The Children of Henry VIII (18 page)

But the letter was not sent from Hertfordshire where a Cinderella figure might plausibly have been quarantined, but from St James’s Palace.
¹⁷
Elizabeth was there because Henry had invited all three of his children to a dinner at Whitehall on the eve of his departure for France.
¹⁸
Spacious as the king’s principal palace was, there was not room to house everyone and their servants within its precincts, but St James’s was less than a mile away across the park. The queen herself lodged there sometimes.
¹⁹
In any case, Katherine must have been in contact with Elizabeth by messenger a week before the so-called ‘exile’ letter was written, since she reassured Henry on 25 July that all his children were in good health.
²⁰

Elizabeth’s letter said that she looked forward to being with her ‘illustrious’ stepmother soon.
²¹
This was not backhanded. All three siblings would shortly rendezvous with Katherine at Hampton Court. Edward was sent there first with his independent ‘side’, occupying a newly refurbished Prince’s Lodging in a different wing of the palace to Katherine’s own, but one which was connected to the royal apartments by a long gallery.
²²
Katherine and Mary came next by barge.
²³
Finally, Elizabeth was brought from St James’s.

Again in September, Katherine was accompanied by all three children when she took the Court on a miniature royal progress through the forests of Surrey to avoid the plague in and around the capital. And on 3 October, everyone was together at Leeds Castle in Kent to greet the king on his return from France, triumphant after the capture of Boulogne.
²⁴

Further changes were made in Edward’s household during 1544. With the prince approaching 7—the age at which protocol dictated that he should be treated as a young adult—Lady Bryan and her female assistants were discharged. Richard Page, who had invaluable experience as Fitzroy’s former vice-chamberlain, was brought in to replace Sir William Sidney as head of the enlarged establishment, while Sidney took over as steward.
²⁵

So far, the prince had been taught to read and write in English by Richard Cox. As part of the latest reorganization, John Cheke, an inspirational teacher from St John’s College, Cambridge, was put in overall charge of the prince’s studies. Cox was given the post of almoner, but retained chiefly as the prince’s grammar coach. A year or so later, a Frenchman, John Belmain, a Calvinist refugee and Cheke’s nephew by marriage, was brought in to teach the boy French.
²⁶
Now Edward’s education could commence in earnest.

On the principles recommended earlier by Vives, companions of roughly the prince’s own age were recruited to join him in the schoolroom. They included Henry Brandon, the eldest son of Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, by his fourth marriage to the 14-year-old Katherine Willoughby. Two years older than Edward, Brandon was the same age as Barnaby Fitzpatrick, heir to the barony of Upper Ossory in Ireland, another of the recruits. Sent to live at Henry’s Court as proof of his father’s loyalty to the king, Fitzpatrick would soon become Edward’s closest friend.
²⁷

One of the great myths about Fitzpatrick is that he was the prince’s ‘whipping boy’, the unlucky recipient of the corporal punishment Edward would otherwise have received when he refused
to do his lessons had he not been the heir to the throne.
²⁸
The story is romantic fiction, since Cox shared none of the timidity of Fitzroy’s schoolmasters. When in December 1544, the frustrated tutor found his pupil bored, sulking and intractable, he gave him a final warning, and then, ‘I took my morris pike [i.e. staff used for morris dancing] and at will I went and gave him such a wound that he wist [knew] not what to do. … Me thought it [was] the luckiest day that ever I had in battle.’
²⁹

Over the next two years, Edward settled down to reading Cato’s
Moral Precepts
and Aesop’s
Fables
, using the Latin editions rather than Caxton’s translations. Guided by Cheke, he turned next to Erasmus’s
Colloquies
, intermingled with a variety of biblical texts and the writings of Vives. By Christmas 1546, he was poised to embark on more advanced authors such as Cicero, Livy, Pliny the Younger and the Latin translations of dialogues from Lucian. He did not begin Greek yet—his first serious foray into that language was not until 1548, when he was reading the second oration of Isocrates to Nicocles.
³⁰
But he made progress in written French.
³¹
Spoken French he found more challenging. When introduced to the French ambassador in February 1547, he spoke in Latin, ‘because he does not yet understand French very well and has only just begun to learn it.’
³²

Elizabeth was 11 before her father woke up to the need to equip her with a schoolmaster. Until then, Kat Champernowne had taught her, doing it so successfully that when, in late 1539, Cromwell’s secretary and man of business Thomas Wriothesley had visited her at Hertford Castle, he found she could converse ‘with as great gravity as [if] she had been forty years old’.
³³

F
IGURE
9
The opening page of one of Edward VI’s schoolroom exercises, a fair copy of a treatise in French against the papal supremacy, written in a fashionably bold, if somewhat clumsy, italic script, and done chiefly during the winter of 1548–9. The young king addresses the work to his elder uncle, Edward Seymour, Protector Somerset.

But someone else must have been teaching her unofficially, since she could manage an italic hand by the time she wrote the so-called ‘exile’ letter to her stepmother. Kat, although an educated woman, wrote all her life using an old-fashioned, cursive style of penmanship.

The explanation lies with Kat’s brother-in-law, Sir Anthony Denny, one of the king’s Privy Chamber intimates. It was Denny who had recommended John Cheke to Henry as Edward’s principal schoolmaster, and he had almost certainly sent John Picton to help Kat with Elizabeth. Besides an italic hand, ‘Master’ Picton must also have begun teaching the young girl Italian, because her ‘exile’ letter was written in that language throughout. This also fits, since several of Denny’s closest friends, notably Philip Hoby and his brother Thomas, were fluent Italianists.

Denny, who would shortly rise to the position of chief gentleman of the Privy Chamber, was the keeper of Hatfield manor and had a house in the grounds as well as at Cheshunt nearby. He stood at the hub of a network of evangelical friends who were fervently committed to the idea of moderate religious reform along Protestant lines. They included Henry’s chief physician, William Butts, another of the king’s doctors Thomas Wendy, Thomas Cawarden and Richard Moryson. Both Cawarden and Moryson were gentlemen of the Privy Chamber planted there by Cromwell shortly before his fall. Their patronage links ran deep into the universities, chiefly Cambridge. As with Katherine Parr, discretion was their watchword, for if Henry had appreciated the full extent of their susceptibility to Protestantism, he would have savagely reined them in.

Born into a Hertfordshire gentry family in 1501, Denny had first studied under a legendary grammarian, William Lily, at St Paul’s
School before progressing to St John’s College. Butts was a Norfolk man who had attended Gonville and Caius College, barely a hundred yards from St John’s, where he had stayed until he married a gentlewoman in Mary’s household and was summoned to Court as a royal physician. For twenty years he had been a patron of preachers and scholars with links to Cromwell and Cranmer, acclaimed by his admirers as ‘Maecenas’ and ‘master’.
³⁴

A Fellow of Denny’s college and a client of Butts, John Cheke had made his name at Cambridge as another leading champion of the Renaissance and its values by devising a new system for pronouncing classical Greek that for the first time made it fully intelligible. The trail does not end there, because Cheke was Roger Ascham’s tutor, a rising star among the new intellectual elite whom Thomas More’s eldest daughter, Margaret, had attempted in vain to recruit as a tutor for her own children.
³⁵

Before long, Ascham would be lobbying to secure an appointment for himself as Elizabeth’s schoolmaster, which he believed would guarantee his position in the pantheon of scholars. But at first, Cheke selected a younger man, one of Ascham’s own pupils, William Grindal, whose appointment Henry confirmed in October 1544.
³⁶

By then, the king had returned from France. On his homecoming, his two younger children’s households were once more detached from Katherine Parr’s and sent back to Hertfordshire. Circling in an orbit based on Ashridge, Hatfield, Hertford and Hunsdon, Elizabeth’s establishment became a satellite of her half-brother’s in reality rather than just in theory, and would remain so until Henry’s death.
³⁷
It was Mary, now almost thirty, who stayed largely at Court, where she and the queen continued to draw down prodigious quantities of fabric from the Whitehall silk store.
³⁸
Edward did his best to keep in touch with his elder sister, writing her letters and regularly exchanging gifts and other small tokens of affection.
³⁹
But although Mary regularly returned gifts, including a clock, she rarely wrote him letters. To Elizabeth she did not write at all.

Under Grindal’s direction, Elizabeth advanced by leaps and bounds, getting to grips with Latin and starting on Greek.
⁴⁰
She also became fluent in French, taught by Belmain—a teacher she shared with Edward—and was continuing her Italian, most likely now as a pupil of Giovanni Battista Castiglione, who had fought with Henry’s troops in France in 1544 and returned with them to England.
⁴¹

But Henry never allowed his youngest daughter to stray far from the limits Vives had set for her half-sister when he had urged that she should hear and speak only ‘what pertains to the fear of God’. The purpose of educating a woman, the king still believed, was to increase her feminine virtue, not to equip her to rule, which was to be her brother’s work. This explains why the tasks her tutors set for her—rather than original compositions or extempore speeches—were translations of texts to be given as New Year’s gifts to her father, stepmother, and half-brother.

Of these translations, the most proficient is of a mystical religious poem,
The Mirror or Glass of the Sinful Soul
by Margaret of Angoulême, the devoutly evangelical sister of Francis I. Elizabeth turned the poem, a meditation by a tormented sinner on the nature of God’s redemptive love, into English prose for her stepmother as a New Year’s gift for 1545, sending it with a letter and an elaborate needlework cover embroidered by herself.
⁴²

Since the original poem includes metaphors of love, spiritual and physical, that to modern ears can appear to border on the
incestuous, it is sometimes said that Elizabeth’s choice of copy text reflects a congenital distaste for matrimony on her part. In reality, little was unusual about her selection. Her great-grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, had translated an equally disturbing text on the filthiness and misery of human beings and the joys of Paradise entitled
The Mirror of Gold for the Sinful Soul
.
⁴³
The aim was to combine training in translation with a religious exercise on a penitential theme. Texts of this nature were routinely given as exercises to young aristocratic women. Elizabeth’s choice does not necessarily imply anything about her personal opinions.