Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

The prince’s coming to court that summer coincided with a dispatch from Rome, where negotiations over the dispensation for Catherine’s remarriage had dragged on interminably. While Alexander VI, the Borgia pope, may have been a byword for nepotism, the new incumbent, the belligerent Julius II, was proving no slouch on that front himself, packing the curia with his relatives from the Tuscan city of Lucca. The head of the English ambassadorial team and former Borgia favourite, Adriano Castellesi, had been lobbying frantically to ingratiate himself with the new papal regime, and to stay in Henry’s good books. He was, he wrote to the king, ‘ex toto anglicus’, English to his core, and was ‘your creature and the work of your hands’. He stressed his loyalty and commitment by decorating his lavish new palace in Rome with England’s coat-of-arms and making it over to the king as an embassy – thereby cementing his own position – and by laying out a detailed programme for obtaining the dispensation. Castellesi’s plan largely involved showering the new pope’s Della Rovere clan with sweeteners in the form of cash, lucrative offices and honours, including conferring the Order of the Garter on Duke Guidobaldo of Urbino whose cultured court acted as a back-channel to the papal curia. All of which appeared to do the trick. When, on 20 May 1504, the English embassy arrived in Rome to profess obedience to the new pope, the deputation was headed by Castellesi. His uneasiness, however, would prove entirely justified.¹³

On 6 July, Julius wrote to Henry VII protesting that he had never intended to withhold the dispensation, and that the delay was simply due to his desire to ‘consider the case more maturely’; he would, he stressed, take the affairs of England under his ‘special protection’. He was delighted, he added casually, that the king had chosen as his Cardinal Protector the pope’s nephew, Galeotto della Rovere, and he took the opportunity to drop in a few more names of those whose advancement might further Henry’s cause in Rome. Castellesi’s name was notable by its absence. But among them was another of the pope’s extended family, Silvestro Gigli, on whom Julius heaped praise for his efforts on Henry’s behalf.

Intrigue ran in Gigli’s blood. His uncle Giovanni, born in the Netherlands of Lucchese parents, had moved to England decades previously, joining the London branch of the family merchant-banking firm. A cultured man of letters, he had become the first resident English ambassador at Rome and, on his death, had been succeeded by Castellesi. Silvestro, also a merchant-financier and a member of Henry’s diplomatic team, was given his uncle’s bishopric of Worcester. Silvestro, though, had his eye on Castellesi’s job. Now that Julius II was in power, he saw his opportunity. As the king’s two chief diplomats at Rome scrambled for his favour in their race to obtain the dispensation, their mutual antagonism would have unexpected side-effects. In the months and years to come, it would crystallize into faction between Henry’s counsellors and would ripple out into the houses of London’s intelligentsia and, ultimately, into the household of the prince himself.¹⁴

In the last week of July, preceded by the harbingers who rode ahead, checking that accommodation was ample and correctly allocated according to rank – as well as for warning signs of disease and ‘perilous sickmen’ in the towns and villages through which the court passed – the household moved out of Greenwich and along the main London–Canterbury road, through apple orchards and fields of wheat and barley parched with lack of rain, horses straining at carts piled high with coffers and trunks. With his son at his side, and the brief for the marriage dispensation just arrived, Henry was in expansive and solicitous mood. On 4 August he dispatched one of his privy servants with a letter to Catherine, who had fallen seriously ill at Greenwich; her fever, racking cough and stomach problems were exacerbated by a hamfisted doctor whose laboured efforts to bleed her resulted in ‘no blood’. Rather than accompanying the court and her betrothed on progress, she had returned to Durham House with her household to convalesce. Henry promised her the best physicians he could find. He loved her, he stressed, ‘as his own daughter’, and told her to ask him for anything she wanted.¹⁵

But it was Henry’s demonstrative affection for his son that attracted most attention. Travelling with the court, the Spanish ambassador Ferdinand Duque – sent to bolster, and keep an eye on, the activities of the Anglophile Rodrigo de Puebla – remarked warmly of the king’s parenting skills in a letter to King Ferdinand. ‘It is quite wonderful’, he wrote, ‘how much the king likes the prince of Wales’ – and with good reason, for the prince ‘deserves all love.’ ‘Certainly’, he commented approvingly, ‘there could be no better school in the world than the society of such a father as Henry VII.’

Ferdinand Duque had no reason to disbelieve the evidence of his own eyes, and indeed, Henry’s delight in the prince was entirely consistent with his behaviour on the rare occasions that the pair had previously been seen together. The king did love his son – who was, after all, the embodiment of everything he had fought for over the previous quarter century. Besides which, the boy probably reminded Henry of Elizabeth.

But Duque also mentioned something else, a topic that was evidently the talk of court that summer. Previously, the king had never taken his son on progress, in order ‘not to disrupt his studies’. Henry, he continued, was so wise, and attentive to everything regarding his son’s upbringing: ‘nothing escapes his attention’. Indeed, Duque concluded, if the king were to live ten years longer, he would leave the prince ‘furnished with good habits, and immense riches, and in as happy circumstances as man can be.’¹⁶ For the first thirteen years of Prince Henry’s life, he had barely inhabited his father’s world. Suddenly, in Duque’s portrait, they had been thrown vividly, closely together; Henry, hawklike, watching over his son’s security and development.

The situation in which Henry and the prince now found themselves was, however, highly unusual. Every heir to the throne in living memory, and many more before that, had been trained in adversity – or at the very least in a separate household, away from their parents. Henry himself, as he was always at pains to point out, had been hardened in the refugee’s struggle for sheer survival – and besides, he had won his battles. At the age of ten Prince Henry’s grandfather, Edward IV, was marching on London at the head of an army ten thousand strong.¹⁷ Everybody understood that the first requirement of kingship was to lead by example – and that meant by fighting and military leadership. When, back in the 1460s, the lawyer Sir John Fortescue lectured the Lancastrian heir Edward, prince of Wales on the importance of studying law, he took it for granted that kings knew how to fight, which was ironic given that his pupil’s father, Henry VI, was the only king in living memory who had not distinguished himself in battle; indeed, his helpless diffidence – which Henry VII was now reinventing as a saintlike passivity – had plunged the country into civil war.

So, at the age when Prince Henry might have been expected to be exposed to the world around him, and to acquire responsibility for his actions, his father wrapped him in cotton wool, his independence restricted, his every move tightly controlled. Contemporary educationalists would have been concerned. One, writing in 1500, believed that the offspring of rich families were spoiled brats, ill-equipped for life, because they were ‘lost nowadays in their youth at home, and that with their fathers and mothers’. There was, he believed, a point in a child’s development where the tender-hearted indulgence of mothers, with their ‘weeping and wailing’ over the slightest scratch sustained by their beloved offspring, simply got in the way. The king, of course, was hardly one for cosseting of this kind. But, given the situation he now faced, it was the only option. Forced to keep his son at his side, Henry VII was belatedly ‘playing the mother’s part’. He would make a virtue of necessity.¹⁸

Duque’s comment about the prince’s education was not, or not only, a platitude. Although the prince’s study-companion, Lord Mountjoy, was increasingly preoccupied by his duties in Calais – the financial sword of Damocles suspended over him undoubtedly helped him keep his mind on the job – he was still heavily involved in the prince’s educational development, in particular the modish classical curriculum in which he was now well advanced. When John Holt, the prince’s grammar master, died in June 1504, Mountjoy’s fingerprints were all over the appointment of his replacement, William Hone.

Cut from the same cloth as his predecessor – when Holt was appointed the prince’s tutor, Hone succeeded him as master of Chichester prebendal school – Hone was an obvious choice. But Holt’s death, which had by all accounts been sudden, had come just as Prince Henry had arrived at court, where there was another figure who might have been expected to play a major role: Prince Arthur’s former tutor, a blind, black-clad Augustinian canon from Toulouse called Bernard Andre. That Andre was notable by his absence from the prince’s education spoke volumes.

Introduced to Henry in exile by Richard Fox, Andre had been a fixture at court since Bosworth. He was high in royal favour, friends with highly influential figures like Lady Margaret and Richard Fox, and had by his own account given Prince Arthur an exemplary classical education, following which he had been put out to grass with a wealthy benefice and the post of court historian, receiving a handsome annuity for a succession of saccharine eulogies and supine annual chronicles of the year’s major events. When, in 1502, John Skelton had left Prince Henry’s service, there had been a good reason why Andre had not been appointed in his place: the prince’s education was still overseen by Queen Elizabeth and by Mountjoy, then her chamberlain. But now Andre, still only in his early fifties and apparently in good health, was an obvious choice, particularly as he seemed still to be actively involved in tuition, giving lessons to the likes of Henry Daubeney, son of the king’s chamberlain. What was more, a comparison