Thomas Penn - Winter King - Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

Four names in particular made a profound impression on him. Presiding over the quartet was the benevolent Oxford don and Greek scholar William Grocyn. A generation younger, Thomas Linacre and John Colet had recently returned from extended tours in an Italy ripped apart and traumatized by the French invasion of 1494. A classical scholar and medical doctor of firecracker brilliance, Linacre was now kicking his heels in London, short of money and looking for jobs. Introverted, ascetic and with a contempt for money and careerism that only the truly rich and privileged could affect, John Colet had no such concerns. Son of the powerful London mercer and twice mayor Sir Henry, he had gone abroad, Erasmus said, in search of knowledge like an acquisitive merchant, and had returned fired by the learning of the Florentine thinkers Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, men who had fused Platonic philosophy with exploration of the Bible in its original Greek, in writings of mystical, interiorized spirituality. There was something radical and dangerous about these thinkers. Mirandola cultivated a Dominican friar, Savonarola, whose millenarian visions had provoked revolution: in the wake of France’s invasion, he had inspired a popular uprising in Florence, its ruling Medici family replaced by a people’s republic. Colet had been bitten by the bug, too. At Oxford, he had delivered a coruscating series of lectures on St Paul, fulminating against the corruption of the clergy and the abuses of the church. 32

The fourth member of the group was Thomas More. By far the youngest at twenty-one, he already seemed its focus. Grocyn was his ‘creancer’, Linacre taught him Greek, and Colet, whose intense piety fascinated More, was his spiritual guide. 33More had grown up in the household of Henry VII’s late chancellor, Archbishop Morton, who, recognizing his precocity, had dispatched him to Oxford aged fifteen. Returning to London to follow in the footsteps of his father, a prominent city lawyer, More had instead fallen under Colet’s spell. He had, much to his father’s annoyance, ducked out of his legal education and instead immersed himself in a programme of religious learning, taking up residence at the Charterhouse, the Carthusian monastery on the city’s north-western edge.

It was very probably the Hertfordshire knight Sir William Say – who as well as being an acquaintance of Archbishop Morton and More’s father Sir John, was Mountjoy’s father-in-law – who had provided the young More with an introduction to Mountjoy, with whom he became firm friends. The Say family, indeed, joined all the dots: Sir William was half-brother to Elizabeth countess of Surrey, and among the queen’s gentlewomen was his sister, Anne. Here was a skein of relationships that led to the heart of the queen’s household – and to that of her son, the duke of York.

When More and Erasmus met in 1499 they formed an instant bond – though Erasmus, typically, fell more quickly for the younger man: ‘What has Nature ever created more sweet, more happy than the genius of Thomas More?’ One early autumn afternoon, More called on Erasmus at Sayes Court, and the pair strolled over to nearby Eltham to visit Mountjoy, who was with the royal children. Erasmus remembered the meeting, framed in his mind’s eye: the children assembled in Eltham’s great hall, Prince Henry at their centre, already looking ‘somehow like a natural king, displaying a noble spirit combined with peculiar courtesy’. 34It was a scene carefully choreographed by Mountjoy and More, to show off the cultured young prince as a master of that peculiarly Renaissance art of constructed spontaneity, sprezzatura . And, as Erasmus recollected, the encounter left him squirming with embarrassment.

As they were presented to the eight-year-old Henry and his household, More produced a gift of writing for the prince. It was a deliberate and – for one supposedly so ‘sweet’ – curiously calculated display of one-upmanship, for Erasmus had come empty-handed. His humiliation was compounded when, at dinner, Prince Henry produced a note to Erasmus, challenging him to write something. In the next few days, Erasmus cobbled together a ten-page ode to England, Prosopopoeia Britanniae Maioris , in which he lauded Henry VII and his children to the skies. In an accompanying dedicatory letter, he wrote that he would have felt it necessary to urge the prince to the pursuit of virtue, ‘were it not that you are thither bound already of your free choice; and that you have a bard of your own in Skelton, the great light and ornament of English letters, who can not only inspire but perfect your studies’ – the emphasis being strictly on Skelton’s English, rather than his Latin. Given his non-existent English, Erasmus, unable to read a word of Skelton’s, had undoubtedly been briefed. What he really thought of Prince Henry’s ‘creancer’ is indicated in a later, 1507, edition of the Prosopopoeia , by which time Skelton had left royal service: his name had been deleted. 35Erasmus always had a particularly economical attitude to flattery.

As Erasmus’s dedication implied, however, there were no job opportunities in the prince’s household – or, for that matter, anywhere else. That autumn, away from the serene picture at Eltham, the regime was tense, with Suffolk loitering in Calais and Warbeck’s conspirators plotting feverishly; the king’s counsellors, their hands full, barely afforded Erasmus a second glance. As October drew on, the delights of England started to pall. Fed up with trying to ingratiate himself with ‘those wretched courtiers’, as he sniffily put it, Erasmus was desperate to leave. Thanks to the ‘recent flight of a certain duke’, however, with the Channel ports on high alert and Kent crawling with soldiers on the lookout for infiltrators, travelling in safety was impossible. Particularly, he might have added, given his Dutch accent, clerical appearance and lack of English, which would have shouted ‘spy’ to any suspicious militiaman. 36

Erasmus’s enforced sojourn, however, was to prove transformative. Retreating to Oxford, he did a crash course in Greek with Grocyn and discussed theology with Colet: both experiences which in the next years would have a profound impact on his work and thought. But if Erasmus appreciated English scholarship, he was less enamoured of its officialdom. When, in early January 1500, he finally reached Dover, customs officers relieved him of the gifts of money he had been given, amounting to a healthy £20 – despite Mountjoy’s blithe assurances to the contrary, there was no taking hard currency out of the kingdom – before sending him on his way. It would be another four years before Erasmus returned hopefully to England. There would be no repeat then of the cosy familial scene he had witnessed at Eltham. 37

Erasmus’s account of his Eltham visit was, of course, designed to portray Mountjoy, his sometime student and hoped-for patron – and by implication himself – in the best possible light. But its portrayal of the gracious, cultured atmosphere of the prince’s household was accurate enough. His emphasis on Mountjoy’s influence, too, was not misplaced. A conduit to the prince, he was a principal path to Elizabeth’s favour as well: in 1501, she appointed him her new chamberlain.

The humanists’ growing influence over the prince’s education was evident in the reshuffle in his household that took place after Prince Arthur’s death in April 1502. This seismic change in the prince’s life coincided with a natural educational progression in which, around the age of twelve, he moved on to a more advanced programme of studies. Skelton was pensioned off – or perhaps, unable to face the increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere of the king’s court, he jumped before he was pushed, retreating to the Norfolk benefice of Diss, to which he had been presented by Lady Margaret as a reward for his services. The appointment of his replacement, the progressive Chichester grammarian John Holt, had More’s and Mountjoy’s fingerprints all over it. Previously an employee of Archbishop Morton, Holt was More’s ex-teacher and a firm friend. A few quiet words from More in Mountjoy’s ear undoubtedly worked wonders. 38