freely give their advice as Councillors,’ said Mar, ‘which the King well allowed of.’ Although James VI welcomed advice and debate, he never felt bound by any of it. The godly Mar envisaged king and well-born advisers ruling together in council, through the legislature, for the good of the realm as a whole. It was hard to imagine Newton or Mar working to shape a future Henry IX who believed his councillors should ‘leave all to the King’s pleasure’.
From these first days in the schoolroom, Prince Henry was exposed to at least two potentially incompatible sets of ideas about who he was, what he should believe, his attitude to monarchy and how he should act.
Newton was not left alone to educate Henry. Walter Quin, an Irish poet, was sent for to assist him. Quin came with the blessing not only of King James of Scotland but also of the Earl of Essex over four hundred miles away in London. Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex, was Elizabeth I’s principal favourite, a significant power in the country and a military commander in Ireland. In his poems praising James VI, Walter Quin urged the king to let a man of great Renaissance virtue guide him onto the English throne. He surely had Essex in mind.
Essex meanwhile courted James and tried to persuade Elizabeth of the need to settle the succession in favour of the Scottish king and his progeny. However, Elizabeth would not listen to his counsel, to the earl’s fury. Essex firmly believed strong councillors secured an absolute monarch. These councillors must criticise when they saw their sovereign acting in error, against the good of the whole commonwealth.
As well as tutors of all kinds, Henry needed body servants. Mar brought in his first cousin, David Murray of Gorthly, as First Gentleman of the Bedchamber. Murray’s high forehead and thick red hair and beard framed small bright eyes, giving him the look of an alert, friendly squirrel. A full-lipped mouth twitched upwards in a smile, all set in a long, rectangular face. A Renaissance soldier-poet, Murray was also a godly Calvinist, like most of the Mar clan. As overseer of the prince’s bodily needs, Murray slept on a truckle bed in Henry’s chamber. No man saw more of the boy.
James sent David Foulis to work with Murray and take charge of Henry’s wardrobe. Foulis had first come to James’s court as a pageboy. Later, he would be entrusted with taking the king’s communications to Elizabeth. Now, as ‘an ancient friend’ of the Essexians, he acted as go-between in the secret correspondence between James and Essex. His role allowed him easy access to intelligence on the prince and his household, which he then sold on to the English earl and his camp.
In the letters, Essex’s codename was ‘Plato’ and the king ‘Tacitus’. James might have wondered why he was Tacitus. The Roman historian was a source of great fascination for the Essexians and Henry Savile, who tutored Essex’s son, was a renowned translator of his writings. Rediscovered in the Renaissance, Tacitus’s works analysed the virtues of Rome under the Republic, where power resided in a strong council of elected individuals representing the flower of the whole community, under an elected leader. In comparison, Tacitus had reservations about the imperial era in Rome under the rule of the Caesars: absolute rule by non-elected emperors, ‘free’ to be unaccountable for their actions, if they wanted. Referring to James VI as ‘Tacitus’ suggested the Essex group dreamt that Stuart rule would inaugurate a Tacitus-influenced English political system: strong council with virtuous rule, and the security of a hereditary monarchy.
Mar facilitated and encouraged regular communication between Prince Henry’s schoolroom and Essex House, the Earl of Essex’s power base near Westminster. In this arrangement Mar boasted of his own importance as guardian of the heir and future King of Scotland and England. Essex confided to Mar that his faction’s support for the Scottish king might possibly lead to arms, forcing Queen Elizabeth to name James as her successor in Parliament. The imprimatur of parliamentary legal consent mattered to Essex’s group. For them, only a strong buffer of constitutional safeguards, legitimised in Parliament, guaranteed the Crown’s authority. Issues such as the succession must then, Essex House concluded, include parliamentary participation. Although, Essex believed MPs had to be guided by Parliament’s steering group, the Privy Council, staffed mainly by politically and militarily active aristocrats.
The Cecil faction, Essex’s rivals for Elizabeth I’s favour, also wanted to serve a monarch exercising absolute or ‘imperial’ powers, but contained by the due process of law and counsel by virtuous men of honour. The chivalric soldier in Essex would go further, fatefully, than any of the Cecil group in an attempt to bring this to fruition. For now, Essex suggested Mar come to London for private discussions.
This, then, was the complex, multifaceted and intensely ideological environment in which Henry began his formal education at the age of four: writing the alphabet; reading classical masters of Latin grammar; studying the elements of rhetoric; learning French, and a bold italic hand to express himself in. If James thought his own character had been adversely affected by the brutality and instability of his childhood, then perhaps Henry’s more temperate personality – described as showing ‘sparks of piety, majesty, gravity … using a mild and gentle behaviour to all, chiefly to strangers’ – reflected the kinder setting in which the boy was being raised. He shared his classroom with some of Mar’s seven boys, and the earl’s five daughters lived close by. Henry grew up with plenty of other children, but not his siblings.
Henry’s handwriting was seen as reflecting the quality of the king in training, and the esteem he felt for the recipient. A scrawled letter, half illegible in a childish hand, found to be full of spelling mistakes when it could be deciphered at all, insulted the person and country receiving it. Henry sat in the Prince’s Tower and practised italic script over and over. Cicero said you could not think well if you did not have a solid grounding in morally edifying texts, and good handwriting. So Henry filled his notebooks with lines of rrrrrs and ssssses. He perfected phrases before they went into the final copy of a letter. Typical child, he covered pages of his exercise books with his signature, practising his joyful twirls and flourishes –, Henricus, Henricus, Henry, Henry – for illustrious addressees.
By the age of six, he was initiating exchanges with foreign states and rulers. The first official letter he wrote in 1600 was to the Dutch States General and Maurice of Nassau, commander of the Protestant Dutch troops in their rebellion against Catholic Spain. In it he thanked them for their good opinion of him in his tender years. Henry promised these ‘first fruits of his hand’ showed ‘his interest in serving them … hereafter in better offices’. The Dutch were already paying the 500 crown annuity promised at his baptism, though it went straight to the king’s coffers. Henry would repay their faith in him, by coming to serve in the field, and learn the military arts from Maurice himself.
The king appointed a court favourite Sir Richard Preston to school the prince in the military arts. Preston had fought for the Dutch with the Earl of Leicester and Leicester’s brother, the late Sir Philip Sidney, both English heroes of international Calvinism. Many of Prince Henry’s household, and the Essexians in London, shared a belief that Scottish Calvinism and the Church of England were parts of a greater body: the united European community of Protestants. With a touch of knights on a quest about them, such individuals felt honour-bound to defend any fellow Protestant state threatened by a Catholic power. Subsequently Preston, ‘a gentleman of great accomplishments in mind and body’, became a follower of Essex.
As Preston trained Henry, it was quickly observed how well the young prince ‘began to apply himself to, and to take pleasure in, active and manly exercises, learning to ride, sing, dance, leap, shoot with the bow and gun, toss the pike, &c., being instructed in the use of arms’. Preston tutored Henry in the honour code of ‘Protestant martial Virtue’ he espoused. By May 1599, Preston occupied a ‘“Praetorian” role’, as ‘captain over all the officers in the King’s Household’.
Veterans of Europe’s religious wars, men such as Preston, recounted poems and stories, and introduced the prince to the latest innovations on the modern battlefield. Henry learned, while tales of siege trenches, training and army camp life replayed in his and his followers’ imaginations. Soon ‘no music being so pleasant in his ears as the sounding of trumpet and the beating of drum, the roaring of the cannon, no sight so acceptable, as that of pieces, pistols, or any sort of Armour’, he wanted