Mary Tudor: The First Queen Read online

  Although she was never to see him again, Charles stayed in Mary’s mind. He was a charming and gracious guest and his visit was one of the great state occasions of the early 16th century. On his arrival by boat at Greenwich Palace on 2 June 1522, he was greeted by Queen Katherine and her ladies and, of course, the Princess Mary. All her life she remembered his kindness to her, which seems to have been natural and not in any way forced. What else does a six-year-old princess expect in a husband? Admiration for the way she carries out the set-pieces expected of a great lady? Compliments leading to evident parental approval of her deportment? Later, she would see him as a father-figure, a constant in times of unpredictable and unwelcome change, beset by danger. They had met when she believed her future was to be his bride, and both her parents talked of her as the heir to the throne. It was a happy time.

  England took to Charles as well. He was the first - and, as it turned out, last - Holy Roman Emperor ever to visit and Londoners, who always loved a spectacle, warmed to him when he entered their city with Henry, accompanied by great pageantry and rejoicing. The emperor himself reported that he was ‘met with a magnificent reception from a great company of knights and gentlemen, with solemn and costly pageants, to the great joy of all the people’. Records of the preparations made for two days of jousting, on 4 and 5 June 1522, are further evidence of Tudor England’s impressive ability to entertain lavishly. For the decorative backdrop to the jousts, 46 yards of cloth of gold of damask, 11 yards of cloth of silver and 26 yards of russet velvet were ordered. One William Mortimer was hired to embroider the russet velvet with ‘knights on horseback, riding upon mountains of gold, with broken spears in their hands and ladies coming out of clouds, casting darts at the knights …’.15 Charles was equally well received as he toured southern England on a month-long hunting trip. When he left on 6 July, Mary’s thoughts may have turned to making the trip across the North Sea to Brussels herself in years to come, as Europe’s empress and England’s queen. But it was not to be. Both Charles and Henry knew the harsh realities of diplomacy; the benefits of the treaty of Bruges were tangible but temporary. Charles needed a bride nearer his own age and readily available. A man with his responsibilities could not wait for years and years, no matter how sweet his little cousin was. So he married the handsome Isabella of Portugal, and she soon produced the male heir that his aunt had so conspicuously failed to provide for England. There would be plenty of other suitors for Mary’s hand.

  Perhaps she was disappointed. Or perhaps she never viewed it as anything other than a play in which she was the leading actress for a while. During this period of raised expectations Mary was without Margaret Pole, temporarily removed as lady governess because her daughter’s father-in-law, the duke of Buckingham, had crossed Wolsey and been accused of conspiring against Henry. He was executed and Margaret, through association, found herself, not for the first time, mistrusted.16 The affair, the first in Henry’s reign when he moved against a great subject, blew over without permanent damage to Margaret. By 1525 she was back in charge of Mary’s daily life and ready to support her in the next phase of her preparation for queenship. Henry, with an eye to the future, thought it was time that his daughter got some practical experience of government. He had decided to send her off to the Welsh Marches, where generations of princes of Wales had gone before her to play their part in the royal family and to finish their education. If Mary’s childhood was not yet over, it was definitely entering a different and more serious phase.

  Chapter Two

  The Education of a Princess

  ‘She is very handsome and admirable by reason of her great and uncommon mental endowments.’

  The French envoy,Turenne, reports on Mary in February 1527

  At an early age, Mary had already been given a lesson in the harsh realities of English politics and one that had a direct bearing on her own life. To be near to her father was as dangerous as it was glorious, though it is unlikely that she realised this at such a young age. No doubt any questions she may have raised about the replacement of her lady governess would have been met with easy answers and, even if there were new relationships to be forged, her world, the world of England’s heiress, continued as before. By the time the countess of Salisbury returned, the formal approach to Mary’s education was established. It did not encourage idle speculation about over-mighty subjects, and Margaret Pole herself could be relied upon to keep quiet about the real reasons for her absence. Failure to do otherwise would have put her in great peril.

  The king’s decision to send his daughter to Wales does not mean that her education had been neglected or unstructured up to that point. Both parents took an evident interest in how Mary would be moulded to meet her destiny as a king’s daughter. Henry liked to show her off and his attitude was part parental affection but also prudent. It was making a statement about his own power and ambitions. The greater the effect Mary had on those who met her, the more it reflected well on him. To say that Mary was brought up ‘among the women’ is to give a false impression of the learning she had already received. Like other European princesses, she was taught by men, following the precepts of the leading thinkers of the day. Her education was at the cutting edge of Renaissance theory, though there must have been a need to adapt it to her own abilities. But her unique situation as Henry’s successor was enveloped in uncertainty. Here the theorists and tutors were in uncharted territory, for no one had ever formalised how a future queen regnant should be taught. Did her preparation need to be different from that of a male heir? The question was never directly raised, and Henry, who was privately ambivalent and touchy about the future, did not encourage such speculation. Neither did Katherine, who always believed with absolute firmness that her daughter must inherit the throne and did not want to open up a debate on the subject. She made sure that Mary would be appropriately trained for what lay ahead.

  Information on Mary’s early studies is fragmentary, but a considerable amount can be deduced, pieced together from reports of her official appearances and the accounts of her household. As she grows older, the picture becomes clearer and a polished humanist princess emerges from the schoolroom. Even as a very small girl, she was able to acquit herself superbly in public demonstration of her skills, and there were regular occasions of state that kept up the pressure on her to show what a king’s daughter could do.

  She clearly had an early aptitude for music and dancing and grew to be highly accomplished in both. At the age of four she could play the virginals and she later learned the lute and the regal.1 Playing these instruments was one of her main sources of relaxation and entertainment as she grew up, and the comments on her ability seem to have been more than the studied politeness of official observers. Dancing was also a vital accomplishment for royal ladies, and Mary’s enjoyment of it began early. She learned to dance at least as well as any lady at her father’s court. After Henry’s death, her brother EdwardVI would criticise Mary for her unseemly devotion to this pastime at which she excelled.

  Mary also became an accomplished linguist and had evidently learned some French by 1520, when she so impressed the French lords sent to inspect her. Again, this may have been, like the musicianship, a skill inherited from her father, who used it to communicate with the emperor’s French-speaking diplomats throughout his reign. There would have been no need for such a young child to converse at any length, only to demonstrate that she could exchange pleasantries and formal greetings. As an adult she relied on her French for communication with the imperial ambassadors at a time when they were almost her sole support and, later, for speaking to her husband. She may have picked up some Spanish from those around her mother, overhearing the conversations of Katherine with people like her confessor and her ladies-in-waiting, but the numbers of those who had, long ago, accompanied Katherine from Spain were dwindling, and the queen did not regularly use her native tongue any more except with her priests. Mary could, though, read Spanish; in the 1530s, when their worlds changed so dramati
cally and Katherine needed to be very careful in her letters to her daughter, she wrote to Mary in Spanish.The princess, however, does not seem to have spoken it well, and she did not use it in public.

  We do not know who taught Mary her first French, though there were French speakers at court and she may have received initial coaching from one of them. Nor is it possible to say with precision how she acquired basic literacy in English. The notion that Katherine of Aragon sat down and taught her daughter the alphabet is fanciful. It is appealing to think of the Spanish queen and her dutiful daughter bending their heads over Mary’s first attempts to form letters, but they were apart too often for Katherine to have had a sustained role as a teacher.2 Her oversight of the process of Mary’s education was, though, close. She followed Mary’s progress keenly, and there is no doubt that her influence would have started as soon as Mary could talk and be socialised.

  There is not a separate line in the princess’s accounts for a schoolmaster until she went off to Wales in 1525, when Dr Richard Fetherstone is first mentioned. Probably Mary learned the basics of literacy from her chaplain, Henry Rowle. General education as well as religious instruction was one of the services performed by chaplains for aristocratic households.3 At the age of nine, Mary could already write in Latin, and her first steps in this language, the prerequisite of greater learning, may well have been guided by one of the foremost English humanist scholars of his day, the royal physician,Thomas Linacre.

  Linacre was a distinguished Oxford scholar who, like many of his contemporaries, had travelled widely in Italy at the end of the 15th century. He combined an interest in Greek with medicine and his translation of the Greek physician, Galen, into Latin gave him a European reputation. He took his medical degree in Padua in 1496, and two years after Mary’s birth, in 1518, he and five other physicians, supported by Wolsey, petitioned the king to set up a College of Physicians in London. Katherine of Aragon had first met him during her time as princess of Wales, when he had been Prince Arthur’s tutor. She seems to have supported his appointment as royal physician when HenryVIII came to the throne. His credentials as a scholar would have made him an ideal choice for introducing a princess to the study of classical and humanist Latin.

  By the time Mary came to sit down with her first Latin textbooks, probably at the age of around seven, Linacre was more than 60 years old and greatly revered. He counted among his friends the three leading English humanists, More, Colet and Grocyn, and the towering European figure of Erasmus. He had already published, in English, two works on Latin grammar, and was shortly to bring out a more detailed one, in Latin, for students who had gone beyond the basics. Mary’s ability in Latin was widely remarked upon by the time she was 12, so it seems that the elderly Linacre, who died in 1524, gave her a good grounding in its study.

  Perhaps in his medical capacity he also advised on the importance for a child of a healthy lifestyle. Certainly, the physical side of Mary’s early education was not neglected. Sixteenth-century England placed a great deal of emphasis on physical fitness, believing that it was good for moral fibre as well as warding off sickness. Despite the challenges of long clothing and the vagaries of the weather, Mary was expected to exercise regularly: ‘… at seasons convenient, [she is] to use moderate exercise for taking open air in gardens, sweet and wholesome places and walks which may confer unto her health, solace and comfort …’.4 She would have been able to ride before she received the present of a horse from Lord Abergavenny in 1522, and she enjoyed horses and hunting throughout her life. Her accounts for that year show only one stable-boy, but her stables quickly grew, as was to be expected with an expanding household. She also kept a pack of hounds and liked coursing and hawking. Such blood sports were an essential part of aristocratic life. Mary was introduced to them early.

  Though Queen Katherine’s personal presence in Mary’s schoolroom was irregular, she had considerable input into her curriculum. At about the same time that Linacre was putting the princess through her first Latin primer, Katherine, looking to underline her credentials as a patron of new ideas, commissioned a work on female education.The writer was the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives, and his book, The Education of a Christian Woman, was considered radical. In his introductory letter to Katherine, Vives made a claim that ran counter to the still-prevailing negative attitude of the time towards women - he stated unequivocally that the proper education of a woman, as man’s essential companion, was vital for the well-being of the state. It was an outlook shared by Katherine herself and it coloured her own attitude to the role of a queen consort. But what did it mean for Mary, when she came to succeed her father?

  Many writers have seen Vives as a malign influence on Mary’s entire life. In effect, he has been accused of taking an intelligent girl and denying her the chance, through his theories, of developing as an independent, confident woman. This fits well with the long-held view of Mary as a victim; at the point in time when she began the more serious part of her schooling, she was trussed into the straitjacket of Vives’s ideas and emerged permanently damaged, believing that she was inferior to men and could not trust her own judgement. In this interpretation, she never stood a chance of being a successful ruler since her education had alienated her from the very qualities needed to become one. Nearly a generation later, her much younger half-sister, Elizabeth, benefiting from the new ideas that spread with the Reformation, was not so encumbered and was thus better equipped to take the reins of government.

  This conveniently symmetrical explanation for one of the apparent differences between the daughters of HenryVIII has condemned Vives to be widely misunderstood and, more seriously, to be judged without reference to the context in which he produced The Education of a Christian Woman. Katherine of Aragon commissioned him to write the work in 1523, shortly before his arrival in England to take up a teaching post at Oxford. She may have been inclined to patronise him because he was Spanish (he was from Valencia), but it is more likely that she chose Vives because he was already a well-established writer and thinker. After studying in Paris, he was appointed professor of the humanities at Louvain, a leading centre of study in the Low Countries.While there, he wrote a general treatise on education, On the right method of instruction for children, and a commentary on St Augustine’s The City of God, which he dedicated to Henry VIII. If not directly competing with her husband in her support for learning, Katherine certainly wanted to be identified with Europe’s prominent thinkers. In this ambition, she was typical of most high-born women of her day. It was an outlet for their intellects and interests in a world dominated by men, and it gave them influence and, indirectly, power. But it does not necessarily follow that Katherine intended Vives’s work as a precise blueprint for Mary’s tutors to follow.

  In the unctuous introductory letter to his treatise,Vives made it clear that he understood that the commission was more about Katherine than it was about Mary:I dedicate this work to you, glorious Queen, just as a painter might represent your likeness with utmost skill. As you will see your physical likeness portrayed there, so in these books you will see the image of your mind, since you were both a virgin and a promised spouse and a widow and now wife (as please God you may long continue) and since you have so conducted yourself in all these various states of life that whatever you did is a model of an exemplary life to others. But you prefer that virtues be praised rather than yourself …

  Quite what Katherine made of these references to her early life in England, as well as the strange aside about her marriage, is impossible to know. It would have made uncomfortable reading in the years to come. But then Vives turned to Katherine’s daughter, the beneficiary, he hoped, of his ideas: ‘Your daughter Mary will read these recommendations and will reproduce them as she models herself on the example of your goodness and wisdom to be found within her own home.’ A touching idea, but very much at odds with reality; Katherine and Mary had never lived together in the kind of cosy domestic bliss that Vives described. He would, of course, have kn
own this very well, but it sounded good and related to the philosophy he developed in the writing itself. So he continued in confident vein: ‘She will do this assuredly, and unless she alone belie all human expectations, must of necessity be virtuous and holy as the offspring of you and Henry VIII, such a noble and honoured pair.’ Clearly, it was important to remember Henry as well, and not just for form’s sake.Vives believed that the institution of marriage itself was the foundation of society. He went on to conclude: ‘Therefore all women will have an example to follow in your life and actions … and precepts and rules for the conduct of their lives. Both of these they will owe to your moral integrity’.5 In these closing lines,Vives demonstrated a shrewd understanding of his royal patron. Katherine’s moral integrity was the cornerstone of her being and the unwavering certainty it gave her she would pass on to Mary. The princess did not need Vives’s prompting, as she grew older, to absorb its importance.

  The Education of a Christian Woman has irritated many commentators in modern times, though the most recent edition is more generous in its editorial stance and acknowledges that Vives’s insistence on the intellectual superiority of women is important. But social equality was not something that the Spaniard advocated. His emphasis on the domestic virtues desirable in women is very much in tune with his times - and, indeed, the prevailing attitudes of the next four hundred years. If this seems unrealistic as part of the education of a future queen, it is worth bearing in mind that Katherine of Aragon and her sisters had been taught to bake bread as children in Spain. Presumably they had little occasion to put their expertise into practice as adults. Mary herself told her brother’s privy councillors that ‘her parents had not taught her to bake and brew’, but Vives would have considered this an omission; it was directly counter to his own ideas. He thought all girls should learn the art of cooking, though ‘not the vulgar kind associated with low-class eating houses’.Vives envisaged something closer to a domestic goddess than an innkeeper’s wife, a woman not afraid to work with her hands, fully equipped to manage a home.We should not sneer too much at his insistence on the attainment of such attributes. Running a large household in the 16th century was a formidable undertaking. The skills it called for were eminently transferable to the running of a country, even if this was not officially recognised by a patriarchal society.