In Bed with the Tudors: The Sex Lives of a Dynasty from Elizabeth of York to Elizabeth I Read Online Free PDF

writer Wace, as well as Layamon’s Brut , established the Arthurian idyll as a golden epoch and formed the basis of most subsequent chronicles for centuries. Edward I had hung a huge round table in the castle’s great hall; tapestries bore the arms of the mythical Arthur’s ancestors and alchemists repeated Merlin’s prediction of the union of a red king and white queen, which had been responsible for the creation of the first Arthur. Queen Elizabeth’s own father had genealogical trees drawn up to establish his own connection with the great British hero and Henry’s banner at Bosworth had born the red dragon, Arthur’s heraldic device, against a white and green background. In 1486, Winchester was carefully selected as a symbolic location to realign the new dynasty with its Welsh heritage and recreate a context for the iconography of the new regime. Henry wanted to endow his first born son, the hope of his fledgling dynasty, with the strength and riches of national myth. Later chroniclers stated that the child was named to ‘honour the British race’, describing the people ‘rejoicing’ in reaction to the child’s name, which made foreign princes ‘tremble and quake’ at the choice, which was to them ‘terrible and formidable’. 12
    Some doubt has arisen among modern biographers as to the exact location of Arthur’s birth, with accounts divided between Winchester Castle and the Prior’s lodgings at the nearby Abbey. Built as part of William the Conqueror’s system of strongholds across Britain, the castle was expanded in the thirteenth century into a huge flinty edifice flanking two courtyards, of which only the Great Hall remains today. It would seem a logical place for Elizabeth’s lying-in but if she had any intentions of delivering her child there, her mind may have been changed by the castle’s deteriorating condition. By 1486, it was considered old and draughty: its discomforts belonged in the era of civil warfare, rather than in the urbane, sophisticated, new European court Henry was forging. The royal party probably settled instead at the Prior’s House, now renamed the Deanery, at St Swithin’s Priory. Strong evidence for this comes from John Stowe’s Chronicle, published in 1565, which describes the baby’s christening procession: the ‘hole chapel met with my lord prynce in the qwens great chamber’, from where the child was carried into the church and up to the ‘hyghe aultar to St Swithin’s shrine’, which would have been a prohibitive journey for a newborn, had he arrived in the castle. 13 It is far more likely that they remained in residence there whilst the Prior’s House was made ready. This three-storey stone building, with its arched entrance portico, was used to house distinguished guests separately from the pilgrims lodged in the usual guest house.
    Winchester lay on one of the major highways of medieval England, a centre for pilgrimage housing around thirty Benedictine monks in 1500, who kept open house for visitors under the new Prior Thomas Silkested. There, Elizabeth’s ladies would have gone about the business of readying a chamber for her lying-in, against a backdrop of monastic business, punctuated by bells and the sound of voices raised in prayer and chant. Far from being austere and chilly, the Priory would have been able to extend their guests a warm welcome. As one of the richest monasteries in the land, St Swithin’s would have had no problem catering for their royal guests: Cathedral rolls show the variety of the monks’ diet, which, in 1492, included meals of venison, beef, mutton, calves feet, eggs, dishes of marrow and bread; on fast days they had salt fish, rice, figs and raisins. The rolls are full of details for the provision of ‘good’ beer, cheese, salt, wine, butter and candles; the gardener was to supply apples in season every two days and flowers for church festivals. A further entry records the duties of the cellarer to include the upkeep of