The birth of his first child, the king decided, would be no ordinary affair. It would take place at Winchester. And it would invoke the atmosphere of history and romance that hung around the place. For Winchester was believed to be the site of King Arthur’s castle and capital of Camelot. After all, as Caxton had just pointed out in his new edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, published only the month before Bosworth, the Round Table itself was still there to prove it.3
Then, having been born in Arthur’s capital, the child would be christened Arthur too, and Britain’s golden age would be renewed.
It was a giddy prospect indeed. But it depended on one enormous assumption: that the child the queen was carrying was a son. Presumably the royal doctors and astrologers had declared this to be the case. And the king must have believed them. For if he were not confident that the child could be christened Arthur, what was the point of dragging the court, the heavily pregnant queen, and the whole bulky apparatus of royal ceremonial some sixty-odd miles to Winchester, over roads that had turned into muddy quagmires in the torrential autumn rains?4
It was a tremendous gamble (imagine the shame and confusion if the child had turned out to be a girl!). Yet the gamble paid off, as Henry VII’s gambles always seemed to.
But only just. The court arrived at Winchester at the beginning of September. Less than three weeks later, Elizabeth of York went into labour and the child was born in the early hours of 20 September 1486, ‘afore one o’clock after midnight’, as Lady Margaret Beaufort noted in her book of hours.5
The birth was at least a month premature.
Perhaps the queen had been shaken by the journey, in her gaily decorated but springless carriage or, when the going got really rough, in her litter slung between two horses. Or perhaps it was merely the difficulties of a first pregnancy.
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But at least the child was healthy, and – above all – it was the promised boy. The Te Deum was sung in the cathedral, bonfires lit in the streets and messengers sent off with the good news to the four corners of the kingdom.6
It remained only to get the ceremonies of his baptism – dislocated by his premature birth – back on track. The main problem was the whereabouts of the intended godfather, the earl of Oxford. He was still at Lavenham, the immensely rich cloth-making town that was the jewel in the crown of the de Vere family’s principal estates in Suffolk. Lavenham was over a hundred miles from Winchester, and the roads were getting slower by the hour as the rains continued. To give Oxford time to make the journey, the christening was put back to Sunday, 24 September.
On the day appointed, the other actors assembled: the prince’s procession formed in his mother’s apartments; while the clergy and his godmother, the queen dowager Elizabeth Woodville, who had been restored to the title and lands which had been forfeit under Richard III, prepared to receive the baby in the cathedral. The earl, they were then informed, was ‘within a mile’. It was decided to wait for him.
They kept on waiting. And waiting.
Finally, after ‘three hours largely and more’, and with still no sight of Oxford, Henry VII intervened. As protocol dictated, the king was out of sight. But he was never out of touch, and, losing patience at last, he ordered the ceremonies to begin. The prince was named and baptised with a substitute godparent, Thomas Stanley, the king’s stepfather, who had been made earl of Derby as a reward for his family’s behaviour at Bosworth, as his sponsor.7
At this moment, Oxford entered. John de Vere, 13th earl of Oxford, was probably the most powerful man in England after the king; he was certainly the noblest, with an earldom going back to 1142. He had been a Lancastrian loyalist even in the dark days after the destruction of the house of Lancaster at Tewkesbury in 1471, and had been imprisoned by Edward IV. In 1484 he escaped and joined Henry Tudor in France. Almost all of his other supporters were tarnished with accommodation at the least with Edward IV; Oxford was unblemished and Henry, who trusted so few, felt he could trust him implicitly, as one ‘in whom he might repose his hope, and settle himself more safely than in any other’.8 It was a relationship that endured, and Oxford became both Henry VII’s most important military commander and – by virtue of his hereditary office of lord great chamberlain, to which he was restored – his leading courtier as well.
Oxford now assumed his intended role in the ceremonies. He ‘took the prince in his right arm’ – the arm that had fought so often for Lancaster – and presented him for his Confirmation. That done, another procession formed and the child was carried to the shrine of St Swithun, the patron saint of the cathedral, in whose honour more anthems were sung.
The adults then took refreshments – ‘spices and hypocras, with other sweet wines [in] great plenty’ – while the prince was handed back to the Lady Cecily, the queen’s eldest sister, who carried him home in triumph with ‘all the torches burning’. The procession passed through the nursery, ‘the king’s trumpets and minstrels playing on their instruments’, and brought him at last to his father and mother, who gave him their blessing.
Arthur’s christening was the first of the many spectacular ceremonies that Henry VII used to mark each stage of the advance and consolidation of the Tudor dynasty. Like its successors, it was carefully planned, staged and recorded. It also showed Henry VII’s bold eye for theatre – and his willingness to take the risks that all great theatre involves.
Finally, and above all, its scale and ambition make clear why Henry’s own christening ceremonies at Greenwich, which were almost domestic in comparison, were so comprehensively ignored by contemporaries.
The court remained at Winchester for the next five or six weeks. Partly this was out of necessity. The queen was ill with an ‘ague’, which was almost certainly a post-partum fever following a difficult birth, and was taking time to recover. Indeed, she seems to have attributed her recovery and her child’s survival only to the attentions of Alice Massy, her obstetrix or midwife, whom she insisted on using for all her future births. There were also the formalities of her ‘churching’, or ceremonial purification from the pollution of childbirth, to go through. For most women, the church would only perform the ceremony after sixty days had elapsed from the time of delivery. For the queen this was normally abbreviated to about forty, as indeed seems to have been the case on this occasion.9
The time appears to have been put to good use as well to finalize the details of Arthur’s upbringing during his infancy – and perhaps beyond.
The basic arrangements for the upbringing of the little prince were already in place. One of the ladies who had attended the christening was ‘my lady Darcy, lady mistress’. This was Elizabeth, Lady Darcy, the widow of Sir Robert Darcy. She was the best-qualified person possible for the job, since she had fulfilled the same function, which carried overall charge of the royal nursery, for Edward IV’s eldest son, Edward.10 The substantial fee, of 40 marks, or £26.13s.4d a year, was commensurate with the responsibilities of the post.
Almost as well paid, with £20 per annum, was Arthur’s wet-nurse, Catherine Gibbs, who as was then customary suckled the boy on his mother’s behalf.11 This was double the amount that would be paid to the nurses of subsequent royal children, including Henry himself, and it