Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (11 page)

In 1516 Henry VIII was twenty-four and his Queen, Catherine of Aragon, six years older. Catherine had come to England in 1501 to marry the ailing Prince Arthur, Henry’s elder brother. The marriage had taken place but according to Catherine was never consummated, and since her life proved her a most honest, upright and religious woman there is no reason to doubt her word; within a year Prince Arthur was dead. The young widow remained in her new country, for there were cordial feelings between England and Spain, and the alliance was important for the English crown. In 1509 she was given in marriage to young King Henry, and though she was a homely person whose short, stocky figure thickened with the passing years and he was the most handsome and accomplished of princes, he had no reason to consider himself mismatched. She was sober, capable and devoted, and the daughter of powerful Spain was a prize for any prince. In 1510 her first child, a daughter, was stillborn; in the next six years she gave birth to four sons but none lived longer than a few weeks. The last three babies had been stillborn and this run of misfortune was taken as a fearful omen. On 18th February 1516 the Queen was at last delivered of a child who lived and the rejoicing in the court and country was great indeed. That the child was a female was taken to be of no account. ‘We are both young’, the King told the Venetian ambassador. ‘If it was a daughter this time, by the grace of God the sons will follow.’ Four days later, with the ceremonial and splendour that the King loved, the baby was christened at Greenwich Palace and named Mary after the King’s sister, the Dowager Queen of France.

The little princess was given an establishment worthy of the daughter of a resplendent monarch. Her household numbered fifty, presided over by Margaret Lady Brian who administered the budget of more than £1,000 a year—a large sum for the time. The princess was the centre of her own small world and in the extraordinary manner of princes from the earliest age lived away
from her parents. Solicitude for her health condemned her household to incessant wanderings. The fear of the plague, always liable to break out when many were gathered together with little regard for hygiene, was ever present in the minds of her guardians. At the first sign of low spirits or sickness a change of air was recommended; her unwieldy staff with an attendant flock of domestics set out on laborious journeys to Windsor, Richmond, Greenwich, Eltham, Woodstock, or one of the many royal manors that surrounded London. In the course of these flights occasionally father and daughter would rest together at one of the larger palaces, and at the great festivals of the year the royal family was briefly reunited. Despite their long times apart, the parents were affectionate and careful for their daughter. Henry, in his boisterous, jovial way, would himself carry Mary into the presence chamber and invite the admiration of the courtiers and the foreign envoys. And the prudent Catherine ensured that her only child had the best attendants and the best attention.

Mary was small, thin and delicate, with a pale, almost translucent skin and a mass of fair hair. The discipline of her life made her seem grave quite beyond her years. ‘By immortal God,’ her delighted father exclaimed to the French ambassador of his two-year-old child, ‘this girl never cries.’ Her self-control was a fortunate accomplishment, for at a very early age, whether she liked it or not, she was drawn into the affairs of state. At the age of two, in a long and wearying ceremony, she was formally betrothed to the French Dauphin. Four years later this solemn and holy pledge was easily set aside in the cause of policy and the child was reengaged to her cousin Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor; in 1527 this betrothal, too, was cancelled and the young girl was promised to Francis I of France. From a very early age Mary was used to entertaining the great in her parents’ absence. At five she welcomed French gentlemen to her court, feeding them ‘strawberries, wafers, wine and hippocras in plenty’, delighting them with her self-possession and her playing on the virginal so that they ‘greatly marvelled and rejoiced at the same, her young and tender age considered’.

Despite the heavy labours given to so young a child, Mary’s youth appeared to be happy. Between daughter and parents there was a close bond, her father in particular, that tempestuous man, making a rowdy fuss over her which she repaid with the devotion
that the delicate often give to the hearty. And growing up she was a credit to her parents. Though small and weak she was a spirited girl; a member of the royal household called her, at the age of nine, ‘
jocundius
’ and ‘
decentius
’. She burst easily into laughter until the tears obscured her near-sighted hazel eyes. She liked to dance and took to hunting almost as ardently as her father. She was an open, affectionate young girl.

The education of the princess was something which the King and Queen took seriously. The flush of the Renaissance was on England and it was no longer respectable for the royal blood to be rough and ignorant. Henry was a cultivated man of brilliant parts and his court, in the early days before the religious troubles, was a pleasant place where the scholars of England—Colet, More, Linacre and others less famous—were welcomed. Queen Catherine brought with her some of the Spanish learning, then at its height, and also the artistic traditions of the famous Burgundian court, recently incorporated in the Spanish empire. In 1521 Wolsey had met Luis Vives at Bruges and invited the learned Spanish humanist to fill one of the six lectureships that the Cardinal had founded at Oxford. Vives, whose name is connected with so much valuable social reform and whose thought underlay the English poor laws, had given some attention to the neglected subject of women’s education. His
De Institutione Feminae Christianae
was published the year he came to England and dedicated to Queen Catherine. She immediately asked him to draw up a plan of studies for her daughter, which he did, and soon afterwards took on the personal supervision of Mary’s schooling.

Vives was a stern master; his strictness led his friend Erasmus to remark pleasantly that he hoped Vives would not treat his wife according to the rules of the
Institutione
. For Mary he devised a course solidly based on the Church Fathers and on the more worthy Latin writers, especially the historians, moralists and philosophers. Ambrose, Cyprian and Jerome were well represented; Augustine’s
City of God
was read, but not his
Confessions
. Plato, Plutarch, Seneca and Cicero were to be studied, especially for their political views. Of the moderns, the only writers to receive particular notice were Erasmus and Thomas More, whose
Utopia
was published in the year of Mary’s birth. It seems that Mary had little instruction in Greek. Greek studies were new to England; even More did not take up the language until his manhood. Nor
did Vives recommend the poets and the romancers, all of whom he considered dangerous for women. Mary learnt French from an early age and spoke it well and fluently; her Italian was rather hesitant. She naturally learnt Spanish from her mother and her Spanish ladies, but allowed it to grow rusty so that when she met her husband Philip II for the first time she could understand what he said but would not trust herself to reply in Spanish.

Grave studies were the natural diet of an heir to the throne, and Mary learnt her lessons well. In later years her idiomatic command of Latin surprised and pleased the scholars. And to the serious subjects that Vives appointed for her, she added for her own amusement needlework and music. Like her father, she had a real gift for music which she loved and practised all her life, so that good judges thought her the most accomplished royal performer in Europe on lute, virginal or regal.

For Vives, the aim of Mary’s education was not just the acquisition of knowledge, nor a training in government. He believed that the end of man was to glorify God and an education was nothing unless it taught Christian virtue. All writers and all works were made to bear on that point, and Vives’s ideal was the one Erasmus found exemplified in the household of Thomas More: ‘You would say that his house was Plato’s Academy’, he wrote to a friend. ‘I should rather call it a school, or a university, of the Christian religion.’ With the example of her devout mother, supported by the instruction of Vives, and encouraged by the presence at court of such noble men as Linacre, More and Erasmus, Mary from her earliest years showed a strong devotion to the Catholic faith.

In this she was her mother’s daughter. Spain, schooled by the long contest with the Moors, was the sternest of Christian countries, and the great Isabella the Catholic, Mary’s maternal grandmother, the most uncompromising of Christian monarchs. Queen Catherine brought with her to England the sober virtue of the Spanish. She provided for the religious instruction of her daughter, sometimes herself taking Mary through the catechism, and shielding her to some extent from the easy-going immorality of the King. Catherine appointed to Mary’s household a number of Spanish ladies who were as careful and upright as the Queen, so much so that they were in great demand as brides for English lords who valued their sobriety and competence above the more flighty and slovenly girls of the English court. When the emperor asked that
Mary should be sent to Spain for her education, according to the marriage contract, the English envoys refused on the grounds that Mary already had in her mother the finest tutor in Christian virtue that Spain could provide.

The religious influence of her mother lasted the whole of Mary’s life. The princess, though learned enough, had a simple, uncomplicated mind which held tenaciously to a few, clear principles. Her upbringing and education had stressed the prime importance of her faith, and the trials which her innocent mother was soon to endure at the King’s hands could only confirm her religion. The shifts of policy in the Reformation that made religion a weapon of the State she could never understand. The profound, unbending religion was already something strange in an English princess; the course of English polity in her lifetime made her conviction seem at first eccentric, then perverse, and at last bloody.

The years passed and Henry’s greatly desired son did not appear. When Mary was ten, the Queen was forty and soon beyond childbearing. The King was worried about the succession. Only one queen had succeeded to the throne since the Conquest, and the reign of Matilda was an unhappy precedent. While the King did his best to prepare Mary for the throne, sending her at the early age of nine to represent the crown in the Welsh Marches, he also looked for other ways to secure the Tudor dynasty. He thought that his little bastard son, the Duke of Richmond, three years younger than Mary, might succeed him, and gave the boy a household worthy of a Prince of Wales. But as long as Queen Catherine and Mary lived and had legitimacy on their side, the chances of a bastard were slight. The King felt the safety of his line threatened by Catherine’s unfortunate inability to bear a son.

Henry had not been faithful to his wife. He was by nature selfish, wilful and amorous, and easily gave way to his desires. His affairs were notorious and his mistresses had their places at court. But like many self-indulgent men he needed the support of a forgiving and capable wife. Catherine ran his household with a careful economy that offset his own extravagance; it was said that she counted the linen with her own hands. He needed her to come home to, to look after his gross body undermined by excess, to bathe his ulcerated leg, to sit by his bed and listen to his complaints and his fears. They had been married so long, since he was a youth of eighteen, that she had become a comfortable habit; and
no one could ever deny that she was the most virtuous and loving of wives. The sentiment that Shakespeare put into the King’s mouth in
Henry VIII
was no more than the truth:

That man i’ the world who shall report he has

A better wife, let him in nought be trusted,

For speaking false in that: thou art, alone.

Once, in the early negotiations over Mary’s betrothal, the French envoy had questioned the validity of a marriage between a man and his brother’s widow and therefore wondered if Mary was legitimate. Other whispers were heard from time to time, and slowly a convenient doubt grew in Henry’s mind. If Catherine, now beyond childbearing, could be put aside and the King marry again, he might yet provide England with a royal son. The scruple about his marriage was aggravated by his new passion. Recently, the cool, quizzical eyes of Anne Boleyn had cast their spell on Henry, and he was writing her hot pleas. But Anne was calculating and her family exceedingly ambitious; she kept the King at a certain distance, aiming to be something more than a royal plaything, and thus inflamed Henry’s desire. Catherine’s age and plainness, Anne’s beauty and perversity joined together with the King’s fear for the succession; Henry decided to divorce his wife.

In the spring of 1527, soon after Mary had celebrated her betrothal to Francis I with dancing, jousting, plays and music, Henry quietly began his proceedings against Catherine: ordered by the King, Wolsey privately cited Henry before a court on the charge of illegally cohabiting with a woman not his wife. Mary was not told of the scheme afoot, but in a court little can be hidden. Catherine was distraught and went to Vives weeping ‘over her fate that the man she loved more than herself should be so alienated from her as to think of marrying another’. Vives, the princess’s fatherly tutor and adviser, left England in disgust. The court was breathless with surprise and anticipation; within a year the King’s ‘secret matter’ was the scandal of Europe. Mary was only an undersized girl of fourteen, but she was intelligent and bred to responsibility. Though the consequences of her father’s brutal act could not be clear, she saw enough to fear the pain and humiliation ahead.

In May 1529 the trial of the King’s cause began in Blackfriars Hall before Wolsey and Cardinal Campeggio, the papal legate.
The evidence for Henry, in the most callous way possible, did nothing to spare the Queen’s feelings. Catherine countered with a noble and tragic speech denying the competence of the court, and demanding that the matter should be referred to Rome. Henry had been married by a dispensation of Pope Julius II; he now wanted Pope Clement VII to declare that dispensation void as being beyond the powers of his predecessor. If the cause were tried in England it seemed that the court might be bullied into pronouncing for the King; if the matter were dealt with in Rome, where the Pope only reigned with the consent of the Emperor, who was Catherine’s nephew, Henry had no chance. But the legate had instructions to reach no verdict. The trial went on until July, then the court was adjourned and the cause removed to Rome.