The Tudor Rose, page 2
Despite the turbulent social and political landscape of the country, Mary Rose’s early years were safe and serene. News of local insurrections might create anxieties for the Court and the Council, but the reins of the royal household were held by Mary’s grandmother, Lady Margaret, whose personal discipline ensured that life in the royal nursery proceeded on an even keel. The thrifty King kept a close eye on household accounts, paying for the children’s upkeep from the Great Wardrobe. The Queen contributed from her own Privy Purse. But Henry was a true Tudor: when diplomacy necessitated a splash, he could put on displays of conspicuous extravagance to rival any monarch in Europe.
The young Royals wanted for nothing. There were regular consignments of soft furnishings and clothing from the Great Wardrobe, bright silk ribbons for the Princesses, new clothes to delight Mary’s older sister, vain, tempestuous Margaret. Active children like Mary fretted in the restrictive apparel decreed by the fashions of the day. Royal babies were encased head to toe in stiff garments of silk or damask. There were few concessions to infancy. By the age of three or four, the little Princess wore full-skirted, long-sleeved dresses with tight-fitting bodices, miniature versions of the gowns worn by grown women. On formal occasions, both Princesses wore close caps, with long gold chain necklaces draped around their chubby little necks. The frequent deaths of members of her family meant that Mary was often in mourning, but black suited her blonde beauty. Black, like scarlet, achieved by using the kermes beetle, was an expensive colour to produce at the time. It entailed a complicated dyeing processes, and was in consequence a popular colour with the aristocracy and adopted by people of all ages and not only in connection with mourning. At two, Mary Rose was pictured in gowns of dusky satin and velvet, trimmed with mink or ermine, and belted with heavy dark ribbon. Her wardrobe included linen smocks, black damask kirtles, hose – and a constant supply of soled shoes, testament to her passion for dancing!
At four, she appeared in purple tinsel satin and blue velvet, crimson, green or tawny kirtles. Kirtles, tunic-like garments worn by both sexes since the Middle Ages, by peasants as well as princesses, had a front-opening bodice and an unlined skirt. At eight, Mary graduated to nightgowns; before then, the list of her clothing includes only night kerchiefs. Children probably slept naked, and were often told to sleep with their mouths hanging open – a measure recommended for the sweetening of the breath.
When Mary was two, the Tudors were spending Christmas in one of the King’s favourite residences, the delightful old Yorkist palace of Sheen, nine miles upriver from the Tower. This former hunting lodge, once known as the ‘Shining Palace’, had undergone frequent refurbishments. Mary’s father, enthusiastic about his building projects, had had it repaired and enhanced, adding gardens, warrens and a deer park. Suddenly a mysterious fire broke out and most of the palace burned to the ground.
After the fire, the younger royal children, Margaret, Mary Rose and their brothers, Henry and Edmund, moved more permanently to Eltham, a moated palace in Kent, although they still occasionally stayed in other royal residences. Oarsmen liveried in the Tudor green and white rowed the Princesses in a state barge between the new palace of Richmond, with its fairy-tale turrets, and Greenwich, where the excited children could watch the bustle as the high-masted sailing vessels put to sea. On summer days the royal party were serenaded by musicians as their barge glided along the Thames. When in London, they were usually based at Baynard’s Castle or the Tower, residences which their mother preferred to the cramped quarters at Westminster.
Eltham, with its royal apartments, chapel, great hall, courtyard and new tilting yard, had been rebuilt by their maternal grandfather, Edward IV. It was an ideal location for the royal nursery, convenient for London, yet set in rural surroundings away from the unhealthy city dirt and the hectic distractions of the court. Discipline here was more relaxed. Mary’s grandmother’s influence was visible everywhere. Lady Margaret had completed building the chapel started by Edward IV. Even the swans on the moat wore enamelled badges bearing the Beaufort insignia, lightly chained about their graceful necks.
Mary’s oldest brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales, inspired universal admiration. Meeting him in 1497, the Milanese ambassador noted that Arthur, at eleven, was ‘taller than his years would warrant, of remarkable beauty and grace, and very ready in speaking Latin’.5 After Arthur acquired his own household as heir apparent, his younger brother Prince Henry, became the focus of the nursery establishment, and this suited Henry very well. Princes were encouraged to be vigorous and full of bluster, and Henry, an ebullient, forceful lad, needed no urging, strutting about and lording it over his sisters and attendants by sheer force of personality. Nobody dared rebuke him. His showing-off was regarded with smiling indulgence as a token of manliness.
The princesses were attended by ladies, but shared their brothers' tutors. Like all royal children, Mary was taught French, Latin, music and composition, also dancing and embroidery, at both of which she excelled. Her handwriting was soon better than her sister Margaret’s, although when distressed she scribbled. She was given a French companion, Jane Poppincourt, before she was five and was soon chatting fluently in French, a skill that was to stand her in good stead. She was also assigned her own small entourage, including a physician, wardrobe-keeper and gentlewomen of the chamber.
The chatelaine of a great house required a grounding in household administration, and, ideally, the skill of an amateur apothecary. Lady Margaret possessed both qualifications and ensured that her granddaughters acquired the same proficiency.
A princess also needed to acquire social graces and accomplishments; she must be a competent dancer and able to participate in social activities such as card games and the performance of masques. She must be a good conversationalist, a mistress of table etiquette and manners. Some knowledge of belles lettres was desirable, but her sphere was the spiritual rather than the academic. As a mere female, contemporary custom denied her the opportunity to exploit her mental gifts to the full. Greater intellectual accomplishments were not required; her job was to serve her husband and bear his children. Even the enlightened Thomas More, in his Utopia, accepted the mediaeval view that the husband was supreme. To Renaissance theologians, women were still tainted with the frailty of Eve, ianua diabolis, a natural temptation. A hundred years after Mary’s birth, in 1595, churchmen in Wittenberg would still be debating whether women could, in fact, be counted as human beings at all.
Although Mary would never receive the same intensive education as her nieces, Princesses Mary and Elizabeth, like all the Tudors, she was intelligent and eager to learn.
The natural brilliance of Mary’s precocious brothers blossomed under the tutelage of inspiring and dedicated tutors. Prince Arthur was conversant with an exhaustive list of works by the great Classical scholars, and could quote them extensively. Prince Henry showed even greater promise. Besides Latin and French, he displayed a remarkable facility for mathematics.
In the autumn of 1499, four-year-old Mary and her prodigious siblings encountered a rising star of the humanism of the English Renaissance, the Dutch scholar Erasmus. Erasmus, on Sabbatical from his Augustinian monastery, was tutoring young Lord Mountjoy. Mountjoy had been married at eighteen to Elizabeth Say, an heiress, in 1497, but the bride, considered too immature for cohabitation, had remained at her father’s home in Gloucestershire. Erasmus and Mountjoy had been planning a jaunt to Italy, but the young Lord’s mother, Dame Laura, informed Mountjoy that it was high time his marriage was consummated; he was to forget Italy and get on with it. Mountjoy had also been invited to become what Erasmus called ‘socius studiorum’, a study companion, to Prince Henry.
Disappointed of his Italian trip, Erasmus accepted Mountjoy’s invitation to stay at his house in Greenwich. Aspects of English manners struck Erasmus as delightful: he enthused to his friend the poet Andrerlini, (poet laureate to King Louis XII of France, Mary Rose’s future husband):
When you arrive anywhere you are received with kisses on all sides,
and when you take your leave, they speed you on your way with kisses.
The kisses are renewed when you come back.
If you should happen to meet, then kisses are given profusely.
In a word, wherever you turn, the world is full of kisses.6
When a visit to the royal nursery at Eltham was suggested by Erasmus’s new acquaintance Thomas More, a clever Lincoln’s Inn lawyer in his early twenties with impressive connections at Court, the Dutch scholar was prepared to be enchanted by a peek into the schoolroom. Aware that Arthur, Prince of Wales, would not be present, Erasmus was not expecting any formal reception. Consequently, when More led the way into the Great Hall, and he beheld, gathered beneath the splendid hammer-beam roof, the four youngest Royals, splendidly attired, posed among their assembled attendants in a reception committee, he was disconcerted. The centrepiece of the impressive tableau was eight-year-old Prince Henry, probably, with his already well-developed notion of his own importance, posing beneath a canopy of state.
On his right stood ten-year-old Margaret. Although golden-haired Margaret was as vain and headstrong as her brother Henry, there was as yet no hint of the outrageous behaviour that would cause notorious scandal. Four-year-old Mary Rose was preoccupied with some childish game. But decades later, Erasmus, in 1523, complimented Mary’s prospective bridegroom, Prince Charles of Castile, on being ‘thrice blessed to acquire such a bride. Nature never formed anything more beautiful, and she exceeds no less in goodness and wisdom.’7
Now that the situation in England appeared more settled, the Spanish sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella, felt it was safe to proceed with the plans for their daughter Katherine’s marriage to the English heir apparent. Hoping to engineer a lasting peace between Henry VII and James IV, they despatched a new ambassador to Scotland, tasked with progressing the plans for the marriage of Princess Margaret and the King of Scots. This union had been under discussion since Margaret was six, but negotiations had been intermittently disrupted by various rebellions.
Despite his mission as a peacemaker, the new Spanish Ambassador to Scotland, Don Pedro de Ayala, first sought to ingratiate himself with the King of Scots by accompanying him on a border raid against England. Writing to their Catholic Majesties, he dismissed this engagement as a skirmish, but noted with some alarm the warlike spirit of the twenty-five-year-old King of Scots. James, reckless and charismatic, relished hunting, amorous dalliance and combat. Don Pedro complained that he had had to drag the King back from the fray by clinging to his skirts.
The Scots pressed to have Margaret sent as a bride without delay but Margaret, at nine, was small for her age, and delicate. Both her mother and grandmother warned King Henry she should not be forced into a physical union too early. Henry confided their concern to Don Pedro, man to man: ‘They fear the King of Scotland would not wait, but injure her and endanger her health’. 8He spared the ambassador’s blushes, and respected his own mother’s privacy, by refraining to mention something that was common knowledge, although never openly discussed. Although Lady Margaret had been married three times, Henry VII was her only child. In giving birth to him in extreme youth, she had been ‘spoyled’ and could have no more children.
Neither Lady Margaret nor the Queen would countenance Margaret’s being sent to Scotland until she was more mature. Their doubts were reinforced by rumours of King James’s numerous and flagrant amours.
Margaret’s siblings were also involved in various matrimonial projects from babyhood. Formal negotiations for the marriage of Prince Arthur to Catherine of Aragon had been on-going since March 1488. Eleven years later, the proxy marriage finally took place on 19 May at Bewdley in Worcestershire. King Henry VII and King Ferdinand spent the next few months haggling over the dowry. Katherine was expected to arrive in England during the summer of 1500, when her bridegroom was almost fourteen, but various obstacles, notably the market-trader bartering between the monarchs, delayed her departure for another year.
Meanwhile, the death of her youngest brother Edmund in 1500 was five-year-old Mary’s first direct experience of death. The Eltham household was plunged into mourning. Even Mary’s schoolmaster and Jane Poppincourt had black garments ordered for them.
By early October 1501, the mood lifted when the ships of Mary’s long-awaited sister-in-law were sighted off Plymouth Sound. Katherine landed to a thunderous welcome. Her progress was slow: 9Jubilation greeted her at every staging post along her route through the West Country. People thronged the streets, quaffing the free wine and gaping at the foreign dignitaries, the gorgeous costumes and the impressive decorations. At Elthamstead, Prince Arthur joined them, heading a procession of splendidly attired noblemen.
There now occurred the first head-on clash between Spanish and English protocol.
Don Pedro de Ayala intercepted the King’s procession and explained that both the Archbishop of Santiago and Doňa Elvira Manuel, the Princess’s duenna, insisted that the Princess must neither converse with the King nor meet her bridegroom before her wedding day. Such was the old Castilian custom.
Henry immediately made it clear that he cared not a fig for the old Castilian custom. Without bothering to dismount from his horse, he summoned an impromptu council meeting right there on the field. It was decided that, since Katherine was already betrothed to Arthur, she was now Henry’s subject, so the laws and formal customs of Old Castile were irrelevant. Henry pressed on, determined to meet the Princess. Informed she was resting, he retorted that he didn’t care if she was still in her bed, he had come to see her, and he intended to do so. Scandalised, Doňa Elvira was forced to back down.
Princess Katherine was undismayed, and was soon exchanging pleasantries with the King of England. Later, to Doňa Elvira’s dismay, once the travellers had changed out of their riding clothes, the Princess and her bridegroom met. Both Henry and Arthur were impressed: pretty Katherine appeared well-mannered and biddable. They conversed in a mixture of Spanish and Latin, with a bishop acting as interpreter. Although the Queen and Lady Margaret had urged Katherine to learn French, she had found it hard going. (Lady Margaret had also advised Katherine to get used to drinking wine, because, she said, the water in England was undrinkable, and anyway, one could not drink water in England because of the climate.)10
Henry and Arthur rode back to join the Queen at Richmond. At St George’s fields Katherine first met her new brother-in-law, Prince Henry. The ten-year-old Prince displayed the self-confidence Erasmus had noted two years earlier, prancing about the town at the head of his own company, two hundred men in blue and tawny livery. Katherine was accommodated in the Bishop of London’s Palace, which had been expensively reglazed in her honour.11
Her entry into London was a riot of colourful pageantry. The streets were festooned with draperies of cloth-of-gold and silver, velvets and gleaming satins. Triumphal arches adorned with the arms of England and the pomegranates of Spain had been erected, and from the fountains red wine flowed. Mary, a wide-eyed child of six, gazed in wonder at the foreign fashions and at the Spanish Princess who would become her friend. Katherine was riding a mule, Spanish style, richly gowned, with a ‘little hat fashioned like a Cardinal’s,’ secured in place with a golden lace.
The young Princesses, waiting at Baynard’s Castle, had been excitedly trying on their new dresses. Mary had two new velvet gowns for the occasion, one russet, the other crimson, fur-trimmed, with a green satin kirtle and matching sleeves. She chose the crimson one. Margaret, six years Mary’s senior, as the betrothed of a King, preened in gorgeous cloth-of-gold, fully aware that she would be subjected to close scrutiny by the Scottish ambassadors.
On November 14 the wedding of Prince Arthur and Princess Katherine was magnificently solemnised at St Paul’s. There was more spectacle to delight a curious child. After the Nuptial Mass, celebrated by the bishops, trumpets blared and carillons rang out. Enlivened by free wine, Londoners cheered the handsome bridal couple all the way back to Baynard’s castle. The sumptuous wedding banquet was followed by the formal bedding. The Earl of Oxford led the way to the bedchamber. He tried the bed first on the side where the Prince would lie, then on the Princess’s side. The Princess was then positioned in the bed, next to the Prince, and the bishops blessed both the bed and the anticipated union. The teenage couple were described by an observer as ‘both lusty and amorous’.
Many years later, Arthur’s gentlemen would swear that the prince emerged next morning from his chamber, flushed with triumph, announcing that he was thirsty, because ‘I have been this night in the midst of Spain.’
This adolescent boast would have far-reaching consequences.
The wedding celebrations continued for days. Besides banquets and dancing, there were public games, masques, and a grand tournament. The whole affair had cost a fortune; to recoup some of the expenses, seats were offered to the common people at extortionate prices. Princess Mary Rose sat enthralled, with her new sister-in-law, the Spanish princess, along with her mother, grandmother and sister. Hundreds of attendant ladies occupied one whole side of the stands.
The vast processions and the grand tournament created a challenge for the King’s new Master of the Horse, Sir Thomas Brandon. Finding stabling and fodder in London for so many extra horses was a daunting task. Himself a skilled jouster, Thomas had carved out a successful career at Court, serving the King in many capacities, as councillor, naval and military commander, and diplomat. As he watched the grand display, he could congratulate himself on another success: the advancement he had contrived for his orphaned teenage nephew, Charles, the son of his disreputable older brother William, a rascal who had only redeemed himself by his hero’s death at Bosworth Field in 1485, where the Tudor crown was won. The East Anglian estates of Thomas’s father, Sir William Brandon, had passed to the second son, Robert, leaving baby Charles and his sister penniless. Now, Thomas, through his contacts, had managed to obtain for young Charles a temporary position in Prince Arthur’s household.
