Henry: Virtuous Prince. David Starkey

political establishment, the queen dowager Elizabeth Woodville. This was the union of the red rose with the white as it was intended to be.

      It lasted for less than six months.

      On 2 February 1487, Henry celebrated the feast of the purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, colloquially known as Candlemas because of the lavish deployment of candles in the ritual, at his favourite palace of Sheen. Candlemas was one of the ‘days of estate’ or unusual ceremony at court. Large numbers of nobles were in attendance on such occasions, and now Henry took advantage of the fact to call a ‘great council’. A ‘great council’ was, in effect, a parliament without the commons, and this one had more impact, both on the country and on Henry’s family, than most parliaments.

      The background was a sudden escalation of Yorkist opposition. This had never entirely died away, but now it took on disturbing echoes of Henry Tudor’s own successful campaign for the throne. An impostor appeared in Ireland, and was successfully passed off as a Yorkist prince. Survivors of Richard III’s regime offered support in England, and the Duchess Margaret in the Netherlands gave refuge and help to Yorkist exiles, just as Brittany had done to Lancastrian émigrés a few years earlier.

      The great council agreed a series of counter measures. Most dramatic was the decision to strip Elizabeth Woodville of her recently regranted dower lands. These were given instead to her daughter the queen, while Elizabeth Woodville herself withdrew from court to live in retirement at St Saviour’s Abbey, Bermondsey, on a comfortable pension.

      Did Henry VII really fear that Elizabeth Woodville might join in the developing Yorkist conspiracy? That she was on the point of turning against her own daughter and grandson, to whom she had just stood as sponsor at his christening? It seems hard to believe. On the other hand, he may have simply decided it was better to be safe than sorry.

      Whatever the case, the effect was the same. With Elizabeth Woodville’s retirement, followed by her death in 1492, Lady Margaret Beaufort emerged as the unchallenged matriarch of her son’s court. Henry would have only one grandmother. Bearing in mind Lady Margaret’s imperious character, he was probably grateful.

      * * *

      The great council had another important result: it flushed out John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln. Lincoln was the son and heir of the duke of Suffolk; he was also, through his mother Elizabeth Plantagenet, the nephew of both Edward IV and Richard III. He was especially close to the latter, who may have nominated him as his heir. Despite this, Lincoln had accommodated himself to the new Tudor world. He presented his aunt, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, with the towel after her ceremonial washing at Arthur’s christening, and a few months later he was one of the ornaments of the court at the celebration of All Saints’ Day at Greenwich.

      He had attended the great council too. But the Yorkist revival had tested his allegiance too far. Immediately after the council, he absconded from court and fled to join the other Yorkist émigrés in the Netherlands.

      It was the beginning of a deadly feud between the Tudors and the de la Poles that only ended thirty years later. Part of the trouble was that the de la Poles proved only too adept at copying Henry Tudor’s tactics in exile. Lincoln raised a force of professional German troops in the Netherlands, sailed with it to Ireland, crowned the impostor as Edward VI and then invaded England at the head of an army swollen with Irish soldiers.

      For the second time in two years, Henry VII had to prepare to fight for his crown in battle.

He took as his base the mighty fortress of Kenilworth in Warwickshire. Thence, in May 1486 he wrote to the earl of Ormond, the queen’s lord chamberlain, to order him to escort Elizabeth of York and Lady Margaret Beaufort, who were staying at Chertsey Abbey in Surrey, to join him.18 A month later, the king and queen separated once more. Henry VII moved east to Coventry as he prepared to close in on the rebels. But the queen, accompanied by Peter Courtenay, bishop of Winchester, hastened back to be with her son Arthur at Farnham, where she arrived on 11 June. It also looks as though a detachment of the household was sent ahead to Romsey Abbey, eight miles north of the Solent, to prepare an escape route abroad for the queen and prince if things went badly.19

      It proved an unnecessary precaution. Henry met the rebels at Stoke, near Newark in Nottinghamshire, on 16 June. The royal army was much larger and the Yorkists were crushed. Lincoln was killed in the battle, while the pretender was captured, uncrowned and, in an act of ironical mercy, sent to spend the rest of his life in the royal kitchens.

Stoke had confirmed the result of Bosworth, and Henry’s crown sat that much more firmly on his brow. To celebrate he had a new one made – a ‘rich crown of gold set with full many rich precious stones’ – which he wore for the first time on 6 January 1488, the feast of the Epiphany and the most important of the four ‘crown-wearing’ days at court.20

      This, almost certainly, was the diadem later known as the Imperial Crown. In the fullness of time, the Imperial Crown would become the supreme symbol of Henry VIII’s own monarchy and of his revolutionary claims to authority over church as well as state. For his father, on the other hand, it was much more straightforward: a second victory in battle had made his claim to the throne more solid, and he would wear a crown of unusual size, weight and richness to prove it.

      Another royal visit to Arthur’s nursery at Farnham followed in March 1489. By this time Elizabeth of York was pregnant again. Once more the birth and baptism would be made to symbolize Tudor power, this time in a setting that was even more magnificent than that chosen for Arthur: Westminster.

      Since the thirteenth century the palace of Westminster had been the principal seat of the English monarchy – being, at one and the same time, the king’s main residence and the headquarters of royal government, where parliament, the law courts and the exchequer all sat.

      The royal birth was to be only one element in an autumn of ceremony. On 14 October, parliament, which had been prorogued on 23 February, reassembled. A meeting of parliament brought together everybody who mattered in Tudor England: nobles and knights, clergy and layfolk. The opportunity was too good to miss. Not only would the lords and commons provide a ready-made audience for the birth of the second royal child, they would also, the king decided, dignify the creation of his first-born as prince of Wales.

The decision to invest the three-year-old Arthur was taken soon after the assembly of parliament; the date was set for St Andrew’s Eve (29 November), and summonses were sent out. It is clear that this date was expected to coincide quite closely with the birth of the king and queen’s second child. But was it assumed that the birth and baptism would take place before the creation? Or afterwards?21

      No one, however, would have been bold enough to predict what actually happened – unless, perhaps, one of Henry VII’s astrologers had worked his apparent magic again.

      On Halloween, 31 October, the queen commenced her confinement with the ceremony known as ‘taking to her chamber’. ‘The greater part of the nobles of the realm present at this parliament’ were in attendance. A month later, on 29 November, the rituals of Arthur’s creation began. First he was to be made a knight of the Bath. The ceremonies started ‘when it was night’ and lasted to the following morning.

      But, just as the ceremonies got under way, the queen went into labour. As the king was giving his son ‘the advertisement [or solemn admonition] of the order of knighthood’, the chapel royal were reading psalms for Elizabeth of York’s safe delivery. At a quarter past nine that night a healthy daughter was born.

      The following morning, Arthur was created prince of Wales in the parliament chamber, and immediately afterwards his sister was baptised in the adjacent church of St Margaret’s Westminster. She was named Margaret after Lady Margaret Beaufort, who stood as her godmother.

After the christening, the infant Margaret