Arthur, Prince of Wales

• 1. Introduction

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  Arthur, Prince of Wales was born on the night of the 19th-the 20th of September 1486 at about one in the morning, and he was dead before he turned sixteen. In that brief span, his birth sparked celebrations among French and Italian humanists who saw it as the start of a golden age. His death, six months after his wedding, set off a chain of events that would split the Church of England from Rome and reshape a dynasty.

  His father, Henry VII, had seized the English crown just a year before, defeating Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. The Tudor hold on the throne was fragile, and Arthur was conceived as a living solution. Henry named his firstborn son after the legendary king and sent his wife to give birth in Winchester, the city contemporaries identified with Camelot, to announce that a new age of British glory had begun.

  But the questions Arthur's short life raises are thorny ones. Did his marriage to Catherine of Aragon produce a real union, or only a ceremonial one? Why did his death matter so much more than his life? And how did a prince who has remained largely forgotten since 1502 come to stand at the hinge of the English Reformation?

• 2. A Prince Designed for a Kingdom

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  Henry VII chose Winchester with deliberate care. The city was identified as Camelot, and the Tudors needed to broadcast their Welsh roots and their ancient legitimacy. Elizabeth of York was sent to Saint Swithun's Priory, today Winchester Cathedral Priory, specifically for the birth. Arthur was baptised four days after he arrived, at Winchester Cathedral, by John Alcock, the Bishop of Worcester.

  The godparents assembled for the ceremony were a roll call of Tudor power: John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford; Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby; William FitzAlan, 16th Earl of Arundel; Queen Elizabeth Woodville, Arthur's grandmother; and his aunt Cecily of York. Elizabeth and Cecily carried the infant prince through the ceremony themselves.

  Arthur's nursery at Farnham was headed by Elizabeth Darcy, who had previously served as chief nurse for Edward IV's children, including Arthur's own mother. He was created Duke of Cornwall from birth. On the 29th of November 1489, after being made a Knight of the Bath, he was appointed Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester, and invested formally at the Palace of Westminster on the 27th of February 1490. His procession down the River Thames was met at Chelsea by the Lord Mayor of London, John Mathewe, and at Lambeth by Spanish ambassadors already watching this boy's future with interest.

• 3. Education and Character

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  Around 1491, Arthur began formal schooling under John Rede, a former headmaster of Winchester College. His education then passed to Bernard Andre, a blind French poet and Augustinian friar, and afterward to Thomas Linacre, who had previously served as Henry VII's own physician. The curriculum covered grammar, poetry, rhetoric, ethics and history.

  Andre recorded that Arthur had either memorised or read Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Terence, substantial portions of Cicero, and a wide range of historical works including Thucydides, Caesar, Livy and Tacitus. Arthur was also described as a superb archer, and by 1501 he had learned to dance, in the words of the record, "right pleasant and honourably."

  The popular belief that Arthur was a sickly child traces to a misreading of a single letter from 1502. Contemporaries recorded no illness during his lifetime. He grew unusually tall for his age, carried reddish hair, small eyes and a high-bridged nose, and was considered handsome by the Spanish court. Historians Steven Gunn and Linda Monckton described his personality as "amiable and gentle." Sir Francis Bacon, writing later, noted that although Arthur had been born one month premature, he was "strong and able." His brother Henry, who would eventually outlive him by decades, was said to have resembled him closely.

• 4. The Spanish Match

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  Planning for Arthur's marriage began before he turned three. The target was Catherine, born in 1485, the youngest daughter of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon. The goal was a formal Anglo-Spanish alliance aimed at France, and negotiations were conducted in large part by the Spanish ambassador Rodrigo Gonzalez de la Puebla.

  The Treaty of Medina del Campo, signed on the 27th of March 1489, established that the marriage would proceed as soon as both parties reached canonical age, and it fixed Catherine's dowry at 200,000 crowns, equivalent to roughly five million pounds in 2007. Because Arthur was under fourteen and therefore below the age of consent, a papal dispensation was required; it was issued in February 1497. A proxy betrothal followed on the 25th of August 1497.

  In October 1498, Arthur made a Royal Entry to Coventry, where he was welcomed with pageants of the Nine Worthies, introduced by the legendary King Arthur himself and by Saint George. In 1499, a marriage by proxy took place at Arthur's Tickenhill Manor in Bewdley. Arthur wrote to Catherine in October 1499, addressing her as "my dearest spouse" and describing his longing to see her as so strong that the delay in her arrival was vexatious to him. The two corresponded in Latin until the 20th of September 1501, when Arthur turned fifteen and was considered old enough to proceed.

• 5. The Wedding at Saint Paul's

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  Catherine landed at Plymouth on the 2nd of October 1501. On the 4th of November, the couple met for the first time at Dogmersfield in Hampshire. Arthur immediately wrote to Catherine's parents that he would be "a true and loving husband." The pair discovered at once that they had each mastered a different pronunciation of Latin, making easy conversation difficult. Catherine arrived in London five days later, on the 9th of November.

  The marriage ceremony took place on the 14th of November 1501 at Saint Paul's Cathedral. Both Arthur and Catherine wore white satin. Henry Deane, Archbishop of Canterbury, conducted the service, assisted by William Warham, the Bishop of London. After the ceremony, the couple made their way to Baynard's Castle, where entertainers described as the best-voiced children of the King's chapel sang, in the words of the account, "right sweetly with quaint harmony."

  The bedding ceremony that followed was designed by Arthur's grandmother Lady Margaret Beaufort. The bed was sprinkled with holy water; Catherine was led from the wedding feast by her ladies-in-waiting, undressed, veiled and laid in bed; Arthur was escorted into the room by his gentlemen as viols and tabors played. The Bishop of London blessed the bed and prayed for the marriage to be fruitful. This is the only publicly recorded royal bedding ceremony in Britain in the sixteenth century, and what happened in that room afterward would become a question of state consequence three decades later.

• 6. Ludlow and Last Days

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  After a month at Tickenhill Manor, Arthur and Catherine traveled to Ludlow Castle in Shropshire, where the Prince was headquartered as the effective ruler of Wales. Arthur had found governing the Welsh Marches straightforward; the border had grown quiet after centuries of conflict. Henry VII had initially been reluctant to let Catherine follow Arthur west, but ultimately ordered her to join her husband.

  In March 1502, both Arthur and Catherine fell ill. The source of the illness was described at the time as "a malign vapour which proceeded from the air." Historians have suggested it may have been the English sweating sickness, tuberculosis, plague or influenza. Catherine recovered. Arthur died on the 2nd of April 1502 at Ludlow, six months short of his sixteenth birthday.

  News reached Henry VII's court late on the 4th of April. The King was woken from sleep by his confessor, who quoted the Book of Job before telling Henry that his "dearest son hath departed to God." Henry wept. He then sent for his wife Elizabeth so they could, as the account puts it, "take the painful news together." Elizabeth reminded Henry that God had helped him win the crown and that they were still young enough to have more children. Shortly after leaving his chambers, Elizabeth herself collapsed in grief, and the King hurried to her.

  On the 25th of April, Arthur's body was carried on a wagon upholstered in black, drawn by six horses also caparisoned in black, to Worcester Cathedral via the River Severn. Thomas Howard, 1st Earl of Surrey, served as chief mourner. At the close of the ceremony, Sir William Uvedale, Sir Richard Croft and Arthur's own household ushers broke their staves of office and threw them into the Prince's grave.

• 7. The Marriage Question

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  On the morning after the wedding, Arthur reportedly told those around him that he was thirsty, saying he had "been in the midst of Spain last night" and that "having a wife is a good pastime." Modern historians generally treat these remarks as the boasts of a fifteen-year-old boy, not as evidence of consummation. Until her death, Catherine maintained that she had come to Henry VIII as a virgin.

  Henry VIII ascended the throne on the 22nd of April 1509 and married Catherine on the 11th of June. The marriage produced six children; three sons died before reaching three months, one daughter was stillborn, another lived only a week, and the couple's surviving child was Mary I, born in 1516. By 1526, Henry had begun pursuing Anne Boleyn. He became consumed by what his court called the "great matter": the need for a male heir and the desire to dissolve his marriage.

  Henry's argument relied on a passage in the Bible stating that a man who takes his brother's wife commits an unclean act and shall be childless. If Catherine's first marriage had been consummated, then her union with Henry was sinful by that reading, which would justify an annulment. An annulment was issued on the 23rd of May 1533; Henry had already married Anne on the 25th of January of that year. The ecclesiastical dispute this triggered drove the separation of the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church. Anne was beheaded for high treason in 1536. At Henry's death in 1547, his three surviving children were Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. Elizabeth died in 1603, bringing the House of Tudor to its end.

• 8. Remembrance and Afterlife

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  In 2002, on the quincentenary of his death, Canon Ian MacKenzie led a reenactment of Arthur's funeral with a requiem mass at Worcester Cathedral. The event was a rare acknowledgment of a prince who has, despite the scale of what followed from his death, remained largely forgotten.

  Henry VIII kept a portrait of his brother showing Arthur in a red cap with a brooch and a collar of red and white roses. A portrait of Arthur was later rediscovered by the English art dealer Philip Mould. A stained-glass image of Arthur Tudor at prayer survives in the west window of the nave of Saint Laurence's Church in Ludlow, the town where he died in 1502. Arthur's bowels, referred to in historical records by the euphemism "the heart," had been buried in a lead box in the church choir; a note from 1723 records that they had been taken up not long before.

  Writers have returned to Arthur more often than the history books have. Philippa Gregory, Norah Lofts and Jean Plaidy each used his story in historical fiction. In The Constant Princess, Gregory imagined Catherine promising Arthur she would marry his brother. The Alteration by Kingsley Amis built an entire alternate history around an England where Arthur survived and had a son, Stephen II, whom Henry VIII attempts to usurp. On television, Jason Kemp played him in the 1972 BBC series The Shadow of the Tower, and Angus Imrie took the role in the 2019 period drama The Spanish Princess. The chantry erected over Arthur's grave at Worcester Cathedral two years after his death still stands.