Not till a year later was Elizabeth crowned, and by then a little son had been born to her, named Arthur at his father's wish, in memory of the stainless King Arthur, whom Henry VII. claimed as an ancestor through his Welsh grandfather, Owen Tudor.
It was about this time that a great change came over the people of England in regard to their opinion of Henry VI. They had begun by pitying him for his misfortunes; then they had called to mind his patience and humility, his kind deeds, his love of learning, and his pure life, till at last in their eyes he became nothing short of a saint. Richard III. had caused his body to be removed from Chertsey to Windsor, much to the anger of the priests at Chertsey, who had spread abroad stories of wonderful miracles performed at his tomb, which stories, being readily believed, had drawn many pilgrims to the place. And pilgrims never came empty-handed.
Henry VII. came under the influence of this feeling, and he resolved that honour should now be done to this king, whom men had liked and pitied, but had never honoured in life. He had already decided to build a new chapel to the Virgin Mary in the Abbey, or rather to entirely rebuild the Lady Chapel of Henry III., and here he intended Henry VI. should be reburied under a costly tomb. He went so far as to petition the Pope to add King Henry's name to the list of saints; but the Pope would only agree to do so for an extravagant sum of money, and Henry Tudor thought the money could be more profitably spent in other ways. So the matter was allowed to drop, and although the council which had been summoned to decide where Henry should finally be buried--in Windsor, Chertsey, or Westminster--gave their judgment in favour of Westminster, it is very doubtful if his body was ever moved to the Abbey at all. Certainly no monument was raised to his memory. However, the building of the Lady Chapel went on apace, only its purpose was changed. It was no longer to be the chantry of Henry VI., but the chapel of Henry VII., the burying-place of the Tudor kings and queens of his race.
Henry was a curious mixture of a desire to hoard up money, and a desire to build what he undertook on a very lavish scale. He saved more money than any other English king, and he certainly spent less, for he was simple in all his tastes, a silent, gloomy man. But he has left behind him in Westminster Abbey a piece of work as beautiful as wealth and art could make it, a building "stately and surprising, which brought this church to her highest pitch of glory," and though his original ideas as to its purpose were frustrated, his longings that here "three chantry monks should say prayers for his soul so long as the world endured," being ruthlessly disregarded by his own son, Henry VIII., his chapel still stands, so that with Edward the Confessor and Henry III. he ranks among the three great royal builders of the Abbey.