Starkey’s view is that one key to Henry’s character is in his not having grown up the heir. Whereas his elder brother, Arthur, was installed in his own princely household from infancy, Henry’s early years were spent sequestered with his mother, sisters and short-lived younger brother. It is probable, Starkey suggests, that Henry was taught to read and write by his mother.
Childhood did not last long. The pace of life in Tudor times is startling to the modern mind. Henry rode solo into London, and was installed as a Knight of the Bath, at the age of three and a half. (Starkey wonders, ‘What, if anything, did the three-and-a-half-year-old Henry understand of all this, let alone remember?’ I’m inclined to reverse the order of ‘remember’ and ‘understand’.) His brother, Arthur, was regent at the age of six; and when the Yorkists’ puppet pretender, Perkin Warbeck, threatened to invade from the Netherlands, Henry VII’s response was to install his second son as lord warden of the Cinque Ports and constable of Dover Castle. Henry was not yet two.
All this, of course, is a token of the ceremonial theatre of late-medieval monarchy, something Starkey brings out well. Henry was, if not literally born on stage, literally christened there. And with the death of the Prince of Wales in 1502, he went from being the understudy to being the star turn.
Henry’s political moves were shrewd from the start. It happened that he adored jousting; and he made much of it. This did more than just indulge a boyish enthusiasm (Starkey suggests, with splendid vulgarity, that loving the tiltyard then was the equivalent of being a footie-mad teenager now). By putting a sport that had become identified with Yorkist blowhards at the centre of his political pageantry, he co-opted it. He was, you could say, the original big-tent guy.
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