Thomas Penn - Winter King - Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

Greeted by the mayor in his robes of scarlet satin, and the twenty-four aldermen in scarlet velvet, the party moved slowly onto the bridge, clattering across its lowered drawbridge and into the tunnel of houses whose gabled upper storeys met overhead. They then emerged into the bridge’s open square, with its chapel of St Thomas of Canterbury jutting out into the Thames, and into a profusion of dynastic symbolism. Two great gold-painted wooden posts, adorned with the king’s escutcheons, badges and emblems, bracketed a two-storeyed wooden tabernacle. Covered with canvas painted to resemble stonework, it was hung with coloured cloth and images of the Order of the Garter inset with the red rose. On each floor of this tableau sat a costumed figure, portraying saints Katherine and Ursula respectively. 37Each in turn stepped forward to address Catherine.

Previewing the young princess’s imminent journey through the London streets, they figured forth an allegorical world of epic scale, in which reality and myth merged inseparably, with Catherine and Arthur at its heart. The pageants to come would, they said, lead her on a quest for worldly honour and immortal glory, which would culminate in her marriage. Honour, St Ursula expounded, was only obtainable through a combination of virtue and nobility. Over the course of the six pageants this narrative would, as St Ursula described it, be woven into a cosmology in which Catherine’s husband-to-be was both the second coming of King Arthur, the unifying king of legend, and the embodiment of Arcturus, an astrological constellation which, according to the Commentaries of Gregory the Great, signified the epitome of the Christian life of virtue. The verse speeches proclaimed by the two saints were so bafflingly complex that their elaborations sailed over the heads of even the most learned observers. Catherine probably had to rely on the condensed summaries, in Latin, painted on boards hanging from the side of each pageant. The general gist, though, was crashingly obvious: Catherine, the pageants said, was about to become part of something very special indeed.

As Catherine progressed away from the river and into the heart of the city, the tumult of feast-day London pressed in on all sides. Lining the streets – freshly sanded for the benefit of horses and to absorb the evil-smelling mud that seeped through the cracked paving – people surged forward to get a glimpse of the cavalcade. Onlookers filled every available vantage point, leaning from windows, balanced precariously on rooftops, as dislodged tiles skittered down under slipping feet. Tapestry and arras, cloth-of-gold, satin and velvet were hung from the houses lining the route, fine drapery whipped in the autumn winds. 38Separated from the crowds by wooden barriers, members of London’s guilds stood dressed in the various ‘liveries and hoods of their manor’. Halfway up Gracechurch Street, at the road’s widest point, the second pageant soared into the air – a battlemented, turreted castle, covered with more of the dynasty’s emblems and badges and, hovering above it, a huge red dragon. Standing in the castle’s gatehouse, a man dressed as a Roman senator addressed the princess and the assembled multitudes. His name, he said, was Policy. Among the stock allegorical figures, the pageant deviser had managed to insinuate a character resembling nothing so much as one of Henry’s lawyer-counsellors who represented good and accountable government, with his ‘eye on the commonwealth’. Policy was evidently meant to send out a reassuring note to the onlooking subjects: Henry’s counsellors were not an unaccountable cabal; rather, they were tireless servants of the public interest. It was a touch typical of Henry VII – or perhaps of the reception’s co-ordinator, Richard Fox. 39

Moving slowly up Gracechurch Street, the party then turned left, down Cornhill, the city’s financial heart. The next three pageants enacted elaborate astrological variations on the marriage. As Catherine and her retinue approached, each in succession came alive: musicians playing, cogs whirring, mechanical constellations operated by costumed children puffing around treadmills. Constructed over Cornhill’s barrel-shaped conduit, the Tun, the third pageant, of the moon, was the most ingenious, extravagant and costly of the set-pieces, featuring lengthy prognostications of nuptial bliss expounded by Catherine’s ancestor, Alfonso X. But the going was so slow that the short November afternoon had already begun to wane. Having ‘well aviewed the goodly device’, the princess had to leave the orating Alfonso behind, and move on, past the Stocks Market and up the great commercial thoroughfare of Cheapside, whose goldsmiths were, according to one Italian visitor, mouth agape, more impressive than ‘all the shops in Milan, Rome, Venice and Florence put together’. Here the last three pageants were waiting, together with Henry VII and Prince Arthur, who had ‘somewhat privily and secretly’ taken a vantage point halfway up the street. 40

During the reception and wedding Henry’s carefully calibrated public appearances would present him as the wellspring of honour, justice and power, the unknowable, all-seeing sovereign who, as the Milanese ambassador Soncino nicely observed, appeared in public ‘like one at the top of a tower looking on at what is passing in the plain’. 41Henry had done exactly this at Exeter in 1497 when, in the wake of Warbeck’s failed invasion, he had received the submission of captured rebels while lodged at the treasurer’s house on the cathedral green. With half the trees on the green cut down so that he could enjoy the view, and standing at a ‘fair large’ window knocked through for the purpose, he watched, imperious, as the commons of Devon, in only their shirts and with halters round their necks, knelt with ‘lamentable cries for our grace and remission’, before lecturing them on the obedience he expected of them. 42

Now, rejecting the usual arrangement of a grandstand, he had commandeered the house of a rich London haberdasher, one of a number of wide-windowed multi-storeyed merchant houses that lined the south side of Cheapside. 43Henry’s elite security force, the three-hundred-strong yeomen of the guard, had secured the area. With their spiked, bladed halberds, and white-and-green jackets stamped with the red rose, they swarmed all over the house, taking up positions ‘in windows, leads, gutters and battlements’. Surrounded by a cluster of his close counsellors, including Arthur’s godfather the earl of Oxford and Richard Fox, Henry stood at the window in ‘open sight’, lifted above the crowds, remote, untouchable. 44

At the king’s side, the royal chronicler documenting proceedings noted the first indications of Catherine’s approach: the expectant shifting of the crowds, and the royal heralds pushing them back. Then came the young lords and their attention-seeking gallants, ‘making gambads’, pirouetting their decorated horses to shouts of approbation from the onlookers. 45Following them, surrounded by a mass of footmen, rode the animated Prince Henry and, alongside him, Catherine. A tiny, upright figure on muleback, she wore a hat of deep red, her auburn hair falling down about her shoulders. Bringing up the rear came the ladies of Queen Elizabeth’s household paired with Catherine’s. The spectacle seemed to convince even the most coolly appraising of London’s bourgeoisie, including the sceptical, ascetic young legal student Thomas More. More wrote to his former schoolmaster John Holt that everything about the reception was superb, apart from Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting who, he sneered, looked like ‘refugees from hell’ – Isabella had evidently not seen fit to prioritize Henry and Elizabeth’s pleas for comeliness. But when it came to the princess herself, More was positively dreamy: ‘Take my word for it, she thrilled the hearts of everyone; she possesses all those qualities that make for beauty in a very charming young girl. Everywhere she receives the highest of praises, but even that is inadequate.’ He concluded, though, on a slightly hesitant note: ‘I do hope this highly publicized union will prove a happy omen for England.’ It was as if, in their staggering magnificence and heaping up of favourable portents and astrological conjunctions, More felt that the festivities were somehow tempting fate. 46