Henry (12 page)

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’.
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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.
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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,

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.
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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:

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.
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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.
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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 the 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.
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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.
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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.