Tudor Women Queens & Commoners

by Alison Plowden

  In 1508, a new Spanish ambassador, shocked and disgusted by the way she was being treated and bogged down in a pettifogging wrangle with the King's Council over whether or not the Princess's remaining plate and jewels could be counted against the unpaid portion of her dowry, believed there was nothing for it but to admit defeat. When Catherine heard about this, she was furious. The ambassador, she wrote home energetically, was a traitor who should at once be recalled and punished.

  What would have happened if Henry VII had lived another year is anybody's guess - the course of English history might well have taken a very different direction. But old Henry died, and young Henry, imperiously thrusting aside all the boring financial obstacles in the way of his marriage, made it plain that he wanted no more delay. Although he had scarcely seen his fiancée since their betrothal, the new King, a lusty, full-blooded and, by all accounts, divinely handsome teenager, was impatient to prove his manhood and his mettle in the nuptial bed. This, at least, is the generally accepted explanation for the sudden, dramatic transformation of Catherine's prospects.

  Since the King had set his heart on being crowned with the Queen at his side, there was no time to be lost. The wedding took place quietly on 11 June at the Franciscan church close by Greenwich Palace, and ten days later the Court moved to the Tower to prepare for the recognition procession through the City to Westminster and the coronation.

  To Catherine, borne through the cheering crowds in a litter draped with cloth of gold slung between two white palfreys, and wearing one of her new trousseau dresses of white embroidered satin, it must surely have seemed that her troubles were over at last. The handsome prince had come riding to her rescue in the best fairy-tale tradition; patience and virtue had been rewarded, and all she had to do now was live happily ever after.

  Certainly, in June 1509, everything appeared to be set fair for the young couple. Catherine, to her credit, had not allowed her recent experiences to embitter her. On the contrary, she had learned some valuable lessons in discretion, self-reliance and self-control and had matured into a serene, thoughtful young woman of much dignity and charm. The five-and-a-half year difference in age - Catherine had been twenty-three the previous December, Henry would not be eighteen until the end of the month - seemed unimportant. It might even be all to the good. The ebullient young King, with his passion for violent sports, for lavishly expensive parties and banquets, for dressing up and showing off, could only benefit from the gently restraining influence of a slightly older wife, and during the early years of the reign the Queen's influence - both personal and political - was a factor to be reckoned with.

  For two years of her widowhood, Catherine had acted as her father's officially accredited ambassador at Henry VII's Court, and although she'd been unable to achieve anything either for herself or for her country during her term of office, the experience had, nevertheless, given her a useful insight into the workings of the diplomatic machine. She continued after her marriage to take a serious and well-informed interest in international affairs, and there's no doubt that the youthful Henry leaned heavily on her judgement in matters of foreign policy, listening to and frequently taking her advice.

  In the spring of 1513, before leaving for the war with France, he made his wife Governor of the Realm and Captain-General of the home forces - a mark of trust and confidence in her abilities which Catherine amply justified. It was a political cliché that the Scots always attacked England whenever the English were fighting in France, and, on this occasion, no sooner had Henry and his army crossed the Channel than the King of Scots forgot that he was married to the King of England's sister and prepared to invade his brother-in-law's territory. Catherine, left in charge with only a skeleton staff of greybeards to help her, found herself responsible for organizing the defence of the kingdom and was soon energetically immersed in the archaic paraphernalia of raising a citizen army. The overwhelming English victory at Flodden that September was worth more than the capture of a dozen French towns, but the Queen was careful not to crow, tactfully attributing her success entirely to English valour and God's grace. Her task was not yet over, for something must be done quickly to reassure the widowed Queen of Scotland - King James having been one of the casualties of Flodden - and this was not without a little social awkwardness. Books of etiquette, even sixteenth-century books of etiquette, offered no guidance on how to condole with your sister-in-law when her husband had just been killed by the army under your command. Margaret Tudor's marriage had never been a particularly happy one, but now, at not quite twenty-four years old and face to face with the prospect of ruling the turbulent, tribal Scots and trying to safeguard the future of her little son, who had succeeded his father at the age of seventeen months, she was understandably distracted with anxiety. The fact that she was three months pregnant did not make her situation any easier, and Catherine, who was also incidentally pregnant, hastened to send 'comfortable messages' to Edinburgh, promising that if Margaret could only keep the Scots quiet, she would be unmolested and able to count on her brother's protection and support.

  Everyone agreed that the Queen had coped remarkably well, and when the King returned home in October, they had such a loving meeting that 'every creature rejoiced'. The marriage was still, on the surface at least, an unusually happy one. Husband and wife shared many interests - both loved music and dancing, both had intellectual tastes, and both were devoutly pious - and if, after four years on the throne, Henry had grown out of his initial dependence, he was still undoubtedly very fond of Catherine. He received visitors in her apartments, read the latest books with her, planned lavish entertainments, so he said, for her pleasure and had not yet lost the habit of discussing his affairs with her. The Queen seemed, indeed, to have all the virtues of an ideal consort except in one vital department - she could not give her husband a male heir.

  The tragic story of Catherine's child-bearing had begun in May 1510 with a still-born daughter. She was pregnant again immediately and on New Year's Day 1511 gave birth to a boy, alive and apparently healthy. The baby was christened Henry amid spectacular rejoicings, and the nation breathed a sigh of relief. But unhappily, rejoicing and relief were premature, for the little Prince lived only seven weeks. This was a dreadful blow, and the Queen, 'like a natural woman, made much lamentation'. She miscarried in the autumn of 1513, and in December 1514 another boy was born, but born dead. It was not until February 1516 that Catherine produced another living child. It was a girl, given the name of Mary at the Friars' Church at Greenwich where her parents had been married.

  Henry took the disappointment philosophically. When, some time that summer, the Venetian ambassador ventured to commiserate with him over the baby's sex, he replied cheerfully enough: 'The Queen and I are both young, and if it is a girl this time, by God's grace boys will follow.' The King showed no sign, so far at any rate, that he was seriously worried about his lack of sons. What Catherine thought we do not know, but, as time passed and no boys, indeed no other living children, followed, she began to devote more and more time and thought to the upbringing and education of her daughter.

  The notion that girls could and should be given the opportunity to benefit from the kind of academic training normally reserved for boys was of comparatively recent origin, being a by-product of the so-called Renaissance - that great re-birth of learning and intellectual curiosity which had sprung to life in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and spread slowly but steadily northward. It would be more accurate to call it a re-discovery for, paradoxically, the New Learning, as it became known in England, had its roots in a nostalgia for the past. Like most reformers, the Renaissance scholars wanted to go back to the beginning: to revive the classical culture of the ancient world and, especially as the movement gained strength in northern Europe, to return to the purity of the early Apostolic Church. They sought, in fact, to clear away the accumulated debris of the centuries, so that the fountain-head of knowledge and piety and innocence could once more bubble up clean and
uncluttered. They turned to the study of Greek partly to re-discover the pre-Christian philosophers but also to be able to read the Gospels in their original form.

  The effects of the Renaissance were first felt in England during the fifteenth century - greatly assisted, of course, by the arrival at Westminster in 1477 of William Caxton and his printing press - but the spread of interest in scholarship was due chiefly to the efforts of a group of men who congregated in London and Cambridge in the early 1500s. These individuals, who included Desiderius Erasmus, Luis Vives the Spaniard, John Colet (who founded his famous school at St. Paul's in 1509), Thomas Linacre the physician, William Grocyn the Greek scholar and Sir Thomas More the lawyer, were all deeply interested in education and anxious to propagate their plans for a wider and more liberal curriculum in the schools and universities. But Thomas More was the first Englishman seriously to experiment with the novel idea that girls should be educated too. This may have been partly due to the fact that he had three daughters and an adopted daughter but only one son, and was undoubtedly helped by the fact that the eldest girl, Margaret, turned out to be unusually intelligent and receptive. She and her sisters Elizabeth and Cecily, together with their foster-sister Margaret Gigs, studied Latin and Greek, logic, philosophy and theology, mathematics and astronomy, and Margaret More, who presently became Margaret Roper, developed into a considerable and widely respected scholar in her own right.

  Erasmus had been sceptical about the wisdom of the experiment, but he was so impressed by the mini-Utopia of his friend's household - 'Plato's Academy on a Christian footing' as he described it - and by the achievements of the eagerly studious and formidably virtuous young ladies, that he was quite won over and predicted that More's example would be imitated far and wide. In fact, girls like Margaret Roper were to remain the exception rather than the rule, but Sir Thomas did have one influential supporter in Queen Catherine who, like Margaret Beaufort before her, was a generous patron of scholars and who now had a special reason for taking an interest in female education.

  With her memories of her own mother, who had fought her way to a throne, ruled a turbulent country with cool efficiency, expelled the last of the Arab rulers from Spain and still found time to bring up a family of five, Catherine naturally saw nothing especially out of the way in the idea of an English queen regnant, and she was determined that her daughter should be thoroughly prepared for the task ahead. In 1523, therefore, when Mary was seven years old, the Queen asked her compatriot, Juan Luis Vives, to draw up a plan of studies for the Princess which would help her to grow both in erudition and virtue.

  Vives, like all his contemporaries, laid great stress on maintaining a high moral standard and on the importance of character-forming in education. It followed that only the best and most serious of the classical authors should be allowed in the schoolroom, and anything that savoured of romance, lightness or wantonness was to be avoided like the plague. This was particularly important where girls were concerned, since everyone knew that, being naturally frail and 'of weak discretion', they were more easily led astray and more liable to be corrupted into vice by reading unsuitable storybooks.

  In spite of the currently fashionable craze for Greek and the growing use of English as a literary medium, a thorough grounding in Latin remained indispensable, and Vives was emphatic that the Princess should learn from the beginning to use Latin in conversation (though she must, of course, be taught correct pronunciation) and to speak it freely with her tutor and with her fellow pupils. He recommended that she should have three or four carefully chosen companions at her lessons, 'for it is not good to be taught alone'. She should also learn to write fluently in Latin from dictation and to translate from English into Latin. Vives suggested that she should get into the habit of keeping notebooks in which she could jot down useful words and phrases, elegant and unusual words, and any passages from the authors she was reading which took her fancy or struck her as being especially wise and helpful, for, as he sensibly remarked, 'those things stick in the memory which we have written with our own hand, rather than that which is written by another's'. He laid stress on the importance of memory-training. The Princess should exercise her memory daily, 'so that there be no day on which she has not learned something thoroughly'. To begin with, on going to bed at night, she should read carefully two or three times anything which was to be learned by heart 'and on the next morning ask herself for it again'. The rules of grammar, on the other hand, instead of being learned by rote, were better absorbed naturally by the study of suitable authors - Cicero, Seneca, the works of Plutarch, Plato's Dialogues, the epistles of St. Jerome and St. Augustine, Erasmus's Paraphrases, Thomas More's Utopia and a selection of Latin poets, including 'a good part of Horace', were all mentioned in Vives's reading list. Mary was also to read something from the New Testament every day, the passages to be suggested by her tutor.

  Where the King and Queen led, other parents in their circle naturally followed, and although the cult of the learned woman never spread far beyond that circle, which, in Queen Catherine's time, included most of the intellectual elite, the principle of educating girls to a higher standard than previously had gained an undeniable social cachet.

  Not that the new ideas were universally approved. There was a substantial body of opinion which held that to stuff girls' heads with Latin and Greek was 'neither necessary nor profitable' and might well be actively harmful. Women, and especially young women, were notoriously unstable and apt to become excited by novelty; once given access to classical literature, they would be bound to pick up all sorts of unwholesome, half-digested ideas which would make them 'froward' and discontented, if not worse. The intellectuals might talk a great deal about moral uplift, but once a woman had learned to read in English and in foreign tongues, who was to prevent her from getting hold of love stories, tales of adultery and the heathen goings-on of pagan gods and goddesses - matters which no honest woman ought to know about and all too liable to inflame her stomach and distract her from her household duties.

  The scholars, of course, argued that the educated woman would inevitably become more serious-minded, a more rational companion for her husband, a better mother to her children. Women were reasonable creatures, and, if they were given the opportunity of improving themselves, their natural tendency to frivolity would be checked. The educated woman, who spent her leisure time in studying instead of idle gossip with her neighbours, was more likely to prove virtuous and chaste than her uneducated counterpart with nothing better to think about than the latest fashion or the latest piece of scandal.

  As far as household duties were concerned, it is noticeable that not even the most advanced educational theorist ever dreamed of challenging society's two basic assumptions - that a woman's place was in the home and that the nice girl's only ambition should be to make an honourable marriage and become a good wife and mother. Indeed, the educational theorists from Luis Vives downwards all attached great importance to the housewifely arts.

  Vives himself was insistent that girls should learn to spin and weave, citing the example of numerous industrious classical and scriptural heroines. The handling of wool and flax were, in his opinion, two crafts yet left of the old innocent world, and he would 'in no wise that a woman should be ignorant of those feats that must be done by hand, no, not though she be a princess or a queen'. He also thought it essential that every girl should learn to cook, to be able to dress meat for her family and 'not lay all the labour upon the servants'. She should take pains to become skilled in invalid cookery. 'I have seen in Spain and in France', he wrote, 'those that have mended of their sickness by meats dressed of their wives, daughters or daughters-in-law, and have ever after loved them far the better for it.' He added, ominously, that women who could not cook were in danger of being hated by their menfolk.

  The cheerful conviction that woman had been created for the benefit and domestic comfort of man and that the whole of a girl's education, both formal and practical, should properly be direc
ted to that end, lay not very far beneath the teachings of every sixteenth-century educationist. Richard Mulcaster, a strong believer in book learning for young maidens, wrote: 'I think it and know it to be a principal commendation in a woman: to be able to govern and direct her household, to look to her house and family, to provide and keep necessaries ... to know the force of her kitchen', and he went on to say that every girl, whatever her station in life, should be taught household management. Mulcaster was supported by the author of yet another manual on the education of young ladies, who declared that:

  Our gentlewoman shall learn not only all manner of fine needlework ... but whatsoever belongeth to the distaff, spindle and weaving: which must not be thought unfit for the honour and estate wherein she was borne...And which is more, to the end that being become a mistress, she shall look into the duties and offices of domestical servants, and see how they sweep and make clean the chambers, hall and other places: make ready dinner, dressing up the cellar and buttery: and that she be not so proud that she should disdain ... but to be present at all household works.

  The pros and cons of higher education for women continued to be earnestly discussed, especially during the first half of the Tudor century, and despite the misgivings of the old-fashioned, there's no doubt that literacy among women in general was on the increase. The numbers of cookery books, books on household management, needlework and related feminine interest subjects, as well as books of advice and pious exhortation to wives which were now coming off the presses, indicated that there must have been a worthwhile market for them. The widening availability and comparative cheapness of the printed word naturally gave special impetus to would-be readers, but, at the same time, as life became slowly but steadily more urbanized and more complicated, the wives and daughters of shopkeepers, merchants, traders and small businessmen of every kind were finding it more and more necessary to be able to write a letter, con a legal document and cast up accounts.