On the contrary, far from being ‘implicit’, it took a revolution – and one made in blood – to achieve it.
But things have an end as well as a beginning. And it is equally clear that the Wars of the Roses ended with Henry’s accession in 1509. They had not ended with his father’s victory at Bosworth in 1485. Or with his parents’ marriage the following year. Or with Lincoln’s defeat at Stoke in 1487. Or with the crushing of the Cornish rebels in 1497 and the subsequent capture of Perkin Warbeck. They had not even ended with the surrender of Suffolk, the last pretender, to Henry VII in 1506.
But they did end when Henry came to the throne. And that they did so was personally and directly due to him. His own conjoined descent from York as well Lancaster was important. But so too were his decisions – which had been conditioned by his repeated youthful experiences of pretenders and plots and destructive insecurities – to let bygones be bygones, to knit up old wounds and to restore the surviving members of the house of York (always excepting the inveterate traitor Suffolk and his siblings) to their wealth and dignities.
And, what has been insufficiently appreciated, it worked. The spectre of dynastic conflict, which had stalked England for the last fifty years, is suddenly laid. And it does not walk again. There are later dynastic problems of course. But they are not about York and Lancaster. They are about religion. Some of the Yorkists that the young Henry had restored are involved. But not as Yorkists. Instead, they rebel – or rather dream of rebelling – against him because they disagree with his religious policies.
Between these ends and beginnings, Henry’s is a life which naturally falls in halves. Hence my decision to write it in two volumes. This first volume is intended to establish the authenticity and integrity of the young Henry; the second will be to show what he became and why.
Throughout the subject and focus is Henry – not his wives, his ministers, his courtiers or his children. All of course appear. And I have written at length about most of them elsewhere. Here, however, they only figure in so far as they help to explain Henry. And the same goes for everything else. I have drawn on an enormous variety of sources, from music and poetry to theology, architecture and marine engineering. But there are no separate studies of these subjects. They are there – as indeed are the politics, the diplomacy, the finance and the administration – only because they illuminate Henry.
This is, after all, a biography; it is not a life and times or, still less, a history of the reign.
I have incurred many debts in writing and researching this book: to my old friend Margaret Condon for allowing me to use her unpublished ‘Itinerary’ of Henry VII; to Sean Cunningham and Adrian Ailes of The National Archives for checking references and documents; to Adrian Ailes for his further help with heraldry; to Andrea Clarke of the British Library for checking documents and references there and for translating Spanish; to Steven Gunn of Merton College, Oxford for blazing a trail through the obscure last years of Henry VII which the rest of us gratefully follow; to the staff of the London Library who have made it possible for me to write this book here in Kent; to my editor, Arabella Pike and my agent, Peter Robinson for their encouragement, criticism and support, and, above all, to my partner, James Brown, who as usual has read and commented on each chapter as it was written and – not least – put up with me while I was writing them.
The Red House
Barham, near Canterbury
August 2008
HENRY, SON OF HENRY VII and Elizabeth of York, was born on 28 June 1491 at Greenwich, the royal manor on the south bank of the Thames some five miles to the east of London. He was their third child and second son, and he was christened in the adjacent church of the Friars Observant by Richard Foxe, then bishop of Exeter, lord privy seal and one of his father’s leading ministers.1
These bare facts are all that has been known hitherto about Henry’s birth. But somehow they have never seemed quite enough. Fortunately, another piece of evidence has turned up which makes clear that Henry was christened with all the pompous ritual laid down in the handbook of court protocol, known as The Ryalle Book.2
How really could it have been otherwise?
The christening, like most of the ceremonies of the Tudor court, combined the sacred with the secular. And each reinforced the theatricality of the other. First a stage was built, consisting of a tall circular wooden platform with tiers of steps and a central iron post. The assisting clergy stood on the lower steps, leaving the upper step and the reinforced top, with the massive silver font in its centre, free for the stars of the show: Bishop Foxe and Henry.
And heaven help any officious priest or deacon who spoiled the view!
Next, the Tudors’ love of rich, many-textured fabrics came into play. These were the principal source of decoration in a court that was always on the move: they could transform a bare and empty chamber in a long unlived-in palace in an hour or two; they could also turn, equally briskly, the plain box of the Friars’ church into a setting worthy of the prince that Henry was to be. In charge of these fabrics were the specialist staffs of the royal wardrobes, who now took over.
Benjamin Digby, yeoman of the queen’s wardrobe of the beds, and his men covered the wood and iron of the platform with gaily coloured cloth; hung a fringed and embroidered cloth-of-gold canopy over the font from ‘line’ or cords; lined and wrapped the font with fine linen or ‘lawn’ and trimmed its edge with a sheer, almost translucent stuff known as ‘Cypress’ from its original place of manufacture. Finally, other household officers clad the walls of the church with cloth-of-gold and tapestries and laid rich carpets on the floor.3
The stagery complete, the performance could begin. Henry was undressed in the ‘traverse’ or tent-like green room, where more Cypress had been used to cover and draught-proof the adjacent windows. Then Foxe gave him his name and plunged him bodily three times into the waters of the font. Even this had been stage-managed, as the water had been gently warmed beforehand so as not to shock Henry and make him spoil the show by crying.
A new Christian had entered the world, and a new royal prince was ready to take his place in the firmament. Trumpets sounded, the attendants lit their torches, the heralds put on their gold-embroidered tabards and Henry, wrapped in a mantle of cloth-of-gold furred with ermine and clutching a decorated and lighted candle in his hands, was carried in triumph in a burst of light and sound.
Henry had come into the world on a stage; he would live on one and die on one.
Not, it must be admitted, that anybody at the time took much notice.
No chronicler, herald or contemporary historian gave the event more than a passing – and usually retrospective – mention. None of his father’s poets laureate was inspired to commemorative verse. Even his grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, only noted the bare details of his birth in the calendar of the book of hours which she used as a sort of family chronicle.4
How did it come to pass that the Tudor who would make most noise in the world should enter