At the Court of Broken Dreams

ד (daled)

It was when I was about eight that my brother’s marriage to Margaret Beaufort had been annulled on the orders of the king. That man could be a bitch when he felt like it. And I well recall the B.M.’s reaction when she received a letter under the signet announcing this, from that same chamberlain, Lord Saye and Sele. I was playing my little harp — I know the harp is now a girl’s instrument but I was only eight, and it was once the medium of the troubadour — and Mother was seated with her ladies and my elder brother when the letter was brought in. This time she did not look shocked. She was angry.

“So, the king, in his gracious wisdom, has determined that the Lady Margaret, descendant of Duke John of Gaunt and mighty heiress that she is, should not marry you, John, but instead a young man called Edmund Tydr.”

“Who, Mother?” asked my rather confused brother.

“The king’s uterine half-brother whom he has just created Earl of Richmond. The honour of Richmond being a royal perquisite. Not that the new earl is royal, of course, half -royal at most.” She sniffed. “He is apparently now the premier Earl of England. But still, of course, behind you in precedence, my ducal son.”

“Well, I hope they’ll be very happy together, Mother.”

“Oh, don’t be such a dullard, boy. This is a dynastic match, don’t you see that?”

“What does that mean, Mother?” I asked, always more curious than my brother.

“It means His Grace may have something very serious and important in his plans for that happy couple. But we may not speculate on that.” She gave me a very hard look.

“Who’s John going to marry now, Mother?”

“You ask exactly the right question, my son. Someone who will cause His Highness to take notice, I promise you, boys… Perhaps my Lord of York has a daughter we might bid for. Eh, boys?”

“I don’t like my Lord of York, Mother,” said Johnnie, “He’s a fat, ugly man.”

My mother suddenly lashed out at Johnnie, knocking him off his chair. He looked at her in shock then began to bawl.

“You are going to have to grow up very quickly if you are to live to be a man, let alone a great duke like your father, John. Eddie, why do you think a daughter of York would be a good match for your brother?”

The answer was on the tip of my tongue. “Because Duke Richard is a great duke like my father?”

The B.M. looked at me quizzically. “If only you were the older boy, Eddie. Not only is York a great duke indeed, but he is also a cousin of His Grace. Indeed, some people even say that he…” Her voice trailed off.

“Yes, Mother?” I knew from my mother’s reticence that this had to be an essential and exciting piece of information.

“That he should be the king…?” shouted my brother triumphantly. “I heard that—”

But before Johnnie could tell us what he had heard, he had received a whack compared with which the first one had been, well, child’s play.

“If you ever repeat what you have just said, I will see to it that you are disinherited of your title even if I have to declare myself an adulteress to do so!”

And poor Johnnie began to cry all over again.

***

Perhaps, at this point, I should say something to introduce that obnoxious — but increasingly important — family: the Tudors. Let’s start at the beginning because that upstart, varlet family don’t go back very far, I promise you.

How can I describe Jasper Tudor? Or rather Jasper ap something ap something ap Tydr as I am told he should properly be called. There’s only one word to describe him: Welsh. And the English, God bless us (and He usually does), don’t like the Welsh because we don’t understand the Welsh. We conquered the Welsh, therefore we resent them even more than they resent us. Because they are a constant reminder that — far from the saintly Christian nation we take ourselves to be — we are evidently Anglo-Norman oppressors of the British nations, now scattered into the corners of Cornwall, Scotland and Wales. Now, of course, those bloody Welsh have the last laugh (or think they do) with their “unknown Welshman” on the throne of England. So, the last English king of England called him. But that was, of course, a bit of “spin”, a touch of patronising propaganda delivered from on high by His late Plantagenet Grace. For Henry’s uncle, Jasper, was, of course, well-known to all of us — and by “us”, I mean the extended royal family of Lancaster, York, Beaufort and De-la-Pole. And enmity and bloodletting are always more savage within families than without them.

Jasper, with his French-Welsh face and his graceful swan-like neck — rather feminine actually — inherited usefully from his mama Queen Katherine de Valois — whose presence in the genealogy gives her descendants greater proximity to the throne of France than to that of England — was clever as well as Welsh. You have to concede that. Those centuries his ancestors had spent as advisers and middlemen in the Welsh hills and valleys mediating between Celtic princes — they call themselves princes but they’re hardly as powerful as English earls really — and English Crown officials, developed their sharp negotiating skills to the utmost. You could see him thinking in three languages, weighing up the advantages of this course and of that, and always guarding his own back, and his nephew’s. One can only marvel at this extraordinary fusion — this miscegenation as most of my class saw it — of ancient Celtic blood with the sacred blood of the House of Valois, and obliquely with the blood of Plantagenet. How did that old Welsh wizard — Owain Tydr — magic that about? I imagine it happened something like this…

Long, long ago — nearly a hundred years ago, in fact — a victorious King of England, Henry, the fifth of that name, captured the heart (certainly the body anyway) of the mad King Charles of France’s youngest and most beautiful daughter, Katherine de Valois. Their marriage, in 1420 in Troyes (it’s somewhere in France, will that be good enough?) symbolised the happy union of France and England, a union in which the English Lion was the ravisher and La Belle France, the ravished. Kate probably quite enjoyed it; I am told on good authority (a page who helped dress His late Grace) that Hal was hung like a rampant Arab stallion. And we all know that Kate’s mother — Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France — was the biggest tart in Christendom. Some say it was her utter insatiability — coupled with countless infidelities — which drove her poor husband insane (in Seine? Probably). Her oldest sister — named after their mother-whore — was, you may remember, the second child bride of our late and sadly murdered King Richard II, and was then sent politely packing back to France in high Valois dudgeon. She then married her cousin Charles, Duc d’Orleans, whose enmity to their other cousin, the powerful Duke of Burgundy, caused the fissure through which the English tore into France — but that’s another, barely relevant story.

But back to Kate, enjoying her new-found status of Queen of England, laughing all the way to the font with her baby Henry, knowing he would soon replace her dreary brother the so-called dolphin (or, if you prefer, dauphin) as King of France as well as England. But far sooner than any had anticipated, that toddler was monarch of both realms and Kate was a lovely young dowager, very comfortably dowered but far less comfortably hemmed-in by her late husband’s brothers, uncles and courtiers who formed the Regency Council on which (as a young and foreign woman) she was not accorded a seat. So picture the scene: the young and nubile queen-dowager with her pretty French accent, bored and frustrated (remember who her mother was) being waited on, amongst many others, by a strong-limbed chamberlain, Owain, who had formerly been in the household of her late husband’s steward. She noticed two things about Owain (and who wouldn’t?): his odd accent — clearly not French — and the fact that he was built like a stone shithouse. She couldn’t decide which turned her on more. Women are like that: whores. But then again, so are men.

Her ladies whispered in her eager ears that her menfolk — including Welsh-boy — were off that afternoon to go skinny-dipping in the burbling local stream (probably a minor tributary of the Thames at Windsor, if truth be told). So, Katy, blushing not at all, took a few of her favourite girlfriends-in-waiting down to the woods by the stream, very quietly, to hide and watch the proceedings. And, lo and behold, there were the handsome boys and — couldn’t you guess it? — Owain’s todger was even bigger than that of His late Grace, Kate’s first husband. For all at once, she had chosen her second.

When, how or where the marriage took place, nobody knows and there are some of us who doubt if it ever happened at all in a canonical sense. Let us assume some priest and a couple of complaisant witnesses were dragooned into officiating at a quick, secret ceremony to ensure that, technically at least, the three or four children who were extruded from the happy woman’s womb in the early 1430s would not be subject to bastardy or, worse, the penal statutes against the Welsh — though Owain himself would be subject to severe penalties under the statutes of 1428 concerning the queen’s putative remarriage. And so, it befell the Tudor when his wife and protectress sadly left this world in the year of our (I should say their) Lord 1437 after a long and grievous malady, nursed by the kindly sisters in the royal apartments of Bermondsey Abbey.

Owain, urgently summoned by the council, sought immediate sanctuary in Westminster Abbey, until eventually his silver Welsh tongue convinced the councillors of his marriage and love for the late queen and his lack of any personal ambition whatsoever. But who do you think took pity on the poor wretches: his three young sons, Edmund, Jasper and Owen, penniless, untitled children with an unpronounceable surname and no obvious prospects? Come on, guess, who would have been kind (or possibly far-sighted) enough to do such an uncalled-for act of charity? My aunt, of course, Katherine De-la-Pole, the Lady Abbess of Barking Abbey who was ready as always to step into the breach, clear up the mess and give those boys a bloody good education. If Jasper Tudor, Earl of sodding Pembroke, did damn well for himself later in life (forgive my swearing but this really does infuriate me) and managed to put his presumptuous usurping nephew on the high throne of our ancestors — well, my sister-in-law’s ancestors — then it is largely due to the love, care and excellent training my dear Aunt Katherine lavished on him and his siblings as homeless, and virtually hopeless, striplings in the late 30s and early 40s of the last century. She shouldn’t have bothered. She got no thanks. And nor did we.

In about ‘43 or ‘44, the feather-brained young king suddenly remembered, in a flurry of goodwill, that he had a trio of Welsh half-brothers over in Barking whom he might deign to take an interest in. He became their patron and took control of their education; it was one of the very few things he actually had the capacity to control. And then, in the early 50s, it was decided that the House of Lancaster, flimsy and fragile as it was, needed to be bolstered up and by whom other than the two strapping young Welshmen half-brothers (the third became a monk), whom it was decided Henry VI would acknowledge and ennoble as, frankly, he had no one else of his blood whom he could look to. And at that point, there seemed no prospect of an heir to his affectionate but hitherto totally flaccid marriage to that cunning she-devil Queen Margaret, or more correctly Marguerite, of Anjou.

***

My brother’s wedding, as you would expect, was splendid, and was celebrated in St. Paul’s Cathedral (Westminster Abbey wouldn’t have been big enough, and, anyway, the king had only recently held his coronation there and didn’t want it associated with any other connotations). There they stood before the altar to exchange their vows (of course, betrothed couples only make their vows at the lych-gate of country churches, not in great cathedrals): brother John looking every inch the royal duke, tall and saturninely handsome, appearing as he ought to have been in character, regal and dominant; and his bride, the Lady Elizabeth Plantagenet, sadly without the fine looks of her brothers or of her sisters Anne and Margaret, a little plain and dumpy (rather like her father, the old duke) but with a fine and haughty air about her that became a king’s sister.

The Bishop of London officiated, while above in the royal gallery His Grace King Edward smiled down, radiating gracious benevolence and manly charm, flanked by his brothers, the handsome, vapid George, Duke of Clarence, wearing the latest slit doublet from France in the most gorgeous of silks (even more gorgeous than the king’s I noticed quizzically) and his youngest brother Richard, several years younger than me, just a boy really, with one shoulder slightly higher than the other and a keen look on a face just as expressive, if a mite less handsome than his brothers. It was a strong expression; intelligent, and very self-assured for one so young. I dismissed it, but could not forget it. Also sitting by them was their regal mother, Duchess Cecily, proud and haughty, she who later styled herself as “queen by right”; embittered because, by her husband’s death in a skirmish on the orders of her great rival Marguerite of Anjou, she had been denied the chance ever to be queen.

I, still a very young man, was almost moved to tears, when my ducal brother said those lovely old Anglo-Saxon words: “Till that the death depart us tweyne,” even though I was fully aware that this marriage was a dynastic union, a wedding of two great and powerful families, not a sentimental love-match between two burghers or peasants’ children. And I wondered if I should ever say those words, or ever mean them. For whilst I was aware of female sexuality and, in a coarse way, felt its allure, I doubted if I could ever feel the kind of courtly love, the depth of passion expressed so feelingly in French poetry by le Duc d’Orleans, or Monsieur Villon, both of whom were still living at that time. But, as I was musing, day-dreaming as I was wont to do as a lad, my Beloved Mother, by whose side I was standing, very near the newly wedded pair, always, despite her ancestry, so much less poetic and more practical than I, nudged me and said in a stage whisper, “She’s looking down at us, the Rose of Raby as we used to call her. You can see the resemblance to her brother’s son though, when they stand together.”

She was referring to Duchess Cecily, by whose side stood foursquare and monumental, her nephew, the great bear of a man most people assumed, with some reason, was the real ruler of England, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick and Salisbury, the greatest nobleman in the realm. Not as tall as the king but much broader, with magnificent shoulders and ample girth, even in the royal gallery it was uncertain who had the greater presence: Warwick or the king. Not for nothing was Warwick’s symbol the famous bear and ragged staff; the staff stood for his phallic masculine power and the bear, well, you just had to look at him. He treated the king, his younger cousin, as a benevolent uncle should, but an uncle who intended always to keep hold of the pretty boy’s reins.