by Lisa Hilton
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain,
There is written her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
It is Wyatt’s poetry which provides a fascinating key to the evidence which eventually indicted the queen.18 Wyatt was imprisoned in the upper bell tower on 8 May 1536, and the following day, Cromwell began to assemble the jury for the trial. What did Wyatt reveal that allowed Cromwell to act? Or, rather, why was Wyatt’s fate different from that of Norris, Brereton, Weston, Smeaton, and Rochford? He expected to die but instead found his sentence commuted to “honorable detention.”
A poem contained in the Devonshire manuscript of 1536–37, which collates numerous works by Wyatt and his fellow court poets, contains the verses:
There never was file half so well filed,
To file a file for every smith’s intent,
But I was made a filing instrument,
To frame other, while I was beguiled.
But reason hath at my folly smiled,
And pardoned me since that I me repent,
Of my lost years and time misspent,
For youth did me lead and falsehood guiled.
“File” is the key word, not “frame.” In the sixteenth century, it implied “dishonor” or “betray.” Wyatt’s poem is, in a sense, a confession. He talked, and his reward was the pardon for conduct, the youthful folly, of which he repented. Wyatt’s was not the only evidence, of course, which destroyed Anne, but the timing suggests that whatever he said “enabled Cromwell to draw up his indictment [and] muster his juries.”19 Wyatt’s words in the Tower were a good deal more precise than the elliptical subtleties which swirl through the poetry manuscripts. Yet poetry, curiously, occupied a significant place even at this moment of extremis. When Anne understood who her fellow prisoners were, she made a bad, hysterical joke. She knew precisely why her “lovers” had been selected, as players of the game of love at its highest, most ambiguously suggestive level. “They may well make pallets now,” she giggled, punning on ballade/pallet, from sonnet to straw. And among the more extraordinary charges levelled against the queen was that she had laughed at Henry’s verse-making, those earnest missives in which he sought to impress her with his own mastery of courtly love. In the account of Anne and her beaux sneering at the king’s verse, “which was made a great charge against them,” we hear the sniggers of the “pastime,” of mockery of a man whose pen was as limp as his prick (as Rochford suicidally affirmed at his trial). Wyatt’s biographer does not claim that Henry had Anne killed because she sniggered at his clumsiness with a couplet, but that Cromwell relied on “a deliberate misinterpretation of a private language” to spring his trap, which was supported in law by Smeaton’s confession and the Treason Act passed two years previously, which made speaking against the king a treasonous offence.
It was this private language, though, which Elizabeth manipulated so superlatively to her own ends. It is also perhaps Anne’s most significant legacy to her daughter. None of Thomas Wyatt’s poems were published during Anne’s lifetime, nor even in his own. But they were printed in Elizabeth’s, in 1557, the year before her accession. Tottel’s Miscellany contains ninety-six of Wyatt’s poems, alongside forty by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and the collection was the most widely disseminated and influential of the period. Here was the source of poetic inspiration for the courtiers who hymned Elizabeth, and for the other writers, including Shakespeare, who made the courtly sonnet the elastic, startling, finely wrought literary emblem of her age. The Miscellany is a direct linguistic link between Elizabeth’s court and Anne’s, an echoing connection between the two queens. At Elizabeth’s court, though, and in the wider culture around the queen, the language of courtly love was infused with religious veneration. Elizabeth became more than the “mistress” in service to whom the courtier-lover achieves both identity and reward; she made herself, within the perceptual model of the Reformation, into a divine being.
2
HOW OFTEN IN her childhood did Elizabeth hear the word bastard? Kind Lady Bryan may have tried to shield her from the change in her status, but others, including her sister, Mary, were not so gentle. Elizabeth’s illegitimacy was tainted with something even worse—the ghost of incest. For Anne Boleyn might have been executed for high treason, but the grounds on which her marriage to Henry were dissolved were not her adultery but Henry’s previous relationship with Anne’s sister Mary, with whom he had had an affair in the 1520s. Under canon law, such a relationship rendered any subsequent union with a family member taboo, and though Mary Tudor herself was the product of just such a marriage (Henry’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon was, according to his own logic, illegitimate because she had previously been married to his brother Arthur, forbidden in the famous text from Leviticus 18:16—“Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother’s wife”—which sowed the theological seed for his first divorce), she positively relished taunting her sister with her bastard status. Elizabeth’s sensitivity on the subject is signaled by her later discussions with the Venetian ambassador on the legality of Anne Boleyn’s marriage, where she insisted on the legitimacy of her parents’ union. In July 1536, Parliament repealed the act which had made Elizabeth her father’s rightful heir, and though this was later overturned, the queen remained technically a bastard all her life. Nor did the charge of incest ever die away. Writing in the 1580s, the Catholic rebel William Allen described Elizabeth as
an incestuous bastard, begotten and born in sin, of an infamous courtesan Anne Bullen, afterwards executed for adultery, treason, heresy and incest … which Anne, her said supposed father kept by pretended marriage … as he did before both know and keep both the said Anne’s mother and sister.1
Mary Tudor later referred to the allegation that Elizabeth was in fact Mark Smeaton’s child, and cruelly referred to her as the “Little Whore.” Nonetheless, she did show some tenderness towards her motherless little sister, and is credited with bringing Elizabeth to the Christmas court of 1536. By then, Henry’s new wife, Jane Seymour, was just pregnant with the child who proved to be his only undisputed heir. Elizabeth’s brother, Edward, was born at Hampton Court on 12 October 1537. The sisters were at court again for the christening three days later, with Mary standing as godmother and tiny Elizabeth, carried in the arms of Jane’s brother Edward Seymour, holding the chrisom-cloth. Two weeks later, Queen Jane was dead, and Elizabeth’s world changed again. Lady Bryan was to be governess of the new prince, replaced as Lady Mistress by Lady Troy, previously a member of Mary’s household. At the same time, Katherine Champernowne, who had become one of the most significant women in Elizabeth’s life, and who later married another member of Elizabeth’s household, John Ashley, was appointed as governess. Mistress Ashley remained close to Elizabeth all her life and was responsible for her first education.
In 1539, Henry made a strategic dynastic marriage to Anne of Cleves, cementing an alliance with one of the small reformist corridor states that formed a buffer between Hapsburg territories in the Netherlands and Italy. Once again, Henry played the courtly lover, going “incognito” to meet his bride at Rochester in a display of staged impatience, but it was a dismally unconvincing effort. Henry’s reaction to Anne was one of outright repulsion, and, despite going forward dutifully with the marriage ceremony, he was so disgusted by the appearance and body odor of the “Flanders Mare” that he was unable to consummate the union. Anne’s reaction to Henry, who was no stranger to foul smells himself, thanks to the o
ozing sores on his ulcerous leg, is not recorded. Anne and Elizabeth are not mentioned as having met during the six months it took for her chaste marriage to be untangled, but she and Elizabeth did subsequently develop a relationship after the former queen had moved to her own property at Hever, where she apparently led rather a jolly existence.
Henry’s next queen was a cousin of Anne Boleyn, Katherine, daughter of Thomas Howard, second Duke of Norfolk. As a young girl in the household of her stepgrandmother, Katherine had had an affair with another relative, Francis Dereham, but the matter was hushed up and she obtained a place, aged about fifteen, as one of Anne of Cleves’s maids of honor. Henry was soon besotted with the teenage beauty, marrying her within weeks of the annulment of his marriage to Anne. There is no real evidence of Katherine showing much interest in her youngest stepdaughter, though she did present Elizabeth with a few cheap trinkets, the kind of thing that pleases little girls, and had her to visit at Chelsea and on a trip to see Edward at Waltham Cross. Elizabeth herself may have recalled these trips significantly, as she travelled in the royal barge at an age to remember it. But after four years of submitting to Henry’s gouty attentions, Katherine took a lover, Thomas Culpeper. She was in the Tower by early 1542, and on 13 February suffered the same fate as Anne Boleyn.
Elizabeth was an extremely alert and intelligent child, but it is impossible to know what, if anything, she made of this sorry parade of stepmothers. It was a fact of sixteenth-century life that women died in childbed all the time—Elizabeth did not need the example of the death of a woman she had barely met, who died when she was four, to put her off maternity. As an adult, she was harsh in punishing sexual transgression when it in any way touched upon her authority—so if Katherine Howard is to be seen as an influence, it might be inferred that she was unsympathetic. But there is no reason at all to assume that Elizabeth was particularly interested by any of her three stepmothers before her father’s last wife, Katherine Parr. Elizabeth’s was a child’s world, far from the court, with a child’s preoccupations and concerns. Her illegitimate status certainly became an issue in later life, but, again, the external circumstances of her existence were happy and comfortable. She had teachers, activities, companions such as Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, who joined the royal sisters for a time at Hunsdon, and all the bustle of a large household, full of its own small events and dramas, to amuse and distract her. Much has been made of a letter from Lady Bryan soon after Anne Boleyn’s disgrace in which she bemoans the state of Elizabeth’s wardrobe, but the household accounts show that Elizabeth was well cared for in a relatively lavish manner appropriate to her station. Perhaps Mary called her names, but she was also a source of occasional treats and presents, and, anyway, siblings everywhere are perfectly foul to one another from time to time. Elizabeth did not spend her childhood cowed, poor and lonely, hoping desperately that the rays of her father’s fitful favor might once again shine upon her.
Henry was not even a particularly neglectful father by royal contemporary standards. He saw Elizabeth seldom, but he was kept aware of her progress, and in 1542, after dining with both his daughters at Pyrgo Park near Romford, he began to see more of them. In Elizabeth’s case, this may have had as much to do with her age as anything else—she was, in her father’s words, now exhibiting the qualities “agreeable to her estate,” and small girls are not generally very interesting to busy middle-aged men.2 At nine or so, Elizabeth would have begun to be a civilized companion. For the last five years of the king’s life, Elizabeth was given increasing signs that he loved and cherished her, and she reciprocated with a proud and powerful affection which endured in her as queen.
Elizabeth’s last stepmother, Katherine Parr, could not have been more different from poor, flighty Katherine Howard. Parr’s own mother, Maud, had served as lady-in-waiting to Katherine of Aragon, and after she was widowed for the second time at age thirty in 1542, Katherine Parr became mistress of the robes in the household of Mary Tudor. Here she developed a romantic understanding with Thomas Seymour, Jane Seymour’s brother, but this was brought to an abrupt end when Henry made clear that he, too, was interested in this attractive, rather serious woman. They married in a small ceremony on 12 July 1543 in the presence of both Elizabeth and Mary. Like many elite, educated ladies, Katherine had a deep interest in religious progressiveness, composing her own prayers and meditations, and, as queen, holding a regular theological salon in her chamber. She was also considerably more interested than her predecessor in her stepchildren. Elizabeth’s “towardness” was remarked on by many who knew her; now Katherine saw to it that from 1544, Elizabeth was able to share the lessons of her brother, Edward, under the tutelage of John Cheke, the humanist—and reformist—professor of Greek at Cambridge, who had gathered about him an intellectual circle which was to include some of the key figures of Elizabeth’s reign.
Elizabeth’s tutors were both members of St. John’s, Cheke’s college. William Grindal held the post until his death in 1548, after which he was replaced until 1550 by Roger Ascham, who left a detailed record of his studies with the future queen in a tract on education, The Schoolmaster, published in 1570. Ascham’s book, which combines a perhaps surprisingly modern emphasis on a gentle and encouraging pedagogic method with an extraordinary depth and rigor, delineates the aims of a humanist education. For Ascham, Latin was the fulcrum of learning, and the purpose of its study, above all, is to achieve a command of expression which in turn will produce a polished clarity of reasoned thought. The student who began with Cicero’s De Oratore
would not only take wholly away this butcherly fear in making of Latin but would also with ease and pleasure … work a true choice and placing of words, a right ordering of sentences, an easy understanding of the tongue, a readiness to speak, a facility to write, a true judgment both of his own and other’s doings.
Ascham was building on a tradition of reformed education which had begun in Italy in the mid-fifteenth century. There, the auctores octo, medieval tracts on education, had been replaced by classical texts to introduce children to the works of ancient writers, to the extent that, in 1443, the University of Ferrara ordained that only those who could prove their credentials in bonae litterae—humanist studies—might be admitted to teach. Ascham believed that an ideal education consisted of three interdepending strands: the Latin of Tully, the Greek of Plato and Aristotle, and the Holy Bible: “I never knew yet scholar that gave himself to like and love and follow chiefly [these] authors, but he proved both learned, wise and also an honest man.”
Or herself, maybe, for Elizabeth also profited from an advancement in ideas about women’s learning which in England had found its most celebrated exemplar in the “school” established by Thomas More for his daughters and household, and which was known throughout Europe during the 1520s. More founded his system on the thorough method of double translation also adopted by Ascham, whereby the student would translate from Latin or Greek to English and then retranslate their own rendering of the text. The curriculum followed in More’s household was similar to that followed by Elizabeth, who, like More’s daughters, read Latin, Greek, Spanish, French, Italian, and German, and studied mathematics, astronomy, natural philosophy, music, and geography, while the study of grammar, rhetoric, and logic was utilized in practice by debate and “disputation.” Crucially, More’s practice supported his view that women’s intellectual capacity was in no way inferior to that of men:
Nor do I think that the harvest is much affected whether it is a man or a woman who does the sowing. They both have the name of human being whose nature reason differentiates from that of beasts; both, I say, are equally suited for the knowledge of learning by which reason is cultivated.3
Another important precedent in terms of Elizabeth’s education was that of her older sister, Mary, whose studies were supervised by the Spanish humanist Juan Luís Vives. Mary studied the writings of contemporary humanists such as Erasmus and More himself, as well as Plato and Aristotle, and she too was an accompl
ished linguist. When Mary was seven, Vives produced a precursor to The Schoolmaster entitled On a Plan of Study for Children, directed towards the education of a future monarch. Mary’s accomplishments are less well known than those of her sister (not least because she boasted of them less), but in her speeches as queen, it is possible to discern many of the rhetorical elements derived from her education, which Elizabeth herself was to imitate.
An education equivalent to that received by the More girls or the Tudor princesses was obviously reserved for a very small number of women. But what made such an education extraordinary for those few was that, for the first time in England, women were possessed of an intellectual parity with men. Women’s learning was not entirely unknown—indeed, during the early medieval period, convents such as Wilton had been the focus of education for elite women—but Latin culture had generally been reserved for men. One positive consequence of this was the promotion by royal and aristocratic women of vernacular culture, but Latin had always been the language of power, diplomacy, and the law. Joined by her knowledge of Greek, considered essential by humanists for a true understanding of the Bible, Elizabeth’s intellectual weapons were thus as finely honed as those of any of her male contemporaries. Like her brother, Edward, with whom she shared her reading of Livy, Sophocles, and Demosthenes, Elizabeth was educated as a prince.
As the children’s household progressed from one nursery palace to another in between visits to court, Elizabeth and Edward apparently devoured the tasks set for them (and, since they were royal children, they were presumably never lazy or bored). One account captures the peaceful industry of this time: “So pregnant ingenious were [Elizabeth and Edward] that they desired to look upon books as soon as the day began to break. Their morning hours were so welcome that they seemed to prevent the night’s sleeping for the entertainment of the morrow’s schooling.” Elizabeth was, however, excluded from the physical aspects of her brother’s education. When Edward was called away to the “knightly” training which formed part of his own, but not his sister’s, education, Elizabeth “in her private chamber betook herself to her Lute or Viol, and [wearied with that] to practice her needle.”4 Needlework was a far more conventional female accomplishment than making translations from Greek through Latin to English, but Elizabeth was proud enough of her embroidery to sleep on a pillow of her own decorating later in life, and to produce chair covers with her ladies. And while she might have been barred from the weapons drills thought suitable for Edward, Elizabeth acquired a lifelong taste for the brutal sport of cockfighting from Ascham at this period, as well as the riding skills in which she delighted all her life.