The House of Tudor by Alison Plowden Read Free Book Online Page B

to Westminster, the King, wearing a long robe of purple velvet, riding bareheaded under a canopy of estate. The next day, Sunday, Henry Tudor was solemnly crowned in Westminster Abbey and ‘after that solemnization was finished, a royal and excellent feast with all circumstances to such a feast appertaining was holden within Westminster Hall’.
    A week later the first Tudor Parliament met to deal, among other things, with certain anomalies arising out of recent events. Henry had won his kingdom by right of conquest; he had been crowned and anointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury; yet in law, by an Act of his predecessor, he was still attainted of treason - a proscribed person without rights or property. Henry knew that his hereditary title would not stand up to close examination, but he also knew that the country was not so much interested in his legal right to wear the crown as in his ability to hold on to it. He had not summoned Parliament to recognize him as King -he was King already and, in any case, only a true King could summon Parliament. It was a splendidly illogical situation and Henry sensibly resolved the whole tangle by ignoring it, taking his stand on accomplished fact - on his just title by inheritance’, on the judgement of God as delivered at Bosworth, and on the ruling of less exalted judges that his attainder had been automatically cancelled by his assumption of the throne. In order to regularize matters for the future and to satisfy the tidy-minded, a brief Act for the Confirmation of Henry VII was passed, declaring that ‘the inheritance of the crowns of the realms of England and France...be, rest, remain and abide in the most royal person of our now sovereign lord king Harry VII and in the heirs of his body lawfully come, perpetually with the grace of God so to endure, and in none other.’
    The King was not the only person whose affairs had to be sorted out by this Parliament. Elizabeth Woodville, Henry’s prospective mother-in-law, had been stripped of her rank and dignity as Queen by Richard in and her children bastardized. These shameful injustices now had to be erased from the statute book and consigned to ‘perpetual oblivion’. The King’s own mother got back her estates which had been confiscated by Richard in 1483, and the Parliament of 1485 granted to Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby, all the rights and privileges of a ‘sole person, not wife nor covert of any husband’. She was, in fact, to have full and independent control over her very considerable property ‘in as large a form as any woman now may do within this realm’. ‘My lady the King’s mother’ was, therefore, not only an exceedingly rich woman - she also became an exceedingly important and influential woman. Indeed, to all intents and purposes she became honorary Queen Dowager, thus receiving tacit recognition for the vital part, political as well as biological, which she had played in founding the new dynasty.
    The House of Commons now turned its attention to the future of the new dynasty and on 11 December the Speaker presented a petition to the King, earnestly requesting him to take to wife Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV, a request which was solemnly seconded by the lords spiritual and temporal. Henry is generally accused of deliberately delaying his marriage so that no one would have any excuse for saying he owed his throne to his wife. There is no question that Elizabeth’s right to be Queen was a good deal stronger than Henry’s to be King, but no one had ever suggested they should reign jointly. Henry’s title, such as it was, could not be strengthened by his wife’s - it was their children who would benefit from the union of ‘the two bloodes of highe renowne’. So, while the marriage was obviously very desirable politically, it was even more important from the dynastic point of view and that made it all the more essential that it should be an indisputably valid marriage. It would have