In other areas, the record is more mixed: Henry’s attitude to counsel, for example, swung between the conventional respect for advice and Skelton’s heretical contempt for it. Finally, Skelton notched up one total failure. ‘Above all, loathe gluttony,’ the boy was told. Skelton probably put the injunction at the head of his list because it was already clear that Henry was that way inclined. If so, he wasted his breath. Even when Henry was young he was well-fleshed, and when he was old he was gross.
Still, if most teachers achieved Skelton’s overall success rate, they would be happy. On the other hand, we must not exaggerate his influence. Skelton’s teachings may have stuck, but – as we shall see – there is little evidence that Henry had much regard for his teacher or looked back on him with much gratitude.
Skelton’s appointment should have been a climactic moment for Henry – and not only because of the extraordinary personality of his teacher. Both contemporary theory and normal practice divided the upbringing and education of a Tudor boy of the upper classes into two: babyhood and infancy were in the hands of women; boyhood and youth were the responsibility of men.22
Skelton’s appointment should have signalled the moment that Henry crossed this threshold.
Those of a psychological bent have had a field day on this subject. They have blamed Henry’s early sequestration from female company for the adult Henry VIII’s fractured and abusive relationships with women, for his combination of prurience and sexual inhibition, even for the pathological fear of incest which some have attributed to him.
The only problem is that Henry was not sequestered from the company of women at the age of six or seven any more than he had been at birth. Instead, by the standards of the day he continued both to have his cake and eat it: his male teacher, Skelton, was appointed; at the same time he continued to be brought up with his sisters in the nursery at Eltham.
The resulting ménage was seen and described by no less an observer than Desiderius Erasmus, the great Dutch humanist, on his first visit to England in the autumn of 1499. Erasmus was staying at Sayes Court near Greenwich, the country house of his host and former pupil Lord Mount-joy, who was then acting as Henry’s mentor or socius studiorum (‘companion of studies’). Thomas More, Erasmus’s new friend, came to see him, and the two walked or rode over to nearby Eltham. ‘For there,’ Erasmus continues his account,
all the royal children were being educated, Arthur alone excepted, the eldest son. When we came to the hall, all the retinue was assembled; not only that of the palace but Mountjoy’s as well. In the midst stood Henry, aged nine, already with a certain royal demeanour; I mean a dignity of mind combined with a remarkable courtesy. On his right was Margaret, about eleven years old, who afterwards married James, King of Scots. On the left Mary was playing, a child of four. Edmund was an infant in arms.23
There the royal children stand, frozen by the magic of Erasmus’s pen in a timeless tableau vivant, with Henry at its centre. But then the group moves. Once more Henry is the focus. Thomas More stepped forward and presented him with a piece of writing he had brought. Erasmus, who had arrived empty-handed, was covered in embarrassment. And the embarrassment was deepened when, during dinner, to which the visitors were invited to stay, Henry took the initiative again and sent Erasmus a note ‘to challenge something from my pen’.
This was a request which could not be refused. But it took Erasmus three days – fighting against both time and a total lack of inspiration – to knock together something suitable. What is probably the actual presentation copy survives. It is a little manuscript of ten leaves: illuminated, to make it a fitting gift for Henry; rather hastily and carelessly written because of the pressure of time, and (for the same reason) made up largely of reused materials, which Erasmus made a habit of carrying with him on his travels for just such an eventuality as this.
To the eleven already written poems, Erasmus added a new one, in praise of Henry’s tutor John Skelton, and a prose letter of dedication to Henry himself. He also produced, separately, a more substantial ode, entitled Prosopopoeia Britanniae maioris, in which Britain sings her own praises and those of Henry VII and his children.24
In the collection, Skelton, who had taken Erasmus by surprise by lauding him to the skies as a poet (which happened to be one of the few literary genre of which Erasmus was not a master), figures almost as much as Henry. Thanks to his patroness, the muse Calliope, he is the glory of English letters:
The debt that ancient Greece
To Homer owed, to Vergil Mantua,
That debt to Skelton owes Britannia,
For he from Latium all the muses led
And taught them to speak English words instead
Of Latin; and with Skelton England tries
With Roman poets to contend the prize.25
Erasmus must have been well briefed, as he read no English.
Erasmus may have been an indifferent poet, but he was a master letter-writer. And it is the letter of dedication which speaks most directly to Henry (and to us). Erasmus turns the slightness of his gift to advantage. Why give gold?, he asks. All princes are rich, but few are famous. And it is the work of poets and scholars – not wealth or statues or paintings or genealogies – which confers immortality. Henry, Erasmus continues, adopting a tone that must have seemed deliciously confiding to the boy, can understand this, because he, unlike most modern princes, is appreciative of literature and is determined to pattern his life on ancient rather than modern models.26
That was indeed one reading of Henry’s behaviour. And, making the necessary allowances for Erasmus’s flattery, it was true enough. Henry’s book-learning was precocious, and he was to remain unusually bookish as a king. And – whatever else he might fail to absorb from the renaissance – fame and an appetite for greatness were and always remained his goal and spur.
But it was probably the other observer who got the full measure of the scene. Thomas More’s favourite image of politics was as a play. And here we see Henry, barely in his ninth year, able to take an encounter and transmute it into a theatrical performance. He turned the dais of his grandfather, Edward IV’s hall (on which he was surely standing) into a stage, the throng of attendants into the extras and his sisters and younger brother into the supporting cast. His visitors were at once fellow-actors in the rituals of gift-exchange and an appreciative audience for the display of both his charm and his talents. The resulting applause Henry knew was his by right; he also knew that his rightful place in the world (second son though he might be) was first. He was a star.
Erasmus’s letter is a portrait of Henry in words, and a remarkably shrewd and vivid one at that. But there is also a real portrait, thought to be of Henry as a boy, which belongs to more or less the same date.
It is a painted and gilded terracotta bust in the royal collection, which shows a child of eight or nine.27 This would date it to 1499 or 1500, and make it exactly contemporary with Erasmus’s visit. It is also when Guido Mazzoni, to whom the work is attributed, is known to have been in northern Europe at the court of France. The boy is finely dressed. His doublet is represented by a layer of gilding over-painted with green. This probably means that the original was of green cloth-of-gold. It was edged and trimmed with gold braid and lined with a red silk fabric. The lining shows on the revers at the high-collared neck and in the slashings at the shoulders. Here the lining is further decorated with gold. The doublet can be fastened at the left shoulder with a lace. But the lace hangs untied (was Mrs Denton off-duty that morning?). Underneath, a fine shirt is visible, gathered at the neck and trimmed with a neck-band, also of gold. For some reason the child has had his head shaved (had Henry caught lice from one of the stable lads?), and his scalp is protected by a skullcap of gold lace. The complexion is fair, the cheeks bulge with rude health, the lips are finely formed and the eyes blue-grey. They are also rather wide apart, as Henry’s were.
And he is laughing. But it is not a simple childish laugh. The eyes are turned away, and despite t
he dimpled cheeks there is something knowing, adult, even a little disturbing, about his humour. It is, we can guess, how Henry looked when he pressed the reluctant Erasmus for his tribute of laboriously written verse.
A laughing child is not the first image that leaps to mind of the boyhood of Henry VIII. But then, the whole story of his early years turns out to be rather unexpected. The fact that he was brought up away from Arthur means that he was never overshadowed by his elder brother. And the presence of his sisters and their women helped to civilize him and give him poise and confidence.
It was in part a case of nurture working with nature – as a glance at the portrait bust shows. It also presents a sharp contrast to Arthur himself. As Arthur’s one realistic portrait suggests, he took after the opposite side of the family to the ‘Yorkist’ Henry, and closely resembled his paternal grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. He had the same hooked nose and deep-sunk, hooded eyes, with, even as a youth, heavy bags under them.28 He also inherited her slim build, though like his father he was rather tall for the times. And, above all, he had the cold Beaufort temperament as well.
So heredity alone would have made the brothers very different. The difference was intensified by Arthur’s driven, solitary childhood. The result produced a model prince. But, like many models, one somewhat lacking in life. Instead, Arthur displayed the exaggerated sense of responsibility of the eldest child. His public manner was stiff, though formally gracious. He was intellectually precocious.29 But women, as we shall see, were a bit of a closed book. King Arthur would have been respected, perhaps feared, but not, one suspects, loved.
Henry, on the other hand, always aroused strong feelings: first of love and adulation; then, subsequently, of hate and terror. It was a matter of character. But it was also a question of upbringing. The years of childhood idyll at Eltham suggest that being a second son had its advantages – at least when you were young.
Notes - CHAPTER 7: EDUCATION
1. Bentley, Excerpta Historica, 105.
2. A characteristic specimen is reproduced in J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (1968), illustration 4. The letter, to Wolsey, begins: ‘Because writing to me is somewhat tedious and painful’.
3. For a specimen of Margaret’s hand, see Queens of Scotland I, 105. It is as big and bold as Henry’s and most of the letter forms are the same. But the rhythm is different.
4. For Mary’s hand, see W. C. Richardson, Mary Tudor: the White Queen (1970), illustration 23.
5. See below, p. 178.
6. J. O. Halliwell, ed., The Most Pleasant Song of the Lady Bessy, Percy Society 69 (1847), 10.
7. BL Cotton MS Vespasian F XIII, reproduced in Queens of England II, 396.
8. J. Skelton, The Complete English Poems, ed. J. Scattergood (1983), 312–58.
9. Ibid., 347, lines 1226–7.
10. Ibid., 132.
11. Ibid.
12. D. R. Carlson, ‘Royal Tutors in the Reign of Henry VII’, Sixteenth Century Journal 22 (1991), 253–79, 255–60.
13. Skelton, Complete English Poems, 132; Nelson, Skelton, 15.
14. M. St Clare Byrne, ed., The Letters of King Henry VIII (1968), 420–1.
15. Nelson, Skelton, 239, n. 2, cited in Carlson, ‘Royal Tutors’, 258, n. 11. Arthur first took up residence at Tickenhill Manor, Bewdley in 1499. It was an informal, half-timbered maison de retraite, which had been ‘in a manner totally erected by King Henry VII for Prince Arthur’ (Leland, The Itinerary II, 87–8).
16. Nelson, Skelton, 48–9; Skelton, Complete English Poems, 345–7.
17. Skelton, Complete English Poems, 347; F. M. Salter, ‘Skelton’s Speculum Principis’, in Speculum 9 (1934), 25–37.
18. Skelton, Complete English Poems, 347; Salter, ‘Skelton’s Speculum Principis’, 25–37.
19. Salter, op. cit., 29.
20. Cf. Nelson, Skelton, 75–6; Carlson, ‘The Latin Writings of John Skelton’, 1–125, 38–42.
21. G. R. Elton, ed., The Tudor Constitution (Cambridge, 1962), 344.
22. W. K. Jordan, The Chronicle and Political Papers of King Edward VI (1966), 3; Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke of the Governour, ed. H. H. S. Croft, 2 vols (1883) I, xx.
23. F. M. Nichols, ed. and trans., The Epistles of Erasmus, 2 vols (1904) II, 201.
24. BL Egerton MS 1651; P. Smith, Erasmus (1923), 61–2, 453–7; W. K. Ferguson, ed., Erasmi Opuscula (The Hague, 1933), 25–31.
25. Nelson, Skelton, 57, 72.
26. CWE I, 104.
27. J. Larson, ‘A Polychromatic Terracotta Bust of a Laughing Child at Windsor Castle’, Burlington Magazine 131 (1989), 618–24.
28. Reproduced in K. Hearn, ed., Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Stuart England, 1530–1630 (1995), no. 1.
29. See for example the account of his behaviour at his reception by the City on 30–31 October 1498 (Great Chronicle, 288–9).
8
WEDDINGS
‘CHOOSE A WIFE FOR YOURSELF, and prize her always and uniquely,’ Skelton had solemnly enjoined the little Henry. Actually, royal children rarely had much choice in the matter. Serious marriage negotiations for Henry’s elder brother Arthur had begun when the lad was aged three; his sister Margaret had been offered to James IV of Scotland at the age of seven; now, it seemed, it was the turn of Henry and his little sister Mary.
The occasion was a one-day summit conference held at St Peter’s church outside the walls of Calais on 9 June 1500. Henry’s parents had first travelled to Calais a month earlier on 8 May, in a simple attempt to avoid an outbreak of epidemic disease which was playing havoc in London and the vicinity.1 Contemporaries called the disease the ‘sweating sickness’, after its principal symptom. It seems to have been a virulent form of influenza, with a mortality rate that matched that of the plague itself.2 Despite its inauspicious beginnings, the royal visit to Calais soon blossomed into a considerable diplomatic event, which culminated in the summit conference between Henry and the Archduke Philip, ruler of the adjacent Netherlands and son of Maximilian.
For the meeting, which lasted only a few hours, the king transformed the interior of St Peter’s church into a palace from the Arabian Nights. Chambers were formed out of richly figured tapestry, and the floor was strewn with roses and lavender. The banquet included seven horseloads of cherries and a holocaust of kids (young goats).
The aim was to repair the damage done to Anglo– Burgundian relations by Habsburg support for the Yorkist cause. All seemed to go well. Philip, who had always been less infatuated with Warbeck than his father Maximilian or his aunt, the Dowager Duchess Margaret of York, acknowledged Henry VII as his ‘patron, father and protector’. And, to cement their good relationship, the two rulers discussed a double marriage alliance: between Henry, duke of York and Philip’s daughter Eleanor, and between Henry’s four-year-old sister Mary and Philip’s infant son Charles.3
It might even be that his father let Henry know something of these plans. In late July, six weeks after Henry’s parents had returned from Calais, the king despatched Richard Weston, one of his most intimate body servants, to ride to ‘my lord of York’. Was the king, following the death of Henry’s short-lived brother Edmund, who had died during his parents’ absence in Calais, anxious about the wellbeing of his second son?4 Or was he informing him of the wealthy bride that awaited him in the Netherlands?
At any rate, a month later the king sent the young duke a gift of £2, again by Weston’s hands. And it was Weston too who gave a reward of 10 shillings to the servant Henry sent to court to thank his father for his present.5
But the marriages of Henry and Mary were far from the mind of the special Spanish envoy, Gutierre Gomez de Fuensalida, as he spurred his horse from Paris to the Channel. Word of the Anglo–Burgundian summit had quickly spread on the diplomatic grapevine, and Fuensalida was desperate to reach Calais to find out what was afoot.
Fuensalida, like his masters Ferdinand and Isabella, had heard worrying rumours. The real purpose of the Calais meeting, everybody in France told him, was t
o arrange another Tudor–Habsburg marriage: between Henry’s elder brother Arthur, prince of Wales, and Philip’s sister, the Archduchess Margaret.6 And that, of course, would have meant breaking off the marriage which had already been contracted between Arthur and Catherine of Aragon, Ferdinand and Isabella’s youngest daughter.
In fact, Fuensalida’s worries were unnecessary. Henry VII, who was well aware of Spanish anxieties, might tease Spain’s resident ambassador in London, De Puebla, with a deliberatively vague account of the Calais meeting with Philip. ‘It had,’ he claimed airily, ‘no other object than to show to the world their paternal and filial love, and to give something to guess at to their evil-wishers.’7
But (as De Puebla well knew) Henry VII’s commitment to the Spanish match for his eldest son and heir was absolute.
Ferdinand, king of Aragon, and Isabella, queen regnant of Castile, had unified Spain by their marriage and carried it to the front rank of European powers by their prowess in diplomacy and war. Henry VII, who had achieved something similar in England – though on a much smaller scale – with his victory over Richard III and marriage to Elizabeth of York, had first put out feelers to the pair in 1487, only two years after Bosworth. The proposal took the usual form for the day, of an alliance to be cemented by a marriage – between his one-year-old son Arthur and Ferdinand and Isabella’s two-year-old daughter Catherine. Ferdinand and Isabella, still in the throes of the reconquest of the Islamic south of Spain and eager for allies against France, had responded favourably, and Henry VII sent an experienced embassy to Spain to conclude matters.
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