Henry VIII Virtuous Prince: Part Three Prince Henry

Hello and welcome to the next of my videos on the life of the King that I've devoted so much of my life to studying, Henry VIII. Indeed, my agent once suggested that my autobiography should be called The King and I, leaving that aside. We've now got to the point at which Henry ceases to be the spare Duke of York and becomes the heir Prince of Wales. This follows the death of Arthur at Eastertide in 1502. I described a little of Arthur's death at the end of the last video and I mentioned too the fact that the news is broken to Henry VII and his wife Queen Elizabeth of York at Greenwich by their confessor, or rather by the King's confessor, Dr John Bernelis. We only know the name in the Latin form. We don't know his real name, whether he's even French or English or whatever. But anyway, Bernelis breaks the news using the Book of Job, the book about suffering inflicted by God on the righteous to the King. The King breaks down and the Queen is summoned and she comforts him. Then she goes back to her apartments and she breaks down and the King comforts her. Any notion that somehow the Tudors didn't love their children, people in earlier times didn't love their children, is nonsense. Of course they loved them differently because they were different people and they had different values and they wanted different things for them but they felt for them just as we do and this shows it. The reaction of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York to the death of their eldest son shows it clearly with all the bitterness, the parental grief of the premature death of a child, perhaps especially an elder child and eldest son. We know nothing, on the other hand, of Henry's reaction to Arthur's death. Remember the two of them had spent very, very little time with each other because Arthur is primarily at Ludlow and before that he'd been at Farnham and Henry is, if not actually at court, he's near to court. Primarily we think in the area of Greenwich and particularly his childhood house at Eltham. So we don't know really how Henry reacted at all. I doubt if it would have been too bitter a blow because, as I said, he scarcely knew his brother. On the other hand, the death of Arthur had a big impact on Henry's life. Not an impact yet on where he was brought up. There was no question, for example, of reverting to the model of Arthur and sending Moss to Ludlow. He remains at the periphery of court, particularly his mother's household and at Eltham. But the big change is in his education, what is now regarded as being appropriate for Henry as the heir to the throne. In the last video I talked about his tutor, his earlier tutor when he's Duke of York, that extraordinary chaotic tumble helter-skelter poet John Skelton. Well, I'm afraid Skelton is pretty promptly dismissed with a not very substantial payoff and sent off to the rectory of Dis up in East Anglia. Dis is the Greek for hell and Skelton certainly regarded the company of East Anglian peasants as hellish, but it made no difference. There he was sent. It's striking what he was replaced with. Skelton, in his own way, was very learned in the fashion of 15th century England or the unfashionable bit of 15th century England. His was the old-fashioned, rich, ornate, luxuriant Latin that was a wholly an invention of the Middle Ages, whereas the new fashion was, of course, represented by Erasmus, who had actually met, as we saw, Henry in about 1499. Dis is a very different Latin, the Latin which attempts to recreate the real classical Latin, the Latin of Cicero, because there is this whole movement at this point. When I talked about Thomas Linacre in that video there, we talked about the return to the sources, and in the case of Linacre, to the sources of medicine in the classical world, to Galen. For Erasmus, it's the classical Latin first, and then dramatically, of course, what we also talked about in the Linacre video, the return to the actual biblical sources, the original Greek text of the New Testament, and so on, which, by notion of going back to an original purity, leaping over the impurity of the Middle Ages, the impurity of medieval religion, the impurity of medieval Latin, produces the great revolutions of Luther, the Reformation, and so on. Well, Henry now experiences this new, or rather old, Latin, this return to the sources in Latin, because he's given a very, very different kind of teacher from Skelton. He's given the latest young man down from Oxford, a man called John Haught, who is an expert grammarian in the new grammar. He's written, he's mouthed out, performing with distinction at Oxford, he goes on to Magdalen College School, he goes on to a school in Chichester, and so on. He's composed a new fashionable printed textbook called Lac Puerorum, Milk for Boys, in other words, nourishing grammar and nourishing tasty grammar for them. He's even got mnemonic illustrations using a hand to enable them to understand the conjugations and declensions of Latin nouns and verbs and adjectives, and so on. It's absolutely bang up to the minute. Now, how was Haught found? Well, this is, again, fascinating and also a mystery. His close contacts are undoubtedly Thomas More. Thomas More writes the introductory and the concluding verses to Lac Puerorum in his own very much reformed, elegant, Erasmus-style Latin. He also, even more interestingly, exchanges a remarkably intimate letter with Haught, describing in terms which would lead to my recancellation if I actually reproduced them, describing in devastating terms the entourage of Catherine of Aragon when she had come to London in November of the previous year, in November 1501, because it of course included elements that were North African, Saracenic, Moorish, whatever you want to call them, and he describes them into our ears as shockingly racist terms. More was a man with all his greatness of his own times, but he writes this letter to Haught. So there is this clearly intimate bond between the two, which raises the question, how on earth does Thomas More have this access to the man who is now heir to the throne? Where does it come from? The answer is we simply do not know why More, who is really himself still a young, untried man, is able to exercise this degree of patronage. He can't have done it pointing the schoolmaster to the heir to the throne. He can't have done it directly. Everything points to his contacts in turn with William Blunt, Lord Mountjoy, that I think I mentioned before was what's called the socio studiorum, the companion of studies to Henry, which is a kind of mentor figure, not a tutor, he's much too high rank, he's a nobleman, but a kind of mentor figure to the young king. So we're here into this complex world of Erasmian contacts and the king, Henry, the future king, let's get this right, the future king Henry learning this new style Latin. Now this is extraordinarily important. It means that Henry really, I think for the first time since probably Henry V or Henry II, has got those literary skills that mean that he could keep up with the theology, the canon law of the period, the whole history of the divorce of the Church of England, the formation of the Church of England, the declaration of the royal supremacy over the would have been completely different if Henry hadn't had this, as it were, reformed education, this sudden shift of educational direction. And of course it comes at a very appropriate moment. It's the sort of beginning of what we would regard as secondary school. He's what? He's 11 at this point. He's literally, I suppose, he's going to grammar school. But again, like any good grammar school, he's not only just going to do Latin, he also has a native-speaking French teacher, a man called Gilles Douw, D-U-W-E-S, a French-speaking native of the Low Countries, and he is clearly, Gilles is clearly a brilliant teacher. He teaches not only Henry, but Henry's sister Mary, and in turn, when Henry is married and has a daughter, also called Mary, he teaches her. He writes an excellent French textbook, which doesn't have all this, you know, the pen of my aunt stuff. The illustrations in it are, the conversations in it are genuinely witty, funny. They reflect the actual situations of these people in the court. It's manifestly an excellent teacher, and Henry acquires an extremely solid, competent, rather clunky French, which again has fundamental impact. It means that he is able to correspond with Anne Boleyn, who herself is pretty well totally French in culture, in French, in fluent, a little bit stiff, formal, but then Henry could be pretty stiff and formal, French. So once again, this shift of educational pattern having enormous impact on the future king, his career, and how he's able to handle events and people. Another aspect of Gilles, Gilles is a fine musician. He's a lutenist, and he takes Henry in hand here. So again, it's this double shaping of the king, because of course, French is also, it's not simply the language of diplomacy or the language of much government business. It's the language of supremely, the language of poetry and of courtly love. English, following on from Chaucer and the developments of the 15th century, is assuming an important role here, and Henry himself will become a poet and a composer, and quite competent at both. But it's above all that the English is still very much a subdivision of greater French culture, and once again, musical as well as everything else. And once again, Gilles, this period of Henry's education, plays an enormously important part in immersing the king in this. And he again, he has another musical tutor who teaches him the pipes, in other words, wind instruments. So Henry can both play the intimate string instrument, which is particularly used for the chamber, which is used for the chamber song, the strophic song, which is essentially 99% of the time about love, whereas the wind instruments are the more public, the noisier instruments of the ceremonial of the court. And Henry can do that as well. And he also has a chap who's called Master at Axis, so they're already sorting out his PE, his physical training. So that's the educational pattern, the remarkable shift that follows Henry becoming heir to the throne. There are very big changes too, in the personal aspects of his life. The first takes place in the summer of 1502, when his sister Margaret is married to King James IV of Scots, and actually assumes now the formal status of Queen of Scots. She even dines as an equal, as a sovereign, with her mother Elizabeth of York. She's still in England, but she's now with that distance of being a queen, rather than merely Henry's sister. But the dramatic change is with his mother, with Elizabeth of York herself. As part of the resolution of the two of them following the death of Arthur, Elizabeth had actually said to Henry VII, we're still young enough to have children again. And they do. She becomes pregnant, but she'd always had a difficult birth. Something goes badly wrong. She is taken with birth pangs long before she's actually withdrawn to her chamber. It happens in the Tower, it takes people by surprise. The birth is extraordinarily difficult. A daughter is born, she never recovers. She dies, and Henry loses his mother in February 1503, when he is only a boy of 12, 13. We do know a little about the impact of this. We know it in retrospect. There's no comment from Henry at the time, but there is a comment in a letter to Erasmus, in which he refers to another event, the death of the Archduke Philip, as the most terrible thing that had happened to him since the death of his mother. Now, this is in Latin, it's informal, ground Latin, but I think we can believe it. And once again, there's a fascinating comment, an elegy, a lament in English for Elizabeth, written by, again, Thomas More, that voices the profound grief, which is not simply Henry, not simply Henry, his father, Henry VII, but appears to be a genuine national grief. She was an extraordinarily popular, beautiful, sympathetic, rather soft, in contrast with all those hard figures around her, Henry VII, Margaret Beaufort, extraordinarily soft, agreeable, sympathetic woman. And her death was widely mourned as a very grand and pathetic funeral, which deploys the language of sentiment very much in the same way that we see, using, again, different devices, but similarly, with the death of Princess Diana and her funeral, and the funeral sermon for Elizabeth of York. The preacher ends that he spoke these words for England, a sense of national mourning, national grief, with, of course, Henry, one imagines, at the heart of it. He wouldn't have walked in the funeral procession, like poor Prince Henry, our modern Prince Harry, because kings didn't do that, and members of royal families didn't do that. But one can imagine the private grief, because, of course, his relations with his mother had been much closer than that of the typical upper-class Tudor boy, because he'd been brought up in her circle, with her women, with his sisters, to this point in his life, and indeed for another year, until he completes his 13th year. So there is then, between Arthur's death and his 13th birthday, and in 1504, there is, in this period, the altered education, the impact of the grief, the loss of his mother. But then, in June, Henry's born in June, in June 1504, there is this, one perhaps could argue, even bigger transformation, and it's a transformation, I've already mentioned, sort of changing of school, the sense that after Arthur's death, Henry went to grammar school at the age of 11. I think you can make a more dramatic and probably much more precise comparison with this change now. Henry is now aged 13. The Tudors see this as the moment at which you begin the years of discretion, you become an adult, and a girl, after all, couldn't marry at age 12, and it's the age at which you begin to become adult. It corresponds, of course, talking educationally now, of the shift from a prep school to a public school, which normally takes place at age 13. And Henry's father, Henry VII, now decides there is going to be a similarly fundamental change in the way in which Henry himself, Henry, Prince of Wales, is brought up. The first thing to do is actually to make him Prince of Wales, and he has created Prince of Wales in early 1504, the independent household which he'd had hitherto as Duke of York, with its own estates, its own receiver. All that is wound up, he's formally deprived of the title of Duke of York, and he is created Prince of Wales. We know absolutely nothing about the ceremony at all. It appears to be pretty private, even perfunctory, nothing at all like the grandeur of Arthur's creation, or even the arguably greater grandeur of Henry's own creation as Duke of York. It's, as it were, a piece of business to be done. The big event instead is stopping Henry's formal education, that education that, by the standards of the time, is extremely thorough and competent, and has received that further cranking up with the appointment of John Holt, the new Latin, Giles Dews, and all the rest of it following Arthur's death. But all that now stops being the boy's principal concern. He doesn't cease studying, he doesn't cease working, he doesn't cease doing Latin, or history, or anything else, mainly under the supervision now of Lord Mountjoy. But what Henry does, he changes where he lives. He is brought to court. So once again, this complete difference in the way in which Henry is being brought up from the way Arthur was brought up. Presumably, Henry VII regards sending Henry off to Ludlow, as Arthur had been, as the equivalent of a death sentence. He was there after all that his beloved elder son had died. And now, of course, the boy is also without a mother. And the Thomas More poem that I mentioned, the Lament for Elizabeth of York, includes the line, Henry now had to be father and mother also. And he decides to do this by bringing Henry to court, to live in the king's household. He has a separate mini-household within it, but to live actually at court, and to have his upbringing supervised directly by the king. In other words, to be trained in kingship. And this seems to me to be one of the fundamental things that's lacking in most common accounts of Henry. Most common accounts of Henry stress his unpreparedness for kingship, his youth, his indulgences, the failure of his father to induct him in the business of monarchy. This simply seems to me to be wrong. Henry VII goes out of his way to introduce his son to kingship, to court, and in many ways he does it in quite extraordinarily imaginative fashion. And it's this imaginative, not the word we normally think of with Henry VII, and it's this sensitive, imaginative father that I want to talk about now in the remainder of this video. It's a very particular moment, and the other things that are going on in this summer of June-July 1504 are also of absolutely crucial importance to the end of Henry VII's reign, the beginning of Henry VIII's, and they will form the subject of a future discussion. But here what I want to do is to discuss how he's brought to court. Remember it's an enormous change. Henry had been the king of his little castle at Eltham. The young Henry had been the king of his little castle at Henry. Let's call him Prince Henry from this point onwards. Prince Henry had been the king of his little castle at Eltham, and there's that wonderful description by Erasmus of Henry as the star on the stage with his elder sister and his younger brothers and sisters all arrayed around him, and eyes all focusing on Henry. But now, of course, he moves to a world in which eyes don't focus on him, even though he's Prince of Wales, they focus on the king. And, of course, it's also a very different world in which the court, although it has women in it, is primarily male. And it becomes even more male because not only had Elizabeth of York died in the spring of 1503, that summer Margaret, now Queen of Scots, had actually been sent off to Scotland. So Henry's court is, save when Lady Margaret Beaufort is in residence, primarily a male court. So Henry, Prince Henry, has shifted from this very female environment to a very male one. How would he cope? Well, the signs are, you know, it's a bit break. I remember my own experience of moving from a very female-dominated primary school with headmistress, largely female teachers and so on, to the very masculine world of a grammar school was problematic. Henry seemed to have had those problems, but partly Prince Henry doesn't seem to have had them, because, above all, his father makes it easy. His father decides to do it, to make the shift of Henry to court, when the court was at its nicest, at its smallest. He decides to do it in the progress time. It's extraordinary. He decides effectively to go on holiday with his son. This is not an image at all that we have of Henry VII, but I think it's true. And we, what makes it all the better, we actually have an ambassador, the Spanish ambassador, Hernan Duque, writing a dispatch, telling us about the king's feelings for his son, his affection for him, his determination. He actually notes his determination, that he's going to suspend his full-time education now, he's going to bring him to court, he is going to be his own teacher, he is going to form him in the business of being a king, and he remarks that, as an extraordinarily wise and successful king, Henry VII will be the very best possible teacher for Prince Henry. And you can see that it's not only formal, the king makes sure that his son is going to have a good time. He makes very careful preparations, and the preparations are of a nature which, again, I think rather surprises us. I was one of the first to pin down precisely what kind of chivalric activity the young Prince Henry undergoes. This is later on in 1507, 8 and 9, right at the end of his father's reign, it was always said that he actually jousts, he doesn't, he performs the training exercise of what is called riding at the ring. But it's pretty tough stuff, you know, you're in armour, you're using a lance, but it's training rather than the actual full combat of the joust. But what is clear is that his father is deliberately preparing him for this, and he makes sure that the boy is going to have companions at court who will train him, because the signs that something new is happening, that the court is going to shift to accommodate the prince, and the training of the prince takes place in the early summer of 1504, when Lady Margaret Beaufort, always Lady Margaret Beaufort, an entry into her accounts shows her paying very considerable sum of £6.13 and fourpence to 10 marks, to her relation of the half-blood, Morris and John, who is a great favourite of hers. She'd put him in Arthur's household, she's now clearly determined to shift him into Henry's orbit, because she pays him this very considerable sum, £6.13 and fourpence, to set him up as a gentleman at arms. What on earth is this? There is no position as gentleman of arms, or whatever one wants to call it, in the Tudor court. Well, there is now. It's a term that's borrowed from the French court, and it refers to the mounted soldier, who has also got a couple of assistants, archers riding with him, that form the main unit of the very sophisticated standing French army. This is new to England, but a group of them, just four, are created, especially, I think, to do two things. This is both training for Henry in the art of jousting, it's also a kind of Henry's own personal miniature army. We're familiar with the training, say, of a Frederick the Great. This is something of the same sort of thing. He's given a little toy army with little toy troops, except they're real men, they're a bit older than him, they're real companions, and look at their names. There's not only St John, there's a Neville, there is a Carey, and there is a Parr. Look at those families. These are the inner court families, so this group is manifested there to entertain the young prince and to begin to induct him in the world of arms. It has a profound impact. From this point onwards, he aspires to create this, I think, into a proper core of a new royal guard, alongside the yeomen of the guard, the archers, of a much lower status. These people are gentlemen, the yeomen of the guard are yeomen, they wear livery, these people don't, they wear formal dress and so on. They have different, they carry battle axes and lances, as opposed to the guard with their bows and their halberds, and so on. So it's a new sort of guard, and one of the first things Henry does when he comes to the throne is to set this up as a much larger group, and you see him throughout the reign trying to create what his father had done, but on a much larger scale, a new pompous royal guard, but also he clearly sees as the nucleus of a new style standing army, and finally he's actually able to do it, he has enough money to do it on a permanent basis, but only after Thomas Cromwell has dissolved the monasteries for him, and it's again, it has to be said, done over almost literally Cromwell's dead body. So this extraordinary impact of this first experience of court, he's got his own bodyguard, he's got something else, he really, I think at this stage, has his father to himself. They go off through Kent, they leave from Greenwich, and they ride through Kent, through this lovely landscape, from house to house. They go to Burling first, which is on the Medway, it overlooks a great valley, this beautiful hunting country. It is again Neville, I mentioned Neville being one of the men-at-arms around Henry, this is John Neville, his older brother is the owner of Burling, it's George Neville, Lord Abergavenny, and they stay there at Burling. It's a magnificent, beautiful house with great parkland. Henry clearly is smitten by it, quite quickly in his reign, when he's king, he acquires it. So he sees first, experiences first, the men-at-arms, decides he's going to have those. He goes to Burling, he likes Burling, he decides he's going to have Burling, and then the expedition moves on, the great rolling, the caravanserai of the court, rolls on further north and up to the Medway itself, up to Queenborough. Queenborough, long demolished unfortunately, an extraordinary castle built in the reign of Edward III to control access to the Isle of Sheppey. The court is there at this point because there is the risk of invasion in the name of the pretender, the Earl of Suffolk, who had broken out of restrictive custody in the Netherlands at Easter 1504, so Henry VII is very worried about him. Indeed, that's the background to much of the expedition in Kent. But they go to Queenborough. Queenborough is like nothing else in England, it's a study of pure geometry. There is a circular well in the middle, there is a circular curtain wall around it, there are round towers with internal corridors that form a kind of star pattern, and then there's a circular moat. Nothing like it in England at that point. But when Henry, with that clear memory of Queenborough in mind, starts to build his own great scheme of fortification in the 1530s, well, they all look like miniature versions of Queenborough. Again, this sense of this first youthful experience of the court imprinting itself on the king's mind. From Queenborough via Canterbury they go off to Western Hangar, which is the house of Sir Edward Poynings, which is, you look at it, bits of it actually do survive. At the time, well, it was the absolute vision of an English castle, not quite regular, but beautifully set in its moat. There is a grand entrance, there are the heavily carved or maybe painted coats of arms above it, there's a new impressive wing to accommodate the king and prince. In other words, this is exactly what we English like even now, an old house that's got all mod cons, that's been nicely refurbished, set in an immemorial landscape, except it isn't. He's just bought it. He is a man, and this again is interestingly the case with Lord Abergavenny at Burling. He's a man, Poynings is a man of uncertain status, a man who aspired to a baronial title, but it had gone back through another branch of his family. Similarly, Abergavenny had a landed estate that was the equivalent of many an earl, but he'd been deprived again by an accident of succession. So these are people of uncertain, of awkward status. Henry, I think Henry the Younger, is being introduced by Henry Senior, his father, not simply to these houses, not simply to these houses which are beautiful and lovely and very agreeable places to stay and hunt, but he's being introduced to people that he will have to learn to manage. The king is trying to manage them because there is a crisis in Kent. Oh, and by the way, Western Hangar clearly impresses Henry very much, and when he becomes king, he eventually will acquire Western Hangar too. And from Western Hangar, they continue going down, and they're now turning south, they go towards Romney Marsh, and they go to the house of Sir Richard Guilford, which is another very splendid house called Holden in Rolvenden. Guilford, extraordinary figure, close to Henry from the very beginning of the reign. He joined in Buckingham's revolt. He also had been master of the horse, he'd been master of the armouries, he's an expert in fortification, expert in draining. There is still the Guilford level in the Romney Marshes, where he has begun the process of draining the marshes, but he is profoundly indebted, and this is destabilising the whole politics of Kent. There is increasing rivalry between Abergavenny and Guilford, there is open tension between them. How is it all going to be balanced out? What is the role of the king in playing these groups off against each other? Once again, Henry is learning, he's being trained. The progress continues from there through Sussex and across into Portsmouth, and there Henry sees the next of his great adventures. He sees the first of the dry docks, which have been created in England by his father. He sees the great ships, his father's great ships, the sovereign and the regent. He goes aboard, he's experienced the navy too, and he will never forget that. So this sense of the impression of the progress on the young boy, but of course his father's mind is on other things as well, and it's that big, that broader context of this progress that I'll turn to in the next video. Hello and thank you for watching David Starkey Talks. If, as I very much hope, you're enjoying them, why not become more actively involved and join my members club? As a member, you'll be able to take part in the members-only weekly question and answer session, suggest topics for forthcoming videos, and have priority booking for my forthcoming live events. And while you're at it, why not have a look at the store page on my website davidstarkey.com. There you can purchase t-shirts and other merchandise, buy signed copies of my books, and, if you're feeling brave and a bit flush, even arrange to take me out to lunch. Thank you once again for watching. I look forward to hearing from you and to welcoming you to my members club.