Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (26 page)

Beyond reporting that he had been ordered to produce the 
Epistola
, Vives did not try to justify his plan or explain how Mary’s study of policy or rhetoric would enhance (or fail to detract from) her feminine virtue. Perhaps he was not quite sure himself: he certainly returned to cultivating chaste domesticity with his 
De officio mariti
 of 1529. It was this preferred, original pattern, moreover, that came to dominate representations of Mary and Elizabeth’s schooling.

IV

By 1525, Catherine had made her case with Henry VIII that Mary required a careful education largely on account of her failure to produce a male heir. From August 1525 until early 1527 Mary served as the king’s vice-regent in the Welsh Marches, an office typically assigned to the heirpresumptive.
⁴¹
The princess was accompanied by her recently reappointed governess, Margaret Pole, a council led by John Voysey, Bishop of Exeter, and an independent household of up to 304 people.
⁴²
Among them were her new schoolmaster, Richard Fetherstone (archdeacon of St. David’s in Brecknock, South Wales) and her French tutor, du Wés.
⁴³
On July 20, 1526, Mary’s council was instructed to report on her academic progress at least once a month.
⁴⁴
“W[i]thout fatigacion or wearines” Salisbury was “to intende to [Mary’s] learning of Latine tongue and French” daily.
⁴⁵
Salisbury, Fetherstone, and du Wés did well in Wales: the king rewarded the countess with 33 ounces of plate, and Fetherstone and Duwes with 20 ¾ oz each on January 1, 1528. All three continued in their posts until December 1533.
⁴⁶
Between 1525 and 1533, Henry provided for the careful education of his daughter.

It was Mary’s status as a potential heir, rather than Vives’s argument that a lack of learning would imperil her chastity, that secured her a schoolmaster. Nevertheless surviving evidence of the princess’s education reflected Vives’s plan for the Christian woman, rather than Erasmus’ curriculum for princes, or even the prescriptions of Vives’s 
Epistola
. Mary’s reading apparently focused on works that encouraged piety and moral rectitude and she circulated translation exercises, apparently for the edification of her social inferiors.

In 1527, for instance, Mary translated Thomas Aquinas’ prayer for the ordering of life, which had begun to attain popularity in England among the devout laity. Indeed the prayer would be included in primers authorized by each Tudor monarch.
⁴⁷
Analysis of English and continental versions of the prayer reveals that Mary probably worked from a medieval Latin rendering, printed in a 1514 Salisbury Book of Hours.
⁴⁸
Henry Parker, Lord Morley, was right to praise her for coming “neare to the laten” of the original.
⁴⁹
The prayer asks God to “graunte [the penitent] to covyt with an ardent mynde those things whiche may please [him].” She begs God to make her “Obedyent w[i]t[h] oute arguyng, Pacient w’t oute grutching, And pure wi[t]h oute corrupcion.”
⁵⁰
These were suitable lessons for a Christian woman. By translating the prayer, Mary demonstrated that she had inscribed them on her character. Moreover, Mary’s Englishing was subsequently copied by other women and children, notably a female courtier, who placed it in her book of hours, and the family of Lord Morley, who also copied it into their books.
⁵¹
Like Vives’s Christian woman, Mary demonstrated that she used learning to edify herself as well as other women and children.

The most important and widely circulated relic of Mary’s schooling stretched but did not break with Vives’s prescriptions. Shortly after Mary’s reinstatement to the succession in 1544, Katherine Parr encouraged the princess to translate the 
Paraphrase of Erasmus on the Gospel of Saint John
(printed 1548).
⁵²
As I have argued elsewhere, Mary made a serious attempt at it.
⁵³
Despite the fact that the English 
Paraphrases
 were subsequently placed in parishes across England to further the Reformation, Erasmus’ commentary on John contained little to offend Mary doctrinally. After all, it had been recommended to the princess by Vives himself. Nicholas Udall, the editor of the 
Paraphrases
, concurred that Mary’s literary activities constituted a “royal exercise in ded of virginly educacio[n].”
⁵⁴
The princess was the image of Vives’s chastely educated Christian woman.

The surviving evidence of Mary’s education does not preclude the possibility that she actually followed a more “princely” curriculum. Indeed she seems to have studied rhetoric at some point.
⁵⁵
We can conclude, however, that prior to Mary’s accession Featherstone, Morley, Udall, and arguably the princess herself presented her schooling as if it was preparing her for Christian womanhood, rather than sovereignty. This sustained representation of Mary’s education as peculiarly feminine has frustrated historians’ attempts to analyze her preparedness to rule and encouraged some severe assessments of her intellectual powers.
⁵⁶
We may speculate that the guise of the educated Christian woman was a prudent way of dressing the princess’s intellectual activities. She was certainly permitted to continue her “most becoming studies” during her years of political marginalization (1534–36) when more civic-minded reading may have appeared seditious.
⁵⁷
As we will see, moreover, Elizabeth’s pedagogues regarded Mary’s education as worthy of imitation.

V

Princess Elizabeth’s position with respect to the succession proved to be even more tenuous than Mary’s. At birth she was proclaimed Henry’s heir but in May 1536, before her formal education had commenced, Elizabeth was declared illegitimate and ineligible to rule. Consequently provisions for her schooling echoed the early arrangements for Mary. No schoolmaster was appointed to Elizabeth’s household until 1544 but others stepped in to fill the breach: a certain John Picton and Katherine Champernowne (subsequently Astley), who would become the princess’s “mistress” sometime before 1547.
⁵⁸
If Elizabeth’s first letter and translation are indicative, Picton and Champernowne introduced her to Italian and French, but not Latin or Greek. Her early education was not princely.

In 1544, however, Parliament restored Mary and Elizabeth to the succession behind Prince Edward. On July 7 that year Edward was placed under humanist schoolmasters Richard Coxe, John Cheke, and Jean Belmaine.
⁵⁹
These men came to occupy the same sector of the confessional spectrum as Edward’s godfather, Thomas Cranmer. Shortly afterward, men of similar outlook were appointed to teach Elizabeth: Cambridge graduate William Grindal, whom Roger Ascham had introduced to John Cheke in 1544; and Jean Belmaine, who taught her handwriting as well as French. After Grindal’s death in January 1548, Ascham became Elizabeth’s schoolmaster, allegedly at the princess’s request.
⁶⁰
By August 1549 Edmund Allen, the evangelical catechist, had become her chaplain. At Martin Bucer’s request he introduced Johannes Spithovius, a pupil of Melanchthon’s, to Elizabeth’s schoolroom.61

Yet Elizabeth’s surviving school exercises have more in common with Mary’s than Edward’s.
⁶²
These relics, predominantly religious translations, do not represent the princess’s total curriculum but they were circulated at court, so they provide evidence for how Elizabeth and her tutors wanted her education to be perceived. Indeed, as late as November 1566, the queen was still claiming to have studied nothing but devotional works before her accession.
⁶³
As with Mary, careful arrangements were made for Elizabeth’s education because of her position in the succession, but the first fruits of her learning suggested that she was merely a good Christian woman.

On December 31, 1544, for instance, Elizabeth presented an English prose rendering of Marguerite of Navarre’s 
Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse
, entitled “Glasse of the synnefull soule,” to Katherine Parr. Her text adopted the perspective of a sinner who discovers she can “do nothing that good is or prevayleth for her salvacion, onles it be through the grace of god.”
⁶⁴
Despite the probable guidance of Belmaine, the translation is riddled with errors, which have led modern scholars to diagnose Elizabeth with various Freudian ailments.
⁶⁵
As Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel have pointed out, however, most of the princess’s mistakes are “eye skips” or misuses of gendered pronouns to reflect Marguerite’s French.
⁶⁶
They are just the sort of errors that an eleven-year-old under pressure of a deadline would make. “There is nothinge done as it shulde be,” Elizabeth moaned in her dedicatory letter to Parr.
⁶⁷
Actually, all Elizabeth’s juvenile translations contain slip-ups; like her sister, she was an enthusiastic but hurried grammarian.

Psychosexual readings of Elizabeth’s “Glasse” have gained traction because the Pauline conversion experience of the original was described in deeply sensual language. Specifically, Marguerite employed imagery derived from the royal marriage in the Song of Solomon to describe her soul’s union with God.
⁶⁸
This had not troubled the Sorbonne, but it strikes modern readers as an odd choice for an eleven-year-old girl.
⁶⁹
In fact, Elizabeth chastened Marguerite’s language in translation. She excised the most explicit phrases, such as Marguerite’s description of God’s love as 
ung
doulx dard
 and her injunction to “let Him alone be enclosed in you” (
Et que
luy seul soit enfermé en vous
).
⁷⁰
Additionally, she moderated the sexual force of Marguerite’s figurative language: 
consummer/ Fondre, brusler, du tout
abeantir/ l’ame
 was reduced “to be consumed by love’; love for the Creator should “styrre,” rather than 
brusler,
 a sinner; 
charité ardente
 became merely “charitie.”
⁷¹
With this translation, the princess showed her learned capacity to transcend carnal ignorance and attain true chastity of mind.

Finally, Elizabeth justified her translation in Vives’s terms. She explained to Parr that she had undertaken the translation to avoid falling into “pusilanimite and ydlenes,” which she deemed “most repugnante unto a reasonable creature.”
⁷²
Indeed Elizabeth demonstrated that she had employed both of Vives’s prophylactics against female sin by binding her works in covers of her own embroidery. Subsequently Elizabeth’s translations were also used to edify her social inferiors. In 1548 John Bale printed Elizabeth’s “Glasse” with significant revisions and editorial additions. In one of his commentaries he described Elizabeth as one in a line of English women who cultivated godliness in “all sortes of people, hygh, lowe, hayle, sycke, ryche, poore, lerned, and unlerned.”
⁷³
As with Mary, Elizabeth’s efforts were circulated under her own name because of her royal blood. Yet the virtuous conduct that pious translations could be used to emphasize—personal attention to morally improving texts and a concern for the spiritual welfare of one’s social “children”—was that which Vives had lauded for all Christian women.

Elizabeth and her teachers evidently saw the pattern of the well-educated Christian woman as a useful hand-me-down from Mary. Perhaps they thought it would help to establish Elizabeth’s virtue in the eyes of those who had seen her mother’s disgrace. When Elizabeth presented French, Italian, and Latin translations of Parr’s 
Prayers or Meditations
 to Henry VIII in 1545, for instance, she insisted it proved she was her father’s daughter, who “would be indebted to you not only as an imitator of your virtues but indeed as an inheritor of them.”
⁷⁴
Of course, in 1545 the chance of Elizabeth inheriting Henry’s throne was slight. By translating the work of a queen consort into three tongues, however, Elizabeth demonstrated readiness for her more probable future as a pawn in a diplomatic marriage.

A surprising continuity in both princesses’ Henrician displays of erudition lay in their confessional tone. Elizabeth’s “Glasse” emphasized that scripture was God’s word made flesh in Christ, and that Christ’s love was an entry to salvation and a model for human relations. These themes were central to Mary’s translation of Erasmus’ 
Paraphrase on the Gospel of
Saint John
, to Elizabeth’s (lost) French version of Erasmus’ 
Dialogus fidei
(1544), and her trilingual translation of Parr’s 
Prayers or Meditations
 (1545).
⁷⁵
Elizabeth’s school exercises engaged with the Pauline conversion experience to a greater degree, but both sisters were associated with an Erasmian spirituality that emphasized the centrality of scripture and faith for salvation, without attacking the real presence in the Mass. From 1544 to 1546, both princesses steered this moderate course through the murky waters of religious policy. Their public expressions of personal religion diverged only in Edward’s reign.

VI

If Mary’s education set the pattern for Elizabeth’s, we might ask how historians have concluded that Mary had been taught to subject herself and England to Spain, while Elizabeth studied for rule? The explanation lies in the ultimate success of the English Reformation.

Elizabeth’s Latin rendering of “De Christo sermo,” the twelfth sermon of the second part of Bernardino Ochino’s 
Prediche
 (1543?–62), dedicated to King Edward, demonstrated a new inclination for further reform.
⁷⁶
Although it is difficult to date the translation precisely, its performance was part of the celebratory reception of Ochino in London, where he served as one of Cranmer’s key recruits to Edward’s church militant.
⁷⁷
By Edwardian standards “De Christo sermo” was a moderate affair, which emphasized the redeeming power of God’s grace as expressed through Christ’s love. Nevertheless Elizabeth’s translation advertised her acceptance of the idea that “Christ imprinted love (
amorem
) on the heart of his elect (
suorum electorum
)” alone.
⁷⁸
In 1545 she had translated the first chapter of Jean Calvin’s 
Institution de la religion Chrestienne
 (1541, French edition) so as to mute Calvin’s claim that God elects only “those to whom it pleases him to give knowledge of himself for salvation” (
ausquels il luy plaist se
donner à congnoistre en salut
).
⁷⁹
In translating Ochino, however, Elizabeth acknowledged that God would not redeem all his human creations.