I just read that Henry VII's background was Welsh and his father was named Edmwnd Tudur and his father was named Owain Tudur, both very Welsh sounding named. Did Henry speak Welsh? Were any other British monarchs able to speak a local language?
Might I add a question?
How long after the Norman invasion before the monarchs even spoke English?
There is no contemporary record of Henry VII having spoken or known Welsh, but it's not beyond the bounds of possibility.
Reasons for:
He spent a large portion of his childhood, until his teenage years, in Wales, having been born at Pembroke Castle and subsequently having been raised there for a large portion of his early life.
He is reported to have had a Welsh speaking Nanny as a child.
The Tudors used Welsh and broader Celtic mythology and symbolism in legitimising their claims.
Reasons against
His father died three months prior to his birth so he would not have learned Welsh from him.
Although he was raised in Wales, Welsh would have been the vernacular in his environs, with French, Latin and to some extent English being the preferred Courtly languages.
His son actively suppressed the Welsh language during his reign, suggesting Henry VII did not pass it down to him.
This is an interesting read on the Welshness of the Tudors.
http://www.historytoday.com/peter-r-roberts/welshness-tudors
Henry VII's granddaughter Elizabeth I on the other hand was famed for being a polyglot and having a special skill for language learning. There are several contemporary accounts to this effect, from her childhood tutor Roger Ascham to visiting foreign dignitaries during her reign.
The reported number of languages she could use, besides English, and her fluency in them varies between sources, the ones most frequently mentioned are Latin, Greek, French, Flemish, Spanish and Italian.
She is also reported to have either spoken or made an effort to learn Cornish, Welsh, Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic. We can at least confirm that she made some attempt at learning some Irish Gaelic as she had a 'primer'; a phrase book with Irish Gaelic translated in to English and Latin.
For a diplomatic and courtly language such as Latin we have good evidence of her competency as we have letters that she herself wrote in that tongue, however, for a language like Welsh whose use would have been largely oral it's trickier to pin down exactly how confident she was in it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/people/elizabeth_I http://www.vaguelyinteresting.co.uk/?tag=queen-elizabeth-i-spoke http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elizabeth_I's_primer_on_Irish.jpg http://virtuallinguist.typepad.com/the_virtual_linguist/2012/08/elizabeth-is-primer-of-irish.html
Prince Charles is conversant in Cornish. I remember reading something like only two or three professors or Cornish linguistic scholars are still alive.
That being said Charles is Duke of Cornwall as well as Prince of Wales - and the Prince of Wales is required to give some sort of antiquated speech (the name escapes me) in Welsh when he is formally invested with the title by the Monarch. Which means King Edward VIII and Prince Albert Victor and King Edward VII and so on spoke at least a rudimentary amount.
Source: King Charles III - A biography Holden, Anthony 1988 Grove publishers - London
(Sorry for poor sourcing format - I'm on mobile)
If you look to pre-Union Scotland, I know that the early Stuart monarchs (Robert II-James IV) spoke Gaelic. James IV was the last Scottish king to speak the language of the Highlands and Isles. Source: Charles W.J. Withers, 'The Geographical History of Gaelic in Scotland' in Colin H. Williams, ed. Language in Geographic Context (Clevedon, 1988), p. 138.
