Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (29 page)

In the last week of July, preceded by the harbingers who rode ahead, checking that accommodation was ample and correctly allocated according to rank – as well as for warning signs of disease and ‘perilous sickmen’ in the towns and villages through which the court passed – the household moved out of Greenwich and along the main London–Canterbury road, through apple orchards and fields of wheat and barley parched with lack of rain, horses straining at carts piled high with coffers and trunks. With his son at his side, and the brief for the marriage dispensation just arrived, Henry was in expansive and solicitous mood. On 4 August he dispatched one of his privy servants with a letter to Catherine, who had fallen seriously ill at Greenwich; her fever, racking cough and stomach problems were exacerbated by a hamfisted doctor whose laboured efforts to bleed her resulted in ‘no blood’. Rather than accompanying the court and her betrothed on progress, she had returned to Durham House with her household to convalesce. Henry promised her the best physicians he could find. He loved her, he stressed, ‘as his own daughter’, and told her to ask him for anything she wanted.
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But it was Henry’s demonstrative affection for his son that attracted most attention. Travelling with the court, the Spanish ambassador Ferdinand Duque – sent to bolster, and keep an eye on, the activities of the Anglophile Rodrigo de Puebla – remarked warmly of the king’s parenting skills in a letter to King Ferdinand. ‘It is quite wonderful’, he wrote, ‘how much the king likes the prince of Wales’ – and with good reason, for the prince ‘deserves all love.’ ‘Certainly’, he commented approvingly, ‘there could be no better school in the world than the society of such a father as Henry VII.’

Ferdinand Duque had no reason to disbelieve the evidence of his own eyes, and indeed, Henry’s delight in the prince was entirely consistent with his behaviour on the rare occasions that the pair had previously been seen together. The king did love his son – who was, after all, the embodiment of everything he had fought for over the previous quarter century. Besides which, the boy probably reminded Henry of Elizabeth.

But Duque also mentioned something else, a topic that was evidently the talk of court that summer. Previously, the king had never taken his son on progress, in order ‘not to disrupt his studies’. Henry, he continued, was so wise, and attentive to everything regarding his son’s upbringing: ‘nothing escapes his attention’. Indeed, Duque concluded, if the king were to live ten years longer, he would leave the prince ‘furnished with good habits, and immense riches, and in as happy circumstances as man can be.’
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For the first thirteen years of Prince Henry’s life, he had barely inhabited his father’s world. Suddenly, in Duque’s portrait, they had been thrown vividly, closely together; Henry, hawklike, watching over his son’s security and development.

The situation in which Henry and the prince now found themselves was, however, highly unusual. Every heir to the throne in living memory, and many more before that, had been trained in adversity – or at the very least in a separate household, away from their parents. Henry himself, as he was always at pains to point out, had been hardened in the refugee’s struggle for sheer survival – and besides, he had won his battles. At the age of ten Prince Henry’s grandfather, Edward IV, was marching on London at the head of an army ten thousand strong.
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Everybody understood that the first requirement of kingship was to lead by example – and that meant by fighting and military leadership. When, back in the 1460s, the lawyer Sir John Fortescue lectured the Lancastrian heir Edward, prince of Wales on the importance of studying law, he took it for granted that kings knew how to fight, which was ironic given that his pupil’s father, Henry VI, was the only king in living memory who had not distinguished himself in battle; indeed, his helpless diffidence – which Henry VII was now reinventing as a saintlike passivity – had plunged the country into civil war.

So, at the age when Prince Henry might have been expected to be exposed to the world around him, and to acquire responsibility for his actions, his father wrapped him in cotton wool, his independence restricted, his every move tightly controlled. Contemporary educationalists would have been concerned. One, writing in 1500, believed that the offspring of rich families were spoiled brats, ill-equipped for life, because they were ‘lost nowadays in their youth at home, and that with their fathers and mothers’. There was, he believed, a point in a child’s development where the tender-hearted indulgence of mothers, with their ‘weeping and wailing’ over the slightest scratch sustained by their beloved offspring, simply got in the way. The king, of course, was hardly one for cosseting of this kind. But, given the situation he now faced, it was the only option. Forced to keep his son at his side, Henry VII was belatedly ‘playing the mother’s part’. He would make a virtue of necessity.
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Duque’s comment about the prince’s education was not, or not only, a platitude. Although the prince’s study-companion, Lord Mountjoy, was increasingly preoccupied by his duties in Calais – the financial sword of Damocles suspended over him undoubtedly helped him keep his mind on the job – he was still heavily involved in the prince’s educational development, in particular the modish classical curriculum in which he was now well advanced. When John Holt, the prince’s grammar master, died in June 1504, Mountjoy’s fingerprints were all over the appointment of his replacement, William Hone.

Cut from the same cloth as his predecessor – when Holt was appointed the prince’s tutor, Hone succeeded him as master of Chichester prebendal school – Hone was an obvious choice. But Holt’s death, which had by all accounts been sudden, had come just as Prince Henry had arrived at court, where there was another figure who might have been expected to play a major role: Prince Arthur’s former tutor, a blind, black-clad Augustinian canon from Toulouse called Bernard André. That André was notable by his absence from the prince’s education spoke volumes.

Introduced to Henry in exile by Richard Fox, André had been a fixture at court since Bosworth. He was high in royal favour, friends with highly influential figures like Lady Margaret and Richard Fox, and had by his own account given Prince Arthur an exemplary classical education, following which he had been put out to grass with a wealthy benefice and the post of court historian, receiving a handsome annuity for a succession of saccharine eulogies and supine annual chronicles of the year’s major events. When, in 1502, John Skelton had left Prince Henry’s service, there had been a good reason why André had not been appointed in his place: the prince’s education was still overseen by Queen Elizabeth and by Mountjoy, then her chamberlain. But now André, still only in his early fifties and apparently in good health, was an obvious choice, particularly as he seemed still to be actively involved in tuition, giving lessons to the likes of Henry Daubeney, son of the king’s chamberlain. What was more, a comparison between André’s reading list for Prince Arthur and Holt’s set texts for Prince Henry revealed much the same curriculum.
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It ranged in both cases from Cicero, the pre-eminent classical icon of political thought, and ancient historians such as Caesar and Livy to the iconoclastic fifteenth-century Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla, who had singlehandedly demolished one of the key documents of papal supremacy, the Donation of Constantine, when he exposed it as a fake. Neither was there a great deal of difference in their methods of teaching. But while there seemed little wrong with André, instead the prince got an obscure grammarian who, while effective, was unknown at court and in international literary circles.
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Part of the reason for this was, perhaps, in order that the prince might be taught ancient Greek, the avant-garde language of choice for humanists, in which Hone was an expert. But there was, undoubtedly, a political subtext. Mountjoy and his intellectual friends detested André who, years before, had decisively terminated the prospects of one of their number: Thomas Linacre had hoped to get a job as one of Prince Arthur’s tutors, André had spoken against him to the king, and that was that. So aggressively and successfully did André guard avenues to royal favour – he was on good terms not just with the likes of Fox but also with Francis Marzen and Matthew Baker, two of Henry’s French privy chamber servants – that Erasmus later christened him ‘Cerberus’, after the dog who guarded the entrance to Hades. If André had gained the post of tutor to Prince Henry, one of the Mountjoy circle’s vital routes to the prince would have been severed – and it was a line of influence that they were determined to keep open. They were in luck. Henry wanted his son to have the best possible classical education, and Mountjoy had undoubtedly proved himself an excellent supervisor. His proposal of William Hone as the prince’s tutor stood. That, though, would not be the end of the matter.
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Although Henry VII had a healthy respect for the latest classical scholarship, recognizing the prestige it brought him and his family, he remained a distant admirer. French, which he spoke like the native he almost was, remained his literary language of choice, and he preferred the classics in translation. Notably, the biography of the fashionable Florentine intellectual Pico della Mirandola that later turned up in the royal library was not Thomas More’s acclaimed Latin version, but another – in French. It was, as much as anywhere else, in the library’s lavishly illuminated Franco-Burgundian volumes, the books of chivalric romance and, especially, history – which as Erasmus recalled both he and his son loved ‘above all’ – that Henry’s and the prince’s minds met.

In early 1504, perhaps with his son’s impending arrival in mind, Henry had expanded the library staff, taking on the printer, scribe and book-importer William Faques to supplement the skills of his longstanding librarian, the engagingly named Quentin Poulet. Both men were from northern France, and were calligraphers and illuminators of considerable talent. Poulet had been in his post for over a decade, stocking the royal library with the latest printed volumes from Paris and the Low Countries, and transcribing books for the king. As a ‘limner’, he added the delicately traced sprays of red-and-white roses that blossomed in the books’ margins and title pages – often obscuring the badges of Edward IV and Richard III underneath – and painted in brightly coloured scenes of courtly love and chivalric adventure. And, around the time of Faques’ arrival, Poulet was busy at work on one of the king’s prized manuscripts,
L’imagination de vraie noblesse
, adding to it the crown and ostrich feathers of the prince of Wales. The royal library, Henry made sure, was somewhere where the prince could browse to his heart’s content, guided in his programme of reading by another Frenchman who had come with him from Eltham, Giles Duwes.
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Starting life at court in the 1490s as teacher of French and librarian to the royal children – in which capacity Henry VIII would continue to employ him – Duwes was also a lutenist of rare quality and an outstanding music teacher. In the prince and his younger sister Mary, he had willing and able pupils. By the time the prince arrived at Richmond, he was already proficient in the musicianship for which he would become celebrated, in ‘singing … playing at recorders, flute, virginals, and in setting of songs, making of ballads’. Although he also had a ‘master at pipes’, it was Duwes, his ‘Master to Lute, French’, who played a key role in the prince’s transformation from schoolboy into sophisticated courtier. The king, too, recognized his value. Whether in acknowledgement of Duwes’ influence on his son’s education, or whether he simply liked listening to him play, on his son’s arrival at court Henry added ‘Giles luter’ to his own payroll, just below Arthur Plantagenet, on the handsome half-yearly salary of £6 8s 4d.
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Amid the atmosphere of instability and insecurity, the arrival of the prince and his attendants in the royal household prompted a subtle but palpable recalibration, one encapsulated by a young chamber servant, Stephen Hawes. Hawes was one of the thirty or so grooms of the chamber who carried out routine domestic duties – cleaning, dusting, setting up the moveable ‘boards’ or trestles at mealtimes for the household to dine on, and doubling as security staff. With a salary of forty shillings a year, it was a good, though not particularly privileged, position; it did, though, give Hawes an opportunity to get himself noticed. Like all chamber servants, he was presentable, decorous, trained in the ways of the court. He was also a flourishing young poet, a talent that, just occasionally, was his passport into the most exclusive company, to provide entertainment and ‘pastime’ for influential members of court and their guests.
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Despite his assiduous copying of John Skelton, Hawes had none of his genius. Written in the florid aureate style of the time, his ploddingly conventional verse dealt with the formulaic topics – service, etiquette, the virtues of chivalry, the romance of courtly love – in an entirely predictable way. It was, in short, the kind of middle-of-the-road, crowd-pleasing stuff that people lapped up. Bringing him popularity at court and beyond, it also attracted the attention of Wynkyn de Worde, Caxton’s former apprentice, who had taken over his Westminster print-shop and who had an appraising eye for a bestseller. Sometime after Prince Henry arrived at court, Hawes presented a new poem to the king – which de Worde then rushed out in print. But while
The Example of Virtue
was dedicated to Henry VII, it also had one eye on his son. Larded with lines lifted from Skelton’s poems, its dedication included a fulsome reference to ‘our second treasure/ Surmounting in virtue and mirror of beauty’. On closer inspection, moreover,
The Example of Virtue
was entirely about the prince, for it was written specifically with his education in mind.

Hawes’ poem was one of the many treatises, manuals of ‘nurture’, manners, practical education and instruction for life in polite society that were ‘very utile and necessary unto all youth’ – including children of ‘blood Royal’ – which household servants churned out on a regular basis. Most of these works had literary pretensions of one sort or another, written in (often execrable) rhyme, or garnished with authoritative classical tags, but Hawes went one better. Sugaring the educational pill, he wrote his poem in courtly rhyme royal, and cloaked his sententious advice in a chivalrous romance, in which a horsebacked Youth goes on a quest; finally, through his ‘good governance’, he kills a three-headed serpent, and is transformed into the ‘noble veteran’, Virtue.
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