Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (12 page)

Spoiled, pampered and the darling of all eyes from his earliest years, Henry had no doubts about the righteousness of his cause, and the opposition he now met infuriated him. Behind him, he heard the persuasive, nagging tones of Anne Boleyn and her family, daring him to complete the business he had begun, for they knew that their fates were bound up in this cause. He resolved that he would have his way. If the Emperor could play politics with the Pope, he too could bring pressure to bear on the Pope and gain his point by any means. The obstinacy and outrage of his wife also offended him and the two fell into miserable bickering which only drove Henry to the solace of Anne’s arms. The policy of Anne was to keep the royal family divided, and under her influence Mary was only allowed short and infrequent visits to her mother. Mary was going through puberty, and suffering with it; already she was showing those symptoms which later caused the French ambassador to ask anxiously if she were capable of bearing children. She was ill, in low spirits, and the doctor bled her too often. She begged to be with her parents, but Henry refused. In the summer of 1531, greatly angered by a summons to appear in Rome, he cut himself off from his obstinate family. Mary was sent to Richmond and Catherine to an insignificant manor called the More. King and Queen never met again. In the five years left to her Catherine was progressively moved to quieter, gloomier, more constricted lodgings, ending finally in one room at Kimbolton Castle, watched at every moment and allowed out for nothing except the Mass. She had with her one or two elderly, unpaid servants. She did her needlework, prayed, smuggled a few letters to her daughter and
her friends. She would not give up her claim to be Queen of England. In January 1536 she died; there was some suspicion of poisoning, but death, to one of her faith, could only be a relief from a wretched and tedious existence.

Though Henry had put Catherine away, the influence of the mother on the daughter could not be so easily set aside. The women were too much alike; both were straightforward and courageous, with simple, clear principles undisturbed by subtleties. In a world of shifting policies they inevitably appeared obstinate and bent on self-destruction. At first, Mary was not harassed. Henry’s early concern was to break Catherine and the Pope to his will. From 1529 onwards, with the help of a frightened and subservient Parliament, he began to attack the papal rights and privileges in England. In this fortuitous way he began the Reformation in England, though he himself still failed to get what he wanted from the Pope. In 1533 events forced Henry’s hand. Anne was pregnant and if the Pope would not annul the marriage with Catherine he must arrange a divorce by his own hand. In April he was secretly married to Anne; in May the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Cranmer, pronounced the marriage to Catherine invalid; and on 1st June Anne was crowned to no applause from a sullen populace. On 7th September the baby Elizabeth was born and the King now had the embarrassment of two daughters.

The desperate logic of Henry’s action now made his elder daughter illegitimate in his own eyes. The privileges that Mary had formerly enjoyed were to be transferred to Elizabeth; the household of the elder daughter was dissolved and Mary sent to stay with her baby half-sister at Hatfield. Mary understood the implication of the move, but could not believe that her father had ordered it and earned ‘the King’s high displeasure’ for questioning it. Henry now had both Catherine and Mary opposed to his will, for neither would renounce the title and position they thought were theirs by right; and Henry with his usual heartlessness began to play the two women against each other, threatening Catherine especially that her daughter would be sent abroad, forced into a nunnery, or into a base marriage unless both did what the King wanted. But Catherine, who was beyond fear herself, knew exactly the way to steady Mary’s resolution. ‘Daughter,’ she wrote in the winter of 1533, ‘I have heard such tidings that I do perceive, if it is true, the time is come that God Almighty will prove you; and
I am very glad of it, for I trust He doth handle you with a very good love.’ She sent Mary a
Life of Christ
and the
Epistles
of Jerome; advised her to play the virginal for her recreation; and cautioned her to be as quiet and obedient as possible: ‘Speak you few words, and meddle nothing.’ For mother and daughter the King’s acts were against the laws of the Church and therefore should be resisted with all the confidence of a serene faith; oppression and suffering were merely the expectations of a good Christian.

The conflict between Henry and Mary was the more pathetic because they kept their affection for each other. The King was exasperated by Mary and threatened ‘to abate her stubbornness and pride’, but even Chapuys, the Emperor’s ambassador and the chief friend and adviser to both Catherine and Mary, noted that he still spoke of his daughter very fondly. Once Mary was removed to Hatfield, Henry left her in peace. But the new Queen, Anne Boleyn, jealous of the hold Mary had on the King’s heart and frightened for the future of herself and her own daughter, persecuted Mary maliciously. Anne boasted, Chapuys reported, ‘that she will make of the Princess a maid-of-honour in her royal household, that she may perhaps give her too much dinner on some occasion,
¹
or marry her to some varlet’. On Anne’s orders Mary was kept in the house, forbidden to exercise in the garden or to attend Mass. She was spied upon and her papers searched; she was separated from her old attendants, some of whom were imprisoned and interrogated; she was told to eat at the common table or starve; and the special diet ordered by Mary’s doctor was denied her on the grounds that it cost too much—‘at the least to the sum of £26.13.4’. And if Mary was not obedient Anne told her aunt Lady Shelton, the guardian of the household at Hatfield, to administer a few slaps across the face ‘considering the bastard that she was’. All this Mary bore with dignity; she wept in the privacy of her room, but in public held her head high and insisted as well as she could on her rights as a princess.

With misguided simplicity Mary thought that if only she could speak with her father all would be well. Anne was careful to keep them apart, but Mary’s hopes were illusory. Henry was so far gone in despotism that he could see no good but his own desire,
and no law but his own will. The only limit on his selfish appetite was a canny instinct for the feelings of the people and what they would stand. State and Church he reformed into his own instruments. In 1534 the Act of Succession declared his elder daughter a bastard; later in the same year the Act of Supremacy made the King Christ’s English vicar. Mary, the most pious Catholic, could not be expected to assent to either of these measures. Yet, like all subjects of the crown, assent she must. Those who refused the oath faced death. Within a very short time the headsman’s axe was busily at work; John Fisher, as saintly a man as there was in England, fell, and not even Sir Thomas More, friend, loyal servant and good companion of Henry’s earlier years, was spared.

The oath was brought to Catherine and Mary, and naturally both refused to take it. But Henry, always the astute politician, knew he could not afford to execute Mary. She had a large following in the country and the King, pressed by foreign enemies, would not provoke a rebellion. The Pope had recently judged the royal matrimonial cause in favour of Catherine and had excommunicated the King when he would not take his wife back. The Emperor Charles, Mary’s cousin, was increasing his power and must not be goaded into an attack on England. The civilized in Europe were horrified by Henry’s barbaric executions, and England had few friends. Henry saw that Catherine and Mary must be made to take the oath, to acknowledge the King’s right and to give their assent to their own indignity. He wanted Mary alive and submissive, and he guarded her carefully so that Chapuys and her friends could not smuggle her out of England.

At the beginning of January 1536, Mary heard of the death of her beloved mother. On 29th January, the day of Catherine’s funeral, Anne Boleyn miscarried of a boy, an event which doomed her. Thomas Cromwell drew up her indictment and on the 19th May she was executed. A few days later Henry married Jane Seymour and began once again the attempt to provide a son for the English throne. Catherine’s death had relieved him from the immediate threat of war, and also of his most embarrassing opponent. In her moving last letter to the King Catherine had commended ‘unto you Mary our daughter, beseeching you to be a good father to her’, but for Henry policy came before fatherly solicitude and he continued the attack on his ill and grief-stricken daughter, delegating to the task Cromwell, his most wily and competent minister.

In June 1536 a second Act of Succession made both Mary and the child Elizabeth illegitimate and demanded Mary’s submission to the Act. By subtle diplomacy, pretending to be the barrier between her and the King’s anger, Cromwell worked his way into Mary’s confidence. On 13th June he sent a commission headed by the Duke of Norfolk with the paper for her to sign, but he had misjudged her resolution; she sent the delegation back with contemptuous arguments. Mary was taken from her companions, held incommunicado and watched night and day. Alone, sick and only twenty years old, Mary managed to get word to Chapuys asking what he and his master, the Emperor, would have her do. Judging that Henry was now determined to execute her if she refused and thinking her more important to Spain alive than dead, they advised her to sign. That advice from her warmest and most influential friends decided her. She took the document Cromwell had sent her and signed it without reading it, denying the Pope, recognizing her father as the head of the English Church, acknowledging her mother’s ‘incestuous and unlawful’ marriage and her own illegitimacy.

For the first and perhaps the only time in her life Mary acted against her faith and her principles. Her rigid adherence to both in the future may be put down in part to remorse for this one fall. Henry was determined to break her, and who was she to set her puny powers against the full majesty of the King? For four years, in the sensitive time between sixteen and twenty, she was almost a prisoner and treated roughly and spitefully. With her inexperienced mind she had to resist the persuasive arguments of Cromwell. At last, with her mother dead, with her Spanish advisers counselling submission, and with the likelihood of execution if she refused, she gave way. It is a measure of her character that Henry found it harder to tame his daughter than it was to alter the laws and religion of England to his own convenience.

‘As soon as the news of her subscription arrived, incredible joy was shown in all the Court.’ The Lady Mary—as she was now called—was re-united with her father and his new Queen; for the remaining ten years of Henry’s reign she lived peacefully enough on the sidelines of the court. She was no longer a threat to the King’s policy; in 1536 he had put down the rebellious Catholics of the Pilgrimage of Grace; in October 1537 the succession was secured by the birth of his long-awaited son. He could now
recognize his eldest child and allow his natural generosity to reign. He gave her a household of forty-two people, and a decent allowance to which he added presents of cash from time to time. Her well-kept accounts are the best record of her daily life.

Having leisure, security and an energetic mind, Mary returned to her studies. A French visitor spoke of her new interest in mathematics, physics and astronomy, besides further studies in the classics, history and languages. She wrote a little, both prose and poetry, and did it competently. Three Latin prayers of hers survive, and also a translation from Erasmus; a lighter Ballade mentioned by Cromwell unfortunately has not survived. She practised her music. Like her father in his youth, she was very active, a great walker and a great rider despite her small, frail body. She was a sociable young woman; indeed, observers at court noted that her little sister Elizabeth was the reserved, contained one, while Mary was jolly. She liked dancing and had her father’s appetite for gambling; cards, bowls, riding, any sport was fit for a wager, an indulgence that often strained her budget.

She was both generous and affectionate. Her account books record the presents she gave, not only the gifts to the members of the royal family and to the courtiers, but also the kind offerings to the poor and the humble: 20s. to London prisoners, 15s. to an ill child, 8s. 6d. ‘to my Lord Marquess’s servant for singing’, 20d. ‘for bringing unto my Lady’s Grace bacon and eggs’, and a shilling for a poor woman bringing apples. To Elizabeth and little Edward she appeared to be all that an elder sister should be. ‘My sister Elizabeth’, she assured Henry, ‘is in good health and, thanks be to our Lord, such a child toward as I doubt not your Highness shall have cause to rejoice of in time coming.’ When Elizabeth suffered from Henry’s neglect, following the execution of her mother, Mary helped her as best she could from her allowance. And Mary doted on her little brother Edward, showering him with the affection that she might have given to her own children had she been blessed with any. Edward responded with a devotion of his own, declaring to her in Latin: ‘I love you as much as a brother may love his dearest sister.’ Even when the serious youth became a strong Protestant he still preferred his gay eldest sister, though he deplored her Catholicism. With Henry’s succession of queens, also, Mary was on good terms. She had a short-lived quarrel with Catherine Howard, but Anne of Cleves and Catherine Parr
remained her friends whatever the circumstances at court.

Henry died in January 1547. For the last years of his reign Mary had carefully avoided all interference with politics and religious strife. She was silent when her friends were exiled or executed. When her oldest and dearest companion, the aged Countess of Salisbury, was hacked to death by a bungling executioner, Mary was so ill the doctors feared for her life, but she said nothing. Henry had left the doctrine of his English faith Catholic in most essentials, but with the coming of young Edward VI the Protestant party had their moment and seized it. The practice of the Mass was ridiculed; priests were attacked at the altar; a dead cat was tonsured, dressed in robes and nailed to a board with the Host in its paws. The Catholic Lord Chancellor was dismissed and Gardiner and Bonner, the most Catholic of Henry’s bishops, were imprisoned. In 1549 an Act of Uniformity forbade the sacrifice of the Mass and based worship on Cranmer’s
Book of Common Prayer
. The penalties for non-conformity were mild enough, but the Protector and the Council had the difficult task of persuading Mary, newly restored as heiress to the throne under the terms of Henry’s will, to conform to an Act of Parliament.