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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ