Mary Tudor (6 page)

In November 1531 Mary’s matrimonial prospects again evaporated when Francis decided to marry his son to the pope’s niece, Catherine de’Medici. This time Henry decided not to take offence, because a strengthening of French influence in Rome might conceivably work in his favour as he struggled against the consequences of Habsburg dominance. The Duke of Cleves immediately expressed an interest, but nothing came of it and the princess was once again available. Whether she was even aware of these developments is uncertain. They certainly made no difference to her normal routine, but she was now of full age to marry, and she would have been less than human if she had not been interested in her own prospects. She was, according to a contemporary observer, pretty and well proportioned, although not very tall. Her father continued to demonstrate his affection rather clumsily with lavish provision for her household and a generous New Year gift, but Anne was his main preoccupation, and he did not want to take the risk of bringing them together.

1532 was to be a decisive year. Even before it had begun, Imperialist cardinals and diplomats were fearing that Henry was about to do something desperate. They spoke of the need to get Catherine and Mary out of his clutches, and the pope prepared a solemn excommunication – just in case. Since 1530 the king had been trying intermittently to blackmail the curia by bullying the English Church with charges of
praemunire
– the crime of exercising ecclesiastical jurisdiction without the king’s consent. The clergy had bought these charges off, but the threat remained.
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There was at the time an anti-clerical element in the House of Commons, and Thomas Cromwell, the king’s secretary, who was the formulator although not the inspirer of royal policy at this juncture, sensed an opportunity. In the summer of 1532 he persuaded his allies to present to Parliament a ’Supplication against the Ordinaries’, which he probably drafted himself. This was a complaint, along the lines of the previous
praemunire
proceedings, that the Church courts were not subject to the royal prerogative. Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester, as spokesman for the clergy, walked straight into what looks very much like a trap. He responded to the supplication with a thumping defence of ecclesiastical independence. Henry was seriously angry, and Cromwell was able to push through an act compelling the bishops to accept a royal veto on any new canons. On 16 May, immediately following the passage of the act, Sir Thomas More resigned as lord chancellor. A way ahead in the king’s ‘Great Matter’ was now opening up.
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On 23 August the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, died, and it began to look as though Imperial suspicions would be confirmed. The king would seek a solution from his own bishops, without reference to the pope. In September he created Anne Boleyn Marquis of Pembroke in her own right, with land worth £1,000 a year. As a declaration of intent, this was unambiguous.

There was nothing that Catherine could do about this. She had many and strong sympathisers in England (particularly among aristocratic women) and almost unanimous support in Europe, but her defences, although intact, were about to be outflanked. Much against her will, she was compelled to hand over her jewels to a woman whom she described as ‘the scandal of Christendom’. For several obvious reasons Anne and her supporters were strongly pro- French, but when she accompanied Henry to Calais for a meeting with Francis in October 1532, her presence presented the French king with a dilemma. He could hardly refuse to meet her without causing offence to Henry, and she was in any case acting as hostess. So he compromised, allowing himself to be entertained by her, but keeping his own queen carefully out of the way, in order to avoid disputes over protocol, as well as respecting Eleanor’s opinion of Anne’s morals. He had, in any case, his own agenda in Rome. Pressure was applied on Mary to take part in what was, in effect, the triumph of her mother’s rival, but she was not present and her inclusion in the published propaganda account was a fiction.
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Meanwhile, the queen continued her rearguard action. Her case had not yet been officially heard in Rome, because Clement was an inveterate believer in delay. Catherine did her best to cajole the Emperor into forcing the issue, but he had no desire to make a definitive break with Henry, and was beginning to find his aunt an embarrassment.

It was events in England which brought a solution. Before Christmas the king had decided that his next archbishop would be Thomas Cranmer. Cranmer, an erstwhile Cambridge academic and a committed supporter of the king’s cause, was presently on a diplomatic mission to the Emperor, in the course of which he had (secretly) married and picked up various unorthodox religious opinions.
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In January 1533 Anne, who had probably surrendered at last to the king’s sexual yearnings during their stay in Calais, was found to be pregnant. Cranmer’s appointment was made public and the pope (who knew his track record but was still trying to avoid a showdown) duly confirmed him. By the time that this happened Henry and Anne had married in a secret ceremony, and on 23 May Cranmer, using his own authority and jurisdiction, declared that marriage valid, and the earlier contract between Henry and Catherine null and void. On Saturday 30 May a visibly pregnant Anne was duly crowned as queen.
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The news was received across Europe with shudders of revulsion, and the Emperor was urged to make war upon England ‘with the aid of the people’. Chapuys was convinced that there would be a great rising in Catherine’s support, but Charles’ council advised him more soberly that Henry’s matrimonial tangles were a private matter, and that the King of England had given him no pretext to intervene. In July 1533 Catherine was visited by a powerful delegation of Henry’s council, which demanded that she renounce the title of queen and accept that of Princess Dowager of Wales. She refused. Henry thereupon reduced her household to the level deemed appropriate for a princess dowager, and removed her to the manor of Buckden in Huntingdonshire, where she effectively remained under house arrest. In spite of Chapuys’ shrill and horrified protests, the house was commodious and in good repair, and the financial allowance generous.
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Her friends came and went freely – except Mary, who was strictly forbidden to go to Buckden.

There had been various comings and goings in Mary’s household since 1528. Lord Hussey had become her chamberlain at some point before the autumn of 1530. Her treasurer, the long-serving Richard Sydnor, had retired, and Richard Wollman had replaced Fetherstone as her tutor. However, by 1533 she was seventeen, and the days of regimented schoolwork were probably over. Both in 1532 and 1533 there were renewed rumours of a marriage with the King of Scots, and a rather wilder report of a negotiation with Transylvania.

All this was gossip, but it was linked to a significant new development. Some of the Emperor’s servants (although not Charles himself) were eyeing the possibility of using her as an agent against her father. Catherine was useless from that point of view. Even if she had been willing (which she was not), she had no claim to the throne of England – but Mary had. In the summer of 1533 it was being reported in France and Italy that the Scots had invaded, backed by the Emperor and the Danes, and that the English were rising in her favour because she was so popular. An exotic alternative was that the knight errant coming to Mary’s aid was Dom Luis of Portugal, and that the Scots were being supported by a Genoese fleet in the service of the Emperor.
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The only substance behind all this was that Mary was now politically more important than her mother, a fact of which Henry was perfectly well aware. In spite of this, and much to Anne’s chagrin, the ban on communication between mother and daughter, which had theoretically been in place since 1531, was not only being regularly evaded but was occasionally specifically relaxed. Mary was ill again both in March and June 1533. The first time the king’s physicians attended her, but the second time she asked for her mother’s servants, ‘which the king was well pleased to grant’. At that time messengers were passing freely between them, with the king’s knowledge and indulgence. Visits, however, remained prohibited. Anne apparently fumed against the younger woman, vowing that she would reduce her to a servant or marry her to a varlet, but she was powerless to put any of these threats into effect.
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Henry, meanwhile, was hesitating over what to do about his daughter. In the light of Cranmer’s decision regarding the validity of her mother’s marriage, Mary was now illegitimate. However, the king seems to have hoped that by proceeding gently and showing her favour, he would persuade her to accept the new situation without a fuss. The only warning was that Lord Hussey was instructed to inventory her jewels, an exercise that was frustrated by the intransigence of the Countess of Salisbury. It is unlikely that Mary herself even knew about it.

On 7 September Anne Boleyn was delivered of a daughter, who was named Elizabeth, and this event focused everyone’s mind. The royal couple were bitterly disappointed, and the hostile courts of Europe could hardly contain their mirth.

Henry had moved heaven and earth to beget a legitimate son – and this was the result. Clearly God had a sense of humour. More importantly, it now became critical to distinguish between the legitimate and illegitimate daughters. By the laws of the Catholic Church Mary was legitimate and Elizabeth a bastard, but by the laws of England the reverse was the case. There must be no mistake over which was to prevail. Within a week Mary was informed that she was no longer princess but rather ‘the Lady Mary, the King’s daughter’ (and therefore outranked by her illegitimate half-brother, the Duke of Richmond), that her household would be reduced, and that her servants were henceforth to wear the king’s livery rather than hers. She refused to receive these tidings in any form other than a letter from the king, but Henry seems to have believed that she had submitted. On 1 October he authorised a new household for her, to number 162 persons and still headed by Lord Hussey and the Countess of Salisbury.
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Chapuys made his habitual protest, but the reduction was probably no more than 25 per cent, and would have reduced the cost from almost £3,000 per annum to about £2,500. It soon became apparent, however, that such generosity was contingent upon her unequivocal acceptance of her new status. On 30 September she was visited by a commission headed by the Earl of Oxford, which required her, on pain of the king’s displeasure and punishment by law, to stop using the title of princess. This she adamantly refused to do, and followed up her refusal on 2 October with a letter of self-righteous reproach to her father, worthy of her mother at her most outspoken. She could not believe that he would act with such manifest injustice – and so on.
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The king now had two recalcitrant female consciences to deal with, and he was not pleased. Moreover, in view of the plotting that was going on, both within England and abroad, his daughter’s defiance might well turn into serious danger. Henry pretended to believe that her mother and her servants were really responsible for this defiance, but the punishment could only be inflicted upon Mary herself. In early November, about a month after her refusal, Mary’s entire establishment was dissolved, and she herself, with some half dozen personal servants, was placed within the household then being created for Princess Elizabeth. Chapuys was speechless with indignation, blaming everything on the malice of Anne, ‘the concubine’. If he was right, it was an act of justifiable selfdefence in view of the symbolic position that Mary now occupied. From Buckden Catherine wrote to her daughter with a kind of gloomy exaltation: ‘Almighty God will prove you, and I am very glad of it, for I trust he doth handle you with a good love.’ They were now companions in martyrdom as well as misfortune.
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Theoretically the new household was for both the king’s daughters, but of course Elizabeth as the legitimate princess took precedence in everything, and ‘the Lady Mary’ was under house arrest, in much less comfortable circumstances than her mother. It was not until 16 December that the decisions about the provision for Mary and Elizabeth were put into effect, so the former had had over a month to get used to the idea of her impending suffering. This makes her own protests on the day, and those of the Countess of Salisbury, appear distinctly theatrical, especially as a sympathetic crowd seems to have been assembled to witness the distressing scene. In spite of Cromwell’s diligence, Henry was not doing well in the battle for hearts and minds.
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CHAPUYS’ LETTER TO CHARLES V 16 December 1533

According to the determination come to by the king about the treatment of the Princess and the bastard,
*
of which I wrote in my last, the said bastard was taken three days ago to a house seventeen miles from here; and although there was a shorter and a better road, yet for greater solemnity and to insinuate to the people that she is the true Princess, she was taken through this town with the company which I wrote in my last; and next day the Duke of Norfolk went to the Princess to tell her that her father desired her to go to the court and service of the said bastard, whom he named Princess. The Princess answered that the title belonged to herself and to no other; making many very wise remonstrances that what had been proposed to her was strange and dishonourable. To which the Duke could not reply. After much talk he said that he had not come there to dispute, but to accomplish the king’s will; and the Princess, seeing that it was needless excusing herself, demanded half an hour’s respite to go to her chamber, where she remained about that time, to make, as I know, a protestation which I had sent her, in order that, if compelled by force or fraud to renounce her rights, or enter a nunnery, it might not be to her prejudice. On returning from her chamber she said to the Duke that since the king her father was so pleased, she would not disobey him, begging him to intercede with the king for the recompense of her servants, that they might have at least a year’s wages. She then asked what company she should bring. The Duke said it was not necessary to bring much, for she would find plenty where she was going; and so she parted with a very small suite. Her gouvernante, daughter of the late Duke of Clarence and near kinswoman to the king,
†
a lady of virtue and honour, if there be one in England, has offered to follow and serve her at her own expense, with an honourable train. But it was out of the question that this would be accepted; for in that case they would have no power over the Princess, whom it is to be feared they mean to kill, either with grief or otherwise, to make her renounce her right, or marry basely, or make her stain her honour, to have grounds for disinheriting her, since notwithstanding the remonstrances I have hitherto made touching the Princess, to which I have had no reply, the king has proceeded to such excesses; and considering that my words served only to irritate him, and make him more fierce and obstinate, I have resolved not again to address to him a single word, except he oblige me, without a command from the Queen. In order that the mother may have no occasion to envy her daughter being visited on the part of the king, certain persons, as I wrote to you, have gone to resolicit the Queen to ratify the sentence of Canterbury, and revoke the interdict which the Pope has so injuriously fulminated against the king and his kingdom. And to do this they threaten her punishment, and by degrees will cut off her train and her household.