Henry (16 page)

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

T
HE 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.
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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.
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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.
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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 Puero
rum
(‘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.
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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
.
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* * *

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.

In Oxford, Erasmus heard John Colet’s revolutionary lectures on the Epistles of St Paul; in London, he became fast friends with Thomas More, who was studying law at Lincoln’s Inn; and at Eltham he met the young Henry.

* * *

He also met Henry’s then tutor, John Skelton, and the two, as we have seen, exchanged fulsome compliments. Nevertheless, Skelton’s days as royal tutor were numbered from that moment. He was a practitioner of the florid Latin which had been fashionable for most of the fifteenth century; Erasmus was a pioneer of the new, easy style, and abominated everything that Skelton stood for. Erasmus also had powerful allies: Mountjoy was his most aristocratic disciple, while More was already a distinguished practitioner of the new style himself.

The trio must have decided to rescue Henry as soon as practicable. Two years later, Arthur’s death and the ensuing transformation in Henry’s status offered the opportunity. They seized it with both hands. Skelton was packed off to Diss, and (to judge from his former pupil’s indifference) his name and scholarship were blackguarded behind his back.

The donkeywork in retraining Henry was undertaken by the professional John Holt, and after Holt’s early death in 1504 by his successor and lookalike, William Hone, who had trodden in Holt’s footsteps at each stage of his career: at Magdalen, in Morton’s household and at Chichester.
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But the dominant influence was Mountjoy. And behind Mountjoy, Erasmus himself. Mountjoy, studying with Erasmus, had got the new Latin from the horse’s mouth; Henry was to get it second-hand from Erasmus’s works, which Mountjoy – ‘once my pupil’, as Erasmus notes with a teacher’s pride – now encouraged Henry to study intently.

The result was that, in time, Henry developed a style which had echoes of Erasmus’s own. One later letter from Henry to Erasmus was so well-written, indeed, that Erasmus, like Latin teachers throughout the ages, suspected a crib. When he was next in England he put his doubts to Mountjoy. Mountjoy reassured him, but Erasmus was still doubtful. To settle the matter, Mountjoy showed him a bundle of drafts of Henry’s correspondence, written in his own hand and including the letter addressed to Erasmus. The draft was obviously the result of much labour, as it was corrected and re-corrected; but it was in one hand throughout, and was evidently the work of a single mind.
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In one important respect, however, there was continuity. Skelton had particularly emphasized the importance of history, and history remained a principal field of study for Henry and Mountjoy. This was because history, as Erasmus wrote later to Mountjoy’s son Charles, was ‘especially regarded by that wise and judicious king’, Henry VII.
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But the focus would have shifted from the English and French chronicles, which had formed a staple of Skelton’s teaching, to the great classical historians who had figured largely in André’s syllabus for Arthur.
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Modern languages, especially French, were not forgotten. Skelton had probably laid the foundations by reading with Henry an exciting old French chronicle describing the derring-do of Richard Coeur de Lion in the Crusades.
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Here, too, Skelton’s departure was followed by professionalization, as a native French speaker, Giles Duwes, took over Henry’s instruction by February 1503 at the latest.

Duwes, who was probably born in Normandy, had an extraordinarily long career in the Tudor service: he began as tutor in French to Henry’s elder brother Prince Arthur; in 1506 he became librarian at Richmond of the largely French collection that had been built up by Edward IV and Henry VII; and he died, still in harness, in 1535, as French teacher to Henry’s own daughter, Princess Mary.

He was evidently a skilled and imaginative linguist, and the manual he wrote for Mary is a model of its kind. Instead of the usual stilted dialogue, the conversational exercises are sharply observed and even funny. It is easy to see how, with a teacher like this, Henry acquired the ‘clear and perfect a sight’ in the language, to which John Palsgrave, author of another teach-yourself-French book, paid lavish tribute.
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Duwes, who doubled as a musician as well as a linguist, was also responsible for teaching Henry the lute. He first appears in Henry’s household in this capacity in 1501. But Henry, who had been bought a lute by his father in 1498, had begun to play the instrument long before. He may even, in view of his natural musical abilities, have been largely self-taught – though receiving a polish from Duwes’s professional hand. In addition, Henry had a ‘schoolmaster at pipes’, a certain ‘Guillam’, who coached him in wind instruments and, to judge from his name, was similarly French or Walloon.

Finally, to make sure that his physical development was not forgotten, the twelve-year-old Henry also had a ‘master at arms [or perhaps ‘axes’]’.
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Despite the truly ‘Renaissance’ breadth and diversity of Henry’s curriculum, however, Latin remained predominant and in pride of place. And here, after 1502 at least, there was a distinct intellectual tone. The temptation is to label it ‘Erasmian’, and draw the obvious conclusion: ‘in fixing Henry’s attention upon the writings of Erasmus, Mountjoy was unconsciously preparing his mind for the reception of the principles of the Reformation’.
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The trouble is that even the Erasmus of these early years was not ‘Erasmian’. He was an innovative Latin stylist, neither less nor much more either. In other words, he had not yet developed the characteristic set of attitudes that we think of as Erasmian: that the text – and particularly the Scriptural text – speaks directly to the mind, and still more to the emotions, of the reader; that the literal meaning of the Scriptures is the proper one; that we determine the meaning of the text by considering its context, and so on.