The Children of Henry VIII (9 page)

On Wednesday, 7 June, at an election of new knights to the coveted Order of the Garter in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, Fitzroy was declared the unanimous first choice to fill one of two vacant places. At his installation on the 25th, he was placed in the second stall on the sovereign’s side, the most exalted position after his father’s, after which his banner, helm and crest were set up over his stall and his new coat of arms embossed on the roof of the chapel above the organ gallery, clear for all to see.
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On Sunday, 18 June, an investiture still more astonishing and far-reaching in its significance took place. At Bridewell Palace on the Thames, Henry’s principal London residence following a disastrous fire which had destroyed much of the old palace of Westminster in 1512, Fitzroy was raised to the foremost rank of the peerage.

As the trumpets sounded, the 6-year-old boy—first dressed in the robes of an earl—was escorted through the long gallery by the Earls of Arundel and Oxford and led into Henry’s Presence Chamber, its walls resplendent with tapestries and cloth of gold. When he drew close to his father, who stood in majesty before a golden throne, flanked on either side by Wolsey and a galaxy of lords and prelates, he knelt.

Henry then ordered his son to stand up, the cue for Thomas More to read out (in Latin) the child’s letters patent creating him Earl of Nottingham. After his investiture, the new earl withdrew, only to reappear a short while later, dressed this time as a duke and led in by the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk. Once more the boy knelt before his father, this time to be invested as Duke of Richmond and Somerset.
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These dignities were not chosen at random. Henry VII’s father, Edmund Tudor, had been created first Earl of Richmond by his half-brother Henry VI. Even more to the point, the dukedom of Somerset was the one inherited from Henry VIII’s Beaufort ancestors, the progeny of the illicit relationship between John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford. As to the earldom of Nottingham, its last incumbent was Richard, Duke of York, the younger son of Edward IV.

To give substance to his son’s position, Henry granted the boy castles, lordships and lands valued at £4,845 per annum, making him one of the wealthiest nobles in the kingdom. Scattered across England and Wales with the lion’s share in Lincolnshire, Somerset and Devon, the new ducal estates included many properties traditionally associated with the titles he now held.
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A jewel in his crown was the manor of Collyweston in Northamptonshire, one of Henry’s grandmother’s favourite houses, which she had expensively remodelled as a secondary royal palace. The king even gave his son a privy apartment at St James’s Palace.
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And Henry’s bounty did not stop there. On Sunday, 16 July, Henry nominated Fitzroy as Lord Admiral of England, one of the greatest offices of state.
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To contrive the necessary reshuffle, he risked a quarrel with Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, whom the king had originally appointed Lord Admiral for life, but now displaced. Since a child of 6 could hardly discharge the duties, they were reassigned to Viscount Lisle, who was made Vice-Admiral.
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In official documents Fitzroy was to be addressed as ‘the right high and noble prince Henry … Duke of Richmond and Somerset.’
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Katherine, increasingly protective of her daughter’s status and dignity, did not flinch in expressing her sense of outrage to her husband. All she did was infuriate him.
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Quick to nose out a
scandal, the Venetian ambassador told a friend that three of the queen’s Spanish gentlewomen had encouraged her to speak her mind. The king, in retaliation, ‘has dismissed them [from] the Court—a strong measure, but the queen was obliged to submit and to have patience.’
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Once Henry had been careful to appease his wife in everything, but those days were over. Now, her position was seriously weakened and by other factors than the king’s liaison with Mary Boleyn, which had largely fizzled out. Forty, fat, with no son and seemingly little chance of conceiving one since she was said to have passed the menopause, the queen’s hold on Henry had become tenuous. By the end of 1524, the royal couple had stopped sleeping together.

Foreign affairs further undermined Katherine. A fortnight or so after Henry had commissioned Fitzroy’s coat of arms, her nephew Charles repudiated his promise to marry Mary. His move was part of a drastic upheaval in diplomacy begun when his armies had routed the French at the battle of Pavia on 24 February 1525 in the biggest slaughter of Frenchmen since the battle of Agincourt. Francis I had been captured and taken to Madrid. His captivity would last just over a year.

Henry was at first overjoyed. The ‘Great Enterprise’ he had planned with Charles in 1522 had come unstuck the following year, when the Duke of Suffolk marched to within fifty miles of Paris, but failed to capture the city. After Pavia, it briefly seemed that France, after all, would be partitioned by the two allies.
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But it was not to be. For instead, the victorious Charles decided to marry his cousin Isabella, the infanta of Portugal, and ditch his agreement with Henry.
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He may have been unnecessarily provoked, since Henry too had attempted to vary the terms of the earlier treaty, even suggesting that, in exchange for delivering Mary to
him in marriage, Charles should send the captured Francis to England, or else meet Henry in Paris and watch while he was crowned king of France.
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Whoever was more to blame, the marriage treaty was in tatters, putting an end to Katherine’s dreams for her daughter of a Spanish match.

Around the Court an explosion of speculation greeted Fitzroy’s ennoblement. Some thought the king planned to declare Fitzroy to be his heir; others that he would be made king of Ireland.
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Whether Henry had decided to make Fitzroy his successor ahead of Mary is difficult to judge. He was certainly considering it, even if he was dithering.
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His views on female succession are known to be extremely close to those expressed in 1531 in the preface to a pamphlet entitled
A Glasse of the Truthe
, the contents of which he vetted himself.
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With his divorce from Katherine and quest for a legitimate male heir then topping the agenda, the
Glasse
cautioned that if a woman ‘shall chance to rule, she cannot continue long without a husband, which by God’s law must then be her governor and head, and so finally shall direct the realm.’
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Henry feared that a woman successor was a recipe for civil war, and when later in his reign he did finally concede that circumstances could arise in which a woman might succeed, he attempted to dictate precisely how she would be permitted to marry.
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But Henry had a more immediate objective in mind by ennobling Fitzroy. On Wolsey’s advice, a radical reorganization of regional government was about to begin. For ten years, the cardinal had been planting his own ‘new men’ into key positions in the outlying regions as part of a deliberate policy aimed at diluting the influence of the traditional nobility and centralizing state control.
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By late 1523, government in the far north had all but collapsed after Wolsey lost patience with the two leading northern magnate families, the Percies and Dacres, for their flagrant abuses of power. He ousted them from their entrenched positions, and in despair at the resulting chaos the Duke of Norfolk resigned as Warden-General of the Marches (i.e. borderlands) against Scotland.
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Wales too was in radical need of reform. Crime went unpunished in a society riddled with different lordships, customs and laws. In particular, conflicts of jurisdiction enabled criminals to escape trial by fleeing from one lordship to another.
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On 22 July 1525, Henry and Wolsey made Fitzroy the titular head of a revived Council of the North and appointed him Warden-General, following a precedent set by Richard III when he had declared his son’s household at Middleham to be his Council in the North.
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The move explains why, within a few days of Fitzroy’s investiture, a large and luxurious princely household was recruited for him with a full complement of thirty or so bureaucrats and councillors, backed up by over a hundred lesser officials and servants. According to Wolsey’s estimates, the annual cost of food, fuel and clothing alone for such an establishment would leave only small change out of £2,500.
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A scribbled list of the furnishings needed just for Fitzroy’s chambers and those of his head officers includes two ‘cloths of estate’, four ‘great carpets’ and twenty smaller ones, four chairs including one of cloth of gold and one of velvet, enough wall hangings, stools and cushions for up to eight rooms, twenty-one beds, and several dozen sets of bed hangings, quilts, pillows, linen and blankets to put on them.
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In effect, the councillors and officers of Fitzroy’s household had become the new northern administration, acting in the boy’s
name. Along with the young duke, who was given yet more commissions as Chief Justice of the Forest beyond the Trent and Lieutenant-General in the North, they were sent to live at the castle of Sheriff Hutton, thirteen miles north of York.
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Wolsey must have regarded their departure as urgent, since they left London a mere four days after the boy was appointed Warden-General.
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This was possible because almost all the new councillors and officials were already in Wolsey’s service in one way or another. The overwhelming majority were churchmen or lawyers, and none was above the degree of a knight. They were typical of the ‘new men’ the cardinal had already been positioning around the regions.

Katherine, meanwhile, muffled her opposition to Fitzroy’s honours after Henry issued supplementary letters patent declaring that, although his son’s ducal rank was to be superior to that of all other dukes, it was not to take precedence over ‘the offspring of our own body and heirs and successors’.
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Such a formula implied that Mary was
not
excluded from the succession—or at least not in so many words—although curiously this document was never copied into the official series of Chancery enrolments and so lacked legal force.

The point quickly became irrelevant. For on the same day as Henry proclaimed Fitzroy to be Warden-General, Wolsey announced similar instructions and ordinances for the government of Wales that had Mary as their focus. He had, it seems, been working on this all along while the king was dithering. And now Henry decided to implement it.
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The result was that, in mid August, the 9-year-old princess found herself riding in a horse litter to the Duke of Buckingham’s
former castle at Thornbury on her way to Ludlow on the Welsh borders, where she was to become the titular head of a new Council in the Marches of Wales. Her existing household at Ditton Park was dissolved and a new one recruited.
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And to Katherine’s delight, her daughter’s new household and councillors vastly outshone Fitzroy’s. Whereas none of his officers had ranked above a knight, Mary’s chamberlain and steward were peers, the head of her household and president of her Council was John Veysey, a leading courtier-bishop, and sixteen ladies and gentlewomen, many of the highest rank, were recruited to her Privy Chamber.
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Even Margaret Pole was recalled as a sop to the queen, in case she worried that her daughter was being sent 150 miles away.
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Overall, 300 officials and servants gained places in Mary’s new household.
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So ruinously expensive was it, bills amounting to £5,900 were run up in its first eighteen months of operation.
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Building repairs alone cost £500. Both Ludlow Castle, which Edward IV had rebuilt for his eldest son, and its associated manor house at Tickenhill, near Bewdley, which Henry VII had refitted for Prince Arthur who spent much of his time there, needed refurbishment. Tickenhill especially had fallen into severe disrepair.