But, even as they grew apart, Catherine and Henry kept one thing in common. This was the welfare of their only surviving child, the daughter born in February 1516. She was named Mary, after Henry’s favourite sister, and she turned into a fine child. Catherine doted on her and Henry, when the mood took him, was also a proud and indulgent father, who delighted in showing off his pretty little daughter.
One such occasion took place on 23 February 1518, when the Venetian ambassador, Giustiniani, had an audience at Windsor. The King ordered the Princess, who had just celebrated her second birthday, to be brought in. Solemnly, Wolsey, ambassador Giustiniani and the attendant lords kissed the child’s hand. Then Mary caught sight of Friar Dionysius Memo, the great Venetian organist, who was then resident keyboard virtuoso at Henry’s Court. ‘Priest! priest!’ she ‘commenced calling out in English’ and would not stop until Memo agreed to play for her. Henry was delighted at the display, which showed that Mary was in truth her father’s daughter: musical, precocious and imperious far beyond her years. Taking her ‘in his arms’, he came over to Giustiniani and started singing Memo’s praises in Latin: ‘Per Deum! iste est honestissimus vir…’ (God’s Name! That man is a most worthy gentleman and one who is very dear to us…)
‘Greater honour,’ Giustiniani concluded, ‘was paid to the Princess than to the Queen.’ Catherine would not have minded: it showed that her daughter, despite her gender, was England’s heir.1
And raising Mary as a worthy heir to the throne became the major objective of Catherine’s fourth decade. She drew on her own experience; she consulted leading scholars and commissioned educational treatises. Above all, she herself mothered her child, in a way that was highly unusual in a royal parent. Years later, when Mary had a serious teenage illness, Catherine, surely recollecting these childhood days, announced she would take personal charge of her daughter. ‘There is no need’, Catherine insisted, ‘of any other person but myself to nurse her…I will put her in my own bed where I sleep, and will sit up with her when needful.’ Rare even is the modern royal child who has such loving attention.2
Henry, too, was an unusually hands-on royal father. In the sixteenth century royal daughters–and even second sons, like Henry himself–were brought up by their mothers with little or no interference from their fathers. Instead kings concentrated largely on their eldest son and heir. They did not raise them themselves. But they did take care over the choice of those who did. They nominated their governors (the male equivalent of the Lady Mistress) and Households, and drew up elaborate regulations for their education and upbringing. The most important set of these regulations was issued by Edward IV, Mary’s great-grandfather, ‘as well for the virtuous guiding of the person’ of his eldest son, Edward, Prince of Wales, ‘as for the politic, sad [wise] and good rule of his Household’. These Ordinances served in turn as a model for the upbringing of Catherine’s first husband, Arthur, and, in the fullness of time, for that of her daughter, Mary, as well.3
For Mary, of course, was not only Catherine’s daughter; at this time she was Henry’s only child and therefore his heir. And, long before she was sent off to Ludlow in the footsteps of Arthur and the Yorkist Prince Edward, her father treated her as Prince[ess] of Wales. Just as though she had been a boy, he hand-picked her governess, vetted the organisation of her Household and watched anxiously over her health.4
The result was that Mary had a hybrid upbringing. Sometimes she was reared like a royal daughter; sometimes like a Prince of Wales. And sometimes her mother took the lead and sometimes her father. But Catherine’s, it seems safe to say, was the constant guiding hand. Catherine had her reward. For, when Mary had to choose, it was to her mother, not to her father, that she gave her unshakable loyalty.
Mary was christened in the Church of the Observant Friars at Greenwich on 20 February 1516 in a magnificent ceremonial which, inevitably, had been prepared for the expected prince. The canopy over her was borne by four knights. They included Sir Thomas Parr, father of Catherine, and Sir Thomas Boleyn, father of Anne. The godparents were the King’s minister, Thomas Wolsey, who had been made Cardinal in 1515, Mary’s great-aunt, Catherine Plantagenet, daughter of King Edward IV and widow of the Earl of Devon, and the Duchess of Norfolk. At her confirmation, which, according to the usual royal practice, followed immediately after the christening, Margaret Pole acted as her godmother.5
Catherine clearly had a hand in all this. Both Parr and Boleyn had wives who were ladies-in-waiting to Catherine, while Margaret Pole was Catherine’s friend from the old days at Ludlow, during her first marriage to Prince Arthur. In 1513, Henry, probably prompted by Catherine as much as by his own conscience, had restored Margaret in blood and status by creating her Countess of Salisbury. But the restoration was incomplete: she was given the lands of the earldom of Salisbury but not the far greater inheritance of the earldom of Warwick, to which she was also heiress.
After the christening and confirmation, Mary, preceded by her godparents’ gifts, was carried back in triumph to the Queen’s Chamber and presented to Catherine. Then the baby was handed over to the staff of the nursery. Once again, its leading members seem to have been hand-picked by Catherine. The wet-nurse, who was critical to the child’s immediate survival, was Catherine Pole. Her husband, Leonard, was another member of Lady Salisbury’s family. The Lady Mistress, Lady Bryan, had also been one of Catherine’s ladies. Under Margaret Bryan was the usual nursery staff of four rockers, who took it in turns to rock the royal cradle, and a laundress, who was needed to wash the large amounts of linen which even the best-behaved royal babies soil. The little establishment was completed by a gentlewoman and a chaplain.
But Lady Bryan’s appointment also shows that Henry took a strong interest in the arrangements for his daughter. ‘When the Lady Mary was born,’ Lady Bryan recollected, ‘it pleased the King’s Grace to appoint me Lady Mistress; and [he also] made me a Baroness.’ Lady Bryan was writing many years later. But her memory is confirmed by the fact that Wolsey, Henry’s alter ego, personally signed the letters patent which authorised the payment of her wages.6
For the first few years of Mary’s life, Catherine kept her daughter close to her at Court. Mary’s name appears in all the household lists of the period and her expenses and the wages of her servants were paid on an ad hoc basis by the Treasurer of the Chamber, who was the principal paymaster of the Court. In the larger palaces, she had her own ‘Chamber’, or set of rooms, which formed part of the Queen’s much larger suite. The Princess herself had two rooms: an inner one, where she slept in her everyday cradle, and an outer one, where she received visitors in infant state in her great ‘cradle of estate’, with its canopy, royal arms and quilt of ermine. Lady Bryan had a room, and the laundress another where she both worked and slept. Finally, there was probably a dormitory chamber for the lesser female servants, and slightly better accommodation for Mary’s chaplain.7
Finding room for so many was impossible in all but the largest palaces. And the problem got worse as male servants, in considerable numbers, were added to the original female nursery staff. The Princess had twenty-two menservants by 1519 and thirty-one a year later. So Mary and her Household had to move out, to an adjacent manor-house. This is what happened during the Christmas season of 1517–8. Catherine and Henry were spending the holidays at Windsor, while Mary was lodged at nearby Ditton Park. Ditton Park is only a couple of miles from Windsor. But it lies on the north bank of the Thames while Windsor Castle is on the south. Fortunately, there was a convenient river-crossing at Datchet ferry, and Mary and her servants were ferried over on two separate occasions.8
One such journey from Ditton to the Castle almost certainly took place on 1 January 1518. For then Mary, aged one year and eleven months, participated in her first recorded ceremony and received the customary New Year’s gifts. Her godfather, Cardinal Wolsey, sent her a gold cup by one of his servants; her godmother, the Countess of Devonshire, sent a gold spoon and the Duchess of Norfolk, her other godmother, a primer, from which no doubt Mary was soon expected to learn to read. The servants who delivered the presents each got a reward or tip, strictly graduated according to the rank of their master or mistress. Tips to Henry’s and Catherine’s servants are not recorded, however, which must mean that Mary’s father and mother gave their gifts to their baby in person–probably in the Queen’s Presence Chamber in the Castle.9
The problems of accommodation were particularly acute during the summer. This was the time of the Progress, when the King and Queen wandered from house to house, hunting in the parks as they went. Often, the houses they stayed in were little better than hunting lodges, and Henry and Catherine could scarcely accommodate their own, much reduced, travelling Household, let alone that of Mary. The summer was also the time of the plague, when disease struck apparently at random. Henry, rightly, was terrified of infection and maintained a policy of strict quarantine. On Sunday, 18 July 1518, Pace reported to Wolsey from The More (now Moor Park near Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire) that Henry had just learned that one of the Princess’s servants had fallen ‘sick of a hot ague’. He had recovered but Henry decided to take precautions and Wolsey was ordered to prepare ‘such gists [list of stopping places] as shall be most for the King’s surety and my Lady’s’.10
The effect was that Mary spent the rest of July following in her parents’ footsteps. She was brought forthwith to Bisham Abbey, Berkshire, which the King and Queen had left on the Saturday, and she stayed there till the following Tuesday. That Tuesday was also Henry and Catherine’s removing day from The More, which they vacated for Enfield. This left a few hours to clean and tidy The More, before Mary’s arrival there, which was planned for the Wednesday. The arrangement, which required considerable logistical skills to organise, nicely squared the circle. It kept Mary close to the Court. It avoided the mingling of the two Households, with the risk of cross-infection. And it gave Catherine ample opportunity to see Mary whenever she chose. The Queen and Princess were never more than fifteen miles apart and often less. And Catherine was still a good horsewoman. ‘The Queen’, Pace reported on the 18th, ‘intendeth to hunt tomorrow four miles hence in a little park of Sir John Peachy’s.’ Sometimes, no doubt, her quarry included her daughter.
At the end of the following year, 1519, Wolsey, acting in Henry’s name, carried out a general reform of the royal government and Household. Mary’s little establishment received attention as well. It was assigned a fixed income of £1,100 a year from the Treasurer of the Chamber (the same amount, incidentally, on which Catherine herself had so conspicuously failed to make do as Princess-Dowager a decade and a half previously). And responsible head-officers were appointed. It had now become the fully-fledged, independent household appropriate to Mary’s status as Princess-Inheritrix of England.11
More importantly, from Mary’s point of view, there was also a change of Lady Mistress at about the same time. Lady Bryan was a highly competent manager of the nursery (and went on to perform this role for all Henry’s other children). But, good though she was with babies, it seems to have been felt that she lacked the status and perhaps the talents to supervise the education of the rapidly developing little Princess. Her replacement was Lady Salisbury. It seems an ideal appointment. The Countess was Catherine’s confidante and she was royal, religious and virtuous.
She was also seriously interested in learning. One of Margaret Salisbury’s own sons, Reginald Pole, the future Cardinal, was the most scholarly and most pious English aristocrat of his generation. And while she was Mary’s governess, the Countess commissioned a translation of Erasmus’s ‘sermon’, De immensa dei misericordia (On the Boundless Mercy of God). The translation, published in 1526, was dedicated to the Countess as one who bore ‘great mind and deep affection toward all manner of learning, and especially toward that which either exciteth or teacheth virtue and goodness and concerneth the way of our salvation’. She was certainly in post with Mary by early 1520. But the actual date of her appointment may go back much earlier, to the beginning of 1518 when a royal messenger was sent to Birling to ‘my Lady Mistress’. Birling in Kent was the house of Lord Abergavenny, who was a close friend and family connexion of Lady Salisbury’s. It would have been a natural place for her to have spent Christmas before taking up her duties at Court.12
Lady Salisbury proved a great success. Lady Bryan’s memory was effaced and Mary became devoted to her new governess, regarding her ‘as her second mother’. Henry, on the other hand, was more doubtful of her influence on his daughter. Was it because Margaret Salisbury was too close to Catherine?
The results of the Countess’s care were clear in 1520 when Mary carried off her first State visit. A party of French gentlemen had come to England to see the sights. These now included the King’s talented daughter, who was then in residence at Richmond. The gentlemen were rowed there on the afternoon of 30 June, with the benefit of a following tide. They were received in the Presence Chamber by Mary, who was attended by her governess, Lady Salisbury, her godmother, the Duchess of Norfolk, and a galaxy of other noble ladies. Mary was on her best behaviour. She welcomed her visitors ‘with most goodly countenance, proper communication, and pleasant pastime in playing at the virginals, that they greatly marvelled and rejoiced at the same, her young and tender age considered’. Her parents were delighted: her father with her musicality, her mother with her deportment and linguistic skill.13
But the new arrangements for Mary’s Household had little immediate impact on her movements. In part, this may have been because Lady Salisbury fell under a cloud. Her daughter Ursula had married Henry, Lord Stafford, the son and heir of the mighty Duke of Buckingham. Buckingham had sought and received the King’s blessing for the match. Even so, it represented a potential danger. Both the Staffords and the Poles had a royal descent and a possible claim to the throne. Now the two claims were fused. Buckingham made matters worse by his ostentatious dislike of Wolsey, his quarrels with Compton, the King’s favourite, and, above all, his loose talk about the succession.14
Henry was nervous about this, as well he might be with only Mary as his heir. In the spring of 1521, the King and Wolsey decided to nip matters in the bud.
Catherine and Henry had spent Christmas at Greenwich. They celebrated Candlemas, as the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin was known, there as well on 2 February. Mary was with them and her offering at the altar in the Chapel Royal was made by Mountjoy, Catherine’s Chamberlain. Then, in the middle of the month the King and Queen journeyed north. They travelled together to Enfield, after which they separated. Catherine, who had not quite abandoned hope of another child, continued on pilgrimage to Walsingham ‘to fulfil a vow’. But Henry turned east to his recently rebuilt palace of Beaulieu or New Hall near Chelmsford. Here he spent the next month alone and worrying: about epidemic disease, about his own state of health, and about Buckingham.15
By the time Catherine rejoined him at Beaulieu in mid-March, the die was cast. She had many ties of friendship with the women of Buckingham’s family and she had always got on well with the Duke personally. But even if she had wished to intervene, it was too late.
Buckingham was summoned to London at the beginning of April and shadowed en route by the royal guards. On 16 April he arrived and was sent to the Tower. That same day, Henry was at Greenwich, personally interrogating the witnesses against Buckingham. He quickly decided that their evidence was sufficient and that the Duke would be found guilty. Buckingham was tried on 13 May, condemned and executed four days later; his son-in-law Abergavenny was stripped of his offices and subject to penal fines and the Poles were expelled from the Court.
The treatment of the Countess of Salisbury herself was ‘under discussion’, as Pace cryptically noted in Latin, ‘because of her nobility and goodness’. But one thing was certain: in the circumstances, she could not remain in charge of the heir to the throne.
The quest for a replacement occupied much of the rest of the year. Henry’s first thought was to turn to the Dowager Countess of Oxford. But, as expected, she refused on grounds of ill health. Henry’s second choice was the husband-and-wife appointment of Sir Philip and Lady Calthorpe: Lady Calthorpe to be Lady Mistress and her husband Mary’s Chamberlain. This was first mooted in late July. But it took until October to sort out their fee (£40 a year) and the formalities of appointment.16
Henry had originally emphasised the urgency of the need to find a solution to Mary’s care: he ‘intendeth within brief time to depart hence [from Windsor] to Easthampstead, and to pass his time near hereabouts, in such places as he shall have no convenient lodging for my Lady Princess’. In fact, he remained at Windsor, with only shortish visits to Woking and Guildford, until mid-November. And Mary remained with him, staying either in the Castle itself or at Ditton Park. ‘The King, Queen and Princess continue at Windsor,’ Lord Darcy’s Court agent informed him on 12 October. And when Henry and Catherine moved on 21 November, the Princess followed them and ‘was [still] with the King at Richmond’. Not till 2 December 1521 did Mary and her parents go their separate ways. The King and Queen left to spend Christmas at Greenwich; Mary was taken from Richmond to her old abode at Ditton Park, giving alms on the way. And there she had her first Christmas in her own house, complete with a decorated boar’s head and a lord of misrule. This year, too, for the first time, her father’s New Year’s gift, of a silver cup filled with money, was sent by a servant. But Catherine, paying a flying visit, gave hers in person.
In the course of the first six months of 1522, Mary rejoined her parents for long stays at Greenwich and Richmond. But this year, the summer Progress, which traversed East Anglia from Ipswich in the east to Walsingham in the north, was unusually extended. So, in early July, Mary bade farewell to her parents at Windsor and, escorted by Catherine’s footmen, rode the short distance to Chertsey, which served as the first of her summer residences. She was apart from her family for the whole of August and September. By October, the Progress was over and the separation was felt to have gone on long enough. The King and Queen had remained in East Anglia, alternating between Hertford Castle and Hatfield Palace, while Mary had moved to Richmond. She was now brought to Bedwell, a manor-house in Hertfordshire three miles east of Hatfield.17
The location of the house was obviously a crucial consideration. But so too was its ownership. For Bedwell was one of the principal seats of the wealthy knight Sir William Say, father-in-law of Lord Mountjoy, Catherine’s Chamberlain. It was lavishly furnished and its estates were well-stocked, especially with pigeons from its dovecotes, to which Mountjoy was partial. Once again, the Queen’s footmen provided an escort for Mary’s journey, which took two full days on the 17th and 18th. Mary thereafter remained at Bedwell, within easy reach of her parents, for the next two months. During this time Catherine also communicated more formally with Mary’s Council by letter. And when mother and daughter went their separate ways for Christmas, Catherine provided for Mary’s transport in fine style, with both a palfrey on which she could ride when she wished and a litter in which she could rest when she was tired.18
Mary was now approaching her seventh birthday. The sixth or seventh year was an important threshold in Tudor childhood. Before that age, boys were brought up with their sisters ‘among the women’, from whom they received elementary instruction in reading and writing; afterwards, they were given over to male schoolmasters and began their formal education. Girls, on the other hand, remained with their mothers to be inculcated in domestic tasks. Which direction would Mary take? Would she continue to be educated informally by her mother, who was, after all, by virtue of her own superior education, unusually well qualified as teacher? Or would she follow the masculine road of a formalised education with male teachers and a more intellectually demanding curriculum?
Catherine, as usual, considered the matter carefully. She also had one notable example to hand. Sir Thomas More had four children, three daughters and one son, who were born about a decade before Mary. In his Utopia, More had thought the unthinkable. In the upbringing of his children, he decided to do the unthinkable as well and give his daughters, who turned out to be brilliant, and his son, who did not, exactly the same rigorous education. All four children studied at home and had the best masters, who taught them Latin, Greek, mathematics and astronomy. Catherine knew about this experiment. It had been made famous by Erasmus’s praise of More’s household academy and More himself was a familiar figure at Court where he was a resident Councillor from 1518. But Catherine turned elsewhere.19
Predictably, her chosen adviser was a Spaniard. Juan Luis Vives was born in 1492 in Valencia. After a thoroughly traditional education in scholasticism and logic at the academy in his native city, he proceeded to further study in Paris and the Netherlands. In his late teens he underwent a sort of conversion. He passionately rejected his youthful studies as arid and destructive and embraced instead the new literary programme of Erasmus with its emphasis on clarity and personal integrity and its appeal to the heart rather than the head. He also built up a reputation as a brilliant teacher. By 1522, however, his career was in crisis. The actual business of teaching had become ‘in the highest degree repulsive’ and his former pupil and patron, William de Croy, Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo, had died. Vives needed a new patron and a new job.20
At this point, Catherine of Aragon offered her patronage. Vives leapt at the opportunity. He would spend part of the year in England. And he would exchange the drudgery of the classroom for the well-paid role of educational consultant. It did not quite work out like that. Vives was snapped up as Wolsey’s Reader in Rhetoric at Oxford. But this appointment left him with plenty of time for attendance at Court. He complained that his lodgings were mean and in the City which was a long way from the usual seat of the Court at Greenwich. But, despite his protests, he enjoyed the excitement of being at the heart of things. He also came to hold Catherine herself in respect and affection.21
But what did Catherine see in Vives, apart from his Spanishness? There were the things in him that everybody found attractive, such as his youth, his brilliance, his engaging personality, his freedom from the usual scholarly bile and malice. For Vives was a most unscholarly scholar. Most scholars were not gentlemen. Instead, they were low born, in priestly orders and, rather often, like Erasmus himself, ‘not the marrying sort’. Vives was a world apart. He was of gentle birth, with a good pedigree, a coat-of-arms and a motto, Siempre vivas. He was a layman. And in 1524 he was to marry. All this appealed powerfully to Catherine: she liked gentlemen, she was conventional and she was passionately devoted to marriage.
Vives therefore was ‘one of us’–unlike Erasmus. He was also, unlike More, ‘a safe pair of hands’. Catherine could ask him for his advice on a programme for Mary’s future education and be confident that the result would not frighten the horses–or, more importantly, her husband.
Vives did not disappoint. Catherine must have made her request early in 1523. Vives worked with his usual speed (he had written twelve books by the time he was twenty-eight) and the dedicatory letter to De institutione feminae christianae (The Institution of a Christian Woman) is dated 5 April 1523 at Bruges. ‘I have been moved [to write]’, Vives told Catherine, ‘partly by the holiness and goodness of your living, partly by the favour and love that your Grace beareth toward holy study and learning.’ But Catherine, he continues, was to be more than the inspiration of the treatise, she was herself to be the model of the educated Christian woman, whose example Mary was to follow in all things. ‘Your dearest daughter Mary shall read these instructions of mine, and follow in living. Which she must needs do, if she order herself after the example she hath at home with her, of your virtue and wisdom.’
This sets the tone immediately. But another woman is an even more powerful presence: Blancha Maria, Vives’s mother. Blancha also came from a good family, which had literary tastes and had produced several poets. Her love for her son was deep but undemonstrative. And his feelings for her only strengthened with the passage of time. ‘Therefore,’ he recalls in De institutione, ‘there was nobody that I did more flee, or was more loath to come nigh, than my mother, when I was a child. But after I came to a man’s estate, there was nobody whom I delighted more to have in sight.’
But it is Blancha’s relations with her husband, Luis, not with her son, which are principally at issue. Vives remembered, ‘I could never see her strive with my father’. Instead, she had two habitual sayings. ‘When she would say she believed anything well, then she used to say, “It is even as though Luis Vives had spoken it.” When she would say she would [wished for] anything, she used to say, “It is even as though Luis Vives would it”.’ The result, Vives said proudly, was that ‘the concord of Vives and Blancha was taken up and used in a manner for a proverb’.
All this, Vives claims artfully, is an aside. ‘It is not much to be talked in a book, made for another purpose, of my most holy mother.’ But the disclaimer is itself an artifice. For the invocation of his patron Catherine, in the dedicatory epistle, and of his mother, Blancha, in the text, serve to announce the principal theme of his book: that the new education is entirely compatible with the old woman and with the old, subordinate place of women. Fathers, according to Vives, have nothing to fear from educated daughters, nor husbands from learned wives. As for women themselves, they too have everything to gain from education, as it will fit them better for their proper role, as handmaidens to man and God.
But when Vives turns from principles to practice, De institutione disappointingly runs out of steam. Instead of an educational programme, there are two lists, one of ‘good’ books and one of ‘bad’. The ‘bad’ books are vernacular romances. Vives lists many examples in Spanish, French and Flemish but not in English since he was familiar with neither the language nor the literature. Romances were the Mills and Boon of the day and their content was recognisably the same. It consisted of bold knights, handsome heroes, wicked villains, distressed damsels, unrequited love and nights of passion–sometimes occurring outside marriage, sometimes before it, but rarely, alas, after the knot was tied. Such works, according to Vives, were libri pestiferi (noxious books): they inculcated false values and incited women’s imaginations, which in any case were more fevered than men’s, to lust. He wanted them banned, for Mary and for all other women.
Vives’s list of ‘good’ books, which he would substitute for the bad, is much less sensational. It fell into three groups. The first consisted of much of the Good Book itself, including part of the Old Testament, together with the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles. Then there were the three Fathers of the Church, Saints Cyprian, Jerome and Augustine. Finally, Mary was to read something of the best moral philosophers of the Classical World, such as Boethius, Plato, Cicero and Seneca, as her teacher would select.
Vives also disapproved of cards and dice and fine clothes, which Mary came to enjoy, and dancing, at which she already excelled.
Catherine was enthusiastic about the general arguments of De institutione. But she wanted more and more detail. Her opportunity came six months later, after Vives had taken up his post at Oxford. From 22 September 1523, Catherine and Henry were at Woodstock Palace, five miles from Oxford. They had bade farewell to Mary at Richmond on 13 August and then travelled west by easy stages. The main purpose of their visit to Woodstock was to hunt the magnificent park. But they interrupted their sport to hear Vives deliver one of his lectures. Probably Catherine repeated her request in person. With his usual efficiency, Vives dashed off a more detailed programme of study for her daughter, De ratione studii puerilis, which he prefaced with a letter, dated at Oxford on 7 October, dedicating the work to Mary herself.
So the De ratione was a practical work, intended for actual classroom use. It shows. Vives gave rules for the pronunciation of Latin and Greek (for Mary, like other Tudor children, was expected to have a spoken as well as a written knowledge of the ancient tongues). He advised that something should be learned by heart (memoriter) every day, and read over two or three times before bedtime to impress it permanently in the memory. He recommended a Latin and English dictionary and discussed the latest available grammars (the one, for instance, prepared for Mary by the late Thomas Linacre was sophisticated in intent but rather slapdash in execution with misprints and errors in the examples). He refined his earlier list of recommended reading and leavened the diet with some poetry. Since Mary would be Queen, he added some political science, including Plato and Thomas More’s Utopia. And, since she would be Defender of the Faith, she was to read the New Testament night and morning. She was also to learn by heart the main examples of ancient proverbial wisdom, which had been conveniently collected together by Erasmus in a single little volume.
Finally, Vives remembered that all work and no play makes a dull girl. ‘Let her be given pleasure in stories which teach the art of life. Let these be such as she can tell to others.’ There follows a list of improving stories–of Joseph in the Bible, of Lucretia in Livy, or (a rare concession) of patient Griselda in popular fiction. In thus prescribing Mary’s leisure-reading as well as her schoolwork, Vives had the same intention as the authors of politically correct fairy stories today: to harness a child’s perennial interest in story-telling to the fabrication of a new culture. But Vives, like Erasmus, quickly realised that the number of suitable readymade stories was inadequate. So he turned his own considerable gifts as a narrator to the telling of new ones. The result was a compendium, Satellitium vel Symbola, of stories designed to amuse and edify Mary. It was published in 1527, and it included an account of a conversation that Vives had with her mother in the Queen’s barge.
There was clearly a good deal of direct contact between Vives and Catherine and between Vives and Mary too. But Vives was never Mary’s teacher: he gave only advice to the mother, not lessons to the daughter. Catherine had appointed a teacher, whom Vives knew and respected. And he is careful to explain their relative input. ‘Since thou’, he tells Catherine, ‘hast chosen as her teacher a man above all learned and honest, as was fit, I was contented to point out details, as with a finger. He will explain the rest of the matters.’ Unfortunately Vives never mentions the teacher’s name. Nor does any other source. Equally, it is clear that the teacher, whoever he was, enjoyed only delegated authority. For Catherine remained in control. She might have consulted the leading authorities, commissioned reports and appointed expert staff. But it made no real difference: in infancy, she had nursed Mary through her childish ailments; now she corrected her Latin exercises, kept her up to scratch with her handwriting and assessed her progress. ‘Time will admonish her as to more exact details,’ Vives advised Catherine, ‘and thy singular wisdom will discover for her what they should be.’ This sort of parental interest places a child under immense pressure. Fortunately, Mary had the talent to respond. Aged twelve, she was able to make a translation of a prayer by St Thomas Aquinas, that, like all the best prayers, is both stately and euphonious; in her twenties, and responding to the encouragement of another Queen Catherine, she was author of a published translation of one of Erasmus’s Biblical paraphrases. The achievement is considerable; the credit is largely Catherine of Aragon’s.22