Bloody Mary (7 page)

If I lie, backbite or steal

If I will curse, scorn, mock or swear,

If I chide, fight, strive or threat,

Then am I worthy to be beat.

Good mother or mistress mine,

If any of these nine

I trespass to your Knowyng;

With a new rod and a fine

Early naked before I dine

Amend me with a scourging.
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If children were taught to fear the consequences of disobedience, they were kept in terror of the uncontrollable world of the occult. They were told to “double the thumb”—to enclose their thumb under their clenched fingers—in the presence of danger, for this shape of the hand resembled the Hebrew name of God. Their imaginations were opened to the invisible troupe of menacing beings which wandered the night or waited in the forest. The list of these unseen tormentors was enormous: spirits, witches, hags, satyrs, pans, sylens, tritons, centaurs, dwarfs, giants, imps, calcars, nymphs, incubi, hobgoblins, Robin Goodfellow, the spoorn, the mare, the man in the oak, the hell-wain, the firedrake, the puckle, and the terrifying “Boneless.” Ruling them all was the ultimate horror, compounded of all the animals children fear most: the Devil, “having horns on his head, fire in his mouth, and a tail in his breech, eyes like a Bason, fangs like a Dog, claws like a Boar, a skin like a Niger, and a voice roaring like a Lion, whereby we start and are afraid when we hear one cry Bough!”
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These dark imaginings were offset by the sunlit pleasures of riding and hawking. At six Mary rode well, and Lord Abergavenny sent her a
horse of her own. Henry sent her a goshawk, and she seems to have spent many hours in the summer of 1522 learning to hunt with her. One entire August day Mary and her attendants rode in the forest near Windsor Castle, picnicking on bread and ale.
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The princess’ household establishment was quite large by the early 1520s. At age six she had seven gentlemen, ten valets and sixteen pages, plus stableboys, kitchen urchins, her laundress and woodbearer. The lists of goods supplied to her bakehouse, butlery, kitchen, and accatry grew longer each year, until her table was costing the king nearly twelve hundred pounds annually.
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Among the members of Mary’s growing household were two who would be in her service for decades, Beatrice ap Rice, her “lavender” or laundress and David ap Rice, who was at first a page but soon became yeoman of the chamber. More ephemeral are the names of minstrels who were in her pay for only a few months at a time, English and French names in most cases but occasionally a Welshman like Elandon, who joined her establishment when she was nine.

Music was the most intimate of the links between Henry and Mary. Among Henry’s prodigious talents was the ability to play, with the bravado of a gifted amateur, on a good many musical instruments—among them the gittaron, lute, cornet, and virginal. He liked nothing better than to follow up an afternoon of strenuous jousting with an impromptu evening concert, where he performed in alternation with the professional musicians of his court and often played nearly as well as they did. He collected instruments, and was always looking for advancements in design and sonority; in his collection was a mechanical virginal, described as operating “with a wheel without playing upon.”
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His serious compositions—motets and masses—were no less praised than his lighter songs, and among the popular tunes of Mary’s childhood—“Hay the Eye,” “Maugh Murre,” “Bonny Wench”—was the king’s own “O My Heart.”

Henry collected musicians as he did instruments. In 1519 he had at least three very distinguished soloists at his court, a French clavichordist, a German keyboard player who so impressed the king that he took him along on his summer progress to entertain him at Woodstock, and the famed Venetian organist Dionysius Memo.
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Memo, who was organist of St. Mark’s, arrived at Henry’s court with his own organ, “brought hither with much pain and cost,” and a group of virtuosi; the king promptly made him chief of his musicians and chaplain. He almost certainly became Mary’s teacher as well, for his stay at court coincides with her early childhood and by the time she was three or four she was playing the virginal for visitors. Mary shared both Henry’s love of music and his natural aptitude. As a child in arms she learned to recognize Memo across a room full of dignitaries and would call out loudly to him to play for her.
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She became a skilled player in her own right, with a facility for rapid and intricate
passagework, and when she grew older she taught the women and girls in her household to play.

Mary resembled her father in many ways besides her musical gift and fair coloring, but her formal education took no account of this resemblance. Instead she was taught to deny in herself all traces of Henry’s spontaneous flamboyance and self-assertion, and to perceive the overriding truth that for her, as for all women, life must be a grim battle against temptation and weakness, a battle she was destined to lose.

We know a good deal about what and how Mary was taught in her childhood. At Katherine’s request the Spanish humanist Vives designed a plan of study for her, set out in several educational treatises. One of these prescribed a curriculum in the classics, describing how the princess was to acquire the rudiments of pronunciation and grammar and then read simple Greek and Latin stories before going on to Plato, Plutarch, Cicero and Seneca. The Christian Latin poets and the writings of the church Fathers were to be emphasized, and, of course, Mary was to read passages from the scriptures every morning and evening. For recreation she was to read stories about self-sacrificing women. Vives recommended in particular Livy’s account of the virtuous Roman matron Lucretia, who after being raped by the son of Tarquin the Proud, stabbed herself to death, and the story of the patient Griselda, whose husband put her through endless trials to assure himself of her devotion. These were to be her models, in addition to the suffering holy women whose lives she knew intimately from the legends of the saints.

More important to Vives than Mary’s mastery of Greek and Latin was her education in virtue. Every young girl, he wrote in his work
On the Instruction of a Christian Woman,
ought to keep constantly in mind that she is inherently “the devil’s instrument, and not Christ’s.”
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To Vives as to most humanists the central dilemma of female education was the inherent sinfulness of women. This negative premise was the foundation of Mary’s training, and everything she learned was to be chosen in the light of whether it was likely to palliate or entrench the inescapable perversity of her nature. When Katherine asked Vives to draw up a plan of education for Mary, she envisioned it primarily as a form of protection for the young girl, to guard her “more securely and safely than any spearman or bowman whatever.”
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The protection she referred to was, first and most obviously, protection of Mary’s virginity. Erasmus, who at first saw no point in education for women, was persuaded in England that “nothing so completely preserves the modesty” of young girls as learning, for without it “many from simplicity and inexperience have lost their chastity before they knew that such an inestimable treasure was in danger.”
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At courts where the learning of girls is ignored, he wrote, they spend their mornings dressing their hair and painting their faces, showing themselves off at
mass, and gossiping. In the afternoon they lie about on the grass in fair weather, joking and flirting, “with men leaning over on to their laps.” Their days are spent among “sated and indolent servants, very squalid, and of impure morals.” In this atmosphere modesty cannot thrive, and virtue has little meaning. Vives hoped to keep Mary from these influences, and in consequence he devoted as much attention to the environment in which the princess was to be educated as he did to the content of what she learned.

From earliest infancy, he insisted, she should be kept away from the company of men, lest she become attached to the male sex. Since “a woman that thinketh alone, thinketh evil,” she was to be surrounded at all times with “sad, pale and untrimmed” servants and taught to weave and spin when her lessons were over. Weaving Vives recommended as inducing a “love of sober sadness,” an approved frame of consciousness likely to discourage the sensual musings native to all females. Of the “foul ribaldry” of popular songs and books the young girl should know nothing, and should beware of romances “as of serpents or snakes.” Lest she trust herself too much, he advised, she should be encouraged to fear being alone; she should be trained to require the company of others and rely on them for everything. Vives’ recommendations amounted to a deliberate programming for helplessness, with the feelings of inferiority and depression that accompany it.
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But his warnings against sensuality were even more harmful. The child’s movements should be watched, he noted, to prevent “uncomely gestures or moving of the body.” Only the blandest food should be served, which would not “inflame the body.” He recommended that as an adolescent Mary should fast to “bridle the body and press it down, and quench the heat of youth.” Fasting, always a mark of the ascetic life, became in the early sixteenth century the special hallmark of young female saints. Popular pamphlets told of the prodigious fast of one young girl in the Netherlands, Eve Fliegen, who gave up all food and drink and subsisted for years entirely on the scent of roses.
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Weak wine was permissible, Vives thought, but water was best, since “it is better that the stomach ache than the mind.”
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All adornment of the body was of course hazardous. Like the sight of men, perfumes and ointments “fire the maid with jeapardous heat” and were to be avoided, and Mary’s guardians were to impress on her that an alluring woman is “a poisoner and sword” to all who see her.

Mary’s education was intended to provide her with an intellectual chastity belt—a view of herself and of the spiritual dangers facing all women that would frighten her into an attitude of withdrawn virtue. For it was a vital corollary to this concept of self that it was only compatible with a life of domesticity. Public life in any form was impossible for women, for it meant loss of chastity and good repute. Vives’ model of female
behavior envisioned a woman at home and silent, with “few to see her and none at all to hear her.” Leaving the house was full of perils; it demanded that she “prepare her mind and stomach none otherwise than if she went to fight.” In streets and public places “the darts of the Devil are flying on every side,” Vives insisted, and her only defenses were the good examples she had been taught, her determination to remain chaste and “a mind ever bent toward Christ.”
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To forestall prying eyes she should cover her neck and veil her face, leaving “scarcely an eye open to see the way.”

Vives’ educational doctrines called for claustration, cultivated prudery and an exaggerated horror of sensuality in every form. They were more the product of Spanish than English attitudes toward women, but Vives took many of his teachings directly from the works of St. Jerome, whose views on female education had been a respected part of Christian culture since antiquity. That women were morally inferior to men was a commonplace of theology, and the fathers and scholastics of the middle ages had elaborated dozens of antifeminist formulas. The traditional starting point of these arguments was the Christian story of creation itself, in which Adam was made directly by God but Eve was made only indirectly, by means of Adam’s flesh. Eve was thus not made in God’s image but in Adam’s, and was inferior to him. It was Eve, too, who tempted Adam to disobey God and was responsible for mankind’s fall. To these sins scholastic theologians added the Aristotelian teaching that all female creatures are “misbegotten males”—biological accidents and imperfections. Man was seen as the norm of humankind, woman as the abnormal exception, and some Christian writers wondered whether, at the last judgment, women would rise from the dead in female form or whether they would be resurrected in the perfect form of men.

What gave these teachings their enduring authority was that they were biblical in origin and thoroughly integrated with the other doctrines of the church. St. Paul had written that “the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church,” and had forbidden women to speak in the Christian congregation; women, he taught, should reverence men and remain in proper subjection to them. Several New Testament passages implied that men were to serve as mediators between their wives and Christ, just as Christ served as mediator between man and God. Male superiority was in an important sense essential to salvation—a part of the revealed truth of Christianity. To doubt the inferiority of women, then, was to doubt salvation itself.

Social doctrines also supported this view of women. English men and women of the Tudor age believed that society was held together by a complex network of relationships between superiors and inferiors. Each individual had a preordained place in this network, and only by staying
in that place could the social order be maintained. Women were ranked in the social hierachy according to the status of their fathers, first, and later according to that of their husbands; if they presumed to throw off their subservient role they risked upsetting the entire social structure.

Of course, Mary had only to read and to look around her to see contradictions to the principle of female weakness and inferiority. Medieval women had worn armor and led feudal armies; they had conducted sieges and organized the defense of towns and castles. Fist fighting was known in fifteenth-century England as “fighting like women,” and the chronicles of the age were full of accounts of embattled women. In her grandfather Henry VII’s reign, during fighting in Flanders a small group of English soldiers were left to guard Nieuport against the French. Many of the soldiers were wounded, and the others proved too sick or exhausted to defend the town when the French attacked. Just as they entered the gates, however, a shipload of English archers from Calais landed, and the women of the town joined them in pushing back the attackers. Crying “Help, Englishmen!” they rushed on the French with knives and cut their throats as fast as the archers could shoot them.
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