Henry

by Starkey, David

  It had been the same back home in the Netherlands. Shortly before his departure, Philip had held a tournament in Brussels in honour of his father, Maximilian. It took place indoors by torchlight. Not only did Philip take part, his father could not resist joining in as well. Maximilian rode incognito and tilted with his son. ‘And each shivered three spears so adroitly that for address and everything else they proved themselves superior to all their competitors.’6

  The contrast with the round of spectator sports Philip was offered in England could not have been greater.

  It remained only for Philip to pay the bill. He did so with a good grace. On the morning of Sunday, 15 February he offered to hand over the pretender, Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, ‘unasked’. It was a grand public gesture, and worthy of a prince of Burgundy. But behind it lay weeks of intense private negotiation in which the parties had tried to reconcile Henry VII’s determination to get his hands on Suffolk with Philip’s promise to protect and aid him.

  Suffolk himself had joined in on 28 January, when he gave a set of instructions to his agents. In them he sought a peace with honour with Henry VII: the king would restore him to favour, to his dukedom and to his ancestral lands; he, for his part, would become the king’s ‘true subject and liegeman’ and, after his death, would remain faithful ‘to my lord prince the king’s son’. Prince Henry, as well as the king, would ratify whatever agreement was reached. Finally, Suffolk’s brother William, and all others who were ‘in prison for the said duke’s sake or cause’, were to be released and restored to their property.

  The Burgundians believed, or professed to believe, that Henry VII had agreed to something like these terms, and Suffolk seems to have believed so too. His reception in Calais should have disabused him. He was handed over on 16 March. Eight days later, on the twenty-fourth, he was shipped to Dover with an escort of forty soldiers of the garrison, all in armour. In Dover he was met by the formidable Sir Thomas Lovell and taken to the Tower. But so long as Philip remained on English soil, Henry – out of regard for his guest’s feelings – maintained the fiction that Suffolk’s imprisonment was an ‘honourable’ one, pending the outcome of successful negotiations.7

  Meanwhile, after a final round of entertainment, Philip finally took his leave of his hosts. The parting was itself a long-drawn-out affair. They said their farewells before dinner on Monday, 2 March. After dining, Philip was booted and spurred and ready to leave when the king and prince, also booted and spurred, appeared and announced that they would accompany him on the first stage of his journey. A mile or so from Windsor, the last farewells were made. Henry VII’s final words were to entrust his son to Philip’s care, beseeching him to be his ‘father, protector and friend’.8 Immediately after leaving Windsor, Philip became feverish – ‘partly because of the Lenten fare and partly because of the weather, which was severe’ – and lay sick for eight or nine days at Reading Abbey. Having resumed his journey, he met Juana at Exeter and reached Falmouth on 26 March.9 But it was another three weeks before the winds turned favourable.

  With Philip’s final departure from Falmouth on 16 April, the pretence of Suffolk’s honourable treatment was abandoned. He was ‘exhaustively interrogated’; two more of his associates, George Neville, Lord Abergavenny and Sir Thomas Green, were arrested, and Suffolk himself disappeared into the recesses of the Tower, from which he was to emerge – years later – only for his execution.

  Meanwhile Henry wrote to Philip. The letter, dated at Greenwich, 9 April 1506, is the first of Henry’s to survive.10 It is written in French, as so many of his later letters were to be, including much of his correspondence with Anne Boleyn. The composition could have been the work of the king’s secretary in the French tongue, John Meautis, whose job it was to draft royal correspondence in French. But the signs are that, with his thorough grounding in the language, Henry scarcely needed his help.11

  But if, as seems likely, he composed the letter himself, he did so by dictation. For it is written in a fine, regular clerk’s script. Only the subscription and signature – ‘Vostre Humble cosyn, Henry Prynce de galles’ – are in Henry’s own hand. Yet even these seven words are instantly recognizable. Henry is the graphologist’s dream: the writing is the man; it is big, bold and rather square. All that will happen as Henry gets older is that the hand will loosen up: the strokes will become more varied, the letters wider, and the spaces between them bigger.

  The content of the letter, like the penmanship of the body of the text, is fairly formal. It is a request to Philip to show his favour to Catherine of Aragon’s chamberlain, who had business in Spain. This is probably Don Pedro Manrique, who was the husband of Catherine’s former duenna, Doña Elvira Manuel. In making the request on behalf of Catherine’s household official, Henry gives Catherine her full title of ‘my most dear and well-beloved consort the princess my wife’.

  More interesting, though, is the way in which Henry addresses Philip himself. Calling him ‘most high, most excellent, and mighty prince’, he begs him that he will ‘apprise me from time to time and let me know of your good health and prosperity’. In return, he assures Philip, ‘whenever I can find a fitting messenger I am determined to do the like to you’. The terms are formal, but the request for a correspondence is unusually direct: bearing in mind Henry’s age, it is almost as though he were asking the king-archduke to be his pen-pal.

  But this auspicious beginning went nowhere. Within six months of his arrival in Spain, Philip was dead. The news of his death spread throughout Europe. Towards the end of the year, Erasmus picked it up and wrote to condole Henry. The fact that he did so is interesting. It shows the scholar’s determination to keep up the acquaintance which had begun in 1499. It also suggests that he had heard that Henry and Philip had got on famously during the days they had spent together at the beginning of the year.

  It was 17 January 1507 before Henry got round to replying. This, his second surviving letter, is in Latin rather than French; it is also in his own hand. We know this from an endorsement which Erasmus wrote on a copy of the letter: ‘the whole of the letter enclosed he wrote when a youth in his own hand’. Henry gave Erasmus elaborate thanks for his sympathy on the news of Philip’s death, ‘for never, since the death of my dearest mother, hath there come to me more hateful intelligence’. We have already discussed whether the phrase was a true reflection of his feelings about his mother and decided that it was; it was almost certainly sincerely meant about Philip as well.12

  It remained only for Henry to put his feelings about Philip into practice.

  Notes - CHAPTER 14: PHILIP

  1. M. Gachard, ed., Collection des voyages des souverains des Pays-Bas (Brussels, 1876) I, 408–29; Memorials, 282–303.

  2. CSP Ven. I, 320.

  3. CSP Sp., supplement to vols I & II, 132–3.

  4. AR II, 315.

  5. Vergil B, 139.

  6. CSP Ven. I, 306.

  7. LP Hen. VII I, 280–5; CSP Ven. I, 317–21; Vergil B, 137–9; The Chronicle of Calais, 5–6.

  8. Gachard, Voyages des souverains des Pays-Bas I, 429.

  9. CSP Ven. I, 314–15.

  10. LP Hen. VII I, 285–6; a photograph of the original (BL Add. MS 21,404, fo. 9) appears on the back of the dust-jacket of M. L. Bruce, The Making of Henry VIII (1977).

  11. J. Otway-Ruthven, The King’s Secretary and the Signet Office in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, 1939), 104–5; see above, pp. 179–80.

  12. See above, pp. 169–70.

  15

  JOUSTING

  PHILIP’S INFLUENCE TOOK ALMOST immediate effect, and helped shape one of the dominant traits of Henry’s character: his obsessive dedication to sport. The sports changed with time – beginning with the active and dangerous games of his youth, which burned off his surplus energies in a self-imposed martyrdom, and ending with the gentle, old man’s pastime of hawking.

  But in his teens one sport involved Henry to the exclusion of everything else. Nowadays young men get obsessed
with football; Henry ate, slept and drank jousting.

  The jousting mania struck Henry in the eighteen months following Philip’s visit. The court had consoled itself for the king-archduke’s departure with a week-long tournament in honour of the lady of the May on 14–21 May 1506.1 A year later, in 1507, the May – that celebration of renewal and young love, in which youths went into the greenwood to gather boughs of May blossom for their true loves – was again marked by a joust.

  The joust took place at Kennington, two miles to the south of London Bridge, and it is unclear whether Henry was a spectator – though as Kennington was the old suburban residence of the prince of Wales, it seems more than likely.2

  What is certain, however, is that the joust provoked unusual criticism. This stung the organizers into a reply in the form of a follow-up joust and tourney in June; they also commissioned a verse pamphlet to set out their case in print. The use of print suggests a real attempt to win over public opinion; but the jousters also had a narrower and more important target audience – Henry, who (the pamphlet boasts) had been sitting on the edge of his seat throughout the June tournament, and behind Henry, his father the king.3

  The verse pamphlet summarizes the criticism of jousting in the vaguest and most generalized terms.

  Some reprehende

  Suche as entende

  To condiscende

  To chyualry

  God then amende

  And grace them sende

  Not to offende

  More till they deye.4

  It is easy to read between the lines. For the treason of Suffolk and his jousting companions had given the whole sport a bad name: jousters were politically unreliable at best, and downright Yorkists and traitors at worst.

  What, wiser heads no doubt asked, was the heir to the Tudor throne doing spending day in, day out in the company of such men?

  There was also a practical as well as a presentational problem. Suffolk’s treason and the ensuing arrests had seriously depleted the number of skilled jousters at the English court. Henry VII’s solution was to create the post of spear in the summer of 1504, a few months after Henry had come to court. A small of group of young men of good birth were given a generous stipend – for themselves and for a custrell, a page and two archers each. A knight with these auxiliaries formed the basic fighting unit of the day. But the numbers involved were too small to make any serious military contribution.5

  They were enough, however, thoroughly to rejuvenate the tournament, and one of the spears, Charles Brandon, was among the four challengers in the May joust of 1507; he was also one of the two principal challengers in the June tournament.

  * * *

  The trouble was that the distinction between the newly minted young spears and the old Adam of Suffolk’s cronies was by no means clear-cut. William Hussey, also one of the four challengers in the May joust, had, as we have seen, been up to his neck in the Suffolk affair. And Hussey was brother-in-law of the young earl of Kent, who was Brandon’s fellow challenger in the June tournament.6

  Nor was it only a matter of past transgressions. Kent, for instance, who had succeeded to his earldom in 1503, was so headstrong and improvident that he took only four years to get himself almost irretrievably into debt – partly to moneylenders, but principally to the king. By the summer of 1507, indeed, his situation was so bad that Henry VII imposed an extraordinary settlement on him. This treated Kent as though he were non compos mentis: he surrendered control of his estates, gave up the management of his own household and agreed to reside permanently at court.7

  Here, presumably, the king felt he could keep an eye on him. In fact the young reprobate seems to have spent most of his time inducting the king’s admirably brought-up son into the finer points of knightly biffing and bashing. Kent even gave Henry a symbolic present of a silver image of a knight – ‘a man armed on horseback’ – to keep his devotion to chivalry up to scratch.8

  Did Henry’s father know? Did he care?

  There was one apparent shining exception to all this. Charles Brandon, who was to become Henry’s closest friend and eventual brother-in-law, had, as son of Sir William Brandon, Henry VII’s standard-bearer who had fallen heroically at Bosworth, an impeccable lineage of Lancastrian loyalism.

  But Brandon, too, kept some strange company. He was master of the horse to Henry Bourchier, earl of Essex. He lived in the earl’s house in Knightrider Street, where he was a neighbour of Henry’s high-minded socius studiorum, Lord Mountjoy. And he was in the middle of a messy, on-off affair with another member of the earl’s household, Anne Browne. After premarital sex, the birth of a bastard, Charles’s betrayal and brief marriage to Anne’s elderly aunt, the couple eloped and were married first privately and then publicly – just to make sure.9

  Anne also brought her own political baggage, as she was the daughter of Sir Anthony Browne of Calais and his wife Lucy, who had both taken such a cavalier view of their allegiance to the Tudors. As for that matter did Essex, Brandon’s noble patron. Essex, who descended himself from two of Edward III’s sons and was half-brother to the earl of Kent, had been one of the select group who had banqueted with Suffolk on the eve of his flight into exile. And he was the only one still out of gaol. ‘Quite why,’ his latest biographer observes, ‘is hard to say.’10

  In view of all this, it is not surprising that the jousters tried to use their second tournament in June to present themselves and their sport as whiter than white. Literally so, as the challengers wore a white enamelled heart between the letters ‘R’ and ‘H’ on a blue ground. White betokened a pure, unspotted heart, ‘R H’ stood for ‘Roy Henry’, while blue was the colour of constancy.

  The resulting message was spelled out by the author of the descriptive poem:

  Theyr hertes whyte and pure in euery houre

  Shall truely reste for ony storme or shoure

  And to serue euer truely to theyr powre

  Our kynge royall.11

  And Henry VII must have believed – or at least affected to believe – them. He permitted his daughter and Henry’s younger sister, Mary, who ‘hath to fader Kynge and Emper-oure alone’, to act as lady of the June joust. He honoured them with his own presence.

  Above all, he gave ‘our yonge prince Henry’ free rein as an enthusiastic spectator.12

  It was, nevertheless, a role that Henry visibly chafed at. Later that year the Spanish ambassador commented on his unusual stature: ‘There is no finer youth in the world than the prince of Wales,’ De Puebla reported; ‘he is already taller than his father, and his limbs are of gigantic size.’13 The verse-chronicler of the tournament was similarly struck:

  Notwithstondynge his yonge and tender aege

  He is moost comly of his parsonage

  Size and strength were the two basic physical qualifications for the successful jouster, and Henry was eager to put his natural advantages to the test:

  Syth our prynce moost comly of stature

  Is desyrous to the moost knyghtly vre

  Of armes to whiche marcyall auenture

  Is his courage.

  Meantime, he was eager for jousting talk, and was willing to bend the rules of etiquette to get it:

  And though a prynce/and kynges sone be he

  It pleaseth hym of his benygnyte

  To suffre gentylmen of lowe degre

  In his presence

  To speke of armes and of other defence

  Without doynge vnto his grace offence.14

  By the following year, Henry had come off the terraces and on to the pitch – or rather the tilt-yard. We even have the dates of the fixtures, thanks to the remarkable Latin Annales which the royal historian, Bernard André, composed for the twenty-third regnal year of Henry VII (1507–08).15

  The Annales is one of a series of yearly narratives which André intended as a continuation of his Life of the king. Only two of these continuations survive, for 1504–05 and 1507–08. The former, like most of André’s work, is full of high-flown gene
ralization; but the latter is a sort of diary. It seems to have been written in the heat of the moment, and events tumble over each other in all the vivid disorder of real life: extraordinary weather, the deaths of friends in high and low places, and – above all – Prince Henry’s sudden sporting prowess.

  News of this first came to André’s ears in mid-May 1508. The king was convalescing from his most recent bout of severe illness at Eltham, Henry’s boyhood home; meanwhile Henry was undergoing one of the rites of passage into manhood next door in the tilt-yard at Greenwich. ‘Daily’ he was running at the ring ‘with his companions in arms’. This was not the first time, as André refers to Henry’s exercising himself ‘previously as well as at this time’.

  The daily training paid off, and at the next joust, held at Greenwich on 15 June 1508, Henry was triumphant. ‘The jousting at Greenwich in the presence of the nobility,’ André noted, ‘was very heavily attended on account of the excellence of the young armed prince, supported round about with very famous nobles on all sides.’ Henry had a similar triumph in July, at another joust held at Richmond. This time the king himself watched his son compete: ‘very many men fought with him but he was superior to all of them’.16

  * * *

  It is, however, important to be clear what André was saying. His grandiose phraseology of heroes and renown conjures up daring deeds of derring-do. The reality was rather more modest. To understand it we need to disentangle more carefully the terms used to describe the different forms of chivalric mock-combat. As we have already begun to see, ‘tournament’ or ‘joust’ was the name of the whole meeting, in which a variety of specific events were often combined. These might include the ‘joust’ proper, in which the combatants rode against each other, one to one, with lances, and the ‘tourney’, in which the combatants fought, again on horseback and one to one, with swords. The tournament of June 1507, for instance, began with the joust and continued with the tourney. This became the usual English pattern.