Mary Tudor (5 page)
It was into this developing crisis that Mary returned. She received the French envoys at Greenwich on St George’s Day, 23 April, speaking to them both in Latin and in fluent French, also entertaining them, as was her wont, on the virginals. They were impressed by her accomplishments and by her seemly gravity, but they also observed that she was ‘so thin, spare and small as to make it impossible to be married for the next three years’.
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The French king could not afford to wait that long, and the agreement that was eventually reached was for an engagement between the princess and Francis’ second son, the Duke of Orléans. Knowledge of this uncongenial arrangement had already reached Catherine when she had her confrontation with her husband in July, and had done nothing to sweeten her mood. She seems to have been ignorant of the fact, but the complex situation that was then developing was made worse by Henry’s developing relationship with Anne Boleyn.
Anne was the younger sister of the king’s earlier mistress, Mary Boleyn, now happily married off, and seems to have come to his attention at some time during 1526. In spite of the intensity that it later developed, this was not at first a passionate infatuation, and seems to have grown gradually out of a charade of courtly love. In June Anne was ill of the ‘sweat’ and Henry was worried, but it was not clear at this point to anyone (except perhaps the parties themselves) that Catherine’s place in her husband’s affections had been usurped by one of her own ladies. However, even if she had known, the queen could hardly have been more obdurate. Realising what Wolsey was now about on the king’s behalf, she sent a secret message to Charles, begging him to use all his influence to frustrate the English moves in the curia (the papal court). In the circumstances, he hardly needed any urging.
As she emerged from childhood, Mary was thus caught in a domestic and political firestorm for which she was ill-equipped. Before moving to Wales, she had been urged by her mother to study diligently with Dr Fetherstone, but most of the evidence for her having done so is indirect, in the form of commendations from others – most notably from Erasmus. Almost the only direct evidence is that she translated a prayer of St Thomas Aquinas into English, while the French envoys of 1527 testified to the success of Mary’s French tutor, Giles Duwes. As far as her health was concerned, evidence of sickness during her stay in the marches is very scant, although she was moved from time to time to avoid infection. However, of her personality at this stage in her life nothing very much emerges. She seems to have been a biddable child who answered to expectations, diligent but not noticeably bright, and not apparently showing much curiosity about the world around her. Although well known in some quarters by the summer of 1527, the rupture between her parents was not understood outside the court, and Mary seems for some time to have been protected from its implications. It was not until 1529, when she was thirteen, that she found herself in the painful position of having to decide how she was going to react.
Henry’s case for an annulment of his first marriage was not strong, but he did have a case – and in other circumstances it might have been sufficient to persuade the pope to oblige him. Two considerations could have worked in his favour. Firstly, Julius II’s dispensation was from consanguinity, in other words it assumed that Arthur and Catherine had consummated their marriage; but if, as Catherine insisted, her marriage to Arthur had never been consummated, that was an irrelevant issue. The impediment of what was called ‘public honesty’, the marriage ceremony with Arthur itself, remained. This was not a strong argument, but it could have been sufficient. Stronger, but much more controversial, was the argument that Leviticus 20:21, which forbade a man to marry his brother’s wife, constituted divine law from which the pope did not have the power to dispense. Not only was this theologically dubious, because the ruling was apparently contradicted by a passage in Deuteronomy (ch. 25), but it also savoured of the Lutheran precept of
sola scriptura
– that the word of scripture must take precedence over any ruling of canon law.
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As was observed several years ago, to have succeeded, Henry’s case in Rome would have required both good luck and highly skilled management – neither of which it received.
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Henry himself rendered the public honesty argument inoperative by insisting that Catherine had not come to him as a virgin, and sabotaged any chance of an amicable arrangement by his dogmatic clumsiness. Wolsey was battling against overwhelming odds, but in 1528 he did secure a legatine commission for himself and Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio to hear the case in England, with a verbal undertaking that Pope Clement would confirm the finding.
This was the nearest he came to success. Campeggio’s mission was doomed from the start, because Henry was so committed to his divine-law opinion that ‘an angel from heaven could not dissuade him’.
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The king was also furiously impatient, because his relationship with Anne Boleyn was coming to the boil, and she was holding out on him. Even more seriously, both cardinals Wolsey and Campeggio were the victims of the pope’s duplicity, because, being committed to the Emperor (who was Catherine’s nephew), he had not the slightest intention of confirming any finding that they might make in Henry’s favour. He was merely buying time in the rather desperate hope that the situation would resolve itself. Although he was unaware of this, Wolsey knew the king well enough to be seriously worried. If Henry did not get his own way, not only would Wolsey’s own career be finished, but England might break with the papacy altogether. ‘I close my eyes before such horror … I throw myself at the Holy Father’s feet’, he wrote in December 1528. Perhaps Clement did not take such blusterings seriously; at any rate they made no difference.
When the legatine court at length convened on 18 June 1529, Catherine refused to recognise its competence, and after a futile exchange of arguments, the session was adjourned on the pretext of the Roman vacation. The king was enraged beyond measure, and Wolsey was disgraced, much to the satisfaction of his many enemies, but to no positive gain whatsoever.
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Henry’s bluff had been called, and he had to decide what to do, because dismissing his chancellor made not the slightest difference in Rome. For the time being Catherine had won, and was still the king’s lawful wife. However, that had always been likely to happen, given the pope’s predicament, and if it was a consolation to her, it was no benefit. While Henry groped around for a new policy, and she retained her status at court, Anne Boleyn moved in and a curious
ménage à trois
developed. Politically Anne and her friends dominated the king’s council, but she refused to share the king’s bed. Catherine continued to accompany her husband on official occasions, and, as far as we can tell, continued to sleep with him, at least intermittently, for another two years.
Inevitably Henry found himself reproached by both women for this indecisive situation, and caught between their fierce tongues he appears more than a little ridiculous.
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The tensions must frequently have become intolerable. Mary was now thirteen, and must have been well aware of what was going on, although she was not normally resident at court. For the time being nobody was much interested in her. She remained betrothed to the Duke of Orléans, but nothing much could be expected to happen until he reached the canonical age of cohabitation, which would not be until 1533. Given her lack of physical development, her own puberty may well have been delayed, but such matters were not discussed and her household accounts, which could have been revealing in that respect, do not survive for this period. She seems to have been a frequent and welcome visitor at court, and we know she was there at Christmas 1529, when her father gave her extra pocket money to the tune of £20 ‘for to disport her with’. She went with both her parents to mass on the Feast of the Circumcision (2 January), but how long she remained after that we do not know. At an age when even a royal princess might have expected something a little more entertaining, she seems to have spent most of her time at her books, relieved only by needlework and music, and mostly on her own.
According to Augustino Scarpellino, who visited the court on behalf of the Duke of Milan in the summer of 1530, Mary was ‘always apart, at a distance of ten or fifteen miles, with a suitable establishment …’
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Henry sent her regular presents of £10 or £20, perhaps to ease his conscience, and she on one occasion sent him a buck. This suggests that by this time she was relieving the tedium with a little hunting, because the point of such a present would surely be that she had killed it herself. Apart from Scarpellino’s comment that she was ‘said to be already advanced in wisdom and stature’, we get hardly any sight of her – and he was reporting a general opinion, because he never met her himself. She seems to have spent most of her time at Richmond, which would just about meet Scarpellino’s description.
There were insubstantial rumours of alternative marriages for Mary – to Francesco Sforza, the Duke of Milan, even to her half brother Henry Fitzroy – but none of these had any substance. The Fitzroy idea, which Eustace Chapuys, the new Imperial ambassador, instinctively attributed to ‘the concubine’ (Anne Boleyn) because it was so repellent, seems in fact to have originated with an increasingly desperate pope. Clement was simultaneously suggesting bigamy to Henry, so the holy father was doing himself no favours.
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At Christmas 1530 Mary was again at court, and again received £20. Although she was fifteen in February 1531, the early part of that year really marked the end of her childhood – the calm before the real storms of adolescence began. She spent almost the whole of March with her mother, and in June her father came to Richmond and ‘made great cheer’ in her company.
However, in early April Mary fell ill from what Scarpellino described as ‘hysteria’, and was still not fully recovered three weeks later. This was clearly a menstrual disorder of some severity, and may well have represented the delayed and somewhat irregular onset of puberty. She was attended by the king’s physicians, and by a certain Dr Bartelot, who was probably the Tudor equivalent of a consultant gynaecologist. As he was paid £20 for his attendance, he was clearly a specialist of some standing.
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The stress of her parents’ deteriorating relationship may also have been a factor in this illness. In May, Henry and Catherine fell out bitterly over their respective relations with their daughter, and that may well have been a factor in the final breakdown, which came at the end of June. Henry dismissed his wife from the court, with the furious words that he never wished to see her again. She was ordered to retire to The More (in the king’s hands since the death of Wolsey in November 1530), while Mary was to remain at Richmond. They were ordered never to see each other again.
This was not quite as final as it sounded, because Catherine was at Windsor in July, and Mary spent some time with her there. It did, however, represent a serious intention, and the queen was at The More by the end of August. Thereafter contact between mother and daughter was by way of written messages.
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In some respects Henry’s bark was worse than his bite. He had threatened to reduce Catherine’s household drastically, but did not in fact do so, and she had over 200 servants at The More, including a chamber staff of 50, which was a full complement for a queen consort. In some ways Mary was harder hit than her mother. Her material circumstances remained unchanged, but her mother’s occasional company had been a great comfort to her as she faced the daunting challenge of growing up. Now she was on her own apart from the frequent company of Margaret Pole, the Countess of Salisbury, whose own adolescence was so far in the past that she may not have been much help. Christmas 1531 was miserable. Mary received her usual £20, but was not at court, probably by her own choice. Communication with Catherine was prohibited, and Anne Boleyn, in spite of her political ascendancy, was in no position to take over Catherine’s role.
Moreover the news from Rome was as bad as it could be. Henry had obstinately persisted with his representations there, long after it should have been obvious that they were futile. His last throw had been to claim a partial exemption from certain aspects of papal jurisdiction (such as matrimony) on the basis of the ancient liberties of England. Now he learned that that bid had also failed, and that it was only a matter of time before a definitive sentence was pronounced against him.
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In theory, Mary’s relations with her father remained unchanged, but in practice her sympathies were entirely with her mother. Henry was fond of his daughter, but he was too prone to treat her as a dynastic chess piece – too obviously in control – for her to regard him with much human warmth. The prohibition on communication was a challenge that mother and daughter conspired to evade, and the king’s security arrangements were distinctly porous, perhaps by design. Chapuys was convinced, probably correctly, that Anne Boleyn was the real problem. Not only was her very presence an insult to Mary, Catherine and their sympathisers, but she had good reason to fear a girl who represented an alternative vision of the future to any that she could offer. Catherine had been defeated, but Mary’s relationship with her father was of a different order, and might prove more difficult to unravel. According to Chapuys, who was well informed but by no means impartial, Anne hated her ‘as much as the queen, or more so because she sees the king has some affection for her’.
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