Tudor by Leanda de Lisle Page B

the Leicester car park.
    In England we have no equivalent today to the shrine at Lourdes in France, visited every year by thousands of pilgrims looking for healing or spiritual renewal, but we can remember the vast crowds outside Buckingham Palace after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Imagine that feeling and enthusiasm in pilgrims visiting the relics and the tomb of two innocent child princes, greatly magnified by the closeness people then felt with the dead. A cult of the princes would have been immensely damaging for Richard III, who had taken their throne, and for Henry VII, who was fearful of being regarded as a mere king consort to his wife, the sister and heir to the princes. This is why the princes were simply ‘disappeared’, why they were given no tomb, and why they were nowhere officially remembered. Yet the ghosts of the princes – whom Henry VII never laid to rest – haunted the rest of his reign, and when his son Arthur Tudor died it seemed that, like Richard III, Henry too was cursed. But he survived, ruling with an iron hand and helped, crucially, by the fact he had a family, including a surviving son.
    On Henry VIII’s accession in 1509 it seemed England had a ‘true’ king again: he was the the senior male relative of the lost princes, and it was his resemblance to his glorious grandfather, Edward IV – not his father Henry VII – that made Henry VIII ‘the more acclaimed and approved of’. For twenty years thereafter Henry VIII represented an ideal of chivalric kingship that his father had never achieved. Henry VIII’s royal blood, his glamour, his martial qualities, charm and piety, together carried the most tremendous force. In Flanders it was said that the young Henry VIII’s ‘great nobleness and fame’ was ‘greater than any prince since King Arthur’.
    The myth of the convivial ‘bluff King Hal’ lived on in national memory into the next century. Samuel Rowley’s Jacobean play, When You See Me You Know Me , which helped inspire Shakespeare’s HenryVIII , depicted a king going out in disguise to mingle with his subjects, getting into brawls and even being arrested. It is impossible to imagine such a play being written about Henry VII. Even today, we still prefer to remember the young and virile Henry VIII to the old, impotent tyrant. The trigger for Henry’s tyranny was – naturally – his anxieties concerning his inability to have a son with Katherine of Aragon. ‘We think all our doings in our lifetime are clearly defaced and worthy of no memory, if we leave you in trouble at the time of our death’, Henry once commented. Certain he was a ‘true’ king, he believed that his marriage must be false, and therefore cursed. After all, having no son was not only a personal blow, it also meant a possible future struggle for the crown, with his sisters and their heirs gaining a new importance in the future of the succession. These were the defining issues of Henry’s reign and the key influences on his rule: the nature of a true king, the importance of securing national concord and a stable future in blood heirs. Of course, sons required not only a king to sire them but also a queen to bear them – and Henry VIII is remembered today, perhaps most of all, for his queens.
    It was not just his wives who were important, however, in the matter of the succession. The second part of this book opens with the battle of Flodden, as seen through the eyes of two queens: Henry’s sister Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots, whose husband James IV was killed, as well as Katherine of Aragon, Captain General of the English army that killed him. It was a shattering defeat for Scotland, but having children was more important for the succession than winning battles. It was the losing side, in the shape of Queen Margaret, who was destined to carry the Tudor bloodline forward through her son, James V of