Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (23 page)

It is clear from the manual’s contents that Duwes was presenting to his readers a depiction of Mary at the height of her pre-Reformation power and status as the de facto Prince(ss) of Wales. He mentioned household members such as the “karver” John ap Morgan, who served in Mary’s household only during her tour of duty in the Welsh Marches.
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The scale of the household depicted by Duwes was much more suggestive of the Welsh household than Mary’s households before or after the mid-1520s.
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The international situation that Duwes portrayed as forming the topic of conversation between Mary and her privy chamber ladies also suggests the 1520s when Mary was a much-sought after prize on the royal marriage market—a status she would lose after the Boleyn marriage.

In fact, it is the conversations that Duwes presented to his readers that define the manual. In its use of dialogue form and its portrayal of Mary as a princely ruler, the Duwes manual may have represented an early English response to Castiglione’s 
Book of the Courtier
, printed in Italy in 1528.34 Space constraint does not allow for a consideration of the dissemination of the manual. The argument made here is that the content alone reflects Mary’s status, not that Duwes’ readers learned of Mary’s court through reading his manual—though this may well have been true in some instances. The strongest similarity between Duwes’ manual and 
The Courtier
 was the idea that erudite and polite conversation can (and should) function as a vehicle for the acquisition of virtue (
grazia
).
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Duwes depicted various conversations in which the young prince(ss) sought enlightenment on topics such as the nature of the soul, the definition of love, and how to achieve optimum physical health. Duwes was not starry-eyed about his native language, rather he took a hard-eyed humanist view in this manual: French was a skill, a tool. Duwes depicted Lady Maltravers as advocating this view when she urged Mary to learn French so she would not need to employ a “minion” to translate her speech to her future husband “were he either kyng or emperour.”
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Although Duwes presented French as a tool, a vehicle rather than a virtue in and of itself, he depicted Mary’s Welsh household as a royal court engaged in the erudite pursuit of virtue. Duwes appeared to bridge the gap between 
The Courtier
 and the “Mirror for Princes” genre.
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Despite Duwes portraying Mary as the interlocutor seeking enlightenment, the topics rarely concern ruler—or governorship. Nor did Duwes provide advice to aspiring courtiers. The intended audience for this French manual was 
everyone
. Anyone who wanted to learn French could, in Duwes’ view, derive benefit from this manual. The topics that Duwes selected also furthered the pursuit of learning and virtue. Duwes’ decision to use dialogue form meant that those who could not read could, nevertheless, have the dialogues read or, even better, performed for them; the theatrical quality of the conversations suggests that the latter was probably closer to Duwes’ original intention.

The egalitarian orientation of Duwes’ manual very much accorded with the question that he portrayed Mary as asking about the utility of the Latin mass for those who did not know Latin. Duwes depicted Mary as asking her almoner how can non-Latin speakers derive benefit from the mass: “what shall do they whiche understand it nat”?
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This question along with the dialogue form and concentration upon language situated the manual within a humanist context. Nevertheless, the manual was not entirely innocent of political or social ambition. Duwes’ highly flattering depiction of Mary as a princely ruler, at a time when she was being demoted in favor of her half-sister Elizabeth, was an incendiary commentary on Henry VIII’s decision to disinherit Mary. Indeed, one suspects that Duwes took the risk because he hoped his advanced years and long record of service would save him from Henry’s wrath and it appears that this was the case as Duwes died in his bed in 1535.
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The egalitarian orientation meant that, like 
The Courtier
, Duwes’ manual too carried an implicit criticism of the ideal that only the nobility could acquire the necessary virtue to advise rulers. Throughout the manual, Duwes presents mainly non-noble courtiers offering learned examinations on the soul, love, St. Augustine, the mass, and the body, among other topics, to the princess. Nobles or high-ranked officeholders such as Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, or John Vosey, bishop of Exeter, barely make an appearance in the manual. The most common interlocutors with Mary are Peter Burrell (the lawyer and almoner), Richard Sydnor (the treasurer of Mary’s privy chamber), and Duwes himself as her French tutor and gentleman waiter of her privy chamber. Duwes, as was common practice of the time, did not refer to these men by name but by office. Lest the office title should obscure the non-noble status of people such as her almoner Peter Burrell and, to a lesser extent, Sydnor, Duwes explicitly referred to the non-noble status of these household/privy council officers when he depicted Mary referring to Burrell as a “lawyer” and to Sydnor as “a doctour and well lettred.”
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Duwes referred to himself in the manual as Mary’s “unworthy servant.”
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Duwes portrayed the royal court as one characterized by thinly disguised sexual banter. Perhaps following Castiglione’s lead, Duwes overlaid the ostensible sexual tension with Platonic philosophy. This is especially welcome given that the court of Duwes’ depiction was that of the then nine-year-old Mary (although she would have been eighteen by mid-1534, the likely date of publication of Duwes’ manual). The best example of the sexual and Platonic tenor of the conversations was one that Duwes portrayed between Mary and her treasurer of the privy chamber, Richard Sydnor.
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In a custom that Mary herself would continue in her later households, Duwes alluded to Mary’s active participation in the practice of drawing for valentines.
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Duwes depicted Mary drawing Sydnor one year as her valentine and referring to him as her “husband adoptif.”44 In this depiction, Duwes portrayed Sydnor as suffering from the gout that caused him to miss some days during his attendance upon Mary. According to Duwes, Sydnor’s sick-leave earned a swift reprimand from the young princess: “ye take great care of your goute...than ye do of your wyfe.” In a startling (to modern eyes at any rate) reference to marital relations, Duwes depicted Mary further commenting that Sydnor’s retirement to a sickbed should have resulted in him “visiting” his wife (Mary) “oftener” rather than in absenting himself “specially beyng so nygh of her.” Leaving aside the unsettling portrayal of a preteen girl flirting with a servant old enough to suffer from gout, this exchange was likely intended to showcase Mary’s wit and facility with word-play more than her pubescent sexuality.

Duwes depicted Mary archly continuing the exchange by commanding that Sydnor “declare me what it is of loue/ for ye be a doctour and well lettred/ with that a good husbande ought to teche his wyfe.” What undercuts the age situation in Duwes’ portrayal was not only the word-play and classical allusions that liberally pepper this lengthy exchange between the princess and her treasurer but also the seeming inversion generated by social station. The princess may have been playing at what was considered then as the subordinate role of “wyfe,” but as a royal she clearly outranked her household servant. The young Mary was not merely the fair lady accepting homage from a lovesick knight. Although Mary’s gender is acknowledged in this long disquisition on the nature of love, she was not depicted according to the contemporary notions of subordinate womanhood. Duwes here was not presenting a gendered advice manual similar to Juan Luis Vives’ 
On
the Education of a Christian Woman
.
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Rather, Mary had issued a command to Sydnor whom Duwes depicted as promptly responding to her order “nat be wyllyng to disobey you.” Mary was playing the role of “wyfe,” however, she was not adhering to the subordinate status wives were supposed to adopt in relation to their husbands advocated in contemporary prescriptive literature.
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No matter what games she played or roles she assumed, the princess never forgot her station nor allowed others to forget it.

Duwes depiction of Mary combining the officially subordinate role of wife with that of rulership anticipated John Aylmer’s much later defense of female sovereignty. That later work refuted the charge levelled by John Knox in 
First Blast against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
 [1558] that the divinely ordained subordination of wives to their husbands was incompatible with a married woman wielding sovereign authority, since a wife would not possess sufficient authority to command even her husband. Aylmer went on to argue that a married female sovereign could command her husband by virtue of her “office.”
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In other words, sociopolitical hierarchy could overturn the “natural” order of things on occasion. Duwes’ depiction of the mock love-play between the princess and Sydnor suggests he may have shared Aylmer’s view that marriage need not compromise a woman’s ability to govern. Later, the marriage settlement between Queen Mary and her real husband, Philip of Spain, would protect her sovereign prerogative.
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Mary would employ the language of subjection toward Philip as Duwes portrayed her doing with Sydnor but in both instances Mary’s explicit consciousness of her rank destabilized the rhetoric of subjection.

IV

The exchange with Sydnor on the nature of love was not the only instance where Duwes depicted Mary as well aware of the privileges “due and requisite” to her as princess. When her almoner Peter Burrell absented himself from her table one night, the young Mary reminded him that he was promised “a good benefyce” by Henry VIII and Queen Catherine if Burrell would help Mary to attain fluency in French.
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Duwes depicted Mary as anxious to immerse herself in the language by speaking it at dinner with Burrell to supplement her lessons with Duwes. Mary linked Burrell’s receipt of the benefice to her favorable report to her parents on how Burrell was (or was not) helping her to learn French. Duwes described Mary as dryly noting that, under the circumstances, Burrell could not afford to neglect her at the dinner table since her progress in French, “of the whiche me thynketh that ye ought to do some by dylygence,” will determine how favorably Mary reported to her royal parents and, thus, whether Burrell will obtain the benefice.
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Throughout the manual, Duwes portrayed Mary’s household staff as adhering to the Instructions to behave always toward Mary “with reverence...as to so great a princess doeth appertaine.”
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Duwes depicted a literary court culture in which Mary’s servants addressed her in highly reverential terms: “most soverayn,” “right hygh/right excellent...My right redouted lady/ my lady Mary of England/my lady and mastresse,” and “Trewly madame there is nothyng in my power that I nedyd for the honour of you” being some of the more ornate declarations.
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These highly deferential forms of address are sprinkled throughout the manual and echo some of the injunctions of the king’s instructions that Mary’s staff should treat her reverently. As the rest of this essay will detail, there was a great deal of agreement amongst Mary’s contemporaries that Mary had attained, in 1525, a status as the de facto Prince(ss) of Wales that merited the panegyrical forms of address found in Duwes’ manual.

Duwes’ manual was not the only indication that Mary, as de facto Prince(ss) of Wales, had acquired a special status that heralded her suitability for future sovereign rule. In the Additional manuscript collection in the British Library, there survives a poem signed by William Newman and dated by him to 1525.
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It has been bound in vellum with documents contemporary to the fifteenth century. However, the poem clearly centers on Mary as the de facto Prince(ss) of Wales or, as the poem referred to her, “of rose and pomegarnet [sic] the redolent princesse.”
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According to the poem, Mary’s noble bloodline, deriving from the Spanish and English Royal houses, rendered her worthy to rule one day “the state Imperyall” of England.
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Not only did Newman consider her worthy by blood and nature to rule, he also noted that she was serving her political apprenticeship in the Welsh Marches as “cheff governure betwene strange realmys.”
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Indeed, the poem was likely intended to mark the commencement of Mary’s tour of duty in the marches.

Mary’s residence in the marches ended in 1528. Yet there were interesting legacies and echoes of her time there that persisted up to the start of her reign in 1553. The culture of reverence specified in the Instructions for Mary’s 1525 household, as seen in the works by Duwes and also by Newman, was evidently a feature of Mary’s later households. In 1536, one of Mary’s attendants, Lady Anne Hussey, was arrested and interrogated by the state for referring to Mary as “princess” after Mary had been forced to yield the title to her half-sister Elizabeth.
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Her privy council continued to operate under the title “the princes[s’] council” until 1536 when it assumed a title more in keeping with its function—the Council of the Marches.
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Furthermore, at least one member of Mary’s 1525 household continued to receive wages as such until 1532.
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Evidently, the official story was that Mary’s household was only in temporary abeyance. In fact, the princess would never return to the marches. Nevertheless, Mary’s household accounts from 1536 to 1543 indicate that she received the Welsh symbol of a leek on the Welsh holiday of St. David’s.
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Most worrisome from Henry VIII’s viewpoint was that a yeoman of his own guard presented Mary with the leek in March 1536, a few months before the “Pilgrimage of Grace” rebellion.
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One of the more surprising evocations of young Mary’s Welsh household comes from a poem celebrating Catherine of Aragon as
The Second Grisild
 [1553] penned by William Forrest in which he refers to Catherine pining for Mary in 1525 when the latter was ruling her court in Ludlow as a “sovereign princess.”
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