Henry (21 page)

With this trifling exception, André’s evidence seems clear-cut. Yet almost all Henry’s modern biographers assert that he jousted – in the full sense – as a youth.
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They do so on the basis of the despatches of the Spanish ambassador Fuensalida. He arrived in England in the spring of 1508, which means that his statements can be checked against André’s narrative. The results are instructive. Shortly after his arrival, Fuensalida was invited to Richmond to watch a tournament that had been organized in honour of Princess Mary’s betrothal and for the entertainment of the ambassadors at the English court. During his visit he had an audience with the king, who waxed lyrical about his children, Mary and Henry, and their intended spouses.

One historian imagines his praise of Henry taking on a fresh edge as the proud father glimpsed his son on the tiltyard, shining and erect like a young god. The joust, which took place on 5, 6 and 7 March, was also mentioned by André. In view of the diplomatic importance of the event there had been lengthy preparations. The tournament had been proclaimed in January, and Lord Henry Stafford, the brother of the duke of Buckingham, and other lords had been practising daily at Kennington. At the end of February there was a sort of dress rehearsal, again at Kennington, ‘
vultibus
occlusis
’ – with closed visors – which allowed the participants to practise the most difficult and highly-scoring manoeuvre of breaking a lance on their opponent’s helmet.

Finally came the joust itself: the magnificence of the spectacle, André claimed, was in everyone’s mouth, and the knights, led by Stafford and the earl of Kent, had fought ‘hotly backwards and forwards’.
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Only one thing was missing: the involvement of Prince Henry. André’s failure to mention his name proves conclusively that he did not take part – and, to be fair, Fuensalida nowhere states that he did. Fuensalida’s actual reference to Henry’s martial activities is more modest. ‘Since Easter’, he noted, the prince had been running at the ring (
correr la
sortija
) and tourneying, and the king had watched. This, clearly, is a synopsis of the events in May, June and July which are described more fully by André: Fuensalida is vague and generalized, André precise and detailed.
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And above all, André is clear that Henry only ‘rode at the ring’.

It has always seemed strange that Henry VII, who so jealously guarded the person of his only surviving heir, should have allowed Henry to submit himself to the uncontrollable hazards of the tilt. Now it is clear that he did not. But running at the ring, for all its circumscribed quality, was an earnest of things to come.

Henry would joust just as soon as there was no one to say nay.

* * *

It seems almost as strange, however, that Henry VII allowed his son to keep the kind of company he did: with a rake like Brandon, a wastrel like Kent and the assorted aristocratic misfits and ne’er-do-wells who now crowded into the tilt-yard to catch the eye of their future king.

Did he worry about their possible influence on his son? That they would corrupt him and make him as giddy, extravagant and mindlessly violent as they were?

And what of the whiff of Yorkist sentiment which, in spite of everything, clung to the jousting fraternity? Henry VII had spent his whole life nipping Yorkist conspiracy in the bud.

Would Henry?

Or was there perhaps method in the ageing king’s madness? For Henry VII, it is clear, had never been fully accepted by the nobility. They tolerated him, respected him and, latterly, feared him. But they did not love him. Did Henry VII want his second son to be different? And did he realize that the rough camaraderie of jousting was the most effective means to that end?

It is possible. And it seems certain that Henry himself – despite his youth – knew exactly what he was doing.

H
ENRY’S FATHER WAS DYING
: slowly and by fits and starts. The fact was obvious to nearly everybody else, though till almost the end he himself talked confidently of recovery.

Meanwhile, Henry continued at court, getting bigger, stronger and better-known as his father dwindled and declined. There is no sign that he was reaching out for the crown. But, cautiously and almost imperceptibly, courtiers and councillors began to adjust to the ending of the old reign and the beginning of the new.

At least, most of them did. For some, it is clear, found the prince a much more receptive audience than others. Jousters, clearly, were welcome. As were scholars and their patrons. But what of the lawyers and financial experts who were the powerhouse of Henry VII’s government in its latter phase? Would they too have the ear of the prince?

Or would they be out in the cold – or worse?

The downward spiral in the king’s health began in the spring of 1507. A ‘quinsy’ or severe throat infection left him unable to eat or drink for some six days, and ‘his life was despaired of’. But he survived and commenced a slow recovery. By the autumn, indeed, he seemed to be in rude health: he was exercising daily, with hunting or hawking; he was even, De Puebla noted with surprise, ‘growing stout’.
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Early the following year, however, in February 1508, he fell grievously ill once more, this time with
articulari morbo
(‘a disease of the joints’). This has been glossed as ‘gout’.
2
But it seems to have been more like an acute rheumatic fever. A month later there had been little or no improvement, and the worst was evidently feared.

Lady Margaret Beaufort came to court to be at her son’s side, and took charge. The king was moved by water by easy stages from Richmond to the supposedly healthier Greenwich. And there, on 15 March 1508, Henry stood in for his father, invisible in his sick-room, and dined in public in the king’s chamber: ‘the prince, in place of the king, that day dined as was customary with certain lords in the king’s chamber’.
3

Henry had sat in his father’s seat; probably he and everybody else expected that he would shortly be wearing his crown.

* * *

But, once again, Henry VII cheated death – though at a great cost. For the next three months he suffered from chronic fatigue, a loss of appetite and bouts of depression. There were moments when he seemed to be recovering. But they proved to be false dawns, and it was not until early July that his malaise – mental and physical – really lifted. André dated the moment to about 10 July, when, ‘thanks to the relaxed state of his mind’, Henry rode the ten or a dozen miles from Hanworth to Langley Park and began a great circuit through the hunting country between Windsor and Richmond. For ‘previously’, André noted, ‘a long illness had depressed him for much of the time with tiredness and weight-loss’.
4

The combination was profoundly debilitating, and must have rendered the hustle and bustle and hubbub of court life almost intolerable. The king did the essentials: he gave audience to ambassadors, watched Henry joust at Richmond and transacted business. But whenever he could, he escaped: on 11 May ‘he withdrew privately … to Eltham in order to refresh his health’; on 3 July ‘he retreated’ to Hanworth; ‘then he went along the river to Fulham to hunt there with a small retinue’ and ‘retired’ to Hanworth once more.
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Meanwhile, ‘at Greenwich the king’s household and the royal family, observed in their magnificence, were waiting for the king himself’.

The result was an aberration: there was a court without a king, and a king without a court. There was also a capital
without a monarch, as months now passed without the king deigning to step foot in London. Instead, royal life focused on the two great suburban palace-complexes of Richmond and Greenwich. The former lay some ten miles to the west of the City; the latter five miles to the east. They were linked by the great highway of Tudor London: the Thames. Every few months the king took his ‘new barge’, freshly painted and with ‘a dragon … stand [ing] in the foreship’, and moved from Richmond to Greenwich or back again.
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Normally he took two days over the journey, with an overnight stop in or near the City. But he avoided his own palaces of Westminster and the Tower, preferring instead to stay privately at the bishop of Bath’s opulent town-house which lay to the west of the Middle Temple, and, with its gardens and appurtenances, occupied the whole space between The Strand and the river.
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This meant that all London saw of its king was a glimpse of his great barge and its escort as it swept up-or downstream. But even this, in a city starved of the oxygen of royalty, was enough to set off demonstrations of loyalty. ‘It is scarcely possible to say,’ noted André of one such river-transit, ‘how much joy gripped this city at [the king’s] approach.’
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Nor, for that matter, was the king much more generally visible in his ‘house [s] of honour’, as André called them, at Richmond or Greenwich. Some fifteen years earlier, in 1493 or ’94, Henry VII had broken with tradition and set up a new department of the royal household. Historically there were
two of these: the lord steward’s department, which provided food and drink; and the lord chamberlain’s department, which dealt with both ceremony and the king’s personal service. To these Henry VII added a third: the secret or privy chamber. This took over responsibility for the king’s body service; it was also used, as its name indicates, to enforce a much more rigorous separation between the king’s public and private lives.
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In this, the secret chamber reflected the moment of its genesis. It was a product of the security scare triggered by the Perkin Warbeck affair, when treason, as we have seen, had reached into the very heart of the royal court and implicated both head officers of the traditional household: the lord steward and the lord chamberlain himself. But the new emphasis on privacy was also conditioned by Henry VII’s unique character and experience. He was foreign to England and English ways; and he was never really at home with the English elite, nor was he ever fully accepted by them.

In these circumstances, the protection of a door, a guard and a wall of etiquette became a matter of necessity as well as personal preference.

Naturally, the king’s taste for privacy was also translated into bricks and mortar. Both in his new buildings – like Richmond and Greenwich – and in his adaptations of existing structures – like Windsor Castle – Henry VII created a honeycomb of private rooms for himself and his family: his mother, wife and children. Towards the end, even this was not enough, and he
acquired
maisons de retraite
in the vicinity of his two favourite palaces – Hanworth near Richmond and Wanstead near Greenwich – and laid out considerable sums on them. Hanworth was valued especially for its gardens and Wanstead for its park. But, above all, it was their seclusion that mattered: they were, in effect, free-standing privy lodgings.
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It was into this secretive, private world that Henry now found himself plunged. The evidence lies in the accounts of the royal household for 1507–08, where there is a special section for ‘payments for the expenses of the most noble lord Henry, prince of Wales residing in the court with our lord the king’.
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These show that he accompanied his father step by step in his shuttlecock movements between Richmond and Greenwich and back again, joined his private hunting parties and, as the sweating sickness took hold once more in high summer, sought refuge with him in the houses of favoured courtiers that had escaped the blight of infection.

No doubt this perpetual proximity to his ailing father sometimes became irksome to Henry. But did it really crush his personality and development in the fashion suggested by the new Spanish ambassador, Gutierre Gomez de Fuensalida, knight-commander of Membrilla, in a well-known despatch? The prince, Fuensalida reported a few months after his arrival in England in the spring of 1508, was kept in closer seclusion than a nubile girl back home in Spain:

Perhaps. But the ambassador, remember, was not an impartial reporter; instead, he was writing to justify his own failure to gain access to Henry to put the case directly for the conclusion of the prince’s on-off marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Moreover, there is plenty of evidence which points in a different direction. Take, for instance, Henry’s behaviour in the tilt-yard. Whether as a spectator or competitor, his uninhibited enthusiasm hardly looks like the product of shyness or repression. Nor does his willingness to talk jousting to all and sundry suggest any fear – on his part or on that of his interlocutors – about engaging in conversation. But what most undermines Fuensalida’s reliability as a witness is something else: it is his conviction that Henry would turn out to be much like his father.

Instead, of course, explaining how he came to be so different is the real challenge. And this in turn suggests another
reading of the events of the last year of Henry VII’s life. Father and son were indeed living cheek-by-jowl in the privy lodgings and, still more, in the
maisons de retraite
at Hanworth and Wanstead. But, despite their proximity, they were leading surprisingly separate and different lives. This is exemplified in two of the leading attendants of their respective households: Henry’s
socius studiorum
, Lord Mountjoy, and his father’s principal private servant, known as the groom of the stool, Hugh Denys.

It would be hard to think of two more different men – or two more distinctive careers.

We have already met William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, as the dominant influence on Henry’s later formal education. This had ended, as was customary, in Henry’s fourteenth year. At about the same time, Mountjoy had been appointed as lieutenant of Hammes Castle in the pale (or outlying territories) of Calais. This was a position which was more or less hereditary in his family. But neither event severed Mountjoy’s connexion with his young charge. Instead, much of the time, he discharged his responsibilities at Hammes through a deputy and remained resident at court. In 1507–08, indeed, he was in daily attendance on the prince. This is shown by the prince of Wales section of the royal household accounts for this year, which contain a regular entry for the carriage of
estuffamentum domini Mountjoye
(‘Lord Mountjoy’s stuff’)
per totum itinerum predictum
(‘through the whole of the fore-said journey’).
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The role of attendant lord was one to which Mountjoy was ideally suited. The point, as so often, was caught by his former teacher Erasmus, who described his pupil as ‘the most learned of the noble and the noblest of the learned’. As a gentleman, Mountjoy happily took part in all the usual diversions of the court, from hunting to music and dancing. But as a scholar, he continued to work with Henry to polish his understanding of Latin. They read selected works together; Mountjoy also encouraged the prince to keep up his Latin correspondence with figures like Erasmus himself.

And Erasmus was, of course, a window for Henry into the whole world of European culture – a world, moreover, that Erasmus had himself begun to transform. The transformation really got under way in 1505–06 when Erasmus returned to England, probably at Mountjoy’s invitation, and stayed with his friend – and Henry’s acquaintance – Thomas More in his house in Bucklersbury. There More and Erasmus spent their time translating the dialogues of the Greek poet Lucian into Latin. The exercise helped them perfect their knowledge of Greek; but it also laid the foundations for their critique of contemporary culture. Tradition and custom, they began to consider – whether in the church, in chivalry or in ordinary human relations – were the great obstacle to reason and reform. Only, they concluded, if mankind managed to break the bonds of tradition could humanity rediscover itself – and God.

The resulting collection of translations from Lucian was printed in 1506, and became all the rage. Probably it went over
Henry’s head at this stage. But Erasmus, who was worldly enough to be a supremely effective self-propagandist, had made sure that it would be widely noted in England by dedicating the constituent essays to leading members of the English political establishment. The dedicatees included the man who had christened Henry, Richard Foxe, now bishop of Winchester and lord privy seal, Thomas Ruthall, the king’s secretary, and William Warham, who had succeeded as archbishop of Canterbury and lord chancellor in 1503. These men – the
crème de la crème
of Oxford canon lawyers – were Henry VII’s leading clerical ministers and the weightiest members of the royal council.
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