The Children of Henry VIII (4 page)

C
HRISTMAS
1510 was a time of joyous celebration for Henry VIII, his wife Katherine of Aragon and their Court. Not only would the second anniversary of their marriage and coronations soon be approaching, but more significantly Katherine was heavily pregnant.

Nothing mattered more in a dynastic monarchy than that the queen should give birth to a legitimate son and heir to settle the succession. So when, on the morning of New Year’s Day 1511, Henry VIII, not yet 20, heard the news that Katherine, who had celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday only a fortnight before, had been delivered of a healthy son at Richmond Palace, he was exultant. As the gunners of the Tower fired salvoes in salute, he ordered bonfires to be lit in the streets of London and free wine to be distributed to the citizens to drink his health and that of his wife and child.
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On Sunday, 5 January, the baby was christened Henry after his father and grandfather in the Franciscan friary church beside the
privy garden at the palace. The ceremonies, similar to those at Henry’s own baptism, followed to the letter the handbook, first devised by the Lancastrian kings and handed down by the Yorkist Edward IV, known as the
Royal Book
. Wrapped in a tiny mantle of cloth of gold lined with ermine, the infant was carried by his godmother from the great hall of the palace to the friary church along a neatly gravelled path protected from the cold and rain by a covered walkway. Inside the church, the west door, walls and ceiling were draped with fine tapestries and cloth of gold, with carpets laid under foot. The heavy solid silver font, brought in specially from Canterbury on a cart, stood on a raised temporary platform, three steps high, that was overlaid with crimson fabric and hung about with cloth of gold. Suspended above it was a canopy of crimson satin fringed with gold. Beside it, concealed behind a screen, a brazier burned sweet-smelling herbs to purify the air. Along the side walls of the nave 200 esquires and yeomen stood holding torches, poised to light them as soon as the child was baptized.
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The next day was the Feast of the Epiphany, more colloquially known as Twelfth Night, the final climax of the Christmas festivities. Like his father before him, Henry put on his imperial crown and purple robes and sat in state in his Presence Chamber dressed almost exactly as he had been at his coronation with an orb and sceptre in his hands. Thus arrayed, he solemnly processed with his nobles and courtiers to the Chapel Royal, where he offered gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh like the Three Kings at the very first Epiphany, afterwards presiding at spectacular candlelit revels and a banquet in the great hall of the palace, surrounded by statues of eleven of his most revered ancestors.
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With the celebrations over, Henry went on a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Walsingham in Norfolk to
give thanks for the birth of his son.
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On his return, he ordered a tournament to be held on 12–13 February in the tiltyard at the palace of Westminster, where he meant to put his jousting skills and masculinity on show as one of the four challengers. Katherine, rested and recovered from the ordeal of childbirth and attended by her ladies, presided serenely over this glittering and expensive piece of theatre from the vantage point of a newly constructed gallery.

Henry in his youth was the personification of monarchy, the fount of honour; his only flaw was his inability, like his father before him, to look people straight in the eye.
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Six feet two inches tall and with a thirty-five-inch waist, he was as lean as he was fit before gluttony caused him to bulge.
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Calling himself ‘Loyal Heart’, he and his companions first entered the lists at the Westminster tournament on horseback, hidden inside an elaborate mock forest resting on a huge chariot that was pulled by mules disguised as a lion and an antelope. When the chariot stopped before Katherine, actors dressed as foresters blew their horns, the signal for Henry and his fellow challengers to burst out of a golden castle at the centre of the forest, each brandishing a spear. When the jousting began, Henry hogged the limelight by running twenty-five courses, far more than anyone else.

Once the jousting was over on the second day of the tournament, Katherine presented the prizes, her prestige as the mother of an heir to the throne indicated by the fact that she did not have to declare her husband to be the champion.
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But on 23 February, joy turned to sorrow. Prince Henry, just seven weeks old, suddenly died.
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Katherine was distraught. As the
chronicler Edward Hall records, ‘like a natural woman [she] made much lamentation’. Henry, it seemed at the time, was less troubled than he would be later, believing that since he and his wife were still young, they would have many more children together. According to Hall, he took the calamity ‘wondrous wisely’, selflessly hiding his pain in order to console his wife. Perhaps, but knowing Henry, it is more likely that Hall’s report is the equivalent of a modern press release, designed to portray the king as a model husband. What his private feelings were, we can only imagine.
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Swaddled in a pall of black velvet, the tiny coffin of the young prince was carried along the Thames from Richmond to Westminster Abbey in a cortege of three black-draped barges. By tradition, members of the royal family did not attend funerals, so neither Henry nor Katherine was present in the abbey to see their son interred in a tomb to the left-hand side of the high altar near to the shrine of the abbey’s founder, St Edward the Confessor. But if the dead prince’s parents were absent, the leading nobles and courtiers and more than 400 others were in the abbey, including a contingent of 180 poor men, clad in specially tailored black gowns and hoods. Later, the poor men, who were doubtless selected from among the occupants of the abbey’s almshouses or those who had received Maundy money, were handsomely rewarded for bearing wax torches in the funeral procession and praying for the child’s soul.
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This would be neither the first nor the last reproductive tragedy to befall Katherine. Her earliest known pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage on 31 January 1510, when she had ‘brought forth prematurely a daughter’.
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At the time it was routinely assumed that
Henry and Katherine’s inability to have a living son was her fault. The stereotype was that if a woman failed repeatedly to produce living offspring, it was the result of her gynaecological or obstetrical difficulties.

Thus Andrew Boorde, an experienced physician who wrote several medical treatises and claimed to have attended Henry VIII, believed that a woman’s inability to conceive was the result of ‘too much humidity’ in the womb. The result was that when ‘the seed of man is sown’, ‘the woman cannot retain it’. She should avoid laxatives, declared Boorde, and try crushed mandrake apples mixed with rose water and sugar, eat plenty of peaches and (if she were fat) scatter pepper liberally on her food. If she had menstrual pains, she might ease them by taking the juice of St John’s wort mixed with red wine. In the ‘unlikely’ event that the man was at fault, he should eat only wholesome food, try such remedies as ‘a confection of ginger’ and avoid sex immediately after meals.
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Tudor medicine had scarcely advanced since the time of the ancient Greeks. Now modern experts argue that Katherine’s pregnancy mishaps fit the symptoms of haemolytic disease of the newborn caused by a genetic incompatibility between the blood groups of the parents. In this situation, a couple will rarely be able to produce successfully more than one living child. In other instances, the foetus or newborn infant will develop severe, often fatal anaemia, jaundice or heart failure caused by the destruction of its red blood cells. In a newborn child, death will typically occur within a few weeks.
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F
IGURE
3
Lady Margaret Beaufort, Henry VIII’s grandmother, from a nineteenth-century engraving.

Henry would have been responsible for the couple’s problems if he were positive for a blood group antigen known as Kell and his partner—like 90 per cent of Caucasian populations—was negative. In those circumstances, a high proportion of the foetuses he
fathered would die because his partner would make antibodies to the foetal red blood cells. And the genetic mismatch, in Katherine’s case, would have been this way round, because her sisters, Juana of Castile and Maria of Portugal, each produced living children with consummate ease and are therefore likely to have been Kell negative.

In 1513 Katherine was pregnant again, but in September or October she was delivered of a premature son who died within hours. Another boy was stillborn in November or December 1514.

At last, and to the royal couple’s considerable relief, on Tuesday, 18 February 1516, at about 4 a.m., the queen produced a healthy daughter, who was christened Mary. Katherine doted on her and at first was eager to bring up and educate the child herself, but Henry was determined to follow royal protocol. As revised and updated by his grandmother Margaret Beaufort in 1493, this specified that—once the christening was past—the baby should be put in a royal nursery under the charge of a ‘lady mistress’ or governess, who was to be assisted by a nurse and four female chamber assistants known as ‘the rockers’, who took it in turn to rock the royal cradle. A physician was to be in regular attendance and was to supervise every aspect of the infant’s diet.

The child’s everyday cradle was to have ‘four pommels of silver and gilt’ and other suitable decorations. And a ‘cradle of estate’ was to be available when ambassadors or visitors were present, covered by a quilt of ermine and a canopy of crimson cloth of gold and blazoned with the royal arms. Yeomen, grooms and a laundress were appointed to perform menial duties in the nursery at the direction of the governess. Lastly, generous supplies of mattresses, sheets, blankets and swaddling bands were to be requisitioned as well as eight large carpets to cover the floor to exclude draughts.
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Put in charge of Mary’s nursery on the eve of her mother’s accouchement in 1516 was Elizabeth Denton, none other than Henry’s own governess when he was a boy. Appointed when he had been about 5, she was the most important figure in his childhood apart from his mother, Elizabeth of York, and he retained the fondest memories of her.
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Long in receipt of a generous pension from the king, she was brought out of retirement, but either she became ill or clashed with Katherine, since Margaret, Lady Bryan, mother of one of Henry’s cronies and the sister of Lord Berners (a distinguished translator of romances and chivalric histories including Froissart’s
Chronicles
), was appointed to replace her.

Marked out by Henry as Denton’s successor even before the latter had officially vacated the post,
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Lady Bryan took up her new role in 1518 when—perhaps to strengthen her hand in dealing with Katherine—the king created her a baroness. Bryan then served as Mary’s governess until the early summer of 1519, when she moved elsewhere.