Arthur Tudor (1486-1502) : The Lost Tudor Prince Of Wales

It is hardly contested that, amongst the kings that ruled in England, one of the most famous is Henry VIII. However, it comes to the acknowledge of few that he was the second son who was not prepared to receive the English crown. In fact, he owes much of his throne to the death of his older brother and presumptive heir, Arthur Tudor. And although there is little discussion about the life of this prince, mostly because of his early death, he was not the first British heir to die so young, but likely to be the one whose life would change the course of it's history, after all, many ask what would have been of England had he lived. What kind of King would have he become? Is it possible to especulate if the events that had left their impact in Henry VIII's reign such as English Reformation would have happened under Arthur's authority? Perhaps all we might get is a glimpse of Arthur's character, and what was shaping it before his premature death. But even doing so, we cannot play with certainties or make assumptions, so based on that, this post is only an attempt to enlight the life of a prince who has become merely a footnote to History.

In previous posts, where the Tudors are concerned, we have already discussed about Arthur's father, King Henry VII, his sister Margaret, and some of the wives of his brother such as Anne of Cleves and Anne Boleyn. There, we have explained that Henry Tudor, formerly known as the Earl of Richmond, entitled to it by his birth, conquered the English crown after the Battle of Bosworth, which occurred in 22 August 1485 by opposing Tudor and his Lancastrians forces to the Yorkist ones leaded by Richard III, previously the duke of Gloucester and the youngest son of Richard duke of York. In theory, by becoming King Henry VII, his ascension put to an end an English Civil War that lasted for almost 30 years known as the Cousin's Wars or the Wars of the Roses, and his marriage to Elizabeth of York, duchess of York and the heiress of the deceased King Edward IV upon the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower.

As soon as they were married in 1486, Elizabeth of York was pregnant and Henry Tudor was very certain their first child to be a son. And indeed he was proved to be correct. A boy was born in 20 September of that same year, a month before he was expected to, at Winchester, which was believed by Henry VII to have formerly been the legendary capital of Camelot. For this reason, his first born son received the name Arthur "anticipating his reign and dynasty would bring back the golden age of the legendary king."

Upon his birth, he was bestowed the duchy of Cornwall and the earldom of Snowdon, and a few days later he was baptised at Winchester Cathedral by the Bishop of Worcestor, John Alcock. His godparents were both Lancastrians and Yorkists, once Arthur's birth was seen as the physical embodiment of the union of two former enemy houses of the late Plantagenet Dynasty. Here we see John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford; Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby; William FitzAlan, 16th Earl of Arundel as his godfathers and Queen Elizabeth Woodville and Cecily of York as the prince's godmothers.

Three years later,

"On 29 November 1489, after being made a Knight of the Bath, Arthur was appointed Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester and was invested as such at the Palace of Westminster on 27 February 1490. As part of his investiture ceremony, he progressed down the River Thames in the royal barge and was met at Chelsea by the Lord Mayor of London, John Mathewe, and at Lambeth by Spanish ambassadors. On 8 May 1491, he was made a Knight of the Garter at Saint George's Chapel at Windsor Palace."

Also,

"Henry was worried about his son's household, or so a letter he wrote one summer to Sir Henry Vernon, it's comptroller, suggests. The King thanked Vernon that 'by your wise and poletike meanes his household is the better conducted and governed, which is greatly to your laude and praise', but he also urged him 'to dispose you to contynue and yeve your personal attendance there at such seasons as the counsail of our said son shal thinke necessarie and expedient', warning that 'elles we must of urgent necessite appointe oon of our hede officers to exercise your saide rowme, and calle you to serve us in his stede'. Henry had deliberately not placed a single nobleman in charge of Arthur's establishment as Edward [IV] had appointed his brother-in-law Earl Rivers as 'governor and ruler' of his son. Presumably he had wished to avoid the partisan use of the prince's power practised by the Woodvilles and the bloody outcome it had brought in 1483. The decision was also congruent with Henry's reluctance to entrust the rule of any region to a single magnate. But this left the seven-year-old prince nominally master in his own house, a house in which head to learn to command and reward his servants with only the guidance of Vernon and his other senior household officers."

The prince's household, established in order to fulfill the purpose of learning how to display the royal power, to understand the protocol that moved his father's court as well as being taught of what kingship is. As we can see below:

"The household was also where Arthur could practice the magnificence that displayed royal power. [..] Entertainers in his household helped him provide sophisticated hospitality- we know of his lutenist, organist and poet- and his fame was spread further abroad by his company of players, who toured the provinces regularly from 1494-5. His tapestry collection may have included a set with red, white and Tudor roses, the ihs monogram and the legendary arms of King Arthur, of which fragments survive at Winchester College. He learnt to give  magnificent gifts in the styles appreciated at his father's court, like the book of hours, printed at Paris on vellum and illuminated, he gave to Thomas Poyntz, a servant since his childhood."

We come to other names that are part of his household, such as Anthony Willoughby and Maurice St John, who was the favoured great-nephew of Lady Margaret Beaufort aside of other men of his generation such as Sir Gruffydd ap Thomas, son of Sir Rhys ap Thomas, who was his closest companion. Apparently, to men as Willoughby and St John, "he famously said on the morning after his wedding night 'Bring me a cup of ale for I have been this night in the midst of Spain."

Men who were out of the favour of the Tudor dynasty also served the prince of Wales, such as Robert Ratcliffe, son to John Ratcliffe Lord Fitzwalker, who was executed for plotting with Perkin Warbeck in 1495-6. He too was present amongst those who witnessed the Prince speaking the former sentence concerning consummating his marriage to the Princess of Wales and would later help to carry the "canopy over Arthur's corpse." In short, Arthur was not only surrounded by men favoured or not by the Tudors, but also by men who were greatly influenced by Renaissance, which will lead us to his education.

Following the establishment of the prince's household, the king was decided to educate his son and heir following the humanist ideals that Renaissance had been exporting to Europe in those days. It can be assumed that the transition to Modern Age began with the Tudors. We can attest that

"It was around this time that Arthur began his formal education under John Rede, a former headmaster of Winchester College. His education was subsequently taken over by Bernard André, a blind poet, and then by Thomas Linacre, formerly Henry VII's physician. Arthur's education covered grammar, poetry, rhetoric and ethics and focused on history. Arthur was a very skilled pupil and André wrote that the Prince of Wales had either memorised or read a selection of Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Terence, a good deal of Cicero and a wide span of historical works, including those of Thucydides, Caesar, Livy and Tacitus. Arthur was also a "superb archer", and had learned to dance "right pleasant and honourably" by 1501."

Although he preferred books in contrast to his brother, Henry, who would be a king known for the taste of dancing and great festivities, to say Arthur was not skilled in these same activities is not valid. He was, like his father and younger brother, fond of hunting and was, as said before, excellent archer besides being fond of horseback riding. That being said, Arthur's education was set to prepare him to be a humanist king as his father planned to. Most of the questions that surround him concentrate in asking:  what kind of ruler would Arthur have been? How different would Britain's history be if Henry VIII had been sent to the Church and Arthur had not died in 1502?

There can only be made assumptions to respond these questions, if they can be answered properly at all. According to "Arthur Tudor, Prince of Wales: Life, Death and Commemoration",

"Arthur might not have tried to govern his whole realm too much like southern England, as Steven Ellis has argued Henry VIII did, with dire effects. In that measure at least did his preparation for kingship might have made him a different king not only from his father, who had spent too long in Brittany to know the realm he had to rule, but also from his brother, who had spent too long in the Thames Valley. In other ways his preparation for kingship seems to have designed to make him at once a model humanist prince and recognizably his father's successor."

Another aspect of Arthur's life that is very discussed is his personal life, in other words, his marriage to the princess of Wales, the Spanish Infanta, Catherine of Aragon. Born in 1485, she was the youngest child of Isabel de Castile and her consort, Ferdinand of Aragon. Together, they united the realms of Castile y León and Aragón under their marriage. Catherine, their daughter and rumoured to be their favourite, was as educated following humanist tradition dictated by Renaissance as her betrothed to be, Arthur, who was born a year later.

The negotiations that would lead to the marriage of an Infanta who came from a powerful united Spain to the prince of Wales, whose dynasty had only been established in England's throne, took years and a great deal of time before it actually happened. The Treaty of Medina del Campo was arranged in order to straighten the alliance of England and Spain through the marriage of their children. As we can observe Henry VII's policies in general, he would use marriage to keep peace instead of going to war, something he would be successful to.

We do not intend to go too deep over the Treaty of Medina del Campo and it's implications to Henry VII's government. Instead, we will focus in the marriage between the prince and his infanta. Catherine, whose Spanish name is Catalina, set sail from Spain after years exchanging letters with Arthur in latin, since both had no knowledge of each other's mother tongue. Despite the first awkward welcome from her father-in-law, who insisted to see the princess himself, whether she was sleeping or not, all parts seem to have got along well. Once introductions finally happened, it was supposedly said that Arthur wrote well of Catherine, admiring her beauty and, to his in-laws, promising to be a good husband to her. They were then married to St Paul's cathedral on 14 November 1501. "The prince and his bride were sent down to the borders of Wales to keep court at Ludlow, where, in less than five months, the bridegroom died on 2 April 1502."

Far from provoking a discussion whether their marriage was consummated or not, we come to discuss a more important matter: the sudden Arthur's death. The prince and heir of England who was often known as the Tudor rose for physicially emboding the houses of York and Lancaster, that being even seen at his household when the choice of men were to represent it well, died. Until our present days, there was this idea that Arthur Tudor was sickly and not as strong as his younger brother was. A lie that was wrongly perpetuated by a misunderstanding of a Victorian historian, as we can see that "in actual fact Arthur's health seems to have been perfectly normal up to the time when he succumbed to what was probably some form of plague."

And this:

"To the nineteenth-century historian James Gairdner, however, Henry's words appeared simply to express a concern about the general state of his son's health--and when put together with the fact that Arthur was to die soon afterwards, this seemed to make adequate sense. Thus it was that a 'weak and sickly' Prince appeared in Gairdner's article on Arthur in the hugely influential Dictionary of National Biography (volume I, first published in 1885) and the idea was authoritatively established."

The words of Henry VII which this paragraph refers to are nothing but the expression of the King's concern in sending Arthur and Catherine to settle in Ludlow. Would it be safe? Arthur was months younger than his wife and this was to be considered, although Catherine was seen as ready to give birth. This was a common concern of those days, although it was acceptable that from the age of 14 royal 'children' could consummate their marriage. But we know well that Henry decided to send the prince and the princess to Ludlow, so they could be taught how to rule court.

His death in 1502 was, pointless to reinforce, the disappointment of a nation, the break of hopes destined to that prince. If in his birth, so many poets aluded to the glorious moment of it, in his death, lamentations and sorrows followed. It was a great procession that followed, and it must be remembered that in Tudor days, the parents did not participate their children's funeral. We have a small account to share of the funeral of the prince, taken from the book "Arthur Tudor, Prince of Wales: Life, Death and Commemoration."

"From here [Ludlow] the procession to Worcester began, accompanied, amongst others, by the bishops of Linconl and Salisbury, the abbot of Chester, and the chief mourner the Earl of Surrey (deputizing for the royal family). The funeral took place in Worcester Cathedral 'with weping and sore lamentation'. 

"The lord treasure of England, the earl of Surrey, was probably the chief managed of the funeral. [...] The prince's council no doubt played an important part in the local planning and co-ordination of the ceremonies. Two of it's members, Sir Richard Croft and Sir William Uvedale, respectively steward and comptroller of Arthur's household, rode ahead of the cortège from Bewdley to Worcester and made sure nobody passed through the city gate before it's arrival. [...]"

With Arthur's death, expectations about the rise of a second King Arthur and a legendary reign died too. But it must not be assumed that he was a very different prince, when he was a boy of his days. According to Steven Gunn, his rule would probably have differed little of his father, so is it safe to assume that many of the events that marked Henry VIII's reign could have been avoided? Perhaps. But Reformation was already in course long before Henry VIII himself decide to divorce his first wife, so this cannot be responded with certainty.

His memory was, like so many prince of Wales that had not reached the crown, been left aside to the praise of great monarchs that were not expected to be kings or queens. Again, it must be remembered he was not a sickly prince. Conditions in the 15/16th century England, or in medieval times as a whole, would hardly prevent an amount of diseases to spread. Arthur Tudor was healthy and could have been a great time if destiny permitted. Or maybe, as many Englishman could have thought, that was just not the God's will. 

Whether be the case, our prince of Wales, the king who never was, should not live in the shadow of his brother Henry VIII. 

Bibliography:
-Prince Arthur's Preparation for Kingship, Arthur Tudor, Prince of Wales: Life, Death and Commemoration.Edited by Steven Gunn and Linda Monckton.

-Arthur Tudor, Prince of Wales: Life, Death and Commemoration. Edited by Steven Gunn and Linda Monckton.

-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur,_Prince_of_Wales

-http://www.luminarium.org/encyclopedia/arthurtudor.htm

-https://thefreelancehistorywriter.com/2013/04/01/arthur-tudor-prince-of-wales/