Mary Tudor by Linda Porter Read Free Book Online

she so impressed the French lords sent to inspect her. Again, this may have been, like the musicianship, a skill inherited from her father, who used it to communicate with the emperor’s French-speaking diplomats throughout his reign. There would have been no need for such a young child to converse at any length, only to demonstrate that she could exchange pleasantries and formal greetings. As an adult she relied on her French for communication with the imperial ambassadors at a time when they were almost her sole support and, later, for speaking to her husband. She may have picked up some Spanish from those around her mother, overhearing the conversations of Katherine with people like her confessor and her ladies-in-waiting, but the numbers of those who had, long ago, accompanied Katherine from Spain were dwindling, and the queen did not regularly use her native tongue any more except with her priests. Mary could, though, read Spanish; in the 1530s, when their worlds changed so dramatically and Katherine needed to be very careful in her letters to her daughter, she wrote to Mary in Spanish.The princess, however, does not seem to have spoken it well, and she did not use it in public.
    We do not know who taught Mary her first French, though there were French speakers at court and she may have received initial coaching from one of them. Nor is it possible to say with precision how she acquired basic literacy in English. The notion that Katherine of Aragon sat down and taught her daughter the alphabet is fanciful. It is appealing to think of the Spanish queen and her dutiful daughter bending their heads over Mary’s first attempts to form letters, but they were apart too often for Katherine to have had a sustained role as a teacher. 2 Her oversight of the process of Mary’s education was, though, close. She followed Mary’s progress keenly, and there is no doubt that her influence would have started as soon as Mary could talk and be socialised.
    There is not a separate line in the princess’s accounts for a schoolmaster until she went off to Wales in 1525, when Dr Richard Fetherstone is first mentioned. Probably Mary learned the basics of literacy from her chaplain, Henry Rowle. General education as well as religious instruction was one of the services performed by chaplains for aristocratic households. 3 At the age of nine, Mary could already write in Latin, and her first steps in this language, the prerequisite of greater learning, may well have been guided by one of the foremost English humanist scholars of his day, the royal physician,Thomas Linacre.
    Linacre was a distinguished Oxford scholar who, like many of his contemporaries, had travelled widely in Italy at the end of the 15th century. He combined an interest in Greek with medicine and his translation of the Greek physician, Galen, into Latin gave him a European reputation. He took his medical degree in Padua in 1496, and two years after Mary’s birth, in 1518, he and five other physicians, supported by Wolsey, petitioned the king to set up a College of Physicians in London. Katherine of Aragon had first met him during her time as princess of Wales, when he had been Prince Arthur’s tutor. She seems to have supported his appointment as royal physician when HenryVIII came to the throne. His credentials as a scholar would have made him an ideal choice for introducing a princess to the study of classical and humanist Latin.
    By the time Mary came to sit down with her first Latin textbooks, probably at the age of around seven, Linacre was more than 60 years old and greatly revered. He counted among his friends the three leading English humanists, More, Colet and Grocyn, and the towering European figure of Erasmus. He had already published, in English, two works on Latin grammar, and was shortly to bring out a more detailed one, in Latin, for students who had gone beyond the basics. Mary’s ability in Latin was widely remarked upon by the time she was 12, so it seems