Henry VII, wanting to maintain the Spanish…

April 1509 CE

Henry VII, wanting to maintain the Spanish alliance, had therefore arranged a papal dispensation from Pope Julius II for Prince Henry to marry his brother's widow Catherine, a relationship that would have otherwise precluded marriage in the Roman Catholic Church.

Queen Elizabeth had died in childbirth in 1503, so King Henry had the dispensation also permit him to marry Catherine himself.

After obtaining the dispensation, Henry had had second thoughts about the marriage of his son and Catherine.

Catherine's mother Isabella I of Castile had died and Catherine's sister Joanna had succeeded her; Catherine is therefore daughter of only one reigning monarch and so less desirable as a spouse for Henry VII's heir-apparent.

The marriage will not take place during his lifetime.

Otherwise, at the time of his father's arranging of the marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the future Henry VIII was too young to contract the marriage according to Canon Law, and would be ineligible until age fourteen.

Henry has made halfhearted plans to remarry and beget more heirs, but these never come to anything.

He is in 1505 sufficiently interested in a potential marriage to Joan, the recently widowed Queen of Naples, that he sends ambassadors to Naples to report on the twenty-seven-year-old's physical suitability.

The wedding never takes place, and curiously the physical description Henry had sent with his ambassadors describing what he desires in a new wife matches the description of Elizabeth.

Records show the Tower of London was after 1503 never again used as a royal residence by Henry Tudor, and all royal births under Henry VIII will take place in palaces.

Henry VII had been shattered by the loss of Elizabeth, and her death had broken his heart.

During his lifetime he is often jeered by the nobility for his re-centralizing of power in London, and later the sixteenth century historian Francis Bacon will be ruthlessly critical of the methods by which he enforced tax law, but equally true is the fact that Henry Tudor is adamant about keeping detailed bookkeeping records of his personal finances: these and one account book detailing the expenses of his queen survive in the British National Archives.

Many of the entries in his account books show a man who spends generously on his wife and children, and not just on necessities: in spring 1491 he had spent a great amount of gold on his daughter Mary for a lute; the following year he spent money on a lion for Queen Elizabeth's menagerie.

Immediately after Elizabeth's death, Henry had become very sick and nearly died himself, and only allowed Margaret Beaufort, his mother, near him.

Henry VII dies at Richmond Palace on April 21, 1509, of tuberculosis and is buried at Westminster Abbey, next to his wife, Elizabeth, in the chapel he had commissioned.

His mother survives him; she will die two months later on June 29.

His second son succeeds him as Henry VIII.