Which now in order let me first dispose,
And tell the union of the blessed rose,
That to thy grandsire Henry I may bring thee,
(From whom I after to thy birth may sing thee.)
That Tudor’s blood did worthily prefer,
From the great queen that beauteous dowager,
Whose son brave Richmond from the Britons fet,
Graft in the stock of princely Somerset,
The third fair scion, the sweet roseate plant,
Sprung from the root of the Lancastrian Gant,
Which had seventh Henry, that of royal blood
By his dear mother, is the red-rose bud,
As their great Merlin prophesied before
Should the old Britons regalty restore,
Which Henry reigning by th’usurpers death,
Married the princess fair Elizabeth
Fourth Edward’s daughter, whose predest’nate bed
Did thus conjoin the white-rose, and the red.
Michael Drayton, To the Majesty of King James (1603)
‘thy grandsire Henry’: Henry VII.
‘great … dowager’: Catherine de Valois, queen consort of Henry V.
‘brave Richmond’: Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, the eldest son of Catherine de Valois by her second husband, Owen Tudor.
‘from … fet’: fetched (ie. derived, by virtue of his father).
‘seventh Henry’: Henry VII, the son of Edmund Tudor and Margaret Beaufort.
‘his dear mother’: Margaret Beaufort, daughter of John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, and great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster.
‘predest’nate bed’: recalling the prophecy of Merlin, and thereby claiming divine right to the throne. Drayton adhered to the narratives of the ‘British history’ derived from the works of Geoffrey of Monmouth, in which Merlin stands as a key figure of British (Welsh) nationalism. History, from the establishment of the Tudor dynasty through to the Stuarts, becomes a progression towards a new British ‘regalty’.
— Andrew McRae and John West, Literature of the Stuart Successions (2019)
