Edward was an affectionate little boy, of good impulses. Of course it was unthinkable that a prince should ever be flogged; so the fond father appointed a whipping-boy to act vicariously in his stead. It was Barnaby Fitzpatrick who was honoured by receiving the royal thrashings, though Edward was such a good little boy that Barnaby was seldom called upon for duty, and grew up a firm friend of the little king who might have suffered in his person but for him. Edward’s wet-nurse was a motherly woman whom he later called his “mother-jak.” I do not know what childish utterance that may have represented, but it is silly enough a term to have come from the mouths of babes and sucklings. At eleven months old no less a personage than Thomas Cromwell visited him officially and, no doubt, dandled him upon his knee. Says Cromwell’s secretary, speaking of this time, “And I do assure your lordship that I never saw so goodly a child of his age; so merry, so good and loving a countenance, and so earnest an eye, as it were exercising a judgment towards every person who repaireth to his grace; and, as it seemeth to me, his grace encreaseth well in the air where he is.” (Already he had been sent to the country for his health.) “And, albeit a little of his grace’s flesh decayeth, yet he shooteth out in length and waxeth firm and stiff and he can steadfastly stand.” So clearly he was a nice little boy of eleven months, if anything rather forward for his age. When he was about two, his father, the king, used to take his little son in his arms and stand at the window to show the multitude how bravely his boy was fighting life; and the crowd would clap and cheer for joy, for King Henry VIII was still beloved, and the Tudor succession was at every Englishman’s heart; the awful mental and physical degeneration in the king was still to come, and there is no more delightful scene in Henry VIII’s life than that of him standing at the window holding up his son to be cheered by the crowd. How little we really know of our public men! Who could have foretold that this smiling king was to become the most murderous tyrant who ever sat upon the throne of England? For the present let him be glad, and his little son with him, smiling and chuckling with true Tudor tact. The tragedy to both comes soon enough.