The Prince Who Would Be King: The Life and Death of Henry Stuart

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

‘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.