August 17, 2024 • 44 mins
Join host Natalie Grueninger in this fascinating episode of "Talking Tudors" as she delves into the incredible story of Henry Tudor's rise to power. Sponsored by the Gloucester History Festival, this episode features special guest Nathan Amin, author of 'Son of Prophecy'.
Nathan shares his extensive knowledge of the Tudor dynasty, focusing on Henry VII's unlikely ascent to the throne. Discover the Welsh origins of the Tudors, the significance of the prophetic "Son of Prophecy," and the intricate relationships between the Welsh and the English during the 15th century.
Learn how Henry's lineage, personal qualities, and strategic marriage to Elizabeth of York played pivotal roles in his survival and success. This episode promises a deep dive into the dramatic and lesser-known aspects of Tudor history, offering fresh perspectives and captivating narratives.
Visit Nathen Amin's official website.
Find out more about your host at https://www.nataliegrueninger.com
Buy Talking Tudors merchandise at https://talkingtudors.threadless.com/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello and welcome to Talking Tudors, a fortnightly podcast about the ever-fascinating Tudor dynasty.
My name is Natalie Gruniger and I'll be your host and guide on this journey
through 16th century England.
Are you ready to step through the veil of time into the dazzling and dangerous
world of the Tudor court?
Without further ado, it's time to talk Tudors.
(00:23):
Music.
(00:51):
Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Talking Tudors.
I'm your host, Natalie Gruniger. Thank you so much for joining me today.
I'd like to begin by thanking the sponsor of today's podcast,
the Gloucester History Festival.
The Gloucester History Festival invites you to join a hundred of Britain's top
(01:13):
historians, actors, comedians, and broadcasters in a mouth-watering program
of events this September.
The 50 Blackfriars Talks take place in the magical setting of Blackfriars Priory,
and will be live-streamed for you to enjoy wherever you are in the world.
Watch in person or online to hear from Philippa Gregory, Alison Weir,
Nathan Armin, Linda Porter, David Olusoga, Dan Jones,
(01:37):
Greg Jenner, William Dalrymple, Janina Ramirez, Kate Williams,
and more world-class speakers who'll be sharing their love of history in Gloucester.
Live-stream event tickets give you access to your events until the 27th of September.
Book now at gloucesterhistoryfestival.co.uk.
The festival runs from the 7th to the 22nd of September.
(01:58):
I'd also like to acknowledge and thank the generous listeners who continue to
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As an independent podcaster, this means the world to me.
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(02:20):
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You can also support the podcast and share your love of Tudor history with the
world by buying Talking Tudors merchandise.
Check out all the products at talkingtudors.threadless.com. Now, on to today's episode.
(02:43):
I'm thrilled to welcome Nathan Armin to the podcast to talk about The Rise of
Henry Tudor and his new book, Son of Prophecy.
Nathan is an author from Carmarthen West Wales who focuses on the 15th century
and the reign of Henry VII.
He's the author of The House of Beaufort, Henry VII and the Tudor Pretenders, and Son of Prophecy.
As of 2020, Nathan is a trustee and founding member of the Henry Tudor Trust,
(03:07):
and in 2022 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Let's dive straight into our conversation.
Welcome to Talking Tudors, Nathan. How are you going?
Yeah, thank you very much for having me back to talk Tudors, Natalie.
You were one of the the first people to give me a platform all those years ago.
So it's always fun to come back and chat about what I've been up to.
(03:30):
Yes, and you certainly have been up to a lot since the last time we spoke.
So before we dive into the subject of our chat, which is your new book,
which is really exciting, can you just please just introduce yourself to our
listeners and just tell us a little bit about you and your background?
Yeah, my name is Nathan Amin and I'm an author from Carmarthenshire in West
Wales. West Wales is very much Tudor country.
(03:52):
It is the area where the Tudors began their remarkable rise in the 15th century,
the birthplace of Henry Tudor.
I studied journalism at university and always wanted to be a writer.
And once I became hooked on the story of the Tudors, and in particular the Welsh Tudors,
I began my research there, in fact, to try and put out work into the world that
(04:16):
no one else had yet written, to write books that I wanted to read. over the years.
It turns out, fortunately, there are other people out there with the same interests
in me when it comes to the early Tudors.
So it's been a fun journey and I've now written five books. Maybe there'll be
more, but we'll see. That's absolutely amazing.
And some of our listeners may remember that in 2021, your book,
(04:39):
Henry VII and the Tudor Pretenders was published and now you've turned your
attention to Henry Tudor again.
So what inspired you to do this? Did you feel that you still had more to say about this man?
Yeah, I mean, like most people, I came to the Tudors with, you know,
I was drawn in initially by Henry VIII.
Henry VIII, you know, he's the big seller of this industry and he was the person
(05:01):
I first began to read about.
But I've always said I'm the type of person who's into things like boxing and rugby.
And there was only so much of the romantic intrigue about the six wives and
Henry that I think I could read.
And I kept on picking up that at the beginning of every for his book about Henry
VIII, there was this brief story of his Welsh father who won the crown in war.
(05:22):
You know, knights on horseback. It really shouted to the little boy in me.
And obviously the Welsh background, his father is from the same area I was.
So I started doing research about Henry VII. And I found out
And very quickly, it becomes evident that he's been written in history as a
dour accountant king, a boring miser, who's not worth studying.
You know, a lot of history has traditionally jumped from Richard III straight
(05:46):
over his head to Henry VIII.
He has been trapped within these two monsters in every way of the word of English history.
And when you really start to pay attention to Henry VII, you quickly realise
he doesn't deserve to be overlooked.
Overlooked he's very misunderstood and he
essentially presided over one of the most drama-filled reigns
(06:07):
england's ever had and he was one of the most unlikely kings
england ever had his story is extraordinary and
i think it's it's a pity that certainly up to the last decade at least he has
not been given the full justice that he deserves so it's good to try and shine
a light right on the darker side of the Tudor period, if you will.
(06:31):
Again, luckily, it does seem over the years that there are plenty of people
out there who have felt the same way.
And I think Henry VII at the moment is very much the current star of the Tudor dynasty.
We are living in Henry VII's time at the moment, it does seem.
Yes, who would have thought that, hey, that Henry VII would be the star of the show.
So in case, Nathan, that some of our listeners aren't too familiar with the
(06:53):
origins of the Tudors, which I know you've worked hard to kind of shine a spotlight
on. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Yeah, so when Henry VII becomes king, he wishes to counter what he calls slanderous
assertions about his family background.
In the run-up to the Battle of Bosworth, Richard III is basically taking aim
at Henry's Welsh background.
(07:15):
He's a lowly Welsh invader. He doesn't deserve the English crown, etc.
You know, he's making this propaganda claim that Henry is just not worthy of being a Welshman.
So Henry wants to counter this. He wants to find out where is he actually from?
He sends a group of people into Wales, you know, genealogical experts to track down his origins.
(07:36):
Now, some of it is fanciful. It tracks himself all the way back to mythical
kings like Arthur and Brutus, who the medieval people believe founded Britain.
But it does track him back about seven or eight generations into North Wales.
And the first real historical solid figure we have is a chap called Ednafed Vychan.
(08:02):
And Ednafed lived in the late 1100s in North Wales.
And he was very much what we would call today a prime minister of one of the
independent Welsh kingdoms of Gwynedd.
He was a skilled diplomat. He was a talented warrior, a very well-rounded figure
who was very important and influential in North Wales at this time.
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I mean, it wouldn't even have been called North Wales. It would have been called
Gwynedd. It was an independent kingdom.
And Ednafod Vachon and his children were hugely influential.
In fact, there is a story that during one particular battle with the English,
Ednafid Vachan crossed the border and he came back with three English heads.
And for this, he was given the nickname the Terror of England.
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Now, this family, you know, the Welsh people, they lost their independence quite soon after this.
1282 is the year that King Edward I of England conquers the Kingdom of Gwynedd,
and that represents the fall of the Welsh people.
They are now under English rule. But Ednafed Vachon's children,
(09:09):
grandchildren and great-grandchildren, they still hold great influence in North Wales.
There are times when they actually revolt against English rule.
In 1295, we have Ednafed's son rebelling against English rule.
In 1345, we have Ednafed's great-great-grandsons actually murdering an English
(09:33):
royal officer on Valentine's Day.
So I'm guessing they were, you know, feeling the love.
Now, the reason for this is after the Welsh people were conquered.
They were very much put under a system of oppression by the English.
The English officials move into North Wales.
They take control of the towns.
They erect what we would now consider wonderful castles,
(09:56):
very famous castles in north wales like conwy
carnarvon harlech but these
in their own day were visible signs
of domination designed to oppress the welsh so what's happening is there's a
racial seal in the play so like men of what we would now call the tudors men
(10:17):
of the tudor family they retained influence but they were not given any power
they weren't allowed to hold any jobs and so on.
So this is why we do see this multi-generational acts of rebellion taking place
within this one family. They are repeatedly rebelling,
against the English crown, because they're frustrated at their life.
(10:40):
So Henry VII's family, we can see they are very much rooted in North Wales.
They are a powerful and enduring family of influence, very much rooted in North
Wales and of princely stock.
They are descended from the great and ancient Welsh princes.
And they should prove very important later on down the line in the 15th century
(11:04):
When Henry VII, Henry Tudor, he was also born in Wales, he was raised in Wales,
and it was recognised that he was of Welsh royal lineage.
It would be very important when he was later recast, not just as a potential
king in England, but in Wales as the son of prophecy.
And so, Nathan, how does this family that's obviously a prominent family in
(11:28):
Wales, but that experienced these acts of oppression, then come to prominence in England?
So in 1400, a chap called Owain Glyndŵr raises the banner of revolt against the English.
He calls himself the Prince of Wales and he decides he's going to launch a Welsh War of Independence.
(11:48):
And initially he's quite successful. Now his first cousins are actually members
from this family we now call the Tudors.
So his first cousins decided to join this revolution, this uprising,
this revolt with their cousin Owain Glyndŵr.
And like I said, initially, it does seem to be quite a successful war of independence.
(12:09):
Gradually, English might prove too much. And the House of Lancaster,
Henry IV and his son, Prince Henry the Future, Henry V, did quell this rebellion.
This is a very famous period in Welsh history. and to this day,
Owain Glyndwr is held up as being a Welsh national hero.
This is very much Wales' version of the whole William Wallace, Braveheart type story.
(12:35):
But what it does mean is that once the Welsh lose the war, the English come
in and they truly enact much harsher legal punishment on the Welsh.
If the Welsh had it tough before, they're going to have it even more tough now to break their spirit.
And this creates an exodus. A lot of young Welshmen now join the French wars of the English kings.
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There's no point in staying in their ruinous homeland.
There's nothing for an ambitious young man to obtain in Wales.
One of these people who leaves is someone we would come to know as Owen Tudor.
And he doesn't go to France, but he does come to England. We would call him
today an economic migrant.
There's nothing in his war-torn home. He's looking for something new.
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So he crosses over the Welsh border and he comes to England.
Now, we don't know when, we don't know how, but he does eventually meet a woman
and falls in love with her.
He's a Welsh rebel. He's a son, grandson, nephew of Welsh rebels.
And he's now crossed the border and fallen in love with a woman.
The problem for Owen Tudor is that this woman he's fallen in love with just
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happens to be a widowed queen of England.
And that is a problem. So now Owen is very much a rebel like his forefathers,
but this time he's a rebel because of love, not war. What a story. It's incredible.
And so do you want to talk to us a little bit more about relations between the
Welsh and the English at this point? point, obviously incredibly tense,
(14:03):
incredibly complex, but maybe just give us a kind of general outline of what was happening.
Yeah, I mean, I think you've hit the nail on the head. That is incredibly tense and complex.
There was a lot of different aspects of this relationship taking place.
But, you know, there was a long history of conflict taking place between what
we would now call the Welsh and what we would now call the English.
(14:25):
I mean, this stretches back into the seventh and eighth centuries when the Vikings or the Danes.
First started coming onto these islands, and then you would get the Saxons and later the Normans.
And of course, they were coming up against people who were also already living
here, people we would now call the Welsh, for example, who had taken control
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of their lands after the Romans had departed.
So it creates this constant wave of conflict between these warring people.
I'm sure many listeners have seen things like The Last Kingdom and these kind of fiction shows.
They understand a lot of what's going on. There is a lot of war,
there's a lot of bloodshed.
There is sometimes inter-trade and inter-marriage, but it is,
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to put it in the simplest terms, a period of friction.
And gradually what happens in Wales is they come to resent, you know,
the foreigner, the English heathen, the Saxon heathen.
There's a lot of poetry taking place about resistance and fighting,
and it creates this pride in this particular people that they must stand up
(15:30):
against the Norman yoke, and to use other phrases.
Now, when England falls to the Normans in a matter of weeks in 1066,
Wales is conquered piecemeal.
Bit by bit, it's taken, the Normans are coming in and taking control of Wales, but it still holds out.
The final kingdom holds out until 1282.
(15:53):
I mean, if we want to talk about the last kingdom, it should be Gwynedd in North
Wales. And once Gwynedd is conquered, of course, there is still this element
of hatred to the English for being oppressed.
But many Welsh families have no option than to work with the system.
And that is what happens. The family we call the Tudors.
There are periods where they are working with the English superior because they
(16:17):
have to. There is very little choice.
But we do see these pockets of violence that take place that give us an insight
into when they are able to stand up, they go for it.
And, I mean, English-Welsh relations to the modern day are they can be fractious,
they can spill over from being good-natured, friendly banter,
(16:37):
as I'm sure you know with Australia and New Zealand, or they can manifest themselves quite poorly.
You know, it's just the nature of what we would call in Wales,
little brother chafing against the big brother.
And it would have been no different back then, except rather than squabbling
online, sometimes it would have turned itself into physical warfare.
(17:00):
So given this history of tension and conflict, and obviously this element of
compulsion, the need to have to work for the English at some point,
How is it that this family, the Tudors, survived the tumultuous century that is the 15th century?
With great difficulty, but extraordinary resilience and a knack for survival.
(17:21):
Luckily for the Tudors, Owen Tudor, so he falls in love with the widowed Queen
of England, Catherine of Valois, who is the widow of Henry V and the mother of Henry VI.
When she dies, he is exposed.
And for his crime, he is thrown into prison. Now, he could have just been left
there to die, and we would never hear anything about the Tudors to this day.
(17:44):
But fortunately for him, his stepson was the king, Henry VI,
a teenage boy at this point, and as we would know, a man...
Clearly had a bit of a kind streak about him. He was different to other kings
of England of this period.
And he decides to pardon Owen Tudor. In return, Owen Tudor pledges his loyalty
(18:04):
to Henry VI, and Henry VI takes into his control two of Owen Tudor's sons,
Edmund and Jasper Tudor.
So these Tudor boys, the sons of Owen Tudor, these inheritors of this great
Welsh lineage, they are now being raised by the English Royal House of Lancaster.
(18:24):
This is the moment Welsh rebels begin their transformation into English royals. This is the moment.
And of course, we know that Edmund Tudor dies at the age of 26. He dies quite early.
But by this point, he has been gifted a royal bride.
And this is the young Margaret Beaufort. Now, it's very unpalatable to you.
(18:47):
Year, but at the age of 26, Edmund impregnates the 12-year-old Margaret Beaufort.
The compulsion to do so is to get her pregnant.
He won't gain control of all of her lands forever, for she is a very rich and wealthy heiress.
Obviously, that's not okay today, and it certainly wasn't considered okay during
(19:08):
his day. You know, this is a distasteful act he's done.
Now, he dies shortly thereafter, after. And young Margaret Beauford at the age
of 13 gives birth to Edmund Tudor's child in Pembroke.
And this is Henry Tudor. So what we have is just this extraordinary transformation
in fortunes of this family.
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And it begins with Owen Tudor becoming again, a refugee, an asylum seeker,
whatever term we would use today.
He moves to England, he meets, marries a queen, and then he's thrown in jail.
He comes out of jail and his children are being raised as royals.
And it's just, it's just extraordinary. I mean, just to put it into simple terms,
(19:51):
Owen Tudor's father and two uncles went to war with the House of Lancaster in 1400.
Now, Owen Tudor's children are being raised in the House of Lancaster by the
Lancastrian King of England.
That is an extraordinary change in just two generations. politicians,
and I'm sure they would have been very okay with that scenario.
(20:15):
They could never have imagined that just one generation later,
one of their number was not just going to become loyal to the House of Lancaster,
he was going to become the House of Lancaster.
It's just an astonishing story, to be honest.
It is astonishing, and I think when you remove the element of hindsight that
we obviously have that's difficult for us to kind of forget,
it is even more extraordinary because they would never, as you have said,
(20:38):
imagined such a shift in the family's fortunes.
But I want Nathan now to talk about the significance of the title of your new
book, Son of Prophecy. Can you tell us about that?
Yeah. I mean, in many ways, when we try to put ourselves back into their own
mindset and for them to try and understand how this has happened,
how has Henry Tudor come from nowhere to become a potential King of England,
(20:59):
we can start to understand why they were taken with such a concept as the Son of Prophecy.
Okay, so what is the Son Well, during the medieval period, there was a wonderful
bardic tradition where many poets in Wales would practice what is called or prophetic poetry.
And a central element of these poems was somebody called the son of prophecy.
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Now, this was a messiah who it was told would be raised one day to save the
Welsh people from the oppression.
It was going to be a hero who would come and he would chase all of the Saxon invaders into the sea.
And the River Thames in London would run red with Saxon blood.
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For this Messiah was sent to save the people.
And this is the kind of poetry that comes from an oppressed people.
You know, the Welsh bards are unhappy at the status of Wales.
So they're starting to talk about this national redeemer who would come and save their people.
Now, over the years, over the centuries, many people in Wales were given this
(22:09):
title. But as shown, you know, the Welsh still lived under the English boot.
So these messiahs had failed.
Now, as the 15th century wears on, the attentions of the bards begin to fall on young Henry Tudor.
They know he's Welsh-born, they know he's Welsh-raised, and they know he comes
from a long line of Welsh kings.
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So they start to really go to town on mentioning him as this son of prophecy.
He is the destined one when henry suddenly
raised up as a potential king of england by the
english in 1483 you know the english are
not happy but some of the english rather are not happy with richard iii they
want anyone to be king and they start to talk about henry tudor the welsh bars
(22:54):
they can't resist they love this they love the idea oh my god one of our own
he has a chance here to start to write about how Henry Tudor is the hope of our race.
He's a high-born Briton who is going to bring about a long golden summer.
In the weeks before Bosworth, we have these poems saying that how these Welsh
(23:15):
bards, we are waiting for him, our hero, to show.
And he is going to come down from the mountains with a sword to kill the English.
There's a lot of this idea that he is the one.
He's the chosen one. Again, for people who watch Game of Thrones, George R.R.
Martin famously took this and reinterpreted it as his The Prince That Was Promised
(23:37):
concept. It's run throughout the entire show.
This is a very medieval Welsh tradition. And what's telling is once Henry Tudor
wins at the Battle of Bosworth and becomes king, for the first time in hundreds
of years, the Welsh bards put down their crowns.
And they don't write this poetry ever again because the son of prophecy has
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finally come. Their hero has arrived.
And that is how Henry was viewed within Wales, both during his own time and
for at least a century after his death.
But we still have a lot of poetry. It's not prophetic poetry,
but it's more just general praise poetry where Welsh poets deep into the Elizabethan
(24:19):
period read are praising Henry for being the man who freed the Welsh, the son of prophecy.
And that's essentially where it comes from. And it's a very potent,
it was a very potent piece of political propaganda that Henry himself was able to play on as well.
That's extraordinary. I'm embarrassed to say that I had never heard it until
I saw your book. So, you know, that's quite amazing.
(24:41):
Now, you've talked about the fact that we had Owen Tudor, there was Edmund and
Jasper, and that Obviously, Edmund dies, but he's married Margaret Beaufort.
How do we go from that to winning the Battle of Bosworth?
Obviously, this is a huge question, but maybe could you just kind of touch on
the main events that lead to that?
A lot of English noble blood being spilled.
There was the Rosiers, you know, English noble after English noble knocking each other off.
(25:05):
Now, it's very important to stress that when Henry Cato was born in 1457.
Nobody foresaw him being a king of England.
That was never on the cards. There were way too many people with better royal
bloodlines ahead of the line of him.
You know, we need to get rid of this concept that people still are holding on
(25:26):
to, that Marlborough Beaufort had a lifelong dream, etc. for her son.
Nobody thought Henry Tader was ever going to be a king.
The earliest we can really say Henry Tudor first believed he could become a king of England is 1483.
And it's only when Richard III becomes king and creates this new fracture within
(25:48):
his royal house of York are people going, we need somebody else.
So 1483 is the earliest. But to get to that point, a lot of people have died in the interim.
Him which is 1483 and it's simply he is
the last man left of some royal blood
with a story that can be told and the
story that can be told here by his supporters
(26:11):
is that he is of English royal descent he's the right man of the right age he's
living abroad he's out of reach of the English king he's related to the French
royal family as well so he can use them to try and get support and what What
he does is he knows about his Welsh lineage.
So he starts to say, well, he starts to feed into the idea that he's the son of prophecy.
(26:34):
God has destined him to come and be king.
He is the great liberator. He uses terms like this.
He is going to free Wales and England from tyranny. He is the chosen one.
And he makes a lot of play on his Welsh ancestry because what he's saying is
all well and good, Richard III being descended from William the Conqueror and
(26:56):
the Plantagenets, Henry is descended from.
5th, 6th, and 7th century Welsh kings who ruled over this island long before
the Plantagenets looked across the English Channel.
You know, he is of the true blood of this island.
And that's why he uses a red dragon as a symbol.
(27:18):
The red dragon is a symbol that is from the 7th century from a guy called Cadwaladr,
who was king of the Britons.
And this, as Henry claims, is his ancestor. Esther. She's using all of this
idea to build up, in truth, what is still quite a weak position.
He is still a relative nobody, living across the water, holding his hand out
(27:39):
to the French, begging for some money to try and conquer.
She's using all of this concept of him being a foretold hero to try and help boost his cause.
But he is able to gain some money from some French merchants, and he does invade.
He lands in his native Wales when he invades, which is again very storytelling,
with really an army that's just full of French mercenaries and some English rebels.
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But during his march through Wales, he's raising this red dragon banner.
The Welsh people recognise the significance of this.
Their messiah has just landed. That's what they're being told by the bards.
That's what they believe in. He has the dragon banner.
In these poems that have been spread for
centuries they always talk of the messiah as
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being the fated dragon who will
come and now here he is a soldier on
their beach with a dragon banner the Welsh flock to his side and he really does
bolster his numbers by the time he reaches England with many Welshmen perhaps
as many as two or three thousand Welshmen and he goes on to Bosworth now should he win at Bosworth no.
(28:50):
Richard III is the King of England with a bigger, larger army. It's in his hands.
Unfortunately for Richard, he was betrayed by the Stanleys at the final moment,
and Henry II becomes King of England.
One of the most remarkable upsets that is in English history,
and you can start to see why people believed he was the son of prophecy,
(29:10):
because how could this be?
And we can see why Henry straight away made a big show that he had become king
through divine judgment.
God wills this. This is why he is king.
This is the story that is now being packed around English circles.
Well, of course, Henry must be the rightful king. God must have had a hand in
(29:32):
what is taking place here today.
One thing I do find quite interesting is we know this idea of him being the
son of prophecy occurs in the run-up to Bosworth. It occurs in his own lifetime.
By the time we get to Shakespeare's time, 100 years later, this idea that his
rise to the throne was foretold has become reinvented as an English story.
(29:53):
In Shakespeare's play Henry VI, he includes a scene where the young boy Henry
Tudor goes to the English court.
And Henry VI actually predicts that one day this young boy would be king.
And it's a very good scene in Shakespeare's plays, which we know,
they knew in Shakespeare's day and we know now that would be true this young
(30:15):
boy would become King of England and.
But in Henry VI's time, that concept was utterly absurd, particularly when Henry
VI still had his own son who should have been next in line.
But it does show how I think this Welsh poetry was known by Henry VII and by
his court, and it gradually became reinvented as a very English tradition.
(30:40):
And many people still talk about today. People who know their Shakespeare,
and we all know how influential Shakespeare is, still mention,
oh, well, the boy was predicted to become king.
And the answer is yes, by the Welsh, not by the English kings.
Now, that's so fascinating, Nathan, and so powerful, obviously, the power of prophecy.
I'm just thinking it makes so much sense now why the Welsh people would have flocked to him.
(31:02):
He was almost imbued already with this kind of sense of divinity or like a mystical
power, almost, that I imagine would have been very attractive to people at this
time. Yeah, and like we say, the Welsh bards have prepared the ground for centuries.
The Welsh have been living under, again, a racial ceiling.
They were living under foreign oppression, so to speak.
(31:26):
In the words of Bonnie Tyler, a famous Welsh singer, they were holding out for
a hero to come and save them.
You know, the grounds were prepared for Henry Tudor. Again, Henry Tudor's rise
is remarkable for him just being in the right place at the right time.
He was exactly that with the case for the English throne.
Somebody abroad who could marry Elizabeth of York and have some royal blood.
(31:51):
But even for this Welsh aspect, he doesn't become King of England without this Welsh aspect to him.
If he doesn't land in Wales, if he doesn't build up momentum,
men, you know, it doesn't happen.
And so you've obviously alluded to the fact that the Welsh people appear to
have been quite happy with his rise to power. But what about the English?
What do they think once he wins at Bosworth? He's now, you know,
(32:15):
the first Tudor king, King Henry VII.
What are the English people thinking about this? I mean, obviously,
when it comes to the Welsh and the English, we never truly know what the average
man or woman on the street was thinking.
We can only go really with what the social higher-ups were writing at the time.
With regards to the English, I
would be amazed at how many people thought Henry Tudor was going to last.
(32:40):
I think he was installed on the crown with the idea that he would actually be a bit of a puppet.
And it's those Yorkist rebels who supported
him against Richard III they thought they were going to get a
puppet that they could control I think the French who'd sponsored his
invasion thought they were going to get a puppet and
in reality they got one of the strongest minded kings England had ever had but
(33:01):
still I would be amazed if people believed he would last because well kings
of England were being thrown off their throne left right and centre during this
period Henry's own reign had repeated pretenders come against him.
The remarkable thing about Henry is that he made it through his 24-year reign
and he becomes the first king of England in 87 years to pass his crown on to
(33:24):
his son, who goes and takes up that kingship. So he survives, remarkably.
But I think he would have been interpreted as being just an unknown,
brief interloper on this crown.
Now, what I would suggest with Henry Tudor, he's come down to us as a dour accountant
king because of how his historiography has only ever focused on his administrative qualities.
(33:50):
He must have been an incredibly charismatic man. We, in fact,
have quite a few ambassador reports that tell us what a good speaker he was
and how his face lit up when he spoke to people.
You know, he would have had something about him that encouraged people to sail
from France, to march through Wales, to go to Bartle, where you're probably
(34:12):
going to die, and then to stick with him.
His 24-year reign does have a lot of plots, but these, almost in every instance,
are foreign plots put against him by
his foreign enemies, whether it's the Burgundians, the French, the Scots.
In England, we don't really get much evidence of uprisings and rebellions against him.
(34:33):
Now, was he loved? I don't necessarily think so. Certainly towards the end of
his reign. Was he respected and followed? Yes.
And that has to do, perhaps, with a lot of his own character.
So I think the fact of him becoming king at Bosworth would have been incredulous
to many people. Who? Who is our king?
Henry what? Who's this guy? But if you're living, I mean, even in today's modern
(34:57):
England, if you live four or five hours north of London, it could sometimes
feel like rightly wrong.
Some people feel like they're a forgotten part of a political scene.
Imagine it in 1485, some small hamlet in the north of England,
no weeks later there's a new king.
They probably would have shrugged their shoulders and carried on working in the field.
(35:20):
I doubt they would have made much difference to them. So they just threw on
with it because there probably would have been another king in a couple of years anyway.
And so you've obviously talked about the fact that you think Henry had some
personal qualities that I suppose contributed to his success and the longevity
of his rule, despite, you know, everything that's sort of come before.
What role do you think his marriage to Elizabeth of York plays in terms of his survival?
(35:46):
Everything, ultimately. You know, the key thing to get is that Henry VII did
not claim the throne in any way, shape or form through Elizabeth's lineage.
Henry VII becomes king because he is the king, but
in the record of divine judgment on the first act of
parliament that is passed specifically stipulates that
(36:07):
the crown of england rests in henry's hands
and in his heirs only it
never stipulates the heirs of henry and elizabeth so henry always was the king
the sole king and the crown was his and his children's only he could have married
anybody he wanted to it would have been their children's crown.
(36:31):
Now, that is a fact. The political reality was the only way Henry got the support
of four or five hundred English rebels who then propelled him to the throne
was by promising to marry Elizabeth of York.
I think the political reality was he always had to marry Elizabeth of York,
and he obviously did marry her as soon as he possibly could,
(36:53):
to bond together these two rival houses. Now, also, it is all to do with stories.
Henry knows the stories of him being the son of prophecy.
He gets that. He's using it to show himself to be the saviour.
He is saving England. He is the man.
And he's going to do this by being the unity candidate.
(37:15):
He is the man who's coming to bring peace and prosperity to England.
And he's going to do that by marrying the daughter of the rival house and uniting it.
So there's also never, there was never ever any doubt he wasn't ever going to
marry Elizabeth of York because it was a political marriage.
It doesn't matter whether he liked her or didn't like it or loved her, etc.
(37:39):
The story that creates, the bond that creates to unite the houses,
it feeds into his whole ethos of being the Messiah, of being the saviour.
Because look at him, he is bringing a project of peace to the English people,
not a project of fear or killing.
And of course, Elizabeth is very popular, certainly with Londoners and over
(38:03):
time with her people. And that does help Henry.
It gives Henry that, it helps him project constantly this idea of the House of Tudor.
We are both red rose and white rose. I think if he doesn't marry Elizabeth of
York, or Elizabeth of York dies younger, in fact, I think he struggles.
(38:23):
I think he faces much more potential to be deposed without her at his side.
Yeah, I mean, that York marriage, it means everything. Not just because it would
become a marriage of quite mutual affection or even love.
It clearly means a lot to Henry in a personal aspect, once they get to know each other, of course.
But it's all part of the project.
(38:46):
It is the story he is telling. And that is the most important thing sometimes.
What is my narrative? What narrative am I telling? We still get our modern politics.
It's not often about the substance.
It's still who's got the better story?
Who's spinning the narrative? That marriage was a poor building block of the House of Tudor.
Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. Narrative and stories are so important.
(39:09):
And that's how we understand our lives, through stories.
Absolutely fascinating. So I've got a couple more questions for you,
Nathan, and then I'll let you get on with your day.
So what is one misconception, you've probably got a long list,
about the Tudors that you wish you could absolutely stamp out and quash right now?
I've probably covered a lot of them already in today's talk.
I mean, I think less about the Tudors because, you know, once we get out to
(39:32):
the reign of Henry VII, I start to lose my way a little bit.
But with Henry VII, certainly, I just wish we could get away with this misconception
conception that he was a dull, miser, Ebenezer Scrooge-esque figure.
That simply isn't the case.
Yes, Henry VII embarked on what we would call financial tyranny towards the end of his reign.
(39:54):
He was very greedy in accumulating great treasure.
The word we should be using for him, however, is avaricious, greed.
He is not a miser. Henry VII became one of the richest kings of England ever,
but he's also one of the biggest spenders of England ever. He was not Ebenezer Scrooge.
(40:14):
This man spent money unlike anyone and we have all of his payment records.
He was a lavish spender on his family. He liked to treat his family to jewels,
to furs, to musical instruments.
He was a great builder. He erected the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey and
Richmond Palace, which by every measure seems to to have been greater than Hampton Court.
(40:38):
And it's a shame the Richmond Palace isn't standing today. So I think we need
to get away from this misconception that Henry VII was a dull Ebenezer Scrooge.
There couldn't have been anything further from the truth. And as we've shown
today, he had something about him that made men stay loyal.
What was that about him in person?
That he, what qualities did he have that we have not come down to us with the
(41:00):
modern day. I'm sure he probably would have been good in the social media age.
He would have got his real personality out there perhaps.
And that would have been fun to see. Very last question for you, Nathan.
So obviously you've written this book, you've come back to Henry Tudor,
you've got so many insights about this period and you've come at it from such a fresh perspective.
What is something that you hope all your readers will take away after reading your book?
(41:23):
That there is as much an abundance of drama, intrigue, scandal,
love, and war taking place in the Tudor family story long before they become the Tudors.
So we are fixated on 1485 to 1603.
Well, let's look at 1170 to 1485 because there's going to be everything you
(41:48):
love about the Tudors in a year and more.
Oh, I love it. And I'm patiently awaiting for my copy to arrive And I recommend
everyone go and order Son of Prophecy right now.
So, Nathan, what's next for you? Do you know what you're doing next? Nothing at the moment.
I'm joking. I'm joking. I'm retired for the time being. I've finally written
the book that I really always wanted to write.
(42:09):
And the reason I started writing blogs in the first place was this very subject.
My first blog was on the background of the Welsh Tudors. So at the moment, I'm taking it easy.
I'm concentrating on being a book judge, which is taking up all of my time. But never say never.
But at the moment, I'm just waiting for the project to reveal itself.
Yeah, exactly. Well, enjoy your well-deserved break from writing.
(42:33):
I'm sure something will pop into your head very soon, and we all look forward to it.
And thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast and talk Henry Tudor with us.
No problem. Thank you very much, Natalie. Always a joy.
Well, that brings us to the end of this episode of Talking Tudors.
Thank you so much for joining us. I absolutely love to hear from listeners,
so if you have any comments or suggestions or just want to say hi,
(42:57):
please get in touch with me via my website,
www.onthetutortrail.com, where you'll also find show notes for today's episode.
If you've enjoyed the show, please share the podcast with friends and family,
and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review.
I also invite you to join our Talking Tudors podcast group on Facebook,
where you can interact with other Tudor history lovers and hear all the behind-the-scenes news.
(43:21):
You'll also find me on Twitter. My handle is onthetudortrail and on Instagram as themosthappy78.
It's time now for us to re-enter the modern world. As always,
I look forward to talking Tudors with you again very soon.
Music.
Hello and welcome to Talking Tudors, a fortnightly podcast about the ever-fascinating Tudor dynasty.
My name is Natalie Gruniger and I'll be your host and guide on this journey
through 16th century England.
Are you ready to step through the veil of time into the dazzling and dangerous
world of the Tudor court?
Without further ado, it's time to talk Tudors.
(00:23):
Music.
(00:51):
Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Talking Tudors.
I'm your host, Natalie Gruniger. Thank you so much for joining me today.
I'd like to begin by thanking the sponsor of today's podcast,
the Gloucester History Festival.
The Gloucester History Festival invites you to join a hundred of Britain's top
(01:13):
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Watch in person or online to hear from Philippa Gregory, Alison Weir,
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(01:58):
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Check out all the products at talkingtudors.threadless.com. Now, on to today's episode.
(02:43):
I'm thrilled to welcome Nathan Armin to the podcast to talk about The Rise of
Henry Tudor and his new book, Son of Prophecy.
Nathan is an author from Carmarthen West Wales who focuses on the 15th century
and the reign of Henry VII.
He's the author of The House of Beaufort, Henry VII and the Tudor Pretenders, and Son of Prophecy.
As of 2020, Nathan is a trustee and founding member of the Henry Tudor Trust,
(03:07):
and in 2022 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Let's dive straight into our conversation.
Welcome to Talking Tudors, Nathan. How are you going?
Yeah, thank you very much for having me back to talk Tudors, Natalie.
You were one of the the first people to give me a platform all those years ago.
So it's always fun to come back and chat about what I've been up to.
(03:30):
Yes, and you certainly have been up to a lot since the last time we spoke.
So before we dive into the subject of our chat, which is your new book,
which is really exciting, can you just please just introduce yourself to our
listeners and just tell us a little bit about you and your background?
Yeah, my name is Nathan Amin and I'm an author from Carmarthenshire in West
Wales. West Wales is very much Tudor country.
(03:52):
It is the area where the Tudors began their remarkable rise in the 15th century,
the birthplace of Henry Tudor.
I studied journalism at university and always wanted to be a writer.
And once I became hooked on the story of the Tudors, and in particular the Welsh Tudors,
I began my research there, in fact, to try and put out work into the world that
(04:16):
no one else had yet written, to write books that I wanted to read. over the years.
It turns out, fortunately, there are other people out there with the same interests
in me when it comes to the early Tudors.
So it's been a fun journey and I've now written five books. Maybe there'll be
more, but we'll see. That's absolutely amazing.
And some of our listeners may remember that in 2021, your book,
(04:39):
Henry VII and the Tudor Pretenders was published and now you've turned your
attention to Henry Tudor again.
So what inspired you to do this? Did you feel that you still had more to say about this man?
Yeah, I mean, like most people, I came to the Tudors with, you know,
I was drawn in initially by Henry VIII.
Henry VIII, you know, he's the big seller of this industry and he was the person
(05:01):
I first began to read about.
But I've always said I'm the type of person who's into things like boxing and rugby.
And there was only so much of the romantic intrigue about the six wives and
Henry that I think I could read.
And I kept on picking up that at the beginning of every for his book about Henry
VIII, there was this brief story of his Welsh father who won the crown in war.
(05:22):
You know, knights on horseback. It really shouted to the little boy in me.
And obviously the Welsh background, his father is from the same area I was.
So I started doing research about Henry VII. And I found out
And very quickly, it becomes evident that he's been written in history as a
dour accountant king, a boring miser, who's not worth studying.
You know, a lot of history has traditionally jumped from Richard III straight
(05:46):
over his head to Henry VIII.
He has been trapped within these two monsters in every way of the word of English history.
And when you really start to pay attention to Henry VII, you quickly realise
he doesn't deserve to be overlooked.
Overlooked he's very misunderstood and he
essentially presided over one of the most drama-filled reigns
(06:07):
england's ever had and he was one of the most unlikely kings
england ever had his story is extraordinary and
i think it's it's a pity that certainly up to the last decade at least he has
not been given the full justice that he deserves so it's good to try and shine
a light right on the darker side of the Tudor period, if you will.
(06:31):
Again, luckily, it does seem over the years that there are plenty of people
out there who have felt the same way.
And I think Henry VII at the moment is very much the current star of the Tudor dynasty.
We are living in Henry VII's time at the moment, it does seem.
Yes, who would have thought that, hey, that Henry VII would be the star of the show.
So in case, Nathan, that some of our listeners aren't too familiar with the
(06:53):
origins of the Tudors, which I know you've worked hard to kind of shine a spotlight
on. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Yeah, so when Henry VII becomes king, he wishes to counter what he calls slanderous
assertions about his family background.
In the run-up to the Battle of Bosworth, Richard III is basically taking aim
at Henry's Welsh background.
(07:15):
He's a lowly Welsh invader. He doesn't deserve the English crown, etc.
You know, he's making this propaganda claim that Henry is just not worthy of being a Welshman.
So Henry wants to counter this. He wants to find out where is he actually from?
He sends a group of people into Wales, you know, genealogical experts to track down his origins.
(07:36):
Now, some of it is fanciful. It tracks himself all the way back to mythical
kings like Arthur and Brutus, who the medieval people believe founded Britain.
But it does track him back about seven or eight generations into North Wales.
And the first real historical solid figure we have is a chap called Ednafed Vychan.
(08:02):
And Ednafed lived in the late 1100s in North Wales.
And he was very much what we would call today a prime minister of one of the
independent Welsh kingdoms of Gwynedd.
He was a skilled diplomat. He was a talented warrior, a very well-rounded figure
who was very important and influential in North Wales at this time.
(08:24):
I mean, it wouldn't even have been called North Wales. It would have been called
Gwynedd. It was an independent kingdom.
And Ednafod Vachon and his children were hugely influential.
In fact, there is a story that during one particular battle with the English,
Ednafid Vachan crossed the border and he came back with three English heads.
And for this, he was given the nickname the Terror of England.
(08:48):
Now, this family, you know, the Welsh people, they lost their independence quite soon after this.
1282 is the year that King Edward I of England conquers the Kingdom of Gwynedd,
and that represents the fall of the Welsh people.
They are now under English rule. But Ednafed Vachon's children,
(09:09):
grandchildren and great-grandchildren, they still hold great influence in North Wales.
There are times when they actually revolt against English rule.
In 1295, we have Ednafed's son rebelling against English rule.
In 1345, we have Ednafed's great-great-grandsons actually murdering an English
(09:33):
royal officer on Valentine's Day.
So I'm guessing they were, you know, feeling the love.
Now, the reason for this is after the Welsh people were conquered.
They were very much put under a system of oppression by the English.
The English officials move into North Wales.
They take control of the towns.
They erect what we would now consider wonderful castles,
(09:56):
very famous castles in north wales like conwy
carnarvon harlech but these
in their own day were visible signs
of domination designed to oppress the welsh so what's happening is there's a
racial seal in the play so like men of what we would now call the tudors men
(10:17):
of the tudor family they retained influence but they were not given any power
they weren't allowed to hold any jobs and so on.
So this is why we do see this multi-generational acts of rebellion taking place
within this one family. They are repeatedly rebelling,
against the English crown, because they're frustrated at their life.
(10:40):
So Henry VII's family, we can see they are very much rooted in North Wales.
They are a powerful and enduring family of influence, very much rooted in North
Wales and of princely stock.
They are descended from the great and ancient Welsh princes.
And they should prove very important later on down the line in the 15th century
(11:04):
When Henry VII, Henry Tudor, he was also born in Wales, he was raised in Wales,
and it was recognised that he was of Welsh royal lineage.
It would be very important when he was later recast, not just as a potential
king in England, but in Wales as the son of prophecy.
And so, Nathan, how does this family that's obviously a prominent family in
(11:28):
Wales, but that experienced these acts of oppression, then come to prominence in England?
So in 1400, a chap called Owain Glyndŵr raises the banner of revolt against the English.
He calls himself the Prince of Wales and he decides he's going to launch a Welsh War of Independence.
(11:48):
And initially he's quite successful. Now his first cousins are actually members
from this family we now call the Tudors.
So his first cousins decided to join this revolution, this uprising,
this revolt with their cousin Owain Glyndŵr.
And like I said, initially, it does seem to be quite a successful war of independence.
(12:09):
Gradually, English might prove too much. And the House of Lancaster,
Henry IV and his son, Prince Henry the Future, Henry V, did quell this rebellion.
This is a very famous period in Welsh history. and to this day,
Owain Glyndwr is held up as being a Welsh national hero.
This is very much Wales' version of the whole William Wallace, Braveheart type story.
(12:35):
But what it does mean is that once the Welsh lose the war, the English come
in and they truly enact much harsher legal punishment on the Welsh.
If the Welsh had it tough before, they're going to have it even more tough now to break their spirit.
And this creates an exodus. A lot of young Welshmen now join the French wars of the English kings.
(12:57):
There's no point in staying in their ruinous homeland.
There's nothing for an ambitious young man to obtain in Wales.
One of these people who leaves is someone we would come to know as Owen Tudor.
And he doesn't go to France, but he does come to England. We would call him
today an economic migrant.
There's nothing in his war-torn home. He's looking for something new.
(13:19):
So he crosses over the Welsh border and he comes to England.
Now, we don't know when, we don't know how, but he does eventually meet a woman
and falls in love with her.
He's a Welsh rebel. He's a son, grandson, nephew of Welsh rebels.
And he's now crossed the border and fallen in love with a woman.
The problem for Owen Tudor is that this woman he's fallen in love with just
(13:41):
happens to be a widowed queen of England.
And that is a problem. So now Owen is very much a rebel like his forefathers,
but this time he's a rebel because of love, not war. What a story. It's incredible.
And so do you want to talk to us a little bit more about relations between the
Welsh and the English at this point? point, obviously incredibly tense,
(14:03):
incredibly complex, but maybe just give us a kind of general outline of what was happening.
Yeah, I mean, I think you've hit the nail on the head. That is incredibly tense and complex.
There was a lot of different aspects of this relationship taking place.
But, you know, there was a long history of conflict taking place between what
we would now call the Welsh and what we would now call the English.
(14:25):
I mean, this stretches back into the seventh and eighth centuries when the Vikings or the Danes.
First started coming onto these islands, and then you would get the Saxons and later the Normans.
And of course, they were coming up against people who were also already living
here, people we would now call the Welsh, for example, who had taken control
(14:45):
of their lands after the Romans had departed.
So it creates this constant wave of conflict between these warring people.
I'm sure many listeners have seen things like The Last Kingdom and these kind of fiction shows.
They understand a lot of what's going on. There is a lot of war,
there's a lot of bloodshed.
There is sometimes inter-trade and inter-marriage, but it is,
(15:09):
to put it in the simplest terms, a period of friction.
And gradually what happens in Wales is they come to resent, you know,
the foreigner, the English heathen, the Saxon heathen.
There's a lot of poetry taking place about resistance and fighting,
and it creates this pride in this particular people that they must stand up
(15:30):
against the Norman yoke, and to use other phrases.
Now, when England falls to the Normans in a matter of weeks in 1066,
Wales is conquered piecemeal.
Bit by bit, it's taken, the Normans are coming in and taking control of Wales, but it still holds out.
The final kingdom holds out until 1282.
(15:53):
I mean, if we want to talk about the last kingdom, it should be Gwynedd in North
Wales. And once Gwynedd is conquered, of course, there is still this element
of hatred to the English for being oppressed.
But many Welsh families have no option than to work with the system.
And that is what happens. The family we call the Tudors.
There are periods where they are working with the English superior because they
(16:17):
have to. There is very little choice.
But we do see these pockets of violence that take place that give us an insight
into when they are able to stand up, they go for it.
And, I mean, English-Welsh relations to the modern day are they can be fractious,
they can spill over from being good-natured, friendly banter,
(16:37):
as I'm sure you know with Australia and New Zealand, or they can manifest themselves quite poorly.
You know, it's just the nature of what we would call in Wales,
little brother chafing against the big brother.
And it would have been no different back then, except rather than squabbling
online, sometimes it would have turned itself into physical warfare.
(17:00):
So given this history of tension and conflict, and obviously this element of
compulsion, the need to have to work for the English at some point,
How is it that this family, the Tudors, survived the tumultuous century that is the 15th century?
With great difficulty, but extraordinary resilience and a knack for survival.
(17:21):
Luckily for the Tudors, Owen Tudor, so he falls in love with the widowed Queen
of England, Catherine of Valois, who is the widow of Henry V and the mother of Henry VI.
When she dies, he is exposed.
And for his crime, he is thrown into prison. Now, he could have just been left
there to die, and we would never hear anything about the Tudors to this day.
(17:44):
But fortunately for him, his stepson was the king, Henry VI,
a teenage boy at this point, and as we would know, a man...
Clearly had a bit of a kind streak about him. He was different to other kings
of England of this period.
And he decides to pardon Owen Tudor. In return, Owen Tudor pledges his loyalty
(18:04):
to Henry VI, and Henry VI takes into his control two of Owen Tudor's sons,
Edmund and Jasper Tudor.
So these Tudor boys, the sons of Owen Tudor, these inheritors of this great
Welsh lineage, they are now being raised by the English Royal House of Lancaster.
(18:24):
This is the moment Welsh rebels begin their transformation into English royals. This is the moment.
And of course, we know that Edmund Tudor dies at the age of 26. He dies quite early.
But by this point, he has been gifted a royal bride.
And this is the young Margaret Beaufort. Now, it's very unpalatable to you.
(18:47):
Year, but at the age of 26, Edmund impregnates the 12-year-old Margaret Beaufort.
The compulsion to do so is to get her pregnant.
He won't gain control of all of her lands forever, for she is a very rich and wealthy heiress.
Obviously, that's not okay today, and it certainly wasn't considered okay during
(19:08):
his day. You know, this is a distasteful act he's done.
Now, he dies shortly thereafter, after. And young Margaret Beauford at the age
of 13 gives birth to Edmund Tudor's child in Pembroke.
And this is Henry Tudor. So what we have is just this extraordinary transformation
in fortunes of this family.
(19:28):
And it begins with Owen Tudor becoming again, a refugee, an asylum seeker,
whatever term we would use today.
He moves to England, he meets, marries a queen, and then he's thrown in jail.
He comes out of jail and his children are being raised as royals.
And it's just, it's just extraordinary. I mean, just to put it into simple terms,
(19:51):
Owen Tudor's father and two uncles went to war with the House of Lancaster in 1400.
Now, Owen Tudor's children are being raised in the House of Lancaster by the
Lancastrian King of England.
That is an extraordinary change in just two generations. politicians,
and I'm sure they would have been very okay with that scenario.
(20:15):
They could never have imagined that just one generation later,
one of their number was not just going to become loyal to the House of Lancaster,
he was going to become the House of Lancaster.
It's just an astonishing story, to be honest.
It is astonishing, and I think when you remove the element of hindsight that
we obviously have that's difficult for us to kind of forget,
it is even more extraordinary because they would never, as you have said,
(20:38):
imagined such a shift in the family's fortunes.
But I want Nathan now to talk about the significance of the title of your new
book, Son of Prophecy. Can you tell us about that?
Yeah. I mean, in many ways, when we try to put ourselves back into their own
mindset and for them to try and understand how this has happened,
how has Henry Tudor come from nowhere to become a potential King of England,
(20:59):
we can start to understand why they were taken with such a concept as the Son of Prophecy.
Okay, so what is the Son Well, during the medieval period, there was a wonderful
bardic tradition where many poets in Wales would practice what is called or prophetic poetry.
And a central element of these poems was somebody called the son of prophecy.
(21:25):
Now, this was a messiah who it was told would be raised one day to save the
Welsh people from the oppression.
It was going to be a hero who would come and he would chase all of the Saxon invaders into the sea.
And the River Thames in London would run red with Saxon blood.
(21:46):
For this Messiah was sent to save the people.
And this is the kind of poetry that comes from an oppressed people.
You know, the Welsh bards are unhappy at the status of Wales.
So they're starting to talk about this national redeemer who would come and save their people.
Now, over the years, over the centuries, many people in Wales were given this
(22:09):
title. But as shown, you know, the Welsh still lived under the English boot.
So these messiahs had failed.
Now, as the 15th century wears on, the attentions of the bards begin to fall on young Henry Tudor.
They know he's Welsh-born, they know he's Welsh-raised, and they know he comes
from a long line of Welsh kings.
(22:30):
So they start to really go to town on mentioning him as this son of prophecy.
He is the destined one when henry suddenly
raised up as a potential king of england by the
english in 1483 you know the english are
not happy but some of the english rather are not happy with richard iii they
want anyone to be king and they start to talk about henry tudor the welsh bars
(22:54):
they can't resist they love this they love the idea oh my god one of our own
he has a chance here to start to write about how Henry Tudor is the hope of our race.
He's a high-born Briton who is going to bring about a long golden summer.
In the weeks before Bosworth, we have these poems saying that how these Welsh
(23:15):
bards, we are waiting for him, our hero, to show.
And he is going to come down from the mountains with a sword to kill the English.
There's a lot of this idea that he is the one.
He's the chosen one. Again, for people who watch Game of Thrones, George R.R.
Martin famously took this and reinterpreted it as his The Prince That Was Promised
(23:37):
concept. It's run throughout the entire show.
This is a very medieval Welsh tradition. And what's telling is once Henry Tudor
wins at the Battle of Bosworth and becomes king, for the first time in hundreds
of years, the Welsh bards put down their crowns.
And they don't write this poetry ever again because the son of prophecy has
(23:58):
finally come. Their hero has arrived.
And that is how Henry was viewed within Wales, both during his own time and
for at least a century after his death.
But we still have a lot of poetry. It's not prophetic poetry,
but it's more just general praise poetry where Welsh poets deep into the Elizabethan
(24:19):
period read are praising Henry for being the man who freed the Welsh, the son of prophecy.
And that's essentially where it comes from. And it's a very potent,
it was a very potent piece of political propaganda that Henry himself was able to play on as well.
That's extraordinary. I'm embarrassed to say that I had never heard it until
I saw your book. So, you know, that's quite amazing.
(24:41):
Now, you've talked about the fact that we had Owen Tudor, there was Edmund and
Jasper, and that Obviously, Edmund dies, but he's married Margaret Beaufort.
How do we go from that to winning the Battle of Bosworth?
Obviously, this is a huge question, but maybe could you just kind of touch on
the main events that lead to that?
A lot of English noble blood being spilled.
There was the Rosiers, you know, English noble after English noble knocking each other off.
(25:05):
Now, it's very important to stress that when Henry Cato was born in 1457.
Nobody foresaw him being a king of England.
That was never on the cards. There were way too many people with better royal
bloodlines ahead of the line of him.
You know, we need to get rid of this concept that people still are holding on
(25:26):
to, that Marlborough Beaufort had a lifelong dream, etc. for her son.
Nobody thought Henry Tader was ever going to be a king.
The earliest we can really say Henry Tudor first believed he could become a king of England is 1483.
And it's only when Richard III becomes king and creates this new fracture within
(25:48):
his royal house of York are people going, we need somebody else.
So 1483 is the earliest. But to get to that point, a lot of people have died in the interim.
Him which is 1483 and it's simply he is
the last man left of some royal blood
with a story that can be told and the
story that can be told here by his supporters
(26:11):
is that he is of English royal descent he's the right man of the right age he's
living abroad he's out of reach of the English king he's related to the French
royal family as well so he can use them to try and get support and what What
he does is he knows about his Welsh lineage.
So he starts to say, well, he starts to feed into the idea that he's the son of prophecy.
(26:34):
God has destined him to come and be king.
He is the great liberator. He uses terms like this.
He is going to free Wales and England from tyranny. He is the chosen one.
And he makes a lot of play on his Welsh ancestry because what he's saying is
all well and good, Richard III being descended from William the Conqueror and
(26:56):
the Plantagenets, Henry is descended from.
5th, 6th, and 7th century Welsh kings who ruled over this island long before
the Plantagenets looked across the English Channel.
You know, he is of the true blood of this island.
And that's why he uses a red dragon as a symbol.
(27:18):
The red dragon is a symbol that is from the 7th century from a guy called Cadwaladr,
who was king of the Britons.
And this, as Henry claims, is his ancestor. Esther. She's using all of this
idea to build up, in truth, what is still quite a weak position.
He is still a relative nobody, living across the water, holding his hand out
(27:39):
to the French, begging for some money to try and conquer.
She's using all of this concept of him being a foretold hero to try and help boost his cause.
But he is able to gain some money from some French merchants, and he does invade.
He lands in his native Wales when he invades, which is again very storytelling,
with really an army that's just full of French mercenaries and some English rebels.
(28:04):
But during his march through Wales, he's raising this red dragon banner.
The Welsh people recognise the significance of this.
Their messiah has just landed. That's what they're being told by the bards.
That's what they believe in. He has the dragon banner.
In these poems that have been spread for
centuries they always talk of the messiah as
(28:26):
being the fated dragon who will
come and now here he is a soldier on
their beach with a dragon banner the Welsh flock to his side and he really does
bolster his numbers by the time he reaches England with many Welshmen perhaps
as many as two or three thousand Welshmen and he goes on to Bosworth now should he win at Bosworth no.
(28:50):
Richard III is the King of England with a bigger, larger army. It's in his hands.
Unfortunately for Richard, he was betrayed by the Stanleys at the final moment,
and Henry II becomes King of England.
One of the most remarkable upsets that is in English history,
and you can start to see why people believed he was the son of prophecy,
(29:10):
because how could this be?
And we can see why Henry straight away made a big show that he had become king
through divine judgment.
God wills this. This is why he is king.
This is the story that is now being packed around English circles.
Well, of course, Henry must be the rightful king. God must have had a hand in
(29:32):
what is taking place here today.
One thing I do find quite interesting is we know this idea of him being the
son of prophecy occurs in the run-up to Bosworth. It occurs in his own lifetime.
By the time we get to Shakespeare's time, 100 years later, this idea that his
rise to the throne was foretold has become reinvented as an English story.
(29:53):
In Shakespeare's play Henry VI, he includes a scene where the young boy Henry
Tudor goes to the English court.
And Henry VI actually predicts that one day this young boy would be king.
And it's a very good scene in Shakespeare's plays, which we know,
they knew in Shakespeare's day and we know now that would be true this young
(30:15):
boy would become King of England and.
But in Henry VI's time, that concept was utterly absurd, particularly when Henry
VI still had his own son who should have been next in line.
But it does show how I think this Welsh poetry was known by Henry VII and by
his court, and it gradually became reinvented as a very English tradition.
(30:40):
And many people still talk about today. People who know their Shakespeare,
and we all know how influential Shakespeare is, still mention,
oh, well, the boy was predicted to become king.
And the answer is yes, by the Welsh, not by the English kings.
Now, that's so fascinating, Nathan, and so powerful, obviously, the power of prophecy.
I'm just thinking it makes so much sense now why the Welsh people would have flocked to him.
(31:02):
He was almost imbued already with this kind of sense of divinity or like a mystical
power, almost, that I imagine would have been very attractive to people at this
time. Yeah, and like we say, the Welsh bards have prepared the ground for centuries.
The Welsh have been living under, again, a racial ceiling.
They were living under foreign oppression, so to speak.
(31:26):
In the words of Bonnie Tyler, a famous Welsh singer, they were holding out for
a hero to come and save them.
You know, the grounds were prepared for Henry Tudor. Again, Henry Tudor's rise
is remarkable for him just being in the right place at the right time.
He was exactly that with the case for the English throne.
Somebody abroad who could marry Elizabeth of York and have some royal blood.
(31:51):
But even for this Welsh aspect, he doesn't become King of England without this Welsh aspect to him.
If he doesn't land in Wales, if he doesn't build up momentum,
men, you know, it doesn't happen.
And so you've obviously alluded to the fact that the Welsh people appear to
have been quite happy with his rise to power. But what about the English?
What do they think once he wins at Bosworth? He's now, you know,
(32:15):
the first Tudor king, King Henry VII.
What are the English people thinking about this? I mean, obviously,
when it comes to the Welsh and the English, we never truly know what the average
man or woman on the street was thinking.
We can only go really with what the social higher-ups were writing at the time.
With regards to the English, I
would be amazed at how many people thought Henry Tudor was going to last.
(32:40):
I think he was installed on the crown with the idea that he would actually be a bit of a puppet.
And it's those Yorkist rebels who supported
him against Richard III they thought they were going to get a
puppet that they could control I think the French who'd sponsored his
invasion thought they were going to get a puppet and
in reality they got one of the strongest minded kings England had ever had but
(33:01):
still I would be amazed if people believed he would last because well kings
of England were being thrown off their throne left right and centre during this
period Henry's own reign had repeated pretenders come against him.
The remarkable thing about Henry is that he made it through his 24-year reign
and he becomes the first king of England in 87 years to pass his crown on to
(33:24):
his son, who goes and takes up that kingship. So he survives, remarkably.
But I think he would have been interpreted as being just an unknown,
brief interloper on this crown.
Now, what I would suggest with Henry Tudor, he's come down to us as a dour accountant
king because of how his historiography has only ever focused on his administrative qualities.
(33:50):
He must have been an incredibly charismatic man. We, in fact,
have quite a few ambassador reports that tell us what a good speaker he was
and how his face lit up when he spoke to people.
You know, he would have had something about him that encouraged people to sail
from France, to march through Wales, to go to Bartle, where you're probably
(34:12):
going to die, and then to stick with him.
His 24-year reign does have a lot of plots, but these, almost in every instance,
are foreign plots put against him by
his foreign enemies, whether it's the Burgundians, the French, the Scots.
In England, we don't really get much evidence of uprisings and rebellions against him.
(34:33):
Now, was he loved? I don't necessarily think so. Certainly towards the end of
his reign. Was he respected and followed? Yes.
And that has to do, perhaps, with a lot of his own character.
So I think the fact of him becoming king at Bosworth would have been incredulous
to many people. Who? Who is our king?
Henry what? Who's this guy? But if you're living, I mean, even in today's modern
(34:57):
England, if you live four or five hours north of London, it could sometimes
feel like rightly wrong.
Some people feel like they're a forgotten part of a political scene.
Imagine it in 1485, some small hamlet in the north of England,
no weeks later there's a new king.
They probably would have shrugged their shoulders and carried on working in the field.
(35:20):
I doubt they would have made much difference to them. So they just threw on
with it because there probably would have been another king in a couple of years anyway.
And so you've obviously talked about the fact that you think Henry had some
personal qualities that I suppose contributed to his success and the longevity
of his rule, despite, you know, everything that's sort of come before.
What role do you think his marriage to Elizabeth of York plays in terms of his survival?
(35:46):
Everything, ultimately. You know, the key thing to get is that Henry VII did
not claim the throne in any way, shape or form through Elizabeth's lineage.
Henry VII becomes king because he is the king, but
in the record of divine judgment on the first act of
parliament that is passed specifically stipulates that
(36:07):
the crown of england rests in henry's hands
and in his heirs only it
never stipulates the heirs of henry and elizabeth so henry always was the king
the sole king and the crown was his and his children's only he could have married
anybody he wanted to it would have been their children's crown.
(36:31):
Now, that is a fact. The political reality was the only way Henry got the support
of four or five hundred English rebels who then propelled him to the throne
was by promising to marry Elizabeth of York.
I think the political reality was he always had to marry Elizabeth of York,
and he obviously did marry her as soon as he possibly could,
(36:53):
to bond together these two rival houses. Now, also, it is all to do with stories.
Henry knows the stories of him being the son of prophecy.
He gets that. He's using it to show himself to be the saviour.
He is saving England. He is the man.
And he's going to do this by being the unity candidate.
(37:15):
He is the man who's coming to bring peace and prosperity to England.
And he's going to do that by marrying the daughter of the rival house and uniting it.
So there's also never, there was never ever any doubt he wasn't ever going to
marry Elizabeth of York because it was a political marriage.
It doesn't matter whether he liked her or didn't like it or loved her, etc.
(37:39):
The story that creates, the bond that creates to unite the houses,
it feeds into his whole ethos of being the Messiah, of being the saviour.
Because look at him, he is bringing a project of peace to the English people,
not a project of fear or killing.
And of course, Elizabeth is very popular, certainly with Londoners and over
(38:03):
time with her people. And that does help Henry.
It gives Henry that, it helps him project constantly this idea of the House of Tudor.
We are both red rose and white rose. I think if he doesn't marry Elizabeth of
York, or Elizabeth of York dies younger, in fact, I think he struggles.
(38:23):
I think he faces much more potential to be deposed without her at his side.
Yeah, I mean, that York marriage, it means everything. Not just because it would
become a marriage of quite mutual affection or even love.
It clearly means a lot to Henry in a personal aspect, once they get to know each other, of course.
But it's all part of the project.
(38:46):
It is the story he is telling. And that is the most important thing sometimes.
What is my narrative? What narrative am I telling? We still get our modern politics.
It's not often about the substance.
It's still who's got the better story?
Who's spinning the narrative? That marriage was a poor building block of the House of Tudor.
Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. Narrative and stories are so important.
(39:09):
And that's how we understand our lives, through stories.
Absolutely fascinating. So I've got a couple more questions for you,
Nathan, and then I'll let you get on with your day.
So what is one misconception, you've probably got a long list,
about the Tudors that you wish you could absolutely stamp out and quash right now?
I've probably covered a lot of them already in today's talk.
I mean, I think less about the Tudors because, you know, once we get out to
(39:32):
the reign of Henry VII, I start to lose my way a little bit.
But with Henry VII, certainly, I just wish we could get away with this misconception
conception that he was a dull, miser, Ebenezer Scrooge-esque figure.
That simply isn't the case.
Yes, Henry VII embarked on what we would call financial tyranny towards the end of his reign.
(39:54):
He was very greedy in accumulating great treasure.
The word we should be using for him, however, is avaricious, greed.
He is not a miser. Henry VII became one of the richest kings of England ever,
but he's also one of the biggest spenders of England ever. He was not Ebenezer Scrooge.
(40:14):
This man spent money unlike anyone and we have all of his payment records.
He was a lavish spender on his family. He liked to treat his family to jewels,
to furs, to musical instruments.
He was a great builder. He erected the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey and
Richmond Palace, which by every measure seems to to have been greater than Hampton Court.
(40:38):
And it's a shame the Richmond Palace isn't standing today. So I think we need
to get away from this misconception that Henry VII was a dull Ebenezer Scrooge.
There couldn't have been anything further from the truth. And as we've shown
today, he had something about him that made men stay loyal.
What was that about him in person?
That he, what qualities did he have that we have not come down to us with the
(41:00):
modern day. I'm sure he probably would have been good in the social media age.
He would have got his real personality out there perhaps.
And that would have been fun to see. Very last question for you, Nathan.
So obviously you've written this book, you've come back to Henry Tudor,
you've got so many insights about this period and you've come at it from such a fresh perspective.
What is something that you hope all your readers will take away after reading your book?
(41:23):
That there is as much an abundance of drama, intrigue, scandal,
love, and war taking place in the Tudor family story long before they become the Tudors.
So we are fixated on 1485 to 1603.
Well, let's look at 1170 to 1485 because there's going to be everything you
(41:48):
love about the Tudors in a year and more.
Oh, I love it. And I'm patiently awaiting for my copy to arrive And I recommend
everyone go and order Son of Prophecy right now.
So, Nathan, what's next for you? Do you know what you're doing next? Nothing at the moment.
I'm joking. I'm joking. I'm retired for the time being. I've finally written
the book that I really always wanted to write.
(42:09):
And the reason I started writing blogs in the first place was this very subject.
My first blog was on the background of the Welsh Tudors. So at the moment, I'm taking it easy.
I'm concentrating on being a book judge, which is taking up all of my time. But never say never.
But at the moment, I'm just waiting for the project to reveal itself.
Yeah, exactly. Well, enjoy your well-deserved break from writing.
(42:33):
I'm sure something will pop into your head very soon, and we all look forward to it.
And thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast and talk Henry Tudor with us.
No problem. Thank you very much, Natalie. Always a joy.
Well, that brings us to the end of this episode of Talking Tudors.
Thank you so much for joining us. I absolutely love to hear from listeners,
so if you have any comments or suggestions or just want to say hi,
(42:57):
please get in touch with me via my website,
www.onthetutortrail.com, where you'll also find show notes for today's episode.
If you've enjoyed the show, please share the podcast with friends and family,
and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review.
I also invite you to join our Talking Tudors podcast group on Facebook,
where you can interact with other Tudor history lovers and hear all the behind-the-scenes news.
(43:21):
You'll also find me on Twitter. My handle is onthetudortrail and on Instagram as themosthappy78.
It's time now for us to re-enter the modern world. As always,
I look forward to talking Tudors with you again very soon.
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