Page:The Queens of England.djvu/404

 362 THE QUEENS OF ENGLAND. where she then took up her abode. Mary is described as being, at that period, not only a healthy, but a handsome child, of a lively disposition. The custom of offering rich gifts to royalty at Christmas, and on other festivals, was then much practiced ; and those presented to the princess by her relatives, sponsors, and the nobility of the court, were very costly ; those offered by her godfather, Cardinal Wolsey, being the most so of all. Mary had attained her sixth year, when the Emperor Charles the Fifth visited England, and a treaty of marriage was en- tered into, as stated in the life of Katharine of Arragon. The emperor quitted England, leaving the youthful princess fully impressed with the belief that she was one day to become his bride. Katharine was most desirous that her daughter should prove worthy of the elevated station she was expected to fill ; and to effect this point she consulted Ludovicus Vives, a man esteemed among the most learned of his time, on the education of the Princess Mary. His instructions bear the evidence not only of his erudition, but of his strict morality; for he prohibited the perusal of all light books, as calculated to draw her atten- tion from graver ones, and to corrupt her imagination, while he recommended serious and religious works, of which he sent a list. Of the child's natural abilities and application a notion may be formed by the fact, that at eight years old she was able to translate Latin into English with a facility that merited the commendations of her preceptor. While Mary was pursuing a system of education that left but too little time for the indulgence of the pleasures of childhood — pleasures as necessary for health in the first stage of youth as sunshine is for the expansion of flowers — Henry was begin- ning to entertain a project that must inevitably lead to the destruction of the treaty, which had in all probability induced the queen to adopt so rigid a code. The divorce of the mother, the niece of the Emperor of Spain, must, of course, annihilate every prospect of the mar- riage of the daughter with that sovereign. But while Henry was meditating the most cruel injury he could inflict on the mother, he was lavishing on his daughter all the gauds of state and all the splendor befitting the heiress of his kingdom. With a character like his, in which dissimula- tion formed so striking a feature, it may be surmised that this ostentatious exhibition of Mary as the successor to his throne may have originated in a scheme to procure her some advan-