Henry VIII’s Lost Brother, Prince Arthur

Not Just the Tudors

History Hit

History

4.8 • 3.4K Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2022

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

During the early part of the sixteenth century England should have been ruled by King Arthur Tudor with his wife Catherine of Aragon as Queen. Had the first-born son of Henry VII lived into adulthood, his younger brother would never have become King Henry VIII and married - and divorced - Arthur’s widow, and the subsequent history of England would have been very different.

In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Dr. Sean Cunningham, author of Prince Arthur: The Tudor King Who Never Was, in which he surveys Prince Arthur’s life and assesses what type of king he might have become.

This episode was edited by Thomas Ntinas and produced by Rob Weinberg.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Henneth the Eighth was never meant to be king. If his father, Henneth the Seventh Schemes,
0:10.3	had come to fruition, we would have had a king Arthur. Perhaps our history books would
0:15.5	be filled with stories of the long and happy union of King Arthur and Queen Catherine,
0:20.4	who resisted the Lutheran Reformation and allied with Spain. Or perhaps their marriage
0:25.8	would have been an old for non-consumation. But the question we tend to ask about Arthur,
0:31.7	whether he and Catherine of Argonne did or did not do the deed, is probably the least interesting
0:36.6	thing to ask about him. Here was a young boy who had a financially wealthy, emotionally
0:42.4	impoverished existence. A boy groomed for kingship from six years of age, a lad who would never
0:49.2	live to be king. Introducing me to Prince Arthur is Dr. Sean Cunningham. He is head of medieval
0:55.7	records at the National Archives and one of the leading historians on the reign of Henry
0:59.9	VII. There are few people who know the political, military, legal and financial records of the
1:04.9	late 15th century better than Sean, and all this shows in his biography Prince Arthur, the
1:11.6	lost Tudor King. I'm grateful to St. Cross College Oxford where I recorded this podcast.
1:24.0	Sean, Dr Cunningham, thank you so much for joining me on not just the Tudors. I'm really looking
1:29.8	forward to talking to you. Thank you very much, Susie. I'm really pleased to be here. So we're
1:33.4	going to be talking about Prince Arthur and you are known for your work on Henry VII and I wondered
1:40.8	what had drawn you to want to write about this short-lived Prince. It's a really good question
1:47.8	because a child who dies at 16 before a really fulfilling any potential might seem like an afterthought,
1:53.1	especially as we know what happens after he dies in the way Tudor England develops. So partly it is
1:58.2	because of that tragic death and that early, an unfilled-filled life, but I think it's also a fact
2:03.8	that what he did pack in and the things he did do had such a lasting impact. Even the manner of
2:08.6	his death seemed to have a legacy with his brother and what happened subsequently because obviously the
	...

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