Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII (4 page)

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Authors: Robert Hutchinson

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His spontaneous action, born out of natural paternal pride, was Henry’s only public acknowledgement of the tender years of his second son. Perhaps it was also tempered by his relief that the ceremony had passed off so successfully.
The next day, Saturday 1 November, was the Feast of All Hallows, one of the great red-letter days in the calendar of the royal court.
It was the day selected for the creation of Henry as Duke of York and the king was up early, attending the religious office of matins in St Stephen’s at cockcrow before returning to his chamber to don his robes of royal estate. He then processed to the Parliament Chamber and stood waiting on a dais beneath a great canopy of cloth of gold, surrounded by a throng of prelates, wearing their mitres and pontifical vestments, and the premier nobility of the realm. Ranged down the sides of the chamber were the judges in their coifs and red robes; Richard Chawry, Lord Mayor of London, and his aldermen, and ‘a great press of knights and esquires’. Above, from a windowed chamber or closet, the queen and her mother-in-law looked down on the vibrant proceedings, probably in some anxiety lest the child now disgrace himself before all the spiritual and temporal peers and a host of commoners of England.
Amid the shuffling of feet and suppressed coughing, a small procession approached the king. Sir John Writhe, Garter King of Arms and principal herald, stepped forward and, bowing low, presented the letters patent – the document creating the new Duke of York. Three other nobles accompanied him, one carrying a ‘rich sword’, the hilt uppermost, another the ducal rod or staff of gold and the third an ermine cap of estate with a duke’s coronet. Behind came Sir George Talbot, Fourth Earl of Shrewsbury, a veteran of the Battle of Stoke Field, carrying the toddler duke in his arms. He gently set him down, and the Marquis of Dorset and the Earl of Arundel helped the child walk through the chamber, halting him immediately in front of the king.
Oliver King, now Bishop of Exeter and the king’s secretary, read out the letters patent, which included a handsome annuity of £1,000 a year (£538,000 in current values) to the holder of the dukedom. The king then solemnly invested his son with all the noble accoutrements of a duke – the sword, the cap and coronet and the rod of gold – and, the
ceremony over, moved back into St Stephen’s Chapel for a solemn High Mass. Much, much later, when he ruled England, Henry VIII carefully amended the herald’s report of the ceremony, inserting a phrase demonstrating that he had, as a child, carried ‘his verge [rod] of gold in his hand’ and clarifying the difference in roles of John Lord Dynham, the Lord Treasurer of England, and Sir Thomas Lovell, now Treasurer of the Household.
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This could not be just mere pedantry. It was a conscious decision to call for the manuscript and check its contents. Perhaps Henry was anxious to demonstrate his royal bearing, even at an early age. Certainly that occasion spawned his later delight in gaudy pageantry and lavish ceremonial.
Back in 1494, his father stood in the dean’s pew in the choir stalls and organised the procession into St Stephen’s Chapel, but four of his noblemen, cursed with a frightful sense of timing, bickered loudly over their order of precedence, an unseemly argument swiftly resolved by a few short, sharp words from the king. Mass was then celebrated by Cardinal John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Henry’s Lord Chancellor, assisted by eight bishops and a whole chant of mitred abbots.
All then processed through Westminster Hall, the Earl of Shrewsbury carrying a desperately tired, if not overexcited, new Duke of York in his arms.
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Substantial gratuities must have been provided to the heralds, for after the second course of a bewildering array of choice meat and fish dishes, Garter led his brother officers to thank the king. They also cried ‘largess’ for the generosity of the newly created duke – which naturally had been supplied by his father. In ringing tones, they then proclaimed young Henry’s new style and title for the first time in French – ‘the most high, mighty and excellent prince, second son of the king our sovereign lord, Duke of York, Lieutenant-General of Ireland, Earl Marshal, Marshal of England, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports’.
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After the strain and exhaustion of all the official ceremonies, now came the reward of spectacular entertainment for the three year old. Celebratory jousts in his honour were held over three days at Westminster from 9 November – the first witnessed by the little boy.
These had been delayed for two days by Henry VII’s decision to take advantage of the presence of most senior members of the English nobility to hold two impromptu council meetings, both attended by Sir William Stanley, even though the king was well aware of his suspect loyalty.
When the jousts were finally staged, little Henry must have wriggled and squirmed with excitement as he sat alongside his mother and father in a grandstand richly hung with blue Arras cloth decorated with gold fleur-de-lis, watching the armoured contestants ride out of Westminster Hall, their horses trapped with the Tudor colours of green and white, tiny bells tied to the coursers’ manes. It must have been an especial thrill to see the challengers wearing the Duke of York’s new personal livery of blue and tawny brown.
Henry’s five-year-old sister Margaret presented the prizes to the winning knights after three days of jousting, which included a diamond-studded gold ring to the leading challenger, Edmund de la Pole, Sixth Earl of Suffolk, younger brother of the rebel Earl of Lincoln who had been killed seven years before at Stoke Field.
The thunder of the steeds’ hooves; the jingling of their harness; the splintering crashes as the competitors’ lances ‘shivered’ (broke) against shield, body or helmet; and the screeching clash of sword on armour: all must have thrilled the toddler – and imbued Henry with his future passion for the chivalry and spectacle of the tournament.
The following month he was appointed the figurehead Warden of the Scottish Marches, covering the vulnerable border region with England’s sometimes truculent neighbour.
That Christmas was spent at Greenwich, but less than a week after Twelfth Night – 6 January 1495 – Henry VII moved back upriver to the Tower of London. Messengers had brought the startling news that one of Warbeck’s supporters, Sir Robert Clifford, had seemingly turned coat and held important information about the extent of the domestic conspiracy against the Tudor crown. In reality, Clifford – who had fought for Henry at Stoke and had been knighted afterwards – was almost certainly one of the king’s spies. The historian Polydore Vergil claimed the move to the Tower was to enable Henry VII to ‘imprison
in that safe place any members of the plot whom [Clifford] might name’.
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Stanley was ‘suddenly arrested and put under sure keeping’, as were a number of others, including William Worsley, Dean of St Paul’s, and William Richford, the Provincial of the Dominican Order of the Black Friars, ‘one of the most famous preachers at that time about London’. The last two were pardoned but died shortly afterwards.
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Stanley was arraigned on treason charges at the Court of King’s Bench in Westminster Hall on 6/7 February and was beheaded nine days later.
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The life of the former Lord Steward, Sir John Radcliffe, Baron Fitzwalter, was spared and he was sentenced to life imprisonment, but was executed in November 1495 in Calais after a failed escape. Clifford received an opportune royal pardon for his evident offences and £500 in cash for information received.
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He was later rewarded with the appointments of Knight of the Body and Master of Henry VII’s Ordnance.
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This fresh plot against the Tudor crown seemed to have been nipped in the bud, but Warbeck remained in Burgundy, a dormant threat beyond the reach of the king.
He was quick to take advantage of Henry VII’s absence on royal progress in Lancashire and the North. After becoming becalmed, the pretender had arrived off Deal in Kent on 3 July 1495, with troops and ships paid for by Burgundian cash. Warbeck mistakenly expected to rally popular support for his cause. The partisan historian Edward Hall was contemptuous of this forlorn hope of an invasion force:
So gathering a great army of valiant captains of all nations … some English sanctuary men, some thieves, robbers and vagabonds which [desired] only to live of[f] robbery and rapine, came to be his servants and soldiers.
The Kentish men, hearing that this feigned duke was come and … that he was but a painted image … thought it neither expedient or profitable … to aid and assist him.
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Warbeck – wisely, perhaps – decided not to disembark from his ship, as the four hundred troops who came ashore were quickly cut off by the local militia and one hundred and fifty hacked to pieces before the
handful of survivors were driven back in panic to their ships. A further one hundred and sixty were taken prisoner and dragged off to London ‘railed in ropes like a team [of] horses drawing … a cart’.
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These riffraff soldiers of fortune were executed, some in London and others in towns along the coasts of Kent, Sussex and Norfolk, and their corpses were left hanging to rot near the high-water mark as a terrible warning to those who contemplated insurrection.
Warbeck may have been down, but he was not out. He sailed on to Ireland and there, with support from Maurice Fitzgerald, Ninth Earl of Desmond, besieged Waterford that August. His ships, however, were driven off after eleven days’ determined resistance by the city and he fled to Scotland and the protection of King James IV, who was always delighted to be a thorn in England’s side.
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He promptly fed and clothed ‘Prince Richard of England’ and provided him with spending money. Furthermore, Warbeck married the king’s cousin, Catherine Gordon, daughter of George Gordon, Second Earl of Huntly – ‘a young virgin of excellent beauty and virtue’ – on 13 January 1496 and was granted the munificent pension of £112 a month. It was the closest he came to any pretence of royalty.
Warbeck was certainly dogged in his attempts to claim the English crown; some might have considered him almost suicidally so. If he hoped for more than half-hearted Scottish military support, James was too crafty to supply it, even though Warbeck had promised him the handsome prize of the border fortress town of Berwick-upon-Tweed.
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In September 1496 the pretender led just 1,400 men into England, hoping to rally the population of Northumberland to his standard.
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It quickly became merely another tiresome border raid. After just three days of pillaging and burning, it was obvious that his cause was as unpopular in the north as it had been in Kent and he quickly retreated to Scotland, his tail between his legs.
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Far away from the alarums of the north, family life for the real Duke of York still centred on his nursery at Eltham Palace. He was to see little of his elder brother and lived away from his father for much of his young life.
There are only fleeting glimpses of father and son together during
this period. On 17 May 1495, young Henry received the Garter, the highest order of chivalry in England. He wore a long crimson velvet gown and bonnet of the same material, specially made for the occasion.
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Later that year the king paid out £7 10s for ‘diverse yards of silk bought for my lord of York and [his sister] my lady Margaret’. The royal accounts for 1496 – 7 also record purchases of a furred gown in black camlet,
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a black satin coat and a scarlet petticoat for Henry. Thriftily, an old lambskin garment of his was repaired so it could be used as a gown, as good as new. There was an order on 4 December for a crimson velvet gown trimmed with black lamb’s wool, possibly intended for little Henry to wear that coming Christmas, as a present from his father.
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The child would have noticed the increasing absences from play of his younger sister Elizabeth. Unknown to the royal physicians, she was suffering from atrophy, a wasting disease caused by the breakdown of her body’s tissues, and on Saturday 14 September 1495 Henry’s sibling and playmate died at Eltham Palace, aged three years and two months.
Her funeral, attended by one hundred poor men in black gowns and hoods, was arranged by Cardinal Morton; the newly appointed Lord Chamberlain, Giles, Lord Daubeney; and the Lord High Treasurer, John, Lord Dynham, at an unusually high cost for a child of £318.
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She was buried in Westminster Abbey, as close as possible to the sacred shrine of St Edward the Confessor, beneath a Purbeck marble tomb-chest with her effigy in gilded copper placed on the black marble cover-stone. Her Latin epitaph read:
The royal child lies after death in this sarcophagus,
A young noble Elizabeth, an illustrious princess,
The daughter of King Henry VII
Who holds the flourishing sceptres of two kingdoms.
Atropos, the severe messenger of death, took her away
But may there be eternal life for her above in heaven.
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The loss of Elizabeth was eased by the birth of another sister, Mary, on 18 March 1496, who joined Margaret and Henry in the nursery at Eltham.
Henry’s first public duty came at Windsor on 21 September 1496,
when he was aged five. This was his formal witnessing of a royal grant of a charter to the abbot and convent of Glastonbury to hold two annual fairs in the Somerset town.
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Paradoxically, forty-three years later as king, he destroyed the abbey during the Dissolution of the Monasteries and had its last abbot brutally hanged for high treason.
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