Six Wives (28 page)

    In the course of the first six months of 1522, Mary rejoined her parents for long stays at Greenwich and Richmond. But this year, the summer Progress, which traversed East Anglia from Ipswich in the east to Walsingham in the north, was unusually extended. So, in early July, Mary bade farewell to her parents at Windsor and, escorted by Catherine's footmen, rode the short distance to Chertsey, which served as the first of her summer residences. She was apart from her family for the whole of August and September. By October, the Progress was over and the separation was felt to have gone on long enough. The King and Queen had remained in East Anglia, alternating between Hertford Castle and Hatfield Palace, while Mary had moved to Richmond. She was now brought to Bedwell, a manor-house in Hertfordshire three miles east of Hatfield.
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    The location of the house was obviously a crucial consideration. But so too was its ownership. For Bedwell was one of the principal seats of the wealthy knight Sir William Say, father-in-law of Lord Mountjoy, Catherine's Chamberlain. It was lavishly furnished and its estates were well-stocked, especially with pigeons from its dovecotes, to which Mountjoy was partial. Once again, the Queen's footmen provided an escort for Mary's journey, which took two full days on the 17th and 18th. Mary thereafter remained at Bedwell, within easy reach of her parents, for the next two months. During this time Catherine also communicated more formally with Mary's Council by letter. And when mother and daughter went their separate ways for Christmas, Catherine provided for Mary's transport in fine style, with both a palfrey on which she could ride when she wished and a litter in which she could rest when she was tired.
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    Catherine, as usual, considered the matter carefully. She also had one notable example to hand. Sir Thomas More had four children, three daughters and one son, who were born about a decade before Mary. In his
Utopia
, More had thought the unthinkable. In the upbringing of his children, he decided to do the unthinkable as well and give his daughters, who turned out to be brilliant, and his son, who did not, exactly the same rigorous education. All four children studied at home and had the best masters, who taught them Latin, Greek, mathematics and astronomy. Catherine knew about this experiment. It had been made famous by Erasmus's praise of More's household academy and More himself was a familiar figure at Court where he was a resident Councillor from 1518. But Catherine turned elsewhere.
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    Predictably, her chosen adviser was a Spaniard. Juan Luis Vives was born in 1492 in Valencia. After a thoroughly traditional education in scholasticism and logic at the academy in his native city, he proceeded to further study in Paris and the Netherlands. In his late teens he underwent a sort of conversion. He passionately rejected his youthful studies as arid and destructive and embraced instead the new literary programme of Erasmus with its emphasis on clarity and personal integrity and its appeal to the heart rather than the head. He also built up a reputation as a brilliant teacher. By 1522, however, his career was in crisis. The actual business of teaching had become 'in the highest degree repulsive' and his former pupil and patron, William de Croy, Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo, had died. Vives needed a new patron and a new job.
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    At this point, Catherine of Aragon offered her patronage. Vives leapt at the opportunity. He would spend part of the year in England. And he would exchange the drudgery of the classroom for the well-paid role of educational consultant. It did not quite work out like that. Vives was snapped up as Wolsey's Reader in Rhetoric at Oxford. But this appointment left him with plenty of time for attendance at Court. He complained that his lodgings were mean and in the City which was a long way from the usual seat of the Court at Greenwich. But, despite his protests, he enjoyed the excitement of being at the heart of things. He also came to hold Catherine herself in respect and affection.
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    But what did Catherine see in Vives, apart from his Spanishness? There were the things in him that everybody found attractive, such as his youth, his brilliance, his engaging personality, his freedom from the usual scholarly bile and malice. For Vives was a most unscholarly scholar. Most scholars were not gentlemen. Instead, they were low born, in priestly orders and, rather often, like Erasmus himself, 'not the marrying sort'. Vives was a world apart. He was of gentle birth, with a good pedigree, a coat-of-arms and a motto,
Siempre vivas
. He was a layman. And in 1524 he was to marry. All this appealed powerfully to Catherine: she liked gentlemen, she was conventional and she was passionately devoted to marriage.

    Vives therefore was 'one of us' – unlike Erasmus. He was also, unlike More, 'a safe pair of hands'. Catherine could ask him for his advice on a programme for Mary's future education and be confident that the result would not frighten the horses – or, more importantly, her husband.

    Vives did not disappoint. Catherine must have made her request early in 1523. Vives worked with his usual speed (he had written twelve books by the time he was twenty-eight) and the dedicatory letter to
De
institutione feminae christianae
(The Institution of a Christian Woman) is dated 5 April 1523 at Bruges. 'I have been moved [to write]', Vives told Catherine, 'partly by the holiness and goodness of your living, partly by the favour and love that your Grace beareth toward holy study and learning.' But Catherine, he continues, was to be more than the inspiration of the treatise, she was herself to be the model of the educated Christian woman, whose example Mary was to follow in all things. 'Your dearest daughter Mary shall read these instructions of mine, and follow in living. Which she must needs do, if she order herself after the example she hath at home with her, of your virtue and wisdom.'

    This sets the tone immediately. But another woman is an even more powerful presence: Blancha Maria, Vives's mother. Blancha also came from a good family, which had literary tastes and had produced several poets. Her love for her son was deep but undemonstrative. And his feelings for her only strengthened with the passage of time. 'Therefore,' he recalls in
De institutione
, 'there was nobody that I did more flee, or was more loath to come nigh, than my mother, when I was a child. But after I came to a man's estate, there was nobody whom I delighted more to have in sight.'

    But it is Blancha's relations with her husband, Luis, not with her son, which are principally at issue. Vives remembered, 'I could never see her strive with my father'. Instead, she had two habitual sayings. 'When she would say she believed anything well, then she used to say, "It is even as though Luis Vives had spoken it." When she would say she would [wished for] anything, she used to say, "It is even as though Luis Vives would it".' The result, Vives said proudly, was that 'the concord of Vives and Blancha was taken up and used in a manner for a proverb'.

    All this, Vives claims artfully, is an aside. 'It is not much to be talked in a book, made for another purpose, of my most holy mother.' But the disclaimer is itself an artifice. For the invocation of his patron Catherine, in the dedicatory epistle, and of his mother, Blancha, in the text, serve to announce the principal theme of his book: that the new education is entirely compatible with the old woman and with the old, subordinate place of women. Fathers, according to Vives, have nothing to fear from educated daughters, nor husbands from learned wives. As for women themselves, they too have everything to gain from education, as it will fit them better for their proper role, as handmaidens to man and God.

    But when Vives turns from principles to practice,
De institutione
disappointingly runs out of steam. Instead of an educational programme, there are two lists, one of 'good' books and one of 'bad'. The 'bad' books are vernacular romances. Vives lists many examples in Spanish, French and Flemish but not in English since he was familiar with neither the language nor the literature. Romances were the Mills and Boon of the day and their content was recognisably the same. It consisted of bold knights, handsome heroes, wicked villains, distressed damsels, unrequited love and nights of passion – sometimes occurring outside marriage, sometimes before it, but rarely, alas, after the knot was tied. Such works, according to Vives, were
libri pestiferi
(noxious books): they inculcated false values and incited women's imaginations, which in any case were more fevered than men's, to lust. He wanted them banned, for Mary and for all other women.

    Vives's list of 'good' books, which he would substitute for the bad, is much less sensational. It fell into three groups. The first consisted of much of the Good Book itself, including part of the Old Testament, together with the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles. Then there were the three Fathers of the Church, Saints Cyprian, Jerome and Augustine. Finally, Mary was to read something of the best moral philosophers of the Classical World, such as Boethius, Plato, Cicero and Seneca, as her teacher would select.

    Vives also disapproved of cards and dice and fine clothes, which Mary came to enjoy, and dancing, at which she already excelled.

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Catherine was enthusiastic about the general arguments of
De institutione
. But she wanted more and more detail. Her opportunity came six months later, after Vives had taken up his post at Oxford. From 22 September 1523, Catherine and Henry were at Woodstock Palace, five miles from Oxford. They had bade farewell to Mary at Richmond on 13 August and then travelled west by easy stages. The main purpose of their visit to Woodstock was to hunt the magnificent park. But they interrupted their sport to hear Vives deliver one of his lectures. Probably Catherine repeated her request in person. With his usual efficiency, Vives dashed off a more detailed programme of study for her daughter,
De ratione studii
puerilis
, which he prefaced with a letter, dated at Oxford on 7 October, dedicating the work to Mary herself.

    So the
De ratione
was a practical work, intended for actual classroom use. It shows. Vives gave rules for the pronunciation of Latin and Greek (for Mary, like other Tudor children, was expected to have a spoken as well as a written knowledge of the ancient tongues). He advised that something should be learned by heart (
memoriter
) every day, and read over two or three times before bedtime to impress it permanently in the memory. He recommended a Latin and English dictionary and discussed the latest available grammars (the one, for instance, prepared for Mary by the late Thomas Linacre was sophisticated in intent but rather slapdash in execution with misprints and errors in the examples). He refined his earlier list of recommended reading and leavened the diet with some poetry. Since Mary would be Queen, he added some political science, including Plato and Thomas More's
Utopia
. And, since she would be Defender of the Faith, she was to read the New Testament night and morning. She was also to learn by heart the main examples of ancient proverbial wisdom, which had been conveniently collected together by Erasmus in a single little volume.

    Finally, Vives remembered that all work and no play makes a dull girl. 'Let her be given pleasure in stories which teach the art of life. Let these be such as she can tell to others.' There follows a list of improving stories – of Joseph in the Bible, of Lucretia in Livy, or (a rare concession) of patient Griselda in popular fiction. In thus prescribing Mary's leisurereading as well as her schoolwork, Vives had the same intention as the authors of politically correct fairy stories today: to harness a child's perennial interest in story-telling to the fabrication of a new culture. But Vives, like Erasmus, quickly realised that the number of suitable readymade stories was inadequate. So he turned his own considerable gifts as a narrator to the telling of new ones. The result was a compendium,
Satellitium vel Symbola
, of stories designed to amuse and edify Mary. It was published in 1527, and it included an account of a conversation that Vives had with her mother in the Queen's barge.

    There was clearly a good deal of direct contact between Vives and Catherine and between Vives and Mary too. But Vives was never Mary's teacher: he gave only advice to the mother, not lessons to the daughter. Catherine had appointed a teacher, whom Vives knew and respected. And he is careful to explain their relative input. 'Since thou', he tells Catherine, 'hast chosen as her teacher a man above all learned and honest, as was fit, I was contented to point out details, as with a
finger. He will explain the rest of the matters.' Unfortunately Vives never mentions the teacher's name. Nor does any other source. Equally, it is clear that the teacher, whoever he was, enjoyed only delegated authority. For Catherine remained in control. She might have consulted the leading authorities, commissioned reports and appointed expert staff. But it made no real difference: in infancy, she had nursed Mary through her childish ailments; now she corrected her Latin exercises, kept her up to scratch with her handwriting and assessed her progress. 'Time will admonish her as to more exact details,' Vives advised Catherine, 'and thy singular wisdom will discover for her what they should be.' This sort of parental interest places a child under immense pressure. Fortunately, Mary had the talent to respond. Aged twelve, she was able to make a translation of a prayer by St Thomas Aquinas, that, like all the best prayers, is both stately and euphonious; in her twenties, and responding to the encouragement of another Queen Catherine, she was author of a published translation of one of Erasmus's Biblical paraphrases. The achievement is considerable; the credit is largely Catherine of Aragon's.
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