Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII

by Robert Hutchinson

  In the seventeenth century it was claimed, without any evidence, that the king intended Henry to be a future Archbishop of Canterbury – a prince of the church, rather than of the realm.6 If this is true, it would be characteristic of the king’s scheming and cunning persona. Perhaps Henry VII believed his dynasty should rule England both regally and ecclesiastically, with Tudor hands safely gripping the two main levers of power controlling his subjects’ faith, lives and finances, through tithes and taxation. Not for him a repetition of the catastrophic tensions between church and state suffered by Henry II with Thomas Becket in the twelfth century. One cannot help wondering what would have happened to the Reformation in England if Prince Henry had been in charge of Mother Church, given his devotion to the old liturgies in his later years.

  Around 1496, the king appointed his mother’s protégé John Skelton as tutor to Henry. He had been created Poet Laureate nine years before, entitled to wear the green and white Tudor livery, and he was now to teach his young charge English grammar and Latin – the international language of diplomacy, religion and scholarship – and instruct him in the standard classical works. He was a satirist, his views making him something of a loose cannon, and very fond of extolling his own skills and virtues.

  One of the histories that Skelton is known to have used in teaching Henry was a fifteenth-century manuscript chronicle of France, the Chronique de Rains, now in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. 7 This was copiously annotated by the tutor – a bad habit acquired by his pupil who later demonstrated a proclivity for writing marginalia in his own books and paperwork.

  Henry had a hard act to follow in his elder brother. His tutor, the blind poet Bernard André, boasted that before he had reached the age of sixteen, Arthur ‘had either committed to memory or read with his own eyes and leafed with his own fingers’ twenty-four books by the ancient Greek and Roman authors, including the favourites of the fashionable Italian humanist scholars: Guarino of Verona, Lorenzo Valla and Cicero.8 Lady Margaret Beaufort gave her elder grandson a copy of Cicero’s De Officiis, printed on vellum at Mainz in Germany in 1465, for his private edification. This pinnacle of moral philosophy was personalised by the insertion of colourful Tudor heraldic badges, and on one folio there is a tiny illuminated initial containing a picture of Arthur, standing rather sheepishly in his red and ermine robes in front of his tutor who is seated behind his desk, surrounded by books.9 The prince does not look too happy – possibly he has stumbled over the words of his set recitation.

  Perhaps in reaction to André’s bragging, Skelton was far from reticent about his own success in schooling Henry: one of his later poems boasted of his teaching skills with the little duke – notably with his spelling:

  The honour of England I learned to spell

  In dignity role that doth excel …

  I gave him drink of the sugared well

  Of Helicon’s10 waters crystalline

  Acquainting him with the Muses nine.

  It comes … well [for] me to remorde [recall]

  That creausner [tutor] was [I] to thy sovereign lord.

  It pleases that [a] noble prince royal

  Me as his master for to call

  In his learning primordial.11

  In August 1501 Skelton wrote a handy guide to proper princely behaviour for his pupil, entitled Speculum Principis (‘A First Mirror’)12 which, to modern eyes, reads like a code of morality written for the estimable Boy Scout movement.

  It bulges with earnest, if not trite, maxims: ‘Do not deflower virgins; do not violate widows’ (reflecting the oath Henry took as a Knight of the Bath); ‘Avoid drunkenness’; ‘Above all, loathe gluttony’ (was Henry already prone to greediness?). Not much camera-fodder here for far future Hollywood scriptwriters!

  Then there are the principles of conduct more pertinent to royal life: ‘If you want to excel all others in majesty and find glory you should lead in learning and virtue.’ Henry was also urged not to rely wholeheartedly on his councillors in adulthood – they will be ‘either learned or ignorant, either indecisive or weak’. True wisdom came only from books and the careful study of the past: ‘Peruse the chroniclers – seek out histories and commit them to memory.’

  Finally, there was also an injunction that was to echo hollowly down the sad and sterile years of Henry VIII’s reign: ‘Choose a wife for yourself; prize her always and uniquely.’

  All these – and more – the young prince probably learnt by rote, repeating them ad nauseam until Skelton believed they had been committed fully to his heart and mind. How much influence they had in Henry’s later years is more doubtful, judging by his many lapses from kingly probity.

  Then there was the French language, taught by the Fleming Giles D’Ewes (later royal librarian), who also taught Henry how to play the lute.13 Another musical teacher was ‘Guillam’, an expert in the playing of wind instruments such as the trombone-like ‘sackbut’ and the shawm flute, with its six finger keys and one for the thumb.

  A contemporary description of the royal children as they gathered in Edward IV’s great hall at Eltham Palace has come down to us. The compelling word picture was written by the Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus, who accompanied his former pupil William Blount, Fourth Baron Mountjoy, to England in the summer of 1499. Mountjoy had already been appointed a companion to Henry and had shared in his studies of Latin and history. He and Erasmus were staying at Sayes Court, near Greenwich, and one day the Dutchman’s new-found friend, twenty-one-year-old Thomas More (whom he called mellitissime Thoma, ‘sweetest Thomas’), visited them. The trainee lawyer14 took the scholar ‘for a walk as far as the next village [Eltham], where all the king’s children (except Prince Arthur) were being educated’. Years later, Erasmus recalled:

  When we came into the hall, the attendants not only of the palace but also of Mountjoy’s household were assembled.

  In the midst stood Prince Henry, then nine years old [sic] and having something of royalty in his demeanour, in which there was a certain dignity combined with singular courtesy.

  On his right was Margaret, about eleven years of age … and on his left played Mary, a child of four.

  Edmund was an infant in arms.

  More walked across to the group, bowed low to Henry and presented him with some of his writings. This was the small beginning of a long and tumultuous friendship between prince and pious lawyer – More was already wearing a hair shirt next to his skin to mortify his flesh – that was to end tragically on the Tower Hill scaffold thirty-six years later.

  Erasmus had brought nothing with him to offer the prince and was angry with More for not warning him that he would meet the royal children, ‘especially as the boy sent me a little note while we were at dinner, to challenge something from my pen’.15

  Afflicted by a stultifying attack of writer’s block, Erasmus took three days to cobble together a suitable poem in Latin to send in recompense. The ten-page, rather tedious Prosopopeia Britanniæ (in which Britannia heaps praises upon her princes as well as immodestly on herself) bears the telling stigmata of its writer’s frustration and haste.16 His covering letter, headed ‘Erasmus to the most illustrious prince, Duke Henry’, emphasises the lasting importance of poetry and learning and hints at Henry’s inspiring future:

  We have for the present dedicated these verses, like a gift of playthings, to your childhood and shall be ready with more abundant offerings, when your virtues, growing with your age, shall supply more abundant material for poetry.

  I would add my exhortation to that end, were it not that you are of your own accord, as they say, underway with all sails set and have with you Skelton, that incomparable light and ornament of British Letters, who can not only kindle your studies, but bring them to a happy conclusion.

  Erasmus ends: ‘Farewell and may Good Letters be illustrated by your splendour, protected by your authority and fostered by your liberality.’17

  Henry VII may have been a distant, rarely seen father, but in
his second son’s early years, he kept him well clothed in the manner of a prince. John Flight was paid 4s 4d for a tippet of sarsenet (thin, lightweight silk) for Henry in April 1498.18 It was followed by a green velvet riding gown lined with black satin and a crimson doublet. The new outfit came with knee-high tawny buskin boots.19 A set of formal robes was made for Henry that November consisting of a long crimson velvet gown splendidly decorated with 2,800 ermine tails, together with another gown of black velvet, lined with sable fur. This grand ensemble was completed by crimson velvet bonnets and scarlet petticoats. The same month he received four pairs of knitted hose and two pairs of long hose to keep his chubby legs warm during the long winter nights.20

  So who was Henry VII – many of whose character traits were inherited by his second son? The king’s sombre portraits depict a dignified, haughty and driven man with a sallow complexion and aquiline features (Plate 1). Behind the sparkling brilliance of his blue eyes are hints of a certain craftiness, if not slyness, in his personality.21

  The Italian-born contemporary chronicler Polydore Vergil described Henry VII as slender in body

  but well built and strong, his height above the average.

  His face was cheerful especially when speaking. His mind was brave and resolute and never, even at moments of the greatest danger, deserted him. He had a most pertinacious memory.

  In government he was shrewd and prudent so that no one dared to get the better of him through deceit or guile.

  Those of his subjects who were indebted to him and did not pay him due honour or were generous only with promises, he treated with harsh severity.22

  Given his turbulent life and the repeated threats to his crown, it is not surprising that he was a self-centred king who kept his distance from those around him – indeed, a Milanese ambassador described Henry VII as someone who ‘has no need of no one, while everyone needs him … his majesty can stand like one at the top of a tower looking on at what is passing in the plain’.23

  The security of his precarious crown must have consumed his thoughts almost daily throughout his reign. After the joy of the birth of his third son, Edmund, Duke of Somerset, in February 1499, the child’s death on 19 June the following year must have been a crushing blow.24 But he still had two sons living and had good cause to hope that at least one would live to succeed him.

  The Spanish ambassador Don Pedro de Ayala reported that Henry was disliked by his subjects ‘but the queen is beloved because she is powerless. The king looks old for his years but is young for the sorrowful life he has led …’ Henry was also ‘much influenced by his mother [Lady Margaret Beaufort] and his followers in affairs of personal interest and in others. The queen … does not like it.’

  Then there is the issue of his legendary and notorious meanness and love of money. The envoy added:

  The King of England is less rich than generally said. He likes to be thought very rich because such a belief is advantageous to him in many respects. His revenues are considerable … [with] great impoverishment of the people by the great taxes laid on them. The king himself said to me that it is his intention to keep his subjects low, because riches would only make them haughty …

  He spends all the time he is not in public, or in his council, in writing the accounts of his expenses with his own hand.25

  He also handled the cash himself. In his own handwriting, he itemised the moneys delivered in one day to John Heron, the treasurer of his chamber: ‘sov[er]eigns of gold … diverse coins of gold … old weighty crowns … good crowns … [Venetian] ducats’ and ‘Spanish gold’, all amounting to several thousands of pounds.26

  A year later, de Ayala sneered that if ‘gold coin once enters his strong boxes, it never comes out again. He always pays in depreciated coin … All his servants are like him; they possess quite a wonderful dexterity in getting other people’s money.’27 On just one day – 5 February 1509 – the king paid eleven individuals a total of £5,000 all in pennies, amounting to 1.2 million coins weighing more than 1,800 lbs (837 kg), which posed an immense and laborious task in counting it out.28 Did he miserly begrudge the payment of every coin?

  Aside from regular taxation, Henry VII collected money through a pernicious system of written legal obligations and recognisances imposed on many subjects, both high- and low-born, to guarantee their absolute allegiance to the crown. These were administered by two notorious royal servants, the lawyers Sir Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley. If any suspicion surrounded the victims, no matter how flimsy the evidence, they were forced to pay substantial cash penalties to the crown or face imprisonment. Many suffered both.

  This insidious process of wealth generation accelerated after 1502 to the extent that of the sixty-two families in the English peerage that survived the butchery of the Wars of the Roses, forty-seven were at the king’s mercy, either by living under attainder29 or forfeiting substantial sums to the crown to guarantee their good behaviour. Only fifteen noble families were entirely free of this regal financial coercion.30

  Some bonds or recognisances were imposed on what seem to us today to be absurdly slim pretexts. A one-time royal favourite, George Neville, Third Baron Abergavenny,31 was liable for the remainder of his life under a bond for £5,000 should he ever enter the counties of Kent, Sussex, Hampshire or Surrey without the king’s permission. This was on top of existing recognisances for £100,000 that he faced for unlawfully maintaining retainers and to assure his loyalty to the Tudor crown. Richard Grey of Ruthven, Earl of Kent from 1505,32 had a £10,000 bond imposed on him to make no sale, lease or grant of any land, offices or annuities without the king’s explicit consent. He also had to be seen in the king’s house at least once a day and could not leave court without a royal licence, except for an agreed eight days away every three months.

  This was all easy money: Dudley alone brought in nearly £219,500 to the royal coffers from sureties guaranteeing these bonds in the period 1504 – 8 – worth more than £113 million at today’s prices. Henry VII knew full well how to not only keep his nobility submissive, but also how to squeeze the last silver groat33 out of their depleted purses and those of his other hapless, complaining subjects.

  Vergil alleged that:

  [Henry] began to treat his people with more harshness and severity than had been his custom, in order … to ensure they remained more thoroughly and entirely in obedience to him.

  The people themselves had another explanation … for they considered they were suffering not on account of their own sins but on account of the greed of their monarch …

  [Henry] gradually laid aside all moderation and sank into a state of avarice.

  Empson and Dudley realised ‘they had been given the job by the king not so much to administer justice as to strip the population of its wealth without respite, and by every means fair or foul, vied with each other in extorting money’. Moreover, Vergil added, ‘they devised many fresh ways of satisfying their king’s avarice while they were eagerly serving as the ministers of their own private fortunes.’34

  Historians have debated long and hard over whether Henry VII was truly guilty of charges of rapacity and avarice,35 but documentary evidence suggests strongly that the king was responsible personally for many of the decisions to extort money and Dudley, years later, acknowledged that the king’s chief aim was ‘to have many persons in his danger at his pleasure’.36 This was state blackmail, pure and simple.

  At Henry’s death, most of his abundant treasure was held ‘in secret places under his own key and keeping’ at his new riverside palace at Richmond, Surrey.37 Potential revenue from recognisances during the king’s reign has been estimated at £954,790 – or £495 million at 2011 prices – which was over and above the £142,000 the royal coffers received annually in later years from more traditional sources of income under the wise guidance of the Lord Treasurer of England, Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey.38 This grossly swollen exchequer was an extraordinarily rich legacy to Henry’s son and heir, who all too diligently learnt at his father
’s knee the delights of sequestering cash and property from those who fell victim to kingly power.

  Much of the king’s revenues was consumed by an ambitious building programme begun in the 1490s, which was designed to emphasise shamelessly the prestige of the new Tudor dynasty. A disastrous fire on 21 December 1497 at the old palace at Sheen destroyed a ‘great substance of richness, as well as jewels and other things’39 along with most of the wooden buildings. The blaze

  about nine of the clock began suddenly … within the king’s lodging and so continued till midnight. By violence whereof … [a] great part of the old building was burnt and much more harm done upon costrings [curtains] and hanging beds of cloth of gold and silk and much other rich apparel with plate and manifold jewels belonging to such a noble court.

  How well loving thereof be to God [that] no living creature was there perished.40

  Divine intervention had indeed truly shielded and protected the Tudor family. They had gathered at Sheen for the Christmas festivities but fortunately the king, his wife and mother, together with ‘my lord of York [and] my lady Margaret’ all escaped from the fire unhurt. What excitement for the young Henry: hustled away from his warm bed into the cold darkness of the night, amid the crackling flames and flying sparks piercing the night sky and the panicked shouts and confusion of the royal household. His father may have feared the fire was the prologue to another attempted coup d’état; his son probably saw it as an adventure after the well-ordered serenity of his nursery at Eltham Palace.