Henry: Virtuous Prince - David Starkey

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and in the wrong place. It was high summer, and most people who mattered were about to leave stinking, plague-ridden London for the country delights of the Long Vacation. Nor did Greenwich help. Still officially known as Placentia or ‘Pleasure’ in medieval Latin, it was a semi-private riverside retreat, more the queen’s than the king’s and emphatically off the beaten track.

      Nevertheless, intention came into it as well. That Greenwich was used for Elizabeth of York’s confinement in the first place suggests that a decision had already been taken to downplay the event. For Henry was the wrong baby to attract attention anyway. In the fullness of time he would be a royal star, effortlessly drawing all eyes and becoming the prime mover of the political cosmos and the axis round which English history turns. Then, he was only the spare and not the heir.

      And the spare did not matter – or, at least, did not matter very much.

      But there is a paradox, as there will be so often in Henry’s story. What made Henry relatively unimportant to others, including his own parents, was supremely important to him. For his status as second son was to condition almost everything about his first dozen years: his upbringing, his education, his relationship with his parents and his siblings, his attitude to women, even where he was brought up.

      In short, in so far as the Henry we know was a product of nurture rather than nature, that nurture was determined by his also-ran place in the family pecking order.

      On the other hand, of course, all this matters – to us and indeed to Henry – only because in circumstances unimaginable, or at least unimagined, at the time of his birth, Henry was to become the eldest surviving son.

      And that changed everything – for England as well as for Henry.

      Notes - CHAPTER 1: ENTRY INTO THE WORLD

       2

       ANCESTORS

      AMONG HENRY’S EARLIEST MEMORIES were stories of his own turbulent family history. Some probably came from the horse’s mouth of his parents and relations, and especially his mother; others formed a staple of the teaching of his first boyhood tutor, the poet John Skelton.

      Henry, Skelton reminded him in the written materials he prepared for his pupil’s instruction, was of ‘noble’ – that is, royal – blood on his mother’s side as much as his father’s. This was unusual. But then so was the whole of Henry’s family story. For not only were his parents both royal; they both had a claim to the throne. Henry’s mother, Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Edward IV, was heiress of the house of York; his father, Henry VII was, much more remotely, heir of the house of Lancaster. And the two claims, of course, were incompatible.

      * * *

      For the last few decades, their – and Henry’s – ancestors had struggled for possession of the crown in a conflict known, after their respective emblems – the red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York – as ‘The Wars of the Roses’. Four kings, two princes and a dozen royal dukes had met violent deaths; others, of similar status, had been imprisoned, dispossessed or driven into exile. As well, there were the women who mourned their menfolk, or, at great risk to themselves, plotted and schemed on their behalf. All were Henry’s relations: his father, mother, uncles, grandfather, grandmothers, great-grandfather and cousins innumerable.

      There must have been moments when Henry felt that his tutor had come near to rubbing his nose in it.

      Now, of course, the victory of Henry’s father at Bosworth and the subsequent marriage of his parents was supposed to put an end to all this. But passions were too entrenched for there to be any such swift and easy conclusion. Instead the aftershocks continued through Henry’s childhood and youth, and provided the other great theme in his upbringing.

      They determined the why and when of his entry into public life, of the offices he held and the titles he bore. They shaped his extended family and with it his own developing sense of identity and political affiliation. They even helped him choose between his parents: he would incline to his mother rather than to his father and, as a young man at least, preferred York to Lancaster.

      It was a rebalancing which, more than anything else, would allow the union of York and Lancaster – sketched only imperfectly under his fiercely partisan father – finally to flourish and become a reality.

      Henry’s father and mother were a striking couple on their wedding day on 18 January 1486. Aged nineteen going on twenty, Elizabeth of York was one of the beauties of the age: tall, statuesque, with blonde hair, blue eyes, fair skin and pure, regular features. She was singularly attractive as a character too, and in a royal family of strident and assertive personalities, she was a healer and reconciler. King Henry VII, though nine years older, was in the prime of life. He too was well above average height, slim, even spare, but strong and with a full head of brown hair, worn rather long, a brilliant eye and a mobile, expressive face. He had also just shown many of the key qualities of kingship: bravery, decisiveness and the ability to master men and events.

      Above all, he had had luck. And he had had it time and time again.

      * * *

      For really nothing was less likely than that this homeless, penniless, long-exiled adventurer, of dubious blood on both sides, more Welsh than English and more French than either, should become heir of Lancaster, king of England and marry the heiress of York.

      Henry Tudor was lucky, in the first place, even to have survived the dire circumstances of his birth. This took place on 28 January 1457 at Pembroke Castle on the extreme south-west coast of Wales. His father, Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond, had died of the plague three months earlier. His mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, was only thirteen and had taken refuge with her brother-in-law, Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke. With her youth

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