The first Elizabeth Read online

  When Elizabeth was fifteen, and her lady mistress was in the Tower in peril of her life, Elizabeth put her feelings into words which, though bookish, were sincere. "[She] hath been with me a long time, and many years, and hath taken great labor and pain in bringing me up in learning and honesty; and therefore I ought of very duty to speak for her, for Saint Gregory sayeth 'that we are more bound to them that bringeth us up well

  than to our parents, for our parents do that which is natural for them that bnngeth us into the world, but our bringers-up are a cause to make us live well in it.' " 2

  This wordy sentiment itself owed much to Mistress Champernowne— or Kat, as Elizabeth called her—for it was she who provided all of Elizabeth's early education, including her grounding in Latin and her acquaintance with Saint Gregory and the other Church Fathers. Well into adulthood Elizabeth was to be "more bound" to this Devonshire gentlewoman than to her blood relatives, though in time Kat became a relative by marriage, taking as her husband a Boleyn cousin, John Ashley, senior gentleman attendant in Elizabeth's household.

  What sort of bringing up Kat Ashley provided, though affected by her temperament and intellect, was circumscribed by the conventions of the age. Children were welcomed into the Tudor world not for themselves, but as potential adults, and in light of this everything possible was done to make them old before their time.

  From infancy little girls were dressed as women, wearing uncomfortable corsets and all the layers of petticoats and underskirts that women wore over them. They toddled in voluminous long robes stiff with embroidery, and struggled with cumbersome detachable puffed sleeves that made their arms too heavy to lift. Portraits of the time show little girls barely old enough to walk, their round faces encircled by tight-fitting lace caps, their bodies encased in layers of skirts and overdresses cinched in tightly at the waist, their plump necks chafing under starched collars. Sometimes they earn gold rattles, secured by chains to their waists, but their expressions are far from playful. Often their faces express a sobriety verging on the tragic, as if their thoughts ran prematurely to the mortality that hung over them.

  One writer observed with pride that the children of his day "seemed to be born wise, and have gray hairs in their youth." A similar compliment was paid to Elizabeth at age six. Thomas Wriothesley, a somewhat unimaginative man soon to become principal secretary of state and then chancellor to Henry VIII, saw her in December of 1539, and brought her Christmas greetings from the king. Elizabeth was ushered in to him. having been carefully dressed and coached by Kat Ashley on how to behave. His message delivered. Wriothesley listened for Elizabeth's response. "She gave humble thanks." wrote Cromwell afterward, "enquiring again of his majesty's welfare, and that with as great a gravity as she had been forty years old. If she be no worse educated than she now appeareth to me, she will prove of no less honor to womanhood than shall beseem her father's daughter." 3

  Slavelike obedience to parents, precocious seriousness, modesty and prim decorum: these were the hallmarks of a well-brought-up child. Fathers and mothers were treated with a pious dutifulness akin to religious reverence. God and parents alone, the child was taught, were to be supplicated on both knees; one knee sufficed for everyone else. Stubborn, willful children were commonly made to crawl to their parents on their knees, scraping them raw across the entire length of the immense Tudor galleries as penance. A father's or mother's blessing was the precious sign of parental approval. From infancy children learned to kneel morning and evening and say "Father, I beseech you your blessing for charity." The parent, holding up his joined hands, would respond with a formula of blessing: "Our Lord bless you, child," or "May God guard you and lead you to great goodness." One parents' manual of the 1530s recommended that a "stiff-hearted" child, unwilling to submit to this filial ritual, be "whipped with a rod" until he was obedient; if too old to whip he was to be subjected to general abuse, with every member of the household hurling insults at him as they would a common criminal. 4

  Failure to observe "honorable esteem" toward parents had extreme consequences. Disobedient children were thought of as unnatural beings, "cruel murderers of their parents," who would at the very least be harshly punished by God for their impiety. Sometimes a magistrate was called in to impose a father's penalty on his son or daughter. But most parents would have found this excessively nice, preferring to follow the simple maxim "Whip the devil out of them!" for all misbehavior. Whippings, thrashings, severe spankings were everywhere incident to Tudor childrearing. Beating was seen as a sort of behavioral purgative, driving out the child's inborn inclination to wantonness and vice. Even the best-behaved children were pinched and cuffed and slapped when their perfection faltered; insensitive parents teased and threatened their tortured sons and daughters almost past endurance in the vague belief that affectionate treatment bred wrongdoing.

  Henry VIII fully subscribed to the prevailing view of punishment, admonishing parents "to imploy their diligence and busy care to educate and instruct their children by all means in virtue and goodness, and to restrain them from vices by convenient discipline and castigation." He seems not to have punished his children himself, but was quite merciless in instructing others to punish them for him. When Mary, stripped of her rights and title, stubbornly clung to the name of princess and would not yield precedence to Anne Boleyn or her daughter, Henry sent Norfolk to break her will. The duke shouted abuse and threatened every sort of savagery, saying at last that if she were his own daughter he would kill her, dashing her head against the wall until her skull cracked and became "soft as a boiled apple." Yet

  rough as Norfolk was, the king ordered him to be rougher, and was angry at him for going about his task too gently. 5

  To the little Elizabeth her father must have been a fearsome creature, toweringly tall and, by the time she was five or six, growing mountainously fat. He was no longer the nimble-footed athlete who jousted and danced with youthful abandon. He could still show agility on occasion, but he limped heavily on his painful legs and often had to rest them, and riding had become an effort. The hearty cordiality that had made the king a popular figure in his youth was not yet fully eclipsed, but darker powers of spirit were emerging in him, and the memory of friends and relatives he had sent to the block curdled his affections and stained his character. He was a stern, old-fashioned father, who believed in a father's godlike authority. "Although sons and daughters were bound to some obedience toward their mothers," he once wrote, "their chief duty was to their fathers." 6 And that duty consisted primarily in total, unhesitating obedience.

  Beyond deference to parents modest, "shamefaced" behavior was a principal goal. The temptations usual to childhood—fist-fighting, spitting, breaking windows, "casting snow or balls of snow" among myriad others —were severely punished, of course, but even such innocuous habits as running with other children "in heaps like a swarm of bees," or leaning against walls, or blushing and stammering at the teasing of other children were not tolerated. In his book of instructions for young children the great humanist Erasmus prescribed in minute detail proper control of the body. Shuffling the feet or wiggling the fingers or toes, he wrote, was indecorous, as was rolling the eyes or standing about in purposeless confusion. The arms, like birds' wings, should not swing idly but find some useful task to perform, perhaps in coordination with practice in bowing "after the fashion of England," bending the right knee first and then the left. When sitting or standing, the legs should be kept together—not as in Italy, Erasmus added, where everyone seemed to stand on one leg like a stork. And in walking, the child should cultivate a grave and seemly gait, neither so fast as to be undignified nor so slow as to appear to be loitering. 7

  When speaking the child was to frame his words pithily and to the point, uttering every word "with grace." Baby talk, like all other signs of childhood, was eliminated as early as possible, and very young children were taught to memorize "godly, grave and fruitful" maxims they could not possibly understand, such as "There is one invisi
ble God, creating himself and all creatures," and "He is of the highest good; without him nothing is good." Silence was preferable to speech in childhood, but if an adult spoke to a child the child was to answer as appositely as possible, speaking, as Erasmus put it, to clergy about God, doctors about health and painters

  about design. Whether adults spoke to children about childhood seems doubtful.

  But the strictures imposed on speech by the childrearing manuals were one thing, real family life another. Roger Ascham, Elizabeth's tutor during her adolescence and a highly proper, if not quite priggish, schoolmaster, wrote about his visit to a gentleman's house where a young child, "somewhat past four years old," could not manage to pronounce a short grace at table. "Yet," said Ascham, "he could roundly rap out so many ugly oaths, and those of the newest fashion, as some good man of four score years old hath never heard named before." It was easy enough to see where the problem lay; the little boy spent too much time with the serving men in the kitchen and stables, and picked up every word they uttered. But "that which was most detestable of all," wrote the earnest Ascham, "his father and mother would laugh at it." 8

  Nothing revealed good or ill breeding so quickly as behavior at the dinner table, and when Elizabeth was old enough to dine with the adults she had to master yet another realm of etiquette. She had to learn to manage a spoon and knife (no forks were used), to say "I thank you" politely even to dishes she could not eat, to lay picked bones neatly on a corner of her trencher for a servant to remove, and to try to ignore the dogs that licked her greasy fingers under the table. In his own fifteenth-century childhood, Erasmus recalled, food was valued; people kissed the very bread that fell on the floor as a mark of respect. Now that respect had fallen away, and heedless parents allowed their children to stuff themselves at table until they vomited. It would have been understandable, if not excusable, if the daughter of the gargantuan eater Henry VIII had stuffed herself to excess. But Elizabeth, at least in adult life, ate lightly, and there is no evidence of her overindulgence in childhood.

  Civilized eating habits called for more than proper management of food; neatness, sociability and discretion were required. To wipe one's hands on one's sleeves (or on the linen tablecloth) was unforgivable; if the sleeves were of the long and open kind that hung down in deep folds and threatened to get into the food, they should be thrown back over the shoulders, or turned up at the elbow and pinned out of the way. Caps were to be on throughout the meal, lest the hair "fall into the dishes," and the hair itself had to be kept combed to remove lice. Children had a unique problem at meals. They were taught to join in the table conversation, for to remain silent, "in stupor or ecstasy," was bad manners. Yet they could not speak until spoken to, and in households where the young were ignored this must have led to considerable tension as the meal drew to a close. Nor were they to join in any gossip that might be aired, nor reopen old quarrels, nor repeat

  afterward anything their elders said, especially if the elders were inebriated at the time. 9 It was an intricate initiation into the adult world, with its formalities and hypocrisies, an introduction to society in microcosm.

  The moral education of girls required special instruction, and in the training of Anne Boleyn's daughter extraordinary precautions must have been taken. It was the unchallenged conviction of sixteenth-century thought that women were far inferior to men in their capacity for goodness and virtue—as well as in intelligence and sound judgment. But Elizabeth bore a double stigma. She had not only the inherent incapacity and moral weakness of a female, but the added tendency toward wantonness and sin that was her presumed inheritance from her condemned mother. To make a virtuous, modest child from such unpromising material was Kat Ashley's principal task, though there is little evidence of how she went about it. Yet always assuming that she followed convention, the watchword of little Elizabeth's instruction must have been self-control.

  Self-control in avoiding "lustful movements" and other signs of sensuality; self-control in gestures, posture, and speech; self-control in keeping silent, or modestly soft-spoken, in the company of adults. Above all Kat must have sought to breed out of Elizabeth any sign of her mother's vivacious high spirits, any tendency to draw attention to herself through boisterous spontaneity or laughter. Laughter, Erasmus taught, indicated either empty-headedness or a wicked soul, or, in the extreme, utter madness. (Even smiling betokened deceit.) People whose laughter was as shrill as a neighing horse, or who showed all their teeth when they laughed, like a snarling dog, made their degeneracy plain for all to see.

  Of course it was impossible for Elizabeth not to laugh at Lucretia the Tumbler, Mary's fool, or not to show pleasure when her own minstrels played. But there was proper laughter and improper laughter. Proper laughter should not distort the features, but a well-bred child ought to cover his mouth with a handkerchief whenever he laughed, just in case. There were many facial expressions to be avoided: wrinkling the nose, twisting the mouth into unbecoming shapes, furrowing the brow or working it up and down "like a hedgehog"—Erasmus' catalog of undesirable behaviors reads like a bestiary—as well as yawning, sniffling, and sneezing. Sneezing in particular was surrounded with ritual. If an adult sneezed, the child was to remove his cap and say "Christ help you," or "Christ's mercy on you." If the child had to sneeze—something he should try with all his strength to prevent—he should turn away from his companions and bless his mouth with the sign of the cross afterward, then acknowledge the blessings of others by taking off his cap. 10

  Girls, fragile creatures that they were, needed constant supervision, both by the servants and waiting women who were always in attendance on them and by a relative or lady mistress. Their days were filled with purposeful activity, leaving little time for playing with dolls or riding hobbyhorses or running with a hoop.

  Needlework was their traditional pastime, and it took years of diligent labor to progress from the simple cross stitch, crewel and feather stitch of samplers to the twist, back stitch, satin stitch, and chain stitch required by intricate decorative embroidery. Little girls applied themselves to stitching the alphabet and sententious proverbs on wall hangings; by age six or seven they had progressed to fancier work and were able to decorate cushions or clothing. There were dozens of styles to master, and an accomplished needlewoman of ten or twelve could spend most of her free time hidden behind an embroidery frame, skeins of thread wound round her neck, her kirtle prickly with needles. Parents found the hours lost to needlework reassuring. One nobleman wrote that all daughters should be put to vast embroidery projects "that will ever be in the beginning and never ended." Kat Ashley seems to have held to this view, at least to an extent, for at age six Elizabeth presented her two-year-old brother Edward with a cambric shirt "of her own working," and in the following year she gave him another piece of needlework. 11

  But if Elizabeth spent a good deal of time stitching, she spent much more in the schoolroom, where under Kat's guidance she made remarkably rapid progress in learning to read and write.

  She had a bright, quick intelligence and a good memory, and languages —the core of her humanist education—came easily to her. When she began to puzzle out words is not known, but most likely she read with great facility by the age of five or six, for by then she had begun her second language: Latin. In both tongues short sentences gave way to longer ones with longer words, then to the Bible and Caesar and Cicero. In time Edward's tutors allowed her to join his lessons; eventually she acquired a tutor of her own.

  By then she had also begun to master the art of handwriting, with its accompanying lore of pens, paper and ink. Quill pens were made from the third or fourth feather of the wing of a goose, sharpened with a penknife, softened with spit and rubbed afterward on the underside of a piece of clothing, where the stain would be hidden. Ink too had to be mixed, the type of ink used depending on the haste of the writer and the intended permanency of the lettering. Children in Elizabeth's time wrote on paper —parchment was saved for official documents�
�and kept a second sheet

  of coarser stock at hand to blot their work and try out their pens. Some of this coarse paper used by Elizabeth as a girl has been preserved; on it she practiced again and again her brother's name. 12

  When all the materials had been made ready, writing could begin. The ink, stirred and thinned, was placed beside the right hand. Then the pen was dipped in, the excess ink shaken off, and the point touched to the practice sheet to make certain it was free of hair. Then the letters were carefully drawn, the student clenching his teeth and trying not to bend low over the page. ''As much as you can," a handwriting text warned, "write with your head upright: for if one stand with his head downward, humors fall down to his forehead, and into his eyes; whereof many infirmities do arise, and weakness of sight." 13 Slowly the beginning writer traced the alphabet, a cross, the Lord's Prayer, and the invocation "In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, Amen." Later, longer passages were written, sometimes translations of Latin texts or, still later, translations from English into Italian or French.

  Such was Elizabeth's early education: filial duty, submissive self-restraint, self-improving pastimes, the solid beginnings of a thorough classical education. And with it all, habits of religious devotion—morning services and evening services, Bible reading and prayer, a view of the world as God's creation blemished by human sin and redeemed by the sacrifice of God's son.