5

‘A challenge made by me’

The material reality of Edward VI’s life was a physical and tangible one, of beautiful objects as well as rewards and obligations. It was a king’s world of sport and recreation, of education and of religion, of learning to govern and of play and fun. The Privy Purse expenses recorded by his officials show us a lively and bustling court. Here are Edward’s shirts and buttons, his bags of fragrant powders, his longbows and crossbows and his portable bed rich in cloth of gold, velvet and silk ribbon. We find payments to his majesty’s apothecary, Thomas Alsopp, for stores of ginger candy water and to Thomas Browne, the king’s cap-maker, ‘for sundry cap feathers of sundry sorts and for trimming of divers caps and feathers together’.

There were rewards Edward made either in recognition of gifts or more generally out of his largesse. ‘One that brought hawks’ from a foreign duke was given £30 (today something over £6,000), while the servant of the Earl of Tyrone, who presented the king with two falcons and ‘a brace of greyhounds’, received £6. The servant of the genial diplomat Sir Philip Hoby who played to the king on the lute found himself a richer man by £10. There were gifts for many noblemen at the christenings of their children. Scholars who presented their works to Edward were rewarded by the scholar king: £30 for the renowned Dutch polymath Hadrianus Junius, £7 10s. for the Frenchman ‘that gave his majesty a book in French of civil policy’, and the great sum of £50 for Louis Le Roy, ‘that gave the king’s majesty Isocrates’s orations translated into French’ (Isocrates was an ancient Greek rhetorician whose work was specially commended by John Cheke). Some got money from the king because they were ill. Edward once sent £20 to the German Protestant theologian Martin Bucer, sick and miserable in freezing Cambridge.¹

There was always music and song at Edward’s court: John Fowler playing his lute at nine o’clock in the morning in the king’s gallery at St James’s; Sir Philip Hoby’s man performing before the king; Peter and Philip van Wilder of the Privy Chamber doing the same. Philip took care of Edward’s lutes, paid from the Privy Purse for ‘lute strings and for ribbing and for lining his majesty’s lute cases’. Edward listened to the voices of the six singing children of his Privy Chamber and his singing men. Other performers entertained the king, including the private players of the nobility, of the Duke of Somerset, of the dowager Duchess of Suffolk (the mother of Edward’s companions Duke Henry and Lord Charles), and of the Marquess of Northampton. The king rewarded them all. During the great French embassy of 1551 some of the ambassador’s men entertained the court on flutes and sackbuts, while one vaulted and danced on a rope and a boy ‘tumbled before the king’s majesty’.²

The life of any royal court was a performance, from the routine and familiar structures of the everyday to the elaborate shows of splendour and taste at Christmas and New Year, at Shrovetide, and for the visits of foreign ambassadors. Sometimes Edward’s court resembled the front and back stages of a West End show. Dramatic ambition was never wanting. At Hampton Court in 1547 players and torchbearers performed in a masque set around a ‘counterfeit Tower of Babylon’. In 1549 the king and his courtiers were entertained by hermits, lance-men and friars, their costumes put together by the king’s Revels Office: gold skins and silver paper, cloths of red and popinjay green, pilgrims’ staves, canvas bags and globes. This was a riot of colour, music, performance and satire.³

At Christmas and New Year of 1550 and 1551 the Revels Office was especially busy. Its teams of joiners, carpenters and painters worked for days and nights to get everything ready for performances before the king and his courtiers. The tailors were busiest of all, fifteen of them, each paid for six days and two nights of work. The Revels Office operated under the watchful eye of its master, Sir Thomas Cawarden, and Cawarden answered directly to the Privy Council: entertainment at court was a serious business.

Twelfth Night in 1551 was celebrated at Greenwich Palace to the sound of an Irish bagpiper hired specially for the evening. The other performers were brought to the court by barge. There were Irishmen everywhere, or at least masquers dressed for the part, carrying ‘Irish swords’ and shields and between them a halberd. Canvas, flax, linen, Paris silk, coarse Paris thread, felts, sheepskin and lambskin, black thread and thread of ‘divers colours’, yellow gold sarsenet – we can almost reach out to touch the costumes for ourselves.⁴

The king paid seven ‘players of interludes’: Robert Hinstock, George Birch, Richard Coke, Richard Skinner, Henry Harriot, John Birch and Thomas Southey. We know that Will Somers, Edward’s fool, performed that Twelfth Night. So probably did Edward and, given the Irish theme of the masque, his friend Barnaby Fitzpatrick too. The accounts of the Revels Office record the ‘new making, translating, garnishing and finishing of divers and sundry garments, apparel, vestures and properties as well for the king’s majesty in his person, as his young lords and divers players and other persons’. So as well as presenting at court serious orations in classical Greek and Latin under the eye of John Cheke, which by now Edward was doing on Sundays, the young king was a practised performer on the stage. Very likely it served him well in the great set-piece performances of his kingly duties.⁵

Cheke was as ever drilling Edward in his studies. The works of Cicero, that touchstone of Roman public duty, were never out of the schoolroom. As well as Latin and now Greek, Edward also kept up with the modern languages. Jean Belmaine continued as the king’s French tutor, working with him at ever more sophisticated compositions. Louis Le Roy, who was a scholar of European reputation, made his presentation of Isocrates in French to the king in person in October 1550. Sir William Pickering, Edward’s ambassador in Paris, sent to the king Louis Meigret’s Grammaire française, as well as a popular book by the Spanish author Pedro Mexía. Edward read the dialogues in French and English published by Pierre Du Ploiche, a French Protestant refugee living and working in London. Du Ploiche’s book was a kind of Berlitz phrasebook of its day, beginning with various prayers but mainly covering travel, food, buying and selling, numbers and the alphabet. Here eager students of modern French could search for phrases like ‘God speed you sir’ (‘Dieu vous gard monsieur’) or, for bedtime, ‘Mine host, I have great lust to go to rest’ (‘Mon hoste i’ay grant fain d’alter reposer’). There are some wonderful set-piece conversations Edward is unlikely ever to have needed, including one on the absence of a wife sick with the ague for fifteen days or more. Another little scenario concerns a schoolboy far humbler than the king:

James, can you speak good French?

Yea, a little sir.

Where go you to school?

In Trinity Lane at the sign of the Rose.

Have you long time learned to speak French?

Almost half a year.

Learn you also to write?

Yea sir.

What more?

The Latin tongue.

It is well done: learn always well.⁶

Edward’s study of French went far beyond these conversational pleasantries, for under Belmaine’s supervision he wrote essays on the weightier topics of religious idolatry, the Christian faith and the false supremacy of the pope.

Edward’s education was for its day a broad one. Though rooted in the classical curriculum, he learned mathematics with the help of Robert Recorde’s Pathway to Knowledge and a rare edition of Euclid’s Elements. Recorde dedicated his book to the king, explaining the importance of a mathematical education:

And for human knowledge this will I boldly say, that whosoever will attain true judgment therein, must not only travail [work hard] in the knowledge of the tongues, but must also before all other arts taste the mathematical sciences, specially arithmetic and geometry, without which it is not possible to attain full knowledge in any art.⁷

Edward loved astronomy. In his private study at Whitehall Palace there were six ‘instruments of astronomy hanging upon the wall’. When in November 1549 the Privy Council sealed up the ‘chair house’ and secret jewel house at Whitehall (till then only the disgraced Protector Somerset had had the keys to them) Edward took away three astronomical instruments and gave one of them to his companion Lord Strange. What certainly survives is a brass horary quadrant very likely made for Edward by Thomas Gemini. Gemini was one of the king’s surgeons but he was also a talented engraver and printer. The quadrant could be used to find the hour of the day, to mark the movements of the sun and moon, and to find the date of Easter. It is a beautiful object, inscribed with Gemini’s initials and the name of the king, ‘Edwardus Rex’. What Edward’s other ‘instruments’ were we can guess: astrolabes, astronomical compendiums, ring sun dials, nocturnals. Here was the promise of discovering so much about the earth and the stars, as well as a world of navigation and travel – fascinating for any fourteen-year-old boy gripped as Edward was by adventure and action.⁸

More obscure – but in many ways more tantalizing still – are Edward’s encounters with the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli. Here we meet the intriguing and elusive character of William Thomas, a clerk of Edward’s Privy Council.

Once an apprentice on the run from his master, Thomas spent time in Italy, where he fell in love with the Italian dialects and the histories of the Italian city states. Power and government fascinated him. In 1549 and 1550 he had printed in London The historie of Italie and a book of political morality called The vanitee of this world. Thomas’s Principal rules of the Italian grammar (1550) was the first Italian grammar and dictionary published in English. So the young man who had gone on the run to Italy made good in the end.⁹

Thomas dedicated The historie of Italie to John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, by then the most powerful of the king’s councillors. With a canny eye for further patronage, he presented a work of translation to Edward’s companion Henry, Duke of Suffolk, and gave the king a New Year’s gift of an account of Venetian voyages to the Middle East. Here Thomas wrote glowingly of England, whose subjects were ‘the king’s children and not slaves as they be otherwhere’. He presented his translation to Edward knowing that the young king was ‘most desirous of all virtuous knowledge’.¹⁰

Thomas had boundless confidence in his own ability. He was never likely to sit quietly in the Privy Council office and be wholly satisfied at keeping the council’s register up to date or writing the councillors’ letters. He was bursting with knowledge he wanted to impart. Not someone with easy access to the king’s private rooms, Thomas devised a clever way of communicating with Edward. When he gave the council’s papers to Sir Nicholas Throckmorton of the Privy Chamber for the king to read, he included with them some essays of his own. Thomas felt there was no more deserving recipient than Edward of everything he knew about politics, Italy, statecraft and government reform.

In this way Thomas introduced the king to the writings of Machiavelli, using them to discuss interesting topics about government with a young king whose knowledge was growing all the time. Thomas never used Machiavelli’s name: here he was at his most ebullient, with (as one historian once wrote) ‘a sense of humour beyond the ordinary’ and a Renaissance scholar’s talent for plagiarism.¹¹

Thomas had read Machiavelli’s History of Florence in order to write The historie of Italie: ‘Nicolas Macchiavegli, a notable learned man, and secretary of late days to the commonwealth there’. What Thomas supplied to Edward was not The Prince, that extraordinary analysis of political power; instead it was Machiavelli’s greatest work, his account of republican government called The Discourses, on the first ten books of Livy’s History of Rome. Three of Thomas’s ‘discourses’ for Edward survive: on whether it is best to adapt policy to changing times; on the friendship of princes; and on whether the power in a state should rest in the nobility or in the common people. Thomas also wrote a paper for Edward on the reform of England’s coinage, showing here that he had an eye for a topic that interested the king. Edward seems to have enjoyed unpicking technical subjects like currency, international trade and military campaigns of history.¹²

And so in this way young Edward VI learned his Machiavelli, mediated through the lively mind and busy pen of Master William Thomas. It was a mild but also a stimulating dose, and it played both to the political and intellectual passions of Thomas and to Edward’s education by John Cheke in the ancient historians. Thomas’s discourses spoke to a young king who was beginning to see the political world around him through an ever more sophisticated lens. The bright boy of fourteen was very different from the king of nine or ten.

Like so much of Edward’s life there is a lot that we will never know. We can guess that Thomas and his king met only rarely. Thomas’s essays for Edward from Machiavelli were a secret. Thomas wrote:

It becometh a prince for his wisdom to be had in admiration … And since nothing serveth more to that than to keep the principal things of wisdom secret till occasion require the utterance, I would wish them to be kept secret. Referring it nevertheless to your majesty’s good will and pleasure.¹³

Perhaps Edward squirrelled Thomas’s papers away in his writing desk, along with his ‘Chronicle’ and the bric-a-brac – as private a space as a young king was ever likely to have.

In the spring and summer of 1551 Edward was absorbed by competitive archery. In his ‘Chronicle’ for 31 March he wrote: ‘A challenge made by me that I, with sixteen of my Chamber, should run at base, shoot, and run at ring with any seventeen of my servants, gentlemen in the court.’ These were the skills of combat at which his father had excelled: running, archery, and riding on horseback with a lance. The following day the competition began: ‘The first day of the challenge at base, or running, the king won.’ Five days later he lost ‘at rounds’ (shooting at targets set at a fixed distance from the archer) but won at ‘rovers’ (shooting at targets selected at random). His competitive appetite was beginning to sharpen.¹⁴

All the time he was moving towards manhood. So in May and June, with Edward by now thirteen years of age, there was a flurry of diplomatic activity, with first Sir Philip Hoby, then the Bishop of Ely and finally the Marquess of Northampton sent off to France to negotiate Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth, the six-year-old daughter of King Henri II. Henri was serious enough about the prospective match to present Edward with her portrait. Hoby went with ten gentlemen dressed in velvet and wearing chains of gold. Northampton was the principal ambassador, whose task it was first to present Henri with the Order of the Garter and then to negotiate the terms for the marriage. Edward’s government expected Elizabeth to bring with her a marriage portion of 12,000 marks a year and the staggering dowry of at least 800,000 French crowns. Edward’s treasury would forfeit 100,000 crowns if he failed to perform the agreement.

A month later France reciprocated with an embassy. Where King Henri had been made a Knight of the Garter, so Edward would be elected to the correspondingly elite Order of St Michael. Henri’s ambassador, Jacques d’Albon, Marquis de Fronsac, Seigneur de St-André, left Châteaubriant for England on 11 June with a train of up to five hundred horse and the best of King Henri’s musicians. It was obvious that Edward’s court would have to put on quite a show to receive them.

Edward accepted the Order of St Michael ‘by promise’ to the French ambassador resident at his court on 16 June. Four days later Northampton, by now in France, invested Henri with the Garter in the king’s bedchamber. With great formality the Bishop of Ely made an oration to which the Cardinal of Lorraine replied. A day later they got down to business. Edward recorded in his ‘Chronicle’ that the French commissioners ‘did most cheerfully assent’ to his marriage to Elizabeth, agreeing with Northampton that neither party should be bound either in conscience or in honour until she was at least twelve years of age. But the French mocked the sums of money asked of Henri by Edward’s diplomats. By Edward’s account it took four days for the commissioners to hammer out an agreement satisfactory to both sides. Successful French haggling brought the dowry down to 200,000 crowns, to which Edward’s negotiators agreed so long as Elizabeth was eventually brought to England at Henri’s expense.¹⁵

Edward told much of the story of the embassy of the Maréchal de St-André in his ‘Chronicle’. Right from the beginning the diplomatic and royal etiquette had to be impeccable. When St-André arrived at the port of Rye he was met by a royal official who presented him with Edward’s handwritten letters and made arrangements for the baggage of the ambassador’s great entourage to be carried up to London. St-André was feasted by courtiers on the journey to meet Edward. In London a merciless sweating sickness had broken out that, in the king’s understanding, killed its victims within three hours and caused some to ‘die raving’. This was the sweat that, when it reached Cambridge, killed Edward’s companions Henry, Duke of Suffolk and his brother Lord Charles. On the day St-André arrived in London a gentleman of the King’s Chamber and a groom died. Quickly Edward was removed for safety to Hampton Court.¹⁶

St-André was welcomed to London by the sound of the cannon of fifty warships in the Thames and the ordnance of the Tower of London. To escape the infection he went to Richmond Palace. His embassy was huge: Edward was told that St-André had with him about four hundred gentlemen. The following morning, 14 July, the maréchal came to meet the king. Edward described the occasion with a precise eye for diplomatic protocol and a keen memory:

He came to me at Hampton Court at nine of the clock … and so conveyed first to me, where, after his master’s recommendations and letters, he went to his chamber … all hanged with cloth of arras, and so was the hall and all my lodging. He dined with me also. After dinner, being brought into an inner chamber, he told me he was come not only for delivery of the Order but also for to declare the great friendship the king his master bore me, which he desired I would think to be such to me as a father beareth to his son, or brother to brother … I answered him that I thanked him for his Order and also his love, etc. and I would show like love in all points.

The next day St-André formally invested Edward with the Order of St Michael.¹⁷

Edward seems to have thoroughly enjoyed himself during the embassy. There were grand dinners of a dozen courses in great outdoor banqueting houses built in Hyde Park and Marylebone Park. The structure in Hyde Park was especially splendid, with stairs, a turret, ranges built of brick and furnaces for boiling water, and tables, trestles and dressers. Edward wrote that St-André saw a display of ‘the strength of the English archers’, and the king and the maréchal and their gentlemen hunted together. There were gifts and rewards, including for St-André a diamond ring from Edward’s finger ‘both for [the maréchal’s] pains and also for my memory’. The rewards of money were huge: £3,000 in gold for the maréchal and sums of £1,000 and £500 for the other senior diplomats in the embassy.

Most interesting of all was the private time that Edward and St-André spent together. On 20 July the maréchal saw the king on a typical day in his life. Edward wrote:

He came to see mine arraying [dressing] and saw my bedchamber and went a-hunting with hounds and saw me shoot and saw all my guard shoot together. He dined with me, heard me play on the lute, ride, came to me in my study, supped with me, and so departed to Richmond.

Here was Edward’s world in his private rooms, perhaps with Philip van Wilder carrying his lute, John Cheke and Edward’s officials in the king’s study, the gentlemen and grooms of the Privy Chamber always in attendance, exercising, studying, eating, conversing: a king for whom there was all the promise of the future – adulthood, marriage, a realm to be governed by a young man who was to his fingertips a prince, and a dynastic union between England and France that would surely shape the future of the whole of Europe.¹⁸

This promise is shown most beautifully in a portrait of the king now in the Musée du Louvre in Paris. It was painted in 1551 by Edward’s court artist Guillim Scrots, and probably it was the picture referred to by Edward’s resident ambassador at the French court, Sir William Pickering, in October of that year. Flattering Edward, King Henri had told Pickering that the picture ‘was very excellent and that the natural [that is, Edward in the flesh] as he was persuaded much exceeded the artificial’.¹⁹

Scrots painted Edward in full length, a very conscious nod to the style of portraiture favoured by the powerful Habsburgs of the Holy Roman Empire: Edward was a king to be reckoned with, easily equal to his brother monarchs of Europe, just as his father had been. He is beautifully dressed in a doublet of brown intricately patterned in gold thread and decorated with golden aglets. In his right hand are gloves. The thumb and fingers of his left hand hold the belt of his richly decorated rapier. On his chest is the Garter medallion of St George, the viewer’s eyes drawn to its handsome broad blue ribbon around his neck.

Scrots’s Edward has lost the immaturity of the portrait of 1546. The young boy is now very much the adolescent of fourteen. Still the pale skin, the grey, steady eyes and the auburn hair: but Edward’s face is slim and his jawline more defined than it was as prince.

Here was the acknowledged and legitimate heir to the throne of Henry VIII: here was England’s hope for the future.