Six Wives (90 page)

    Cromwell, as usual, moved fast. Four days later, on the 30th, Mary thanked him for getting her Henry's blessing and permission to write to him. They were the highest comforts that had ever come to her. In return, she would be as obedient to him 'as can reasonably be expected'.
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    The letter, despite its formal humility, breathes an easy confidence. 'That woman', who had destroyed Mary's mother's marriage and poisoned Mary's own life, was out of the way. Instead, Henry had a good Queen who longed, she knew, to welcome her as a daughter. And he was surrounded by courtiers and councillors who were her devoted servants and now dared to show it. Soon, and with the minimum of fuss, everything would be back to normal.

    She had reckoned without Henry – and without Cromwell.

* * *

By 8 June, apparently, her reconciliation with her father was complete. Mary understood, she wrote, 'that he has forgiven all her offences and withdrawn his displeasure'. But her happiness would not be complete until she was allowed to see him. '[She] hopes God will preserve him and the Queen and send them a Prince'.
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    Then, over the next two days something went wrong. More would be required of her, perhaps as much as Anne herself would have exacted. On the 10th she wrote to Cromwell in a state of desperate anxiety. 'I desire you, for Christ's passion,' she wrote, 'to find means that I be not moved to any further entry in this matter than I have done.' 'For I assure you,' she continued, 'I have done the utmost my conscience will suffer me.'
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    But it was not enough and, within a few days, a delegation of the Council, headed once more by Norfolk, appeared at Hunsdon with a list of formal demands. Would she acknowledge Henry as her Sovereign Lord and accept all the Laws and Statutes of the Realm? Would she accept him as Supreme Head of the Church and repudiate the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome? And would she acknowledge that her mother's marriage was invalid by the laws of God and Man?

    Anne could have done no more, and Mary responded as she had done previously. In return, the Councillors threatened her crudely. If she were their daughter, they said, 'they would knock her head so violently against the wall that they would make it as soft as baked apples'. She was a traitoress, and deserved to be punished as such. Finally, before leaving, they ordered Lady Shelton to hold her incommunicado.

    Nevertheless, Mary managed to get in touch with Chapuys to ask for advice. Yield in the face of the threat of death, he advised. But yield as little as possible.
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    Cromwell now wrote to her, disowning her and commanding her, in the King's name, to sign the articles required. Or else she would face the consequences. And he reminded her of her likely fate by launching a preemptive strike against her supporters. Lady Hussey, the wife of her former Chamberlain, was sent to the Tower. The Marquess of Exeter and Treasurer Fitzwilliam were suspended from the Council. Sir Anthony Browne and Sir Francis Bryan were interrogated on the 14th, and Browne for a second time on the 17th. Their answers pointed inescapably to Carew as the prime mover in the campaign for Mary's restoration. And Carew clearly knew that the game was up. He wrote to Mary advising her to submit and to follow Cromwell's advice. His wife Elizabeth, who was Sir Francis Bryan's sister, used her mother, Lady Bryan, to get a still more urgent message to Mary. '[She] desired her, for the Passion of Christ, in all things to follow the King's pleasure, otherwise she was utterly undone.'
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    And Mary would not be the only one to be undone. For the new Bill of Succession, which Audley had promised, had not yet been submitted to Parliament. Until it was passed, the First Act of Succession remained in force. This, as we have seen, made it treason to impugn Elizabeth's status as heiress to the throne. The activities of Carew and the rest undoubtedly fell within its scope: they were traitors, as much as Mary was a traitoress. And, if she did not yield, they were likely to suffer together.

    At this point, Jane tried to intervene in the crisis, praying Henry on her knees to forgive his daughter. But her influence counted for nothing and 'she was rudely repulsed'.

    Only a day or two before she had taken part with Henry in the Corpus Christi Day celebrations in the Abbey. They made a magnificent couple. 'For as his Grace', Bryan recalled in his examination, 'stood above all those present in person, so [he] surpassed all in princely gesture and countenance'. Sir John Russell had been equally enthusiastic about Jane's appearance: 'The Queen was in likewise . . . in apparel the fairest . . . lady [there]'. They seemed made for each other, destined for 'long life together' and many children.
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    But suddenly, out of this clear blue sky, storm clouds had gathered. When would lightning strike? And where?

* * *

Inevitably, faced with this threat to her supporters as well as to herself, Mary yielded and, late at night on the 22nd, she signed the formal 'confession' required of her. Even so, it seems to have taken more than one attempt to get her to concede everything. Easiest to allow, apparently, were the general issues raised by the Reformation. She acknowledged Henry's Sovereignty and Supremacy and repudiated the Bishop of Rome. Then she signed the paper, as though she had finished.

    But she had not. For she had not yet brought herself to address the more personal question of the invalidity of her mother's marriage and her own bastardy. Finally this too was wrung from her. 'I do freely [and] frankly . . . [ac]knowledge that the marriage, heretofore had between his Majesty, and my mother, the late Princess Dowager, was, by God's law and Man's law, incestuous and unlawful.'
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    Each word was a poisoned arrow which pierced her heart, and she died a little with each. Then she signed a second time. She had signed away, she knew, everything that she had stood for.

* * *

    Nothing was now too good for Mary. Councillors knelt to her and sought her pardon. She was offered her choice of servants, and new and sumptuous clothes. The King sent her a horse. And, as the final mark of favour, he agreed to meet her for the first time in five years.
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    Bearing in mind all that had happened, it was felt that this first encounter should be kept both secret and private. In the small hours of Thursday, 6 July, Mary was brought from Hunsdon to Hackney. Then, in the afternoon, the King and Queen, 'with a small and secret company', also left for the rendezvous. Henry, now that Mary had cast herself at his feet, was at his most expansive. He talked to her constantly and showered her with affection and promises. Jane gave her a beautiful diamond and Henry a present of 1,000 crowns 'for her little pleasures'. They parted on the Friday evening, with many expressions of mutual love.
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    Henry last words were to promise that she would be brought to Court. She was, and took her place immediately after the Queen. But she did so solely on Henry's terms.

    Mary was a trophy. And it is hard to think, after all this, that Jane was much more.

* * *

This was made even clearer by the Act of Succession as it was eventually passed. Chapuys had justified Mary's surrender on the grounds that it would open the way for Henry to recognise her as heir. But neither she nor her supporters were given any such consolation. The Act was introduced into the Lords on 30 June, eight days after Mary's capitulation. And it took full advantage of it. For the Act, like Henry, contrived to take with both hands. On the one hand, it stripped Elizabeth of her title of Princess and her status as heir. On the other, it failed to restore them to Mary. Instead the succession was given only to Henry's children by Jane or (lest she become too proud) by any subsequent wife.
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    This decision, since no such child existed, created a dangerous vacuum. To fill it, Henry was given unprecedented powers to nominate such successor as he wished, from time to time, by his Will.

    Henry had always guarded his power jealously. Now, like misers throughout the ages, he could use the Great Expectations of his Will to control the behaviour of his possible heirs while he was alive.

* * *

The handling of Carew and the rest of Mary's supporters was also an object lesson in political management. Cromwell had used them to help bring down Anne. But, when they demanded their share of the spoils, they were threatened with the same fate as the Boleyns. It was an extraordinary achievement and confirmed his absolute mastery of the political scene. Not even Wolsey had enjoyed such power.

    Nor had he been so hated for it.

    The weary catalogue of unfulfilled dreams and broken promises continued throughout the summer. The idea of a great Progress to the north, to match the one to the west country of 1535, had been abandoned even before Anne's fall and it was not reinstated. The Dissolution of the Monasteries gathered pace, despite Jane's rather pathetic attempt to save the admirably managed nunnery of Catesby in Northamptonshire. Finally, at the end of September, Henry decided to reconsider the plans for Jane's coronation. The date fixed on was Sunday, 29 October. But as Ralph Sadler, Cromwell's new fixer at Court, reported to his master on 27 September, the King was having second thoughts. Perhaps significantly, he gave voice to them after having supped with Jane in her Chamber.
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    'The plague had reigned in Westminster and in the Abbey itself ', Henry told Sadler. This meant, he continued, 'that he stood in a suspense, whether it were best to put off the time of the Coronation for a season'. Cromwell was to summon a full meeting of the Council to Windsor to debate the matter with the King.

    The decision, inevitably, was 'to put off '. No doubt the excuse of plague was genuine. But there must also be the suspicion that Jane was being punished for her failure to conceive. Moreover, Henry's notorious eye had started to rove again. 'The King will not have the prize of those who do not repent in marriage,' Chapuys reported. A week after the publication of his marriage to Jane, Henry had met two beautiful young ladies. He had sighed and said '[he was] sorry that he had not seen them before he was married'.
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Jane's honeymoon was proving shorter than she expected.

* * *

And there was a price to pay for Cromwell's magnificent dishing of conservative hopes. For the three years of Anne's reign, Chapuys's correspondence had been filled with predictions of rebellion. Now, five months after her death, the predictions were fulfilled. First Lincolnshire and then the north rose in revolt. In Lincolnshire, Hussey offered feeble and temporising resistance to the rebels, while his formidable wife was openly sympathetic, giving them food and drink and offering money. The rebels found a charismatic leader in Robert Aske and they framed a coherent programme of thorough-going reaction. The monasteries were to be restored. Mary was to be declared heir. Cromwell, Rich and Audley were to be executed or at least exiled. And Anne's heretic bishops, Cranmer, Latimer, Shaxton and Hilsey, were to be burned.
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    Faced with rebellion, the royal family closed ranks and both Mary and Elizabeth were brought to Court and treated with near-royal honours. 'The Lady Mary', a French agent reported, 'is now first after the Queen, and sits at table opposite her, a little lower down, after having first given the napkin for washing to the King and Queen.' 'The Lady Elizabeth', he noted, 'is not at that table, though the King is very affectionate to her. It is said he loves her much.'

    But, behind the façade of unity, there were deep divisions over policy. Jane, undoubtedly, was sympathetic to the main thrust of the rebel demands. 'At the beginning of the insurrection', the French report continued, 'the Queen threw herself on her knees before the King and begged him to restore the Abbeys.' Henry repulsed her once more. 'Get up!' he said. 'He had often told her not to meddle with his affairs.' Then he added the terrible warning: remember Anne. '[It] was enough', the Frenchman concluded, 'to frighten a woman who is not very secure.'
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    But, though Henry could rule his wife and his Court with a rod of iron, the provinces proved more recalcitrant. Norfolk, who, in his younger days, had played a crucial role in Catherine's great victory at Flodden, was brought out of retirement to lead the King's armies. But the north was too strong, Norfolk advised, for the King to defeat the rebels in the field. Instead, he must negotiate. With profound reluctance, and always in bad faith, Henry agreed. Finally, in tense negotiations at Doncaster in early December, a settlement was reached. It was understood differently by the two sides. But they at least agreed that outstanding differences were to be referred to a Parliament.

    The rebel armies were now disbanded, and on 15 December, Henry sent a personal message to Aske, carried by Peter Mewtis of the Privy Chamber, to summon him to Court for the Christmas festivities at Greenwich.
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* * *

These got off to a magnificent start. The Thames was frozen solid, which made the usual journey downriver impossible. Instead, the Court travelled by land. And, as with Jane's river pageant from Greenwich, the journey was turned into a resounding reaffirmation of royal orthodoxy.

    First, the new Lord Mayor of London was presented to the King and knighted in the Presence Chamber at York Place. The palace itself was now officially known as the Palace of Westminster. But popular usage had already started to refer to it as Whitehall, to distinguish it from what was left of the old medieval Palace of Westminster. And, as usual, popular usage won.