The Children of Henry VIII (10 page)

Katherine’s one remaining concern was that, while the small print of Wolsey’s instructions clearly identified her daughter as the ‘Princess of the Realm’ and she would from now on be colloquially known as the ‘Princess’ or ‘Princess of Wales’, her father never officially invested her with either the title or the lands associated with it, as he clearly had done for Fitzroy.
³⁶
He had allowed her to assume the title most closely associated since Edward I’s reign with the succession, but had failed to back it up with a more tangible form of recognition.

Was such ambiguity an oversight, or had Henry deliberately recognized his son as a
de facto
prince while allowing Mary to build up false hopes?

With each of Henry’s children now living in the regions, their educations began in earnest. Palsgrave, a graduate of the University of Paris and an expert in languages including Greek, seemed to be an ideal choice as Fitzroy’s tutor. His pupil, however, was more problematic. A healthy, active boy, tall and red-haired like his father and with a love of outdoor sports, he proved headstrong and unruly. No sooner had his entourage travelled four miles out of London on its journey north than he refused to ride in the horse litter provided for him, demanding instead to mount his own pony. And when the cavalcade reached Collyweston, an anxious Palsgrave wrote to inform Wolsey that the child had insisted on hunting in the park, killing a buck.
³⁷

Once at Sheriff Hutton and Pontefract Castle, where Fitzroy increasingly preferred to live, Palsgrave settled down to instruct his charge, using a distinctive method of teaching French that he claimed to have invented for Henry’s younger sister and a new and simpler way of teaching Latin.
³⁸
After learning the basic rules of Latin grammar, Fitzroy began reading some elementary Latin poetry such as Virgil’s
Eclogues.
³⁹
And as a way of better understanding the meaning of the texts, Palsgrave set him short ‘themes’ or essays (sometimes in Latin) on topics encountered during his reading.

Fitzroy, unfortunately, was weak at mastering vocabulary. It was holding him back, so Palsgrave asked Henry to send his son a painter to illustrate the words being taught. ‘It shall’, he told the
king, ‘be to him [Fitzroy] a great furtherance in learning as well to know the names of things as the things themselves by their pictures.’

But when Henry discovered which artist the tutor had his eye on, he employed him elsewhere, leaving Palsgrave to complain how the want of a painter was causing both master and pupil to struggle.
⁴⁰
Wolsey’s response was to send him a classroom assistant, who was also to teach the boy singing and the virginals.
⁴¹
It was hardly satisfactory, but Palsgrave was unable to obtain more.

In what was tantamount to an end-of-term report to Henry, the thwarted Palsgrave decided to lie. He declared himself extremely fortunate to be charged with training ‘so excellent’ a young mind. There had been difficulties, but he felt confident that he could overcome them. He and his pupil, he continued, soon hoped to embark on Greek, a decision taken after Henry had consulted Thomas More.
⁴²
Himself the beneficiary of an expensive classical education after Prince Arthur’s death in 1502, but never having studied Greek, Henry wanted to hear the pros and cons. Before finally making up his mind, he sent for More’s daughters, who all knew Greek, and who displayed their prowess before the whole Court at Richmond Palace to the astonishment of their audience.
⁴³

As Palsgrave privately briefed More, Fitzroy had some ability, but he was surrounded by philistines who constantly distracted him, ‘some to hear a cry at a hare, some to kill a buck with his bow, sometime with greyhounds and sometime with buckhounds … some to see a flight with a hawk, some to ride a horse.’
⁴⁴
Schoolmasters, he knew, regularly beat their lazy or disobedient pupils into compliance, but Palsgrave hesitated to touch a prince. ‘To make the child love learning’, he declared wistfully, ‘I never put
[him] in fear of any correction, nor never to suffer him to continue at any time till he should be wearied.’
⁴⁵

To help motivate his pupil, Palsgrave found him classmates as study companions, just as Vives had recommended. But since those he recruited were either much older or younger than Fitzroy and not, as Vives had suggested, of the same or a similar age, this was far from ideal.
⁴⁶

Palsgrave’s career as a royal schoolmaster came to an abrupt end in February 1526, when through Wolsey’s patronage he was replaced by Richard Croke. An internationally renowned scholar and Reader in Greek at Cambridge University, Croke was a difficult, self-righteous character who could quarrel with anyone and left Cambridge under a cloud. He was hardly likely to succeed where Palsgrave had failed.
⁴⁷

Soon Croke was accusing one of the boy’s gentlemen-ushers, Sir George Cotton, of luring the child away from his books. Spurred on by Cotton—as the hapless schoolmaster claimed in a graphic litany of complaints to Wolsey—Fitzroy ducked his lessons to practise archery or to ride, hunt and hawk. He refused to get up at six in the morning to study before attending mass as Croke demanded, and refused to write anything before dinner (which then was eaten between 12 noon and 2.30 p.m. depending on the season). When in the late afternoon he did finally saunter into the schoolroom, he was too tired to study.

F
IGURE
6
Henry Fitzroy’s earliest letter to Henry VIII, thanking him for a New Year’s gift, 14 January 1527. The letter was the 7-year-old boy’s first attempt at the fashionable italic script favoured by the champions of Renaissance values in education.

Cotton, it seems, also made a fine art of ribbing or humiliating Croke in front of the prince and his fellow pupils. Should the tutor criticize the boy’s work, Cotton would say, ‘The passage is too difficult: he made a mistake. What can you expect?’ And if Croke lost
his temper, Fitzroy—incited by Cotton—would taunt him, saying, ‘Master, if you beat me, I will beat you!’ When Cotton finally invited ‘players and minstrels’ into the boy’s Privy Chamber for a recital of bawdy songs, Croke’s patience snapped.
⁴⁸

What stung Croke most was that, having successfully taught Fitzroy how to write using the italic hand so favoured by the champions of Renaissance values in education, Cotton had gone out of his way to teach him the old-fashioned, cursive, idiosyncratic script that Croke especially reviled.
⁴⁹
That Croke was teaching Fitzroy to write in an italic hand is conclusively proved by the boy’s earliest surviving letter to his father from Pontefract on 14 January 1527, thanking him for a New Year’s gift (see
Figure 6
).
⁵⁰

After a stand-off lasting several months, Croke managed to agree with Fitzroy that the prince would pay more attention to his studies if, in return, he was allowed to concentrate on texts that captured his imagination. So Croke reluctantly dropped Latin poetry and moral philosophy. And in an inspired move, he encouraged his pupil to dip into the eight books of Julius Caesar on the Gallic Wars, an action-packed narrative full of battles, fire and slaughter, written for the general reader in a simple style that avoids difficult syntax or vocabulary. Depicting Caesar as a loyal patriot and incorporating some of the most vivid descriptions of military strategy ever written, the books clearly struck a chord with a student as eager to imitate the victories of Edward the Black Prince at Crécy and Henry V at Agincourt as his father had been at a similar age.

A year later almost to the day, the 8-year-old wrote separately to his father and Wolsey in a now nearly perfect italic hand, asking for a child’s suit of armour. As he assured his father, ‘I effectually give my whole endeavour, mind, study and pleasure to the diligent
application of all such science and feats of learning as by my most loving councillors I am daily advertised to stand with your most high and gracious pleasure.’ Therefore, he continued, ‘remember me your most humble and lowly servant with a harness for my exercise in arms according to my learning in Julius Caesar.’ And the boy signed off, ‘Trusting in God as speedily and profitably to prosper in the same as your grace shall perceive that I have done in all mine other learnings.’
⁵¹

The effect would have been greatly spoiled had Henry known that, for almost a year, the prince had been corresponding cheerfully with James V of Scotland, seeking his advice about the best kind of hunting dogs. When Fitzroy sent the Scottish king a gift of six or eight dogs ‘for hunting the fox and a couple fit for the leash’, James—who addressed the boy as ‘our tender cousin’—reciprocated with ‘two brace of hounds for deer and smaller beasts’. And if he enjoyed hawking (as he already knew he did), he would send him at the right season ‘some of the best red hawks in the country’.
⁵²

Mary, by comparison, showed every sign of being a serious and dedicated student. Wolsey’s ordinances for her household had laid down that, ‘first, principally and above all other things’, Margaret Pole, ‘according to the singular confidence that the king’s highness hath in her’—the cardinal surely had a glint in his eye when he said that—shall ‘give most tender regard to all such things as [may] concern the person of the said princess, her honourable education, and [her] training in all virtuous demeanour.’
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Pole was to ensure that her young charge ‘at seasons convenient’ was to ‘use moderate exercise for taking open air in gardens, sweet
and wholesome places and walks’. Mary was to continue practising the virginals, but not so excessively that it interfered with learning Latin and French. She was to improve her dancing and learn deportment, and even how to make sure her servants washed and dressed her properly.
⁵⁴

Mary’s first official schoolmaster, Richard Fetherstone, a staunch Catholic, who now took over from Katherine as her daughter’s Latin teacher, also doubled as her chaplain. Plainly her religious education was to be as central to her studies as it had always been to her Spanish mother’s. Already one of Katherine’s inner circle and soon to become one of her legal advisers, Fetherstone’s views on education were conveniently close to those of Vives. It was in these years that the devout Catholic beliefs that were later to become the defining principles of the young princess’s life were instilled into her.