Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (25 page)

CHAPTER 8

CHRISTIAN WOMEN OR SOVEREIGN QUEENS? THE SCHOOLING OF MARY AND ELIZABETH

Aysha Pollnitz*

I

Biographical writing often has a Neo-Freudian tendency, particularly when it deals with a subject’s childhood and education. Mary and Elizabeth I have proved especially fertile grounds for biography and their early experiences have been mined for evidence of the queens they would become. Elizabeth is typically described as having been cultivated for rule while Mary, despite her early exposure to “Christian humanism,” apparently learned to do little more than hand England over to Philip, evil prelates, and/or Rome.
¹

Beyond our modern affinity to psychological explanation, scholars have confronted two related evidentiary difficulties in describing the half-sisters’ educations. First, although their childhoods are comparatively well-documented, historians confront the same source imbalance that pertains to other learned women in the early modern period: there was much more written 
about
 them than 
by
 them. Second, these early modern commentators were frequently unsure what the point of educating women was. Nominally, the object of all learning was to cultivate virtue. In practice, however, the future prospects of a student were critical.
²

One might assume that in the cases of Mary and Elizabeth, “future sovereignty” provided an adequate answer to the pedagogues’ dilemma. Except, of course, the princesses’ positions with respect to the succession changed a number of times between their births and eventual, unlikely accessions. Educators were conscious of the variable fortunes of noblewomen. Thomas Elyot’s treatise the 
Defence of good women
 (1540), for instance, described the fate of Zenobia, the ancient Queen of Palmyra, whose early study of letters had allegedly prepared her for life as a royal daughter, consort, widowed regent, and captive queen. Although Elyot claimed that moral philosophy would fit women for all fortune, his Zenobia actually demonstrated different qualities and skills in each office. As a royal daughter, she was famous for her chastity. As a regent, she needed eloquence to maintain justice and order.
³
Elyot’s observations on the fortunes of noblewomen may have struck a chord with Princess Mary, who rewarded him with five shillings in January 1540.
⁴

Elyot was not alone in associating particular sets of knowledge and skills with specific virtues and future duties. Erasmus of Rotterdam and Juan Luis Vives were among those who presented Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon with advice on how to educate their children. Their works described curricula that were meant to engender desirable conduct and sex-specific virtue in future office-bearers. This essay argues that when contemporaries praised Elizabeth’s or Mary’s learning, or when the princesses and their tutors circulated evidence of their erudition, they relied on similar associations. Instead of offering us windows into Mary’s and Elizabeth’s psyches (let alone their souls), evidence from their schoolrooms provides insights into English political culture. It also suggests some surprising continuities between the princesses’ educations.

II

In the year following Princess Mary’s birth, Desiderius Erasmus presented his 
Institutio principis Christiani
 (1516) to Henry VIII.5 The text became quickly and enduringly influential in England.
⁶

Erasmus justified the careful education of princes by appealing to the Platonic adage that states were well-governed when kings became philosophers. Specifically he proposed that princes study 
honestae
 or 
bonae litterae
under wise and erudite schoolmasters. Erasmus argued that the prince should learn Latin and Greek grammar by reading fables and parables and then tackle selected books from the Bible. Next he should read moral philosophy: Plutarch’s A 
pophthegms
, 
Moralia
 and the 
Lives;
 the works of Seneca; Aristotle’s 
Politics
; Cicero’s 
De officiis
; and Plato’s 
Republic
, for “the purer message” on the duties of philosopher-kings. Finally, he encouraged the prince to draw on his own work on Latin expression, 
De copia
.
⁷

In the 
Institutio
, Erasmus was circumspect about the moral value of much classical history, but with reference to Henry VIII’s own childhood studies, he recommended 
historia
 to princes in his 1531 edition of Livy.
⁸
Indeed, when Elyot and Vives fleshed out Erasmus’ curriculum in their treatises on learning for noblemen, they followed Erasmus’ emphasis on cultivating moral probity, historically informed prudence, and rhetorical flair.
⁹

III

There is no sign, however, that Henry VIII interpreted Erasmus’ gift as pertaining to the education of his daughter, Mary. Prince Edward and indeed Henry Fitzroy, the king’s illegitimate son, studied under humanist pedagogues from the age of six. Household accounts, however, suggest that Mary had no official schoolmaster until 1525.

This absence was one sign that Mary’s princely status had not been resolved prior to 1525. While Mary’s household increased in size and stature from 1519 to 1525, particularly with the temporary appointment of Margaret Pole, countess of Salisbury, as her governess, its scale was unequal to Prince Edward’s establishment in 1544.
¹⁰
Two early contracts for Mary’s marriage described her as Henry’s sole heir, but related correspondence suggests that the king was gambling on the princess’s claim remaining untested.
¹¹
Perhaps most tellingly, on June 28, 1520, when the French sent envoys to check on their dauphin’s fiancée, Princess Mary was swiftly relocated to the king’s palace at Richmond and a gaggle of noblewomen was rounded up to attend on her. Salisbury hastily taught Mary to receive them “w[ith] moost goodly countenence [and] proper commyunycac[i]on.”
¹²
Her “princely” state had to be manufactured for the occasion. The papal envoy, Giovanni Batista Sangi, reported in November 1524 that few believed that “the daughter of the King of England [would] bring that kingdom with her as dower.”
¹³

Henry doubted his daughter’s princely potential; Catherine of Aragon did not. Catherine’s mother, Isabel of Castile, had given her a careful education and a positive model of female sovereignty.
¹⁴
In turn, Catherine tried to promote her daughter’s princely status through her schooling. Reginald Pole reported that it was the queen who had implored the countess of Salisbury to serve as Mary’s governess.
¹⁵
According to Erasmus, she also took Mary’s Latin instruction in hand herself, perhaps in conjunction with Mary’s chaplain and clerk of the closet, Henry Rowle.
¹⁶
Noting Mary’s frequent absences from Catherine’s comp any, David Loades has questioned this claim.
¹⁷
Yet in July 1525, following the appointment of Mary’s first schoolmaster, Catherine wrote to her daughter: “As for your writing in Lattine, I am glad ye shalt chaunge frome me to Maister [Richard] Federston.” She asked Mary to continue sending her “of yo[u]r owne enditing [composition]” so that she could see her keep her letters “latten and fayer writing and all.”
¹⁸
In lieu of a schoolmaster, Catherine may have tried to fill the gaps. If Mary was educated as a prince, she would have a better chance of becoming one.

The other part of Catherine’s campaign was literary patronage. On April 5, 1523 Catherine’s client Juan Luis Vives completed his 
De institutione
feminae christianae
, which he claimed was a plan for Mary’s education.
¹⁹
Vives’s work was influential in England; it was translated into English by Richard Hyrde and printed by Thomas Berthelet in 1529 and reprinted on eight further occasions before 1600.
²⁰
The queen had not commissioned it but the pension she granted Vives in July 1521 encouraged him to “send something” to her when he had completed his edition of Augustine’s 
De
civitate Dei
 (1522).
²¹

Vives claimed to offer Catherine “an image of [her] mind” by describing her honorable conduct as a maid, wife, and widow (to Prince Arthur). If Mary imitated her mother’s behavior, he predicted that she would become a paragon of all that was “virtuous and holy.”
²²
As has been pointed out, however, Vives’s 
De institutione
, like a number of Erasmus’ works on female education, offered a pattern for female domesticity rather than public office.
²³
Where Erasmus had used a Platonic justification for teaching kings to be philosophers, Vives reasoned on remedial, Aristotelian lines for women: polities that failed to “provide for the proper education of women deprive themselves of a great part of their prosperity,” and male citizens found “nothing so troublesome as sharing...life with a person of no principles.”
²⁴
While Vives tended to view all humanity through Augustinian lenses, he thought that women were even more vulnerable to corruption than men.
²⁵
In 
De institutione
 and in his subsequent 
De officio
mariti
 (1529 and revised 1538), Vives made it clear that female weakness was physical and psychological, not intellectual. Nevertheless it meant that women could only aspire to passive, rather than active, virtues on earth.
²⁶

Largely, for Vives, the female virtue under consideration was chastity and the goal of women’s education was to protect it.
²⁷
As such Vives focused his prescriptions for women on needlework and the study of “that part of philosophy that has assumed as its task the formation and improvement of morals.”
²⁸
Vives recommended the Gospels, Acts “and the epistles, the historical and moral books of the Old Testament”; the Church fathers; early Christian writers such as Boethius; Plato, Cicero, and Seneca; and Christian poets such as Prudentius.
²⁹
Reading these works in the original would have required knowledge of Latin and Greek but Vives notes in 
De
officio mariti
 that poetry was just as morally efficacious in translation.
³⁰
In addition, women were instructed to copy down “wise and holy sentiments from the Holy Scriptures or...philosophers” so that these teachings would remain firmly in their memories.
³¹
Once a Christian woman had such learning, she was discouraged from using it publicly. Vives echoed Italian humanists such as Leonardo Bruni in claiming that women’s education was “not at all concerned with eloquence.” He also argued that studying nature, classical histories, chronicles, dialectic, mathematics, political administration, or theology was unsuitable for Christian women.32

Vives, therefore, debarred women, including the Queen of England and her daughter, from the knowledge of civic disciplines. In fact, apart from self-improvement, the only use for learning that Vives did not proscribe was the instruction of other women and children.33 Contemporaries typically construed this as permission for women to circulate pious translations for the benefit of their social inferiors (though men made such translations too). Hyrde, Vives’s own English translator, dedicated Margaret More’s version of a prayer of Erasmus to another “vertuous yonge mayde.”
³⁴
Not only did More’s translation make a spiritually improving work accessible to other Christian women, it also encouraged them to emulate her in learning.

One might speculate that Catherine had more than this in mind for Mary. On January 25, 1524, Vives reported that he had taken to “philosophizing with the queen, now and then” during his time in England.
³⁵
Among other things, they seem to have discussed Mary’s future. When the royal couple met Vives in Oxford in October 1523, the humanist presented the queen with an alternative curriculum for her daughter, 
Epistola
I de ratione studii puerilis
 (printed 1524). Vives noted in his dedicatory epistle that the plan had been commanded (
iussisti
) specifically by Catherine for Mary.
³⁶
This may explain why Vives’s prescriptions in the 
Epistola
 differ so strikingly from those in 
De institutione feminae Christianae
. The 
Epistola
assumed that Mary needed to use learning in public contexts. Vives insisted that Mary pronounce Latin correctly and write it in a hand “not so much elegant as speedy.” Her memory must “hold her back from no business” and she should parse little English orations into Latin.
³⁷
Vives proposed a variety of techniques for developing ready Latin speech and composition, including stylistic imitation, a commonplace book, and daily conversation.
³⁸
Indeed, these methods anticipated Giles du Wés’s plan for teaching the princess French in her household in Wales. Du Wés’s 
Introductorie for
to lerne...Frenche
 (1533?) suggests that his preferred teaching method was to engage the princess in conversation and to role-play dialogues in which Mary acted as head of a noble household, receiving a messenger from the king or bantering with her treasurer.
³⁹
Both Vives’s and du Wés’s instructions indicate that they thought the princess would need ready Latin and French to manage court business with ease and grace.

Significantly Vives also extended the range of authors suitable for Mary’s consideration. He recommended Plutarch’s writings and Plato’s dialogues “especially those which consider the government of the commonwealth.” He also included contemporary political philosophy, such as Thomas More’s 
Utopia
 and Erasmus’ 
Institutio principis Christiani
, alongside the latter’s
Paraphrasis
 on the Gospels. When Mary’s 
ratio
 is compared to Vives’s contemporary prescriptions for Charles Blount, Greek and 
historia
 still seem marginalized.
⁴⁰
Nevertheless, the 
Epistola
 described a curriculum for cultivating ready speech and political prudence—qualities for civic leadership.