Henry: Virtuous Prince. David Starkey

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ had come near to rubbing his nose in it.

      Now, of course, the victory of Henry’s father at Bosworth and the subsequent marriage of his parents was supposed to put an end to all this. But passions were too entrenched for there to be any such swift and easy conclusion. Instead the aftershocks continued through Henry’s childhood and youth, and provided the other great theme in his upbringing.

      They determined the why and when of his entry into public life, of the offices he held and the titles he bore. They shaped his extended family and with it his own developing sense of identity and political affiliation. They even helped him choose between his parents: he would incline to his mother rather than to his father and, as a young man at least, preferred York to Lancaster.

      It was a rebalancing which, more than anything else, would allow the union of York and Lancaster – sketched only imperfectly under his fiercely partisan father – finally to flourish and become a reality.

      Henry’s father and mother were a striking couple on their wedding day on 18 January 1486. Aged nineteen going on twenty, Elizabeth of York was one of the beauties of the age: tall, statuesque, with blonde hair, blue eyes, fair skin and pure, regular features. She was singularly attractive as a character too, and in a royal family of strident and assertive personalities, she was a healer and reconciler. King Henry VII, though nine years older, was in the prime of life. He too was well above average height, slim, even spare, but strong and with a full head of brown hair, worn rather long, a brilliant eye and a mobile, expressive face. He had also just shown many of the key qualities of kingship: bravery, decisiveness and the ability to master men and events.

      Above all, he had had luck. And he had had it time and time again.

      * * *

      For really nothing was less likely than that this homeless, penniless, long-exiled adventurer, of dubious blood on both sides, more Welsh than English and more French than either, should become heir of Lancaster, king of England and marry the heiress of York.

      Henry Tudor was lucky, in the first place, even to have survived the dire circumstances of his birth. This took place on 28 January 1457 at Pembroke Castle on the extreme south-west coast of Wales. His father, Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond, had died of the plague three months earlier. His mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, was only thirteen and had taken refuge with her brother-in-law, Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke. With her youth and diminutive stature, the birth was evidently a difficult one. At any rate, despite two further marriages, she would have no other children. And it was the depths of winter and the plague still raged.

      But, out of these dreadful experiences, the closest bond was forged between Margaret and her only child. Even decades later, their correspondence reads more like the letters of two lovers than of mother and son.

      Both of Henry Tudor’s parents belonged to satellite families of the house of Lancaster. His father was the issue of a scandalous (and dangerous) liaison between the queen dowager, Catherine of France, mother of Henry VI and widow of Henry V, and a handsome young Welsh squire of her household, Owen Tudor. His mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, descended from John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster’s equally scandalous relationship with his long-term mistress and eventual third wife, Catherine Swynford. Their many children were legitimated; given the surname Beaufort and promoted first to the earldom and later the dukedom of Somerset.

      But they were deliberately excluded from the succession.

      Fifty years later, however, their cousin, Henry VI, was having second thoughts. Henry VI was the third king of the house of Lancaster. In 1399, Henry ‘of Bolingbroke’, eldest son of Duke John of Gaunt by his first marriage to Blanche of Lancaster, had dethroned his childless cousin, Richard II and made himself king as Henry IV. Henry IV’s reputation never recovered from the taint of the usurpation and subsequent murder of Richard II. But he did manage to hang on to the throne.

      Any remaining doubts about Lancastrian legitimacy were swept aside under his son, Henry V. Henry V was the greatest general to have sat on the throne of England, and arguably her greatest king. He won a second kingdom by his victories in France, compelling the French king to give him his daughter, Catherine, in marriage and recognize him as heir to his kingdom.

      Our Henry rejoiced to bear the name of his all-conquering predecessor. Almost a century later, tales of Henry V’s exploits, passed on by his mother’s aged lord chamberlain, filled his ears as a boy and gave him his ideal of kingship: he too, he resolved, would conquer France and make the name of the king of England the most feared in Europe.

      France, alas, eluded him; feared, however, he became indeed – for reasons good and bad.

      At his moment of triumph, Henry V died, leaving as heir to both his kingdoms a six-month-old son, Henry VI. Henry VI turned out to be utterly unworthy of his inheritance: he was peace-loving, morbidly religious, and inherited a streak of madness from his French grandfather, Charles VI. Despite eight years of marriage to Queen Margaret of Anjou, he had even failed to produce an heir.

      This left the house of Lancaster dangerously exposed, since none of Henry VI’s uncles had had legitimate children either. In these circumstances, he had decided to bolster the dynasty by brokering the marriage between his cousin Margaret Beaufort and his half-brother, Edmund Tudor.

      Was Henry VI really thinking of establishing a strengthened junior branch of the royal line? It is possible. Of course Edmund – despite his close relationship to the king – had no English royal blood at all, and Margaret’s was tainted. But – in the absence of anything better – their offspring might be half-plausible Lancastrian heirs in the event of the failure of the senior line.

      The arrangements for the marriage were completed in March 1453. By then, it transpired, Margaret of Anjou was already pregnant with the longed-for prince of Wales, Edward, who was born on 13 October 1453. But that did not save his father. Henry VI had already lost most of France; now his incompetence and occasional madness were threatening to cost him England as well. Leader of his increasingly disloyal opposition was Richard, duke of York.

Richard descended twice over from Edward III. Edward III, as he rather smugly informed parliament in 1362, had been blessed ‘in many ways and especially in the engendering of sons who are come to manhood’.2 There were five of them in all. Edward III endowed them with vast estates and borrowed the quasi-royal title of ‘duke’ from France to distinguish them from the rest of the nobility. Through his father, Duke Richard sprang from Edward III’s fourth son, Edmund, duke of York. But through his mother he descended from his second son, Lionel, duke of Clarence. This, since the Lancastrian kings only descended from Edward III’s third son, John of Gaunt, arguably gave him a better title to the throne than Henry VI himself.

And argue it Duke Richard did. From about 1448 he adopted the royal surname ‘Plantagenet’, and in 1460 he claimed the throne itself.3 Six months later, however, he was dead and his severed head – derisively crowned with a paper crown – was displayed over the gates of York.

      But Duke Richard’s son, Edward, earl of March, succeeded where his father had failed. He dethroned and imprisoned Henry VI in 1461 and, reigning as Edward IV, made himself first king of the house of York.

      Edward IV, who was only eighteen when he won the throne in battle, was a natural leader of men. He was six feet three inches tall and broad in proportion, with reddish-brown hair, a pink-and-white complexion and a broad, handsome, albeit flattish face. He was charming, too, especially to women, who found him irresistible. But the sunny mood could turn without warning to terrifying violence: he even, the all-too-plausible СКАЧАТЬ