Henry: Virtuous Prince. David Starkey

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ a magnificent court as a matter of both policy and personal preference. This lover of life also loved his food, and he became grossly fat in his declining years.

      No one, in short, since Edward III had looked or behaved more like a king. And no one looked more like his future grandson, Henry VIII.

      He even married for love.

      His bride was a young widow, Elizabeth Woodville, whom he wed secretly in 1464, after a whirlwind courtship. She was bold, beautiful and came from famously fertile stock. Eighteen months later she presented Edward IV with a daughter, who was named Elizabeth after her mother and would become our Henry’s mother in turn. Two more daughters followed.

      But the marriage was controversial from the start. Elizabeth Woodville, as a subject and a widow, was wholly unsuitable as a royal bride. And she was personally contentious as well. Arrogant, low-born and grasping – with eleven brothers and sisters to provide for as well as the two sons of her first marriage – she went out of her way to alienate powerful Yorkist supporters, including the king’s mother and brothers.

      The result was that in 1470, affronted Yorkists joined with renegade Lancastrians to drive Edward IV into exile and restore Henry VI to the throne.

      The ‘readeption’ of Henry VI, as it was known, turned the world upside down – not least for our Henry’s future parents. For his father, Henry Tudor, then in his early teens, it meant a return to quasi-royal status. Back in 1461, with his powerful Lancastrian connexions, he had been part of the spoils of Yorkist victory, and had been made the ward of the Herbert family of Raglan Castle. They were the Tudors’ Yorkist rivals in south Wales. But, paradoxically, his years at Raglan Castle were the most stable of Henry Tudor’s youth: the Herberts looked after him well, brought him up carefully and intended him to become their son-in-law as husband of their eldest daughter.

But, as the Yorkist following started to splinter in the late 1460s, Henry Tudor’s guardian was among the first to be killed in the struggle. The boy was rescued by his uncle, Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke, who escorted him to London to have an audience with his other uncle, the restored King Henry VI. The audience took place on 27 October 1470. And it was then, if later Tudor accounts are to be believed, that Henry VI prophesied that ‘This … is he unto whom both we and our adversaries must yield and give over the dominion.’4

      * * *

      For Henry’s future mother, on the other hand, the ‘readeption’ spelt humiliation and disaster. Probably, as she was then aged four, it was among her earliest memories. She had been with her mother, Elizabeth Woodville, and two younger sisters in the Tower of London, where the queen was getting ready for the elaborate ceremonies of her fourth confinement. But on 1 October 1470 news came of her father’s flight into exile. Immediately, vicious rioting broke out, and not even the Tower seemed safe. That night, the queen, with Elizabeth and her two sisters, ‘secretly’ took boat to Westminster ‘and there registered her and such as her belonged as sanctuary folk’.

Elizabeth and her mother had begun the day as queen and princess of England; they ended it as refugees. But as York sank, Lancaster rose. On 3 October, Henry VI was released from his prison, where he had not been ‘so cleanly kept as should seem such a prince’, and was ceremoniously conducted to ‘the king’s lodgings where the queen before lay’.5

      No doubt he slept in her very bed.

Meanwhile, in the sanctuary, Elizabeth and her mother found themselves dependent on the charity of friends and foes alike. A London butcher, William Gould, gave them out of ‘great kindness and true heart’ the carcasses of half a cow and two sheep to feed their household each week; Thomas Millyng, the abbot of Westminster, went out of his way to befriend them; even Henry VI’s government provided (and paid for) the services of Elizabeth, Lady Scrope of Bolton, as the queen’s lady-in-waiting.6

A month later, on 2 November, Elizabeth Woodville was safely delivered of a son. Her own doctor and midwife were in attendance. But, since she was a mere ex-queen, there was no ceremony. There was ‘little pomp’ either when the child was christened in the Abbey, with Millyng and the prior as godfathers and Lady Scrope as godmother.7

      Nevertheless, he was named ‘Edward’ after his father – and in the hope of better times.

      And the good times soon returned. Only two years earlier, in July 1468, Edward IV’s sister Margaret had married Charles the Bold, the most magnificent and ostentatious ruler of the day. As duke of Burgundy, Charles was a prince of the blood royal of France. But his real power came from his control of the Netherlands, a patchwork of cities and territories which included not only the modern Netherlands, but also present-day Belgium and much of north-eastern France. It was the richest area of Europe outside Italy, and was England’s principal trading partner.

      Here Edward IV found refuge in his exile. Nevertheless, despite their close relationship, Charles’s initial welcome was cool. It became much warmer in December 1470 when Louis XI of France, the ally and patron of the new Lancastrian regime, declared war on Charles. Duke Charles riposted by agreeing to support Edward IV in a bid to recover England.

      Things were going Edward IV’s way in England as well. Henry VI ‘readepted’ was no more effectual than he had been the first time round. And the unholy alliance of Yorkists and Lancastrians that had restored him was coming apart. The result was that when Edward IV landed in Yorkshire in March 1471 his invasion soon turned into a promenade. As he marched south, troops flocked to join his little army of 1,500 men and he entered London unopposed.

Once again, it was all change, as Henry’s grandfather confronted his great-uncle. Edward IV took the surrender of Henry VI, unkinged him for a second time and sent him back to his prison in the Tower. Then he went to Westminster to liberate his queen and children from the sanctuary. Elizabeth Woodville’s first gesture was to present him with his first-born son Edward – the son he had never seen – ‘to the king’s greatest joy … [and] his heart’s singular comfort and gladness’.8

      Elizabeth, for her part, probably never forgot that moment either.

      It was the eve of Easter, and Edward IV’s enemies expected him to pause for the court’s customary elaborate devotions. Instead, he took them off-guard and defeated both groups in turn: the ex-Yorkists at Barnet and the Lancastrians at Tewkesbury.

      This time, he decided, there would be no survivors. The Lancastrian prince of Wales and the last Beaufort duke of Somerset were killed in the battle, and Henry VI himself was done to death in the Tower with a heavy blow to the back of the head. No one, a Yorkist chronicler exulted, of ‘the stock of Lancaster remained among the living’ who could claim the throne.

      No one, that is, apart from Henry’s father, Henry Tudor.

      He and his uncle Jasper, earl of Pembroke, were in south Wales at the time of Tewkesbury. In the wake of the disaster, they retreated first to Pembroke Castle and then, in late September 1471, took ship from Tenby. It would be fourteen years before Henry Tudor saw either England or his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, again.

      Jasper and Henry Tudor had intended to seek refuge in France. Instead, autumn storms drove them ashore in Brittany. Brittany was the last of the great French duchies to retain its virtual independence from the kingdom of France. King Louis XI, ‘the Spider’, was determined to end its autonomy; Duke Francis СКАЧАТЬ