Puis apprenoit Latine et Grecque lettre
Par oraison, par histoire, et par mêtre.
The wonder of the records of her learning is increased when we remember the frequent overtures of marriage that were laid before her, which must somewhat have occupied her thoughts, also the extraordinary fluctuations of her fortunes. The demands upon her hours, in the time both of her prosperity and adversity, must have been great. In 1525, when the Emperor broke off his engagement to her to marry Isabel of Portugal, she was sent to hold High Court with viceregal splendour, as the first Princess of Wales at Ludlow Castle. There she stayed for eighteen months. The Countess of Salisbury was still her State governess, and Mr. Featherstone her Latin tutor. She did not keep strictly to the advice of the prudent Vives; for she gave considerable time to dancing and playing on the virginals, and in her privy purse expenses there are many entries of her losses when playing at cards. On her return to her father’s Court, she is recorded not only to have danced with him, but to have danced in the ballets, and acted in the Court masques of the day, as well as in one of the comedies of Terence. It was a new and hitherto unheard-of proceeding for Royal ladies to appear as stage performers, but the example seems to have been followed. (Mary was always devoted to the Drama, and spent more on it in a year than did either her father or her sister.) In her sudden fall from her high estate, she relinquished only her gaieties, but continued her studies, including domestic economy, inculcated by Vives. Mary was restored to Court favour after the death of Anne Boleyn, and was on friendly terms with her later stepmothers, especially Katharine Parr. At the request of the latter she undertook the translation of the Latin paraphrase of St. John by Erasmus into the English language. She meant to have translated more, but an attack of illness laid her aside. Her rendering of St. John was printed and published in the same volume with the translations of the other paraphrases of Erasmus by the celebrated reformers, Kay, Cox, Udall, Old, and Allen, though her name was not affixed to the first edition.
Among her scientific tastes was the study of botany, and she imported many foreign plants and trees, striving to naturalize them. She also had a special interest in clock-making, like her relative Charles V. This was not, in her time, so commonplace a manufacture as it is to-day. Her value for time, and the exact measurement thereof, carry us back in thought to the days of her predecessor Alfred, with his candle-measured hours.
Prepared as she was for the throne, the misfortunes of her life make us almost believe in the power of evil stars. Her period of depression lasted too long for her health and spirits; the doctrine of the virtue of irresponsible feminine obedience prevented her from ever showing her true nature, except once. Her courage and prudence at the coup d’état of Northumberland, her clemency afterwards, show what she might have been had she been allowed to act independently, as did the second royal student of the century.
Elizabeth was born on 7th September 1533. Her stars were fortunate, and the moon shone full upon her birth. Her physical health was excellent; her period of depression lasted just long enough to steady her flighty spirits and elevate her character. She was fortunate in the kind sympathy of Katharine Parr, that excellent and learned woman, who showed a genius for fulfilling wisely and tenderly the difficult duties of a stepmother. Elizabeth is said to have been very precocious, learning Latin, French, Italian, and music without difficulty. In a letter of the Princess Mary to her father, Henry VIII, 21 July 1536, she says: “My sister Elizabeth is well, and such a child toward as I doubt not but your Highness shall have cause to rejoice of in time coming.” She was four years old when her brother Edward was born, and Sir John Cheke, being appointed his tutor, sometimes gave her lessons. She was once reading with him when Leland called, and her tutor desired her to address the antiquary in Latin. She immediately did so, and the old scholar in return addressed to her four Latin verses of genuine admiration. By the age of twelve she had considerably advanced in history and geography, understood the principles of architecture, mathematics, and astronomy, was fond of poetry, and studied politics as a duty. She had a talent for languages, speaking French, Italian, Spanish, and Flemish with facility. Her tutor Ascham tells us what she had done in classics before she was sixteen. She had read almost the whole of Cicero and a great part of Livy, some of the Fathers, especially “St. Cyprian on the Training of a Maiden.” The select orations of Isocrates and the tragedies of Sophocles were her Greek text-books. During Mary’s reign Ascham wrote to John Sturmius:
The Lady Elizabeth and I are studying together, in the original Greek, the crown orations of Demosthenes and Æschines. She reads her lessons to me, and at one glance so completely comprehends not only the idiom of the language and the sense of the orator, but the exact bearings of the cause and the public acts, manners, and usages of the Athenian people that you would marvel to behold her.
In addition to the tongues, she studied rhetoric, philosophy, and divinity, and history remained her favourite study. In Ascham’s “Scholemaster,” which was not published until after his death, he praised her as being far above the ordinary university students. Scaliger declared that she knew more than any of the great men of her time, which was certainly flattery. But there are many apparently genuine anecdotes of her prompt replies to foreign ambassadors in their own tongue or in Latin.
During her happy years with her brother Edward she shared his studies and read with him the Scriptures. He called her his “sweet sister Temperance,” probably in allusion to that name in John Hall’s “Court of Virtue,” in which, instead of the heathen muses, the Christian virtues are grouped around their Queen.
Elizabeth appears early not only as a student but as an author. Much of the literature of the period was translation. At the age of twelve she rendered out of English into Latin, French, and Italian the prayers and meditations collected out of prime writers by Queen Katharine Parr. About the same time she translated as a treatise, published in 1548, the “Godly Meditation of the Christian Soule, compiled in French by Lady Margaret, Queen of Navarre, aptlie translated into English by the ryght vertuous Lady Elizabeth, daughter to our Soveraigne Lord King Henrie the VIII.” Appended to this was her metrical rendering of the fourteenth Psalm; and thus, curiously enough, Queen Elizabeth appears as the versifier of the first metrical Psalm printed with date. This little volume was reprinted in 1595, again in Bentley’s “Monument of Matrons,” and a facsimile edition was brought out by Dr. Percy Ames in 1897. Other verses are ascribed to her, and translations from Boethius and Plutarch.