CHAPTER THREE The Education of Princes
I was one day present when she replied at the same time to three ambassadors, the Imperial, French, and Swedish, in three languages: Italian to one, French to the other, Latin to the third; easily, without hesitation, clearly, and without being confused, to the various subjects thrown out, as is usual in their discourse.
Elizabeth’s tutor Roger Ascham to his friend John Sturm in 1562
She has grown so much, and grows daily in height, goodness, beauty and virtue, that she has become the most perfect and accomplished person in all honest and virtuous things that it is possible to imagine … I can assure you that the King is so delighted with her … she amuses him with wise and witty conversation, as if she was a woman of twenty-five.
Cardinal of Lorraine to Mary’s mother in 1553 when the Queen of Scots was ten
IF EXILE IS NOT JUST A PHYSICAL ABSENCE from home but an emotional and spiritual disconnection from one’s earlier self then in the late 1540s both these young queens entered a simultaneous period of exile which would mark them more deeply than anything else in their lives. The reasons, experiences and effects for Elizabeth and Mary individually, however, could not have been more different, or more significant in their differences.
For Elizabeth, the exile was gradual, a journey towards singularity. At first it was the loosening of familial ties which came with orphanhood, then the spiritual estrangement during her sister’s reign, culminating in the physical constraint on her movements, place of residence and then the denial of her rights to safety, even to life. Her contemporary, John Foxe, expressed his outrage: ‘Into what fear, what trouble of mind, and what danger of death was she brought?’1 The transient nature of her security, prospects and hopes, the unpredictable perils she encountered, toughened Elizabeth’s character, sharpened her wits and gave her a powerful sense of her own autonomy. This exile from certainty and ease made a precocious girl endure the most testing initiation in her journey to become a great queen. Camden realized the value of these unhappiest of years: ‘taught by Experience and Adversity, (two most effectual and powerfull Masters,) she had gathered Wisedom above her age’.2
For Mary her exile was more clear cut. She was removed to France before she was six years old in what was to be a physical and spiritual severance from her homeland. Already betrothed to the dauphin, her future now was mapped out by foreign interests. She was to be a French princess and then a French queen, with Scotland as her dowry. John Knox considered in retrospect this French exile to be a poisonous inheritance for his young Scottish queen. Hayward, an early chronicler, mourned the loss to her personally: ‘our young Quene is married into France, where she nowe lyveth as a stranger both to them and us …’3 In fact this dislocation and re-education was to prove so complete that Mary, the Queen of Scotland, would come to consider her French years as the happiest time of her life.
For Elizabeth it was a painful decade which began with the death of her father on 28 January 1547. Her brother Edward was brought to see her at the manor of Enfield and they were told the news together. In a spasm of grief, so the story went, Henry’s two younger children clung together and wept bitterly, then Edward continued on his way to London and the thirteen-year-old princess returned, for the time being, to the studious patterns of her life.
The new young king, himself only nine years old, wrote to this favourite sister: ‘There is very little need of my consoling you, most dear sister, because from your learning you know what you ought to do, and from your prudence and pity you perform what your learning causes you to know.’ His letter was in answer to one from her seeking to console him and place their loss in the context of her classical and religious studies. She had obviously shown herself to be in control of her emotions for Edward added, ‘I perceive you think of our father’s death with a calm mind.’4
Elizabeth had never lived intimately with either her mother or her father and essentially both were unknown to her. However, in her governess Catherine Ashley she had the most loyal, if limited, of mother figures who had been with her all her life and was to remain, until her death, the woman Elizabeth cared for most. The death of Henry and her subsequent status as an orphan was not a personal wrench so much as a loss of the idealized father as hero. Practically too, Elizabeth could no longer rely on that powerful umbrella of protection and instead was exposed to the untrammelled ambitions of others. Henry’s death marked the end of a certain status quo.
Elizabeth’s stepmother, Catherine Parr, Henry’s last wife, was an affectionate woman with a talent for nurturing and inspiring the young. Her previous stepdaughter, Margaret Neville, left a glowing affidavit in her will: ‘I was never able to render her grace [Catherine] sufficient thanks for the godly education and tender love and bountiful goodness which I have ever more found in her.’5 On marrying Henry in 1543 Catherine had embarked on her new life as his queen with a sense of vocation and had fulfilled her duties admirably. She was thirty-one, already had been twice married and twice widowed and was a mature woman of considerable character and independent means. Catherine was the first of Henry’s wives to make any real attempt to take responsibility for the royal children and was to be a particularly important influence on the clever, watchful and spirited Princess Elizabeth. Only ten years old at the time, the young princess was already emotionally self-protective, yet avid for experience and knowledge.
Henry had at least settled the succession before he died. His immediate heir was his son Edward, for whose precious existence he had prayed, plotted and laid waste so many lives, even the foundations of his country’s faith. Edward’s children were to be next in line, followed by Princess Mary – and her heirs – and only then by his second daughter, Elizabeth.* At this time there was every reason to hope that Edward, an intellectually gifted, brave and independent-minded boy, would survive to manhood and have children of his own. For much of her girlhood there was little expectation that Elizabeth would ever be more than a royal princess.
The death of such a long-reigning despot as Henry VIII inevitably released a ferment of long-suppressed ambitions, for power, wealth and the propagation of the reformed religion in England which Henry’s equivocation had stalled. The powerful men around the new young king, specifically in his Privy Council in whose hands his father had left the governance of the kingdom, were predominantly reformist. The most notable among them were Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury and architect of the enduring Edwardian prayer book, John Dudley, and the boy-king’s uncle, Edward Seymour, who became Lord Protector, awarding himself the dukedom of Somerset.
There was a second powerful and ambitious Seymour brother, who was to teach the teenage Elizabeth some malign lessons on the delusions of sexual desire and the snares of ruthless men who would be king. Thomas Lord Seymour of Sudeley, at nearly forty years old, still cut a dashing soldierly figure having distinguished himself in diplomatic, naval and military campaigns under Henry. He became Lord Admiral early in the reign of Edward VI under the protectorship of his own elder brother, Somerset. Thomas Seymour had not only been admired by Henry, he had been loved by his queen. In marrying the King rather than this love, Catherine Parr had sacrificed her heart for the sake of duty. However, on Henry’s death her sense of obligation was fulfilled and after only four months of widowhood, Catherine married Seymour. This was considered indecorous haste, especially for a queen – and for a couple well into Tudor middle age. But even more surprisingly the thirty-five-year-old queen, who had remained childless throughout her first three marriages, now belatedly conceived. This could only enhance the self-confidence and reputation of an already proudly virile man. It seemed inevitable that such a man would have sired a son.
Elizabeth was still only thirteen when her stepmother, of whom she was most fond, married for love. The young princess remained in her care,