The Children of Henry VIII (2 page)
Read The Children of Henry VIII Online
Authors: John Guy
6 Elizabeth,
c
.1551, attrib. William Scrots
7 Portrait of an unknown woman, possibly Jane Grey, attrib. Levina Teerlinc
8 Philip and Mary as King and Queen of England,
c
.1558, by Hans Eworth
10 Robert Dudley,
c
.1564, by Steven van der Meulen
11 An Allegory of the Tudor Succession: The Family of Henry VIII, by an unknown artist,
c
.1572
In citing units of currency, the old sterling denominations of pounds, shillings and pence have been retained. There are twelve pence (12d.) in a shilling (modern 5p or US 8 cents), twenty shillings (20s.) in a pound (£1 or US $1.60), and so on. A mark is 13s. 4d. (66p or US $1.05). Rough estimates of modern values for sixteenth-century figures can be obtained by multiplying all the numbers by a thousand. Equivalents for European denominations, where possible, are worked out from ‘Money and Coinage of the Age of Erasmus’, in
Collected Works of Erasmus
, 76 vols (Toronto, 1974– ), I, pp. 311–47, and P. Spufford (ed.),
Handbook of Medieval Exchange
(London, 1986).
O
N
Saturday, 2 April 1502, Arthur, Prince of Wales, the elder son of the king of England, Henry VII, died at Ludlow Castle on the Welsh borders, aged just 15. The young prince, married less than five months before at St Paul’s Cathedral to the Spanish princess, Katherine of Aragon, had first felt unwell at Shrovetide in early February.
1
On Easter Day (27 March), his condition rapidly worsened, ‘at the which season [there] grew and increased upon his body … the most pitiful disease and sickness, that with so sore and great violence had battled and driven [itself] in[to] the singular parts of him inward.’ Finally, ‘that cruel and fervent enemy of nature, the deadly corruption, did utterly vanquish and overcome the pure and friendful blood, without all manner of physical help and remedy.’
2
The causes of Arthur’s death are keenly debated. A credible hypothesis is that he died of bubonic plague, which returned to the West Country in 1502. If that was so, little could have been done for him, for the best that medical science could offer at this time
was to tuck the patient up warmly in bed and dose him with a cocktail of white wine mixed with the powder of dried ivy berries ground in a mortar, failing which he should have the anus (or ‘vent’) of three or four partially plucked hens pressed against his buboes (or sores) to draw out the infection, after which the buboes were to be rubbed with treacle.
3
The ‘sweating sickness’ and tuberculosis are also regularly suggested.
4
A viral pulmonary disease, the ‘sweating sickness’ or ‘sweat’ had first reached England with the French mercenaries fighting alongside Henry VII’s troops at Bosworth in 1485 when, as Earl of Richmond, he had captured the crown in battle from Richard III, the last of the Yorkist kings. Its usual victims were not children or teenagers, but the middle-aged; the classic symptoms were myalgia and headache, accompanied by ‘a deadly and burning sweat’, leading to abdominal pain, vomiting, increased headache and delirium, followed by cardiac palpitations, paralysis and death. Dreaded for its ‘sudden sharpness and unwonted cruelness’, the ‘sweat’ normally took less than twenty-four hours to kill: those who lasted that long were almost certain to survive the attack.
5
Since Arthur had felt unwell for two months, and even after the onset of his final decline took almost a week to die, his illness would seem to be different. Only one historian makes a positive claim for the reappearance of the ‘sweat’ in 1502, and no evidence is cited to substantiate the assertion.
6
Moreover, while the ‘sweat’ returned to England in 1506 and 1508, these outbreaks are known to have been mild.
F
IGURE
1
Prince Arthur, from a stained-glass window in the north transept of Great Malvern Priory, attrib. Richard Twygge and Thomas Wodshawe.
Tuberculosis is improbable, since the condition develops very slowly and Arthur was considered to be a fit and healthy teenager before he fell ill. The idea that he was generally ‘weak and sickly’ derives from a nineteenth-century misreading of a letter, written in
Latin, that his father sent to Katherine’s parents, King Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, a few weeks after their daughter’s wedding. In it, Henry explained that Katherine had been allowed to accompany her young husband to Wales even though many people had advised against it, ‘because of the tender age of our son’.
7
Arthur was nine months younger than his wife, and Henry had been warned against the perceived dangers of allowing a 15-year-old boy to enjoy unlimited sex—a risk particularly feared by the Spanish ambassador in London, Don Pedro de Ayala, since it was commonly believed in Spain that ‘an undue indulgence’ in ‘the pleasures of marriage’ had caused the death of Katherine’s elder brother Juan, who died aged 19 in 1497, six months after marrying Margaret of Burgundy.
8
A further possibility is testicular cancer, perhaps suggested by the phrase ‘the singular parts of him inward’.
9
If correct, this diagnosis would not merely establish the cause of death but could conceivably explain the protestations of Katherine’s first lady of the bedchamber, Doña Elvira Manuel, in a letter to Queen Isabella sent shortly after Arthur’s funeral that, although Katherine was a widow, she was still a virgin. For if the prince had testicular cancer, a disease most frequently found in men aged between 15 and 44, the pains and the damage to his reproductive system could have resulted in an impaired sexual function. Although Doña Elvira’s letter can no longer be traced in the archives, its contents are known because Isabella quoted them on 12 July in a letter written at Toledo, saying, ‘It is already known for a certainty that the said Princess of Wales, our daughter, remains as she was here, for so Doña Elvira has written to us.’
10
F
IGURE
2
The gatehouse at Ludlow Castle, Shropshire. Prince Arthur and Katherine of Aragon passed through it when they arrived at Ludlow in 1502.