IV

And Iwar a maydyn,

As many one ys,

For all the golde in England

I wold not do amysse.

Katherine’s stillbirth meant that Mary would not, as her father hoped, fade into the background, eclipsed by a brother. Instead she remained an important focus of political attention—so important that her health was the subject of the most assiduous attention at the French court. Through her betrothal to the dauphin Mary had become the living embodiment of peace between England and France; as such it was important that she stay healthy. Queen Claude took to asking the English ambassador Thomas Boleyn how the princess was every time they met, and diplomats and courtiers began to exchange oblique inquiries about “whether the princess had been sick lately” as a matter of course.¹ A few months after her espousals a rumor circulated in Paris that she was dead, causing a few days of confused alarm, but before long Boleyn was able to quiet the disconcerted courtiers with the assurance that Mary was in perfect health.

The size and expense of her household now reflected her diplomatic importance. Before she was three years old the cost of maintaining her establishment had risen to fourteen hundred pounds, and an inventory of her household goods included enough hangings, bedding and other furnishings for a sizable apartment in the palace. Listed in the inventory along with the tapestries, rugs, featherbeds, linen, brassware and pewter basins were the necessary fixtures of a household constantly on the move: five thousand hooks and two thousand crochets for hanging and rehang-ing the tapestries, hammers for driving the hooks into the walls and nailing shut the lids of chests and coffers, dozens of yards of canvas for covering loaded carts and rope for securing bundles and tying the canvas in place.² Included too was a miniature throne—a little chair upholstered in cloth of gold and velvet—with a golden cloth of estate to be suspended over it and small gold cushions to go under the princess’ feet.

By age three Mary had made herself the darling of her relatives and Henry’s courtiers. At New Year’s in 1519 she was showered with gifts—a gold spoon from Katherine’s close friend Lady Devonshire, a gold pomander from her aunt Mary, two smocks from Lady Mountjoy, wife of Katherine’s chamberlain, and from Wolsey a handsome gold cup. She was beginning to take part in the life of the court now, and was dressed up and shown around the room at banquets and other state occasions. She joined in family ceremonies of all kinds, and when her cousin Frances Brandon was born in the summer, Mary was called upon to be her godmother.³

That the king kept a close watch on his daughter at this time is evident from a letter his secretary Richard Pace wrote to Wolsey in July of 1518. Henry and Katherine were staying at Wolsey’s estate of the More, and spending the long summer days hunting. Sometimes they rode together, sometimes the queen rode alone the four miles to the little hunting park on Sir John Pechy’s estate that was her favorite. Neither of them returned until late in the evening, and it was after dark on the night of July 17 that Henry heard the news that one of Mary’s servants was sick with “a hot ague.” Mary had not come to the More with her parents, but was only two days’ ride away, and Henry and Katherine received frequent messages from her household. Reports of small-scale outbreaks of both plague and the sweating sickness had been reaching the court all summer, and Henry was doubtless worried that the “hot ague” might be the sweat. He quickly told his secretary to write to Mary’s servant Richard Sydnour ordering him to bring her to the More by way of Bisharn Abbey, skirting the known infected areas. At the same time he told Pace to write Wolsey, who was in charge of all household affairs, asking him to work out safe itineraries for both Henry and Mary for the rest of the summer, and giving suggested routes.

Though he saw his daughter from time to time Henry’s concern for Mary was usually expressed at a distance. Intimacy between the princess and her royal parents was not built up through daily contact as in less exalted families, but through occasional visits, exchanges of gifts and of money, letters and messages carried back and forth by household servants. In her earliest years Mary spent the greater part of her time surrounded by her gentlewomen and by Margaret Pole, countess of Salisbury, a long-faced, plain featured woman who in time became as dear to Mary as a grandmother.

Her parents moved through her life with the impermanence of pleasant dreams, Katherine in her ash-colored court dress or her hunting skirts, her face always bright with laughter, Henry looming tali and strong in his velvets and jeweled caps. Mary was with them longest at holidays and in the seasons of panic during her second and third summers, but even then she saw them when they sent for her and not when she needed them. And she saw them often from the far end of the banquet hall, or looking out a window at the tiltyard. She may have been allowed to watch the pageant celebrating the French peace treaty in October of 1518, at which knights dressed as Turks and Christians fought an apocalyptic mock combat in front of a mountainous artificial “rock of peace” representing harmony among the European states. But there is no record that she was there. More likely on that evening Henry sent word ordering the princess dressed in her most splendid clothes and jewels, hugged her and carried her once around the room in his arms, and then gave her to an attendant gentlewoman to be put to bed.

Henry certainly admired and cherished his daughter—when he thought about her—and he was capable of a sentimental affection for her that reappeared at intervals throughout his life. But his idea of fatherly behavior was to be boisterous and demonstrative with his daughter for a few moments and then leave her in other hands. He saw to it that they were capable hands, but that was all. He made certain she was well cared for, but made no effort to get to know her or to involve himself in her life as she grew older. There would be no confidential intimacy between Henry and Mary. For that he needed not a daughter but a son.

Elizabeth Blount first came to Henry’s court as a young girl sometime after the birth of the New Year’s boy. A niece of Lord Mountjoy, she was blonde and very beautiful, and became one of the queen’s maids of honor during the period when Katherine was vainly trying each year to produce a son. Elizabeth soon became “Bessie” to the king and his gentlemen, and was an especial favorite of Charles Brandon. Her beauty was put to use to adorn the pageants and revels, and at a court where graceful dancers and clear singing voices were at a premium Bessie Blount danced and sang extraordinarily well.

Bessie was still in her teens when she became Henry’s mistress. She was not the first, of course. Beyond the king’s indiscretion with the duke of Buckingham’s sister there had been rumors of a Flemish mistress during the 1513 campaign, and dozens of the hrief or lasting courtly flirtations which were a little more than an extension of good manners. But Bessie was different. She was certainly the most beautiful girl, if not the most intelligent or fascinating, at Henry’s court. His association with her lasted for several years, not merely a few days or weeks. And most important, she bore him a son.

The boy was born sometime in 1519, when Mary was three years old.Bessie left Katherine’s service when the signs of her pregnancy became an outrage to the queen—for like everyone else she knew very well who the child’s father was—and went to a monastery in the country for her delivery, Her child was christened Henry, with the honorific surname Fitzroy. Bessie herself was henceforth known at court by the unofficial title “mother of the king’s son,” and out of gratitude Henry arranged for her to marry a substantial gentleman, Sir Gilbert Talboys. The king’s liaison with Bessie did not continue after the young Henry’s birth, but Henry and Bessie remained linked through their son, and to Katherine’s immense displeasure both Lady Talboys and her child were revered almost as if they had become part of the royal line. Certainly many observers assumed that, if katherine had no son of her own, the king’s bastard would rule in place of his legitimate daughter. And to keep this possibility open, Henry gave his infant son a princely household and a succession of titles that gave him every appearance of being heir to the throne,

In Mary’s young childhood Henry VIII was at the apex of his popularity, He had taken the ideal of chivalric monarchy to heights undreamed of by his medieval predecessors. He had led an army to victory in France; he ruled a turbulent but adoring people; he had proven himself to be among the wealthiest and most generous of European rulers. Whether they glimpsed him in his red-plumed helmet and golden armor covered with little golden bells, laughing and throwing the bells to Maximilian’s soldiers at the siege of Thérouanne, or riding to the hunt with the entire court at his heels, Henry captured and held the admiring attention of his contemporaries as no earlier king had done. His reign was unfolding as a vast drama in which he played the starring role. His love of costumes and of surprise changes of character, his taste for theatrical spectacles, his constant effort to be unpredictable, to do the unexpected both in his court and in affairs of state, fascinated all who came near him. Henry forced himself on the consciousness of his age and held his central place there until the very end of his life. In a remarkable feat of sustained image-building, he was re-creating the English monarchy in his own likeness.

Mary’s childhood was spent in Henry’s giant shadow. There was a total identification, in the popular mind, between father and daughter, but Mary was seen as the king’s adored plaything, another ornament like his huge jewel-studded admiral’s whistle or his collar of enormous diamonds. His nickname for her denoted a precious adornment to his court: he called her his pearl, “the greatest pearl in the kingdom.” The name aptly conveyed her worth in Henry’s eyes. She was a treasure to be protected, hoarded, and, when the time came, spent to procure a lasting diplomatic advantage. That she might some day succeed her father was no more than an alarming improbability. And so throughout her childhood she was groomed, conditioned and taught not how to rule England, but how to make a successful transition from daughter to wife—to move from ornamenting her father’s court to adorning that of her future husband. Central to this conditioning was Mary’s formal education, which taught her to see herself as a weak and inferior being who could redeem her inherent sinfulness only by an attitude of subservience and vigilant self-denial. The contrast between her gloriously successful father and her admired yet repressed self pervaded Mary’s childhood, especially during her formative years.

This contrast was heightened by the fact that she saw her father, as a rule, only on favored occasions. From about the age of three Mary saw her parents only at Easter and Christmas; during the long months in between she rode in her litter from Windsor to Hanworth to Richmond to Greenwich—to wherever, at Wolsey’s order, fresh rushes had been laid and the rooms “sweetened” for the princess.⁴ Christmas became the high point of her year, for then she not only visited her father and mother but celebrated the holiday with twelve days of feasting, dancing and masques climaxed by the arrival of New Year’s gifts. At her fourth Christmas a company of children performed a play for Mary, under the direction of the royal dramatist John Heywood. In the following year she was allowed her own Lord of Misrule—one of her household valets, John Thurgood—who planned and presented entertainments with morris dancers, carillons and hobbyhorses. For Mary’s sixth Christmas Thurgood outdid himself. Mary’s Christmas this year at Ditton was a miniature version of Henry’s great festivities at nearby Windsor. Her Christmas feast, like his, featured a gilded and painted boar’s head; her mummers appeared in visors and armor, rabbit skins and tails. Her nine morris dancers wore ten dozen tinkling bells, and one of her “disguisings” required “straw to cover twelve men.” Another entertainment was a gory mock battle whose props included twelve crossbows, gunpowder, four gunners, two dozen morris pikes and “a man to kill a calf behind a cloth.” Her New Year’s gifts were becoming more costly each year: a gold cross from the countess of Devonshire, twelve pairs of shoes from Richard Weston, a tall gold salt cellar set with pearls from Wolsey, and from Henry a standing cup of silver gilt overflowing with coins.⁵ And from “a poor woman of Greenwich” a rosemary bush (one of the Tudor symbols) hung with gold spangles.

We know very little about the dim world of Tudor childhood. For Mary it meant the loud noises and crowded halls of the great palaces, the long silences and green vistas of the smaller manors, candlelight, torchlight, black darkness. It meant journeys through the countryside at all seasons, barge rides from Richmond to Greenwich and back again, animals, sudden rain showers and the sweet scent of cherries and strawberries from the gardens of Hanworth and Windsor, It was prayers, priests, music, her jewels, her little throne. It was not a world of indulgent parents or nurses. Visitors to England in the late fifteenth century were struck by the terror children showed in the presence of their parents. Even as adults English men and women stood in nervous silence when their parents entered a room, and did not speak until they were spoken to. Children were governed through fear as a matter of course, and if they failed to obey they were slapped and beaten until they did. Thomas More, who wrote proudly that if he flogged his children at all it was with the tail of a peacock, was famous for his gentleness, but the attitude of his friend Richard Whytford was more typical of his time. Whytford composed a little prayer for children to repeat to their mothers every morning:

If I lie, backbite or steal

If I will curse, scorn, mock or swear,

If I chide, fight, strive or threat,

Then am I worthy to be beat.

Good mother or mistress mine,

If any of these nine

I trespass to your Knowyng;

With a new rod and a fine

Early naked before I dine

Amend me with a scourging.⁶

If children were taught to fear the consequences of disobedience, they were kept in terror of the uncontrollable world of the occult. They were told to “double the thumb”—to enclose their thumb under their clenched fingers—in the presence of danger, for this shape of the hand resembled the Hebrew name of God. Their imaginations were opened to the invisible troupe of menacing beings which wandered the night or waited in the forest. The list of these unseen tormentors was enormous: spirits, witches, hags, satyrs, pans, sylens, tritons, centaurs, dwarfs, giants, imps, calcars, nymphs, incubi, hobgoblins, Robin Goodfellow, the spoorn, the mare, the man in the oak, the hell-wain, the firedrake, the puckle, and the terrifying “Boneless.” Ruling them all was the ultimate horror, compounded of all the animals children fear most: the Devil, “having horns on his head, fire in his mouth, and a tail in his breech, eyes like a Bason, fangs like a Dog, claws like a Boar, a skin like a Niger, and a voice roaring like a Lion, whereby we start and are afraid when we hear one cry Bough!”⁷

These dark imaginings were offset by the sunlit pleasures of riding and hawking. At six Mary rode well, and Lord Abergavenny sent her a horse of her own. Henry sent her a goshawk, and she seems to have spent many hours in the summer of 1522 learning to hunt with her. One entire August day Mary and her attendants rode in the forest near Windsor Castle, picnicking on bread and ale.⁸ The princess’ household establishment was quite large by the early 1520s. At age six she had seven gentlemen, ten valets and sixteen pages, plus stableboys, kitchen urchins, her laundress and woodbearer. The lists of goods supplied to her bakehouse, butlery, kitchen, and accatry grew longer each year, until her table was costing the king nearly twelve hundred pounds annually.⁹ Among the members of Mary’s growing household were two who would be in her service for decades, Beatrice ap Rice, her “lavender” or laundress and David ap Rice, who was at first a page but soon became yeoman of the chamber. More ephemeral are the names of minstrels who were in her pay for only a few months at a time, English and French names in most cases but occasionally a Welshman like Elandon, who joined her establishment when she was nine.

Music was the most intimate of the links between Henry and Mary. Among Henry’s prodigious talents was the ability to play, with the bravado of a gifted amateur, on a good many musical instruments—among them the gittaron, lute, cornet, and virginal. He liked nothing better than to follow up an afternoon of strenuous jousting with an impromptu evening concert, where he performed in alternation with the professional musicians of his court and often played nearly as well as they did. He collected instruments, and was always looking for advancements in design and sonority; in his collection was a mechanical virginal, described as operating “with a wheel without playing upon.”¹⁰ His serious compositions—motets and masses—were no less praised than his lighter songs, and among the popular tunes of Mary’s childhood—“Hay the Eye,” “Maugh Murre,” “Bonny Wench”—was the king’s own “O My Heart.”

Henry collected musicians as he did instruments. In 1519 he had at least three very distinguished soloists at his court, a French clavichordist, a German keyboard player who so impressed the king that he took him along on his summer progress to entertain him at Woodstock, and the famed Venetian organist Dionysius Memo.¹¹ Memo, who was organist of St. Mark’s, arrived at Henry’s court with his own organ, “brought hither with much pain and cost,” and a group of virtuosi; the king promptly made him chief of his musicians and chaplain. He almost certainly became Mary’s teacher as well, for his stay at court coincides with her early childhood and by the time she was three or four she was playing the virginal for visitors. Mary shared both Henry’s love of music and his natural aptitude. As a child in arms she learned to recognize Memo across a room full of dignitaries and would call out loudly to him to play for her.¹² She became a skilled player in her own right, with a facility for rapid and intricate passagework, and when she grew older she taught the women and girls in her household to play.

Mary resembled her father in many ways besides her musical gift and fair coloring, but her formal education took no account of this resemblance. Instead she was taught to deny in herself all traces of Henry’s spontaneous flamboyance and self-assertion, and to perceive the overriding truth that for her, as for all women, life must be a grim battle against temptation and weakness, a battle she was destined to lose.

We know a good deal about what and how Mary was taught in her childhood. At Katherine’s request the Spanish humanist Vives designed a plan of study for her, set out in several educational treatises. One of these prescribed a curriculum in the classics, describing how the princess was to acquire the rudiments of pronunciation and grammar and then read simple Greek and Latin stories before going on to Plato, Plutarch, Cicero and Seneca. The Christian Latin poets and the writings of the church Fathers were to be emphasized, and, of course, Mary was to read passages from the scriptures every morning and evening. For recreation she was to read stories about self-sacrificing women. Vives recommended in particular Livy’s account of the virtuous Roman matron Lucretia, who after being raped by the son of Tarquin the Proud, stabbed herself to death, and the story of the patient Griselda, whose husband put her through endless trials to assure himself of her devotion. These were to be her models, in addition to the suffering holy women whose lives she knew intimately from the legends of the saints.

More important to Vives than Mary’s mastery of Greek and Latin was her education in virtue. Every young girl, he wrote in his work On the Instruction of a Christian Woman, ought to keep constantly in mind that she is inherently “the devil’s instrument, and not Christ’s.”¹³ To Vives as to most humanists the central dilemma of female education was the inherent sinfulness of women. This negative premise was the foundation of Mary’s training, and everything she learned was to be chosen in the light of whether it was likely to palliate or entrench the inescapable perversity of her nature. When Katherine asked Vives to draw up a plan of education for Mary, she envisioned it primarily as a form of protection for the young girl, to guard her “more securely and safely than any spearman or bowman whatever.”¹⁴

The protection she referred to was, first and most obviously, protection of Mary’s virginity. Erasmus, who at first saw no point in education for women, was persuaded in England that “nothing so completely preserves the modesty” of young girls as learning, for without it “many from simplicity and inexperience have lost their chastity before they knew that such an inestimable treasure was in danger.”¹⁵ At courts where the learning of girls is ignored, he wrote, they spend their mornings dressing their hair and painting their faces, showing themselves off at mass, and gossiping. In the afternoon they lie about on the grass in fair weather, joking and flirting, “with men leaning over on to their laps.” Their days are spent among “sated and indolent servants, very squalid, and of impure morals.” In this atmosphere modesty cannot thrive, and virtue has little meaning. Vives hoped to keep Mary from these influences, and in consequence he devoted as much attention to the environment in which the princess was to be educated as he did to the content of what she learned.

From earliest infancy, he insisted, she should be kept away from the company of men, lest she become attached to the male sex. Since “a woman that thinketh alone, thinketh evil,” she was to be surrounded at all times with “sad, pale and untrimmed” servants and taught to weave and spin when her lessons were over. Weaving Vives recommended as inducing a “love of sober sadness,” an approved frame of consciousness likely to discourage the sensual musings native to all females. Of the “foul ribaldry” of popular songs and books the young girl should know nothing, and should beware of romances “as of serpents or snakes.” Lest she trust herself too much, he advised, she should be encouraged to fear being alone; she should be trained to require the company of others and rely on them for everything. Vives’ recommendations amounted to a deliberate programming for helplessness, with the feelings of inferiority and depression that accompany it.¹⁶

But his warnings against sensuality were even more harmful. The child’s movements should be watched, he noted, to prevent “uncomely gestures or moving of the body.” Only the blandest food should be served, which would not “inflame the body.” He recommended that as an adolescent Mary should fast to “bridle the body and press it down, and quench the heat of youth.” Fasting, always a mark of the ascetic life, became in the early sixteenth century the special hallmark of young female saints. Popular pamphlets told of the prodigious fast of one young girl in the Netherlands, Eve Fliegen, who gave up all food and drink and subsisted for years entirely on the scent of roses.¹⁷ Weak wine was permissible, Vives thought, but water was best, since “it is better that the stomach ache than the mind.”¹⁸ All adornment of the body was of course hazardous. Like the sight of men, perfumes and ointments “fire the maid with jeapardous heat” and were to be avoided, and Mary’s guardians were to impress on her that an alluring woman is “a poisoner and sword” to all who see her.

Mary’s education was intended to provide her with an intellectual chastity belt—a view of herself and of the spiritual dangers facing all women that would frighten her into an attitude of withdrawn virtue. For it was a vital corollary to this concept of self that it was only compatible with a life of domesticity. Public life in any form was impossible for women, for it meant loss of chastity and good repute. Vives’ model of female behavior envisioned a woman at home and silent, with “few to see her and none at all to hear her.” Leaving the house was full of perils; it demanded that she “prepare her mind and stomach none otherwise than if she went to fight.” In streets and public places “the darts of the Devil are flying on every side,” Vives insisted, and her only defenses were the good examples she had been taught, her determination to remain chaste and “a mind ever bent toward Christ.”¹⁹ To forestall prying eyes she should cover her neck and veil her face, leaving “scarcely an eye open to see the way.”

Vives’ educational doctrines called for claustration, cultivated prudery and an exaggerated horror of sensuality in every form. They were more the product of Spanish than English attitudes toward women, but Vives took many of his teachings directly from the works of St. Jerome, whose views on female education had been a respected part of Christian culture since antiquity. That women were morally inferior to men was a commonplace of theology, and the fathers and scholastics of the middle ages had elaborated dozens of antifeminist formulas. The traditional starting point of these arguments was the Christian story of creation itself, in which Adam was made directly by God but Eve was made only indirectly, by means of Adam’s flesh. Eve was thus not made in God’s image but in Adam’s, and was inferior to him. It was Eve, too, who tempted Adam to disobey God and was responsible for mankind’s fall. To these sins scholastic theologians added the Aristotelian teaching that all female creatures are “misbegotten males”—biological accidents and imperfections. Man was seen as the norm of humankind, woman as the abnormal exception, and some Christian writers wondered whether, at the last judgment, women would rise from the dead in female form or whether they would be resurrected in the perfect form of men.

What gave these teachings their enduring authority was that they were biblical in origin and thoroughly integrated with the other doctrines of the church. St. Paul had written that “the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church,” and had forbidden women to speak in the Christian congregation; women, he taught, should reverence men and remain in proper subjection to them. Several New Testament passages implied that men were to serve as mediators between their wives and Christ, just as Christ served as mediator between man and God. Male superiority was in an important sense essential to salvation—a part of the revealed truth of Christianity. To doubt the inferiority of women, then, was to doubt salvation itself.

Social doctrines also supported this view of women. English men and women of the Tudor age believed that society was held together by a complex network of relationships between superiors and inferiors. Each individual had a preordained place in this network, and only by staying in that place could the social order be maintained. Women were ranked in the social hierachy according to the status of their fathers, first, and later according to that of their husbands; if they presumed to throw off their subservient role they risked upsetting the entire social structure.

Of course, Mary had only to read and to look around her to see contradictions to the principle of female weakness and inferiority. Medieval women had worn armor and led feudal armies; they had conducted sieges and organized the defense of towns and castles. Fist fighting was known in fifteenth-century England as “fighting like women,” and the chronicles of the age were full of accounts of embattled women. In her grandfather Henry VII’s reign, during fighting in Flanders a small group of English soldiers were left to guard Nieuport against the French. Many of the soldiers were wounded, and the others proved too sick or exhausted to defend the town when the French attacked. Just as they entered the gates, however, a shipload of English archers from Calais landed, and the women of the town joined them in pushing back the attackers. Crying “Help, Englishmen!” they rushed on the French with knives and cut their throats as fast as the archers could shoot them.²⁰

Examples of learned women were equally numerous. Mary’s great-grandmother Margaret Beaufort translated French works into English and was praised as a “right studious” woman with an “upholding memory”; she kept an apartment at Cambridge and founded Christ’s College there. On the continent, the Italian courts were noted for their learned women, and the daughters of the German humanist Pirckheimer were famous throughout Europe for their scholarship. Closer to home, Thomas More’s daughter Margaret was a brilliant scholar whose treatise on the Four Last Things More pronounced superior to his own.

The most obvious exemplar at Henry’s court of female strength, courage and intellect was the queen. Born in a military camp as her mother’s forces were besieging Granada, Katherine had survived a bitter adolescence in a strange country, suffered the deaths of a young husband and all but one of her children, and now lived with the ignominy of her husband’s infidelities. Yet she did not give way to frustration or resignation. She took pride in her ancestry, her capabilities as a ruler in Henry’s absence, her imperturbable dignity and her ever gracious smile. She took pride also in her learning, for which Erasmus called her “a miracle of her sex.” Vives concurred in this judgment, but here the compliment to Katherine the woman ended and the insistence on woman’s weakness began again. For Vives’ highest praise of the queen was that it was only an “error of nature” that she was not a man. “There was in her feminine body a man’s heart,” he insisted.²¹ “But for her sex,” Thomas Cromwell would say of Katherine later, “she would have surpassed all the heroes of history.”²²

Both Mary’s education and her observation taught her in childhood that as a woman she must fear her nature for its weakness and her character for its tendency to sin. Her wit might be considerable, but it would never be trustworthy or profound. She must fear to think or judge or act on her own, and must limit her aspirations to a retired life of quiet obedience to a husband chosen for her by others. If she surpassed herself, she might someday, like Katherine, be compared to a man—but only in a way that pointed to lost opportunities and futile hopes.