Yet Henry fell sick in the month after the executions; he recovered, but his health was now gravely damaged. He was as devout as he was superstitious. He attended Mass each day but he also consulted astrologers and soothsayers. He listened eagerly to prophecies concerning the crown and the kingdom, at a time when he was pursued by private misfortunes. In the spring of 1502 his eldest son and heir, Arthur, died from disease or illness. On his death his strong and intelligent younger brother, Henry, became the heir. Six months before Arthur had married Catherine of Aragon, thus binding together the English and Spanish thrones, but Henry was now in turn betrothed to her. The king continually postponed any marriage, however, in the hope that a better prospect for his son might emerge. The young Spanish lady was caught in the middle of international events, starved of money and of affection.
In the year after the death of her eldest son, Elizabeth of York, the queen of England, suffered a miscarriage and succumbed to a post-partum infection. Henry was severely affected by this fresh sorrow, and it was said that he ‘privily departed to a solitary place and would no man should resort unto him’. Elizabeth lay in state in the Tower, and was then given a ceremonial funeral in Westminster Abbey. Two years later the king sought another bride. He pursued the queen of Naples for her dowry as well as for her presumed attractions. He despatched envoys to Italy with the following questions. ‘Whether she be painted, and whether her visage be fat or lean; whether there appeared to be any hair about her lips; whether she wore high slippers to increase her stature; whether her breath was sweet; whether she be a great feeder or drinker?’ He then pursued Joanna of Castile, in the hope of governing that country as regent, even though the lady herself was known to be insane. The courtships came to nothing, and Henry never married again.
He did enjoy some success, the most prominent being the marriage of his eldest daughter to the king of Scotland. The wedding of James IV and Margaret Tudor in 1502 was the balm upon the wound inflicted by the advocacy of Warbeck. By his engineering of dynastic marriages, in fact, Henry did manage to consolidate the position of England among the ruling families of Europe. In so doing he abandoned the aggressive and expansionist policies of the Plantagenet kings. We may interpret that as a victory of his ‘foreign policy’. In any case war was expensive; it also required taxation that stirred up the people.
Despite the brief interruption in the commerce between England and the Low Countries, as a result of Margaret’s welcome for Warbeck, Henry did his best to foster the market in unfinished wool and finished cloth; they were now the principal exports, and the king wished to expedite the trade. He promoted English commerce in other areas, also, and there was scarcely a country in Europe with which he did not enter trade relations; Iceland, and Portugal, and the Baltic states, all came within his purview.
He was by no means a statesman striving for the common good; he was eager only to enjoy the fruits of the increase in customs revenue that went straight into his coffers. He traded on his own account, too, and in one year earned £15,000 from the import of alum used in the manufacture of soap. This was in theory a papal monopoly, but he considered the risk of excommunication less important than the making of profit. The figure of the king in ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ – in the counting house counting out his money – is likely to have been based on Henry VII.
The possibility of profit also promoted him to support the expedition of Bristol merchants over the seas to the ‘isle of Brazil’, better known as Newfoundland, where they found immense fishing grounds. He also gave John Cabot and his three sons a licence for a voyage of discovery in the western oceans, thus beginning the story of English exploration. Cabot touched down on the coast of North America, while all the time believing that he had reached Asia, and the colonial flag was raised. Hakluyt relates that the Bristol merchants brought back three native Americans from Newfoundland to Henry’s court; they were ‘clothed in beasts’ skins and ate raw flesh, and were in their demeanour like to brute beasts’. Henry made sure that they were furnished with suitable lodgings in Westminster and, within two years, they were ‘clothed like Englishmen and could not be discerned from Englishmen’. Hakluyt adds that ‘as for speech, I heard none of them utter one word’. By the time that Sebastian Cabot reached Hudson Bay, on a subsequent voyage, the king was dead.
