GoKawiilThe death of King Richard III was as close as William Shakespeare’s plays about English history came to his own present day for the vast majority of his career. It wasn’t until the very end of his time in London, when he presented Henry VIII as the misbegotten, unsatisfying coda to his tenure as a working playwright, that he continued the story of England’s monarchs.
Yet it seems to me better for us to take up the subject of what came after Richard already today. For the Tudor dynasty that had Richard’s triumphant nemesis Henry VII as its patriarch was still on the throne as Shakespeare was making his name in London, affecting his life and his art in manifold ways; it was no accident that the tetralogy of plays we’ve just been exploring was, whatever else it might have been, partially rank Tudor propaganda. It can only aid our understanding of the man and his many plays that are still to come if we look now at the most recent history that Shakespeare knew, even if we can’t connect it directly to his works in the same way that we can the history that came before. A strong argument can be made that the Tudors were the most consequential dynasty in all of England’s history, including in their ranks the king who transformed England from a Catholic to a Protestant country and the queen who set it on course to building the biggest empire the world has ever known, that fabled one over which the sun never set.
So, then…
The former Henry Tudor’s first challenge as King Henry VII was to ensure that his own reign lasted longer than that of Richard, in the face of a somewhat dubious claim to the throne and a substantial Yorkist faction who weren’t uniformly mollified by the symbolism of his marriage to Elizabeth of York. To secure his position once and for all, he had to fight one more pitched battle, this time against insurgents rather than as the leader of them. He won the Battle of Stoke Field, which may have been even larger and bloodier than the Battle of Bosworth Field, on June 16, 1487, killing in the process the rebel leader John de la Pole, the Earl of Lincoln and Richard III’s nephew, a man who probably had ambitions of his own to seize the throne. This victory on Henry’s part is often forgotten today — not least because it was never written about by Shakespeare — but it is considered by most historians to mark the true, definitive ending of the Wars of the Roses.
After his period of youthful martial glory was over, Henry VII settled down to become the most detail-oriented king England had known in many a generation. An austere, serious-minded man by disposition, he was for once exactly the monarch that England needed. He stabilized the kingdom’s precarious finances, both by avoiding expensive military adventures and through a taxation regime that many people at all levels of society thought onerous, but that was for the most part fairly administered. His worst failing — an understandable one, in light of what had come before him — was an abiding sense of paranoia. He came down harshly on any hint of sedition; the royal jailers and executioners were kept plenty busy. He had two overriding goals for his reign: to leave England a solvent, governable state, and to leave it in the hands of another Tudor.
Naturally, it was assumed that said Tudor would be his eldest son, whom Henry had invested with the storied name of Arthur upon his birth in September of 1486. Arthur was groomed almost from that very instant for the role of his father’s successor, being surrounded by the best teachers and trainers whom Henry could find. Much to his gratification, Arthur proved a chip off the old block. Earnest and serious, he sponged up languages, religion, philosophy, and statecraft, evincing from an early age an understanding of what his role was to be in this life and how important it was for him to play it well. If the father and the son were perhaps a little on the boring side in their dour earnestness, most could agree that boring might not be such a bad way to kick the next century off, after all that England had been through in the last one. A more worrisome concern was Arthur’s health: he was a frail, sickly boy who seemed unlikely ever to lead any armies into battle in the way that his father once had. The obvious solution to that problem, of course, was for him to avoid having to do so by continuing Henry VII’s policy of neutrality and moderation on the international stage, whilst nipping any internal uprisings in the bud by clamping down on the merest hint of disloyalty.
Having gone a long way toward locking down his authority over his own kingdom with his marriage to Elizabeth of York, Henry looked for a queen for Arthur who could improve its standing abroad. He negotiated a rather dazzling match with Catherine of Aragon, a daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the joint monarchs of the newly united and ascendant kingdom of Spain. The bright and beautiful sixteen-year-old girl arrived in England with great pomp and circumstance in the spring of 1502. There she met the virginal and ascetic fifteen-year-old Arthur, married him, and lay down with him for the first time in a bed strewn with roses and holy water. The poor boy keeled over dead not long afterward. The jokes practically wrote themselves in 1502, as they still do today.
Henry had doted on Arthur, yet he had little time to grieve. He could take solace in the fact that he had a second son, eleven years old at the time, who was also named Henry. Less fortuitously, this spare heir had not received the same education and training as his brother. Prince Henry had grown up in the countryside, well away from the halls of power. He was a lusty, robust boy, a natural athlete who preferred the jousting field and the boxing ring to the classroom or the library. He hardly knew his father, who had regarded him as an irrelevancy while Arthur was being groomed for the throne. Now, that would have to change. Prince Henry was brought to London for a crash course in all the things a future king of England needed to know.
Henry VII was at pains to salvage the guarantee of friendship with Spain which Arthur’s marriage to Catherine had represented, as he was the dowry of 200,000 ducats she had brought with her to England. He decided the only way to do so was to marry Arthur’s widow to Henry. This eyebrow-raising proposition was, as you can doubtless well imagine, not greeted with equal enthusiasm from all quarters. Inevitably, both sides of the debate plumbed their Bibles for relevant scripture — and, equally inevitably, both came up with something that seemed to apply in its frequently self-contradictory pages. Opponents of the new marriage pointed to the Book of Leviticus: “And if a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.” Proponents riposted with the Book of Deuteronomy: “If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead shall not marry without unto a stranger: the husband’s brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of an husband’s brother unto her.”
For her part, Catherine still quite liked the idea of becoming the next queen of England, as she did that of becoming the wife of Prince Henry, who even at age eleven manifested more of the qualities that a buxom teenage girl might find attractive than had Arthur. She put a thumb on the scale by insisting that her first marriage had never been consummated; Arthur, she said, had been too awed and overwhelmed to do the nasty, roses and holy water notwithstanding. If she was telling the truth — admittedly, a monumental if — there was a case for having the marriage annulled, because some theologians considered the marriage pact to be irrevocably sealed only at the moment of consummation. King Henry formally requested an annulment from Pope Julius II on this basis. It was granted in 1503 — but, as we’ll see, the question of just what Arthur and Catherine had gotten up to in the marital bed was destined to come up again much later. For now, though, Prince Henry was betrothed to Catherine, who remained in England with her dowry, waiting for her next husband to come of age. Perhaps mindful of the fate Arthur had suffered after going to bed with her, King Henry decided that the marriage could wait until his second son reached eighteen years of age.
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