Henry: Virtuous Prince. David Starkey

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       INFANCY

      IMMEDIATELY AFTER HIS BIRTH AND CHRISTENING, Henry, like his elder siblings and indeed almost all elite children from the dawn of time to the beginning of the twentieth century, was handed over to be suckled by his wet-nurse. Her name was Anne Uxbridge, and for the first two years or so of his life she was the person closest to Henry. She would have acted as his surrogate mother emotionally as well as physically, and his very survival depended on her good health and assiduity.

Unfortunately, despite her importance to Henry, almost nothing is known about her. We are even ignorant of her maiden name. She had married into a family of minor Sussex gentry, and within a few years would be widowed and remarried to Walter Luke. Assisting Anne were Henry’s two ‘rockers’, Margaret Draughton and Frideswide Puttenham. Theirs was a merely menial duty, and they were paid only a third as much as Anne Uxbridge: £3.6s.8d a year as against £10 for Henry’s nurse.1

      But, menial or not, at least one of them was to remain around long enough to become a fixture in Henry’s boyhood and youth.

These staffing arrangements were more or less identical to those for Henry’s elder siblings, Arthur and Margaret. And much the same physical provisions would have been made for Henry as well. These are described in great detail in The Ryalle Book.2 The royal child was to have a nursery apartment consisting of two main interconnecting rooms – an inner or sleeping chamber and an outer or receiving chamber – and smaller service rooms. Dominating both principal chambers were Henry’s cradles, known respectively as the ‘great’ and ‘little’ cradles.

      The ‘little cradle’ stood in the inner or sleeping chamber of Henry’s two-room apartment. It was made of painted and gilded wood, and was just under four feet long. There were four silver-gilt pommels, one at each corner, and two similar pommels on top of the U-shaped frame in which the body of the cradle swung. The bedding consisted of a mattress, sheets, pillows and a rich counterpane of cloth-of-gold furred with ermine. Sensibly, two sets of each were provided. There were also five ‘swathing’ bands, each with its silver buckle, to hold the child in place and, it was thought, encourage him to grow straight and strong. Over the cradle hung a ‘sparver’ or canopy, while a traverse, or curtain, could be drawn round it.

      And that was the little cradle! The ‘great cradle of estate’, which stood in the outer or receiving chamber, more than lived up to its name. It was a third larger than the other, and covered in cloth-of-gold: the royal arms were placed at its head, rich carpets surrounded it on the floor and its cloth-of-gold canopy was fringed in silk and suspended from a silver-gilt boss.

      These features – the cloth-of-gold, canopy and carpets – were the essential elements of the chair of estate, or throne, which stood in the Presence Chamber of Henry’s father and mother. Even when empty, etiquette dictated that the chair be treated with the same respect as though the sovereign or consort sat in it. The same went for Henry’s cradle of estate: gentlemen doffed their hats and bowed; ladies curtsied. And when Henry lay there the bows and curtsies would have been extra deep. Henry might not have been born to a throne. But he was swaddled in the infant equivalent of one.

The equipment of the smaller service rooms of the nursery apartment was more practical, and took account of the fact that the occupant of the nursery was a baby as well as a prince, with the mundane need of all babies for washing, bathing and feeding. There were ‘two great basins of pewter for the laundry in the nursery’, a ‘chafer’ (to heat water) and a brass basin in which to wash the child, and a liquid-and stain-proof ‘cushion of leather, made like a carving cushion, for the nurse’, on which Anne Uxbridge sat while breast-feeding Henry.3

      Such an infancy – with its wet-nurse and rockers, its cloth-of-gold and ermine, its rituals and deference – seems almost impossibly strange. But then it was par for the royal course: it was neither peculiar to Henry, nor can it have contributed much to what would make him distinctive.

      For that we need to look elsewhere, to aspects of Henry’s upbringing that were less bound by rules and conventions. Should he, for instance, be brought up with his elder brother? Or his sister? The choice was a real one, since separate establishments already existed for the two older children.

Arthur, as we have seen, had had his own independent princely household from the earliest days of his infancy. For the first two years or more of his life, it had been based at the bishop of Winchester’s castle-palace at Farnham, Surrey. A year or two later, by the time of Arthur’s creation as prince of Wales, it seems to have moved a score or two miles east and to have been situated in or near Ashford in Kent.4

Even less is known about the location of Margaret’s much smaller nursery establishment. But it seems a safe bet that it moved from palace to palace with her mother, Elizabeth of York, who normally followed a much less hectic itinerary than her husband, the king. This meant that Margaret was living at Greenwich at the time of her little brother Henry’s birth elsewhere in the palace. As she was only eighteen months old herself, she still had her wet-nurse, Alice Davy, as well as her rockers, Ann Mayland, Margery Gower and Alice Bywymble.5

At some point in the latter half of 1491, Margaret was weaned and her nurse, Alice Davy, paid off. This still left her with her three rockers, who were duly paid their half-year wages of £1.13s.4d on 31 December. But the ‘warrant’, or instruction to pay their wages, also lists Henry’s own nursery establishment, headed by Nurse Uxbridge. A similar joint warrant for both Henry and Margaret’s servants was issued a half-year later, in July 1492.6