Bastard Prince (12 page)

It is also possible that the tutor had a rather exaggerated sense of his importance in the household. He seems to have equated his role with that of Sir William Parr, the chamberlain, and Richard Page, the vice-chamberlain. Nevertheless the ‘six sundry articles' that Palsgrave alleged had been lodged against him do suggest that moves were afoot to take advantage of his present precarious position and oust him from his post. Since the tutor was certain he still enjoyed the full confidence of the king, he had to look elsewhere for the author of his present difficulties. Such a person would have to be sufficiently powerful to deflect the combined influence of Mary Tudor, Sir Thomas More and Elizabeth. The obvious choice would be Thomas Wolsey.

The vast majority of those who taunted Palsgrave answered directly to the cardinal. If Wingfield had engineered the tutor's appointment, then Wolsey had no particular reason to come to his aid and perhaps every reason to wish to see him removed in favour of a candidate of his own. Tellingly, Palsgrave did not appeal to Wolsey to help him out of his difficulties, perhaps not least because in 1515 Wolsey had refused to grant Mary Tudor's requests that her old schoolmaster be made Archdeacon of Derby, or be given a living in the diocese of Durham. In contrast Richard Croke's first loyalty seems to have been to Wolsey. It is probably only coincidence that he was a distant blood relation of the Blounts of Kinlet. Since he had fallen out with his former patron, John Fisher, Croke had a far more pressing reason for entering Richmond's service and would have been suitably grateful to Wolsey for securing the appointment.

Certainly, subsequent events suggest that Palsgrave resented the cardinal. In April 1528 he was rebuked for his attitude towards the King's Council and a search of his papers revealed a number of charges against Wolsey's government. At various times it has been suggested that the articles, which were presumably designed as a basis for attainder, were drawn up under the instructions of, among others, the Duke of Norfolk or Suffolk, Sir Thomas Arundel or Lord Thomas Darcy. However, the enthusiasm that Palsgrave brought to the task also suggests that he had his own agenda. Such enduring bitterness may indicate that Palsgrave held Wolsey responsible for his ignoble and premature departure from the north.

As a Cambridge graduate and reader in Greek at the University, who had studied in Europe, Richard Croke may have anticipated that he was well able to meet the educational needs of a six-year-old. Yet it was not long before he too was complaining that Richmond was all too frequently taken out of lessons to practise archery and other sports. In some respects his complaints mirrored Palsgrave's battles in the schoolroom. His authority was being treated as if it was of no account and clerics in general were being openly demeaned, until even his own pupils felt free to insult him, calling him bastard, fool or rogue. Croke's efforts to reassert his authority by punishment were hampered by the intervention of other members of the household, until the boys had so little respect for him that they felt they could miss lessons whenever they liked.

However, his complaints also highlighted a more serious problem, one that might have repercussions far outside the schoolroom. Richmond probably never saw the vast majority of business handled by his council. A letter written on 3 March 1527 to his father about the state of the north and the ‘right good rule and quietness [that] is in these parts' is clearly a school exercise rather than real news. In matters of policy and direction his role was limited to official correspondence issued in his name. For example, in April 1526 Sir Christopher Dacre advised Lord Dacre that he and the Archbishop of Glasgow had received letters from ‘my Lord of Richmond'. For this purpose an elaborate seal of the duke's arms, some four inches in diameter, had been commissioned for attachment to all official documents. This made his signature a valuable commodity. Richmond's offices endowed him with a good deal of power and influence and when it came to his patronage the division between nominal and actual authority was much less clearly defined.

In his complaints Croke singled out Sir George Cotton, one of the gentlemen ushers, for indulging the duke so ‘he might win the fullest favour for himself'. The tutor protested that Richmond was no longer studying before morning mass or doing any writing before dinner. Indeed, the whole timetable which Wolsey had devised for the duke's studies had simply been set aside. Richmond spent more time with Cotton than in lessons. The tutor's allegation that fools and players had been admitted to the privy chamber to sing bawdy songs is backed up by the £3 18
s
8
d
in the accounts given to ‘players and minstrels for rewards', although exactly what a child of Richmond's age made of the entertainment is not recorded.

As a result of these extracurricular activities Croke found the child was now often too tired to study. If Croke scolded him, Cotton made excuses. Worse, the usher had now taken it upon himself to set ‘lessons' for the duke, which Croke saw as a thinly veiled excuse to encourage Richmond to write letters in his own hand to abbots and other local figures ‘to the great dulling of his wits, spirits, and memory, and no little hurt of his head, stomach, and body', in order to obtain hawks or other small favours for Cotton and his cronies. While the tutor worried that Richmond's handwriting would suffer, he was also careful to remind Wolsey that this was not in keeping with the carefully crafted aura of dignity and status that had been constructed around the duke.

Any hopes that Croke had of improvement were also hampered by the actions of Richmond's chamberlain, Sir William Parr, who Croke alleged was also interfering in Richmond's schedule. On his orders the duke was no longer repeating his lessons after supper and he had arranged for his nephew to hear the daily religious offices of matins and vespers with Richmond. Worse still, the duke was happily exploiting the disunited front displayed by the adults around him and now refused to mind either his usher or his nurse. With some justice Croke predicted that ‘a disposition of the best promise . . . may at last be ruined under such masters, who measure everything for their own pleasure and profit, and nothing for the advantage of their lord'. At his wits' end Croke rather dramatically declared that Richmond's education was finished unless something was done.

His solution was a series of five articles that were designed to increase his control over what Richmond learnt, at what times and in whose company, so that he might ‘be induced most highly to esteem his book of all his other studies'. A lofty ambition perhaps for a child whose preference for sport over study proclaimed him very much his father's son. All of this was a far cry from the pursuit of virtue and learning originally envisaged for Richmond. Now neither threats nor praises could encourage him to settle to his books. If Croke raised the prospect of chastisement Richmond simply responded ‘Master if you beat me, I will beat you'.

Although the idea that a royal child was not subject to corporal punishment has become a popular tradition, with Barnaby Fitzpatrick being cast as the whipping-boy for Edward VI, this was not the case. Other children of rank, such as the Earl of Surrey and Lady Jane Grey, were certainly beaten. Even royal status was no protection. Edward VI's tutor, Richard Cox, was certainly prepared to hit his charge when necessary. On at least one occasion, finding his efforts met with nothing but boredom, and after coaxing and threats had proved ineffective, Cox gave a final warning then hit the child and ‘gave him such a wound that he wist [knew] not what to do'. If Edward could be so sharply punished, Richmond's confidence was slightly misplaced.
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Yet equally there was an increasing reluctance to punish any but the dullest pupils in this manner, if another form of inducement could be found.

Eventually a more suitable solution was found. In a letter probably written in January 1528, Richmond was enthusiastically advising his father:

Such keenness was not provoked by a sudden injection of intellectualism. Richmond wanted the king to send him ‘a harness [suit of Armour] for my exercise in arms' so that he might practise the warlike exploits he had read about in the commentaries of Caesar. Anxious not to miss out, Richmond also addressed an almost identical letter to Wolsey as his godfather ‘to be means for me unto the Kings highness in this behalf'. A combination of texts designed to appeal to the warlike enthusiasms of an active young boy and what looks suspiciously like a little bribery was evidently an effective teaching technique.

While Croke's antagonism towards Cotton rumbled on, his relationship with Richmond clearly improved. When the king recalled him in October 1527, the young duke supplied him with a gracious letter of recommendation. Beautifully written and elegantly phrased, the letter itself was perhaps the best possible testimony to the tutor's ‘labour and diligence to induce me in learning'. For his part Croke honoured his promise not to forget his royal charge. Writing from abroad he asked to be remembered ‘most humbly to my most dear lord and master, my lord of Richmond' and promised on his return to bring the young duke presents of a replica of Caesar's bridges and an unusual model galley ‘such as few men have seen' that had five oars. Whatever intellectual tastes Croke had been able to instill in his pupil were obviously still more practical than contemplative, but it was a sign of his willingness to learn.

Whether Croke anticipated a return to the schoolroom at Sheriff Hutton is not clear: perhaps he welcomed the opportunity of a dignified exit, perhaps no one was quite sure how long the king's business might keep him away. In any case, his departure necessitated the appointment of another tutor. While Richmond refers to him simply as ‘a new schoolmaster' this may have been George Folbury, a contemporary of Croke's at Cambridge. He graduated in 1514 and become a fellow of both Clare and Pembroke Colleges. He took his Master of Arts in 1517 and was preacher to the University in 1519, graduating Bachelor of Theology in 1524. This appointment could have coincided with his return from Montpellier, where he is believed to have obtained his Doctorate in Divinity. This time there are no complaints. Either whatever measures Wolsey had implemented were effective or this tutor had fewer illusions about his proper place in the duke's household.

If things were quite as bad as either Palsgrave or Croke claimed, it is amazing Richmond ever learnt anything at all. Yet the child could boast elegant handwriting, not unlike that used by his half-sister Elizabeth, which was a refreshingly legible change from the scrawl favoured by many of his elders. Unfortunately, many of the letters he wrote at this time were formal set pieces to the king or Wolsey designed to ‘make a demonstration of this my proceeding [progress] in writing', no doubt penned with his tutor breathing down his neck. Others are either a formal request for some favour for himself or a recommendation for one of his servants. Unlike Edward VI, who found endless pleasure in schemes and papers, Richmond was perhaps more like his father: willing, even eager, to attend to business when there was a discernible goal, but lacking the patience to pursue a project purely for its own sake.

Richmond's tutors clearly felt the burden of educating the king's only son. Perhaps they worried that a good mind was not being stretched to its full potential and that they might be called to account. Perhaps they had a vision of the perfect, learned prince and were being frustrated in their attempts to mould Richmond in this image. Certainly, Croke's desire that Richmond ‘should write no thing of his own hand but in Latin' was out of step with an age that increasingly preferred to use the vernacular for personal correspondence. Only one of Richmond's surviving letters was written in Latin and that, a eulogy for his late servant, Matthew Boynton, was written when Richmond was about eleven. His tutors may have forgotten that if Richmond was truly intended to grow up to emulate his father, as he showed every sign of doing, he would need several strings to his bow. Since their concerns were not echoed by any other members of Richmond's council, it seems safe to assume that things were not so bad. While his outdoor pursuits may have offended the sensibilities of his tutors, to his council they were obviously part of the necessary education of a virtuous prince.

When it was first decided that Richmond should go to the north as the king's lieutenant little can have been known about his capabilities. In a sense it did not matter. His blood relationship to the king, his titles and his physical presence all served the required purpose. However, he gradually began to attract notice from abroad. In April 1526 when James V, King of Scotland, sent some papers to Wolsey he desired to be recommended to his cousin. The following month Richmond was included in a list of nobility drawn up by the members of the Cognac League to whom they offered pensions out of any lands conquered in Italy, as part of their plan to persuade Henry VIII to take up arms against Charles V. Richmond was to receive 30,000 ducats per annum. His inclusion was more than an obvious piece of flattery, it reflected Richmond's role as the premier magnate in England. Wolsey was only promised 10,000 ducats, although, in this case, their generosity may also have been prompted by Richmond's presence at court.

The duke's own movements are often poorly documented. Reliance on the correspondence of his council has perpetuated the view that he was continually resident in the north. However, Richmond's person was not required for the day to day running of his council, which frequently decamped to Newcastle or Carlisle without him. Even the various removals of his household are only a general guide to the actual location of the duke. Such speculation is not helped by the fact that Richmond's own correspondence is seldom dated to any particular year. However, just as Mary did not spend all her time in the Welsh Marches during this period, so Muriel St Clare Byrne offers reasonable grounds to suggest that Richmond was back at Collyweston in Northamptonshire by February 1526.
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Furthermore, his name on a charter drawn up at Westminster raises the possibility that he was at court in May 1526. He seems to have been back at Sheriff Hutton by September 1526 when Thomas Magnus included his request for the Cardinal's blessing in his letter. Yet, it is entirely possible that the king's Lieutenant-General north of the Trent spent at least some of 1526 in the south.