Elizabeth and Mary Read online

  In Colloquies Erasmus used satire to attack various human institutions and beliefs, especially those to do with the Church and popular superstitions. Again, this was enlightened material for the receptive minds of the young females of a devout Catholic monarchy. Although Mary was to be personally devout and uncompromising in her beliefs all her life, despite the close influence of her militantly Catholic Guise relations, she was not dogmatic about the beliefs of others and never became an avenging scourge of heretics.

  The editor of the published version of Mary’s translation exercises suggested that they were preparation for an important speech in Latin which she made on New Year’s Day 1555 before the king and court assembled at the Louvre, its subject the merits of female education. Although the speech was largely written by others, Mary obviously acquitted herself well in her recitation. One of her tutors, Antoine Fouquelin, with courtly hyperbole explained: ‘at which point I would say with what admiration from everyone you would have been heard and what hopes would have been formed for you by all that noble company, if I could say it without a suspicion of flattery. Which sentiment I prefer to find expressed exactly by this verse of Ovid where he speaks of Germanicus Caesar, grandson of Augustus:

  When your celestial mouth had broached your concern They say that the gods were wont to speak in that way And that of a prince was worthy such excellence So much sweetness was in your divine eloquence.’54

  Mary had been brought up to believe she was a precocious prodigy, irresistible as a beauty and beyond gainsaying as a queen. With such unremitting adulation, it was very hard for her to know the true nature of her abilities and limitations. Her uncle, the cardinal, gave a revealing insight to Mary’s already well-developed sense of her own importance, her clear appreciation of what was due to her in her status as queen, asserted even at the age of ten: ‘She came hither the other day’, he wrote to her mother, ‘with my said lords and ladies (the children of the French king) and brought her train, all that she has been accustomed to have … In regard to this estate, my advice to you is, that there should be neither superfluity or meanness, which is the thing in this world she dislikes the most; and believe me, Madam, her spirit is already so high and noble that she would make great demonstration of displeasure at seeing herself degradingly treated.’55 Tractable and eager to please when her charm worked to her advantage, Mary tended to be wilful and hysterical in the rare event that she was crossed.

  There was a revealing episode of clashing wills with Madame de Parois, the French governess who replaced Lady Fleming, Mary’s sexy and spirited Scottish governess who had borne the king a son. (In trespassing so blatantly on the territories that belonged to his powerful mistress and wife, she was precipitately banished, and eventually deported to Scotland.) The series of letters Mary wrote to her mother complaining about the first person to appear immune to her charm have a febrile emotionalism: ‘For, Madame, to tell the truth I have as little occasion to content myself with my lady de Parois as of the world’s opinion, for … she has done what she could to put me in the bad grace of Madame my grandmother and in that of the Queen … she has nearly been cause of my death for the fear which I had of being out of your good grace.’56 She begged her mother to get rid of the governess for her.

  While Mary’s energies were being expended on these domestic quarrels, in the process threatening her mother with the death of her only daughter if the offending servant was not replaced, Elizabeth Tudor, at the same age, had been negotiating for her life and the lives of her servants during the investigations of treason involving them and Thomas Seymour.

  In the years immediately following this ordeal, Elizabeth retired even further from court life, careful to dress in sombre clothing, conduct herself blamelessly, her only ostentation being the studiousness and piety of her life. Her tutor Ascham wrote approvingly of her self-effacement, even though as history would prove such restraint in her costume was to be short-lived: ‘she greatly prefers a simple elegance to show and splendour, so despising “the outward adorning of plaiting of the hair and of wearing gold”, that in the whole manner of her life she rather resembles Hippolyta than Phaedra’.*57 In exile at Hatfield, Elizabeth intended to safeguard herself from any more scandals or taints of treason by association. It was no great hardship for her to bury herself in her books. Born with a penetrating intellect, brought up largely away from court, natural ability had combined with circumstances to make the young princess a prodigy of learning. Like her father she was also blessed with remarkable energy and a love of horses and hunting. Country life away from court had its consolations.

  But Elizabeth was lucky too to be living during the sixteenth century when the education of princes and women was a central concern to Renaissance England. Despite the extent of her abilities and learning, Elizabeth’s only disadvantage was that even the most enlightened philosophers considered that the terms ‘woman’ and ‘ruler’ were mutually exclusive. One of the most influential educationalists of the age was the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives, whose writings influenced Roger Ascham himself.

  Vives was a friend and compatriot of Henry’s first wife Catherine of Aragon who, concerned herself about the education of her own daughter, Princess Mary, had commissioned him to write a treatise on the education of women. He was a prolific author and the resultant De Institutione Feminae Christianae was one of his most successful works. Published first in 1523 it ran later to forty editions. Accepting the received wisdom of woman’s subservience to man and the inferiority of the female mind, Vives, nevertheless, was radical in his concern that all women be educated and not in isolation but with fellow students. Piety, chastity and proficiency in the useful arts ‘applicable to the purposes of ordinary life’ were the main objectives, as he saw it, of education. And like the educationalists who followed him he believed that the study of classical literature, chosen for its moral as well as intellectual content, was the basis for a liberal education which, for a woman, should shape her conscience and develop virtue.

  Ascham no doubt learnt much from this great philosopher who preceded him by almost a quarter of a century in the procession of Renaissance educators. His dealings with the Princess Elizabeth, however, completely dispelled any lingering prejudices he may have had about the inferiority of the female mind. Another great influence on Ascham’s approach to educating Elizabeth came from a contemporary, the Strasbourg educationalist Johannes Sturm. He discussed in a series of letters to Sturm his agreement on the value of logic and rhetoric in education, and the primary importance of eloquence. In bringing these masculine disciplines to his education of Elizabeth, he was flying in the face of Vives whose influence on the education of her sister Mary Tudor, and on aristocratic daughters generally, had been so marked. Vives was adamant that rhetoric and speech-making were quite contrary to the central purpose of female education, which was to promote chastity, dutifulness and virtue. Women’s silence was desirable and any spoken or written word should be solely to promote that personal virtue.

  The first known impact of Roger Ascham on Elizabeth’s education came in a letter to her governess Catherine Ashley, whose husband was a friend of his from his student days at Cambridge. In this he propounded his advanced theory of the importance of gentleness and responsiveness towards the pupil: ‘The younger, the more tender; the quicker, the easier to break. Blunt edges be dull, and dure much pain to little profit … If you pour much drink at once into a goblet, the most part will dash out and run over; if you pour it softly you may fill it even to the top, and so her grace, I doubt not, by little and little, may be increased in learning, that at length greater cannot be required.’58 When he officially became the princess’s tutor in 1548, Elizabeth was still only fourteen and Ascham found her proficiency with languages remarkable enough and her appetite for study delightful. Together they read Greek in the morning and Latin in the afternoon. Apart from studying the Greek New Testament, Ascham presented his eager pupil with the best classical authors, chosen for their skills
at oratory and literary expression. He, like other educators of the time, wanted his pupil not only proficient in linguistic skills but also able to absorb the style and moral content of these classical authorities.

  Isocrates and Demosthenes, the great Attic orators, were favourite sources of instruction and inspiration. Elizabeth was expected to translate them out of Greek into English and then back into Greek again. By the time she had completed these tasks she was becoming deeply imbued with the arguments, cadences and modes of expression of the masters. Of the two, Isocrates represented the most elaborate and seamless style, concerned with expression above all, sometimes even to the detriment of meaning. Believing as he did in the importance of prose rhythm, on occasion he could sacrifice lucidity to form – a criticism levelled at some of the later Elizabethan speeches.

  However, Demosthenes provided her with a complete contrast in style for this was the orator known par excellence for the simplicity and sincerity of his language. A convincing and lucid interpreter of arguments, he was a master of metaphor, but with the dramatic sense to use it sparingly. Demosthenes would call upon a wide variety of styles, alternating complexity with plainness in a speech, projecting a sense of spontaneity in even the most carefully prepared oration. His language and style was at its most simple when he expressed something of greatest moment: this was certainly true of the most compelling sections of Elizabeth’s speeches. Addressing the heads of Oxford university, for instance, just after her fifty-ninth birthday, with an oration in Latin which appeared to be quite spontaneous, she thanked them for their unwavering love to her: ‘It is such that neither persuasions nor threats nor curses can destroy. On the contrary, time has no power over it – time that eats away iron, that wears away rocks, cannot disjoin it.’59

  After Greek in the morning, Ascham then took Elizabeth through her Latin studies in the afternoon. Here he used the same exercises of double translation as he had with her Greek, out of Latin into English and then back into Latin again. The works of Cicero made up almost the full surviving corpus of Latin oratory, as well as providing the basis for Roman philosophy, and Elizabeth studied his texts closely. Ascham’s favourite work was De Officiis, Cicero’s last work on moral philosophy. In this he aimed to give advice, ostensibly to his son, on the way to conduct himself in the world, based on Stoic principles, where virtue is happiness and the highest good is a community of reason. Ascham pressed copies on at least two of his friends and Elizabeth read it too, quoting from it in a letter to her equally well-read brother Edward when she was fourteen.

  Two years later, Ascham summed up her accomplishments to Sturm with pride, aware too how they must reflect on his own ability as a teacher:

  The Lady Elizabeth has accomplished her sixteenth year; and so much solidity of understanding, such courtesy united with dignity, have never been observed at so early an age. She has the most ardent love of true religion and of the best kind of literature. The constitution of her mind is exempt from female weakness, and she is endued with a masculine power of application. No apprehension can be quicker than hers, no memory more retentive. French and Italian she speaks like English; Latin, with fluency, propriety, and judgement; she also spoke Greek with me, fluently, willingly, and moderately well. Nothing can be more elegant than her handwriting, whether in the Greek or Roman character. In music she is very skilful, but does not greatly delight.60

  A slightly more jaundiced view of the same linguistic power was provided by the Venetian ambassador, writing some seven years later: ‘[She] speaks Italian more than [Mary I] does, taking so much pleasure in it that from vanity she will not speak any other language with Italians’.61

  If Cicero was Elizabeth’s brilliant companion then it was Plutarch who helped teach her how to govern. In his masterpiece, Parallel Lives, read by Elizabeth and quoted often, she read of the lives of great men, written not so much as strictly factual biographies but more to explore character and exemplify individual virtue. Shakespeare was to use them as source material for Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens and Coriolanus, and Elizabeth quoted from them on various occasions, most significantly a conversation she had early on in her reign about her reluctance to name Mary Queen of Scots as her successor. ‘Plures adorant solem orientem quam occidentem/ [More do adore the rising than the setting sun],’62 she explained to the Scottish ambassador Maitland of Lethington, adding that it was natural for people to think the successor preferable to the incumbent, the dream better than any awakening.

  Plutarch’s Lives dealt exclusively with men. In the biographies of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, however, there emerged an incandescent portrait of a woman and a great queen. Cleopatra dominated the page wherever she appeared and the Princess Elizabeth reading this could not ignore the lessons of ultimate female power. As her sister Mary ascended the English throne in 1553, when Elizabeth herself was not yet twenty, her own chances of becoming queen seemed suddenly less remote. Would Plutarch’s description of this brilliant Egyptian daughter, who ascended her father Ptolemy’s throne when she was eighteen, appear to have some parallels with Elizabeth and her believed destiny, as the rightful heir of her own revered father?

  Her own beauty, so we are told, was not of that incomparable kind which instantly captivates the beholder. But the charm of her presence was irresistible, and there was an attraction in her person and her talk, together with a peculiar force of character which pervaded her every thought and action, and laid all who associated with her under its spell. It was a delight merely to hear the sound of her voice, with which, like an instrument of many strings, she could pass from one language to another, so that in her interviews with barbarians she seldom required an interpreter, but conversed with them quite unaided, whether they were Ethiopians, Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabians, Syrians, Medes, or Parthians.63

  Ascham rated Elizabeth’s written Greek so highly he doubted there were four men in England who could better her, and marvelled that in all these languages, and Spanish too, ‘within the walls of her privy chamber, she hath obtained that excellency of learning to understand, speak, and write both wittily with head, and fair with hand, as scarce one or two rare wits in both the universities have in many years reached into’.64

  Livy, the great historian of the Roman Republic, was also extensively studied by the young princess. Again, not particularly troubled by dry fact, his patriotic narrative of the formative age of Rome sought to inspire in his reader a greater understanding and moral force through learning the lessons of history. Machiavelli studied him for examples of political cause and effect, and Elizabeth read most of his output in her two years with Ascham. He had the imagination and language to convey atmosphere and emotion and his history was full of direct and indirect speech, his heroes making rousing set pieces about the battles to come.

  Elizabeth’s own rallying cry to her troops at Tilbury on 9 August 1588, readying themselves to meet the regrouped Armada, owed much, perhaps, to the heroic style of speech she read in Livy, for instance: ‘Let tyrants fear … being resolved in the midst and heat of the battle to live and die amongst you all, to lay down for my God and for my kingdom and for my people mine honour and my blood even in the dust. I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king and a king of England too.’65 She was also attentive to the vision of herself as a warrior queen, again with more classical allusion: ‘The Queen rode through all the squadrons of her army as armed Pallas attended by noble footmen’66 was how an eyewitness described her dramatic progress on that portentous day. In another account Elizabeth was said to be wearing a symbolic breastplate of gold.

  It is not fanciful to consider Elizabeth’s mind and expression deeply affected by her scholarly reading and study, a discipline and an enjoyment which she continued throughout her life. The solitariness of her youth; her natural aptitude; her attempts at gaining her father’s approval through the exercise of her intellectual skills; her subsequent loss of family and isolation from c
ourt; the consequent danger and fears for her life: all conspired to make her books and her studies gain an emotional force far beyond the merely scholastic. As her life as an insecure princess meant increasingly there were fewer living people she could trust, the company of these sublime dead became for Elizabeth a refuge and a consolation. They were the family circle of friends who expected nothing of her, could not betray her and yet taught her some of the most valuable lessons of her life.

  Ascham, who had studied her as devotedly as she had her books, noted with admiration that his pupil was not just technically brilliant but deeply steeped in the culture and philosophy of her authors which meant she could inhabit those larger horizons. ‘When she is reading Demosthenes or Aeschines, I am very often astonished at seeing her so ably understand … the feeling and spirit of the speaker, the struggle of the whole debate, the decrees and inclinations of the people, the manners and institutions of every state, and all other matters of this kind …’67 In short, her intimacy with the classical authors had given Elizabeth a more complex grasp of human psychology and motivation, and an awareness that there was more variety in human experience than any one philosophy could encompass.