The lore of the fields and of the tilting ground were of course central to Henry's education. No gentleman could afford to be ignorant of the mysteries of the chase. He had to know the nature of the hart and hind and boar that fed by night and lay in cover in the forest during the day, and of the buck and fox and roe that hid themselves at night and came out into the fields in the morning. He had to know too the times and seasons of each beast, the tricks of scent, weather and wind, the arts of hunting with hounds. Hunting was more than sport: it was preparation for war, a toughening of nerve and sinew in conditions not unlike those of the battleground. '*Hunters by their continual travail, painful labor, often watching, and enduring of hunger, of heat, and of cold, are much enabled above others to the service of their Prince and Country in the wars," one treatise declared, ''having their bodies for the most part by reason of their continual exercise in much better health, than other men have, and their minds also by this honest recreation the more fit and the better disposed to all other good exercises."'*
If hunting tempered the body for war, riding was the distinguishing mark of the gentleman warrior. Noblemen were set apart from other men by their ability to ride the giant warhorses bred to carry the weight of a knight in full body armor. Royal sons were expected to excel in horsemanship, for it was understood that no adroitness in diplomacy or at the council board could compensate for a poor showing in the tiltyard or at the wars. "No earthly thing bred such wonder to a Prince," an Italian riding master wrote, **as to be a good horseman. Skill of government was but a Pedanteria in comparison . . ."^
Horsemanship had to be learned young, while the leg muscles were still developing; only then could the child acquire the agility needed to leap onto the horse from either side, or from the back, while he ran free. Once the apprentice rider had learned to mount and dismount without using the stirrup, he tried the same thing in armor, eventually becoming able to grab the mane of a galloping horse and jump into the saddle while burdened with a helmet and breastplate and with heavy cuisses on his legs. Good carriage and a graceful bearing on horseback were essential; with these intact the boy practiced keeping his horse within the lists, running him straight at the ring and not allowing him to swerve aside from an oncoming horse and rider. Management of the lance came next, calling for a coordination of eye and arm needed to avoid running the lance into the post instead of through the ring. Iron-hard courage was needed too, to watch the approach of an opponent and to sustain the violent impact of his lance where it struck the body armor.
All these skills, plus a basic knowledge of horseflesh—of the quality, age and value of a horse, of equine diseases and remedies—were an integral part of what one educational theorist called the "urbanity and nurture of England," the complex of civilizing arts that were the cultural inheritance of the feudal class. The most basic of these arts was civility itself. Politeness, inoffensiveness, courtesy toward superiors and inferiors had to be learned painstakingly through treatises on good behavior. Wipe your nose with a handkerchief—not on your gown, or on the tablecloth— and never look into the handkerchief afterward, these treatises advised. Spit, if you must, on the floor at your feet and tread it well into the rushes. "Belch thou near to no man's face, with a corrupt fumosity," one treatise read. "But turn from such occasion, friend; hate such ventosity." And above all, break wind quietly, and never at the dinner table; only drunkards and idiots and senile old men do that.
Among the civilizing arts was that of personal hygiene. Children were taught to clean their teeth with toothpicks and peeled wands, and to rub them with a linen cloth to whiten them. To keep their breath sweet they were told to sleep with their mouths open, and to wear a nightcap— preferably a red one—with a hole in it "through which the vapor may go out." An effort was made to influence eating habits too, though this must have been a vain effort at Henry VII's bountiful court. The stomach is the body's kitchen, young boys and girls were told; everyone knows that if the kitchen is disorderly the rest of the establishment is in chaos. Moderate food and drink will keep the kitchen in order; overeating was hazardous, "lest the belly-God hale you at length captive into his prison house of gourmandise where you shall be afflicted with as many diseases as you have devoured dishes of sundry sorts."®
But familiarity with knightly skills and pastimes and civilized courtesy were only the externals of gentlemanly conduct. If Henry was to fulfill his princely office he would have to acquire subtler qualities of spirit. He would have to take on the intangible air of authority that inspired fear and respect in others, and with it the trait the writers of his time called affability—the ability to turn a "gentle and familiar visage" on lesser folk
to comfort them and inspire their love. He would have to learn to exercise majesty, that elusive quality "which, like as the sun does his beams, casts on the beholders and hearers a pleasant and terrible reverence."^ The man of majesty carried himself with dignity, spoke deliberately and seriously, without using coarse language, and accommodated his words and gestures to the occasion. He was an exemplar to those around him, a fatherly yet sainted presence, half man, half angel, whose "countenance should be in the stead of a firm and stable law to his inferiors."
Two other qualities were called for. One was magnanimity, a visionary daring beyond ordinary courage which led the nobleman to challenge himself to perform unimaginable feats. Magnanimity was to honor what valor was to arms—an ennobling, high-minded heroism which lifted every bold act into the realm of legend. The other was grace; not the common grace of elegant movement or graciousness, but an air of effortlessness with which the true nobleman performed even the most difficult test of skill. To make the impossible seem easy, and then to dismiss the accomplishment with nonchalance: that was what every wellborn man strove for, though few achieved it. In Castiglione's words, the consummate sign of nobility was "to use in every thing a certain recklessness, to cover art withal, and . . . to do it without pain, and (as it were) not minding it."
These two characteristics, which were to be so prominent in Prince Henry as he grew older, had already begun to stamp themselves on the boy whose air of royalty so impressed Erasmus on that summer afternoon in 1499.
Upon my lap my sovereign sits And sucks upon my breast; Meantime his love maintains my life And gives my sense her rest. Sing lullaby, my little boy. Sing lullaby, mine only joy!
If Prince Henry's tutors instilled in him one set of guidelines for noble conduct, his father supplied a living model for another. Henry Tudor was a remarkable man who had led a remarkable life. Forced into exile at the age of fourteen, he grew to manhood in captivity in Brittany, far from his native Wales and his beloved mother Margaret Beaufort, countess of Richmond. The countess was a great-great-granddaughter of Edward III; by an intricate genealogical calculation this made her son the leading male claimant to the English throne in the Lancastrian line. But the rival Yorkist line held power, in the person of Edward IV, and it was not until Edward's death in 1483—when Henry Tudor was twenty-four—that the Yorkist fortunes began to turn. Richard III became king, and almost immediately Margaret Beaufort, her second husband Lord Stanley, Henry's uncle Jasper Tudor, many Welsh lords and others alienated by Richard's tyranny began to conspire his overthrow.
Their support was essential, but without Henry's own daring their plans would have come to nothing. Borrowing sixty thousand francs from the French king, he assembled an invasion force of two to three thousand Breton and Norman mercenaries and a few hundred English followers. According to one account his soldiers were the worst rabble that could be found—"beggerly Bretons and faint-hearted Frenchmen," Richard III called them—and their arms and equipment too were makeshift. But under the leadership of the tall, slender knight whose blond hair shone in the sun "like burnished gold" and whose blue-gray eyes, "shining and quick," seemed to perceive a hidden destiny, they prevailed over Richard's army at Bosworth Field. To their shouts of "King Harry!" "King Harry!" Richard's crown was put on his head; the throne became his
by right of conquest.
When he became king in 1485 few English men and women had heard of Henry Tudor. Within a few years, though, accounts of his majestic appearance and of the splendors of his court had reached to all corners of his kingdom. Ballads told of his heroic struggle for the crown, and
33
chroniclers noted down his looks and manner for posterity. He was not only fairly tall but well built and strong, one of them wrote, and "of a wonderful beauty and fair complexion." He dressed magnificently. A visitor to the royal hunting lodge at Woodstock on an ordinary day found the king wearing a violet gown lined with cloth of gold; around his neck was a jeweled collar, and in his hat a large diamond and an exquisite pearl. His household accounts show a pronounced taste for finery. Silks and satins, furs of many kinds, a stomacher made of "ostrich skin" were among the entries, and in the years between 1491 and 1505 he spent over £100,000 on jewels. When the king outfitted himself to lead his army into France in the seventh year of his reign, he ordered a matchless suit of armor whose helmet was ornamented with a wealth of pearls and jewels bought from the Lombard merchants.*
More than anything else about him observers noticed the king's lively, arresting eyes. They lit up his animated face, especially when he spoke, and they seemed to take in everything around him. They betrayed a keen intelligence preoccupied by constant vigilance, learned in his years of captivity, in his months of assembling and holding together a disparate invasion force, in his years as king facing rebels and pretenders and threats against his life. In his youth Henry VII had had the gift of attracting men's loyalty; though he never quite lost that gift, by the second decade of his reign it was overshadowed by other qualities. He was shrewd and cautious in government; he had, the chronicler Hall believed, "the ingenious forcast of the subtle serpent." He brooded over each of his decisions, and became intolerant of even the slightest departure from his explicit orders. He remained an enthusiastic hunter, forcing the ambassadors who sought audiences with him during the hunting season to ride at his heels through the thickets of the New Forest, but in the late 1490s he was more often to be found conducting experiments to turn base metals into gold, or enlarging his collection of relics. In particular he treasured his piece of the holy cross, brought from Greece, and his leg bone of Saint George, whose feast he kept each year with the greatest solemnity.
Henry's growing piety was more superstitious than devout, for events in the spring of 1498 had shaken his confidence badly and made him look for occult guidance. Another pretender appeared, this time a Kentish schoolboy impersonating the young earl of Warwick, son of Edward I V's brother George. The true earl was in prison in the Tower, and the pretender hardly had a chance to make his cause known before the king's spies caught him and hanged him. But the incident haunted Henry's mind, and when he heard of a seer who had foretold the deaths of two of his royal predecessors he determined to learn his own fate. He went to the man and asked him bluntly how his death would come. Without answering directly the prophet replied that his life would be in danger throughout the coming year, adding alarming warnings about future conspiracies against the throne. To make matters worse, though the fortuneteller was sworn to secrecy he proved to be indiscreet, and before long rumors of the royal destiny were widespread. Imprisoning the talebearers did little
good. The whisperings continued, and the king saw ill-will everywhere he turned. He spent more and more time hearing masses and carrying out religious devotions. During Lent he was on his knees most of the day, his face anxious and drawn. "He has aged so much," the Spanish ambassador wrote, "that he seems to be twenty years older."
Thus by the time Prince Henry was old enough to begin to take his father's measure the king had begun to decline toward fearful old age. He was in his early forties, but looked much older; his expression had not lost its intensity but his princely good looks had gone long ago. His thinning hair was white, his lined face sallow; the skin hung on his bones, and when he spoke his teeth were "few, poor and blackish." He suffered from gout, and his eyesight was failing. When he tried to write a letter to his mother in his own hand—something he rarely attempted—he squinted and blinked over it for three days. The Englishmen who had once acclaimed him on Bosworth Field now grumbled at his avarice, with those he had specially favored most discontented of all.
Ambassador Ayala summed up the king's predicament. "He would like to govern England in the French fashion"—as absolute sovereign— "but he cannot. ... He likes to be much spoken of, and to be highly appreciated by the whole world. He fails in this because he is not a great man." An immensely capable ruler, as king Henry Tudor had not lived up to his image as a romantic conqueror. His political and diplomatic achievements were considerable, but in terms of his personal majesty his reign was a long anticlimax. Deprived of the adulation he craved, he withdrew to his relics and his alchemy, and spent his spare time poring over his account books and writing out his expenses in a faltering hand.
At King Henry's side through these changes was his wife Elizabeth, the "good queen" who had shared his fortunes ever since he landed in England. True to her motto "Humble and Reverent," she had borne him six children, three of them male, and had given him no cause to regret having taken her as his wife. She decorated his court, she endured the dominating presence of his mother, and she took a seemly interest in his activities, embroidering his Garter mantle and helping to set in place the pearls and diamonds in his jeweled helmet.
Queen Elizabeth not only shared her husband's piety but exceeded it. Wherever she stayed she sent offerings to all the local shrines. While at Woodstock in the summer of 1502 she sent money "to our Lady at Linchelade," and "to the Rood at Northampton," and paid five priests to say five masses before the statue of the virgin at Northampton church.^ In time of illness the number of her donations increased, as they did during the major observances of the Christian calendar. During one Lenten season she sent two men on long pilgrimages on her behalf, one to visit the Rood of Grace, the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury, and fifteen other churches in Kent, and the other to the chapel of St. George at Windsor, "to the holy cross there," to Our Lady of Eton and the "Child of Grace" at Reading, and to view the Holy Blood of Hales—some sixteen shrines in all.^
Her devout piety was not the least of Elizabeth's valuable qualities,
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36 GREAT HARRY
but more valuable to her husband was her lineage. Though jealous of the claims of his own bloodline Henry Tudor owed much of his relative security as king to his union with a Yorkist princess. Elizabeth was Edward IV's eldest daughter; the children she bore Henry were thus both children and grandchildren of kings, and shared equally the Lancastrian and Yorkist inheritance. The joining of the two rival houses had been the work of Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth's mother, Elizabeth Woodville. In the dark months when Richard III ruled and rumor had it that he meant to marry the beautiful young Elizabeth of York himself, the two mothers helped the exiled Henry Tudor and the imprisoned Elizabeth—then a refugee from court living in sanctuary with her mother and sisters—to exchange messages. Before he left France Henry had pledged himself to Elizabeth, and she had sworn to marry this adventurer she had never met. The marriage did not take place, though, until after Henry's coronation, and Elizabeth's own coronation was postponed until after the birth of her first child. Henry Tudor would not have any man say he owed his throne to his wife.
As a young woman Queen Elizabeth was seen as a princess out of legend. She was "the illustrious maid of York, most beautiful in form, whose matchless face, adorned with most enchanting sweetness shines," the girl celebrated in The Song of the Lady Bessy as a heroic partner in Henry Tudor's conquest. As queen she seems to have been a gentle and beloved woman, presiding competently in her Council chamber, supervising the auditor of her lands and those who looked after her "matters and businesses," and providing for her several dozen ladies and gentlewomen. Erasmus found her brilliant and witty, but no evidence of her mental accompli
shments remains. Richmond Palace, the great house Henry VII built on the ruins of Sheen, was her favored residence. There she joined in the conventional amusements of the court, hunting with her greyhounds, gambling at cards, enjoying the music of her three minstrels and the pranks and jests of her fool William.
If the queen left a somewhat indistinct impression in the records of her age her absorbing preoccupation with family ties may have been to blame. It was said she never appeared in public without one of her sisters at her side, and she gave them all annuities and watched over the welfare of their children as carefully as if they had been her own. She included within the circle of her immediate family her aunt Elizabeth and her nephews Edmund and Richard de la Pole, her cousin Margaret, sister of the imprisoned eari of Warwick, and. of course, her mother. Elizabeth Woodville. The latter bond, though natural enough, was a sensitive one. for the queen dowager had had the indiscretion to involve herself with the pretender Lambert Simnel, and the king had punished her by taking away her lands and forcing her into semi-imprisonment among the nuns of Bermondsey Abbey.
The dominating influence of Prince Henry's childhood, however, was not his mother or his maternal grandmother but Margaret Beaufort. who—the king excepted—was without question the most commanding personality in the royal family. The "Venerable Margaret" had lived
through more reigns, with more opportunity to affect their outcome, than any other individual at her son's court. She was, though no one spoke it, rightful queen of England, but she had long since abandoned any thought of asserting her claim. England had not had a queen since the twelfth century, and Margaret's shrewd political sense told her that she could never have seized the throne herself, while her son could. Besides, while Henry ruled she was easily the wealthiest and most powerful woman in the country, with independent control over her extensive lands as "a sole person, not wife nor covert of any husband." In all but name she was queen dowager; she was called "My lady the king's mother," but she was allowed to sign her documents with the regal "Margaret R."
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