Now she was a refugee in the Tower again. Would it be the sanctuary next? Or worse? And what of Henry? Was he to follow in the footsteps of Richard of Shrewsbury for one last, terrible time?
* * *
At times, indeed, it was a close-run thing. The Cornish rebels swept across southern England, and not until they had reached Blackheath, within a mile or two of the royal nursery at Eltham, was Henry VII ready to give them battle. But the waiting game had paid off. Splits appeared among the Cornish, and the rebels were crushed on 17 June.
Henry VII entered the Tower in triumph, not chains, later that day and was reunited with his wife and second son.
A month later, Henry VII, together with the whole royal family, including Arthur, moved to Woodstock – partly for recreation in the magnificent park, and partly to hold a watching brief on Warbeck and his reaction to the Cornish revolt.
While they were there they were visited by the Venetian ambassador, Andrea Trevisan. First he had audience with the king, who received him ‘leaning against a tall gilt chair, covered with cloth-of-gold’ and with ‘the prince, his eldest son, by name Arthur’ at his side. Then Trevisan paid a courtesy visit on Elizabeth of York. She was standing ‘at the end of a hall, dressed in cloth-of-gold; on one side of her was the king’s mother, on the other her son the prince’.
And ‘her son the prince’, the Italian original makes clear, was Henry, duke of York.19
In other words, even when they were under the same roof, Arthur and Henry preserved their distinctive upbringings: Arthur was identified with his father, whom he would succeed; Henry, as always, with his mother, whose family ‘name’ he bore as duke of York.
Meanwhile, James IV of Scotland, who was tiring of ‘Richard’, Henry’s rival duke of York, encouraged Warbeck to take advantage of the confusion in England by mounting another invasion. Warbeck sailed with his wife in July, gathered reinforcements from Ireland and landed in Cornwall. About 3,000 followers joined him, and he besieged Exeter.
As in the summer, the king and queen separated. The king marched west to relieve Exeter, which was ably defended by the earl of Devon. Meanwhile, Elizabeth of York, once again accompanied by Henry, found safety under guise of going on pilgrimage to Walsingham in the far north of Norfolk.20
The precaution proved unnecessary. On hearing of the king’s approach, Warbeck abandoned his followers and fled into sanctuary. He was promised his life, and he surrendered. ‘This day came Perkin Warbeck,’ the king’s account book noted triumphantly on 5 October. The Tudors’ throne was secure, and young Henry’s dukedom safe.
One of the king’s first acts was to send a messenger post-haste to his second son to tell him the tidings and bring him £66.13s.4d ‘for certain considerations’.21
Notes - CHAPTER 6: RIVAL DUKES
1. LP Hen. VII I, 392; RP VI, 470.
2. M. K. Jones and M. G. Underwood, The King’s Mother (Cambridge, 1992), 113–14; L. T. Smith, ed., The Itinerary of John Leland, 5 vols (1906–08) V, 31.
3. K. Mertz, The English Noble Household, 1250–1600 (Oxford, 1988), 216–17; TNA: E 404/82 (warrants dated 17 February 1496 and 13 December 1497); E 404/83 (warrant dated 14 December 1498).
4. CPR Henry VII II (1494–1509), 126, 39, 243, 303; warrants cited in n. 41 above; W. Nelson, John Skelton, Laureate (New York, 1939), 74.
5. BL: Cotton MS Vitellius B XII, fo. 109.
6. Condon, ‘Itinerary’; Bentley, Excerpta Historica, 101; RP VI, 479, 511–12.
7. GEC IX, 610–20.
8. GEC IX, 619 n. d and e.
9. RP VI, 481.
10. PPE Elizabeth of York, 17, 99 and see below.
11. GEC IV, 328–30.
12. Collectanea IV, 222; PPE Elizabeth of York, 79, 189, index ‘Cotton’.
13. Ibid., 32, 75, 103.
14. Ibid., 77, 79.
15. Ibid., 88.
16. Anstis, Register I, 236; II, 41; TNA: E 404/81/4 (warrant dated 12 May 1495).
17. Bentley, Excerpta Historica, 103; TNA: E 101/414/8, fo. 34.
18. Great Chronicle, 275–6, 443n.
19. CSP Ven. I, 754; TNA: PRO 31/14/121. I am most grateful to Dr Adrian Ailes for checking the latter on my behalf.
20. Arthurson, Perkin Warbeck, 192.
21. Bentley, Excerpta Historica, 114; TNA: E 36/126, fo. 37r. I am most grateful to Dr Sean Cunningham for checking the latter on my behalf. He also agrees that it is inconceivable that ‘the duke of York’ refers to anyone but Henry.
7
EDUCATION
HENRY’S EDUCATION STARTED EARLY. On 2 November 1495, when the boy was not yet four and half, his father paid £1 ‘for a book bought for my lord of York’.1 Perhaps this was the book from which Henry first learned to read. Perhaps he had just acquired the skill. But who had taught him? Not a tutor, as there is no trace of a formally appointed teacher for some time. Instead, I would guess that Henry learned from his mother. There is also the strong possibility that she taught him to write as well.
Henry’s own handwriting has always been a bit of a mystery. Its bold, square, rather laboured forms are quite unlike the hands of his known teachers, like John Skelton, and intellectual compeers like Thomas More. On the other hand, it is very like his sisters’ writing. His is more ‘masculine’ and better-formed. It is also the hand of someone who wrote regularly, if (as we know) rather painfully and reluctantly.2 His sisters’, in contrast, are typical women’s hands: loose and unpractised, if only because they wrote little. But the resemblance is still striking. It is weaker in the case of Margaret, Henry’s elder sister.3 But it is much closer in the case of the younger sister, Mary.4 Indeed, her hand at first sight would pass for Henry’s own – especially when he was scribbling rough notes or making corrections. The size, rhythm and letter forms are identical; only the pressure is different. Henry’s massive fist leans heavily on the page; Mary’s little hand flutters.
The reason for the resemblance is obviously a common teacher. Henry and Mary did, as we shall see, share a tutor, William Hone. But he joined their service long after they were literate and had formed their hands.5
The common teacher, instead, I would suggest, was someone who really had been with them from the beginning: their mother.
Elizabeth of York had been unusually well educated for a fifteenth-century woman – that is, if we believe the account given in the ballad of Elizabeth’s life known as ‘The Song of the Lady Bessy’. This claims that her father, Edward IV, had appointed a scrivener, ‘the very best in the City’, as tutor to Elizabeth and her sister Cecily, the next eldest. He had taught them ‘both to write and read full soon … /Both English and also French,/And also Spanish, if you had need’.6
Only a few fragments of her handwriting seem to survive. The most substantial is her inscription of ownership in a book of devotion: ‘Thys boke ys myn Elysabeth the kyngys dawghtyr.’ It consists of only eight words and thirty-nine letters. But it is characteristic enough – in weight, in letter forms and in rhythm – to point to her role in inducting her second son and his sisters into literacy.7
Henry’s encounter with formal education came a year or two later, with the appointment of his first tutor, the poet John Skelton.
Skelton’s poetry is extraordinary: helter-skelter rhymes, rhythms and alliterations tumble down the page; brisk and brutal English alternates with polysyllabic Latin and sententious French. One of his principal subjects was himself, and he felt it a worthy one: he must be the only poet to have written, in The Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell, sixteen hundred lines of verse in praise of himself and his own works.8
The title of Skelton’s autobiographical poem comes from the practice in the ancient world of crowning poets with a ‘garland’ or wreath of laurel. The custom was revived in the renaissance, and Skelton himself received the honour on several occasions: from the universities of Oxford in 1488, Louvain in 1492 and Cambridge, where he had studied, in 1493. In 1488 Henry VII also bestowed the title of poet laureate on Skelton and g
ave him a gown of green and white (the Tudor livery colours) inscribed in gold with the name ‘Calliope’, the muse of epic verse.
But among the proudest achievements to be listed in The Garland was the fact that Skelton had been ‘creancer’ or tutor to ‘The Duke of York … Now Henry the viij, Kyng of Englonde’.9
The date of Skelton’s appointment as tutor is unknown. But it was certainly early – say in 1496 or ’97. Years later, in a poem commissioned by Henry VIII himself, Skelton boasts that ‘The honor of England I learnyd to spell’, and that Henry had called him ‘master … In hys lernyng primordiall’. Equally, it is important to note the rather precise limitations of this: Skelton claims to have taught Henry to spell; he does not claim to have taught him to read or write.10 That distinction instead, as we have seen, almost certainly belongs to Henry’s mother.
Skelton’s principal job as Henry’s tutor was different. It was to consolidate Henry’s skills in English and to use them as a foundation for a second, then much more highly regarded, literacy in Latin. Fluency in Latin was an end in itself; it was also the key to most other knowledge, since Latin was the universal language of intellectual expression.
But why appoint a poet, of all people, to do this? Here it is important to understand the real meaning of Skelton’s repeated laureations. Skelton himself – understandably preoccupied with his identity and reputation as a poet – writes as though they were a seamless tribute to his poetic genius. In fact, his laureations at Oxford, Louvain and Cambridge were primarily university degrees, conferred for his conspicuous achievement in the field of Latin and rhetoric. Facility in the composition of Latin verse was the summit of such distinction. But it was only a part of it.
Skelton himself gives only the briefest account of how he tried to share something of this knowledge with Henry.
I yave hym drynke of the sugryd welle
Of Eliconys waters crystallyne,
Aqueintyng hym with the Musys nyne.11
The phrases are, of course, commonplaces. This makes it difficult to be sure what is meant. Probably Skelton would have given Henry a good grounding in the basics of Latin grammar and vocabulary, and introduced him to examples of the principal literary forms of the ancient world.
This, certainly, was the approach adopted by Skelton’s fellow laureate and tutor, the blind French poet Bernard André, whom we have earlier encountered as Henry VII’s official biographer. André had been appointed royal laureate in 1485, three years earlier than Skelton, and was manifestly senior to him. He was also given the senior royal teaching post as well, with his appointment in 1496 as tutor to Henry’s elder brother Arthur. By this time Arthur, who was in his tenth year, had already completed his ‘secondary’ instruction at the hands of a professional schoolmaster, John Rede; now it was André’s job to give the prince’s education a final, ‘tertiary’ polish.12
* * *
He joined the prince’s household in the Welsh Marches, and both teacher and pupil went to it with a will. ‘Before he reached his sixteenth year,’ André writes, ‘[Arthur] had either committed to memory or read with his own eyes and leafed with his own fingers, in grammar: Guarinus, Perottus, Pomponius, Sulpitius, Aulus Gellius and Valla; in poetry: Homer, Vergil, Lucan, Ovid, Silius, Plautus and Terence; in oratory: the Offices, Letters and Paradoxes of Cicero, and Quintilian; in history: Thucidides, Livy, the Commentaries of Caesar, Suetonius, Cornelius Tacitus, Pliny, Valerius Maximus, Sullust and Eusebius.’13
As Skelton was responsible for Henry until the age of eleven or twelve at the most, the boy cannot have got nearly so far under his tuition. But his reading would have been a scaled-down version of his elder brother’s curriculum.
All this, of course, was in Latin. But Skelton had a magpie mind, stuffed with curious learning of all sorts. It may be that he kept it to himself. But, given the irrepressible zest of his poetry, it does not seem very likely. Instead, he seems to have communicated many of his enthusiasms to Henry: his love of obscure astronomical and mathematical lore; his fierce patriotism and fiercer xenophobia; and, above all, something of his own sense of language and skill in English verse composition.
This last would have been regarded as a leisure activity. But as the adult Henry wrote verse and enjoyed Skelton’s poetry, it is fairly safe to imagine the boy and his tutor whiling away the odd hour in writing doggerel. Something of Skelton is also present in Henry’s prose: in its pungency at best and its prolixity at worst. Even his vocabulary sometimes has a Skeltonic ring, and when, in his great speech to parliament in 1545, the king enjoined the clergy to follow his own middle way in religion, inclining neither to the ‘old Mumpsimus’, on the one extreme, nor the ‘new Sumpsimus’ on the other, we seem to hear the old macaronic rhymester himself.14
Skelton, like André and other fashionable teachers of the day, also wrote didactic works and aids to study of various sorts. One that André composed specially for Arthur survives. It is an index to André’s own commentary on St Augustine’s City of God, which is dated 17 June 1500 ‘in bello loco’ – this latter phrase being a latinization of the name of Bewdley near Kidderminster, which was Arthur’s usual residence at this time.15 The Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell lists several of Skelton’s own contributions to the genre:
‘Item New gramer in Englysshe compylyd.’
‘Of Tullys Familiars the translacyoun.’
‘Item the Boke to Speke Well or be Styll.’
‘In primis the Boke of Honorous Astate.’
‘Item Royall Demenaunce Worshyp to Wynne.’
The first was a Latin grammar, though written in English; the second, a translation of one of the standard rhetorical works, Cicero’s Letters; the third was probably an English version of the Tractatus de doctrina dociendi et tacendi, a popular rhetorical treatise written by Albertano of Brescia; while the fourth and fifth sound like variations on the ever popular themes of courtesy books or mirrors for princes, which dealt with the principles of proper etiquette and good conduct.16
None has survived; nor is it possible to say which, if any, were written specifically for Henry. But these questions can be answered for another work, of which Skelton was very proud. This was his Speculum Principis. The Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell describes the circumstances of its composition:
The Duke of Yorkis creancer whan Skelton was,
Now Henry the viij, Kyng of Englonde,
A tratyse he devysid and browght it to pas
Callid Speculum Principis, to bere in his honde,
Therin to rede, and to understande
All the demenour of princely astate.
To be our kyng, of God preordinate.17
The treatise was originally dated ‘at Eltham, 28 August, in the year of Grace, 1501’; what survives is a later copy, made by Skelton for presentation to Henry when the little duke of York had become King of England.18
* * *
Posterity has not shared Skelton’s own regard for the work: even its first modern editor dismisses it as a flimsy piece ‘whose composition … occupied probably not more than a day’.19 Actually, like its author (and like, too, the boy to whom it was addressed), the treatise is the strangest mixture of commonplace leavened with originality and insight.
The beginning is lost; the surviving text plunges straight into the assertion that virtue is more important to a ruler than wealth or nobility. The assertion is supported by a variety of examples drawn from approved authorities. Therefore, ‘if you wish to excel the rest in majesty and are eager for glory’, Skelton tells his little prince, ‘you must exceed everybody in virtue and learning’. So far, so commonplace. The next step in the well-worn argument would have been to explain that the prince must choose similarly virtuous and learned councillors to help him in his task. But here Skelton breaks sharply with convention. For he has a low opinion of councillors. ‘You will have councillors: either learned or ignorant, the ones irresolute, the others weak’ – and all useless. Instead you must trust to yourself alone: you mu
st be as firm as a rock, as solid as a stone. The lessons are driven home with a set of counter-examples of wicked rulers. There follows another sharp touch of reality, in which, as we have seen, Skelton warns Henry (after a perfunctory apology for his bluntness) that the greatness of his family will not protect him against the miserable fates suffered by his ancestors.
Skelton then summarizes his advice in a series of pithy maxims which were intended to be memorable and which Henry probably had to memorize. ‘Above all, loathe gluttony,’ the litany begins. ‘Hear the other side.’ ‘Do not be mean.’ ‘Love poets: athletes are two a penny but patrons of the arts are rare.’ Finally, turn to books and the past for wisdom: ‘Peruse the chronicles; direct yourself to histories; commit them to memory.’20
It is easy to smile at all this, particularly when one of the moral precepts enjoined Henry to ‘choose a wife for yourself, and prize her always and uniquely’. Or when the ten-year-old boy was solemnly warned not to ‘deflower virgins’ or ‘violate widows’.
But the knowingness may be misplaced. Actually, Henry valued marriage, which is why he married so often. Similarly, the injunctions about virgins and widows were not absurd. Instead, they would have lent authority to the rest, since Henry – as Skelton no doubt reminded him – had already sworn to protect them both in the solemn vows he had taken at his creation as a knight of the Bath.
Indeed, in general, Henry would appear to have taken Skelton’s list seriously rather than otherwise. He longed ‘to excel the rest in majesty and [was] eager for glory’. He loathed meanness – at least to begin with. And he found the idea crucial in defining himself against his father: he would pursue (in Skelton’s words) the ‘glory of virtue’ as against his father’s ‘vain pride in riches’. He was aware of the turbulent history of his family, and did his best to knit up old wounds. He reverenced scholars, and when he was con-fronted with the most momentous problem of his reign, the dissolution of his first marriage, he turned to books for guidance and refashioned the royal library as a result. And for him, as for Skelton, history was the final court of appeal, and his revolutionary new title of Supreme Head on earth of the church of England was based on ‘sundry old authentic histories and chronicles’.21
Henry Page 10
