by John Guy
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.
FIGURE 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 th
ings’, 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.’53
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.
Within two years she would be able to translate the prayer of St Thomas Aquinas from Latin into English well enough to win plaudits from Lord Morley, a noted scholar and translator. ‘I do well remember’, he later wrote in the front of a New Year’s gift to her, ‘that scant you were come to twelve years of age, but that you were so ripe in the Latin tongue … that your grace not only could perfectly read, write and construe Latin, but furthermore translate any hard thing of the Latin in to our English tongue.’55
To improve Mary’s French conversation, Wolsey assigned her an experienced French tutor, the Fleming Giles Duwes. A lutenist and a fluent French speaker who doubled as a royal librarian, Duwes had previously been Prince Arthur’s ‘schoolmaster for the French tongue’ and Henry’s own lute teacher. Sent by Wolsey to join the princess at Ludlow as a gentleman-waiter along with his wife, Duwes possessed a renowned collection of music books and instruments, including clavichords, virginals and regals (small portable organs), all of which Mary was allowed to play.56
As the author of a French grammar that would be published in 1533, An Introductory for to Learn, to Read, to Pronounce and to Speak French Truly, a work most valuable for its advice on pronunciation and glossary of useful words, Duwes set out the manner ‘by the which I have so taught and do teach daily’. If this was indeed how Mary learned to speak French, she would have begun by practising how vowels should be pronounced, then (as in Latin) how to distinguish and use nouns, pronouns, adverbs and participles, and finally how to use and conjugate verbs.
Once the basics were mastered, Duwes expected his pupils to begin to converse, starting by learning model texts by heart. In a number of these, Mary would engage in polite conversation with fictive messengers sent by her father or another foreign prince, who brought a gift or news for her. Other set texts included mock ‘letters’ addressed to her by her officials at Ludlow, along with poems and sample ‘conversations’ on topics with which she was generally familiar, such as ‘the ceremonies of the mass’. Finally, Mary was to speak her lines from the scripts of model ‘dialogues’ after learning them by heart, usually on topics chosen from moral philosophy.57
By April 1527, the 16-year-old Mary had been recalled from Ludlow to Greenwich, where she was visited by French ambassadors as a central plank of one of Henry and Wolsey’s many plans during these years to negotiate another pan-European peace accord. Charles V had released Francis I from captivity in Madrid, but part of the price was that the French king should marry Eleanor, the Dowager Queen of Portugal, Charles’s sister.58 To counter the threat of a Franco-imperial dynastic alliance, Wolsey boldly proposed that Mary should marry Francis instead. Only if Charles agreed to bind himself to a fresh Treaty of Universal Peace, he argued, should Henry stand by idle if Francis married Eleanor, and if such a marriage took place, then to ensure that England was not isolated from the new European order, Mary should marry the French Dauphin and Fitzroy be betrothed to Eleanor’s daughter, the Infanta Maria of Portugal.59
On St George’s Day (23 April), according to an account of the visit now in Paris, Henry led the French ambassadors into the great hall at the palace, where Katherine and Mary were waiting to greet them. The king then asked them to speak to Mary in French, Latin and Italian, ‘in all which languages she answered them’. She then played proficiently on the virginals.60
Just how skilled Mary really was in Italian is open to doubt.61 Other visitors believed she had little more than a smattering, picked up from her mother’s servants. A similar uncertainty surrounds her mastery of Spanish, a language she is known to have spoken, but in which she was never completely fluent, despite learning the basics from her mother. And, unlike in Fitzroy’s case, Henry never provided his daughter with a Greek teacher.62
After weeks of diplomatic haggling, a treaty with France was finally agreed by which Mary would marry either Francis himself or (more likely) his second son, Henry, Duke of Orléans, then a child of 7.63 But the treaty still had to be ratified, and by the time it was, the princess’s world had started to implode. Long before the time of the French ambassadors’ visit, Henry and Katherine were mainly living apart. Soon after Mary had departed with her entourage for Ludlow in 1525, her mother was complaining to her, ‘I am in that case that the long absence of the king and you troubleth me.’64
Worse was to come. Soon Henry would completely dismiss Fitzroy from his thoughts, something which in other circumstances would have caused Katherine’s heart to rejoice. No longer would her fears that her husband’s illegitimate son could oust her daughter from her rightful place in the succession appear justified.
But the reason devastated her. Henry had concluded that his marriage to Katherine was not simply in trouble; he decided that it was ‘incestuous’ and invalid. That explains why Fitzroy was so suddenly dropped from his agenda. Bizarre as it may sound to modern ears, by canon law an illegitimate child could not inherit from a parent living with a wife or husband in an incestuous marriage. In a few special cases, the children of princes were exceptions, but in no circumstances could an exception apply if the father’s marriage was incestuous—even though the child was by his mistress—because the father was an ‘unnatural’ person living in sin in defiance of God.65
A crisis in Katherine’s relationship with Henry was about to begin, and all his children would be casualties.
CHAPTER 4
Sons and Lovers
HENRY fell in love with Anne Boleyn during 1526. As with Elizabeth Blount, he finished his affair with Mary Carey as soon as he knew she was pregnant. Since Mary’s son was born on 4 March 1526, this must have been by the late summer of 1525, when Henry travelled around the south-east for several months with a few chosen intimates, restlessly moving between his houses and hunting lodges, rarely staying at any of them for more than a week.1 The child was christened Henry, and inevitably Katherine’s supporters darkly insinuated that he was the king’s and not William Carey’s, but no proof exists.2 Henry never acknowledged the boy, and if the younger Carey knew he had royal blood in his veins, he took the secret to the grave.
The king’s new love’s looks were surprisingly unconventional. As the Venetian ambassador observed, ‘Madame Anne is not one of the handsomest women in the world; she is of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact has nothing but the English king’s great appetite, and her eyes, which are black and beautiful.’3 A natural brunette with an unremarkable figure, she lacked the pale, translucent beauty and blonde hair then in vogue. One of her protégés, when asked to compare her to Elizabeth Blount, said that Anne was ‘very eloquent and gracious, and reasonably good looking’, but Blount was prettier.4
What Anne had in spade
s was French chic together with wit, vivacity, intelligence and a quick tongue—all combined with a sophistication gained through her nine years of training at the Court of Margaret of Burgundy, Charles V’s aunt, and afterwards in France as a gentlewoman attending first on Henry’s younger sister and then Queen Claude, wife of Francis I.
Not that Anne had lacked suitors since her return from Paris in 1521 to become one of Katherine’s gentlewomen. The poet Thomas Wyatt—married at 15 on his father’s decree to a woman he detested—started wooing her within the accepted limits of courtly love, only to find himself emotionally smitten. Another suitor, Henry Percy, heir to the vast northern earldom of Northumberland, was a more realistic proposition. He first encountered Anne around 1522 when, as one of Wolsey’s servants, he resorted ‘for his pastime unto the queen’s chamber and there would fall in dalliance among the queen’s maidens’. Soon he found himself ‘more conversant with Mistress Anne Boleyn than with any other’ and the couple considered themselves betrothed.5
Percy’s father, however, had very different plans. His son, he decided, would marry Mary Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury’s daughter, a far better catch than Anne. But if Wolsey’s gentleman-usher and earliest biographer, George Cavendish, is to be believed, it was the cardinal who finally ended the betrothal, acting on Henry’s orders—he ‘practised nothing in the matter, but it was the king’s only device’.6 And the anecdote rings true, because Percy reluctantly married Mary Talbot somewhere between the summer of 1525 and September 1526, so the chronology fits.7
