Читать книгу The Prince Who Would Be King: The Life and Death of Henry Stuart - Sarah Fraser, Sarah Fraser - Страница 29

‘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.

If the scope and intensity of his academic education fell short of his father’s expectations and an illustrious Tudor past, Henry’s piety seemed of a piece with some of his forebears. His household listened to sermons several times a week. All members of the royal family attended sermons, arguing afterwards about how it lighted them on the road to salvation, the meaning of life. But the prince was thought to need his own chaplains, to encourage him to work for the salvation of his soul.

The king asked James Montagu, dean of the chapel royal, for the names of men who might be suitable to serve Henry. An active, evangelical Calvinist, Montagu was first cousin to John Harington and Lucy Bedford and former first master of the Puritan seminary at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Montagu’s personal beliefs and family connections made the godly hope he would place more ‘evangelical’ than moderate ‘preachers around Prince Henry’ at St James’s.

Cambridge-educated Puritan, Henry Burton, petitioned to serve the prince and was given a position of the highest importance, as Clerk of the Closet, the prince’s principal chaplain and keeper of his conscience. Burton sought royal service in the belief that God had chosen the Stuarts to continue the great work of perfecting the true Calvinist faith on earth in England. He wrote a tract for Henry on the Antichrist, naturally identifying it as the pope. Henry kept the work on his shelf. Essex’s tutor, Dr Gurrey, persuaded Joseph Hall, a renowned Puritan ‘neo-Stoic’ – a philosophy which attempted to combine Christianity and Stoicism – to preach to Henry’s circle. Henry liked him and asked him to preach again.

Hugh Broughton joined the household as tutor to young Rowland Cotton. Renowned for his immense Hebrew scholarship, Broughton devoted three works of divinity to Henry. Yet, in spite of his scholarly brilliance, James had not invited him to help create the new version of the Bible the king had commissioned, since Broughton was known to be a cleric of pronounced Puritan sympathies. Broughton preached an exposition of the Lord’s Prayer before Henry. It earned him a place as another of his preachers.

As at Stirling, Henry’s Calvinist clergy encouraged him to review his conscience daily in private acts of self-examination, comparing how his thoughts and actions lived up to the model of simplicity, plainness and purity Christ offered in the Bible. Not easy for a royal Stuart, it was the kind of intense self-examination Shakespeare had put Hamlet through.

The moderate clergy of the Church of England also recommended the private measuring up of one’s behaviour against Christ’s teaching; but they advocated a ceremony- and ritual-based religious practice as well. Bishops in ornate vestments presided over the regular ritual consumption of the body and blood of Christ in host and wine. Sublime religious music accompanied the great mythic drama of this holy communion. The whole royal family joined with the established church to celebrate feast days such as the Accession Day of the monarch, Armada Day, the Epiphany, Christmas and Easter. Nothing galled the Puritans more than the official church’s contented drift towards replacing the veneration of Catholic symbols with royalist and nationalist ones.

A jingle began to circulate. If:

Henry the 8 pulled down abbeys and cells,

Henry the 9 will pull down Bishops and bells.

Treasonous in its inference of the death of King James, this piece of Puritan doggerel anticipated the rule of Henry IX to be very different to that envisioned by his parents – closer perhaps to the brutal iconoclast phase of Henry VIII’s reign. How far this reflected who Henry really was, was impossible to see at his young age. He absorbed input from all sides.

For now, the daily life of Henry’s household established it as an extension of the king’s court, illustrating its policies, exploring its possibilities. But beyond that, Nonsuch already contained the potential to be what a Prince of Wales’s household so often is – an alternative source of power.

To give Henry some experience in the business of war and foreign affairs – and after his small ship proved such a hit – James assigned apartments at Nonsuch to the Earl of Nottingham. Lord High Admiral from 1585 to 1619, including the whole period of the Spanish Armada war, Nottingham possessed a breadth of court, government and military experience few others could boast. In 1604 he had just returned from leading a huge delegation to Madrid to negotiate a peace treaty to end the war. Nottingham was available to mentor Henry, informally, about diplomacy, his future navy, or anything else that came up touching on the business of being a king.

The navy was a private fleet, maintained by the monarch out of his own income. After taking ownership of the Disdain, Henry questioned Nottingham exhaustively on the building and equipping of ships; the comparison of the royal navy with the great fleets of the privateers; how he would fight and win sea battles like the Cádiz raid and the Armada; how he would avoid defeat; how the navy could be used to defend merchant shipping against attack; how he might mount expeditions to discover new lands and claim them for England and himself, and enrich his people.

Nottingham wrote that the prince and his friends went ‘a fishing at my house in Carshalton’, near Nonsuch, and also ‘hunted afterwards in Beddington Park’. But the Lord High Admiral soon begged for release from his service, ‘weary with waiting on the Prince’. He had run his long race at court, and perhaps wanted to step back a bit.

Henry soon wanted his own shipwright, and swore Phineas Pett, builder of the Disdain, into his service. Corrupt in his handling of naval supplies, like so many royal naval personnel, few thought that Pett would stop his extensive appropriation of building materials for his private use now he entered royal service, especially now he had far greater scope to abuse his privileges.

In the summer of 1604, Henry sailed downriver from Nonsuch for the most important European event of the year: the signing of the Treaty of London. On 28 August, England and Spain finally agreed peace terms after nearly two decades of warfare. The Spanish had tried to make it a condition of the peace that James withdrew his support from the rebel Dutch. James refused. England still saw itself as a mainstay in European Protestantism.

The Spanish delegation and the royal family attended a special service in the royal chapel at Whitehall. ‘The altar was covered in silver gilt and on it stood the Gospels in English’ – not Latin, the vernacular Bible being the bedrock of Protestantism. ‘After some hymns in praise of peace had been chanted’ – again in English – ‘Secretary Cecil handed a copy of the treaty to the Constable and read aloud the oath by which both the King and Prince bound themselves to the observation of the terms … the King and Prince meanwhile laying their hands on the Gospels.’

Death so often mocked the best intentions in a second of haemorrhage, clot, or bacterial invasion. Spain needed to look beyond James and know the future Henry IX bound himself to honour this peace. The Constable of Castile, chief Spanish negotiator, asked for an audience with the prince. Henry consented.

First the prince danced for him, then he took the constable down into the gardens of St James’s Palace. There he practised at push of pike and rode for him, giving the constable a first feel for what problems or possibilities England might breed up in the years to come. Henry was precociously poised, ‘with a most gracious smile’ but ‘a terrible frown’. His staff thought their prince never ‘tossed his pike better than in presence of his Majesty and great Ambassadors’. The constable gave Henry a beautifully caparisoned pony, and advised Madrid to keep open nascent negotiations for a marriage contract between Prince Henry and the Spanish infanta. If nothing else, it would make Anglo-French and Anglo-Dutch relations less cordial. Both of those countries were already irritated by the peace agreement.

At the feast to celebrate the treaty, Spain and England proposed toasts and exchanged gifts so excessive the Venetian ambassador felt ill at the scale of it all. ‘Taxis [a Spanish minister] is making presents every day and one hears of nothing else just now,’ Niccolo Molino complained. ‘It is said that he has spent upwards of two hundred thousand crowns in jewels, and that money has been given as well. The Spaniards are lauded to the skies; for in fact this is a country where only those that are lavish are held in account,’ he said. ‘Since my arrival in this court ten months ago, I have heard of nothing so often as presents.’ The bribe and bonus culture thrived in a glut of sweeteners. ‘Great nobles and members of the Privy Council make [no] … scruple about accepting them, and scoff at those who hold a different view.’ Only fools entered politics without believing it would make their fortune. Public service and self-service walked hand in hand. James returned the extravagant gift-giving. Power had to be seen to be power.