There was always a special bond between Arthur and his younger sister Margaret, but about his relationship with his brother Henry the records are silent. Five years separated the brothers, and by the time Henry was old enough to be a companion to Arthur the latter was sent to hold court on the Welsh border. After this they saw one another only on ceremonial occasions, or when the family gathered for Christmas.
Certainly the king and queen found a second son to be an entirely welcome addition, and when Henry was bom on June 28, 1491, preparations were immediately made for an elaborate christening, while extra servants were brought in to help out in the royal nursery. Tradition called for the child to be baptized in the font of Canterbury Cathedral; it was brought up to Greenwich and installed in the church of the Franciscan Observants, high enough so that the nobles and townspeople who crowded into the church could see the ceremony without pressing Bishop Fox, who performed the baptism, too closely. Regulations put out by the king in the "Array of her Majesty's infants" called for the new baby to be "had into the nursery where it shall be nourished with a lady govemour to the nursery nurse, with four Chamberers, called Rockers." Lady Darcy, as lady mistress, presided over the entire establishment. Among the rockers were Emily Hobbes and Agnes Butler, and Henry's own beloved nurse, whom he remembered in later years with a generous pension, was Ann Luke.^
Shortly before his second birthday Henry received the first of his numerous ceremonial titles, constable of Dover Castle and warden of the
Cinque Ports. Later he was made earl marshal of England and lord lieutenant o( Ireland, with competent deputies carrying out the actual duties of these offices. In the fall of 1494, when he was three, Henry was required to undergo a series of ceremonies that would have exhausted an adult. On the first of three days of ritual he was set astride a great warhorse and led to Westminster, where after hours of initiation he was made a Knight of the Bath. The next day he received his spurs, and the day after that, before the king and nobles in the Parliament chamber, he was given the title duke of York. There were still more titles and more ceremonies to come—warden of the Scottish Marches, Knight of the Garter—but this was the most significant. In this year of 1494 a false duke of York was still abroad, and Prince Henry was to be made a living rebuke to his claim. To mark the importance of the occasion there were banquets and tournaments at court, and Princess Margaret, then only five, was allowed to present the prize of honor—a ruby ring—to the most valiant combatant in the lists.^
From this time on the duke of York was not only the king's son but a significant, if minor, personage in his own right. As "my lord of York" he appeared more and more frequently in the rolls of the king's expenditures, receiving money to play at dice, to pay his servants, to reward his fool John Goose and his minstrels. A precociously gifted musician, Henry had his own band of music makers, independent of those of his father and brother, from early childhood on.^ The duke of York was feted by the city of London when he was seven. The lord mayor and aldermen cleared the streets of beggars before his arrival, and saw to it that the cheering Londoners who lined the roadway where the prince's escort passed were free from disease. In return for the city's official gift—a pair of gilt goblets—Henry made a brief speech of thanks, adding that he hoped to be worthy of the citizens' ''great and kind remembrance" in future.
As soon as he was old enough to be out of the nursery Prince Henry began to join in the life of the court. His earliest memories were doubtless of the fools and freaks and entertainers his father loved. In addition to the master fools Scot and Dick, Patch, Diego the Spanish jester, and the "foolish duke of Lancaster" there were traveling dancers and acrobats—morris dancers, dancing children, tightrope walkers and men who did conjuring tricks. On one occasion the king gave a reward to "a fellow who distinguished himself by eating of coals." Monstrosities such as "the great Welsh child," "the little Scotsman," and "the great woman of Flanders" were brought to court for the king's amusement, and when he was not jousting or playing tennis or gambling with his courtiers Henry VII liked to surround himself with human oddities.^ Long before he was able to join in the sport himself young Henry knew all about the hawks with their hoods and gilt bells, and went often to see the mules and horses in the stables and his mother's greyhounds in their kennels. Later he was brought to see the royal lions and leopards that were kept at the Tower. These he feared, for one of the lions had mauled a man to death earlier in the reign.
At those rare times when Arthur, Margaret and Henry were together
they followed their father to the hunt, or watched a bull or bear baited by dogs. Henry taught all his children to shoot with the longbow, and they became proficient archers. At fourteen Margaret shot true enough to kill a buck, and both Arthur and Henry rivaled the archers of the king's guard in their marksmanship.^
The royal children were an important part of courtly display, and they took their place in the carefully arranged grouping around the king in the presence chamber whenever important visitors presented themselves. They were spectators at all the great court functions. They stood out of the way in the king's bedchamber on New Year's morning as the usher of the chamber called out from the doorway to announce the bringing in of the gifts. "Sire, here is a New Year's gift coming from the queen," he said, following custom. "Let it come in. Sire." Sitting at the foot of his bed, the king received the gifts of every member of his court, in order of rank, from the queen through the greatest noblemen through the lords and ladies of lesser titles. Afterward the queen received her gifts, and finally the children were allowed to see theirs. Later, on Twelfth Night, they were in the great hall at Westminster when the steward brought in the wassail, giving the traditional greeting "Wassail, wassail, wassail!" after which the chapel singers "answered with a good song." They stayed to watch the disguising that followed, in which a dozen ladies and gentlemen danced in an exotic spectacle; the torchlit hall was always hung with tapestries for the occasion, and benches were erected for the servants and ordinary folk to sit on. After the disguising, confections and spices were served to the king and queen, and then to the courtiers; over a hundred such dishes were served at the Twelfth Night entertainment of 1494. Such magnificence was not confined to holidays. Some eight hundred people dined at the king's table even on ordinary days; when ambassadors or other dignitaries were present the number was even higher, and the dishes—venison, shields of brawn (pickled swine or beef) in armor, swans and peacocks, served tail and all—seemed never to end.
Hand in hand with this splendor went the primitive discomforts of a medieval court. All the royal palaces were perpetually cold and damp. The only warmth came from the fires kept burning in rooms with hearths. The other rooms were warmed, after a fashion, by "fire pans"—round iron pans on wheels, filled with slow-burning charcoal—which were moved from room to room as needed. Carpets of rushes and sweet herbs caught most of the spills and filth that fell on the floor, but even when these were changed as frequently as the king's regulations required the rooms stank after only a few weeks of use, and the household had to move on to another residence. There was no plumbing, only wooden privies kept covered by a "fair cushion" and a green cloth. At night the wardrober brought in a "night-stool and urinal" at need. Cleanliness as we understand it was all but impossible. Expensive tallow or olive-oil-based soaps were available in wealthy households, but the fleas and bugs that lived in the walls and bred in the folds of clothing infested even the cleanest bodies. Mulberry twigs tied in bunches under the bed helped to keep the fleas away at night, but during the day the best that even the king
could do was to wear a little piece ot fur next to his skin to attract all the vermin to one spot.
The age was unkind to children. Margaret Courtenay, a cousin and companion of the royal children, choked on a fishbone and died at a very young age. Arthur, Margaret and Henry appeared to be strong enough, and the queen's third daughter, Mary, was surviving infancy. But her third son, Edmund, was to live only sixteen months, and by
the time she reached her mid-thirties there was some doubt whether Elizabeth of York could bear healthy children in future.
Whoso that will himself apply To pass the time of youth jolly, Advance him to the company Of lusty bloods and chivalry
I
In the summer of 1499 Erasmus of Rotterdam, soon to become the most celebrated scholar of his age, visited the royal nursery. Erasmus was staying at the Greenwich country house of William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, who that summer had been chosen as companion to Prince Henry; Mountjoy was a former pupil of Erasmus, and as such was well suited to serve as an example of humanist courtesy to the prince. He did not come along, though, when Thomas More visited his friend Erasmus and took him out for a walk to the neighboring village of Eltham.
The largest and finest of Henry VII's country houses, Eltham Palace was set in a forested hunting park where the king liked to hunt stag with his companions. The spacious estate held lists for tournaments and outbuildings for banquets and entertainments as well as the imposing main building with its moated inner courtyard and great hall. In this hall the palace staff and all of Mountjoy's household were assembled, rank on rank, to greet the visitors, and in their midst was a stocky boy whose natural authority gave away his identity.
Recalling the incident more than twenty years later, Erasmus remembered how the eight-year-old Prince Henry had "already something of royalty in his demeanor, in which there was a certain dignity combined with a singular courtesy."^ Arthur was not present—he was in Wales presiding at his father's court for the Marches—and in his absence Henry was the star of the occasion. Margaret stood at his right and Mary played on the floor beside him, but it was Henry who received all the attention. More bowed to him and presented him with something he had written, and Erasmus, embarrassed that he had nothing to offer, made his excuses and promised to remedy his oversight another time. Caught off guard, Erasmus was angry with his friend for not warning him in advance about preparing a literary gift for the prince; his chagrin was deepened when later that day he received a personal note from Henry "challenging something from his pen."
He went immediately back to Mountjoy's house and sat down to write. Three days later he finished the Prosopopoeia Britanniae, which he presented to Henry with a dedicatory letter. "We have for the present
27
dedicated these verses, like a gift of playthings, to your childhood," Erasmus began, in elegant Latin, "and shall be ready with more abundant offerings, when your virtues, growing with your age, shall supply more abundant material for poetry."
There is no doubt that Henry, at eight, could read Erasmus' Latin. His tutor, John Skelton, was a scholar of wide learning—Erasmus called him "that incomparable light and ornament of British letters"—and he saw to it that the prince's education was extensive and demanding. He taught Henry Latin and Greek himself; the boy learned French from Giles d'Ewes, author of a noted French grammar. Either d'Ewes or one of Prince Arthur's teachers, Bernard Andre, taught Henry to write a large, round hand influenced by the Italian style. Proficiency in Latin and French was expected of wellborn boys at six or seven; by the time he was ten Henry was reading the Latin treatise Skelton wrote for both Henry and Arthur to instruct them in the duties and behavior of a prince.^
As his principal tutor Skelton held great sway over the bent of Henry's mind. His influence was many-sided, for though he was poet laureate and had recently become a priest Skelton was as ribald and irreverent as he was sharp-witted. He had not yet begun to write the scurrilous poems that have made him the most famous poet of his generation, but his biting sarcasm was already making enemies for him everywhere. He infuriated other writers, clerics, and especially his bishop, who censured him and suspended him temporarily from his church. Skelton's parishioners, who disapproved of his clandestine marriage to a woman who lived in his house, complained that his sermons were more fit for the stage than the pulpit, and when in 1502 he went too far with outrageous behavior he was briefly imprisoned.
Yet it was by design that this colorful personality was put in charge of Prince Henry's early development; Skelton was much favored by Henry's grandmother Margaret, countess of Richmond, who acted as his patron and doubtless chose him as mentor for her favorite grandson. He was chosen chiefly for his learning, but the countess must have hoped that something of his wit and irreverence would rub off on Henry too. Both the prince and his tutor were strong extroverts, and there seems to have been another natural link between them as well: like Henry, Skelton had a gift for music, and liked to sing his poems while he accompanied himself on the lute. In later life Henry loved to sing folk songs with his courtiers; it is more than likely he acquired the habit from singing with Skelton as a boy.
No record of the order of Henry's school day survives. But outlines for the education of royal sons in the generations before and after his childhood describe a pattern of study and recreation that must have prevailed in the nursery at Eltham.'' This traditional regimen called for the boy to rise very early, hear matins sung by his chaplain, and then attend mass at six o'clock. A light meal of ale or wine and meat and bread followed, and then the morning's serious study began—Latin, Greek, and French, penmanship, and perhaps mathematics on one day, logic or law on another. Chivalry was taken as seriously as the classics, and Henry's young head was filled with tales of knightly valor, of "virtue and honor,"
and of the prowess of his medieval ancestors. War and mighty deeds became his obsession; naturally he dreamed of fighting the traditional enemy of England's medieval kings, France. Erasmus, who saw Prince Henry a number of times in his childhood, later wrote to a friend that the boy's "dream as a child had been the recovery of the French provinces"—the lost dream of the Plantagenets in the Hundred Years' War.
The morning's studies were cut short at about ten o'clock, when dinner was served, the dishes "borne in by worshipful folk in livery." The tutor presided at the table, watching to see that his pupil ate and drank "mannerly," "after the book of courtesy." Lapses were to be punished with a stout stick. The long afternoons were given over to martial exercises—jousting on horseback at a quintain or at the rings, riding in armor, fighting with blunt weapons both on horseback and on foot. Boys learned to wield a two-handed sword and battle-axe, to thrust with a dagger, and to defend themselves as they would some day do on the battlefield. To strengthen themselves for this far-off contest they ran foot races against other boys, leaped ditches and hurdled fences, and wrestled till they were exhausted. For recreation they hawked and hunted, and practiced shooting with the longbow.
At four in the afternoon, after evensong, there was another light meal of meat and bread and wine, and then came music lessons and "the polite arts of singing, harping, playing the lute and dancing," and practice in courtly conversation. For this feminine company was required; it was normal for boys to be admitted to the women's apartments to play chess or gambling games in the evening. At nine these "honest recreations" came to an end. The palace gates were shut and the children put to bed, their rooms cleared of servants and playmates and the curtains drawn. Made secure by a "sure and good watch," they slept until early the next morning.
This educational plan was not meant to be followed alone, and it was as one of a group of children that Henry received his instruction. Among the members of this little circle were John St. John, nephew of Henry's grandmother Margaret, Edward Pallet, a child whom Elizabeth of York adopted and raised, and the three Courtenay children—Henry, Margaret and Edward—whose mother was Elizabeth of York's sister Katherine. The Courtenays did not five at Eltham; they had their own establishment in Essex near Havering-atte-Bower. But they saw a great deal of their royal cousins, and Henry Courtenay and Henry Tudor were particularly close. Another boy who was constantly in Henry's company was his page William Compton. When Compton became a ward of Henry VII at the age often or eleven, he was appointed to serve the infant duke of York, and was continually in his service from then on.
Compton was to remain a life
long intimate, but another boyhood companion was to be Henry's closest and most enduring friend: Charles Brandon. An orphan, Brandon had been brought into the royal household at the age of seven to be a companion to Prince Arthur. He grew into a strapping, handsome boy, tall and broad-shouldered and fit to race and
ride and joust alongside the prince of Wales and, later, alongside his younger brother. Brandon's gifts of mind were few, but his splendid military heritage more than made up for his dullness of intellect. His grandfather William Brandon had been Henry Tudor's standard-bearer at Bosworth Field. The elder Brandon had held the Tudor banner aloft until Richard III sought him out and fought him to the death. This gallant sacrifice put the king in debt to Brandon's orphaned grandson, and young Charles Brandon in turn felt the pull of ancestral loyalty to the Tudor house.
Beyond this, though, a strong affinity developed between Brandon and the young Prince Henry, who was at least six years his junior. They were drawn together by a shared physical exuberance—a headstrong delight in running farther, hunting longer and jousting more tirelessly than any of the other boys. Weary of his arduous lessons, and of the exalted company of the scholars, clerics and poets who crowded his father's court, Henry would turn to Brandon to lead him out onto the tiltyard or into the fields, where he could serve as an alter ego to Henry's passionate physicality. The prince grew up in the older boy's shadow, watching him, learning from him, always stretching his own abilities against Brandon's. In the end, as Henry approached the threshold of manhood, he began to outdistance Brandon, and eventually overtook him in every sport and skill they shared. But by this time nothing could shatter the bond that had grown between them. They would be friends for life.
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