Henry

by Starkey, David

  The information reached the court three days later, on the night of the fourth. The council decided to break the terrible news to the king through his father confessor. Henry VII’s first thought was to send for Elizabeth of York, so they could ‘take the painful sorrows together’. The queen comforted her grief-stricken husband ‘with full great and constant comfortable words’, before returning to her own apartments and breaking down in turn.

  Both parents probably felt guilt as well as grief: Henry for inducting his beloved son too early into life as a married man; Elizabeth of York for having seen so very little of him since the moment she had parted from him as a baby at Farnham.

  Now she would never see him again – not even the body, for Arthur, married in the heart of the kingdom at St Paul’s, was buried on its fringes in a plague-ridden Worcester.

  No one can read the account of the reaction of Arthur’s parents to his death and doubt for a moment the reality of their feelings. But, even as they plumbed the depths, the dynastic imperative was not forgotten. ‘God,’ Elizabeth of York reminded her husband, ‘had lent them yet a fair goodly prince; two fair princesses; and that ever God is where he was.’5

  And that ‘fair goodly prince’, Henry, was now heir.

  Or rather, he was heir providing Catherine was not carrying Arthur’s child. Catherine, her parents learned later, was ‘suffering’ – from what is unclear. It could have been grief, or physical illness, or depression brought on by the weather of that wretched marcher spring. Or it could have been a symptom of pregnancy.

  Best to take no risks. Catherine was brought back from Ludlow to London by easy stages in a black velvet horse-litter provided by the queen. By late May she had reached Croydon, where Elizabeth of York sent one of the pages of her chamber to her. We do not know the nature of his message. But one thing at least was now clear: Catherine was not pregnant; Henry was indeed the heir. And on 22 June, as ‘Henry, prince of Wales’, he was given the office of keeper and chief justice of Galtres Forest, where a few years before his tutor, John Skelton, had been invested – yet again – with the garland of laurel by the ladies of the household of Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey.

  But was Henry enough? As Arthur’s wholly unlooked-for death had shown, it was dangerous to leave the future of the Tudor dynasty hanging by a single life – even of a boy as healthy as Henry. It was also unnecessary. For, as Elizabeth of York had reminded her husband at the climax of their grief, ‘we [are] both young enough’ to have more children.

  The couple were prompt to act, and Elizabeth became pregnant within a couple of months of Arthur’s death. On the occasion of her most recent pregnancy, when she had carried her short-lived son Edmund, there had been fears for her life. They were renewed this time. Her prayers on the feast of the conception of the Blessed Virgin, when she made offerings on both the eve of the feast and the feast day itself, 8 December, were likely to have been especially fervent. On the thirteenth, she rewarded a monk who brought ‘Our Lady [’s] girdle to the queen’.6 This was the relic, kept at Westminster Abbey, ‘which women with child were wont to girdle with’ to help them through the travails of pregnancy.7

  Her confinement was due to take place in the Tower. The queen went there to inspect the arrangements, which featured ‘a rich bed’ made for the occasion and trimmed with red and white roses and clouds. The embroiderers had laboured at it seven weeks, often working by candlelight to get it finished in time. She then travelled by boat to Richmond for the Christmas festivities. On Christmas Day she heard a new setting of a carol by William Cornish, the leading composer of the chapel royal; and on New Year’s Day she gave and received the accustomed gifts, including one from Lady Margaret Beaufort.8

  One of the more brazen gifts presented at court that day came from the Italian William Parron, Henry VII’s semiofficial astrologer.

  This was the worked-up version of his Liber de optimo fato Henrici Eboraci ducis. It had been written, Parron complains, against the clock, and indeed it shows signs of haste and last-minute revision. The first section, which pointed to an ecclesiastical career for Henry, remained. But new sections offered an astrological explanation for Arthur’s death, declared that Henry would enjoy a triumphant reign and father many sons, and finally predicted that his mother, Elizabeth of York, would live until she was eighty.

  Parron was so proud of his work that he had a second copy made, complete with a new dedication to ‘Prince Henry’ and a careful explanation for the boy of the illustrated frontispiece, which showed: ‘First a picture of the sky at the creation of the world with the signs and planets in their houses and positions following the opinion of prophets, astrologers and theologians …’9 It was only the second work to be dedicated to Henry, and one imagines that he devoured it eagerly.

  More’s the pity.

  A month after Parron’s confident prophecy, Elizabeth of York ‘took to her chamber’ in the Tower on 26 January. Only days later, on the night of 2 February, the feast of the purification of the Blessed Virgin, to whom she had prayed so fervently, ‘the queen travailed of a child suddenly’. The queen’s midwife, Alice Massy, who seems to have assisted at the births of all her children, beginning with Prince Arthur and including Henry himself, successfully handled the emergency and delivered a baby girl.10 She was christened Catherine, after her aunt, the wife of Lord William Courtenay, and perhaps after Catherine of Aragon also. Ten days later, on 12 February, four yards of flannel were bought for the baby.11

  Elizabeth was frequently ill after labour. But this time her condition deteriorated alarmingly, and the king sent James Nattrass post-haste to fetch a physician, Dr Halesworth, from Kent. He travelled day and night.12 But neither Halesworth, if he arrived in time, nor the queen’s ‘dry nurse’ could save her, and on the morning of Saturday, 11 February 1503, ‘died that most gracious and virtuous princess the queen’.13

  It was her thirty-seventh birthday. And Henry, her surviving son, was not yet twelve.

  The funeral took place on 23 February, when the funeral sermon was preached, once again, by Fitzjames, bishop of Rochester. He took his text from the Book of Job: ‘Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends, for the hand of God hath touched me.’ ‘He spake these words,’ the reporting herald writes, ‘in the name of England.’14

  England was indeed mourning a popular and beloved queen. But there was more: death had walked abroad in the land. Prince Arthur had died, and then the queen, and while the queen was still lying in state in the Tower, Henry Deane, the newly appointed archbishop of Canterbury, died too.

  The unspoken questions in the Abbey must have been: ‘Who next?’ and ‘What next?’

  Henry was not present at Fitzjames’s sermon. Nor had he walked, a white-faced boy, among the throngs of black-robed mourners in his mother’s funeral procession. For at that time royalty did not see death, even of its nearest and dearest.

  But did Henry feel it?

  We know nothing of his reaction to Arthur’s death. But it is unlikely to have been profound, as the two brothers had never been close enough physically to become close emotionally. His mother’s death was a different matter. News of ‘the death of my dearest mother’, Henry wrote some years later to Erasmus, had been ‘hateful intelligence’. This seems clear enough. But the letter was in Latin, in reply to one in the same language from Erasmus. And, as was usual with such Latin compositions (at least in hands less suavely expert than those of Erasmus), Henry had not much to say and said it very well.15

  Still, I am inclined to take this phrase at least at face value. Henry had been close to his mother as a child. She had taught him to read, supervised his upbringing and come to the rescue when danger threatened. More recently, after her unusually long absence on progress to Wales in the late summer and autumn of 1502, Henry had sent a messenger to her on her return.

  We can guess what he felt about her permanent absence.

  Perhaps once again it was Henry’s friend Thomas More, writing this time in Eng
lish, who came nearest to expressing Henry’s real feelings. Soon after the event, More wrote A Rueful Lamentation of the Death of Queen Elizabeth. It takes the conventional form of ‘a dramatic soliloquy by the dead queen, bidding farewell to all her earthly belongings’ – her children, her palaces, everything. But if the form is conventional, the tone is not. Instead, More offers a warmly sympathetic and sharply observed portrait of a woman whom he had known well and to whom he was deeply attached.16

  He also gives vent to his (and no doubt Henry’s) indignation at Parron’s bungled prophecy:

  Yet was I late promised otherwise,

  This year to live in wealth and delice [delight].

  How true is for this year thy prophecy.

  The year yet lasteth, and lo now here I lie.

  But the central verse of the Lamentation deals with the queen’s feelings about her ‘own dear spouse’. She bids farewell to

  The faithful love that did us both combine

  In marriage and peaceable concord.

  And begs her husband to bestow all his love on their children:

  Erst were you father, and now must ye supply

  The mother’s part also.

  It is not a role that comes easily to most men, and Henry VII was no exception.

  Notes - CHAPTER 10: FUNERALS

  1. Bentley, Excerpta Historica, 126.

  2. Collectanea IV, 258.

  3. Busch, Henry VII, 141–5.

  4. BL: Cotton MS Vitellius B XII, fo. 109. LP IV iii, 5774/5ii, 13.

  5. Collectanea IV, 374.

  6. CPR Henry VII II (1494–1509), 258. PPE Elizabeth of York, 14, 77–8, 104.

  7. C. Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England, ed. W. D. Hamilton, 2 vols CS New Series 11 and 20 (1875 and 1877) I, 31.

  8. PPE Elizabeth of York, 82–3, 85, 90–1.

  9. Armstrong, ‘Italian Astrologer’, 451–3.

  10. PPE Elizabeth of York, 95; Materials II, 65, 84; BL Add. MS 4617, fo. 186, citing French Roll, 6 Henry VII; CPR Henry VII II (1494–1509), 354; Great Chronicle, 321.

  11. PPE Elizabeth of York, 94.

  12. Ibid., 96–7.

  13. Bentley, Excerpta Historica, 130; Great Chronicle, 321.

  14. Job 19:21; AR IV, 662.

  15. Byrne, Letters of King Henry VIII, 4.

  16. PPE Elizabeth of York, 52. R. S. Sylvester, ed., The History of King Richard III and Selections from the English and Latin Poems (1963), 119–23; J. B. Trapp and H. S. Herbrüggen, ‘The King’s Good Servant’: Sir Thomas More (1977), no. 19; F. B. Tromly, ‘“A Rueful Lamentation” of Elizabeth: Thomas More’s transformation of didactic lament’, in Moreana 14, no. 53, 45–56.

  11

  RE-EDUCATION

  THE YEAR OR TWO FOLLOWING Arthur’s death were a sort of limbo for Henry: everything changed and nothing changed.

  He was now heir apparent and prince of Wales (though he had not yet been formally created as such). Otherwise, his life continued much as before. His separate household remained in being, save that it was now the household of the prince of Wales rather than the duke of York’s. Commissions to purvey victuals and other necessaries for it were issued under this new title between November 1502 and February 1504; in February 1503 its members were also listed as ‘my lord princes household’ at the time of his mother’s funeral.1

  This latter list only reinforces the impression of continuity. Henry, prince though he had become and growing up though he rapidly was, continued to live with his two sisters. This meant that there was still a powerful female presence in his establishment. Thirteen ‘gentlewomen’ head the list of his household and they include individuals who had been with Henry since birth or earliest boyhood. These included his former rocker, Frideswide Puttenham; his sister Margaret’s rocker, Margery Gower; and other former attendants in the nursery at Eltham like Jane Chace, Elizabeth Bailey, and Avice Skidmore.

  But there are a few pointers to the future too. One of the gentlewomen of the household was Mary Reading, who was Charles Brandon’s aunt, while Henry Guildford, who was to be one of Henry’s closest friends and associates for the first two decades of his reign, had become one of the ‘carvers, cupbearers and waiters’, who did him honorific service at table.

  Henry’s education continued too. But here the household list points to real change, since it shows that Henry’s long-serving tutor, John Skelton, had been dismissed and replaced by a highly qualified professional teacher (who just happened to be Thomas More’s friend and correspondent), John Holt.

  With the change – to exaggerate a little, but not much – Henry had stepped from the middle ages into the renaissance.

  The exact timing is unclear. But almost certainly it came in the hectic months which followed Arthur’s marriage and untimely death. Arthur’s own educational establishment had been broken up on the eve of his marriage, when he had assumed adult status; his death also seems to have provoked a great coming-and-going among the surviving royal tutors.2

  On 29 April 1502, 40 shillings was paid ‘to the duke of York’s schoolmaster’, probably to sweeten Skelton’s departure for rural exile (as he certainly saw it) among disputatious East Anglian peasants as rector of Diss in Norfolk. Skelton may well have been followed by a bridging appointment in the person of an unknown Scotsman ‘schoolmaster to the prince’. But by late 1502 or early 1503 John Holt was definitely in post, receiving, as ‘Master Holt, schoolmaster’, mourning cloth to walk in the funeral procession of Henry’s mother, Queen Elizabeth of York.3

  It would be hard to think of a greater contrast to the mercurial, self-opinionated Skelton: Holt was solid, well-thought-of and had advanced step by step up the ladder of professional schoolmastering.

  The son of a prosperous citizen of Chichester, he probably studied at the cathedral school there, where he was later briefly master himself. He went up to Oxford, and in 1490 became a junior fellow of Waynflete’s foundation of Magdalen College, which specialized in the new approaches to Latin. He shone and became usher, or assistant master, of Magdalen College School in the mid-1490s. Thence he was poached to become schoolmaster to the boys in Cardinal Morton’s household at the archbishop’s palace at Lambeth, for whom he wrote his innovative Latin grammar, Lac Puerorum (‘Schoolboys’ Milk’). Illustrated with woodcuts to help pupils remember the case-endings of Latin words, it was the latest thing, and would certainly have been used by Henry himself.4

  Holt’s career path could have brought him into contact with Thomas More, who was a year or two younger, at several points: through Morton and his household, where More himself had been a pupil as a boy and with whom he remained on intimate terms; at Oxford; or in advanced intellectual circles in London. In any case the two became close, and More wrote the introductory and concluding verses to Lac Puerorum.

  In 1500 Cardinal Morton died. Holt’s career, however, continued with scarcely a blip. The following year he was appointed as master at his old school at Chichester, and he had just taken up the job when More wrote him the letter describing – in grossly unflattering terms – Catherine of Aragon’s entourage on her entrée into London. Five months later came the bombshell of Arthur’s death and Henry’s succession as heir apparent.

  It was, therefore, almost certainly, More’s recommendation which got Holt his position as Henry’s tutor. But More, as a twenty-odd-year-old law student (however brilliant), could not have secured such a plum item of patronage himself. Another, bigger figure must have come into play. Everything points to William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, Henry’s socius studiorum.5

  * * *

  William Blount had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth – or rather, bearing in mind the complexities of late-medieval family structure which followed from frequent remarriages – a whole canteen of cutlery. His grandfather Walter, the first baron and real founder of the family’s fortunes, was an intimate of Edward IV, and of his wife’s family, the Woodvilles, in particular. William’s uncle James, who had sprung the earl of Oxford from imprisonment under
Richard III, was equally close to Henry VII; while William’s second stepfather, James Butler, earl of Ormond, was lord chamberlain to Henry’s mother, Queen Elizabeth of York.

  Any one of these multiple connexions could have placed Blount in Henry’s household. But, bearing in mind Elizabeth of York’s dominant role in Henry’s upbringing, Blount’s stepfather Ormond was probably the key.

  Blount was born in about 1478, which made him a more-or-less exact contemporary of that other great figure in Henry’s youth, Thomas More. He was a promising boy, good-looking and intelligent, and turned out to have a real gift for friendship (with men) and love (with women). He also showed an interest in formal learning that was unusual, though not unprecedented, for one of his high rank.

  He seems to have gone to Queens’ College, Cambridge, where Queen Elizabeth Woodville, Henry’s maternal grandmother, was second foundress, and was tutored by Ralph Whitford, fellow of the college. There is no record of Blount’s having taken his Cambridge degree. But, accompanied by Whitford, he certainly moved on to Paris to complete his studies. There the pair soon encountered Erasmus, to whom William had been given an introduction.

  The attraction was mutual and immediate. In Erasmus, William found a teacher who was both learned and urbane; while in Mountjoy, who was both bright and rich, Erasmus had his ideal pupil. Gratefully casting off the dust of collegiate life, with its unvarying diet of bad eggs and stinking fish, Erasmus moved in with Mountjoy and Whitford and shared lodgings with them in the house of an English gentleman. They studied rhetoric together, and Mountjoy polished his prose under the guidance of Europe’s greatest Latin stylist.

  Mountjoy, who had already interrupted his studies in 1497 when he came home to get married, returned to England for good in 1499. This time, he brought Erasmus with him for an extended visit. Erasmus spent two months at Oxford in the autumn or Michaelmas term; otherwise he was Mountjoy’s guest, either in his London house in Knightrider Street, just to the south of St Paul’s, or at Sayes Court near Greenwich.