The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (10 page)

A letter from Dr William Butts,
⁴⁸
one of Edward’s physicians (who was also in the king’s service as his favourite and most trusted doctor), to his colleague Dr Chambre in 1542 provides a vivid snapshot of the medical attention paid to the five-year-old prince, as well as his developing wilfulness:

Thanks to God, the prince’s grace … [is] taking of meats and took yesterday broths; conveniently keeping and well digesting the same and exercise [sic] himself on foot in his accustomed pastimes, so that now I think shall be no less business to dissuade him from taking of meats than hither …

This night he has slept quietly from nine of the clock to this present hour and now having drunk, turneth him again to sleep.

He had yesterday, after his meat, one sege
⁴⁹
of corrupt matter and no disposition to vomit but good appetite to his meat. This, fare you well, at three of the clock …
⁵⁰

Butts adds as a postscript: ‘He has prayed me to go away and has called me a fool. If I tarry till he call me “knave” then shall I say: “Lord, let now thy servant depart in peace.”’

It was not long before one of the prime roles of an heir to the crown became apparent: to be a partner in a diplomatically advantageous marriage. In the immediate aftermath of the stunning English victory of Solway Moss over the Scots in November 1542, Henry hatched a plan to win control of Scotland that included marriage of the week-old infant Mary, Queen of Scots, to Edward. Nothing came of it due to the proclamation of the Earl of Arran, appointed in the New Year as governor during her minority. But the royal children of both nations were betrothed
as part of a peace treaty agreed by Scottish ambassadors at Greenwich in July 1543, which stipulated that the infant daughter of the now dead James V would come to England when she was aged ten. This agreement also disappeared without trace into the quicksand of Scottish politics, with Mary being removed to France in 1548.
⁵¹

Edward’s education began when he was six with the appointment of two of the most advanced thinkers of the day: John Cheke,
⁵²
the Regius professor of Greek at Cambridge, and Richard Cox,
⁵³
first dean of Christ Church, Oxford, and later chancellor of that university. Both men, later professed Protestants and imprisoned during Mary’s reign and then exiled to Europe, focused on teaching the boy the accepted classics, such as Aesop’s
Fables
. Elizabeth’s tutor, the author Roger Ascham,
⁵⁴
was also sometimes seconded to Edward’s household to help teach him to write and improve his penmanship.

The prince was a bright little boy, quickly learning Latin and, from October 1546, French,
⁵⁵
and, later, Spanish and Italian. Dr Cox told Cranmer in August 1546 that his pupil was ‘of such towardness in learning, godliness, gentleness and all honest qualities’ and that he should be regarded as ‘a singular gift sent of God, an imp worthy of such a father’.
⁵⁶
Some of Edward’s handwritten arguments in Latin and Greek are contained in a 222-page quarto volume entitled
Orationes
or Declamations, now in the British Library, possibly including a small contribution by one of his schoolfellows, Henry Brandon, later Duke of Suffolk, who died of the sweating sickness at Cambridge in 1551.
⁵⁷
There seems little doubt that a select few were taught with the prince: Edward, in a letter to Dr Cox dated 2 April 1546, from Hertford, mentions ‘other boys’ – his schoolfellows – who were more negligent than himself in writing.
⁵⁸

Edward also received tuition in music, geography, astronomy and geometry – a true and rounded Renaissance education, as befitted the son of a king who believed himself to be firmly of that mould, in the full European sense. Amongst John Cheke’s possessions, probably used by the prince, was an astronomical calendar in Latin dating from 1463, with tables for finding the dates of Easter
⁵⁹
and annotated by Edward’s
tutor. Cheke also designed and had engraved an astronomical brass quadrant, used for measuring the positions of stars, for the prince.
⁶⁰
Playing music was at that time regarded as a physical recreation in the education of royal children, as shown by the guidelines drawn up in 1525 for Princess Mary:

To use moderate exercise for taking open air in gardens, sweet and wholesome places which may confer [upon] her health, solace and comfort, as by the said lady governess, shall be thought most convenient.

And likewise to pass her time most seasons at her virginals or other instruments musical so that the same be not too much and without fatigue or weariness to intend to her learning of the Latin tongue and French.
⁶¹

The composer Dr Christopher Tye directed Edward’s music education and he was also taught to play the lute by the Dutchman Philip van Wilder,
⁶²
Keeper of Instruments at the Palace of Westminster and a Groom of Henry’s Privy Chamber.
⁶³
The prince also enjoyed the singing of metrical psalms.

He saw little of his father as he grew up, and Henry remained a distant, rather awesome figure, the very personification of majesty with his massive bulk, intimidating presence and splendour of dress. When he wrote, his son addressed him as ‘Most noble Father and most illustrious King’, and was always fully aware that in all his deeds he had to ‘satisfy the good expectation of the King’s Majesty’. A later letter written to Henry from the little boy fiercely promised that he would be ‘worthy to be tortured with stripes of ignominy if, through negligence, I should omit even the smallest particle of my duty’. Reassurance of the king’s continued regard seemed uppermost in the young prince’s mind.

Edward’s rather unattractive prissiness grew as the years went by. In a letter to Henry’s queen, Katherine Parr, written on 2 May 1546 from Hunsdon when he was just eight, he scolded his half-sister Mary, thirty years his elder, as well as indulging in subtle little sideswipes at the queen herself:

Pardon my rude style in writing to you, most illustrious Queen and beloved Mother, and receive my hearty thanks for your loving kindness to me and my sister.

Yet, dearest Mother, the only true consolation is from Heaven and the only real love is the love of God.

Preserve, therefore, I pray you, my dearest sister Mary from all the wiles and enchantments of the evil one, and beseech her to attend no longer to foreign dances and merriments, which do not become a most Christian princess.
⁶⁴

Another letter to Katherine, written in the same year, concludes: ‘I pray to God to keep you and to grant you learning and virtue, the most sure of riches.’
⁶⁵

His religious education was almost certainly organised by Archbishop Cranmer, one of the leaders of the reformist faction at Henry’s court, with some influence exerted by Katherine herself; some of his later tutors became exiles during the Marian Counter-Reformation after 1553. Edward had a great interest and erudition in religious issues and his library contained many books on the subject. These volumes included
Lectures in Latin on the First Three Chapters of Genesis
, given to him as a New Year’s gift by Glaterus Doloenus, later attached to the royal household. At the end, the donor pointedly seeks a stipend for ministers of the Dutch Protestant Church in England.
⁶⁶
Nothing in life is ever free. Another, later acquisition was the
Ecclesiastes
and the
Song of Solomon
, translated into Latin elegiac verse by the Parisian Martin Brione on forty-nine pages of vellum with illuminated initials to each chapter and dedicated to Edward as king.
⁶⁷
This all seems heavyweight reading for a young prince, but he lapped it up.

John Bale, the fiercely Protestant Bishop of Ossory, wrote in 1552 of the excellence of the prince’s education:

His worthy education in liberal letters and godly virtues and his natural aptness in retaining the same, plenteously declares him to be no poor child but a manifest Solomon in princely wisdom.

His sober admonitions and open examples of godliness at
this day shows him mindfully to prefer the wealth of his commons [people] as well as ghostly [spiritual] as bodily, above all foreign matters.
⁶⁸

There is little doubt that the ideas developing regarding religious change within the mind of the heir to the throne would find echoes in the beliefs held by his new stepmother, who was probably increasingly responsible for the ordering of the prince’s education, bringing in Anthony Cooke and William Grindal, as well as John Cheke.
⁶⁹

Both princesses and Edward lived in separate households, but with the arrival of Katherine Parr as Queen Consort, Mary was finally allowed to stay at the royal court as a member of her entourage while Henry lived. It was part of Katherine’s campaign to create a family for her elderly husband in his remaining years, although she probably would not have dared to express her plans in such stark terms to the king. Whilst separate establishments were maintained for Elizabeth and Edward up to December 1542, Henry’s children by three different mothers were brought together for special occasions. The first opportunity came in August 1543 when Henry was persuaded by Katherine to take a detour to Ashridge, Hertfordshire, to visit the royal children, while they were journeying on their royal progress to Ampthill.

Katherine had a substantial household of her own. The humanist scholar Sir Anthony Cope was her Vice-Chamberlain before her uncle, Lord Parr of Horton, was appointed in his place. Her sister Anne, wife of William Herbert, became her chief lady of the bedchamber and her stepdaughter from her last marriage, Margaret Neville, one of her maids of honour. Her almoner was George Day, Bishop of Chichester, and her chaplains included John Parkhurst. Her household payments provide a detailed insight into her new life and interests. In 1544, Richard Bell was paid a shilling for going to Oldford to fetch Lady Audley’s fool, or jester, to court to entertain the queen. She had her own ensemble of Italian viol-players, who were each paid 10d a day. In 1546, there were a number of payments to William Coke, Groom of the Leash, for milk and straw for Katherine’s greyhounds; Thomas Beck received 4d for
hempseed for the queen’s parrot (which lived in the Privy Chamber) and 12s 4d was paid to Maurice Ludlow, Groom of the Chamber, for transporting her hawks. Giles Bateson, crossbow-maker, received 44s 8d for various contrivances, ‘a crossbow case and one dozen crossbow strings for the queen’s grace’,
⁷⁰
and John Chapman, freemason, 20s for carving a wooden beast – a panther – for the queen’s barge on the River Thames. In September, Edward Fox received 3s for riding from Byfleet, Surrey, to London with one of her clocks to be mended. There are several payments for fetching the queen’s furred gowns, stored at Baynard’s Castle in London, and for travelling from the palace at Eltham in Kent to London for ‘pins, starch and other necessaries’.
⁷¹
Some of these gowns had been made for Katherine Howard, but now were economically altered by the royal seamstresses to fit the new queen. Not that Katherine Parr was parsimonious in her expenditure on fashion: the accounts mention the purchase of forty-seven pairs of shoes in one year.
⁷²
But aside from the hunting, music and other pastimes, Katherine’s sense and prudence shine through the dull listing of her expenditure. Again and again, cash outlays were paid to those tasked in advance with searching out cases of sickness in the areas around the court’s next destination: the queen was anxious to avoid any risk of infection by the plague both for her husband’s sake and for that of her stepchildren.

There is no doubt that Katherine’s kindness and compassion engendered great affection for her amongst Henry’s disparate brood. Edward’s forms of address to the queen in his letters,
Mater Charissima
– ‘my dearest mother’ – or ‘most honourable and entirely beloved mother’, are strongly indicative of the warm relationship that had developed between them.
⁷³
They must have had very regular correspondence, as Katherine wrote to him several times, gently chiding him for his lack of letters to her.

One of Edward’s letters, written on 12 August 1546 from The More, the house Henry had earlier acquired from Cardinal Wolsey, near Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire, thanks the queen for her kindness to him during his visit to Westminster and apologises for not writing sooner:

It seems to me an age since last I saw you. But I wish to entreat your highness to pardon me for that I have not addressed letters to you for so long. Indeed I intended to, but everyday expected I should see you.
⁷⁴

At other times, he clearly showered her with letters. Earlier that year, on 24 May, he wrote to the queen in Latin:

Oh most noble queen, perchance you are amazed that I write to you so often in so short a time but ’twere as like you would marvel that I do my duty unto you.

This I now do most willingly, for I have a fitting messenger, my servant, so that I cannot fail to send letters … to bear witness to my devotion to you.

His correspondence to Katherine was mainly written in Latin but sometimes in English and French. One letter from Hunsdon, dated 10 June 1546, was concerned with the queen’s penmanship and her efforts to learn Latin herself. It is a remarkable insight into the precocity of the eight-year-old, who was writing to a stepmother more than four times his age. With ponderous humour, the prince expresses ‘much surprise’ that a letter, in Latin, had been written by her and not by her secretary: ‘I hear besides that your highness makes progress in the Latin language and in good literature, on which account I feel no little joy, for literature is lasting while other things perish.’
⁷⁶

Six months earlier, he had written to thank Katherine for sending him a new portrait of Henry and herself, saying that the pleasure of looking at the features of those ‘he desired so much to see in person was so great that he was more thankful for such a new year’s gift than if he had received costly robes or chased gold or anything of the highest estimation’.
⁷⁷