CHAPTER TWO
‘I shall, during my life, while I am here, pray to Almighty God that … [the] most noble imp,1 the prince’s grace, your most dear son, may succeed you to reign long, prosperously and felicitously to God’s pleasure …’
LETTER FROM THOMAS CROMWELL, IMPRISONED IN THE TOWER OF LONDON, TO HENRY VIII, 30 JUNE 1540.2
In 1542, one of Prince Edward’s doctors told the inquisitive French ambassador Marillac that he could not predict a long life for the four-year-old ‘fat’ and ‘unhealthy’ heir to the English crown.3 Such remarks have helped to create a persistent tradition that the child was weak, sickly and prone to constant infection. If any sickness was in the offing, it was believed that Edward would catch it.4 In reality, this seems far from the truth: only seven months before, the same diplomat had reported Edward to be ‘handsome, well-nourished and remarkably tall for his age’5 and from the end of October 1541, the prince was recovering from a quartan fever6 – suffering high temperatures every fourth day – far more quickly than his elder half-sister Mary.7 Edward became an active youth, enthusiastically hunting, jousting, playing tennis and regularly trying his hand at archery.
However, his fever of 1541 – by any reckoning dangerous to a child of tender years – came at a terrible time for the ageing king, struggling as he was to contain his shock and grief over the allegations of promiscuity and, afterwards, reckless adultery committed by his queen, Katherine Howard. Was the heir to both the crown and the future of the Tudor dynasty now also threatened? Henry, in those terrible weeks, must have thought his once ordered, secure world was tumbling all around him. All the uncertainties of both past and future had returned to haunt the king’s waking hours. For ten days or so, the prince’s life may have been in danger, and Henry desperately consulted a number of doctors regarding suitable cures.8 But to the relief of the king and his physicians, Edward recovered and grew strongly into a slim, confident, attractive child, adorned with blond hair and the waiflike facial features of his mother, Jane Seymour.
His birth on 12 October 1537 was marked by salutes fired from cannon along the battlements of the Tower of London: more than 2,000 rounds boomed out in ‘a great peal of guns’ to mark the jubilation of the capital and ‘the rejoicing of all Englishmen’ in the arrival of the long-sought male heir. All the parish churches within the city walls celebrated a Te Deum and their bells rang out in celebration until late into the evening. The citizens rejoiced in more secular style with celebratory bonfires in the streets and the consumption of large quantities of fruit and wine.9
The child’s christening, at midnight on Sunday 15 October 1537, was a spectacular affair staged in the Chapel Royal at Hampton Court. Gertrude Courtenay, Marchioness of Exeter,10 carefully carried the infant on a cushion from his own lodgings in the palace, beneath a canopy of cloth of gold, in a winding procession through the echoing council chamber, the great hall and thence into the recently (and expensively) refurbished chapel. Henry’s complex preparations for the ceremony were made with one eye on practicality, the other on the all-important pomp and circumstance of the occasion.11 Within the chapel, a silver-gilt font was elevated on a stepped dais within a screened area, with a temporary side-room to the south heated by a brazier filled with perfumed [char]coals ‘for making ready the Prince [for] the christening’. Silver basins held warm water to ‘wash the Prince if need be’.12 Favoured courtiers Sir John Russell, Sir Francis Bryan, Sir Nicholas Carew and Sir Anthony Browne, prosaically wearing aprons and carrying towels, took charge of the font. Edward’s nurse and the midwife who had delivered him after Queen Jane’s drawn-out confinement were also close by, ready to provide instant assistance if necessary.
Archbishop Cranmer christened the prince, who was wrapped in a richly embroidered white ‘chrisom’ or robe.13 Henry’s choice of Christian name was highly symbolic: the child was named Edward after his maternal great-grandfather, King Edward IV, and also because his birth came on the eve of the feast of St Edward the Confessor, England’s own royal saint of special pious and sacred memory. At the moment of naming, the torches of virgin wax carried by all the esquires, gentlemen and knights amongst the 400-strong congregation14 standing packed in the chapel were simultaneously lit. Garter King at Arms, the chief herald, then proclaimed in a loud voice:
God, of his infinite grace and goodness, give and grant good life and long to the right high, excellent and noble prince, Prince Edward, duke of Cornwall and earl of Chester, most dear and most entirely beloved son to our most dread and gracious lord, King Henry VIII.15
Then twenty-four of the king’s trumpeters sounded a strident fanfare that echoed around the fan-vaulted ceiling of oak timbers, completed the previous year and now resplendent with bright blue paint and gleaming gold leaf.
As usual on such occasions, the proud parents did not attend. Cranmer and the Duke of Norfolk were godfathers, and Princess Mary the godmother. It must have been a galling experience for Mary, as the tiny child had now quashed her hopes of being heir to the throne of England. If it did, she showed no sign of such jealous thoughts: the cup of gold16 she had given as a baptism present was carried out of the chapel by the Earl of Essex as the first of the gifts lavished on the young prince by the fawning royal household. Her half-sister, the four-year-old Princess Elizabeth, was also present, carried by the Viscount Beauchamp, assisted by Lord Morley ‘on account of her tender age’.17
The prince was immediately confirmed as a full member of the Church of England, with Henry’s old friend and sparring partner at the jousting lists, Charles Brandon,18 First Duke of Suffolk, as his godfather.
Edward was afterwards taken triumphantly to his mother’s apartments in the palace where his parents were waiting to give him their fond and grateful blessing. A proud Queen Jane, smiling wanly after her long ordeal, was propped up in bed, wearing a splendid mantle of crimson velvet and ermine.19 Henry took the child up in his arms and blessed him loudly and fervently, invoking the names of Mary, the Blessed Mother of Christ, and St George, the patron saint of England. His mind must have recalled the tragic loss of Prince Henry, after just fifty-two days of life, way back in 1511, and Anne Boleyn’s repeated failures to bear him a son, for emotion suddenly overwhelmed him. The king wept unashamedly with joy as he tenderly held the little prince: at long last, here was a legitimate and incontestable heir to inherit a firmly Tudor England. The queen’s own proud announcement of the birth, in circular letters to the great and good, had earlier emphasized the legality of the joyous event: ‘[Jane the Queen] be delivered and brought in childbed of a prince conceived in most lawful matrimony between my lord the king’s majesty and us.’20
All that marital pain, all those hard travails and bitter disappointments of Henry’s past were now swept away as the tyrant cooed and burbled incongruously over the baby in his arms.21 No doubt the ingratiating guests, all their thoughts unconsciously mirroring those of the king, spontaneously burst into applause. All too quickly, the prince’s nurses reclaimed the child to return him to his own quarters in the north range of the palace’s Chapel Court22 and his canopied cradle in the ‘rocking chamber’. But the merry christening celebrations in the queen’s apartments went on until nearly dawn, with hippocras23 and sweet French wine drunk by the nobility and gentry, whilst they nibbled politely on wafers and bread. To mark the occasion, the king knighted six courtiers, including Thomas Seymour, who was raised to membership of Henry’s Privy Chamber, Thomas Wyatt and William Parr, son of a former Comptroller of the Royal Household.24 The ragged poor, crowding in front of the barred gates of Hampton Court, were not forgotten: Henry ordered generous alms in cash – ‘great largesse’, the heralds called it – to be distributed to those waiting outside in the cold October night.
Twelve days later the queen was dead. Her end came swiftly. Sir John Russell wrote to Cromwell on 24 October: ‘She was in great danger last night and today but if she sleeps tonight, the physicians hope that she is past danger.’25 Alas, their optimism was ill-founded. Norfolk, at eight o’clock that night, sent a letter post-haste by mounted courier, again to Cromwell at Westminster, urging him to be at Hampton Court early the next morning ‘to comfort our good master, for as for our mistress, there is no likelihood of her life, the more pity, and I fear she shall not be alive at the time you shall read this’.26 Cromwell claimed later that Jane had died because of ‘the neglect of them that were about her, who suffered her to take great cold and to eat such things that her fantasy in sickness called for’,27 but the reported symptoms and the lack of medical hygiene in the sixteenth century leave little doubt as to the real cause or major factor in her death.
The king of France had quickly written to congratulate his brother England on the birth of a son. A stunned Henry, now a sudden and unexpected widower, sadly replied:
Divine Providence has mingled my joy with the bitterness of death of her who has brought me this happiness.28
Norfolk, talking to the grief-stricken king on 3 November (‘not wisely, yet plainly’), exhorted him ‘to accept God’s pleasure in taking the queen and to comfort himself with the treasure sent to him and his realm, namely the prince’. Recounting the conversation the next day in a letter to Cromwell, the duke said he had urged Henry ‘to provide for another wife’ – advice that carried, unspoken, the need to sire a Duke of York. Graspingly, charmlessly and with a tactless sense of timing, he also tried to manipulate the king into agreeing to share out the lucrative spoils of the dissolved priory of St Pancras at Lewes, Sussex, between himself and Cromwell: ‘I was content [Cromwell] should have two parts,’ Norfolk told the king. Henry distractedly replied, ‘As you showed unto to me’ – a sign, Norfolk believed, that the king thought the property ‘well bestowed’.29
Henry’s main concern now was that the future security of the Tudor royal dynasty had to be protected from both his enemies and that equally deadly adversary, disease. As ‘God has the devil repugnant to Him and Christ hath Antichrist’,30 so there might be more threats, real or intangible, to the heir to the throne. Were there not reports circulating of evil-doers, practitioners in witchcraft, using a ‘wax child’ or dummy of the baby prince as a means of harming him? Under interrogation, one Richard Guercey confessed that he had spoken, in the kitchen of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, of information given to him by a man called Osmond – ‘one of Peckwater’s Inn’ – that there was
a wax image found in London way with a knife sticking through his head or his heart, representing the prince, and as that did consume, so likewise the prince.31
Edward spent some of the early weeks of his life at Hampton Court before being moved on to another of Henry’s houses, Havering-atte-Bower in Essex. Henry had begun construction work at Hampton Court in May 1537, preparing confidently for a male heir. These extensions included the provision of a new ‘jakes’ or lavatory, a kitchen and a washing house.32 With an eye to the necessities and trappings of the child’s regal future, a small chamber of presence was created, approached by a processional staircase.33 A household for the infant prince was set up in March 1538, led by Sir William Sidney as chamberlain, who was instructed to witness the child’s daily bath and supervise the preparation of his meals in a dedicated kitchen. All food was carefully tasted before royal consumption in case of contamination by an assassin’s poison.
The king issued strict instructions concerning the domestic arrangements for the prince – the ‘whole realm’s most precious jewel’ – to Sidney and Sir John Cornwallis, steward.34 They should ensure ‘that all dangers and adversaries of malicious persons and casual harm shall be vigilantly foreseen and avoided’. Irrespective of rank, no one was allowed to approach the infant’s cradle or to touch the prince (and this limited to only kissing his hands when it was permitted) without a written permit from the king. No pages were employed near the prince, as youths were regarded as frivolous, clumsy and forgetful of their duties.35 Members of the household were also forbidden from entering London during the dangerous hot summer months when the plague was rife in the capital. If one fell sick, they had immediately to quit the precincts of the prince’s establishment. Three times a day, the passages and rooms in the apartments had to be scrubbed with soap to ward off infection. In the same vein, the serjeant porters regularly drove the poor from the gates of wherever the prince was lodged, for fear that they harboured disease. ‘If any beggar shall presume to draw near the gates, then they shall be … grievously punished, to the example of others’, the king’s ordinance laid down. Every want and need of the child was considered and catered for: Joan Mewtes, one of his nurses, was paid out of the king’s household accounts for ‘a dozen handkerchiefs garnished [embroidered] with gold’ at ten shillings each in 1540 and again the following year.36
On 8 September 1538, some members of the Privy Council were granted Henry’s special licence to see the infant prince at Havering for the first time. Sir Thomas Audley, writing to Cromwell, the sycophancy almost oozing off the vellum, enthusiastically reported that he had never seen
so goodly a child of his age. So merry, so pleasant, so good and loving [of ] countenance and [with] so earnest an eye as it were a sage judgement towards any person that repaireth [approaches] to his grace.
The eleven-month-old child, said the Lord Chancellor,
has shot out in length and waxes firm and stiff and can steadfastly stand and would advance himself to move and go if they would suffer [let] him … But … they do best, considering his grace is yet tender, that he should not strain himself, as his own courage would serve him, till he come above a year of age.
I am right glad to hear the king’s majesty will remove him from Havering against winter time: it is a cold house in winter, though in summer, it [has] a good air.37
At the end of November, Lady Honor Lisle, the formidable wife of Arthur Plantagenet – the illegitimate son of Edward IV who was now the Captain of Calais – was allowed to see the child. She, too, was enthusiastic in a letter to her husband:
I have seen my lord prince who is the goodliest babe that ever I set mine eyes upon. I pray God make him an old man, for I should never be weary of looking on him.38
The household became peripatetic, moving from one royal residence to another in search of fresh country air and to avoid any epidemics: from Havering to Hunsdon in Hertfordshire, thence to Ashridge in the same county. Costs of the prince’s household for the first twelve months amounted to £6,500, or £2,920,000 in 2004 monetary values,39 according to bills submitted by Richard Cotton, comptroller; a huge sum, despite the king’s penny-pinching as he urged the household to avoid ‘superfluous charges or waste’ and operate at ‘the least charges’. (Despite this, the prince had his own troupe of players, or actors, who were paid £4 for performing before the king at Christmas 1538.)
‘Mistress Jak’ was appointed Edward’s wet nurse and the infant was reported to be sucking well, ‘like a child of his puissance’,40 before her departure from this most intimate of services in October 1538. There were also four rockers of the cradle, two of them named as Jane Russell and Bridget Forster.41 Margaret, Lady Bryan, who was a member of Princess Elizabeth’s household, was created ‘lady mistress’ of the prince’s establishment, and she reported to Cromwell in 1538 that Edward was ‘in good health and merry. His grace has four teeth and three full out and the fourth approaching.’42 Henry was a frequent visitor, checking on his son’s health and progress. In May of 1538, the king set aside a day to spend with his longed-for heir at a hunting lodge at Roydon, Hertfordshire, ‘and there solaced all the day with much mirth and joy, dallying with him in his arms a long space and so holding him in a window to the sight and great comfort of all the people’.43 No doubt they were kept at a safe distance.
New Year’s gifts to the prince throw some light on the tastes of the dysfunctional Tudor family and their immediate courtiers. On 1 January 1538, Henry’s splendid presents included a gilt basin (forty ounces in weight) with a design of a Tudor rose in the bottom, a gilt ewer and a standing cup and cover of antique design with the figure of a man on the top. Princess Mary gave a coat of crimson satin, embroidered with gold, and Elizabeth, with a nice touch of girlish domesticity, ‘a shirt of cambric of her own making’. Amongst the household’s presents of gold and silver-gilt cups, salts, bowls and pots, Henry Bourchier, Second Earl of Essex, more realistically offered a ‘bell of gold with a whistle’, noted by Edward’s careful accountants as weighing 1¼ ounces.44 He also very practically gave two oxen and twenty mutton sheep as provisions for the prince’s kitchen. The Earl of Southampton, for his part, gave a bonnet in black velvet, adorned with a white feather and a gold brooch.
The young prince spent his early years almost constantly in the company of deferential governesses and nurses, firstly Lady Bryan and Sybil Penn,45 sister-in-law of Sir William Sidney, who was appointed in October 1539 as Mistress Jak retired. The child was brought up, his own chronicle recorded later, ‘until he came to six years old among the women’.46 Their constant fussing attention may well have instilled into his character a priggishness and a perhaps understandable insistence on always having his own way. Despite the fawning reports of his appearance and character, he sometimes behaved badly, like any other child. Bishop Gardiner related an incident sometime before 1540 when the infant became tearful during a visit by ambassadors from Protestant Saxony and Hesse. Despite all efforts by Lady Bryan and his nurse in ‘cheering … and flattering’, Edward ‘ever cried and turned away his face’ and comical face-pulling by the Earl of Essex was required to stem the flow of royal tears. The earl put his ‘great beard’ near Edward’s face, tickled him and made him laugh.47 The conservative Gardiner stuffily believed that the tantrum was a sure sign of the child’s godliness because he was shunning the Protestant envoys.
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 sege49 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 Easter59 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.
Your most obedient son, Edward the Prince.75
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
Now a mystery emerges from the dark recesses of the royal court: the lasting enigma of ‘a child named Ralfe Lyons, that was given to Henry’ in 1546.78 The wording is quite clear: ‘given to our late sovereign lord Henry the eight’ is pointedly repeated on each of four pages of accounts for the last year of the king’s reign and for 1547–8, the first year of Edward’s. In twenty-first-century understanding, ‘given’ clearly implies offered up for adoption or fostering, but this interpretation seems unlikely in mid-Tudor England, although something very unusual had obviously happened to justify the constant use of this tantalising phrase and to warrant maintaining separate accounts for him. Certainly, special care was lavished on the child for the two years that the Privy Purse was responsible for his upkeep. Ralfe Lyons was sent to be taught by Robert Phillips at the Chapel Royal, based since 1533 at St James’s Palace, across the fields from the Palace of Westminster. Payments were made for new clothes – 5s 4d for a doublet, 8d for a purse in 1546 – and for board and wages within the allowances. History is silent on how young Ralfe came to be cared for so well, why he was singled out for this generous attention and what eventually happened to him. Was he the son of a favoured junior member of the royal household whose parents had both died, leaving him an orphan? Can one detect in this the kind, caring hand of Katherine Parr? Given the king’s medical condition and reduced sexual capacity, the child was unlikely to be another royal bastard. Alternatively, was he merely a boy chorister with a fabulous singing voice who was sequestered from another institution, as it is known that efforts were made to employ the best singers for the Chapel Royal?79 The answer maddeningly remains a mystery.
Within the royal family, one particular issue had to be overcome before Katherine’s long-desired normalisation of relations could be achieved. This was Henry’s suspicion regarding Princess Elizabeth and her own distrust of her father after the numerous unsuccessful attempts to marry her off for diplomatic or political ends. By 1545, she was an articulate twelve-year-old well-educated girl who had copious quantities of the low cunning that was an integral part of the Tudor genes. Part of her rehabilitation into family life came with the restoration of both princesses into the line of succession to the crown after Edward and his heirs, enshrined in an Act passed by Parliament in 1544.80 It is not difficult to see Katherine’s quietly manipulative hand in this decision by Henry to legitimise his daughters in the eyes of the law, an action that irrevocably bound both princesses to her patronage and affection.
In July 1544, Henry went to war in France for the last time, appointing Katherine as regent of England. He also changed the structure of Edward’s household, appointing Cox to be almoner and Cheke as a deputy ‘both for the better instruction of the prince and the diligent teaching of such children as be appointed to attend upon them’.81 Edward moved to Hampton Court for greater security, apparently with the two princesses, as on 25 July Katherine wrote from that palace to Henry: ‘My lord prince and the rest of your Majesty’s children are all (thanks be to God) in very good health.’
Elizabeth, who apparently departed soon after, ruefully sent a letter to Katherine on 31 July from St James’s Palace, complaining at her separation from her stepmother:
Envious fortune for a whole year deprived me of your presence and not content therewith has again despoiled me of that benefit.
The princess, however, knew she had Katherine’s love, whom, she heard, had not forgotten her in her letters to the king, campaigning in France.82
Katherine, firmly rooted in modern humanist thinking, was not quite so close to the staunchly Catholic Princess Mary, although she showered gifts upon her and encouraged her to translate into English Erasmus’ Paraphrase of the Gospel of St John.83 The queen also persuaded Elizabeth to translate from the French Queen Marguerite of Navarre’s devotional poem The Mirror or Glass of the Sinful Soul, happily delivered by Elizabeth to Katherine as a New Year’s gift on 31 December 1544,84 and Erasmus’ Dialogues Fidei.
Katherine herself also produced religious books – Prayers Stirring the Mind unto Heavenly Meditations, which became something of a best seller after it was first published in 1545,85 and Lamentations of a Sinner, copies of which were circulating in Henry’s court by November 154586 but which, significantly, only appeared in print after his death in 1547, portraying the king as a Moses who had led England out of the thraldom of Rome. When she was aged twelve, Elizabeth also translated Katherine’s expanded Prayers and Meditations into Latin, French and Italian. This 117-page book, with a crimson silk binding deftly embroidered by Elizabeth herself in gold and silver thread with the initial ‘H’ and a large monogram of the name ‘Katherina’, includes a dedicatory letter to Henry written in Latin and dated ‘Hertford, December 20 1545’.87
Katherine’s interest in religion and her views on its development were reflected in the make-up of her household and those who benefited from her patronage: for example, Thomas Cromwell’s friend Miles Coverdale, who translated the Bible into English; the psalmist Thomas Sternhold; and Nicholas Udall, the ‘thrashing’88 headmaster of Eton, who took part in the translation of Erasmus’ Paraphrases of the Gospels89 with Princess Mary.
Although she loved dancing and fine clothes and jewels, Katherine’s chambers were also a citadel of learning and liberal thought. As a reflection of the religious discussions that constantly went on within her apartments, a Mr Goldsmith who had unsuccessfully sought a position in her household congratulated the queen for her ‘rare goodness [that] has made every day a Sunday, a thing hitherto unheard of, especially in a royal palace’.90 Udall described life in Katherine’s apartments as embracing ‘virtuous exercises, reading and writing and with most earnest study’; she and her ladies ‘early and late, apply themselves to extending [their] knowledge’. The queen’s beliefs and opinions were to lead her into very dangerous waters indeed: the maelstrom caused by the continuing conflict within Henry’s Privy Council over religious reform. It was almost to cost the queen her life.