Mary Tudor (14 page)

I
N FEBRUARY 1535, TWO WEEKS BEFORE HER NINETEENTH BIRTHDAY
, Mary fell “dangerously ill” with pain in her head and stomach. It was feared she had been poisoned. Few had forgotten Anne Boleyn’s threats against her.

Henry was reported to be “as much grieved at her sickness as any father could be for his daughter”; he sent his own physician, Sir William Butts, and instructed Chapuys to choose one or two others to visit her. Their presence was to be strictly controlled: they were not to speak to Mary unless other people were present and then in no language other than English for fear that she would use them to convey messages to the emperor.
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Butts informed the king that Mary’s illness was partly caused by “sorrow and trouble.” He advised that she should be sent to her mother, arguing that it would be both less expensive and better for her health and that if anything did happen to her, the king would be free from suspicion. But Henry did nothing. It was a “great misfortune,” he declared, that she was so stubborn, as she “took away from him all occasion to treat her as well as he would.”
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When Katherine learned of her daughter’s condition, she asked Chapuys to petition the king to reconsider. She had “grave suspicion” about the cause of Mary’s ill health and insisted that “there is no need of any person but myself to nurse her … I will put her in my own bed where I sleep, and watch her when needful.”
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But Henry again did nothing. He blamed Katherine for Mary’s “obstinacy and disobedience,” asserting that “although sons and daughters were bound to some obedience towards their mothers, their chief duty was to their
fathers.” He believed that if Mary had the comfort of her mother, “there would be no hope of bringing her to do what he wanted, to renounce her lawful and true succession.”
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In this trial of wills, he hoped to break Mary’s resolve by starving her of affection and blunt the threat that she and her mother represented. “The Lady Katherine,” Henry declared, “is a proud, stubborn woman of high courage. If she took it into her head to take her daughter’s part, she could quite easily take the field, muster a great army, and wage against me a war as fierce as any her mother Isabella ever wages in Spain.”
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It was a grudging acknowledgment of Katherine’s resolve and her mighty political lineage.

Henry did agree that Mary could be moved to a house nearer Kimbolton, where her mother’s doctor, Miguel de la Soa, could attend her, but on condition that Katherine did not attempt to see her. Writing to Cromwell, Katherine offered her thanks:

Katherine had wanted Mary to be brought to her, she said, as a “little comfort and mirth” would “undoubtedly be half a health unto her,” explaining “I have proved the like by experience, being diseased of the same infirmity.” Both mother and daughter suffered from “deep melancholy.”

Katherine told Cromwell that she did not understand how Henry could distrust them or why he would not allow mother and daughter to be together:

Mary received word through Lady Shelton that the king now regarded her as his “worst enemy.” She had already succeeded in turning most of the Christian princes of Europe against him, and he believed “her conduct was calculated to encourage conspiracy.”
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Cromwell openly lamented the fact that, by their very existence, Katherine and Mary were preventing good relations between England and the Holy Roman Empire. If Mary were to die, it would do far less harm than good, as the immediate result would be a treaty of mutual goodwill between Henry and Charles.
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If only God had “taken them to himself,” Cromwell cursed, no one would have questioned Henry’s marriage to Anne or the right of their daughter to succeed him; the possibility of internal revolt and war with the emperor would never have arisen.
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By early January 1535, Henry was losing patience. Mary was told that she must take the oath and “on pain of her life she must not call herself Princess or her mother Queen but that if ever she does she will be sent to the Tower.”
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THE ACT OF SUPREMACY
, passed in November 1534, authorized the king to assume the Supreme Headship of the Church and repudiated any “foreign laws or foreign authority to the contrary.” Another act established an oath of obedience to the king, which involved a renunciation of the power of any “foreign authority or potentate”—that is, the pope—as well as an endorsement of the Boleyn marriage and the succession. Moreover, by the Treasons Act it was now treasonable, either by overt act or by malicious “wish, will or desire, by words or in writing,” to do harm to Henry, Anne, or their heirs, to deprive the king of his titles (including supreme head) or to call him heretic, tyrant, or
usurper.
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To deny the royal supremacy, even to fail to acknowledge it, was high treason. The stakes had risen.

The first victims of the new treason laws were John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, and the humanist and former lord chancellor Thomas More; both were high-profile opponents of the royal divorce and supporters of Katherine and Mary. They were condemned for refusing to swear to the Act of Succession and for their denial of Henry as supreme head of the English Church. As he faced the block on Tower Hill in June 1535, Fisher addressed the gathered crowd: “Christian people, I am come hither to die for the faith of Christ’s Catholic Church.”
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Once he was dead, his naked corpse was displayed at the site of the execution, as Henry had demanded, and his head put on a spike. Nine days later, More’s sentence of a traitor’s death was commuted from disembowelment to beheading in deference to his former office. He was butchered on July 6 with one stroke of the ax. His corpse was taken to the Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula within the Tower, where it was interred; his head was parboiled and impaled on a pole on London Bridge.
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News of the executions shocked Europe. In Italy the bishop of Faenza described his horror on reading that the English king had caused “certain religious men” to be “ripped up in each other’s presence, their arms torn off, their hearts cut out and rubbed upon their mouths and faces.”
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Meanwhile, Anne Boleyn urged Henry to mete out punishment to the real traitors, as Chapuys recounted: “She is incessantly crying after the King that he does not act with prudence in suffering the Queen and the Princess to live, who deserved death more than all those who have been executed and that they were the cause of all.”
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Fearing for their lives, Mary wrote to the emperor, pleading for immediate intervention, while Katherine addressed the pope.

Through a letter to Chapuys, Mary urged her cousin Charles to take action:

Mary was now desperate to escape England. A servant of the imperial ambassador who visited her at Eltham reported that “she thinks of nothing else than how it may be done, her desire for it increasing every day.”
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Chapuys had raised the prospect frequently over the previous two years, but then the immediate danger had receded and plans had not developed further. This time it was different: Mary felt the danger to be greater than ever. She sent word to Chapuys, “begging him most urgently to think over the matter, otherwise she considered herself lost, knowing they wanted only to kill her.”
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Suspicious of Mary’s intentions, Henry ordered that armed watches be kept around every house Mary stayed at and troops were placed at every seaport within a day’s ride of these residences. On November 6, Chapuys wrote that according to Gertrude Blount, marchioness of Exeter, the king “has lately said to some of his most confidential councillors that he would no longer remain in the trouble, fear and suspense he had so long endured on account of the Queen and Princess” and that they “should see, at the coming Parliament, to get him released therefrom, swearing most obstinately that he would wait no longer.”
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All talk was of imminent martyrdom. Weeks later the imperial agent Dr. Pedro Ortiz wrote of the likelihood that Katherine and the princess would be “sentenced to martyrdom which she [Katherine] was ready to receive in testimony of the Holy Faith, as the Cardinal of Rochester and other holy martyrs have done.”
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Mary would, Chapuys feared, be made an example of, “to show that no one ought to disobey the laws” and that Henry meant to fulfill what “had been foretold of him; that is, that at the beginning of his reign he would be as gentle as a lamb, and at the end, worse than a lion.”
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