Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (27 page)

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Authors: Alice Hunt,Anna Whitelock

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Elizabeth’s flirtation with predestination was probably short-lived.
80
It is clear, however, that Elizabeth’s new schoolmaster, Ascham, whose handwriting influenced the narrower italic of her “De Christo sermo,” was keen to consolidate his credentials as a reformer through his association with the princess. In late 1549 or early 1550 Ascham experienced what he referred to as his “ship wreck” at court and returned to Cambridge.
81
From there, he initiated a correspondence with Strasburg pedagogue Johann Sturm, through which he may have hoped to redeem his position in Elizabeth’s household. The humanists’ impressively Ciceronian letters (printed 1551) praised Edward as a new Josiah and lauded the learning of evangelical members of the English nobility.
82
It was here that Ascham articulated the fiction, which sustained historians until the later years of the twentieth century, that classical learning in the English court was the preserve of reformers.
83

As Ascham explained, he wished to praise erudite evangelical women, including the daughters of the duke of Somerset, Lady Jane Grey and Mildred Cecil.
84
“Among them all, however,” Ascham wrote, “the shining star, as it were, is my Lady Elizabeth, sister of our king. She stands out not so much for brightness of birth as for the splendour of virtue and letters.”
85
Ascham praised the princess for her facility in subjects that Vives had warned pre-Reformation women off: Greek, which Elizabeth even spoke “moderately well,” classical history, and rhetoric. Indeed he alleged that she had learned her Latin from Cicero and Livy and her Greek from Isocrates. It was Elizabeth’s evangelicalism, Ascham claimed, that had encouraged him to teach her rhetoric. Reading scripture had made the princess thirsty for Cyprian and Melanchthon’s 
Loci communes
, in which “pure doctrine was joined with elegant speech.” Elizabeth’s reformed faith enabled her to go “beyond the daughters of Thomas More in all forms of letters.”
86
In order to glorify the reformed religion, Ascham went beyond Vives and his pre-Reformation predecessors in what he was prepared to teach his female pupils.

Yet in his letters to Sturm and in subsequent writings, Ascham continued to insist that Elizabeth excelled in all conventional, Aristotelian measurements of female virtue. “All Aristotelian praise has flowed into her: beauty, birth, prudence and industry, all of the highest order,” Ascham wrote. Despite her eloquence, Elizabeth was chaste in mind and body, indeed “the whole manner of her life seems to reflect Hippolyta, not Phaedra.”
87
If a woman was truly Christian, she might study rhetoric with no threat to her virtue.

In Edward’s reign, Ascham stretched Vives’s pattern for Mary’s education in order to glorify Elizabeth as a distinctly evangelical princess. In the seventeenth century, widespread fear of popery meant that the reformers’ claim to have produced the nation’s first learned ladies went unchallenged. In 1673, for instance, when Bathsua Makin sought to praise erudite women of the past, her panegyric followed Ascham through Cookes and Greys to arrive at the lofty summit of Elizabeth. Mary’s education was never in sight.
88

VII

In life neither Sturm nor Ascham had disdained the patronage of Catholics. After Edward’s death Ascham sought employment with several, including Queen Mary herself.
89
Nevertheless he remained in sporadic contact with Elizabeth and built his subsequent reputation as “the Scholemaster of the best Scholer, that euer were” on his short stint in her service.
90
Indeed Ascham’s relentless self-promotion has arguably been a significant factor in generating the praise that scholars have heaped on Elizabeth’s learning.

One of Ascham’s few surviving personal letters from Mary’s reign was addressed to Sturm on September 14, 1555. It was written in the month following the dismissal of the rockers, who had been on standby awaiting the birth of Mary’s phantom-child.
91
Elizabeth had been brought back to court and her status as Mary’s heir was much discussed by ambassadors and Ascham’s then-patron, Stephen Gardiner.
92
In contrast to previous epistles, Ascham’s description of Elizabeth’s learning in this letter was of a decidedly princely character. He claimed that she had been engaged in the study of Greek forensic oratory, more specifically, in the examination of a pair of speeches by Aeschines and Demosthenes entitled 
On the
Crown
. Ascham praised Elizabeth’s grasp of “all the charges of the case, the decrees of the people, the customs and manners of their city.”
93
It seems as though he had begun preparing Elizabeth for government. He certainly repeated his praise for her comprehension of these orations on several occasions after her accession.

In the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, however, Ascham also continued to extol her feminine virtues. In an early draft of 
The Scholemaster
, probably written in 1562–63, Ascham claimed that the queen was “a Mistres of womanhod to all women, & a mirror of cumlie & orderlier lyvinge to all her court.” Elizabeth excelled other noble women in feminine accomplishments such as “ridingge most trymlie...dansing most comlye, in playing of Instrumments most excellentye in all cunnyng needlework, & finest portraiture.” Yet she was as chaste as Diana when it came to “courtlye pleasing” and “vayne delites.”
94
Ascham seemed unsure which humanist template would magnify the queen’s virtues and his own achievement most effectively.

It was only in the final, printed version of 
The
 
Scholemaster
 (1570) that Ascham finally broke the Marian mould for praising Elizabeth’s learning. Before his death in 1568 he stripped out all textual reference to Elizabeth’s chastity and feminine accomplishments; her chief virtue now was justice. By this retelling, her first exercises were not pious translations from French but the “double translating of Demosthenes and Isocrates dailie without missing euerie forenon, and likewise som part of Tullie euery afternone.”
95
She was the princely embodiment of all that English gentlemen and noblemen should aspire to.
96
In short, Ascham rewrote his account of Elizabeth’s education retrospectively in order to suggest that he had cultivated her for rule from her childhood.

Of course, some of Elizabeth’s reputation for learning is due to her own lion-like oratorical performances as queen. Yet much scholarly praise of the queen’s erudition simply repeats Ascham’s retrospective and self-promoting account of their time together. Through his influential representations, Elizabeth’s education became the education of a philosopher-king, but only after the fact.

VIII

Early modern educational writers would have agreed with Freud that childhood is formative of adult character. Yet they and the culture they shaped viewed the nature and object of education very differently indeed. The princesses, their parents, householders, and schoolmasters regarded the schoolroom as a place for imprinting their otherwise blank and corruptible minds and souls with the knowledge, skills, and virtues they would require as adults. Since Mary’s and Elizabeth’s futures were politically sensitive and varied affairs, their learning was too. The late appointment of their schoolmasters, Vives’s apparently contradictory treatises for Mary’s education, and Ascham’s shifting accounts of Elizabeth’s studies make this quite clear.

As such, the princesses’ schooling was shaped by the succession question and the politics of religious reform as much as it was by the pedagogical impulse of humanism. Although Mary and Elizabeth were educated for dynastic reasons, they and their tutors seized on Vives’s pattern of the Christian woman as the most useful (or least inflammatory) way of justifying their learning until 1555 at least. Despite their subsequent confessional differences, the princesses’ pious translations show the extent to which Mary’s education influenced Elizabeth’s. Yet the process of religious reform and Ascham’s self-promoting account of Elizabeth’s cultivation have arguably obscured such continuities in historical accounts of the Tudor queens.

Notes

* The author would like to thank delegates to the “Partners in Throne and Grave” Conference, Chawton House, 2007 and the Early Modern English Literature and History Seminar, University of Oxford for comments on early versions of this paper, and Trinity College, Cambridge and the Folger Shakespeare Library for supporting this research.

  1. For this representation of Elizabeth, see: John E. Neale, 
    Queen Elizabeth I
    (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934), 19–27, 75; Maria Perry, 
    The Word of a Prince:
    A Life of Elizabeth I from Contemporary Documents
     (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1990), 13, 23–4, 31–2, 46–7; David Starkey, 
    Elizabeth: An Apprenticeship
    (London: Vintage, 2000), 23–30, 81–91. For Mary, see David Loades, 
    Mary
    Tudor: A Life
     (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 31–4, 42–3.
  2. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, 
    From Humanism to the Humanities:
    Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth-and Sixteenth-Century Europe
    (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 29–58.
  3. Thomas Elyot, 
    The Defence of good women
     (London, 1540), Eir, Eiiv, Divr–Dvv.
  4. Privy Purse Expenses of the Princess Mary, Daughter of King Henry the Eighth,
    Afterwards Queen Mary: With a Memoir of the Princess, and Notes
    , ed. Frederick Madden (London: William Pickering, 1831), 82.
  5. C. L. Clough, “A Presentation Volume for Henry VIII: The Charlecotte Park Copy of Erasmus’ 
    Education of a Christian Prince
    ,” 
    Journal of the
    Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,
     44 (1981): 199–202.
  6. See, for instance, Thomas Elyot, 
    The Boke Named the Governour
     (1531), ed. Henry Herbert Stephen Croft, 2 vols. (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1880), I: 95.
  7. Erasmus, 
    Education of a Christian Prince with The Panegyric for Archduke
    Philip of Austria
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  8. Erasmus, 
    Opus epistolarum Desiderii Roterodami
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    Epistola II de ratione studii puerilis
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    Opera Omnia
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    Boke Named the Governour
    , I: 53–90, 116–18.
  10. J. L. McIntosh, 
    From Heads of Household to Heads of State: The Pre-accession
    Households of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor, 1516–1558
     (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 21–9; Hazel Pierce, 
    Margaret Pole, Countess of
    Salisbury, 1473–1541: Loyalty, Lineage and Leadership
     (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), 43, 88.
  11. LP
    , II.ii: no. 4468, 1371; 
    LP
    , III. i: no. 1150, 423–4; 
    CSPVen
    , II: 1103, 474.
  12. BL Cotton MS Caligula D.VII, fols. 238v– 239r.
  13. LP
    , IV.i: no. 843, 378.
  14. Maria Dowling, 
    Humanism in the Age of Henry VIII
     (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 223.
  15. Cited by Pierce, 
    Margaret Pole
    , 43.
  16. Erasmus, 
    Opus epistolarum
    , ed. Allen et al., III: no. 976, 602; 
    LP
    , II.ii: 1473.
  17. Loades, 
    Mary Tudor
    , 31.
  18. BL Cotton MS Vespasian F.XIII, fol. 72r.
  19. Juan Luis Vives, 
    De institutione feminae Christianae
    , trans. C. Fantazzi, ed. C. Fantazzi and C. Matheeussen, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996); James Carley,
    The Libraries of King Henry VIII
     (London: British Library, 2000), 68 suggests that the presentation copy was Bodleian Library, Oxford Arch B.e.30.
  20. Virginia Walcott Beauchamp, Elizabeth. Hageman and Margaret Mikesell, “Introduction,” in 
    The Instruction of a Christen Woman: Juan
    Luis Vives
    , ed. Virginia Walcott Beauchamp et al. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), xliii, lxxvii–xciii.
  21. Vives, 
    Opus epistolarum
    , ed. Allen et al., VII: no. 1847, 107.
  22. Vives, 
    De institutione feminae Christianae
    , I: 8, 9–10, 11.
  23. A. D. Cousins, “Humanism, Female Education, and Myth: Erasmus, Vives, and More’s ‘To Candidus,’” 
    Journal of the History of Ideas
    , 65/2 (2004): 213–30.
  24. Vives, 
    De institutione feminae Christianae
    , I: 2, 3; Aristotle, 
    Politics
    , I.v.12, 1260b14–21.
  25. Juan Luis Vives, 
    De anima
     
    et vita
     (1538), I.ii, in 
    Opera omnia
    , ed. Mayans, III: 304.
  26. Juan Luis Vives, 
    De officio mariti: Introduction and Critical Edition
    , trans. And ed. C. Fantazzi (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006), 120, 121–4, 125, 128, 129.
  27. Vives, 
    De institutione feminae Christianae
    , I: 4, 5.
  28. Vives, 
    De institutione feminae Christianae
    , I: 40, 41
    .
  29. Vives, 
    De institutione feminae Christianae,
     I: 50, 51–2, 53.
  30. Vives, 
    De officio mariti
    , 134, 135.
  31. Vives, 
    De institutione feminae Christianae
    , I: 40, 41.
  32. Vives, 
    De institutione feminae Christianae,
     I: 38, 39–40, 41; Vives, 
    De officio mariti
    , 122–3, 132–5.
  33. Vives, 
    De institutione feminae Christianae,
     I: 40, 41; vol. II: 156, 157–60, 161.
  34. Richard Hyrde, Letter to Frances, in 
    A deuoute treatise vpon the Pater noster,
    made fyrst in latyn by the moost famous doctour mayster Erasmus Roterodamus
    , [trans. Margaret More] ed. Richard Hyrde (London, 1526), aiir–biiiv.
  35. Vives in 
    Literae vivorum eruditorum ad Franciscum Craneveldium,
     
    1522–1528
    , ed. Henry de Vocht (Louvain: Librairie Universitaire Uystpruyst, 1928), 232–3.
  36. Vives, 
    Epistola I de ratione studii puerilis
     (1524), in 
    Opera omnia
    , ed. Mayans, I: 256.
  37. Vives, 
    Epistola I
    , 258, 265: “formandis litteris, non-tam eleganter, quam velociter”; “Memoriam quotidie exerceat...nullo retineat negotio.”
  38. Vives, 
    Epistola I
    , 266–8.
  39. Giles du Wés, 
    An
     
    introductorie for to lerne to rede, to pronounce, and to speake
    Frenche trewly
     (London, [1533]?) Tiir–Ffiir; see Jeri McIntosh, “A Culture of Reverence: Princess Mary’s Household 1525–7” in this volume.
  40. “praesertim qui ad rempublicam gubernandam spectant”: Vives, 
    Epistola I
    , 269.
  41. W. R. B. Robinson, “Princess Mary’s Itinerary in the Marches of Wales 1525–1527: A Provisional Record,” 
    Historical Research,
     71 (1998): 233–52.
  42. LP
    , IV.i: no. 1577, 707–11; Loades, 
    Mary Tudor
    , 39–40.
  43. LP
    , III.ii: no. 2992, 1262; 
    LP
    , IV. i: no. 1577, 708 and no. 2331, 1045; 
    LP
    , VI: no. 1199, 498; Du Wés, 
    An Introductory to...French
    , Aiir, Aivr.
  44. LP
    , IV.i: no. 2331, 1044.
  45. BL Cotton MS Vitellius, C.I, fol. 24v.
  46. LP
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    Dominican Studies
    , 1 (1948): 229–38, 233.
  48. Hore beate Marie virgiinis ad usum insignis ac praeclare ecclesiasie Saru[m] 
    (London, 1514).
  49. BL Royal MS 17 C.XVI, fol. 2v.
  50. BL Add. MS 17012, fols. 192v–94r.
  51. BL Add. MS 17012, fols. 192v–94r; BL, Royal MS 17 C.XVI, fol. 2v.
  52. Desiderius Erasmus, 
    The First tome or volume of the Paraphrases of Erasmus
    upon the Newe Testament
    , trans. Nicholas Udall, Thomas Caius, Mary Tudor and Francis Mallett, ed. Nicholas Udall (London, 1548).
  53. Aysha Pollnitz, “Religion and Translation at the Court of Henry VIII: Princess Mary, Katherine Parr and the 
    Paraphrases of Erasmus
    ,” in 
    Mary
    Tudor: Old and New Perspectives
    , ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming), 119–32.
  54. Udall, 
    The First tome or volume of the Paraphrase of Erasmus
    , C2r.
  55. Pollnitz, “Religion and Translation,” forthcoming.
  56. See, for instance, Geoffrey Elton, 
    Reform and Reformation: England, 1509–1558
     (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), 376.
  57. Loades, 
    Mary Tudor
    , 61 and 
    LP
    , XVI: no. 1253, 536.
  58. Roger Ascham in 
    Whole Works of Roger Ascham, Now First Collected and
    Revised, with a Life of the Author
    , ed. J. A. Giles, 3 vols. (London: John Russell Smith, 1865), I.ii, 85–7; 
    LP,
     X: no. 1187, 494–5; XI: no. 639, 253.
  59. LP
    , XIX.i: no. 864, 537; Edward VI, 
    Chronicle and Political Papers of King Edward VI
    , ed. Wilbur K. Jordan (Ithaca: Folger Shakespeare Library by Cornell University Press, 1966), 3.
  60. Ascham in 
    Whole Works
    , I.i: 55, 57, 160–2; 
    LP
    , XXI.ii: no. 199 (74), 86 and Gordon Kipling, “Belmaine, Jean (fl. 1546–1559),” 
    ODNB
    ; Janel Mueller and Leah S. Marcus, “Preface,” in 
    Elizabeth I: Autograph Compositions and Foreign
    Language Originals
     (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), xiv.
  61. I thank Simon Adams and David Gehring for sharing with me their “Elizabeth I’s Tutor and the Religious Settlement of 1599: A Letter from Johannes Spithovius to the Bishop of Lubeck, 27 February 1559,” 
    EHR
    , forthcoming.
  62. Dowling, 
    Humanism in the Age of Henry VIII
    , 211.
  63. Elizabeth I: Collected Works
    , ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 96.
  64. Bodl. MS Cherry 36, fols. 2r–63r, in 
    Elizabeth I: Translations, 1544–1589
    , ed. Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 40–124; 42.
  65. For instance Anne Lake Prescott, “The Pearl of the Valois and Elizabeth I: Marguerite de Navarre’s 
    Mirroir
     and Tudor England,” in 
    Silent but
    for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators and Writers of Religious
    Works
    , ed. Margaret Patterson Hannay (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1985), 61–76; 
    Elizabeth’s Glass: With “The Glass of the Sinful Soul”
    (1544) by Elizabeth I and “Epistle Dedicatory” and “Conclusion” (1548) by John
    Bale,
     ed. Marc Shell (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 8–73.
  66. Mueller and Scodel, in 
    Elizabeth I: Translations
    , 30–1.
  67. Elizabeth I: Translations
    , 42.
  68. For instance, lines 831–49, drawing on Songs of Solomon 3.7–11, 4.1: Marguerite de Navarre
    , Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse: édition critique et commentaire suivis de la traduction faite par la princess Elisabeth, future reigne
    d’Angleterre: The Glasse of the Sinnefull Soule
    , ed. Renja Salminen (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1979), 56–7, 194–5.
  69. Pierre Jourda, 
    Marguerite d’Angoulême, duchesse d’Alençon, reine de Navarre: É tude biographique et litté raire
    , 2 vols. (Paris: H. Champion, 1930), I: 177–8.
  70. Elizabeth I: Translations
    , 66, 88.
  71. Elizabeth I: Translations
    , 96, 104, 114.
  72. Elizabeth I: Translations
    , 40.
  73. John Bale in 
    A Godly medytacyon of the christen sowle, concerninge a loue
    towardes God and hys Christe
    , ed. John Bale (Wesel [Marburg], 1548), fols. 9v, 42v–45v, 47r, quotation from 42r; Patrick Collinson, 
    Elizabethan Essays
    (London: Hambledon Press, 1994), 93–109.
  74. Elizabeth I: Translations, 1544–1589
    , 136.
  75. BL Royal MS 7DX, fols. 1r–117v in 
    Elizabeth I: Translations, 1544–1589
    , ed. Mueller and Scodel, 129–99; James McConica, 
    English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI
     (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 231.
  76. Bodl. MS Bodley 6 also known as Arch F.f.1, fols. 1r–35v, in 
    Elizabeth I:
    Translations, 1544–1589
    , ed. Mueller and Scodel, 291–327. Edward’s copy may be the 1543 Basel edition, BL 846.f.8–10.
  77. Anne Overell, 
    Italian Reform and English Reformations, c.1535–1585
    (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 41–80.
  78. Elizabeth I: Translations, 1544–1589
    , 312–13.
  79. National Archives, Scotland, MS RH 13/78, fols. 1r–88r in 
    Elizabeth I: Translations, 1544–1589
    , 256–9.
  80. Susan Doran, “Elizabeth I’s Religion: The Evidence of her Letters,”
    Journal of Ecclesiastical History
    , 51:4 (2000): 699–720; 707.
  81. Lawrence V. Ryan, 
    Roger Ascham
     (Stanford and London: Stanford University Press and Oxford University Press, 1963), 112–13.
  82. Ascham and Johann Sturm, 
    Epistolae duae de Nobilitate anglicana
     (Strasburg, 1551).
  83. See Richard Rex, “The Role of English Humanists in the Reformation up to 1559,” in 
    The Education of a Christian Society: Humanism and the Reformation
    in Britain and the Netherlands
    , ed. N. Scott Amos, Andrew Pettegree and Henk van Nierop (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 19–40.
  84. Ascham in 
    Whole Works
    , I.ii: 227.
  85. “inter quas tamen universas veluti sidus quoddam, non-tam claritate generis quam splendore virtutis et literarum, sic eminet illustrissima domina mea, D. Elizabetha regis nostri soror”: Ascham in 
    Whole Works
    , I.i: 191.
  86. “Ad religionis institutionem, post fontes scripturarum D. Cyprianum,
    locos communes
     P. Melancthonis, et alios huius generis simillimos, ex quibus pura doctrina cum elegante sermone libari potuerit, adjunxit” and “Thomae Mori filiabus innumerae nunc honoratae feminae in omni literarum genere praestant”: Ascham in 
    Whole works
    , I.i: 191, 192.
  87. “Aristotelica laus eam tota transfusa est. Nam καλλος in illa, µε'γεδος, σωϕροσυ'νη και' ϕιλοεργι'α omnia summa” and “ut non Phaedram sed Hippolyten omni vitae ratione referre videatur”: Ascham in 
    Whole works
    , I.i: 191.
  88. Bathsua Makin, 
    An Essay to revive the ancient education of gentlewomen, in
    religion, manners, arts and tongues with an answer to the objections against this
    way of education
     (London, 1673), 10–12, 15, 20.

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