A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens (13 page)

 

 

W
hen it came right down to it, Henry VIII was no better a father than he was a husband. Each of the king’s children was bruised to some degree by his overwhelming personality, but Mary, his eldest daughter by Katherine of Aragon, was absolutely battered by it. For more than three decades the sad princess endured being alternately doted upon, terrorized, and regarded with devastating indifference by her father until he finally died and left her alone.

Mary Tudor’s birth in 1516 was greeted with little enthusiasm by her dad, other than his belief that it boded well for the eventual arrival of vastly preferable male children. “If it was a daughter this time, by the grace of God sons will follow,” the disappointed but hopeful monarch remarked soon after Mary was delivered. The little princess was raised amidst all the trappings of royalty, but away from her parents, as was customary at the time. When he did see her, Henry occasionally showed delight in his daughter’s developing musical skills and obvious intelligence. Though he called her his “chieftest pearl,” this was not so much out of any abounding love; rather it was his recognition that Mary was a valuable commodity in the European marriage market. Before she turned twelve, in fact, she had been 101 variously betrothed to the dauphin of France, his younger brother, and her Habsburg cousin, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

Despite her father’s appreciation of her worth, Mary nevertheless remained an only child—and a girl. For the king who determined to secure the Tudor dynasty with sons, this was simply unacceptable. She was not yet twelve when Henry revealed his conviction that his marriage to Katherine had been invalid from the beginning. The princess was in store for a hideous adolescence as her parents’ marriage unraveled before her.

Queen Katherine’s stubborn insistence that she was the king’s true and lawful wife enraged Henry, and Mary was forced to watch as her mother was degraded a hundred different ways in her father’s effort to shed her. One of his cruelest weapons was setting Katherine up in a household close to Mary’s, but only allowing mother and daughter to meet for the briefest of moments. And though Henry still occasionally showed Mary some affection, there was no disguising the fact that his split with Katherine and the invalidation of their marriage would automatically make her a bastard.

When King Henry eventually defied Rome and married Anne Boleyn, Mary acquired one of history’s meanest step-mothers. That in addition to an increasingly remote and hostile father. The new queen loathed the girl, mostly because Mary represented a threat to any children she might have with the king. Anne was incensed when the loyal people affectionately cheered for Mary at her coronation. “As much rejoicing went on as if God Almighty had come down from heaven,” Anne bitterly complained. She later threatened to install Mary as one of her servile maids and then use the opportunity to perhaps “give her too much dinner on some occasion”—that is, poison her—or “marry her to some valet.”

The exiled Katherine heard of Anne’s threats and sent Mary a letter of warning when she heard the new queen was pregnant. “Daughter,” she wrote, “I heard such tidings this day that I do perceive (if it be true) the time is very near when Almighty God will provide for you.” Having seen firsthand how cruel her former husband and his new wife could be, Katherine was convinced that Henry would acquiesce to any demand Anne might make for Mary’s death. Believing this could be the last letter her daughter might ever receive from her, Katherine encouraged bravery in the face of possible murder and concluded with an outpouring of maternal love. “I would to God, good daughter, that you did know with how good a heart I write this letter unto you. I never did write one with a better.”

As it turned out, Mary did survive the birth of her half sister, the future Queen Elizabeth I, but her troubles were far from over. The Act of Succession passed by Parliament in 1534 gave all rights to the throne to Anne Boleyn’s children, excluding Mary entirely. Now she was no longer a princess, but an official bastard. Just before the Act was passed, and in anticipation of it, Mary was ordered to move into baby Elizabeth’s household and act as her servant. The command from the king, addressed to “the lady Mary, the king’s daughter,” provoked a brave response to the diminished title. “I could not a little marvel” at the letter, Mary wrote her father, “trusting verily that Your Grace does take me for your lawful daughter, born in true matrimony.” She signed it, “Your most humble daughter, Mary,
Princess.
”

The young woman, now almost eighteen, had learned much from her mother’s situation and her courage. Though she avowed herself to be obedient to her father in anything he might demand of her, she would never betray her conscience or compromise her rights by acknowledging that she was not the king’s legitimate heir. Henry, on the other hand, resented his daughter’s defiance as much as he did Katherine’s, and went out of his way to make Mary’s life miserable as long as she refused to bend to his will and accept her reduced status.

After all the people who had cared for her growing up were sent away, Mary was given one of the smallest rooms in Elizabeth’s household. There was only one princess now, and she was Anne Boleyn’s daughter. Whenever the baby traveled in her velvet litter, Mary was forced to walk beside her in the mud. At dinner, Elizabeth was given the chair of honor while Mary had to sit with the lower ranks. Any servant who showed her the slightest bit of compassion was sent away. Those suspected of encouraging her pretenses as the true princess were locked away in the Tower. And, perhaps worst of all, Anne Boleyn’s aunt was put in charge of Mary and given license to persecute her any way she liked.

Because Mary had been advised to always assert her rights as Henry’s true heir lest they be compromised by neglect or acquiescence, she had to object every time she was called simply “Lady Mary,” or Elizabeth was called Princess. This brought constant punishment upon her. First her jewels and fine clothes were taken away, in time followed by nearly everything else she owned. When she sent a message to her father advising him of her destitution, Mary ordered the messenger to accept any money or clothing that was offered, but not to accept any writing in which she was not titled princess.

Henry VIII did occasionally visit the household, but it was always to see Elizabeth. Mary was locked away in her room every time he came. There was one occasion, however, when the king did give his first daughter a small taste of the affection he once had for her. She had sent word to the king, begging for permission to see him and kiss his hand. She was refused, but slipped away to the roof terrace to watch him leave. Looking up, Henry noticed her. She was kneeling with her hands clasped together in supplication. Nodding, he touched his hat to her and rode away. The simple but tantalizing gesture would be the last Mary would receive in a long time. A campaign of terror was about to begin.

King Henry began enforcing the Act of Succession with a rigor not yet seen. The law not only declared the king’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon invalid and their daughter illegitimate, it also explicitly denied the authority of the pope in England. Those who refused to swear by it were now subject to the terrible death of traitors. Scores of people were killed. Monks and nuns were hanged, still clad in their religious garb, while the head of the king’s once close friend and chancellor, Thomas More, sat rotting atop Tower Bridge.

Mary’s obstinate refusal to acknowledge the Act was now putting her life in serious peril. Henry began talking openly about killing his daughter, accusing her of conspiring with her mother to thwart his will and encourage rebellion. When Mary fell desperately ill, the king initially kept doctors from treating her, and refused Katherine’s plea to let Mary be with her during her recuperation. His “chieftest pearl” was now his “worst enemy.”

As Mary came close to dying from her mysterious illness, thoughts of Anne Boleyn’s poisoning threats became all the more immediate. The queen, gradually losing her own power struggle, accused Mary of “waging war” against the king and the new order, dramatically pronouncing, “She will be the cause of my death unless I get rid of her first.” With all the malice and tyranny closing in on her, Mary was desperate to escape England. Fearing for her life, she sent word to the Spanish ambassador, “begging him most urgently to think over the matter [of her escape], otherwise she considered herself lost, knowing that they wanted only to kill her,” noted Spanish records of the time.

Meanwhile, Mary’s beloved mother finally expired from grief and illness in 1536. Katherine bequeathed a golden cross to the daughter she had not been allowed to see for more than five years, but Henry confiscated it. Queen Anne also went rummaging through Katherine’s possessions, taking anything of worth and leaving Mary nothing. Soon after, however, Anne Boleyn herself was dead, beheaded on a trumped-up charge of adultery.

Mary’s fortunes now began to improve just a bit. Henry’s new wife, Jane Seymour, encouraged the king to reconcile with his daughter and bring her to court, while Mary wrote her father loving letters of humility and obedience. The king’s counselor, Thomas Cromwell, dictated the words that she hoped would save her life and restore her to some level of favor. “In as humble and lowly a manner as is possible for a child to use to her father and sovereign lord,” one letter began, Mary acknowledged all her faults and offenses, sought forgiveness and professed herself to be “as sorry as any creature living” for defying him. She asked for his “fatherly pity” on her frail sex, noting that “I am but a woman and your child.” Another letter begged Henry to envision her “most humbly prostrate before your noble feet, your most obedient subject and humble child.”

With the letters, Mary bowed as low as she possibly could without explicitly acknowledging the Act of Succession. It wasn’t far enough. The king sent his counselors to her, insisting she elaborate on her claim of obedience by openly accepting that she was a bastard and that the pope had no place in the kingdom. In response, Mary repeated to them what she had already told Cromwell when she wrote the humiliating letters of submission he had dictated: That she would rather die than displease her father, but as for embracing the Act, “my conscience will in no ways suffer me to consent thereto.”

Henry was white with rage when word of Mary’s refusal got back to him. Contemptuously ignoring Jane Seymour’s entreaties for mercy, he ordered his daughter tried for treason. This time, he was determined to be rid of her once and for all. It was only the reluctance of the judges to try the king’s daughter that spared her life. As a delay tactic, the court suggested that she be given a paper to sign, officially documenting her acceptance of the Act.

Trusted advisers warned Mary that this would be the last chance she had to save her life. Failure to sign would surely lead to the block and, to further encourage her, they persuaded her that a greater good was at stake. She must live as Catholicism’s hope for the future, they argued. She would be no good to anyone dead. With this idealistic entreaty, Mary was convinced. Though she signed the document, she did so without reading it to protect her conscience. She also wrote a secret protest against the paper, stating that she had signed it only under duress. From then on, an uneasy truce between father and daughter emerged. Though she was restored to some measure of favor, Mary remained an official bastard with no hopes of a decent marriage or a place in the succession. She rued her hopeless existence. While her father lived, she lamented, “I shall only be Lady Mary, the unhappiest lady in Christendom.”

When Henry VIII died in 1547, she was finally free of his tyranny and was restored in his will as an heir to the crown. Still, she had to endure the six-year reign of her half brother Edward VI during which her faith was under constant assault and the aborted attempt to place her cousin Lady Jane Grey on the throne. She finally came into her inheritance in 1553, embarking on a campaign against heresy that would brand her forever as “Bloody” Mary.

O
ne of the more tragic figures in English history was Lady Jane Grey, “The Nine Days Queen.” This abused pawn of Tudor-era intrigue owed her misery almost entirely to her grasping and malicious mother, Frances Grey, Henry VIII’s niece. Even at a time when children of the aristocracy knew little of parental love, Jane had an especially brutal mother bent on using her to the best advantage (her father was every bit as bad, just a little more passive). Jane had had the poor circumstance to have been born a girl, an undervalued commodity in the power market, and Frances delighted in reminding her daughter of her mistake by regularly thrashing her silly.

The quiet, studious girl, raised at a time when the failure to honor and obey one’s parents was considered a sure path to damnation, did once allow herself the luxury of revealing her horrendous situation to her tutor: “I will tell you, and tell you a truth which, perchance, you will marvel at . . . whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand or go, eat, drink, be merry or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing or doing anything else, I must do it, as it were, in such weigh, measure and number, even as perfectly as God made the world, or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea, presented sometimes with pinches, nips and bobs, and other ways (which I will not name for the honor I bear them) so without measure misordered, that I think myself in Hell. . . .”

The “nips and bobs” she suffered were mere nips and bobs compared with the lethal end to which her parents’ greed and ambition consigned her. Henry VIII’s successor, the boy-king Edward VI, was dying and with him the hopes of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland.
¹⁷
As a sort of regent during King Edward’s minority, Dudley had set England on a course of extreme Protestantism. He and his plans would be doomed, however, if Edward was succeeded by his half sister, the staunchly Catholic Mary Tudor.