Mary Tudor (17 page)

Although he was disappointed by Mary’s failure to challenge Edward’s legitimacy, the Emperor clearly instructed his ambassador, Francois Van der Delft, to keep an eye on her, because Van der Delft was soon reporting in the same querulous tone as his predecessor about the dishonourable way in which she was being treated. She had, he reported, never been shown her father’s will, and had no idea what marriage portion would be allocated to her. In fact it was £10,000, but in the circumstances the point was academic.
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She was being kept, he declared mendaciously, in miserable poverty and no respect was being shown her.

In fact Mary’s estate, when it was finally assembled, was valued at £3,819 a year, which made her the third or fourth-richest person in England. Most of it consisted of former Howard properties in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, including the great house at Kenninghall, which had come to the crown on the attainder of the 3rd Duke of Norfolk just weeks earlier. Whether or not Mary was consulted about this allocation in advance is not clear, but it also included some royal houses where she had lived in earlier days, notably Hunsdon (which was one of her favourites) and Newhall in Essex, upon which Henry had spent a great deal of money in the early part of his reign. It may have been for simplicity’s sake that the council decided to give her an estate much of which already belonged together and cohered, but this also had the effect of transferring many of the leaderless (and conservative, pro-Catholic) Howard supporters in East Anglia to the princess. Not only did Mary acquire a patrimony in the summer of 1547, she also acquired a clientage.
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This was probably not intended, because although no issue had so far arisen, it must have been known to the council that Mary’s religious views were likely to be hostile to the direction in which they were proposing to go. A small hint of this had been given when Archbishop Cranmer had arranged for all his bishops to have their appointments renewed on the death of the old king. Stephen Gardiner had at once protested that this was inappropriate because bishops were ordinaries – that is their authority derived from their consecration and not from their appointment. It was a technical point, but highly significant in view of what was to come. Mary said nothing, but her views were well enough known to her brother. When Thomas Seymour had been angling for Edward’s support in his pursuit of the king’s stepmother, which must have been within a few weeks of his accession, the boy had jokingly suggested that Seymour should try his sister Mary instead ‘to turn her opinions’.
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What Edward knew was certainly known to his council, and yet they took the risk of establishing Mary in what could easily turn out to be a conservative power base very close to London and the Home Counties. Van der Delft might refer to Kenninghall as though it was in Northumberland, but in fact it was within easy reach of the court, appropriate to the honour of the holder, but also – of course – making it easier to keep an eye on her. Perhaps it was felt that if she was going to have it out with the government, it was better to have her where they could see her, and also in control of an ‘affinity’, a support group, whose potential was (more or less) known. Although in a sense Mary inherited a ready-made situation in East Anglia, she did not in fact create her new establishment overnight. She now needed a council, stewards, estate managers and receivers (money collectors) as well as the chamber servants and domestic staff with which she was already familiar. What she seems to have done was to build around her existing household, recruiting particularly from those East Anglian gentry families who were now her neighbours – Robert Rochester, Edward Waldegrave and Francis Jerningham being the most prominent. Special warrants authorised payments to her for these purposes from 12 April to 15 August 1547.
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After that they cease, and it must be supposed that by then she was collecting the revenues from her own lands. Her new establishment seems to have been completed by mid-September.

In spite of what Van der Delft might claim, Mary’s interests were in fact being well looked after at this time, but the politics of the minority government were moving in a direction that was bound eventually to lead to conflict. The Duke of Somerset was not satisfied with the terms of his protectorate. Particularly he wanted to be rid of the restrictive clause that required him always to act with the consent of the council, and at the same time to clarify the procedure by which new councillors were to be appointed. In March 1547 he obtained a new grant of his office by letters patent that addressed these issues.
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He was now required merely to consult the council, and was given the initiative in matters of recruitment. These changes were strenuously resisted by the lord chancellor, the Earl of Southampton, so he had to be removed from office in order that the new patent could be sealed, i.e. authenticated. This was achieved by exploiting a foolish error that he made in delegating his work in chancery to civil lawyers by an unauthorised commission. He claimed that he had the right to act so
ex officio
, without authorisation, but the judgement was against him. He was deprived of his office, fined heavily and sentenced to imprisonment. Both the fine and the imprisonment were remitted, but he lost his office and his membership of the council.
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He was a difficult and crossgrained colleague, but more to the point he was a well-known and tenacious religious conservative who would almost certainly have been a tough opponent of the programme of change that the lord protector now had in mind. Some conservatives remained on the council – Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of Durham, and Sir Anthony Browne, master of the horse – but they had at this stage neither the will nor the ability to be difficult.

By the summer of 1547 religious doctrine was becoming an issue in a way that it had not been while the old king was alive. Cranmer issued a set of homilies. Many of these were innocuous enough, and the archbishop did not write them all, but he did write the one on justification, which Stephen Gardiner, the conservative Bishop of Winchester, immediately pointed out was heretical. It taught justification by faith alone, a Protestant doctrine that had been outlawed by the Act of Six Articles of 1539. The protector was also allowing heretical works to be published in London, and the mass was coming under increasingly abusive attack.

At some point late in the summer or early in the autumn, Mary appears to have written formally to the protector to protest against this direction of events. The letter does not survive, but it can be reconstructed from Somerset’s response.
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Her father, she claimed, had left the realm in ‘Godly order and Quietness’, which the council was now disrupting with innovations. At best they were negligent, and at worst pernicious, allowing ‘the more part of the realm through a naughty liberty and presumption … [to be] brought into a division’. Henry, the protector replied, had not left a peaceful and stable situation, but a half-completed Reformation. The only way to safeguard his great achievement of the royal supremacy was to abolish ‘popish doctrine’ as well as papal authority:

It may please your Grace to call to your remembrance, what great labours, travails and pains his grace had before he could reform some of those stiff necked Romanists or papists, yea, and did they not cause his subjects to rise and rebel against him?
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Mary, it appears, agreed with Stephen Gardiner, who had earlier written in a similar vein, pointing out that the changes that were now appearing were contrary to the Act of Six Articles, and moreover that the council had no right to make any changes whatsoever. Only the king himself could do that, when he reached his majority in 1555. This last point was undoubtedly consistent with Henry’s own view of the supremacy, but it was a limitation that the council could in no way afford to admit. To put the ecclesiastical supremacy on hold until 1555 would not only have been impracticable, it would also have cast serious doubts on the remainder of the protector’s authority.

So similar were Gardiner’s and Mary’s arguments that the council suspected collusion between them, but that is unlikely. In spite of the way in which Van der Delft chose to present the situation, neither of them was arguing for a Catholic Church, but rather for the sanctity of Henry’s settlement regarding the status of the Church in England, which had always owed more to the king’s personal idiosyncrasies than it had to logic, either theological or political. Somerset was undoubtedly right when he argued that the settlement which his government had inherited was unstable, although wrong to claim that the great majority of the people supported his changes.
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Gardiner’s position was undermined, both by his own admission that ‘a king’s authority never lacked, though he be in his cradle’ and more specifically by the repeal of the Act of Six Articles in the first Parliament of the reign, late in 1547. Neither of these factors touched Mary. She never used the Act as an argument, but rather claimed (it would appear) that her father’s position represented true religion, which no human authority had any right to touch. She later claimed that when he achieved his majority, Edward would find her ‘his true subject in this as in all else’, but since she consistently deceived herself about the reality of his position, and the circumstance never arose, too much weight should not be attached to that.

By the autumn of 1547 Mary was returning to the persecuted frame of mind that she had abandoned in 1536. At issue was the whole range of traditional rites and ceremonies that had been permitted by Henry but were repugnant to the Protestants who were now in power. Most specifically, the issue was the mass, and about that she would never retreat or compromise. As early as June 1547 Van der Delft reported that Mary was hearing as many as four masses a day.
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He chose to represent this as a staunch defence of the old faith, but in truth it was a battle on a very narrow front. Four masses a day was excessive devotion, even by the most zealous standards, and suggests on the one hand that she did not have enough to occupy her time, and on the other that she was spoiling for a fight on her own chosen ground. There is no suggestion that her liturgical life was exceptionally rich in other ways, but it can be assumed that all the traditional rites were observed in her chapel, and that chapel was hospitably open to any who wished to participate.

Mary does not seem to have visited the court at all during 1548. Although her personal relations with Somerset remained amicable, she would no doubt have found the whole climate distasteful, and the council had many other things to think about. The English position in Scotland, apparently invincible after the victory at Pinkie in September 1547, was beginning to crumble as the garrisons that had been established in the wake of that victory were harassed and came under pressure. No progress had been made towards reinstating the Treaty of Greenwich.
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After the death of Francis I in April 1547, the French started to make increasingly threatening noises about English-controlled Boulogne, and the Emperor was hostile and would not extend the existing defensive treaty to cover ‘the new conquest’. Cranmer and Somerset were also pressing for the development of a vernacular liturgy, and an experimental English order of communion was authorised. Mary, of course, would have nothing to do with it, but it was as yet merely authorised, not mandatory.

During the summer of 1548 Elizabeth had left the Seymour household in disgrace, and taken refuge with Sir Anthony Denny. The fourteen-year-old princess had been found by Catherine in a compromising embrace with her husband. The main responsibility for this undoubtedly lay with Thomas, but it was convenient to blame Elizabeth – and she may not have been entirely innocent.
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The Dennys provided only a temporary refuge, and the main immediate result was that the creation of Elizabeth’s patrimony under the terms of her father’s will was rapidly put in hand. Catherine had been pregnant at the time of this incident, and on 30 August was delivered of a healthy baby girl. Unhappily, like Jane Seymour eleven years earlier, she did not survive the experience, dying of puerperal fever on 7 September. Whether Mary attended her friend’s obsequies or not we do not know; they had not met for about eighteen months. Nor do we know the princess’s reaction to her sister’s experience, except that she no doubt felt justified in having got out of Thomas’ way as quickly as possible. The lord admiral himself may have been distressed by his wife’s death, but if so his pain was of short duration. Within weeks he had renewed his pursuit of Elizabeth, this time speaking of marriage and the council woke up to the possibility of a serious challenge.
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Lord Thomas Seymour had been at odds with his brother since the beginning of the reign. He thought that the governorship of the king’s person should have been his by right, since he was no less the king’s uncle than the lord protector. He was not satisfied with a barony when his brother got a dukedom, and they had quarrelled bitterly over his marriage to Catherine. He had been spending his wife’s money building a support base for himself, and appears to have been trying to create a party in the House of Lords to have the protector’s patent annulled by statute. He had also been stalking Elizabeth. Just how substantial these ambitions were – and how treasonable – are still matters of dispute, but it would undoubtedly have been high treason to marry the princess without the council’s consent. He was arrested, interrogated and his activities investigated in January 1549. He was attainted, and a few weeks later executed.
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None of this touched Mary, unless she was concerned for her sister’s reputation, which seems unlikely. In the early weeks of the reign, it transpired, Seymour had spoken of the possibility of marrying either princess, before he returned to Catherine, and it may well have been some suspicion of that which had caused her to decamp with such alacrity in April 1547.