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OATLANDS
The family reunited with the king at Easton Neston, sixty-five miles north of London. By the time the Stuarts reached Windsor Castle at the end of June, their train numbered over five thousand, a scale unseen for decades. Lady Anne Clifford, aged thirteen, and her mother, the Countess of Cumberland, killed three horses in their dash to reach the royal family and get a toehold near them. There ‘was some squaring at first between our English and Scottish Lords, for lodging and other such petty quarrels; but all is passed over in peace’. All the Stuarts had to do to repay this fervid reception, was satisfy the expectations of everyone in England who mattered.
At Windsor, James created a host of Garter Knights, the highest order of chivalry, to celebrate his accession. One of the first was Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, freed from the Tower where he had been imprisoned since 1601 for rising with his friend, the late Earl of Essex. For all the talk of continuity, this really was a new age – mixing English, Scots, European family and elites, and rehabilitating the disgraced Essexians.
Prince Henry kneeled with Lennox, the earls of Mar and Pembroke, a proxy for James’s brother-in-law the King of Denmark, and the German Duke of Württemberg. When the prince stood up again, the Garter insignia – a gold-enamelled Protestant St George, thrusting the sword of truth down the maw of the Catholic hellfire-breathing dragon – rested on his breast. Princess Elizabeth and Anne Clifford watched from behind a screen. Lady Anne overheard ‘the earls of Nottingham and Northampton highly commended [Henry] … for diverse his quick witty answers, Princely carriage, and reverend performing his obeisance at the altar’. The earls’ flattery was normal court discourse, but it showed the ease with which Henry was able to play his public role at such a young age. Six weeks after leaving Stirling, Prince Henry had walked onto a stage of oppressive magnificence – and one he could never leave.
The Stuarts’ increasingly grand and numerous progress towards the capital stalled at Windsor. Plague had broken out in London once more, forcing the king and queen to abandon plans for a great coronation. They slipped to Westminster to be crowned on 25 July, where their new subjects were forbidden from approaching them, and then rode away as fast as they could. The court and council followed in their wake, setting up temporary government wherever the king chose to stop.
James was obliged to establish a royal household for the prince and princess in a hurry. He was advised to choose Oatlands palace in Surrey, some ten miles upriver from Hampton Court, though in an alien kingdom he cannot have had any real idea where it was.
With the king unable to settle and establish his own court, Henry immediately took on some of his father’s public duties. At Oatlands he met with the Venetian Secretary, to receive the Republic’s congratulations on James I’s succession. ‘He is ceremonious beyond his years,’ Scaramelli wrote of the prince.
When the Secretary asked him how he filled his days in England, Henry opened up. ‘Through an interpreter he gave me a long discourse on his exercises, dancing, tennis, the chase’ – in lengthy, excited detail. ‘He then conducted me … to visit the Princess. I found her surrounded by her Court under a canopy. They both said they meant to learn Italian.’
Italian delegate and British royals charmed each other. King James’s tutor, Buchanan, had extolled the Venetian constitution, recommending it as a model to his followers. Buchanan’s student, Melville, would have passed the approval to his student, Adam Newton, who passed it to Prince Henry. Yet, Venice was a republic, and Henry the son and heir of a man proclaiming vocally and in print, the divine right of kings and absolute monarchy.
The plague outbreak was the worst for a generation. Travellers carried it from London out into the countryside. The Lord Chamberlain and the Lord High Steward moved the royal couple on, and on – with the Privy Council and the law courts still following behind.
Soon Oatlands fell victim to anxiety over the plague, forcing Henry and his train to follow his father’s court. Elizabeth was moved to new guardians, the Haringtons, parents of Lucy, Countess of Bedford, at Coombe Abbey in Northamptonshire. ‘I most kindly salute you,’ Elizabeth wrote to Henry when she was settled, ‘desiring to hear of your health, from whom, though I am now removed far away, none shall ever be nearer in affection than, your most loving sister, Elizabeth.’ Henry replied with a gift, a verbal message, but also ‘these few lines … I beseech you to accept, as witnesses of my tender dutiful affection … and that by our absence shall [not] be diminished but rather with our years shall be increased … I rest, your loving brother, Henrie’. The formal register of all royal communication masked, but could not prevent, a sense of the deep mutual affection coming through the rhetoric.
Elizabeth thanked him by return. I shall keep these ‘delightful memorials of your brotherly love in which assuredly (whatsoever else may fail) I will endeavour to equal you, esteeming that time happiest when I enjoyed your company … As nature has made us nearest in our love together, so accident might not separate us from living together.’ She always hoped they would live together again.
By December 1603 the number of plague cases each week was falling. On the 23rd, Robert Cecil wrote from Hampton Court, ‘where now the King, with the Queen and the Prince are safely arrived, thank God’.
James had confirmed Cecil in his position as Secretary of State, and raised him to the peerage as Baron Essendon. The king sought to balance Cecil’s power by bringing in two Howards, the earls of Northampton and Suffolk respectively. James was soon calling the three men his ‘trinity of knaves’. The two Howards benefited by the serendipity of being that object beloved by James, ‘an ancient pearl’ of the nobility, as well as having been consistently pro-Stuart before 1603. Northampton was renowned as a man of ‘subtle and fine wit, of good proportion, excellent in outward courtship, famous for secret insinuation and fortuning flatteries, and by reason of these qualities, became a fit man for the condition of these times’. He shared James’s eye for good-looking young men, and was a pedant and flatterer. A Catholic, his support for the Stuarts originated with James’s mother, Mary, Queen of Scots’ claim to the throne. Northampton reverenced the monarchy as divinely appointed, though how he managed to assume high office without swearing the Oath of Allegiance to James and abjuring the pope, was another matter. He must have fudged it somehow. The man wore many masks, and probably played with conviction the role of each one he donned. After years of disappointment, his moment now came with the accession of the Stuarts. Both courtier and councillor, Northampton pursued his own fortune, and government reform. Men like Northampton typified the kind of expert opinion a new ruler could use.
The court settled to enjoy their first British Christmas. Henry threw himself into it. At one moment during the dancing of ‘galliards and corantos … the young prince was tossed from hand to hand like a tennis ball’. The first dynastic marriage of the new era was celebrated – between Philip Herbert, brother of the Earl of Pembroke, and Lady Susan Vere, daughter of the Earl of Oxford. Henry and his Danish uncle, the Duke of Holstein, ‘led the bride to church … The marriage dinner was kept in the Great Chamber, where the Prince, the Duke of Holstein and the great Lords and Ladies accompanied the bride.’ Henry sat next to her at the wedding feast, chatting amiably.
In addition, ‘we are to feast seven Ambassadors: Spain, France, Poland, Florence, and Savoy, besides masques, and much more’, Cecil told a friend, already exhausted by the stamina required to socialise and network at night, and work by day. The names were geopolitical. Some had been in England for months, waiting for the king to return and settle. Cecil longed for Christmas to end so he could get on with the business of government: ‘I protest I am not thoroughly reconciled, nor will not be till we meet at Parliament.’ Whoever was absent on that day, Cecil said, ‘I will protest they do it purposely because they would say, “No” to the Union.’
The plague had delayed the real work of beginning to understand the new sovereign. Having united the crowns, the king now sought the full union of England and Scotland.
The court had its first chance to see who King James really was when he summoned the moderate Calvinists of the English Church, the Puritan Calvinists, and the Roman Catholics to a conference at Hampton Court on 14 January 1604. There they would thrash out the shape of the Jacobean Church.
The Catholics arrived feeling sure the king would lift the penalties against the public profession and practice of their faith. As far as they understood it, James, through the late Earl of Essex, had agreed to remove anti-Catholic legislation, in exchange for Catholic support for James’s candidacy for the throne.
The Puritans arrived feeling even more confident. They anticipated the Calvinist king of a properly reformed Presbyterian Scotland would purify the Elizabethan Church of its papist residues. For them, salvation came only through predestination: God’s will. It could not be earned by attending church ceremonies and rituals of piety, or doing good deeds, as the idolatrous papists and moderates sitting opposite them believed. You got to heaven through faith alone, and constantly proving your faith in God’s goodness by your pious way of life. They knew the Church of England had stalled part way along the path to the international Protestantism of Calvin. God’s appointment of James of Scotland to the English throne was a sign that He knew it as well. James came to perfect the Reformation.
Henry entered the royal presence chamber and sat by his father, the lords of the Privy Council looking on. The king told the conference he did not come ‘to make innovations’ in religion ‘but to conform’. There was ‘one religion’ as ‘by the law maintained’, said James. This law required conformity to the Book of Common Prayer. Elizabeth’s was a national church, generally Calvinist in doctrine but closer to Catholicism in church structure and the rules governing ceremony and forms of worship. The moderates were pleased. Henry knew his father was being consistent with the advice of Basilikon Doron, that the monarch should rule an inclusive church from the middle ground.
The godly Puritans heard, with horror, the king inform them that the English Church only needed upgrading, not further reformation. Investment in education and proper salaries for preachers would produce an intelligent, high-quality clergy. James insisted on retaining ceremonial conformity in the church. He wanted to hear no more extempore preaching odysseys from Puritan clergymen, less open-ended examinations of the Bible with speculative exegesis on its meanings – and no interfering in politics from the pulpit. No theorising would be tolerated about a contract theory of monarchy, or the rightful resistance to a failing monarch; or the explorations of the idea of separate realms and jurisdictions of church and state that had bedevilled his relations with the Scottish kirk.
Worse for the Puritans, James told them that the Roman Catholic Church was still ‘our Mother Church’. Everyone had to grow up and leave ‘mother’ at some point; James believed Catholics were immature. Prone rather to delusion than sedition, they had believed too many of the fairy tales the Mother Church told them in order to keep them obedient.
James foresaw the established church and English Catholics on shared ground ‘in the midst’ of a ‘general Christian union’ to match the new union of crowns. A lot of this was hard for even the predominantly moderate Puritan clergy to swallow. It was the king’s vision of the harmony all Christendom might aspire to, if they just followed his lead. Catholics need only renounce the error of maintaining the pope’s supremacy to the king. Given this, James saw no need to lift the penalties against them. The Catholic representatives left bitterly disappointed, feeling used and deceived.
As for the Puritans, the king denied they were a church; they were merely ‘novelists … a private sect lurking within the bowels of the nation’. Recalling the radical Scottish clergy, they were too arrogant ‘to suffer any superiority’ to their own authority, he said. Therefore, they could not ‘be suffered in any well-governed Commonwealth’. The hard-line Calvinists departed in furious frustration.
Puritans and Catholics should have read Basilikon Doron. It was now widely available after all. James believed the church needed containing not empowering.
If a Calvinist king could not meet Puritan needs, and their queen was a crypto-Catholic, the Puritans would have to look elsewhere. Given the godly character of Henry’s senior servants, men such as his tutor Adam Newton and the soldier-poet David Murray, some radical clergy began to orientate towards a prince still young enough to be moulded in their own image of him.
EIGHT
The Stuarts Enter London (#ulink_dcb7cc44-4fa7-5097-819d-ac4a52cac340)
‘WE ARE ALL PLAYERS’
Eleven months after Elizabeth I’s death, the Stuarts had not even made their official entry into London. As the plague petered out, the day was fixed for the Ides of March, to be followed by the state opening of the first Parliament.
Fields and wooded parks divided the two Londons – the cities of London and Westminster. The City of London resounded with the clatters and bangs of hundreds of ‘mechanicians … carpenters, joyners, carvers and other Artificers sweating at their chisels’, energy levels kept up by a ‘suck [on] the honey dew of Peace’. On 15 March the royal family emerged from the Tower, their palace in the City. Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker created the pageant, and Dekker’s company of actors was now Henry’s: the Prince’s Men. To celebrate, Dekker was collaborating with Middleton on a play for their ten-year-old master – The Honest Whore. Jonson, burly, with a square bruiser’s head, dismissed Dekker as ‘a dresser of plays about town’, but they put aside professional rivalries to produce a politicised vision of the new united kingdoms of Britain as an earthly paradise.
The royal procession left the Tower around midday. Henry rode in front of his father, men on foot and mounted nobles in between them, accompanied by the prince’s friends and leading household officers. The prince gazed about, ‘smiling, as overjoyed, to the people’s eternal comfort’. This was just how the late queen Elizabeth had comported herself among her people in the capital. Henry now turned and ‘saluted them with many a bend’. They shouted and cheered ‘fair Prince’ Henry to the skies, riding ‘in glory … as in the abridgement of some famous story’. To them, he was his father and forebears in miniature. In Henry, the poet Michael Drayton identified ‘every rare virtue of each king/Since Norman William’s happy conquering’.
A five-hour parade lay ahead of them. The king sat on his favourite white filly under a canopy of silk and cloth of gold, ‘glittering, as late washed in a golden rain’. Horses and men seemed made of gold. Courtiers great and small, household officers of all ranks, filed into place.
Shakespeare and his fellow actors, now the King’s Men, had received four yards of scarlet cloth to make up their livery for this day. They began to march. As the King’s Men they were also grooms of the chamber in ordinary. At court functions, they came in as ushers. The court resembled a huge three-decker ship, rocking, unsinkable. Courtiers clambered up, fell overboard, conspired against others, flattered and bantered and vied for favour. Hide-bound by ritual to honour each other to their faces, they hid, spied, informed, gave and broke their word just out of sight. It was rich, brutal and elegant. Shakespeare and his friends waited and watched. What a trove of royal material – a cacophony of information to feed into plays about kings, the nature of monarchy and empires.
From the Tower to Temple Bar (gate), labourers had gravelled the muddy, filth-strewn streets, and railed them to separate the crowds from the nobility. Along the road, the City’s Worshipful Companies waited in their liveries with their ‘streamers, ensigns and bannerets’ blowing. The conduits of Cornhill, Cheap and Fleet Street ran with claret. ‘Diverse music’ flowed from every arch, heightening the party atmosphere and making the wine ‘run faster and more merrily down into some bodies’ bellies’.
The Stuarts processed along Cheapside, lined with the gold-workers’ shops and jewellery merchants they would soon patronise. Near Fleet Street they passed the Mitre and Mermaid taverns. Close to the Inns of Court, these taverns attracted many of the artists, thinkers, radical lawyers, MPs and clerics who would soon be drawn to Henry’s circle, to eat and talk about their employers, their work, and plans for their country’s future, when their hopeful young master was called to the thrones.
Between the Tower and Westminster, the pageant passed under seven arches in all, some over seventy feet high. From the top of the second arch, Genius addressed Queen Anne, praising her birth and virtues, and ‘that fair shoot … your eldest joy, and top of all your store’, Henry. After solitary Gloriana, the English revelled in the myth of a royal family. After the Virgin Queen, pure and alone, came marriage, earth, offspring, fecundity and growth, security of succession. Richard Martin MP welcomed the king on behalf of Members of Parliament and lawyers. He praised the ‘fair inheritance from the loins of our ancient kings … your princely offspring’, deliberately tracing the Stuart descent from the Tudors.
When Henry reached the sixth arch by the conduit on Fleet Street, it looked like ‘some enchanted castle guarded by ten thousand harmless spirits’. It was a ‘tower of pleasure’. In the middle a huge globe rotated slowly, ‘filled with all the degrees and states that are in the land’. Astraea – one of the traditional symbols of Elizabeth I – sat on top, her garment thickly strewed with stars, a crown of stars on her head, a silver veil covering her eyes.
Near Astraea stood Envy, eating the heads off adders. Her ‘rank teeth the glittering poisons chew’ and swallowed, as blessings descended on Henry and his family. The City celebrated ‘the attractive wonder of man’s majesty’ after a loved but barren woman’s majesty: ‘Our globe is drawn in a right line again/And now appear new faces and new men.’
Yet, the presence of Envy and her sisters showed that the Stuarts had enemies. They had inherited Elizabeth’s wars, religious divisions and potential assassins, along with her thrones. The previous year, while the Stuarts rode from here to there, outrunning the plague, two Catholic conspiracies – the Main and Bye plots – had been unearthed, resulting in the first religiously and dynastically motivated executions and imprisonments of the new era. Sir Walter Ralegh had become entangled in one. He was sentenced to death, but sent to the Tower until James made up his mind whether to kill or free him.
In a private letter, Father Tesimond, a disenchanted Catholic priest, gloomily concluded it was Prince Henry, Princess Elizabeth and Prince Charles, the king’s ‘numerous progeny’, that really guaranteed this Protestant succession. Tesimond’s colleague, Father Garnet, a prominent English Jesuit, concurred. The king secured the present, ‘but the son that follows him’ was more important in the long run. Over the hill at thirty-eight – an average male life expectancy in 1600 – James might die any moment. However, James’s heir was in place and being educated for the job. The peaceful transition to the new dynasty made clear to the discontented: the cause of other claimants was a dead issue.
The final arch at Temple Bar marked the meeting point of the City and Westminster. Here the City of London handed the royals over to the court and politicians. Beneath the arch the god ‘Janus’ hung the arms of the new kingdom: a life-sized lion and unicorn rampant, made of brass, gold and silver gilding.* (#ulink_d5feb379-8e2e-5e45-9914-b18b4a6aea8d) The dedication read: to ‘Janus Quadrifrons’, word-play perhaps for James needing four faces (and eight eyes), each one to watch over one of the countries he ruled. This extraordinary union had come about peacefully, after centuries of conflict between the English and Scots. At Whitehall, James’s government had started to work on ending the war with Ireland, and the king and Cecil were negotiating to bring the Armada war to a close.
Towards the end of the day, the court retired to Whitehall to feast and celebrate the new British monarchy. Up the road in the City, the people fell to looting the allegorical world. They hauled down the arches as if it were a revolution, and carried off the chipped, gaudy paintwork, to raise fires and mend houses.
The Stuarts had at last taken possession of Elizabeth’s palaces and hunting lodges, furniture, books, gems, tapestries and jewels. James also inherited her policies and her factions in court, church and state – all competing for power and favour. He reappointed many of Elizabeth’s ministers and lower-ranking officers. He inherited expectations as well as wealth and status. But Henry was new. He had to be settled in a manner suitable for a role hardly anyone remembered – that of crown prince. The last had been Edward VI, born in 1537.* (#ulink_75cbdde6-72b0-5f15-836d-c3c63f3a5a35) Cecil now set to work, consulting old household books from Henry VIII’s time, to find the protocols for creating the crown prince’s household.
* (#ulink_0403c095-887d-5954-8faf-55456c80495c) The arms hang today in the Guildhall.
* (#ulink_e6a89f2f-c0c5-5cb8-8815-01c37e5b393f) Nottingham was born in 1536, his cousin Northampton in 1540; Edward VI inherited in 1547, so even men like these remembered nothing useful of Edward’s time as Prince of Wales.
NINE
Henry’s Anglo-Scottish Family (#ulink_acb45a7b-4fed-59d7-8a0b-81c9e7704bef)
NONSUCH
James set up his son’s first permanent English home at Nonsuch Palace in Surrey. Built by Henry VIII for his son, the future Edward VI, Henry VIII demanded it rival the greatest French Renaissance palaces: there would be none such anywhere in the world. Six hundred and ninety-five carved stucco-duro panels decorated the facades and inner court of the palace. They extended over 850 feet long, rising from sixteen to nearly sixty feet high in places. Gods and goddesses lolled and chased each other across the walls. Soldiers in classical uniforms battled for their lives, frozen for ever in their moment of triumph or death.
The panels overlooking the gardens featured depictions from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Stucco-duro polished easily to a high marble-like sheen: Nonsuch dazzled in sunlight. Other scenes illustrated to the heir the duties of a Christian prince. One panel showed Henry VIII and Edward seated among gods and mythical heroes. Divinities watched over them, blessing the Tudor dynasty. All in all, it was the ‘single greatest work of artistic propaganda ever created in England’. James instinctively knew it was the right setting in which to nurture the first ever Prince of Wales of the united kingdoms. The king had given Nonsuch to the queen, as one of her royal palaces.
Topping the massed bulk of the octagonal towers at each corner of the southern facade, enormous white stone lions bore Prince Henry’s standard in their paws. Mouths frozen in a snarl, their fierce eyes followed Henry and his friends as they hunted, practised feats of arms on foot and horseback, readying themselves to defend, attack, defeat, rule. The boys chased each other through gardens laid out by the keeper of Nonsuch, Lord Lumley, around fountains where water squirted out of the goddess Diana’s nipples, and past tall marble obelisks with black onyx falcons perched on top. Amongst all the treasures, Lumley’s most prized possessions were his books. He had built up the greatest private library in England and now offered an unparalleled collection of teaching materials to Henry’s circle.
The king confirmed Adam Newton in his post as Henry’s principal tutor, and Walter Quin to assist. Newton prevailed on the prince to ask the king to give the vacant, lucrative post of the deanery of Durham to him. (Newton was establishing himself at court by marrying into the Puckerings, an important Elizabethan political family.) Henry did so, writing to his father, the prince said, not because I think ‘your Majesty is unmindful of the promise he made at Hampton Court’ that the Dean’s position would go to Newton in due time, but because I want to ‘show the desire I have to do good to my master’. Henry’s bookish father wanted his son to esteem his tutor. Henry’s letter jogged his father’s memory. Newton got the post of Dean of Durham.
In his domestic sphere, David Foulis retained his place as cofferer in charge of Henry’s wardrobe. David Murray became the prince’s Gentleman of the Purse, and remained in the bedchamber as Groom of the Stool. The affectionate, constant presence of men such as Newton, Foulis and Murray helped give Henry’s new life in England stability. His parents came and went, but these men abided continuously, and seemed to love and honour each other.
They bickered like a family too. Newton and Murray ‘did give [the prince] liberty of jesting pleasantly with’ them, initiating banter. Playing shuffleboard, Newton saw Henry swapping his coins to see if a different one gave him an edge. He told Henry he ‘did ill to change them so oft’. Taking a coin in hand, he told Henry to watch. Newton would ‘play well enough without changing’. He shoved his penny – and lost.
‘Well thrown master,’ Henry crowed.
Newton pushed himself back from the table. He ‘would not strive with a Prince at shuffleboard’, he said.
‘You Gown men,’ Henry countered, ‘should be best at such exercises, being not meet for those that are more stirring’ – such as archery, or artillery practice, or preparing to lead men into war.
‘Yes,’ Newton said, ‘I am. Fit for whipping of boys.’
‘You need not vaunt of that which a ploughman … can do better than you,’ Henry laughed.
‘Yet can I do more,’ Newton eyed him. ‘I can govern foolish children.’
Henry looked up ‘smiling’, and acknowledged that a man ‘had need be a wise man that would do that’.
The king and Privy Council extended Henry’s ‘Scottish family’ to reflect the prince’s enlarged British identity. James appointed an Englishman, Sir Thomas Chaloner, to replace the Earl of Mar and run Henry’s household. Determined to maintain her connection with Henry, the queen gave Nonsuch and all her private estates over to Chaloner’s management. As governor, after the king and council, Chaloner had the last word on who came and went and lived at Nonsuch. Before 1603, Cecil had trusted him to carry Elizabeth’s pension to James in Scotland, and Cecil’s own secret correspondence about the succession. Awarding Chaloner this high office, the king expressed his confidence in him, rewarding Sir Thomas for those long, perilous journeys.
Chaloner had grown up with Cecil at the intellectual, godly college set up by Cecil’s father, the great statesman Lord Burghley. Cecil knew what a great house should look like, and how it should run. Chaloner shared the contemporary obsession with alchemy and chemistry; he maintained a good friendship with the magus John Dee, and corresponded with the Dutch inventor, Cornelius Drebbel, encouraging him to come to England and have Henry patronise him. Chaloner’s scientific endeavours would lead to the discovery of alum on his estate in Yorkshire. He obtained a licence to exploit the mineral, which was widely used in shaving, to treat sores and halitosis, to make glues, and in the purification of water.
Chaloner married Elizabeth, daughter of the late William Fleetwood, Queen Elizabeth’s Recorder of London. Chaloner’s father-in-law had been a Puritan-inclined MP. A committed royalist, Fleetwood nevertheless upheld the place of Parliament against Crown encroachments on its powers, citing Magna Carta to prove his case. Like his Fleetwood in-laws, Chaloner inclined to a more godly Protestantism than James would have liked. He understood the chance fortune had just handed the Chaloners, to build up a base among those jockeying for a place around the heir. He persuaded the king and Cecil to appoint his brother-in-law, Thomas Fleetwood, into Henry’s service as the prince’s solicitor. He encouraged Henry’s cofferer, David Foulis to marry Cordelia, another Fleetwood daughter.
Before he entered royal service, Chaloner had fought in France under Leicester, the ‘Captain-General of the Puritans’. He had tutored Leicester’s illegitimate son, Robert Dudley, and worked as an agent in France and Italy for the 2nd Earl of Essex. Chaloner brought all this experience to his new job.
Something about the prince’s first British entourage recalled the heyday of Elizabethan Protestant internationalism in the 1580s and ’90s, under Leicester, Sidney and Essex, with the group’s ‘militarised ideal of active citizenship … which emphasised the rewards of honour through virtuous service’ to the monarch and commonwealth. It seemed that Henry would soon be drinking in the heady brew of an honour cult of old blood, ceremony and magnificence, blended with humanism, Puritan-leaning religious and political values, and a pronounced martial bent. This was always likely given the character of Henry’s Scottish household, and the Scots who had accompanied him to England.
Time would tell. In the first instance though, Nonsuch was a boys’ home. The prince needed a clutch of new friends to grow up with, the best advancing him to help him rule in God’s good time. On his way south from Scotland, James had embraced Robert Devereux, son of the executed Essex, greeting him as ‘the eternal companion of our son’, and restoring the Essex title to him. The young earl had carried James’s sword during the official entry to London and was now sent to live with Henry. The king confirmed Cecil’s son, William Cecil’s, place here. Newton’s new young brother-in-law, Thomas Puckering, also gained admission.
Two of Chaloner’s five boys, William and Edward, stayed. Two other Chaloners, Thomas and James, came and went continually, joining in the hunts, martial exercises, the equestrian training and dancing. Lord Treasurer Dorset’s grandson, Thomas Glenham, came with Dorset’s nephew, Edward Sackville, arriving shortly after. Thomas Wenman appeared with his luggage trunks and tutor (Wenman’s uncle, Sir George Fermor, a veteran of Cádiz 1596, had hosted the king a few months earlier at Easton Neston). The aristocratic and the more favoured boys were educated with Henry. Others became retainers, halfway between servant and friend.
Queen Anne managed to insert into the prince’s household the relatives of her favourite ladies-in-waiting, Lucy Bedford and Penelope Rich. Lady Rich was the 3rd Earl of Essex’s aunt. Lucy Bedford’s brother, John Harington, son of Princess Elizabeth’s guardians, was sent to Henry. Against the king’s wishes, the queen appointed the nephew and heir of the late Earl of Leicester, Sir Robert Sidney, to be her Lord High Chamberlain and Surveyor General. Robert Sidney’s late brother was the poet and Puritan soldier, Sir Philip Sidney. Robert Sidney’s son came to live with Henry. Sidney and young Essex were cousins by marriage. (The 2nd Earl of Essex had married Philip Sidney’s widow.) Though Henry’s new family contained many different surnames, a dense mesh of blood, religion, and politics connected them beneath the skin.
Through these boys, Anne acquired a constant stream of news and contact with her son when she desired it. Since Henry’s household communicated continually with the king, Anne could also tap into the real heart of power: her husband’s court at Whitehall. Henry went ‘often to visit’ his mother, to ‘show his humble and loving duty towards Her Majesty’. Sometimes the queen might be busy and not admit him: he would wait ‘a long time, in vain’, before returning disappointed to his palace.
At other times, mother and son spent weeks at a time in each other’s company. In the summer of 1605, Anne and Henry stopped at Oxford on a summer progress in order to meet with the king and enrol Henry at Magdalen College. Anne and Henry watched plays and listened to music together. At the university Henry attended debates on a bewildering range of subjects, including: ‘Whether saints and angels know the thoughts of the heart’; and the political problem of ‘Whether a stranger and enemy, being detained in a hostile port by adverse winds, contrary to what had been before stipulated in a truce, may be justly killed by the inhabitants of that place’. Students and academics debated ‘Whether gold can be made by art?’ – touching on the alchemical question. Another day, the psychologically curious issue of ‘whether the imagination can produce real effects’ was discussed in its relationship to mind over matter, fantasies, and questions about the real power of magic, charms, spells, and dreams.
In the early days of Henry’s new life in England, a painting appeared that captured its general ambience. It is a hunting picture. Henry stands centre canvas, a friend kneels by him, with the prince caught in the act of drawing his sword from his scabbard. A stag lies by Henry’s feet, neck exposed for the crisis of the kill. The artist, Robert Peake, made two versions. It was the first ever painting to give a glimpse of a royal in action. In one version, John Harington looks up at Henry. In the other, it is young Essex. The king was devoted to the hunt, so he would have liked the ostensible subject. Yet, the boys’ clothes are the green-and-white livery colours of the Tudors, not the red-and-white of the Stuarts. In the centre of the painting, Henry’s St George Garter badge dangles at his chest, capturing the prince as a Protestant knight, prepared to kill for his cause. By contrast, his father’s portraits showed a regal, peaceful sovereign. James never liked to be immortalised in arms.
Many of Henry’s new friends arrived with their own private tutors. Dr Gurrey accompanied Essex; James Cleland, Scotsman and friend of Adam Newton, taught John Harington; Mr Bird tutored young Sidney, until Sidney stabbed his tutor, and both had to leave – the boy’s father apologising profusely to the king and queen. Thomas Wenman’s tutor was the poet William Basse. Huguenot immigrant, friend of Ben Jonson and Francis Beaumont, Basse collaborated with Shakespeare. They came across each other during their attendance on prince and king, as well as in the greater world outside palace walls.
In the schoolroom, Chaloner employed Peter Bales to give Henry a neat hand. Bales taught Henry for nearly two years before he dared petition Cecil for remuneration. A former Essexian, his unpaid service worked his passage back into favour. The Earl of Rutland introduced Robert Dallington as another unpaid tutor, who might be given a wage if he made himself useful for long enough. A brilliant scholar, Dallington had been imprisoned by Elizabeth I, along with Rutland and Bales, in 1601 when they rose with Essex. These floating tutors, along with various senior aristocrats, would be able to educate Henry’s whole person about his role and his history.
From the other side of the religious divide, the crypto-Catholic Howards, led by the earls of Suffolk and Northampton, generated a connection to Nonsuch through boys like Rowland Cotton, now admitted to serve Henry. Rowland’s father, Sir Robert Cotton, MP and the most eminent antiquary in England, was Northampton’s friend and client.
The other high-placed Howard, Lord High Admiral Nottingham, had no children to place around Henry. Instead he commissioned a model ship, twenty-five feet long, as a gift. He told shipwright Phineas Pett to sail it up to Limehouse and anchor it ‘right against the King’s lodgings’. After lunch on Thursday, 22 March 1604, Nottingham led Henry and his friends on board. Pett ordered the little ship to weigh anchor, ‘under both topsails and foresail’, and they sailed downriver as far as St Paul’s Wharf.
It was love at first sight. The speed and power of a ship moving under him, and the freedom out on the water, thrilled Henry. He took a great silver bowl of wine in his hands, named his first ship the Disdain (how fighting men and ships reacted to danger) and drank to her. All his young friends drank after him. Then Henry walked over to the side of the vessel, leaned out and poured the rest of the wine into the Thames as a libation, tossing the bowl in after it.
Northampton lavished flattery on Henry, as he did the king. The prince was a Renaissance prodigy, he said, matching ‘Mercury with Diana … study with exercise’.
TEN
Henry’s Day (#ulink_3c96c43d-e3d9-5154-b7ab-2d001b2f091f)
‘THE EDUCATION OF A CHRISTIAN PRINCE’
At Nonsuch, Adam Newton and his team of tutors continued the curriculum begun at Stirling, scholars and schoolboys sitting below Holbein’s portrait of Erasmus Writing. Henry’s Latin grammar book contained the Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and Erasmus’s Christiani hominis institutum (‘A Christian man’s practice’). Anthologies of the masters of grammar and rhetoric included Plautus, Cicero, Sallust, Horace, Demosthenes, Seneca, Virgil, and Tacitus. By the age of ten, Henry could tell his father he had been reading ‘Terence’s Hecyra, the third book of Phaedrus’ Fables and two books of the selected Epistles of Cicero’. Unlike James, Henry did not seem to have read Greek texts in the original, but in Latin translations. Since every royal male had to be articulate and literate in Latin, it was an easier way to tackle Greek writers.
Henry thanked his mother in French for a copy of Guy de Faur’s Quatrains, poems on how to wield power and do so morally. Based on a Latin original, Henry’s poet, Sylvester, translated them from French into English. Henry translated them back into Latin, saying they ‘deserved to be imprinted in the minds of men’. Perfectly pitched for the black-and-white morality of a ten-year-old mind, the poems clearly impressed him. A ‘good part’ of them, he told the king, was ‘most powerfully written for the education of princes’. Maybe no scholar, he was no dunce.
Henry, however, never showed his father’s great and deep love of learning. One of James’s tutors, Peter Young, said James at about this age cleansed his thoughts first thing in the morning, by asking God’s blessing on his studies. Then, before anything to eat and drink, he read the Bible in Greek, or Isocrates, and learned Greek grammar. After breakfast he turned to Latin: Livy, Justin, Cicero, or Scottish histories. After dinner, he practised compositions. The remainder of the afternoon he gave over to arithmetic, cosmography (which included geography and astronomy), dialectics and rhetoric. In adolescence, the king knew by heart much of the Bible and reams of classical verse. As James I he was one of the few contemporary writers of European renown, thanks to books such as Basilikon Doron, recognised as a major contribution to the hot European debate over the nature and root of sovereignty.
At Nonsuch, after morning prayers, Henry studied for only about two hours at his desk, before leading his friends outdoors. He passed as much of the day as he could ‘hawking, hunting, running at the ring, leaping, riding of great horses, dancing, fencing, tossing of the pike, etc. In all which he did so far excel as was fitting for so great a Prince … he would many times tire all his followers before he himself would be weary.’ The Venetian ambassador thought the prince attended to his books ‘chiefly under his father’s spur, not of his own desire’. One day, Henry and his friends used up so many cannon balls and gunpowder they were told to stop. That practical part of his education the prince would have worked at ceaselessly, but the household could not afford it.
If Henry and his father did not share academic interests, outside the schoolroom they attended sermons, discussing them afterwards, shared official duties and hunted together. ‘Since he was but two years old,’ the prince ‘knew and respected the King his father above all others … Yea, his affection to his Majesty did grow with his age,’ wrote one of the king’s court. When James fell from his horse, Henry was said to have thrown himself off his pony and rushed to him in distress.
Visiting Henry in Lumley’s fabulous library, James asked his son what was his favourite verse, from any book he was studying? Unhesitating, Henry took the Aeneid, found his page, read the Latin, and then translated: ‘We had a king, Aeneas called, a juster was there none/In virtue, or in feats of war, or arms, could match him one.’ Aeneas was one of the legendary founders of Rome. Had James come to found a new Rome in London? Henry complimented his father with qualities the boy deemed attractive – piety, justice, martial excellence, civic responsibility and valour in arms to build the new Rome.
Adam Newton, curious to know how Henry felt and saw the world, asked him to choose a sentence he really liked out of the hundreds the tutor gathered as teaching materials. Henry flipped through until he found Silius Italicus: ‘Renown is a furtherer of an honest mind’. Elsewhere translated as ‘Glory is the torch of the upright mind’, Henry adopted it as one of his mottoes. It could not be more different from the king’s: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’.
‘Thou doest thy father’s forces lead,/and art the hand, while he is the head,’ David Murray’s poet friend, Sir William Alexander, concluded after seeing Henry. You shall ‘shine in valour as the morning star’. It filled old soldiers like Alexander with joy ‘to see thee young, yet manage so thine arms’. Whatever Northampton might have claimed about the prince matching ‘study with exercise’, others saw that Henry acted as if he honed his virtue more by feats of arms than philosophy.
Although he did ‘have Minerva’s mind’ as well as ‘Bellona’s hands’, Henry more often honoured the goddess of war than intellect.
Henry’s expanded role in public life required his household to remove to London every so often, leading James to give over St James’s Palace to his son. The king ordered new stables and barns to be built for Henry’s official Westminster residence. No official residence was available for Prince Charles when he arrived in the summer of 1604, and Henry gave up his lodgings at Whitehall for his delicate young brother, though Charles often came to stay with Henry for long periods. The king did his best to give his children what he had missed: a secure family life.
‘Sweet, sweet brother, I thank you for your letter … I will send my pistols by Mr Newton,’ Charles told Henry when they were apart. ‘I will give anything that I have to you: both my horse, and my books, and my pieces, and my cross bows, or anything that you would have. Good brother, love me, and I shall ever love and serve you, Your loving brother to be commanded, York.’ He seemed to adore his brother. Their tone swung from formality – when Charles was ‘York’ – to the emotional declaration: ‘I will give anything I have to you’, only, ‘Good brother, love me’. Henry must have loved both his siblings to elicit this kind of response.
The king encouraged his sons to practise dancing, ‘though they whistle and sing to each other for music’ when they could not get hold of a musician. The children sometimes fooled around. Their dancing master, frustrated by the failure of some of Henry’s friends to keep time as he taught them, said ‘they would not prove good soldiers, unless they kept always true order and measure’. Dancing connected Henry to the martial arts.
‘What then must they do,’ asked Henry, ‘when they pass through a swift-running water?’ and then have to find their own feet, and keep their own ‘measure’, not merely march in time.
Still, the old man kept telling them off for carelessness.
‘Remember, I pray you,’ Henry appealed to him, ‘that your self was once a boy.’
The prince’s preference for a life of action over learning and contemplation irritated James. On occasions, the king ‘admonished and set down’ Henry for his lacklustre academic performance and resorted to ‘other demonstrations of fatherly severity’ as well. Maybe he smacked him. James threatened that if Henry did not do better, as a Christian prince must, he would leave the throne to Charles, ‘who was far quicker at learning and studied more earnestly’. When Newton berated his precious charge, Henry responded that he had had enough improving for one day. ‘I know what becomes a Prince!’ he said. ‘It is not necessary for me to be a Professor,’ like you, ‘but a soldier and a man of the world. If my brother is as learned as they say, then we’ll make him Archbishop of Canterbury.’
Sibling rivalry never seemed to enter his relationship with Elizabeth. When she stayed nearby, they rode together for hours every other day. After they parted again, she could not resist trying to maintain the intimacy. ‘My letters follow you everywhere. I hope you find them as agreeable as they are frequent,’ she sighed wryly. ‘I know they don’t contain any important subject matter that could make them recommended.’ Henry reassured his sister: ‘Your kind love and earnest desire that we may be together. I … assure you that, as my affection is most tender unto you, so there is nothing I wish more than that we may be in one company … But I fear there be other considerations which make the King’s majesty to think otherwise, to whose well seeming we must submit ourselves.’ Security, duty and ritual placed strict constraints on his freedom.
