Mary Tudor (20 page)

HENRY NOW TOOK
action against the old Catholic families of royal Plantagenet blood, the Poles, Nevilles, and Courtenays, who had long been objects of suspicion for their loyalty to Katherine of Aragon and Mary. Reginald Pole had denounced Henry’s tyranny and heresy in the bitterest terms and, according to reports by the emperor’s agents, had hoped that the unrest in England might lead to “his marrying the princess himself.”
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As John Wroth wrote in a letter to Lord Lisle, who was in Calais on May 18, “Pole intended to have married my old lady Mary and betwixt them both should again arise the old doctrine of Christ.”
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It was such a union, or a rising in support of Mary against Edward’s succession, that the regime particularly feared.

In late August 1538, Sir Geoffrey Pole, the younger brother of Reginald, was arrested for treason and imprisoned in the Tower. Under interrogation he implicated his elder brother Henry Pole, Lord Montague; Sir Edward Neville, Montague’s brother-in-law; and Henry Courtenay, marquess of Exeter—the king’s cousin—in an alleged conspiracy that sought to deprive the king of his supremacy and marry Mary to Reginald Pole. By November 4, Exeter, his wife, Gertrude, and their twelve-year-old son, Edward, were committed to the Tower. Soon after, the elderly countess of Salisbury was interrogated and her house searched. She was convicted without trial of aiding and abetting her sons Henry and Reginald and of having “committed and p[er]petrated div[er]se and sundry other detestable and abominable treasons” and was imprisoned also.
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On Monday, December 9, Montague, Sir Edward Neville, and Exeter were tried and, having received unanimous guilty verdicts—on the basis of remarks such as “I like well the proceedings of Cardinal Pole”—were executed at Tower Hill.
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Two days after Christmas, Reginald Pole set out again secretly from Rome to rally the Catholic powers against “the most cruel and abominable tyrant” the king of England.
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In the Pact of Toledo in January 1539, Charles and Francis agreed to make no further agreements with England. It seemed that a crusade, termed the “Enterprise
of England,” was about to begin.
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The pope was determined to “chastise the irreverence and extravagance of the King of England.”
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Counties were mustered, defenses were strengthened, and the country prepared for war. Meanwhile, diplomatic overtures were made to the Schmalkaldic League of German princes and any other rulers opposed to Charles or the pope.

On New Year’s Eve, Sir Nicholas Carew, a onetime royal favorite, was apprehended and questioned. A letter had allegedly been found at the home of the marchioness of Exeter that implicated him in the treason for which the marquess had been executed earlier in the month. Carew was tried and convicted on February 14, 1539, and beheaded on Tower Hill three weeks later. For Mary, the execution of so many of those who had supported her and her mother served as a sharp reminder of her father’s capacity for vengeance and cruelty. As Chapuys reflected, “It would seem that they want to leave her as few friends as possible.”
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WITH RENEWED FEARS
of war against him, Henry was keen to secure alliances among the Lutheran princes in Germany. In mid-January 1539, the English ambassador Christopher Mont was sent to the duke of Saxony to discuss the prospect of a double match between Henry and the duke of Cleves’s eldest daughter, Anne, and between Mary and the young duke of Cleves himself.
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Cromwell instructed Mont to make clear that although Mary was “only the King’s natural daughter”—meaning she was not of “princely status”—she was “endowed, as all the world knows, with such beauty, learning and virtues, that when the rest was agreed, no man would stick for any part concerning her beauty and goodness.”
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Though the negotiations for a marriage with Mary and the young duke of Cleves came to nothing, by the autumn an alliance had been secured between Henry and Anne, the sister of Duke William of Cleves. The duke was a natural ally for Henry: a committed Habsburg opponent yet not a Lutheran. Agreement was reached in October, and, as negotiations continued for a match with Mary and another of the German princes, Anne of Cleves began her journey to England.

Meanwhile, Thomas Wriothesley, the earl of Southampton, was
sent to Mary to instruct her that she should entertain the prospect of marriage with the Lutheran Duke Philip of Bavaria, who was in England in advance of Anne of Cleves’s arrival.
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Mary responded that although she knew the matter was of “great importance,” she “would wish and desire never to enter that kind of religion, but to continue still a maid during her life,” although she “committed herself to his majesty, her benign and merciful father.” On December 22, she agreed to meet the duke in the gardens of Westminster Abbey. Speaking partly in German with an interpreter and partly in Latin, the duke declared his intention to take Mary as his wife, if it were agreeable to her, and was bold enough to kiss her.
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When he left England in the new year, Duke Philip believed he would soon be returning to marry the princess. The French ambassador, Charles de Marillac, expected the wedding to take place within “ten or fifteen days,” and in December a draft treaty was drawn up.
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By January, word reached Rome that Mary had already married “without the advice or knowledge of the Emperor.” Chapuys sought desperately to learn if rumors of her marriage to a Lutheran duke were true. They were not. For Henry the negotiations had never been intended as anything more than a ploy to strengthen his hand against the emperor at a time when he feared a Catholic crusade against him.

Steps were also taken to suppress popular heresy and to appease conservatives at home. In the Parliament of 1539, the Act of Six Articles was passed, intended to head off the rising tide of heresy. It reaffirmed the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, with denial punishable by death by burning; rejected Communion in both kinds for the laity; required priests to remain celibate; and advocated the continued use of private Masses and auricular confession. Since the break with Rome, only John Lambert, an Anabaptist and one of Europe’s most radical heretics, had been burned for heresy. The passing of the Six Articles was intended to reassure Europe’s Catholic rulers that Henry, despite the schism, was fundamentally orthodox and they need not respond to the pope’s calls for a crusade against him.

In any event, no invasion came. The pope withheld the promised bull and recalled Cardinal Pole to Rome.
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France was unwilling to take action without a commitment from Charles, and the emperor, faced with the threat of the Ottoman Turks and the Lutherans in Germany
and deteriorating relations with France, was not prepared to act against England.
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Instead, negotiations for an English alliance and a marriage with Mary were reopened with both sides.
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Yet as Marillac, the French ambassador, observed, “The King will not marry [his daughter] out of England, lest the crown of England should be claimed for her as legitimate by the Church and not of those born since the withdrawal of obedience to the Holy See, like the prince.”
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Moreover, as Henry made clear to Marillac, “I love my daughter well, but myself and honour more.” He would not declare Mary legitimate and refused to allow the invalidity of his first marriage to be doubted.
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Mary, then twenty-six, expressed her situation to one of her chamberwomen, an informant of Marillac. “It was folly to think that they would marry her out of England, or even in England,” she said, “for she would be, while her father lived, only Lady Mary, the most unhappy Lady in Christendom.”
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O
N DECEMBER 27, 1539, ANNE OF CLEVES ARRIVED IN ENGLAND
. “The day,” the duke of Suffolk reported to Cromwell, “was foul and windy, with much hail [that blew] continually in her face.”
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She journeyed to Canterbury and then to Sittingbourne and Rochester, where she remained for New Year’s Eve. The following day, a party of six gentlemen went unannounced into Anne’s chamber at Rochester. All were disguised, yet one was the king. He had been scheduled to meet Anne formally at Blackheath on January 3, but curiosity had gotten the better of him.
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“How ye liked the Lady Anne?” Cromwell asked the king on his return to Greenwich. “Nothing so well as she was spoken of,” Henry replied, adding, “if [he] had known as much before as [he] then knew, she should not have come within this realm.” He now asked his minister, “What remedy?” To which Cromwell responded, “I know none, he was very sorry therefore.”
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The twenty-four-year-old was not the beauty that Hans Holbein’s portrait, sent to England before her arrival, had portrayed. Henry immediately questioned her virginity, observing that she had the fuller figure expected of an older woman rather than the slender figure of a maid. He believed she was already married to François, heir to the Duchy of Lorraine, to whom she had been betrothed at the age of twelve.

The marriage was postponed while Cromwell investigated whether the Lorraine match had been properly broken off. Two days later, with assurances from the Cleves ambassadors, Henry reluctantly resumed
preparations for the wedding. Francis I and Charles were celebrating the New Year together in Paris, and Henry needed to maintain the alliance with the German princes. As he later declared, “If it were not … for fear of making a ruffle in the world—that is, to be a means to drive her brother into the hands of the Emperor, and the French King’s hands, being now together, I would never have married her.”
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When Anne made a solemn declaration before the Privy Council “that she was free from all contracts,” Henry urgently petitioned his chief minister. “Is there none other remedy,” he questioned, “but that I must needs, against my will, put my neck in the yoke?” Cromwell hurried away without offering a reply.
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Within a few months the cost of Cromwell’s blunder would become clear.

AT EIGHT IN
the morning on Tuesday, January 6, 1540, the Feast of the Epiphany, Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, celebrated the marriage of Henry and Anne of Cleves in the Chapel Royal at Greenwich. Both Mary and Elizabeth attended the service.
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The next morning, Cromwell visited the king in the Privy Chamber. “How liked the Queen?” he asked, to which Henry replied, “Surely, as ye know, I liked her before not well, but now I like her much worse. For I have felt her belly and her breasts, and thereby, as I can judge, she be no maid.” The king continued, “[The] which struck me so to the heart when I felt them that I had neither will nor courage to proceed any further in matters…. I have left her as good a maid as I found her.”
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