Meantime, I was angry with More for not having warned me, especially as the boy sent me a little note, while we were at dinner, to challenge something from my pen. I went home, and in the Muses' spite, from whom I had been so long divorced, finished the poem within three days." The poem,[50] in which Britain speaks her own praise and that of her princes, Henry VII. and his children, was dedicated to the Duke of York and accompanied by a letter in which Erasmus commended Henry's devotion to learning. Seven years later Erasmus again wrote to Henry, now Prince of Wales, condoling with him upon the death of his brother-in-law, Philip of Burgundy, King of Castile. Henry replied in cordial manner, inviting the great scholar to continue the correspondence. The style of his letter so impressed Erasmus that he suspected, as he says,[51] "some help from others in the ideas and expressions. In a conversation I afterwards had with William, Lord Mountjoy, he tried by various arguments to dispel that suspicion, and when he found he could not do so he gave up the point and let it pass until he was sufficiently instructed in the case. On another occasion, when we were talking alone together, he brought out a number of the Prince's letters, some to other people and some to himself, and among them one which answered to mine: in these letters were manifest signs of (p. 024) comment, addition, suppression, correction and alteration--You might recognise the first drafting of a letter, and you might make out the second and third, and sometimes even the fourth correction; but whatever was revised or added was in the same handwriting. I had then no further grounds for hesitation, and, overcome by the facts, I laid aside all suspicion." Neither, he adds, would his correspondent doubt Henry VIII's authorship of the book against Luther if he knew that king's "happy genius". That famous book is sufficient proof that theological studies held no small place in Henry's education. They were cast in the traditional mould, for the Lancastrians were very orthodox, and the early Tudors followed in their steps. Margaret Beaufort left her husband to devote herself to good works and a semi-monastic life; Henry VII. converted a heretic at the stake and left him to burn;[52] and the theological conservatism, which Henry VIII. imbibed in youth, clung to him to the end of his days. [Footnote 47: _Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 26787._] [Footnote 48: _Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 19553._] [Footnote 49: F.M. Nichols, _Epistles of Erasmus_, i., 201.] [Footnote 50: Printed in 1500 at the end of Erasmus's _Adagia_.] [Footnote 51: F.M. Nichols, pp. 423-24; _L. and P._, iv., 5412.] [Footnote 52: _Cotton MS._, Vitellius, A., xvi., f. 172.]