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‘He was brought up in learning’

In July 1544 the household that had cared for Prince Edward since 1538 was broken up on the orders of his father the king. Henry VIII was off to war, the favourite pastime of any great Renaissance prince. While he was away on campaign in France Queen Katherine Parr, Henry’s sixth and last consort, exercised the powers of a regent. Edward was now six years and eight months old, no longer an infant, and it was time for him to enter the world of men. Sir William Sidney, who had been Edward’s chamberlain for nearly six years, became the prince’s steward. Lord Chancellor Wriothesley and Edward’s uncle the Earl of Hertford dissolved the old household and the prince’s nurses and domestic staff were comfortably pensioned off.

Edward’s education began now in a serious and formal way. He described it in his ‘Chronicle’: ‘At the sixth year of his age he was brought up in learning by Master Doctor Cox, … and John Cheke, Master of Arts, two well-learned men, who sought to bring him up in learning of tongues [languages], of the scripture, of philosophy, and all liberal sciences.’¹

Richard Cox was the older man of the two, in his middle forties, a former scholar and fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, a teacher in Oxford and for a number of years the headmaster of Eton College. He was a man to admire but hardly one obviously to like: a clever and reforming headmaster at Eton, he was also a severe disciplinarian. This was a time when one of the secretaries to Edward as king could say that the ‘rod only was the sword that must keep the school in obedience and the scholar in good order’. These were words that Richard Cox lived and taught by.²

John Cheke celebrated his thirtieth birthday three weeks before the king appointed him to Edward’s household. Strictly he was the junior master whose task it was to ‘supplement’ Dr Cox’s teaching ‘both for the better instruction of the prince, and the diligent teaching of such children as be appointed to attend upon him’. But Cheke was no simple assistant. He was perhaps the most brilliant classical scholar in England. A student and then a fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1540 he was appointed the king’s (or regius) professor of Greek in the university. Cheke lectured on the literature of Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles and Euripides, introducing to Cambridge a revolutionary pronunciation of ancient Greek that supposedly recovered how the language had really been spoken. Cheke irritated the Cambridge old guard and inspired its young men in roughly equal measure. He was a passionate teacher whose pupils adored him. One of those former students, Roger Ascham, wrote in a book he presented to Prince Edward in 1545 how fortunate it was for ‘the commodity and wealth’ of the whole kingdom that Cheke was now Edward’s tutor.³

Prince Edward was set to work on the basics of Latin grammar. It was not unusual for young boys of his age to be taught Latin this early in their lives and at first he had much the same kind of education that other boys received in schools across England. The textbook he used was the standard Latin grammar by William Lily, a book later read by Elizabethan schoolboys like William Shakespeare. One of Edward’s copies of Lily has survived, printed on vellum and bound in crimson silk. More for display in the library than for the classroom, this copy is illuminated with the feathers and the motto of the Prince of Wales, ‘HIC DEN’ for ‘Ich dien’, German for ‘I serve’.⁴

In early December 1544 Dr Cox reported to the king’s secretary, Sir William Paget, that ‘my lord and dear scholar’ was making excellent progress in mastering the parts of grammar set out by William Lily. Edward was also learning to obey his masters. Running through Cox’s letter to Paget is the tiresome metaphor of military campaign. Just as his father had defeated the French, Cox wrote, so Edward had ‘beaten down and conquered’ grammar. Cox’s preference was always for conquest over encouragement; not for nothing was it once said of him that ‘the best schoolmaster of our time was the greatest beater,’ words meant by the man who spoke them – the equally ferocious but brilliant Latinist Walter Haddon, who was once Cox’s pupil at Eton – as a compliment.⁵

Cox sought with his pupils to break ‘an ungracious fellow’ he called Captain Will. He broke down any resistance to learning; it was a matter of pride. As he punned grimly to Paget: ‘and at Will I went and gave him such a wound that he wist not what to do.’ Probably Cox had not actually beaten Edward physically, but he had shown the young prince who was master in the schoolroom. Obedience was the foundation for a strict morality. Cox was explicit here: under his tutelage Edward learned ‘how good it is to give ear unto discipline, to fear God, to keep God’s commandment to beware of strange and wanton women, to be obedient to father and mother, to be thankful to them that telleth him of his faults.’ This was exactly the thought in Edward’s mind eighteen months later when he wrote to Cox: ‘I thank you also for telling me of my fault; for they are my friends who point out to me my errors.’ In 1546 he quoted to Cox two words from the Latin poet Dionysius Cato: ‘magistrum metue’ – ‘Fear [or respect] your teacher’.⁶

John Cheke was a gentler and more encouraging tutor than Cox, and it is difficult to imagine him carrying the birch brandished by schoolmasters and university teachers in every Tudor woodcut of a classroom scene. He was a bright spark of a man who was not afraid to challenge the old establishment, and who had creative and stimulating ideas about language and literature. Of fairly humble birth, Cheke had succeeded by his scholarly brilliance and by his skill as a courtier. His teaching reflected what his devoted pupil Roger Ascham wrote in The Scholemaster: ‘young children were sooner allured by love than driven by beating to attain good learning.’ Here was an idea that to an accomplished veteran of schoolroom beatings like Richard Cox would have been bizarre and even dangerous: at school children learned to obey without question. Yet Prince Edward was different to thousands of young boys of his age being drilled by their schoolmasters in Latin grammar. He was taught to be obedient to his masters – but he was being trained to rule too.⁷

Every day at Mass Edward read from the Old Testament some of King Solomon’s Proverbs, ‘wherein he delighteth much and learneth there how good it is to give ear unto discipline’. Once he had mastered the foundations of grammar he read the famous Latin fables of Aesop and began early in 1545 to learn the ‘distichs’ of Dionysius Cato. These simple couplets were compact pieces of morality that helped Edward with his Latin. Edward quoted one of them to Richard Cox in a letter of 1546: ‘When a poor friend gives you a little present, /accept it kindly, and remember to praise it amply.’⁸

Also in 1545 Edward began to write letters that he copied in his very best handwriting into a copybook. Formal, stuffy and stodgy, they are really exercises in grammar and formal composition. But still they are very interesting, and help us to hear one register of Edward’s voice: respectful, formal, correct and eager to compliment. Edward wrote to the most important people in his life, to his father, to Queen Katherine, to his sisters Mary and Elizabeth, to his godfather Archbishop Cranmer of Canterbury and sometimes to Richard Cox. Edward applied himself to the standards and expectations of his teachers and his family. True, his letters were not masterpieces of self-expression, but he was after all only seven or eight years old. They were instead careful exercises in inculcating and embedding very deeply the values of a culture, and they helped to form him as a person.

The young prince quickly learned how to be royal. He showed respect and deference for his elders. Above and beyond anyone else was Henry VIII, whom he addressed with immense formality: ‘O king most illustrious and most noble father!’ Always there was a sense of obligation and duty, of the place he knew he occupied as Henry’s heir and successor. One of the most telling lines he ever wrote in English was to Queen Katherine: ‘I pray God I may be able in part to satisfy the good expectation of the king’s majesty my father and of your grace.’ These were the heartfelt words of a young boy who perceived already the weight of duty pressing hard upon him.⁹

Edward was introduced to the tricks and vanities of the Renaissance scholar, mocking his own Latin while praising the literary perfections of others. Encouraged by John Cheke he looked for the flourishes of learning. When he received a letter from Queen Katherine which she had written in the elegant roman hand of an accomplished scholar, Edward replied to her with a little story. Cheke, he said, had believed that Queen Katherine’s secretary must have written it for her. But then Cheke had looked at her signature and recognized that the letter was perhaps indeed Katherine’s work. Seven-year-old Edward was likewise ‘much surprised’, praising Katherine for her progress in Latin and good literature, ‘Wherefore I feel no little joy, for letters are lasting; but other things that seem so perish’ – words which, if we take them out of the context of early formal composition done under the supervision of his teacher, make him sound precocious and priggish.¹⁰

Virtue was a watchword of Edward’s letters. Here his tutors stuck fast to values of duty and service that had deep roots in the ancient world, mediated in the early decades of the sixteenth century through the hugely influential scholarship of Erasmus of Rotterdam, who believed that the best kind of prince was virtuous and educated, an enlightened ruler of his people guided by God. And so Edward was raised to believe in the value of knowledge and, for all the wealth and majesty of his father’s monarchy, to prefer wisdom to possessions. Letters were better than treasures, he told Richard Cox. He thought of Cicero, who had said the wise man alone was rich. This was in April 1546, when Edward was half a year away from his ninth birthday. Already he was trying to find his own voice and pen. Another letter he asked Cox to accept as his own composition, the fruit of a prince’s judgement and labour.

At some point in the spring and early summer of 1546 Edward’s portrait was painted. Probably the artist (who may have been Guillim Scrots) did his preliminary work at Hunsdon, for the house can be seen in the picture.

The beautifully dressed and quietly magisterial fourteen-month-old of Holbein’s New Year’s gift to Henry VIII was by now a maturing boy quite as impressive. In the picture Edward is dressed in a superb gown of russet-coloured satin lined with lynx fur and a white satin doublet embroidered with gold. Where the infant held a rattle in his left hand, the boy holds in his right a long dagger. His attitude deliberately evokes the pose of Henry VIII in Holbein’s great mural (since destroyed) of the king and his family that dominated Henry’s presence chamber in Whitehall Palace. This was an image of his father, huge and terrifying, that Edward would have known very well indeed. So the message of the Hunsdon portrait was that here is a prince and a king-in-waiting who would one day take up his father’s great dynastic legacy.

We need to look beyond the picture, to be alert to just how much it tells us about the child behind the image. Edward looks straight at the artist. The boy of eight years has very fair skin, cropped auburn hair and clear grey eyes. He gives little away of his feelings. He appears calm and steady. He is not yet commanding, but there is just the whisper of a set jaw that pushes out his cheeks and forms a line of resolution between his chin and lower lip. In other words, in dress and in attitude he is princelike. And that, of course, was the object of the picture – to capture the authority given to him by his birth and the power of his future kingship. Of the boy we have some first impressions: quietly purposeful, sensitive and alert; developing physically; as yet not wholly comfortable with what was expected of him; a child getting used to the idea of what it was to be a king.

Edward looked always to his father, for his blessing and for his love. In early July 1546 he thanked Henry for sending him a skilled musician, Philip van Wilder, who was helping to improve his playing on the lute. He was even happier to be told that he was to visit the king. The stay at Whitehall Palace was short but he was thrilled by it. Henry loaded his son with gifts of valuable chains, rings, jewelled buttons and necklaces. Afterwards Edward wrote to Queen Katherine with ‘uncommon thanks, that you behaved to me so kindly’.¹¹

Edward now found himself balanced between the private world of his household and the demands of public duty and display. He knew in early August about the diplomatic visit to Henry’s court soon to be made by the Admiral of France, Claude d’Annebaut. Edward was going to help to receive the admiral’s embassy. He was a little nervous, asking Queen Katherine by letter whether d’Annebaut knew Latin very well. If he did, Edward wrote, ‘I want to learn more what I should say to him when I come to meet with him’.¹²

The admiral’s embassy was a tremendous success. Edward saw with his own eyes the splendours of his father’s kingly style. On 20 August, to the ‘terrible’ sound of cannon fired along the waterfront at Bankside and from the Tower of London, d’Annebaut rode ‘in great triumph’ through the city. Edward met the admiral to escort him to Hampton Court. With the prince were the Archbishop of York, Edward’s uncle the Earl of Hertford, the Earl of Huntingdon and 2,000 horsemen. Edward and d’Annebaut embraced ‘in such lowly and honourable manner that all the beholders greatly rejoiced’. Taking the place of honour, Edward rode with the admiral to the outer gate of the palace where they were met by the lord chancellor and the King’s Council.¹³

The excitements of August began to fade in the first week of September, when once again Edward was claimed by Cheke and the schoolroom. He dutifully wrote out his exercises, framing a letter to his father to thank Henry for his care and for the gift of a buck, hoping to see him again soon. A few weeks later he thanked Queen Katherine for the kindnesses she had shown to him, ‘so many … that I can scarcely grasp them with my mind’. As well as the practice these letters gave him in his Latin, Edward was genuinely thrilled by his first experience of what it was to perform on the public stage of royal theatre.¹⁴

Any direct conversation between Edward and the Admiral of France had been in fairly limited Latin or through a translator. But any future king of England needed to be able to speak fluent French. Historically France was England’s enemy and rival, but also potentially its ally. It is telling that Henry VIII had long wanted to emulate the royal fashions of the French court but also tried as often as he could to go on military campaign against France. Two months after his meeting with Claude d’Annebaut Edward began to learn French with Jean Belmaine, a Protestant refugee who had taught the language to Princess Elizabeth. Belmaine gave Edward his first lesson on 12 October, Edward’s ninth birthday. In December Edward wrote in French to Elizabeth to thank her for her last letter, her encouragement and her example.

So here was a prince who was learning quickly and writing with fluency to his family. He knew his obligations. In January 1547 Queen Katherine sent him a New Year’s gift of a double portrait of his royal parents – better to gaze upon, he wrote to her in thanks, than any magnificent gift. He wrote very fondly on the same day to his sister Princess Mary. From Hertford Castle in late January he thanked Bishop George Day of Chichester, John Cheke’s old teacher at Cambridge, for his present of some volumes of Cicero, ‘the prince of eloquence’. He also sent a letter to Archbishop Cranmer, ‘most loving godfather, more dear to me than my eyes’, on the theme of literature and the liberal arts. He complimented Cranmer on his fine Latin style.¹⁵

In July and August 1546 Edward had been with his father and stepmother at Whitehall. He had played his part in the embassy of the Admiral of France. He had then gone back to the hard work of the schoolroom with Cheke and Cox, mainly at Hatfield. He played the lute with Philip van Wilder, talked, read the Latin poet Horace, played and received gifts. In letters he reflected upon love, virtue and duty, learning the ways of royal discourse. He signed those letters with affection. To his sister Princess Mary he was ‘Amantissimus tui Frater’, ‘Your most loving brother’. He was a nine-year-old prince growing and learning all the time, by the measure of his own age a whole lifetime away from adulthood.¹⁶

Edward was at Hertford Castle when he wrote to Archbishop Cranmer on Monday 24 January 1547. Four days later Henry VIII was dead and the prince was now a king.

Hurried back on 31 January to London, Edward VI, ‘by the grace of God King of England, France, and Ireland’, stayed with his court in the royal lodgings of the Tower of London. Touched by God, there was no other authority in the land. But he could not rule for himself, and the power to govern had to be exercised for him.¹⁷

At the Tower on the 31st the council of thirteen executor-advisers appointed by Henry VIII met together ‘reverently and diligently’ to affirm their loyalty to Henry’s last will and testament. Meeting together, they decided that they needed a leader, ‘some special man’ of their number to articulate their corporate will. With the influential Sir William Paget working as the Earl of Hertford’s campaign manager, their choice of Hertford was not a very surprising one.

The councillors agreed that Hertford would have ‘the first and chief place amongst us’ with the two offices and titles of Protector of the king’s realms and dominions and Governor of his most royal person. All thirteen executors then signed the statement in the council’s new book of its proceedings. First of all the signatures, standing out boldly, was the name ‘E. Hertford’.¹⁸

The following day all the councillors met again in the Tower to hear Henry’s will read out from beginning to end, after which they took their oaths to the king. They went to Edward in his private chambers to ask for his consent to their election of Hertford as Protector and Governor. At nine years old Edward had before him his father’s executors, the assistant councillors named in Henry’s will, and the members of the nobility who were with him at the Tower. All of them kissed his hand. For a boy who was still so new to the theatre of monarchy it must have been overwhelming.

Today we surely find it sad, and perhaps even positively cruel, that a boy so very young was expected to show almost no emotion. Even for a child king grief was always something to be properly disciplined. Words, too, were chosen very carefully. Edward wrote to Queen Katherine and to his sisters Mary and Elizabeth. Thinking of his father in heaven, he assured Katherine of God’s rewards for the noble and virtuous. To Mary he emphasized the wisdom of accepting God’s will and promised to be her dearest brother. He knew from a letter already sent by Elizabeth that she, like him, was gaining a victory over nature in moderating her grief at their father’s death.

Edward was a boy transformed: a child who was now a king, the father of his people. The council planned down to the last word and gesture the form of Edward’s coronation in Westminster Abbey. Here Edward VI would be bound publicly to God and to his subjects. This was the duty for which he had been trained: he was both a ruler and a servant who would be held to account by God. Archbishop Cranmer would show the king to his people, declaring: ‘Sirs, here I present King Edward, rightful and undoubted inheritor by the laws of God and man to the royal dignity and crown imperial of this realm.’ Edward would make his coronation oath and, symbolic of the mystical otherness of being a king, be anointed with holy oils on his shoulders, on both of his arms, on the palms of his hands and on his head.¹⁹

On 14 February Princess Elizabeth replied to her brother’s letter. She made clear her loyalty: ‘May God long keep your majesty safe and further advance … your growing virtues to the utmost.’ She addressed Edward as perhaps she had done on the day they heard together the news of their father’s death. He was a boy still growing and to his sisters he was a little brother: but above all Edward was now Rex Serenissime et Illustrissime, ‘most serene and illustrious king’.²⁰