The monarchs we never had
Prince Arthur (1486-1502)
Who was he?
To strengthen his claim to the throne, Henry VII set the genealogists to work to trace his descent back to the ancient British kings. He also identified Winchester with Camelot, and therefore, when his wife Elizabeth of York was about to give birth to their first child, Henry sent her to St Swithin’s Priory in Winchester to have the baby. The boy – born on 20 September 1486, only eight months after his parents’ marriage – was named Arthur after King Arthur of the Round Table, partly as an indication of Henry’s hopes for a rebirth of English greatness and partly to emphasise the Tudor family's links to Wales.
Arthur was christened in Winchester Cathedral. His godfathers were the earl of Oxford, who arrived late for the ceremony, and the earl of Derby. His godmother was his maternal grandmother Elizabeth Woodville, widow of Edward IV. Arthur was duke of Cornwall from birth, and when he was three, he was created earl of Chester and prince of Wales.
Arthur had the red hair, small eyes and high-bridged nose that characterised the Tudors, but unlike his brother Henry, duke of York, who was five years younger than him, he was never a robust child. The king saw to it that his elder son had the appropriate education for a future monarch. The boy was mainly tutored by the blind poet laureate Bernard André, who wrote that, by the age of 15, Arthur was familiar with all the best Greek and Latin authors.
In 1488-9, Henry VII’s negotiations with Spain led to the preliminary treaty of Medina del Campo, which included the proposal that Arthur marry Catherine of Aragon, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. However, the Spanish rulers refused to commit themselves until they saw whether the Tudor dynasty was secure on the throne. In 1499, following the execution of the pretender Perkin Warbeck and the earl of Warwick, the last Plantagenet, they agreed to the marriage. For two years, from his seat at Ludlow Castle in Shropshire, the teenage prince of Wales wrote letters in formal Latin and still more formal terms to a girl a year older than himself whom he had never seen.
After a delay of almost a year, Catherine finally arrived in England in October 1501. After 13 years of negotiation, Arthur’s Spanish marriage finally took place on 14 November in old St Paul's Cathedral in London. The duke of York first met his sister-in-law on this occasion, heading the procession that led her to the cathedral and officially introducing her to the citizens of London.
Although Henry VII had a reputation for penny-pinching, he spared no expense for this wedding, which marked the high point of his foreign diplomacy. His grip on the English throne had been considered by many European powers as illegitimate and untenable, but a bond of marriage between the house of Tudor and the ruling dynasty of Spain gave him the stamp of approval.
The 15-year-old Arthur, now president of the Council of Wales and the Marches, and the 17-year-old Catherine went to Ludlow and set up court as prince and princess of Wales. It was assumed that they were too young to cohabit. The question of whether Arthur’s marriage to Catherine was ever consummated would have a powerful effect on the subsequent history of Britain.
How did he die?
On 2 April 1502, less than five months after the wedding, Arthur died, leaving Catherine a young widow in a foreign country. He was buried in Worcester Cathedral, and a memorial to him was erected there two years later.
The prince perished from what was described as ‘sweating sickness’, which in his case is generally believed to have been tuberculosis. But as with all royal deaths, alternative theories abound. Some say that the fever was caused by the damp weather conditions. Medical researchers have also speculated that Arthur's death was due to an outbreak of hantavirus among rodents in Wales. Others have even suggested that his demise was due to neglect or even murder.
But funerary historian Dr Julian Litten has dismissed these theories. He believes that the real mystery in Arthur's death was the nature of the disease, and whether it was a genetic condition that also affected Edward VI, Arthur’s nephew, who also died young.
What were the consequences?
With Arthur's death, his teenage wife was trapped in England while Henry VII squabbled with her father over the remaining payments on her dowry. Henry didn’t fancy the all-important Spanish alliance going to waste, and soon he was openly proposing that Catherine marry the young duke of York, now the heir apparent and six years her junior. He eventually succeeded in securing a papal dispensation for Catherine to marry Arthur's brother.
The dispensation was based on the belief that Arthur and Catherine’s marriage had not been consummated, as Catherine swore it had not. But this wasn’t universally accepted at the time. According to the Tudor contemporary Richard Grafton, Arthur’s brother delayed taking over the title of prince of Wales until he was sure that there would be no heir:
But the duke [Henry], suspecting that his brother's wife was with child, as was thought possible by the expert and wise men of the prince's council, was by a month or more delayed from his title, name and pre-eminence, in which time the truth might easily appear to women.
The marriage finally took place in 1509, shortly after Henry VII’s death. It was one of Henry VIII's first acts as monarch – a single event that would have the widest-ranging effect of all his future actions.
Henry, as the second son, hadn’t been expected to be king and, as a result, had received a rather modern upbringing. Instead of having the rigorous demands of kingship knocked into him by male tutors and role models, he was brought up at Eltham Palace by his mother and with his sisters who idolised him. This early experience of women’s love made Henry a romantic and, according to Dr David Starkey, ‘paved the way for the great passions and crimes of his adult life’.
And as a second son, Henry had been destined for the Church, and his education reflected this: he received a primarily classical education, mastering Latin and French. A strong emphasis on theology and its esoteric debates remained with Henry for the rest of his life and made him feel uniquely qualified to interpret religious law during the 1520s.
This belief eventually led him to seek a way out of his marriage to Catherine when, in his eyes, she failed to produce a male heir and he had fallen in love with Anne Boleyn. The dispensation given by the pope that had negated Catherine’s previous marriage to Arthur was examined minutely by Henry and his pet theologians and was found wanting. The result was Henry’s break with Rome, the foundation of the Church of England and decades of religious persecution and unrest.
