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

That afternoon, an armada of forty barges conveyed the royal party and London’s civic dignitaries some two miles downstream to Westminster Palace. Abutting the abbey, from whose sanctuary it was separated by a high wall, and the seething lanes of its cramped satellite town, the palace was prepared for a week-long programme of sporting and dramatic entertainment. Security details had searched all the tenements within the abbey grounds and Canon Row, the narrow lane whose houses gave on to the palace yard’s north wall, submitting a written report of their findings; their inhabitants had all been ordered to clean and decorate their homes. Open to the river at its southern end, the expanse of the yard had been gravelled and sanded for the sure footing of the horses; in it had been erected a temporary stadium, ready for a series of jousts. The low-slung bulk of Westminster Hall, in term-time swarming with the business of London’s law courts, stood decorated, prepared to receive the wedding party. 57

A torrential downpour having finally abated, expectant crowds thronged the palace yard. Londoners filed in, mingling with lawyers and students from the nearby inns of court, many of whom had been ordered to attend on pain of royal displeasure – and to pay a hefty 12d entrance fee into the bargain. Onlookers craned out of the overlooking houses, so many ‘that unto sight and perceiving was no thing to the eye but only visages and faces without appearance of their bodies’, straining to catch a glimpse of the Spanish princess as the royal party, some hundreds strong, took their seats in a purpose-built gallery. 58The atmosphere built to fever pitch. Trumpets announced the chief challenger, Buckingham, who emerged from Westminster Hall, fully armoured and on horseback, inside a white-and-green satin pavilion on wheels, scattered with red roses. Followed by his team, he circled the yard slowly, milking the thunderous applause, before doing obeisance to the king. Half an hour later, the five ‘defenders’ appeared through the opposite entrance: Lord William Courtenay, in blood-red plate armour, riding a red dragon led by a giant carrying a tree; the team captain, the marquis of Dorset, in a suit of coal-black armour, horsed, in a pavilion of cloth-of-gold. One of the ‘answerers’ on the opposing team, Lord Rivers, topped the lot, arriving in a ship firing cannon, ‘which made a great and an huge noise’. The Rich Mount made another appearance, this time on wheels as the earl of Essex’s ‘pavilion’; sitting atop it was a young woman in white, hair flowing around her shoulders. Such entrances, said an eyewitness, had not been seen ‘in very long remembrance’. 59

Poring through his big book of jousts, bought from the widow of Edward IV’s king-of-arms, Garter herald John Writhe had devised an elaborate world of stylized violence to rival the famed tournaments of the Yorkists and which bore comparison with the matchless displays of Burgundian chivalry. 60At Calais the year before, Writhe and Henry VII’s tournament-planner, Sir Richard Guildford, had been close and interested observers of Archduke Philip and his knights. Now, conjuring up a world of chivalric make-believe, dream landscapes, damsels in distress, wildmen and unicorns, the pair had created a supreme articulation of political loyalty to Henry VII. In a last-minute adjustment to the Tree of Chivalry standing in one corner of the palace yard, both teams’ escutcheons hung together in a solid expression of unity. The previous arrangement, in which the shields of the teams led by Buckingham and Suffolk were to have faced each other in aggressive opposition, would have sent out entirely the wrong signals. The inconvenient fact of Suffolk’s rebellion had been thoroughly effaced.

Fantasy heroes within a securely Tudor universe, the combatants thundered together, ‘striking, cutting and lashing at each other … Some of their swords were broken of 2 pieces, and some other their harness [armour] was hewn off from their body.’ Guildford, the experienced referee, ensured that the violence stayed within reasonable limits; Writhe kept score. In the grandstand, Henry sat like a Solomon, watching and judging, leaning forward with an aficionado’s keenness, conversing with Guildford and sending messages of encouragement and approbation out to the nobles who jousted in his honour. Following each round, the jousters trotted up, dismounted and climbed the pavilion stairs to do obeisance. At the end of the week, in a prize-giving ceremony, the king’s blue eyes searched the faces of the participants as he congratulated them and distributed precious stones, tokens of his favour. Buckingham received a diamond of ‘great virtue and price’. Dorset, the opposing captain, was presented with a rose made of rubies inset with a diamond: the red-and-white rose was, Henry seemed to say, a highly appropriate prize for the loyal jousting of Suffolk’s replacement. 61

By night, the focus shifted to Westminster Hall, its walls hung with tapestries and at its western end a cupboard, seven shelves high, on which quantities of gold plate winked and glittered in the torchlight. In front of this display, on a raised dais, Henry and Elizabeth sat enthroned under their cloth of estate. Surrounded by the newlyweds, the royal family and the assembled court and household, they watched, enrapt, as William Cornish’s disguisings unfolded before them. One night, a succession of wheeled pageant cars, some eighteen feet high, swayed and creaked out of the gloom of the hall’s eastern end and ground to a halt before the royal company. 62In one scene, actors played out an allegory of Arthur’s wooing of Catherine, in which two English ambassadors descended from a ship, fully rigged and crewed, to pay court to ladies peering from the windows of a Spanish castle. After the performers had come together in a sequence of intricately choreographed dances, the assembled company looked on as the bride and groom danced in succession. Then, last of all, Prince Henry descended from the dais with his fourteen-year-old sister Margaret. They performed two slow bass dances, as the others had done. But the heavy formality of it all chafed at the ten-year-old prince who, feeling weighed down by his clothes, ‘suddenly cast off his gown and danced in his jacket’. In one stroke, he had shattered the gravitas. And everybody loved it, including the king and queen, to whom it gave ‘right great and singular pleasure’. He had stolen the show. 63

After the week-long revelry at Westminster, Friday 26 November was, as the official chronicler put it, a day of business and pleasure. The royal household packed itself up with practised efficiency as it prepared to move some eight miles upriver to Henry VII’s house at Richmond for the final stage in the festivities. Tapestries were rolled up, plate and furnishings were loaded into myriad ‘great and huge standards, coffers, chests, cloth sacks, with all other vessels of conveyance’, then heaved onto carts and wagons, boats and wherries. After lunch, the wedding party emerged from Westminster Palace and crossed the palace yard to Westminster Bridge, the broad landing stage that extended far out into the river. There, the Thames was thick with some sixty boats waiting to transport the dignitaries, festooned with pennants, flags and tapestries, many ‘rowing and skimming’ as they waited their turn to dock. The wedding party boarded the barges that were the royal family’s usual method of transport through London and the flotilla moved off upstream, in its midst the king’s barge with its red dragon prow, accompanied by the ‘most goodly and pleasant mirth of trumpets, clarions, shawms, tabors, recorders, and other diverse instruments, to whose noise upon the water hath not been heard the like’. Landing several hours later at the small village of Mortlake, the party transferred to horseback and, ‘very late, in the silence of the evening’, rode into Richmond, their way lit by the yeomen of the guard carrying flaming brands. 64