Mary Tudor (9 page)

The disillusionment that followed was cruel, but not the result of any hardening of Henry’s heart. His position remained exactly what it had been. If she would accept her own illegitimacy, and his authority over the Church, he would receive her back into his favour – and if not, not. It was not quite clear what that favour would mean, because a position in the succession was not on offer at this stage; however, an independent household, a place at court and renewed marriage negotiations can reasonably be assumed. Without waiting for a reply to her second epistle to Cromwell, on 1 June Mary wrote directly to the king. She congratulated him upon his (very) recent marriage, and asked leave to wait upon the new queen. She acknowledged her offences in general terms, and begged his blessing and forgiveness ‘in as humble and lowly a manner as is possible’. Unfortunately the effect of this dutiful abasement was marred by an unacceptable reservation. She would obey her father in all things ‘next to God’. She humbly besought ‘your highness to consider that I am but a woman and your child, who hath committed her soul only to God, and her body to be ordered in this world as it shall stand with your pleasure’.
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Since this reservation covered both the points at issue between them, she was conceding nothing in spite of her humble tone, and Henry did not even bother to reply. Instead, he caused to be drawn up a set of articles of submission to be presented to her, articles that allowed no room for either evasion or equivocation.

Chapuys, who had remained sceptical about the king’s good intentions, was by early June seriously alarmed. Cromwell showed him a draft of the articles, ostensibly to invite his cooperation, but really in the hope that the knowledge of them would be communicated to Mary and that she would wake up to the gravity of her situation. Chapuys may not have succeeded, or his cautiously worded warning may have been misunderstood, because on 7 June Mary wrote again to Cromwell, clearly thinking that the problem between herself and her father had been resolved. She expressed her joy at the news that he had ‘withdrawn his displeasure’, and asked for some token before she would come to court. Three days later she also wrote to the king, copying the letter to Cromwell with a covering note begging not to be pressed in submission further than her conscience would bear.
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Mary’s state of mind at this point is hard to reconstruct, because she seems to have realised that she had not satisfied her father, but believed that her reservation had been accepted. Given what he knew, Chapuys can hardly have given her that impression, so it may have been derived from some unidentified (and unreliable) courtier. No reply was sent to either of these letters, and on or about 15 June the inevitable happened. The Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Sussex and the Bishop of Chichester arrived at Hunsdon, bearing the king’s commission. Mary was to be asked two questions. Would she repudiate the ‘Bishop of Rome’ and accept her father’s ecclesiastical supremacy? And would she accept the nullity of her mother’s marriage? In a stormy and emotional confrontation she rejected both demands.

This was a crisis of the first importance, because the king’s daughter was now guilty of treason on at least two counts, and the judges whom Henry consulted recommended that she should be proceeded against by law.
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This was not Cromwell’s doing, because right up to the last minute he had been in correspondence with Mary trying to find an acceptable formula – and believed that he had succeeded. Norfolk’s mission blew any such possibility out of the water, and a few days later Cromwell penned a furious letter of reproach, castigating her for obstinacy, and lamenting his own folly in attempting to help her. It was probably never sent, but was a fair reflection of his frustration at the time. The council immediately went into emergency session. Meanwhile, setting his anger aside, the secretary worked furiously to find some solution. Mary’s execution for treason formed no part of his plans, and although it would have deprived the conservative malcontents of their figurehead, it would also have given them a martyr, and ruined any hope that he may have had of a
rapprochement
with the Emperor. Only if she could be forced into submission could the malcontents be sidelined and a volatile political situation stabilised. Mary’s known sympathisers, such as the Marquis of Exeter and Sir William Fitzwilliam, were excluded from the council during these emergency debates. Other friends – Sir Anthony Browne, Sir Francis Bryan and Lady Hussey – were arrested and interrogated. Apart from the last, who had openly referred to her as ‘princess’, their only offence seems to have been to speculate on what a splendid heir Mary would be – if she would only submit. The crisis lasted about a week.

It was solved eventually by a mixture of chicanery and psychological torture. Cromwell succeeded in convincing both Chapuys and Mary herself that she was within a whisker of arraignment and execution. Given Henry’s long record of hesitancy and emotional confusion in his dealing with his daughter, it is by no means certain that this was the case, but the secretary was making the most frightening noises of which he was capable – and it worked. When it came to the point, Mary did not have her mother’s steely resolve – but then Catherine had never been threatened with the axe. It was probably Chapuys who mediated the deal. Once he was convinced that Henry was serious about proceeding to extremes, he began to urge Mary to submit in order to save her life. A martyred princess might make a potent symbol, but a live one (even if slightly tarnished) was more useful. For several days the unfortunate young woman suffered from insomnia, neuralgia, toothache and other stress-related symptoms. Finally, on 22 June, she surrendered. The ever thoughtful Cromwell had apparently provided a comprehensive set of articles of submission, which she signed, and a covering letter, remitting her whole life and estate to the king’s discretion, absolutely and without condition. Chapuys believed, or pretended to believe, that she had signed these documents without reading them, but in view of the effusive letter of thanks that she wrote to Cromwell a few days later, it is clear that she was perfectly well aware of the contents.
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Her gratitude was rather pathetic, given that all he had done was to persuade her into an unconditional surrender – but she believed that he had saved her life, and he was certainly not going to disabuse her.

MARY’S SUBMISSION

Undated, but probably 22 June 1536

The confession of me, the Lady Mary, made upon certain points and articles underwritten, in the which, as I do now plainly and with all mine heart confess and declare mine inward sentence, belief and judgement, with a due conformity of obedience to the laws of the realm; so minding forever to persist and continue in this determination, without change, alteration, or variance, I do most humbly beseech the King’s Highness, my father, whom I have obstinately and inobediently offended in the denial of the same heretofore, to forgive mine offence therein, and to take me to his most gracious mercy.

[
Letters and Papers
…, x, 1137, taken from Thomas Hearne,
Sylloge Epistolarum
(Oxford, 1716). The original does not survive.]

The great crisis therefore ended with a whimper rather than a bang, and Mary’s state of mind is hard to assess. According to Chapuys, she was prostrated with grief and remorse at having betrayed both her principles and her mother, but he was bound to say that, if only to obscure his own role in the proceedings. His object now was to preserve some credibility for her, both with the Emperor and among her own supporters, so he asked Charles to obtain a special dispensation from Rome to ease her conscience. Significantly, he did not represent her as having dissimulated her submission. This may have been for fear lest his despatches should be intercepted, but he had made far more damaging revelations in the past and, in view of his generally pro- Imperial stance, Cromwell would not have authorised such interference. He presumably knew that such a statement would have been untrue. In later life, Mary was to be deeply ashamed of her actions at this time, but in July 1536 the overwhelming impression is one of relief.

On 6 July Henry and Jane visited Hunsdon and stayed for two days. Mary was much closer in age to the new queen than she was to her own sister, or Anne Shelton, or her faithful Margaret Pole, and the two young women quickly became friends. Jane seems to have been a peaceful soul, who had a calming influence on everyone around her, and that included Mary, who was much in need of tranquillity after the trauma of the past three years.

The news of Mary’s return to favour spread like wildfire, and far outweighed any tidings of how that state of affairs had been achieved. In Rome it was thought that she would be restored to the succession, and that the English schism was about to come to an end. Elsewhere it was believed that she would be created Duchess of York, and it was reported that great crowds had greeted the Countess of Salisbury when she visited the court, on the assumption that Mary would be with her. In fact nothing dramatic happened at all, but her rehabilitation was steadily put in place. Within a few days, and before Henry’s visit, she had been invited to suggest appointments to her restored chamber, and she named three women who had been in her service before, including Susan Tonge, better known as Clarencius.
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By mid-August her new establishment was in place, headed by four gentlewomen, and numbering a total of twentynine. There was no chamberlain, and no lady governess. In fact it was not an independent household at all. What happened was that the joint household, which had existed in principle since 1533, was reconstructed to reflect the equal status of its two mistresses. At the same time that Mary was restored, the provision for Elizabeth was reduced, and Sir John Shelton, the controller, reported on 16 August that it was now ‘served on two sides’. He estimated that the cost of this
ménage
would be in the region of £4,000 a year.
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The great advantage of such a set up from Mary’s point of view was that her chamber was ‘detachable’, and that if she wanted to go to court, or to another royal residence on her own, she could do so. In the latter event, she would have taken a proportion of the ‘below-stairs’ servants with her, but they would have continued to be paid by Shelton, who also both hired and dismissed them as circumstances required. Mary had no control over the service departments – and, more importantly, no land or money of her own. Her whole allowance came from the privy purse, and although she was scrupulously consulted over her chamber appointments, she did not make those either.

Another sign of rehabilitation was renewed talk of marriage. Early in August the Emperor sent a special envoy to suggest a match with Dom Luis, the younger brother of the King of Portugal, who had featured in earlier speculations. Chapuys, a little put out by this intervention, did not believe that Henry would allow his daughter to marry outside the realm, but would rather provide her with a suitable husband himself in order to enhance his control. No doubt aiming to frustrate such a development, he persuaded her to renew her pledge to him not to marry without the Emperor’s consent. She was, he reported, not inclined to matrimony at all, ‘save for some great advantage to the peace of Christendom’.
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The ambassador was probably wrong in his assessment of the king’s attitude. As far as Henry was concerned, his daughter was now free again to be deployed in whatever way he thought fit. On 12 September he wrote to his ‘brother of France’, suggesting a match with the young Duke of Angoulême. Henry would legitimate his daughter, and include her in the succession – in default of male heirs – in return for Angoulême’s residence in England. How seriously this was intended we do not know. Nothing came of the suggestion, but it indicates that Mary was now back on the European marriage market, and that her status was negotiable.

Meanwhile Chapuys’ suggestion of a secret dispensation had been greeted with contempt in Rome. It was pointed out that even if secrecy were permissible in such a matter (which it was not), Henry would be bound to find out, and if he became convinced that his daughter had deceived him, her last state would be worse than her first. For his part, the ambassador made no further mention of conscientious scruples, but reported in early October that Mary had written both to the Emperor and to Mary of Hungary, his regent in the Low Countries, professing to have been enlightened by the Holy Spirit. She now realised that her mother’s marriage had been unlawful, and that the pope’s power was usurped. Of course Chapuys claimed that she had been forced to write these letters by her father, and the letters themselves do not survive, so there must be an element of uncertainty. The ambassador was writing to explain away the arrival of these unexpected (and unwelcome) epistles, putting the best gloss that he could upon the situation. If we abandon hindsight, and look only at the evidence from the autumn of 1536, it looks very much as though Mary had undergone a genuine conversion to her father’s point of view. The effect of extreme psychological pressure is often called brainwashing, and it may be either temporary or permanent. In this case it was not permanent, because years later, as queen, Mary was to use her public policies to reverse and undo most of what her father had done, including the repudiation of her mother. However, for the rest of his life, and well into her brother Edward’s reign, Mary gave not the slightest hint of dissent from Henry’s proceedings, and given the number of people on the look out for such signs, we must conclude that, for the time being at least, her conversion was genuine.