by David Loades
The royal nursery was at first presided over by Elizabeth Denton, but she left not long after Mary’s birth to become a lady-in-waiting and was replaced by Anne Cromer, about whom nothing is known apart from her name. Unlike Arthur, Mary was given no separate establishment, but by 1501 she had her own staff of attendants, which was paid out of the Chamber account. This included a physician and a schoolmaster, along with the wardrobe keeper and gentlewomen of the chamber, but it was not large, and nothing very much is known about it – not even who the schoolmaster may have been. The King’s thinking in this respect can be seen in his order of 1502 that his daughter was to be attended on the same scale as his recently widowed daughter-in-law, Catherine of Aragon, for whom an allocation of £100 a month was made, which was enough for six to eight servants – adequate for Mary, but mean for the Dowager Princess of Wales. 13 In 1498, when Margaret was nine and Mary three, a French maiden was imported, partly to keep them company, but more importantly to teach them French by the painless method of daily conversation. Neither the age nor the name of this young lady are known, but it is reasonable to suppose that it was Jane Popincourt, who would have been about seven at that point. 14 Jane was certainly a member of the Chamber shortly afterwards, and much later created a scandal when she became the mistress of the Duc de Longueville while he was in England in 1513. At what point Jane’s morals may have begun to stray is not known, but it cannot have been until about 1503, and if she had any influence over Mary at that time it has escaped the record. It is highly unlikely that the Countess of Derby would have tolerated her continued presence if she had been under any suspicion, because the princess’s chastity was a jewel beyond price.
By 1499 two of King Henry’s surviving children were spoken for in marriage. Arthur had been committed since 1496 to Catherine, the youngest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, who was a year older than himself, while Margaret was on offer to the twenty-eight-year-old King of Scots, James IV. This negotiation had been suspended in 1497 when James briefly supported Perkin Warbeck in his impersonation of Richard of York, but had been resumed two years later when the truce of Ayton was signed between the countries. 15 The former marriage took place in November 1501 and the latter in August 1503, just as soon as the parties were old enough to cohabit. Whether Henry ever considered betrothing his younger daughter as a baby we do not know, but in November 1498 there came an offer which he had no difficulty in refusing. The party concerned was Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, who was looking for allies to confront a threatened French invasion, and he sent to London a special envoy with a threefold request. Firstly he sought an alliance with England, in order to fend off the advances of Louis XII, who had picked up French ambitions in Italy where Charles VIII had laid them down. But Henry replied that he was at peace with France, and had no intention of disrupting that situation. Secondly, in order to seal the alliance, he wanted a marriage between Mary, who was then three, and his own son Massimiliano, who was about the same age. To this the King answered politely but firmly that there was no way in which he would consider betrothing his daughter until she reached the age of seven. If Ludovico was still interested in four years’ time, he would be happy to give the matter serious consideration. The Duke’s third request was the Order of the Garter for himself. However, it was breach of etiquette to solicit such an honour, and the King responded by pointing out that since the King of France was already a knight, it would not be possible to gratify him. ‘The knights of old who bore this badge swore to be friends of friends and foes of foes’, and therefore it would be impossible to admit any enemy of Louis as a member. 16 Henry loved prevarication, and kept the Milanese envoy Raimondo de Raimondi waiting almost forty days for this unsatisfactory response, by which time Raimondo had long since come to the conclusion that Henry preferred French gold to anything that the Duke had to offer. It may be significant that the Venetian report of these exchanges did not come until 1 April 1499, and the Venetians were usually well informed. 17 In fact Ludovico sought in vain for allies, not only in England but in Italy and the Holy Roman Empire as well, and was overthrown by the anticipated French invasion later in the same year. On 6 October Louis made a solemn entry into Milan, which had been conquered in a series of campaigns.
Not long after the Milanese envoy had been dismissed, Mary had an encounter which she may well have recalled later, although it is unlikely to have made much impact at the time. She met Desiderius Erasmus. The great scholar had been persuaded to come to England by William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, who had been a pupil of his in Paris, and while staying with Mountjoy in Greenwich he was taken by Thomas More to visit the royal schoolroom at Eltham. Erasmus later recalled the event:
In the midst stood Prince Henry, now nine years old, and having already something of royalty in his demeanour, in which there was a certain dignity combined with a singular courtesy. On his right was Margaret, about eleven years of age, afterwards married to James, King of Scots, and on his left played Mary, a child of four. Edmund was an infant in arms … 18
Arthur was not there, having an establishment of his own, and Mary, absorbed by her game, was not much impressed by the great man. Erasmus was mainly interested in Henry, with whom he later entered into a Latin correspondence, and had difficulty in believing that the Prince’s letters were really of his own composition. Mary he noted as being ‘divinely pretty’, but had no other comment to make. It would have been difficult for the scholar to relate to a child of that age, and there is no reason to suppose that he spoke to her at all. He had little English and Mary’s French would have been rudimentary at that stage. He saw Henry as a potential patron, with justification, but there would have been no expectation of such a benefit from conversing with either of the girls, let alone one who was not much more than an infant. Although she learned some Latin as well as French, Mary’s schooling was not intellectually demanding, and may well have frustrated a girl of her natural intelligence. Only in music was she stretched, and learned to perform well on several instruments, under the guidance of professionals who are only identified in the accounts by their Christian names. 19 She also seems to have learned the techniques of composition, although nothing by her is known to have survived. Above all, like most Tudor gentlewomen, she was diligent with her needle, learning the embroidery at which she was later to excel, and probably the arts of plain sewing as well. Margaret Beaufort was a proficient apothecary, and it is likely that she transmitted some of these skills to her granddaughter, because in addition to managing the household ministering to her servants’ ailments was part of a lady’s responsibilities. In the event, although not learned in the sense that her nieces were later to be, Mary grew up well balanced and cultivated, possessing at least a superficial knowledge of the humanities. 20 Not enough to have impressed Erasmus, but sufficient to give her the edge over her attendants, and to convince the gentlemen of the court. We know that she did not share her brothers’ schooling, and her sister would have been rather too old, so the chances are that a small group of aristocratic damsels formed a schoolroom for her, although apart from Jane Popincourt we do not know who they might have been.
King Henry VII was not intellectually trained himself, and may have felt at a loss in the company of his well-educated sons, but he appreciated that the world was changing and that his successor would need to be learned in a sense that he was not. He therefore patronised scholars and allowed his tastes to be guided by them. Knowing that expensive tastes were status symbols, he spent lavishly on buildings, jewels and magnificent hospitality. He also insisted that his whole court be splendidly attired, both the women and the men, and his daughters grew up surrounded by luxury. ‘There is no country in the world,’ wrote the Spanish ambassador de Puebla, ‘where Queens live in greater pomp than in England, where they have as many court officers as the King.’ 21 This may mean no more than that Elizabeth was indulged by a loving husband, but she certainly had a large retinue, and they were all splendidly dressed when de Puebla paid a
call, which may not have been as unexpected as he believed. Mary was thus given a high standard to live up to, which explains the satins and brocades referred to in the accounts, and she grew up with a love of fine clothing which never diminished. By the time that she was about ten, with her sister married in Scotland, Mary was the third lady of the court after her mother and grandmother, and lived in some style. She may even have had her own musicians, over and above her tutors, because every member of the royal family entertained some instrumentalists, but these were no doubt paid for by her father, and would not have counted against her allowance. From 1504 onwards, Henry had his own establishment as Prince of Wales, and after his accession the Chapel Royal, which included all the musicians as well as the choristers and Gentlemen, numbered 114 men and boys and cost nearly £2,000 a year. 22 Certainly under Henry VIII, and probably under his father, the Tudor court was the finest musical centre in Europe, and Mary would have learned to dance, which she did with great enthusiasm, to the finest accompaniment available. We do not know whether she had a good singing voice, but given her brother’s accomplishment in that direction, it is probable that she had.
In spite of her patronage of humanist scholars, Lady Margaret’s views on the education of girls appear to have been distinctly old-fashioned. She was proud and austere, and seems not to have thought that the reading prescribed for the boys was at all suitable to a modest maiden. Latin was all very well, but it did not need to extend much beyond the offices of the church, and the works of Ovid, recommended for Arthur and Henry, were particularly unsuitable. A regime of unremitting chastity was laid down, which was all very well for an eight- or nine-year-old, but became irksome with the onset of puberty. Margaret was wedded and bedded at the age of fourteen, but for fourteen-year-old Mary, protected alike by her grandmother and by her attendants from the sexual adventures normal for a girl of that age, it must all have been rather oppressive. We do not know what she thought, but she was a lively child, and the strictly chaperoned dances which was all she could expect at court can hardly have been satisfactory, so she seems to have grown up with an unsatisfied sexual curiosity, which was blandly ignored by those about her. Ideas were changing, but not soon enough to have been of any benefit to Mary. Insofar as the old standards were laid down in writing, they were embedded in the Ancren Riwle and the Garmond of Gude Ladeis , and could be summed up as homemaking, chastity and salvation – not necessarily in that order. 23 Even Chaucer had little more to offer to the frustrated teenager of the early sixteenth century. It was not until 1523, when Mary was already a mother, that Luis Vives wrote De Institutione Feminae Christianae for the guidance of Catherine of Aragon. Vives believed that girls should be taught good Latin, and plenty of it, so that they might study the wisdom of the ancients. Even Greek might be appropriate, given the aptitude, but the purpose of this learning remained depressingly familiar: ‘that which doth instruct their manners and inform their living, and teacheth them the way of good and holy life’. The means were enlightened, but the objective had not advanced very much beyond Margaret Beaufort. 24
Vives, who never suggested that a woman might have the intellectual capacity of a man, was nevertheless highly controversial in his day. Many of those who wrote on the subject were sceptical of the need of girls for any academic training, and equally doubtful of the effect which such a training might have. Women were, they argued, frail by nature, both physically and morally, ‘inclined by their own courage unto vice’ as one of them put it. 25 In reading they would incline to that which was ‘sweet’ rather than to that which was ‘wholesome’, and classical literature would ‘inflame their stomachs a great deal more to that vice’. In other words the ancient authors would ‘set forward and accomplish their forward intent and purpose’, giving them ideas above their naturally humble station in life. Vives by contrast believed that women had an innate tendency to virtue, which would be encouraged by such studies. His ideas were received both earlier and more sympathetically in his native Spain than they were in the north, and Catherine of Aragon had been one of the earliest recipients of these ideas. She had been thoroughly trained in the humanities, and wanted to make sure that her own daughter was similarly advantaged. So she brought Vives to England, and encouraged him to write his book. He was never actually tutor to the young princess, but he drew up a scheme of studies for her guidance, and dedicated the Institutione to Catherine. 26 The Queen of England was not the only royal lady with advanced ideas. Her near contemporary Louise of Savoy, who became the Queen Mother of France in 1515, went further and promoted the idea of equality in education between the sexes, a more radical notion than Catherine ever held, and one which she practised in the bringing up of her own children, with the result that Margaret of Angouleme was one of the best-educated ladies of her generation. Although Louise was practising and Vives was preaching while Mary Tudor was still in the schoolroom, no such notions were allowed to penetrate the shield which surrounded her. The reading which was prescribed for her – and we do not know exactly what it was – would have been designed to make her pious, to love good, hate evil and above all embrace chastity. ‘There is nothing that Our Lord delighteth more in than virgins,’ as one preacher remarked. All women were supposed to go to their husbands on their wedding nights as virgines intacta , and their prospects of a good marriage would be ruined if that were thought not to be the case. God, declared St Jerome, could do anything, but not restore virginity. 27 So wealth, and even royal status, paled into insignificance by comparison with chastity, and a princess, even if she were allowed to read the classics, could expect to be guarded day and night. It is therefore not surprising that as she neared the marriageable age Mary’s sexual curiosity remained unsatisfied, and the changes which were affecting her body continued to be dark and uncomfortable mysteries.
Meanwhile, she had lost her mother. When Arthur married Catherine in November 1501, he had been far from the lusty swain that he was made to appear. His health had been suspect for some time, and it is probable that he was suffering from the early effects of consumption. Henry VII, however, following the fiction rather than the fact, had permitted the couple to live together from the start. This was partly because they were both legally of full age, and partly because he wanted Arthur to keep a court at Ludlow in order to reinforce the royal authority in the Marches of Wales. In spite of some adolescent boasting on Arthur’s part, it is probable that the marriage was never consummated, and his health continued to deteriorate. Less than six months later, in April 1502, he died. 28 Henry was devastated, and made his own grief worse by blaming himself for allowing the couple to cohabit. Although it is highly unlikely that that had anything to do with his death, it was believed at the time that premature or excessive sexual activity could have a fatal effect upon the young. Having dutifully comforted her husband in his grief, Elizabeth then gave way to her own emotions, and promised him that the damage could be repaired. They were both young enough to try again. Sure enough, the Queen conceived promptly, but she was now thirty-six and this was her eighth or ninth pregnancy. All seemed to be going well, and after Christmas 1502 she retired, as was customary, in the royal apartments of the Tower of London. There, at the beginning of February, she was delivered of a child. Unfortunately it was not the hoped for prince, but another girl, who was named Catherine, but who lived only a few days. Elizabeth then succumbed to puerperal fever, that scourge of early modern childbirth, and also died, as we have seen, on 11 February. Henry ‘privily departed to a solitary place, and would no man should resort unto him’. 29 It had been a deeply affectionate marriage, and the King was never to be quite the same man again. After lying in state for several days, the Queen’s body was carried through London for burial at Westminster. ‘She was a woman,’ wrote Polydore Vergil ‘of such character that it would be hard to judge whether she displayed more of majesty and dignity in her life than wisdom and moderation.’ 30 Over 600 masses were said for the repose of her soul, as she would have wished, and she was genera
lly mourned. We know nothing of Mary’s reaction to this bereavement. She does not appear to have attended the funeral, in spite of receiving the same mourning clothes as other members of the family, but her apparent absence may be due to the incompleteness of the records. She had not been particularly close to her mother, and may have blamed her for the strict regime to which she was subjected. However, she was barely eight at the time, and speculation is probably pointless. What we do know is that the mourning weeds were soon rejected, and that shortly after she was appearing in dark blue damask. For whatever reason she did not share her father’s extreme grief, and her life must have continued much as before under the watchful eye of her grandmother.
2
THE PRINCESS OF CASTILE
Between 1502 and 1505, Henry turned his foreign policy around. Before 1502 his main concerns had been to secure a peace with Scotland and a firm alliance with Ferdinand and Isabella. The former he had achieved by the Peace of Ayton in January 1502, whereby he also undertook to marry his daughter Margaret to the King of Scots as soon as she reached the canonical age of cohabitation. The latter had been concluded by the proxy marriage of Prince Arthur with Catherine of Aragon in July 1499, and by their personal union which was solemnised at Westminster on 4 November 1501. 1 Margaret and James were married on 8 August 1503, and thereafter Scotland ceased to be a serious concern. However, with Spain it was otherwise. Arthur died in April 1502, and the question of what was to happen to Catherine became important. Ferdinand was keen to maintain the English alliance, and for that reason did not make haste to reclaim his daughter. At first Henry seemed equally amenable to continued friendship, and proposed that Catherine should be transferred to his second son, Henry, a move which was particularly favoured by Isabella. Unfortunately the Duke of York was only eleven years old, which meant that the seventeen-year-old Catherine would have to wait. However, she could wait in England, and that did not appear to pose any problems. 2 However, in February 1503 Elizabeth of York died, and after a decent interval that put the King of England himself onto the marriage market, a fact which he could not ignore, little as his appetite may have been for such an adventure. A formal treaty for the marriage of Catherine and Henry was drawn up on 23 June 1503, and ratified by Ferdinand and Isabella on 30 September. The fact that such a marriage was within the degrees of consanguinity, and was forbidden by the canon law, meant that a dispensation would be necessary, but that was not expected to present great difficulties. Indeed it would probably not have done so except that Pope Alexander VI died in August 1503, and it took his successor Julius II some eighteen months to get around to issuing it. 3 By that time Henry had gone cold on the whole idea, and complications had arisen in Spain, because on 26 November 1504 Isabella had also died. This not only removed the principal advocate of the marriage, it also created problems over the Castilian succession. Isabella’s heir was not her husband, but her daughter Juana, married to the Archduke Philip of Burgundy, and if Juana’s claim was upheld, Philip would secure the Crown Matrimonial of Castile, and Ferdinand’s usefulness as an ally would be drastically reduced. In July 1505, as soon as he had achieved his fourteenth birthday, Henry caused his son to repudiate the marriage agreement on the grounds that it had been entered into without his consent. 4 This left Catherine stranded, because the King of England had no further use for her, and her father did not want her back in Spain, confusing the question of the succession still further. She stayed in England, unhappy and neglected.
