The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

Despite their vulnerability, children under the age of ten constituted a quarter of the entire population
of England in the mid sixteenth century. Though hardly silent in their own time, they have almost
no voice in history. Others wrote for them, or about them, when they remembered them, but no
children, even the most precocious, even King Edward VI, quite spoke for themselves. Certain statistics about their lives are telling. Children, whether rich or poor, had brothers and sisters, for
in marriages where births could hardly be planned one child followed another. Many brothers and
sisters were step-brothers and sisters, because perhaps as many as 30 per cent of all those marrying
in the mid-century were widows or widowers, and many brought children from the first marriage
to the next. Children lived to learn the sorrow of the deaths of parents an siblings.
The pain experienced at the death of a child reaches down the ages. The Church taught that the
child was a gift of God whom God might take back again, and bereaved parents wrote conventially
of their departed children enjoying the 'joys of Heaven'. Ben Jonson, at the end of the century,
dutifully acknowledged at the death of his first daughter: 'All heaven's gifts being heaven's due/
It makes the father less to rue'. Yet he recollected the loss of his first son, dead of the plague in 1603,
with less tranquility:

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
Oh, could I lose all father now!

Parents loved their children and, loving them, they had to chastise and warn them of the spiritual
danger that surrounded them. Children were taught from an early age that there was hell as well as
heaven, and that the Devil waited to tempt them. As a child John Stow, London's chronicler (born in
1525), was told often of the terrible apparition that bell-ringers saw at St Michael Cornhill during
a storm on St Jame's Eve: it was the Devil. Stow poked feathers in the clefts the Devil's paw had
raked the tower. Children were taught the dangers of sin because they were not invariably regarded
as innocent, as Christ had seen them, but as tainted by the Fall and ready, as Bishop Bonner wrote,
to 'take and embrace vice, unthriftness and all manner naughtiness'. They must be kept from that
sin to which their nature impelled them. Freedom in a child was not seen as an inalienable right
but as wantonness. John Johnson, a London merchant, wrote to his brother-in-law, to whom he had sent his four-year-old daughter Charity to safeguard her from the plague: his wife feared that 'you
will make Charity a wanton in suffering her to have her will'. This was no favour; it would 'cause
her to have strokes [be spanked] thereafter. I pray you, therefore, let her be kept in awe'.
Children must, above all, remember the Fourth Commandment: 'Honour thy father and thy mother.'
In a society which was founded upon obedience, obedience began with a child's duty to parents.
They learnt to ask, kneeling, for their parents' blessing: 'Mother, I beseech you of charity, give me
your blessing.' And parents should respond, making the sign of the cross and saying, 'In the name
of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Amen.' The duty remained while the parents lived. Discipline,
obedience, manners: these were inculcated early, when the child was most amenable, and by force
where persuasion failed. Tudor parents were taught that 'who spareth the rod, hateth the child',
though the correction must be given 'in charity'. 'Let not the feminine pity of your wives destroy
your children', wrote Edmund Dudley; 'pamper them not at home in furred coats and their shirts
to be warmed against their uprising . . . Dandle them not too dearly lest folly fasten on them.'
So constant were the admonitions against spoiling and pampering ('cockering') children that we may imagine the ambivalence of parents torn between tenderness and duty. Sabine Johnson, the same
mother who wished little Charity to be 'kept in awe', asked her husband: 'I pray you, cast away a
little money for some baby [doll]', for their son. The same parents who could bear to send children
away to be nursed for two years showed the greatest solicitude for their welfare. Some teachers,
at least, knew that beating was not the best way to lead a child to study. The Abbot of Reading,
tutor to six-year-old James Basset, 'playeth him to his learning, both to Latin and to French'.
By the age of seven, children became helping hands in a peasant household; both boys and girls
were expected to work. Girls helped their mothers, fetching water, building fires, cooking, and
watching younger siblings; boys herded cattle, tended geese, sheep and pigs, gleaned in the fields,
collected firewood and fished.