Mary Tudor (11 page)

Nor is it known how Mary reacted to the fall of Thomas Cromwell, which occurred at almost exactly the same time. The two events are customarily linked, because it is claimed that Cromwell was responsible for subjecting his master to a disagreeable and humiliating ordeal. In fact this seems not to have been the case, because the marriage had been Henry’s decision, and Cromwell was fully prepared to provide the annulment later secured by others. He rather seems to have been undermined by a coalition of enemies (of which he had many), who succeeded in convincing Henry that he was destabilising the religious settlement by patronising heretics. Once that conviction had lodged in the king’s mind, everything that had gone wrong recently – including Anne of Cleves – suddenly became Cromwell’s fault. On 10 June he was arrested, condemned by Act of Attainder, and executed on 28 July.

Mary had no known connection with any of this, and what she may have thought we do not know. For a time, in the winter of 1536–7, she and Cromwell had been on friendly, almost convivial terms, but as Mary’s relations with her father stabilised, he disappears from the picture. Intensely busy about all manner of things, the lord privy seal (as Cromwell now was) seems to have confined himself to occasional friendly gestures. In 1538 he was occupied countermining some of those to whom Mary had been closest, but who now found themselves incriminated by the activities of Reginald Pole. Pole’s brother, Lord Montague, and Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, were arraigned and executed, while his mother Margaret, Mary’s long-time mentor, was consigned to the Tower.
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Reginald was certainly committed to the idea that Edward was a bastard, and that Mary remained the king’s only legitimate child. It is quite possible that those with whom he was in touch in England shared that view, which was the king’s conviction and the reason why he was prepared to allow Cromwell to act. He seems to have been convinced that the conspirators intended to kill Prince Edward, a charge for which the evidence was purely hearsay. However, her own priority in the succession was a position that Mary herself had ostentatiously abandoned, and she remained in the king’s favour, untouched by the so-called ‘Exeter conspiracy’. Whether she was in any way shielded by Cromwell, or simply never under suspicion, we do not know. She is bound to have viewed the fall of her erstwhile friends with sorrow, and that may have distanced her from the lord privy seal, but there is no sign of the kind of emotional crisis that followed her mother’s death. Cromwell’s own fall was also brought about by those who were in some sense Mary’s friends, but she was not implicated in their intrigues, and his removal did not affect her position in any discernible way.

After Henry married his fifth wife Catherine Howard in July 1540, Mary appears to have spent an increasing amount of time at court, and to have been living ‘on the Queen’s side’ at the time of Catherine’s fall. This was not because of any great affection between them. They were too similar in age and too different in temperament. Catherine, as it subsequently transpired, had a great deal of sexual experience, and a considerable appetite. Mary had no experience at all, and although her appetite remains a matter of speculation, ostensibly she regarded the whole business with distaste. Mary’s presence at court must have been by Henry’s wish, although the reason is uncertain. He may have hoped that the two women who were now closest to him would grow to like each other, or he may have wanted Mary to assume some of those court functions for which his much-adored young wife was temperamentally unsuitable. When the crash came, and Henry became convinced of Catherine’s infidelity in November 1541, she was arrested and her household dismissed. Mary was then conducted ‘to My Lord Princes with a convenient number of the Queen’s servants’.
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There is no mention of her own servants, or of Elizabeth, which presumably means that the old joint household, while remaining in theory, had in fact reverted to serving Elizabeth only. Mary’s chamber certainly remained in existence, and was presumably taken for granted in this relocation. Whether Mary did not wish to rejoin her sister, or was not allowed to do so, is not clear. Her situation over the next few months is uncertain, but presumably it became peripatetic again. In March 1542 she fell ill; not this time with her usual trouble, but with ‘a strange fever’. Henry wrote, and sent his physicians, but she was not at court and he did not visit her. He was still very depressed following the revelations about Catherine Howard, and was always morbidly afraid of infection.
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She was obviously not very far away, perhaps at Hunsdon or Richmond, but we cannot be sure.

It was not until the end of November that the king’s spirits began to revive. This was probably because of the thrashing that his forces had given the Scots at the Battle of Solway Moss, but it may also have been partly inspired by the prospect of a new Imperial alliance. Eustace Chapuys was back in England, and his chatty despatches again become a prime source for illuminating events. On 17 December he reported that Mary and ‘a great number of ladies’ had been bidden to the court for Christmas. Henry had now been a widower for almost a year, and the prospect of a new ‘petticoat presence’ was clearly a cheering one. On the 21st Mary arrived, ‘accompanied and met in triumphal manner’. She stayed for several months. This probably signalled the final break-up of the joint household with Elizabeth, because by the following summer the latter had been relocated to Edward’s establishment, and with Mary normally resident at court there was no longer any reason to keep up two fully independent houses.
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In the spring of 1543 Mary was again close to her father, his black mood having finally departed. Chapuys was even at one point dependent upon her for information about the intentions of the French, and she was able to reassure him about the progress of negotiations with the Emperor. A treaty was signed on 11 February 1543, which committed Henry to a new war in France. It is unlikely that his daughter, now aged twenty-seven, had any influence on the negotiations, but the favour that he was now showing her was a useful sweetener from the Emperor’s point of view, and the question of her status was not allowed to interfere. The king was, Chapuys reported, calling at her rooms in the court two or three time a day.

On 12 July 1543 the king married for the sixth and last time. Catherine Neville, Lady Latimer, had begun to interest him early in the year. Her husband was still alive at that point, but was known to be very ill, and he conveniently died in February. Catherine, better known by her maiden name of Catherine Parr, was thirty-one and had been twice married. As far as we can tell from her portraits she was no great beauty, and totally lacked the avid sexuality of her predecessor; rather she was a calm and dignified matron.
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After Lord Latimer’s death she was sought in marriage by Sir Thomas Seymour, the brother of the late Queen Jane, who may (or may not) have been in love with her, but who was certainly on the lookout for a rich widow. The king, of course, took precedence. He probably was not ideal for her, because she had already endured two almost sexless marriages, and Henry’s fires were now spent, his once magnificent body an unwieldy hulk. She, however, was ideal for him. He no longer needed an energetic bedfellow, nor a sharp and idiosyncratic wit like that of Anne Boleyn. What he needed was a calm companion, who could become a nurse when the circumstances dictated. She had no great intellect and was certainly no scholar, but during Lord Latimer’s last illness she had begun to learn Latin, probably to enable her to read devotional works in that language. She was already friendly with Mary through mutual acquaintances at court, and the princess helped her with her studies. Mary was no great intellect either, but she was an accomplished Latinist, and the two had become close even before the king decided to make Catherine his next bride. The fact that Mary was devoted to the mass and to the ‘old ways’ in the Church, while Catherine was sympathetic to the ‘evangelical’ movement (as the proto-Protestants have been termed), never seems to have come between them. In her later and fiercer mode, Mary would probably have regarded her stepmother as a heretic, but theology was not in question at this stage and at their level of discourse, and the mass was not yet an issue.
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Mary was therefore one of that very select band of those who attended the royal nuptials on 12 July. Shortly after, she moved back again into the ‘Queen’s side’ of the court, and seems not to have left until after her father’s death. As a scholar, Catherine developed all the zeal of a convert, and it was she who commissioned a new translation of Erasmus’
Paraphrases
into English. The humanist Latin was a bit beyond her, but Mary undertook one section. She did not complete it, allegedly because of ill health, but Nicholas Udall, the general editor, praised her efforts in his introduction:

A peerless flower of virginity doth now also confer unto [us] the inestimable benefit of furthering … the more clear understanding of Christ’s gospel …
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Mary attracted similar eulogies from Henry Parker, Lord Morley, in works dedicated to her, but we have no first-hand evidence of her accomplishments. From Elizabeth we have a few translation pieces, and from Catherine herself the
Prayers and Meditations
(in English), but from Mary nothing. This was not because she lacked the time, so it must have been a question of inclination, and we do not know whether the eulogies were anything more than flattery. Her household accounts do not indicate any expenditure at all on books, or on the patronage of scholarship. They may be incomplete, but the signs do not suggest the normal apparatus of an enquiring mind.

What the accounts do show, however, are renewed health problems. Mary ran up considerable bills with her apothecary, and was often bled. In September 1543 she was reported to be ‘very ill of a colic’, and in June 1544 confided to a friend that she had ‘byn nothing well’ for several days. The nature of these ailments is much less clear than it had been in the days of her house arrest, and may have been mere hypochondria. What they were clearly not is stress related.

The court, though, was a fairly stressful place in the 1540s, as the conservatives and the ‘evangelicals’ squared up to each other, with the king apparently moving now one way, now another. The conservatives scored heavily in 1539 and 1540 with the Act of Six Articles (asserting several conservative doctrines, such as clerical celibacy), the fall of Cromwell and the Howard marriage; but thereafter the evangelicals struck back. This occurred first through the destruction of Catherine Howard, then through the marriage with Catherine Parr, and then in the frustration of attacks on Cranmer (the ‘Prebendaries’ plot’) and – apparently – on the queen herself. This last (if it ever happened) may explain the king’s increasing distaste for his conservative councillors in the last two years of his life, culminating in the fall of the Howards at the end of 1546.
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All this infighting, however, appears to have left Mary untouched. Even the story of the attack on Catherine, the substance of which was that some on the fringes of the court were burned as heretics, makes no mention of the princess. At this stage of her life her piety was entirely conventional. Like many Christian humanists she approved of the English Bible, and of sermons, and had no particular affection for the shrines and pilgrimages that Henry had abolished. On the now-dissolved monasteries she was silent, and her enthusiasm for the mass was no greater than Henry’s own, who was to ordain 30,000 ‘trentals’ (each trental being a set of 30 requiem masses) for the repose of his soul. Her accounts show dozens of examples of almsgiving, but only a small proportion for the ‘maintenance of God’s service’ and none at all for traditional local pieties. Having, apparently, come to terms with the royal supremacy, she had settled into an orthodoxy which, although conservative, was by no means militantly so – and she wisely steered clear of the partisan politics with which she was surrounded.

From 1543 to 1546 Henry was at war, and in 1544 he campaigned in person for the last time. The object of his intentions was Boulogne, and the campaign was eventually successful, but given the king’s age and health it was a risky venture. Catherine was named as regent during his absence, and the Parliament that ended in March 1544 again took order for the succession. The Act of 1536, which was still in force, had bastardised both daughters, and settled the crown on any son who might be born to Queen Jane. Edward was therefore the undoubted heir, but what happened if he should die childless? To cope with such an eventuality, the new Act settled the succession first on Mary and the heirs of her body ‘lawfully begotten’, and then upon Elizabeth. In the remote contingency of all Henry’s children dying without issue, the crown was to pass to the descendants of his younger sister, also named Mary, who had died in 1533.
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This Mary had married, and had had children by Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, the surviving one in 1544 being Frances Grey, the wife of Henry Grey, Marquis of Dorset. The children of Henry’s older sister, Margaret, represented in 1544 by the infant Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, were totally ignored. The Act also empowered Henry to alter this order, if he thought fit, by his last will and testament, but in spite of this, it was as complete a statement of ‘constitutional’ engineering as could well be imagined. It was determined neither by legitimacy, nor by hereditary right, but by the will of Parliament. Despite being named as heirs to the throne, neither Mary nor Elizabeth was legitimated, and Frances Grey was preferred to Mary Stuart. Chapuys did not know what to make of this. In a sense it gave the Emperor what he wanted – Mary was now in the order of succession – but it had been done in a fashion that he simply could not comprehend; and in any case a statute could always be repealed. Furthermore, Henry’s preoccupation with Boulogne cost him the Emperor’s good will, and almost as soon as the town was taken Charles made a separate peace with France at Crespy, leaving Henry to defend his conquest as best he could.
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The war continued for another eighteen months – but that is not really part of this story.