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