The Children of Henry VIII (8 page)

Henry’s latest affair became public knowledge when a royal navy ship was named the
Mary Boleyn
.
²⁷
Katherine’s outward reaction was one of stony silence. As with Elizabeth Blount, she believed that Henry would soon tire of his amour. Although finding the liaison a blow to her pride, she did not envisage it encroaching on her own position or her daughter’s inheritance, especially now the princess was pledged to marry the most powerful ruler in Europe.

In private, Katherine threw all her energy into directing Mary’s upbringing, a role her husband had once sought to limit, but was now prepared to tolerate if it stopped his wife from interfering elsewhere. Besides, Henry had so far overlooked his daughter’s education, not regarding it as much of a priority. Convention dictated that, by the age of 6 or 7, a child considered to be next in line for the succession should be given a professional schoolmaster.
²⁸
Henry had sent his daughter a goshawk in the summer of 1522 in an attempt to encourage her to take up the princely sport of falconry, but that was all.
²⁹

While Margaret Pole—an educated woman and a patron of scholars—had been her governess, Mary had started to learn to read.
³⁰
When reciting the ABC, she would have begun by making the sign of the cross and then saying, ‘Christ’s cross me speed’, as all children were taught to do. And if Pole followed the example of Thomas More, who had become famous throughout Europe for giving his daughters the best education that money could buy, she would have read aloud to Mary from books such as William Caxton’s famous translation of Aesop’s
Fables
with its graphic woodcut illustrations, ‘sounding and saying’ the individual vowels
and letters to build simple words and phrases, and pointing to the pictures in the way children were taught then.
³¹

As one of Mary’s godmothers, Pole had promised at her baptism to help with her religious education. The primer (or early reading book) that another godmother, Agnes Howard, had sent as a New Year’s gift would typically have contained the Lord’s Prayer, the
Ave Maria
, the Creed and the Ten Commandments—the texts considered to lay the foundations of a Christian education, which children were expected to learn by heart. Often included in such primers were model graces for use before and after meals, an almanac for calculating the date of Easter and a calendar of saints to whom intercessions might be made.

A talented musician who in later life owned three pairs of virginals, Pole must also have arranged for Mary’s earliest music lessons, because the princess was proficient at the virginals by the time she played host in the summer of 1520 to the party of French gentlemen.
³²
So much so that when Charles’s diplomats who had watched ‘the assault on the
Château Vert
’ said their farewells in 1522, Katherine, determined to display her daughter’s talents, would not allow them to leave until they had seen her dance and play the clavichord. As the envoys dryly remarked, Mary ‘did not have to be asked twice.’
³³

It may also have been Pole who taught Mary how to write with a quill-pen. Whoever taught her was not versed in the latest techniques, for among the literary
cognoscenti
fine penmanship was much more than a mere technique of communication.
³⁴
Whereas More’s daughters learned to shape their letters at an early age, using the clear, bold italic script originating in Italy that was iconic of the educational values of the Renaissance and in which each letter is generally formed with at least one separate pen stroke and sometimes with two, Mary was taught to write in the more conventional, cursive, idiosyncratic style familiar to her parents’ generation (see
Figure 5
).

F
IGURE
5
A letter to Queen Jane Seymour in 1536 from Henry’s elder daughter, Mary, illustrating the more conventional, cursive, idiosyncratic handwriting that she was taught to use as a child in preference to the new bold italic script.

Where Pole had begun until Henry dismissed her from her position, Katherine continued, largely bypassing the Calthorpes. To do so, she would regularly have to commute the fifteen or so miles between the royal palaces and the manor houses where Mary’s household was stationed.

Katherine, we know, began teaching her daughter Latin, because in a letter she wrote to her when she was 9, shortly after Henry
had
at last found her a proper schoolmaster, the queen explains, ‘As for your writing in Latin, I am glad that ye change from me to Master Fetherstone, for that shall do you much good, to learn by him to write right’.
³⁵

Her mother also introduced Mary to elementary French and of course to Spanish, her own native tongue. Her preference for all things Spanish can be observed at close quarters early in 1523, when the child was 7. Then, Katherine offered her patronage to Juan Luis Vives, a Spanish-born scholar living in the Low Countries, whom Thomas More had recommended to her. For seven or eight years now, More’s three daughters had been studying Latin and Greek, moral philosophy, mathematics, music and astronomy. So able was his eldest child, Margaret, that she could identify mistakes in the Latin of More’s best friend Erasmus of Rotterdam, the most distinguished Renaissance scholar and translator outside of Italy.
³⁶

Vives had first met More in Bruges in 1521, when More had gone as Wolsey’s understudy for the secret diplomacy with Charles.
Born in Valencia around 1492, the Spaniard was a brilliant rhetorician also trained in medicine, descended from a family of
converso
Jews. Educated at Valencia and then in Paris and afterwards briefly a teacher at the University of Louvain where Erasmus had lectured, he sought a new appointment and a salary after his young Flemish patron was killed in a riding accident, leaving Vives penniless.
³⁷

More acted as an intermediary for Katherine, who commissioned Vives to write a book on women’s education. When, in April 1523, the Spaniard submitted his draft, his hopes were set on an appointment as Mary’s schoolmaster. Travelling to England to deliver his manuscript entitled
De Institutione Feminae Christianae
(‘The Education of a Christian Woman’), he secured an audience with Wolsey, who snatched him away to Oxford to fill a prestigious post. Visiting More’s house four or five months later, Vives corrected the proofs of his book and inserted a brief eulogy of Margaret More and her sisters.
³⁸

But unlike More, who (after early reservations) allowed his eldest and ablest daughter to read any book she wanted, including oratorical works otherwise allowed only to male students, Vives severely curtailed his reading list for women. Quoting St Jerome, he urged that a woman should hear and speak only ‘what pertains to the fear of God’. Selected books of the Bible and the moral writings of Plato, Tertullian, Cicero, Seneca and Boethius he considered appropriate. Romances and other fashionable literature were banned. Such works, Vives protested, were ‘pernicious’, written by ‘the slaves of vice and filth’. It would be better that a young woman should lose her eyes than read such enticements to lust.
³⁹

Vives, like most of his Spanish contemporaries, was always more concerned with what a girl should not read than with what
she should. Unlike More and Erasmus, he was a decidedly reluctant champion of women’s education.
⁴⁰

In October 1523, Vives sent Katherine a more detailed syllabus for her daughter.
⁴¹
Advising Mary to work at her Latin in company with other girls of the same age, he said that she should begin by mastering the eight parts of speech and five declensions. If a word or phrase caught her imagination, she should write it down and memorize it. Once she had a grasp of Latin syntax, she should ‘turn little speeches from English into Latin, easy ones at first, gradually more difficult ones’ as a way of beginning to converse in Latin.

But—ever the reactionary—he reminded Katherine that, though fluency in Latin and English was the ultimate goal, in the case of a woman it could only be to improve her linguistic skills, not to equip her to make public speeches, least of all to rule, since that was men’s work. His further book recommendations for Mary, which he later published, came revealingly with others for Charles Blount, the son of the queen’s chamberlain. And whereas the boy’s reading list included oratorical works, Mary’s merely added More’s
Utopia
and Erasmus’s
Education of a Christian Prince
to some more of Plato’s moral dialogues.
⁴²

Here was the rub. For while the king’s new mistress would indeed turn out to pose no real threat to either Katherine or her daughter, someone else did. It was not yet even Mary Carey’s sister, Anne. It was Henry Fitzroy, the king’s child by Elizabeth Blount, now approaching 5 years old. Over the next couple of years, he was to step out of the shadows. Henry soon would be declaring that he loved him ‘like his own soul’.
⁴³
And he was about to prove it.

I
N
the last week of May 1525, shocking news began to filter through to Katherine. At Henry’s request, Wolsey had ordered his newly promoted chamberlain, Richard Page, to design a royal coat of arms for the king’s ‘entirely beloved son the lord Henry Fitzroy’.
¹
News also leaked out that John Palsgrave, a former tutor to Henry’s younger sister Mary and a champion of Renaissance values in education second only to Thomas More and his innermost circle of friends, was to be made the boy’s schoolmaster.
²

Just where Fitzroy had been living for the last five years will always remain a mystery. Perhaps he was still with Lady Bryan, perhaps he had rejoined his mother after her marriage to Gilbert Tailboys, to be brought up in Lincolnshire with his half-sister. One of Palsgrave’s letters to the child’s mother complaining of the difficulties he had to overcome in tutoring him appears to cast some of the blame on to her—‘insomuch’, he wrote, ‘that not so little as six sundry matters have been contrived against me, whereof yourself were as guilty in any of them as I was’.
³
This might suggest that
Fitzroy had gone to Lincolnshire at least occasionally. In 1525, however, he was suddenly brought out of obscurity to Court.