Henry and I go back a long way.
My first essays at Cambridge were on his grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort,
and his second wife, Anne Boleyn. My doctoral dissertation was a study of
his privy chamber and its staff. One of them, William Compton, has a part
here.
He was Henry’s groom of the stool and I have only to write the words to be
carried back almost four decades to the Cambridge University Library tearoom
circa 1970. It is about 3.30pm and I have met up with my fellow members of
Geoffrey Elton’s research seminar. We are a noisy, gregarious, grub-loving
group. I am eating lemon cake. I am also drinking lemon tea. And I am
talking. And talking. About Henry and his groom of the stool. “Did you know
the groom was act-ually” - I overemphasise the first syllable as though
already on TV - “in charge of Henry’s close-stool? What? Oh, that’s the
royal loo. He even describes the contents. He may very well have wiped the
royal bottom...”
No wonder my dissertation became known as doctoral faeces (say it fast!).
Happy days. Another Cambridge scene, this time from my undergraduate days. I
am in one of Elton’s lectures and nodding off. Suddenly, I jolt awake.
“Henry VIII,” Elton announces, “is the only king whose shape you remember.”
Then he draws a quick sketch. First, a trapezium for the body. Then two
splayed lines for the legs. A pair of triangles form the arms. The head and
neck are a single oblong, surmounted by an angled line for the hat. Pause
for laughter. Then, playing to the audience, Elton adds another, inverted
triangle for the codpiece. More laughter and applause.
Elton was of course right. Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII is almost too
memorable. For it not only eclipses other English monarchs, with the
exception of Henry’s daughter Elizabeth. It also obscures the other Henry.
The point is this: there are two Henrys, the one old, the other young. And
they are very different. Holbein’s Henry is the king of his last dozen or so
years, when he was - in Charles Dickens’s glorious phrase - a spot of blood
and grease on the history of England. This is the hulking tyrant, with a
face like a Humpty Dumpty of nightmare, who broke with Rome and made himself
head of the church; who married six wives, of whom he divorced two and
divorced and executed two others; who dissolved 600 monasteries and
shattered the religious pieties of a thousand years; who beheaded nobles and
ministers, including those who had been his friends, castrated,
disembowelled and quartered rebels and traitors, boiled poisoners and burned
heretics.
But this book is about the other Henry: the young, handsome prince, musical
and learned as no English ruler had been for centuries. He was
conventionally pious. He proclaimed “I loved true where I did marry”, and
meant it. He determined to knit up the wounds of the Wars of the Roses.
Hence my decision to write Henry’s life in two volumes. This first is
intended to establish the authenticity and integrity of the young Henry; the
second will be to show what he became and why.
Although she was the widow of his elder brother, Henry really does seem to
have chosen Catherine of Aragon for himself. And he was - or at least he
persuaded himself that he was - seriously in love with her. He wrote to her
father, Ferdinand, “even if we were still free, it is she ... we would
choose for our wife before all other”. That was in July 1509, a month after
their wedding and in the first flush of marital happiness. Their first
summer progress ended in late October at Greenwich. This was Henry’s
birthplace, the couple had been married there, and, they decided, it would
be where their first child was born as well.
For Catherine was pregnant. Henry informed Ferdinand at the beginning of
November. “Your daughter with the favour of heaven has conceived in her womb
a living child, and is right heavy herewith.” By then, if later calculations
about the date of the delivery are to be believed, Catherine was about five
months pregnant. Then at Westminster on the morning of January 31 she
suddenly miscarried of a baby girl. According to her confessor, the
miscarriage was kept secret, so that “no one knew ... except the king ...
two Spanish women, a physician and I”. Instead of diminishing, however,
Catherine’s belly, if anything, got bigger. This was probably the result of
infection, but her physician persuaded himself she remained pregnant with a
second foetus. And, despite Catherine’s own doubts and the fact that her
periods resumed, he was believed.
The ceremonious machinery of a royal birth now moved inexorably into gear. In
mid-February the Venetian ambassador “congratulated the king on the queen’s
pregnancy” and on the 26th a warrant was issued for the materials needed to
refurbish “our nursery, God willing”. Soon after, the court moved to
Greenwich and the queen began herfor-mal confinement. Henry - like many
expectant fathers - flung himself into preparations. First he turned his
mind to the important business of the christening. The precedents of his own
birth and those of his siblings were pored over and the Ryalle Book
consulted. He signed the necessary warrant on March 12. This ordered the
supply of red cloth to cover the steps of the font and “cypress” to line it.
The font itself was to be the great silver font of Canterbury, in which the
baby Henry had been plunged by Bishop Foxe. The warrant was dated at
Greenwich in “the first year of our reign”. But the day - that all-important
day when Catherine would be delivered - was left blank.
That day never came. It was not for want of waiting. For calculations in these
matters were never precise. Thus, probably, Henry consoled himself as
Catherine remained in her courtly purdah for March. And April. And on into
May.
But then he snapped. He had not had sex with Catherine since she entered her
darkened, tapestry-hung chamber in early March, and his patience was
exhausted. Moreover, inside the birthing chamber - impenetrable to men - the
truth was dawning on the queen’s terrified entourage. For her “right heavy
belly” began to go down of its own accord.
Wise after the event, the newly arrived Spanish ambassador, Luis Caroz, railed
at the folly of supposed experts who would “affirm that a menstruating woman
was pregnant and ... make her withdraw publicly for her delivery”.
But that did not solve the problem of how to break the news to Henry. Finally
it was probably Catherine herself who plucked up the courage. Her pregnancy
had been a false one. Henry had been misled into taking part in a very
public and humiliating farce.
There was also the problem of going public with the news and what spin to put
upon it. This exercised all those in the know. Ambassador Caroz first
discussed it with the council. And then, in view of the delicacy of the
matter, he had an audience with Henry. Finally, as governments usually do in
such circumstances, they decided to lie. The queen, it was blandly
announced, had suffered a miscarriage. The “news” was current in London in
the first week of June, and on the eighth the Venetian ambassador reported
it in despatches: “The queen”, he wrote, “has had a miscarriage, to the
great sorrow of everyone.” “They are forming fresh projects,” he added,
somewhat mysteriously.
But it was not only the government that lied. So did Catherine. And to her own
father, to whom she repeated the official line in a letter written in her
own hand.
And one lie tends to lead to another. “She and the king her husband are
cheerful,” she protested to her father. In fact, they had just had their
first serious quarrel. This also had arisen out of her false pregnancy.
Henry, as we have seen, had been excluded from his wife’s bed, by both
etiquette and respect for her supposed condition, for nearly three months.
And the strain was beginning to tell.
Ambassador Caroz reported the resulting imbroglio to his government in cipher
and breathless haste. Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, had two sisters,
Elizabeth and Anne. Both lived in the palace as the queen’s
ladies-in-waiting and both were married, Elizabeth to Robert Ratcliffe, Lord
Fitzwalter, and Anne to George Hastings, Lord Hastings. Anne soon caught the
eye of Henry, “who”, Caroz reports knowingly, “went after her”.
Elizabeth, seriously concerned at the threat to her sister’s virtue, took her
brother the duke, her husband and her brother-in-law Lord Hastings into her
confidence. Buckingham reacted with typical choleric impetuosity. He was in
Anne’s chamber at court when William Compton entered to woo her on Henry’s
behalf. The duke “reproached [him] in many and very hard words”.
It was now Henry’s turn to lose his temper and “he reprimanded the duke
angrily”. Outraged, Buckingham withdrew in a huff from court, while Hastings
packed Anne off to a convent 60 miles away. The day after Anne’s removal,
Henry turned Elizabeth and Fitzwalter out of the palace. He believed
Elizabeth had other minions who went “about the palace insidiously spying
out every unwatched moment in order to tell the queen”. Henry wanted to
expel all these as well until he decided it would cause “too great a
scandal”.
The damage was done. The affair became public knowledge. As did the fact
Catherine had sided with Buckingham against her husband. “Afterwards,” Caroz
reports, “almost all knew the queen had been vexed with the king, and the
king with her, and thus this storm went on between them.”
But then there was another twist. Henry had continued to sleep with Catherine
until the very eve of her confinement. By late May, when she finally gave up
on her false pregnancy, she wasreallypregnant. And this time all went
smoothly. At the end of October, the couple took up residence at Richmond.
In November, the formal preparations for the lying-in and christening got
under way and the prior of Canterbury was put on stand-by to send up the
font. Towards the end of the month, Catherine began her confinement, which
continued through the Christmas festivities. Then, on New Year’s Eve, she
went into labour and the baby was born at half past one the following
morning.
It was healthy. It was a boy. It was the best New Year’s gift that Henry had
ever received.
London went wild: bells were rung; bonfires lit; the streets ran with wine;
thanksgiving processions of clergy wended through the City; and at the Tower
the gunners blasted their way through 207lb of gunpowder as the great cannon
thundered out salute after salute.
The christening took place on the following Sunday, January 5. The king of
France was godfather and the Habsburg Archduchess Margaret godmother; the
ambassadors of France, Spain, Venice and the papacy were in attendance and
the boy was christened Henry. That same day Henry, bursting with pride and
love, issued a challenge to a celebratory tournament. He then went on a
pilgrimage of thanksgiving to Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk.
Henry was back at the Tower by January 31, 1511. By this time Catherine was
“churched”, or ritually purified from the pollution of childbirth. She was
also recovered from its after-effects and ready to preside over the joust in
her honour. These took place at Westminster on February 12 and 13 and were
of unparalleled magnificence. Everything was blue velvet, damask and
cloth-of-gold, and the costumes and pavilions of Henry and his three fellow
challengers were covered with letters of “H” and “K”, likewise of fine gold.
Henry as Coeur Loyall (‘Sir Loyal Heart’) stole the show. When he came in
front of the queen’s grandstand or tent, he “leapt and coursed the horse up
and down in wonderful manner”. Finally, he turned his horse’s hooves against
the massive wooden barrier or tilt which ran down the centre of the lists
and “caused him to fling and beat the boards with his feet”. The noise was
ear-splitting and “rebounded about the place as it had been shot of guns”.
Finally, Henry turned to the queen, “made a lowly obeisance [bow] and so
passed in a demure manner into Westminster Hall”. There he quickly unarmed
and returned to Catherine’s grandstand, “where shortly after ... he was seen
... kissing and clipping [hugging] her in most loving manner”. Never had
Henry been so in love with Catherine as at that moment; never would he be so
fully again.
Ten days later, on February 23, the little Prince Henry died at Richmond.
Something in Henry died too. And he never went on pilgrimage to Walsingham
again.
© David Starkey
Edited extract of Henry, Virtuous Prince by David Starkey (Harper Press £25).
Buy it at The Sunday Times BooksFirst price of £22.50 (inc p&P);
0870 165 8585, timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
