between Andre’s reading list for Prince Arthur and Holt’s set texts for Prince Henry revealed much the same curriculum.19 It ranged in both cases from Cicero, the pre-eminent classical icon of political thought, and ancient historians such as Caesar and Livy to the iconoclastic fifteenth-century Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla, who had singlehandedly demolished one of the key documents of papal supremacy, the Donation of Constantine, when he exposed it as a fake. Neither was there a great deal of difference in their methods of teaching. But while there seemed little wrong with Andre, instead the prince got an obscure grammarian who, while effective, was unknown at court and in international literary circles.20
Part of the reason for this was, perhaps, in order that the prince might be taught ancient Greek, the avant- garde language of choice for humanists, in which Hone was an expert. But there was, undoubtedly, a political subtext. Mountjoy and his intellectual friends detested Andre who, years before, had decisively terminated the prospects of one of their number: Thomas Linacre had hoped to get a job as one of Prince Arthur’s tutors, Andre had spoken against him to the king, and that was that. So aggressively and successfully did Andre guard avenues to royal favour – he was on good terms not just with the likes of Fox but also with Francis Marzen and Matthew Baker, two of Henry’s French privy chamber servants – that Erasmus later christened him ‘Cerberus’, after the dog who guarded the entrance to Hades. If Andre had gained the post of tutor to Prince Henry, one of the Mountjoy circle’s vital routes to the prince would have been severed – and it was a line of influence that they were determined to keep open. They were in luck. Henry wanted his son to have the best possible classical education, and Mountjoy had undoubtedly proved himself an excellent supervisor. His proposal of William Hone as the prince’s tutor stood. That, though, would not be the end of the matter.21
Although Henry VII had a healthy respect for the latest classical scholarship, recognizing the prestige it brought him and his family, he remained a distant admirer. French, which he spoke like the native he almost was, remained his literary language of choice, and he preferred the classics in translation. Notably, the biography of the fashionable Florentine intellectual Pico della Mirandola that later turned up in the royal library was not Thomas More’s acclaimed Latin version, but another – in French. It was, as much as anywhere else, in the library’s lavishly illuminated Franco-Burgundian volumes, the books of chivalric romance and, especially, history – which as Erasmus recalled both he and his son loved ‘above all’ – that Henry’s and the prince’s minds met.
In early 1504, perhaps with his son’s impending arrival in mind, Henry had expanded the library staff, taking on the printer, scribe and book-importer William Faques to supplement the skills of his longstanding librarian, the engagingly named Quentin Poulet. Both men were from northern France, and were calligraphers and illuminators of considerable talent. Poulet had been in his post for over a decade, stocking the royal library with the latest printed volumes from Paris and the Low Countries, and transcribing books for the king. As a ‘limner’, he added the delicately traced sprays of red-and-white roses that blossomed in the books’ margins and title pages – often obscuring the badges of Edward IV and Richard III underneath – and painted in brightly coloured scenes of courtly love and chivalric adventure. And, around the time of Faques’ arrival, Poulet was busy at work on one of the king’s prized manuscripts,
Starting life at court in the 1490s as teacher of French and librarian to the royal children – in which capacity Henry VIII would continue to employ him – Duwes was also a lutenist of rare quality and an outstanding music teacher. In the prince and his younger sister Mary, he had willing and able pupils. By the time the prince arrived at Richmond, he was already proficient in the musicianship for which he would become celebrated, in ‘singing … playing at recorders, flute, virginals, and in setting of songs, making of ballads’. Although he also had a ‘master at pipes’, it was Duwes, his ‘Master to Lute, French’, who played a key role in the prince’s transformation from schoolboy into sophisticated courtier. The king, too, recognized his value. Whether in acknowledgement of Duwes’ influence on his son’s education, or whether he simply liked listening to him play, on his son’s arrival at court Henry added ‘Giles luter’ to his own payroll, just below Arthur Plantagenet, on the handsome half-yearly salary of ?6 8s 4d.23
Amid the atmosphere of instability and insecurity, the arrival of the prince and his attendants in the royal household prompted a subtle but palpable recalibration, one encapsulated by a young chamber servant, Stephen Hawes. Hawes was one of the thirty or so grooms of the chamber who carried out routine domestic duties – cleaning, dusting, setting up the moveable ‘boards’ or trestles at mealtimes for the household to dine on, and doubling as security staff. With a salary of forty shillings a year, it was a good, though not particularly privileged, position; it did, though, give Hawes an opportunity to get himself noticed. Like all chamber servants, he was presentable, decorous, trained in the ways of the court. He was also a flourishing young poet, a talent that, just occasionally, was his passport into the most exclusive company, to provide entertainment and ‘pastime’ for influential members of court and their guests.24
Despite his assiduous copying of John Skelton, Hawes had none of his genius. Written in the florid aureate style of the time, his ploddingly conventional verse dealt with the formulaic topics – service, etiquette, the virtues of chivalry, the romance of courtly love – in an entirely predictable way. It was, in short, the kind of middle-of-the- road, crowd-pleasing stuff that people lapped up. Bringing him popularity at court and beyond, it also attracted the attention of Wynkyn de Worde, Caxton’s former apprentice, who had taken over his Westminster print-shop and who had an appraising eye for a bestseller. Sometime after Prince Henry arrived at court, Hawes presented a new poem to the king – which de Worde then rushed out in print. But while
Hawes’ poem was one of the many treatises, manuals of ‘nurture’, manners, practical education and instruction for life in polite society that were ‘very utile and necessary unto all youth’ – including children of ‘blood Royal’ – which household servants churned out on a regular basis. Most of these works had literary pretensions of one sort or another, written in (often execrable) rhyme, or garnished with authoritative classical tags, but Hawes went one better. Sugaring the educational pill, he wrote his poem in courtly rhyme royal, and cloaked his sententious advice in a chivalrous romance, in which a horsebacked Youth goes on a quest; finally, through his ‘good governance’, he kills a three-headed serpent, and is transformed into the ‘noble veteran’, Virtue.25
It was hardly a blinding insight of Hawes to predict that tales of chivalric derring-do would be a good way to teach Prince Henry how to behave. Hawes had seen what everybody at court had also noticed: the prince was absorbed by chivalry, and by his own place in it. Indeed, it would have been stranger if he hadn’t been, given that he was surrounded by reminders: from the histories and romances in which he immersed himself, to the tapestries, statues and paintings of kings from Arthur to his own father, ‘visaged and appearing like bold and valiant knights’, that adorned the royal houses. At every turn, the prince was encouraged to place himself in this world of history and myth, to think of his life as that of a hero on a quest, or as a new Alexander the Great or his glorious Lancastrian forebear, Henry V. But it was not only the history that the prince was interested in. He was proving remarkably good at the practice as well.
With adolescence came a heightened emphasis on the young noble’s military training. Theorists recommended a varied regime, from running and swimming to weightlifting, hawking and hunting – ‘a plain recording of [training for] war’, as one educationalist approvingly put it. Pre-eminent among these sports were the chivalric martial arts: fighting with axes – Prince Henry had his own ‘master at axes’ – swordplay and, the most glamorous discipline of all, jousting on horseback. If the prince could not earn his spurs as a war leader, if he could not maintain his own independent household, then he did have one outlet for self-assertion. The king, who knew the political value of his son’s chivalric education, thoroughly approved.26
Around his older son, Henry VII had encouraged the building up of a loyalty-inducing Arthurian cult, one that had had to be unceremoniously ditched after his untimely death. He had done something similar with Prince Henry’s creation as duke of York, which was explicitly intended to head off Perkin Warbeck’s claim to that title. Now, with his son shadowing him at court, the king would create a renewal of chivalric activity, centred on the prince. In doing so, Henry would kill several birds with one stone. He himself had always been disinclined to joust, a result, perhaps, of lack of opportunity during his refugee’s upbringing in Brittany, or because of the exceptional danger of this ultimate contact sport – or simply on account of his poor eyesight. As one jousting practitioner put it, self-evidently,
