A Journey Through Tudor England by Suzannah Lipscomb Read Free Book Online Page A

London and was bathed in a wooden tub in order to be dubbed a Knight of the Bath the following day.
    Throughout his childhood at Eltham, Henry was often separated from his father, who had his hands full dealing with the threat posed by pretenders to his throne. He also lived almost entirely apart from his elder brother, who had been given a separate establishment at Farnham and was then shipped off to Ludlow at the age of six. Henry was left with his mother, Elizabeth, his two surviving sisters, Margaret and Mary, and the overbearing figure of his grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort.
    Into this female world came the poet John Skelton, who was Henry’s tutor from the mid-1490s to 1502. Under his influence, Henry became an accomplished musician and linguist. He learnt to play the lute, virginals and organ, to sing well, and to speak and write a number of languages, including Latin. When the renowned humanist Desiderius Erasmus visited the young Duke of York with Thomas More in 1499 [see L INCOLN ’ S I NN ], he was so impressed that he later noted ‘when the King was no more than a child … he had a vivid and active mind, above measure to execute whatever tasks he undertook’. ‘You would say,’ he added, ‘that he was a universal genius.’ Skelton also entrusted Henry with a dedicated book of advice, Speculum Principis , or The Mirror of Princes , in which he exhorted him to ‘pick a wife for yourself and love but her alone’ — advice that Henry imperfectly followed on a total of six occasions.
    In these seminal years of education and female affection, Henry would have walked under the spectacular oak hammer-beam ceiling of Eltham’s Great Hall, erected by Edward IV and still there today. In Henry VIII’s youth, it would have been partly gilded and we know it had an impact on the young Henry, because he recreated it at his pleasure palace of Hampton Court thirty years later. He would also have known the medieval stone bay windows in the Great Hall, but little else would have been exactly as it is now. The timber screen at the dais end with the carved beasts is a good guess — it is based on a fifteenth-century rood screen — but it was added by the architects John Seely and Paul Paget in the 1930s, while the stained glass in the windows dates from 1936.
    Henry’s world changed when he was ten years old. In the first of several losses, his brother Arthur died before Henry turned eleven. Less than a year later, his mother died on 11 February 1503, on her thirty-seventh birthday and, four months after that, his elder sister, Margaret, moved to Edinburgh to marry James IV. Henry never saw her again. In the place of relatives came further titles — Duke of Cornwall, Prince of Wales, Earl of Chester.
    The spate of deaths in the family — including five infant mortalities — in so short a time also rocked Henry’s father. He responded by sheltering his remaining son from danger. Unlike Arthur, who had been sent to the Welsh Marches (the part of England bordering Wales) as a training for kingship, Henry was to receive no such apprenticeship. In early 1508, a Spanish envoy called Gutierre Gomez de Fuensalida visited England and reported that ‘the Prince of Wales was kept under such strict supervision that he might have been a young girl’ and was ‘so subjected that he does not speak a word except in response to what the King asks him’. It is not wild to speculate about a link between his sheltered and repressed childhood and his extravagant adulthood, or the excessive masculinityhe displayed as a grown man compared with his upbringing ‘like a young girl’.
    Henry continued to prize Eltham as a young man, extending and remodelling the palace during 1519—22. It was at Eltham that Cardinal Thomas Wolsey formulated a famous set of rules to regulate the royal household and court in 1526: the Eltham Ordinances. But Henry VIII was the last monarch to spend any considerable time at the palace, drawn back, no