Henry: Virtuous Prince. David Starkey

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      Henry continued his solo display by riding along Fleet Street, through Temple Bar, the gateway which marked the limit of the City boundaries, into The Strand and King Street before crossing the large open space of New Palace Yard to reach Westminster. It was here, in this supreme theatre of royal ceremony, that his brother Arthur had been created prince of Wales and his sister Margaret christened. Now it was Henry’s turn.

      First came his introduction to the ceremonies of the court. At dinner on 30 October Henry, together with the most important of those who were to be knighted with him, performed the honorific services for the king at table. One ‘took the assay’ or tasted the king’s food; a second carried his soup; then, when the meal was done and the king was ready to wash his hands, a third bore the water and a fourth the basin. Finally, Henry gave his father the towel on which to dry himself.

      By a happy coincidence, this was both the most honourable and the lightest task. Even so, he must have practised hard during the preceding weeks at Eltham: to hold the elaborately folded linen on his arm, to bow, to proffer it, to receive it again, to back away from the royal presence – and to do it all in the right order and with due decorum.

      This moment in the king’s chamber at Westminster was, of course, only the start of Henry’s training in protocol. But he was a fast learner, and soon knew the rules as well as any gentleman usher. On the other hand – unlike many princes – he never became their victim.

      Etiquette, he thought, existed for him; not he for etiquette.

      As the short, early-winter day drew to an end and night fell, it was time for the rituals proper of Henry’s knighthood to begin. First came the eponymous ceremony of the bath. Twenty-three baths, one for each postulant knight, together with their adjacent beds, had been set up in and around the Parliament Chamber. Henry was undressed and placed in his bath, which consisted of a barrel-like wooden tub, lined and draped with fine linen. Then the earl of Oxford as lord great chamberlain ‘read the advertisement’ or formal admonition of knighthood to him: be strong in the faith of Holy Church; protect all widows and oppressed maidens; and, ‘above all earthly things love the king thy sovereign lord and his right defend unto thy power’.

      When Oxford had finished reading the solemn text, Henry’s father dipped his hand in the water, made a sign of the cross on his son’s shoulder and kissed it. It was a second, and perhaps higher baptism.

      The same ritual was repeated with the other postulant knights. Meanwhile, Henry had been lifted from his bath into his bed and there dried. Then he was dressed in a rough hermit’s gown, and accompanied by his twenty-two companions in similar attire, led in procession to St Stephen’s Chapel on the east or river side of the palace. There, amidst its marble columns, gilded carving and superbly painted walls, Henry and the rest kept vigil till the small hours, before confessing, receiving absolution and hearing mass. They then returned to their beds and slept till daybreak.

      When Henry was roused, he found Oxford, two earls and the lord treasurer by his bed. They proffered him his clothes and helped him dress, as they did with his companions. The knights-to-be then made their way through the private passages on the east side of the palace to New Palace Yard.

      There the postulants, headed as always by Henry, took horse and rode across the yard into Westminster Hall. The hall still stands much as Henry saw it. Its vast interior is like the apotheosis of the railway station. Compared to it, the hall at Eltham must have seemed as small as his own chamber. At the foot of the dais, he dismounted. Clearly he found riding easier than walking, especially when encumbered with elaborate robes, for, with the lesser or White Hall still to traverse, he was carried by Sir William Sandys into the king’s presence. At Henry VII’s command, the duke of Buckingham put on his son’s right spur and the marquess of Dorset his left. The king himself girded him with the sword and dubbed him knight ‘in manner accustomed’.

      Then he picked him up ‘and set him upon the table’. Was it fatherly pride? Or only a determination that everybody could see?

      What, if anything, did the three-and-a-half-year-old Henry understand of all this, let alone remember? The higher symbolism – of physical cleansing, spiritual purification, sleep and awakening as a (re) new (ed) man – would have been beyond him, as indeed it was probably beyond most of his adult fellow-postulants as well. Perhaps instead the event lingered in his memory as a series of intense sensory experiences: cold and heat; wetting and being towelled dry; the scratchy fabric of his hermit’s gown; the mysterious gloom of the chapel in the small hours and the weariness of staying up later than he’d ever done before; and, in the morning, the exhilaration of showing, once more, that he could ride all by himself.

      Or maybe there was more. Maybe he even understood, more or less, what was going on. For in fact he had heard it all before, so many times, in the tales told by his nurse, his lady mistress and his women: of knights, of oaths, of maidens in distress, of vigils, watches, disguises and transformations; of hermits, monsters and kings. It was the world of romance and chivalry that he had inhabited already in his imagination and dreams. Now he was part of it indeed.

      He was a knight! He had sworn the oath. Kept vigil in the church. Ridden the horse. Been touched by the sword. He was a knight! He would be athlete, hero, icon.

      He was a knight!

      The next day was 1 November, All Hallows’ Day, and the day of high festival which had been chosen for Henry’s creation as duke of York. After hearing matins, the king came robed and crowned into the Parliament Chamber and took up his position on the dais under the cloth of estate. He was surrounded by the lords spiritual, headed by John Morton, the cardinal-archbishop of Canterbury, and the lords temporal, including two dukes, four earls, and ‘the substance of all the barons of this realm’. The assembled dignitaries also included the judges, the master of the rolls, the lord mayor and aldermen of London and a ‘great press’ of knights and esquires.

      The place and the personnel (apart from the representatives of the City) were the same as for a parliament; the author of the ‘Black Book of the Garter’, a near contemporary, even mistook it for one,12

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