The House of Tudor (26 page)

Mary was still clinging to the belief that all her own and her mother’s sufferings, all the sufferings which had fallen on other loyal and orthodox Catholics, were due to the evil influence of ‘that woman’; that Henry remained at heart the same good-natured, conventionally pious man she remembered from her childhood, and now that he was no longer bewitched by the she-devil everything would somehow come right again This was not a very realistic attitude but it was a very understandable one. Mary had not seen her father to speak to for five years and she had no conception of the quality of the change in him. Anne Boleyn had for so long been a convenient scapegoat that both Mary and Catherine had been able to shut their eyes to the truth. Neither had faced the fact that Anne had merely provided the catalyst; that the transformation of a loved and loving husband and father into a cold, unfeeling monster was due to characteristics inherent in his own nature. Catherine had been spared the bitter awakening. Mary was not.

At first all seemed to be well. Thomas Cromwell, a practical man of affairs, could see no sense in the continuing estrangement between the King and his elder daughter. To him, these destructive family quarrels were both a waste of time and an unnecessary political complication. So, as God was apparently not going to assist by removing Mary, Cromwell cast himself in the role of peacemaker. He got permission for Mary to write to the King which she did, ‘in as humble and lowly manner as is possible for a child to use to her father’, begging forgiveness for all her offences and ‘beseeching 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.’ She ended by congratulating Henry on his new marriage and assuring him that she was praying God to ‘send your Grace shortly a prince’.

The only response to this painful effort was a letter from Cromwell, enclosing the draft of a formal apology which he advised her to copy. The draft was abject enough and Mary duly made two copies which she returned to Cromwell with a covering letter, telling him that she had now done ‘the uttermost my conscience will suffer me’. But when Cromwell read his copy he found that Mary had added a fatal reservation - she was prepared to submit to her father ‘next to Almighty God’. This was not good enough and Cromwell wrote again, more sharply this time, for Henry’s temper was rising. The Secretary enclosed another draft, to be copied exactly.

Mary, tormented by neuralgia which gave her ‘small rest day or night’, knew now that she would be lucky to get away with a general submission, however abject, without being forced to take the dreaded Oath of Succession. She was no longer in a position to quibble over a form of words and she copied Cromwell’s second draft without ‘adding or diminishing’ - only one copy though, for she ‘cannot endure to write another’. Still it was not enough, and a commission -headed by that bird of ill-omen, the Duke of Norfolk - came down to her at Hunsdon in Hertfordshire. They brought with them a document for her signature, a document which spelt out Henry’s terms for unconditional surrender.

When Mary refused to sign, the behaviour of the commissioners effectually extinguished any lingering hopes of making peace with honour. She was such an unnatural daughter, cried one, that he doubted if she was even the King’s bastard. Another added pleasantly that if she were his daughter, he would beat her to death and knock her head against a wall until it was as soft as a baked apple. They told her she had shown herself a traitor to the King and his laws and would be punished as such. Finally, they said she might have four days to think the matter over and ordered Lady Shelton to see that she made no contact with the outside world and not to leave her alone for a moment, either by day or night.

In spite of this, Mary did manage to make two last frantic appeals - one to Eustace Chapuys, the other to Thomas Cromwell. But the ambassador, for so long her faithful friend and ally, could only advise her to yield if she felt her life was really in danger. Trying to comfort her, he wrote that God looked more at the intentions than the deeds of men and she would be better able to serve him in the future if she gave way now. As for Thomas Cromwell, he was discovering the perils of getting trapped between two battling Tudors and was badly frightened. He told Chapuys that for several days he had considered himself a dead man, for when the commissioners reported their failure with his daughter the King had flown into a towering rage and had been heard to swear that not only Mary should suffer for her obstinacy but many others, including Cromwell.

In his reply to Mary’s last cry for help, the Secretary made his feelings abundantly clear. ‘To be plain with you, madam’, he wrote, ‘I think you the most obstinate and obdurate woman that ever was.’ If Mary did not speedily abandon the ‘sinister counsels’ which had brought her to ‘the point of utter undoing’, Cromwell wanted nothing more to do with her ever again; she had shown herself such an unnatural and ungrateful daughter to her ‘most dear and benign father’ that she was not fit to live in a Christian congregation. All the same, he gave her one last chance, sending her ‘a certain book of articles’ which she was to sign and return with a declaration that she thought in heart as she had subscribed with hand.

When Cromwell’s letter reached her, Mary knew that she was beaten. For very nearly three years she had fought gallantly to defend her principles and her good name. As long as her mother lived and, for that matter, as long as Anne Boleyn was alive, she had been armoured against all attack but now, utterly alone, ill, exhausted and despairing she gave in. At eleven o’clock on a Thursday night about the middle of June, she signed the ‘book of articles’ recognizing ‘the King’s highness to be supreme head on earth under Christ of the Church of England’ and utterly refusing ‘the Bishop of Rome’s pretended authority, power and jurisdiction within this realm’. She also acknowledged that her mother’s marriage had been ‘by God’s law and man’s law incestuous and unlawful’.

Her reward came about three weeks later, when she was brought from Hunsdon ‘secretly in the night’ to Hackney for a private interview with the King. According to Chapuys it was impossible to exaggerate Henry’s kind and affectionate behaviour on this occasion. ‘There was nothing but conversing with the princess in private, and with such love and affection and such brilliant promises for the future that no father could have behaved better towards his daughter.’

Chapuys, of course, was enormously relieved that the crisis had been resolved and so, it is clear, was Henry. Whether or not he would really have treated his daughter as he had treated Thomas More and John Fisher we shall never know, but many people close to him had believed that he might - as the King intended they should. Most likely it had all been a war of nerves - pressure applied relentlessly until the victim finally cracked under it. It is easy to dismiss Henry as a monster for his brutal treatment of Mary, but it was becoming increasingly necessary to secure her capitulation. Serious unrest was brewing in the north, where opposition to the King’s revolutionary policies was strongest and where a variety of social, economic and religious discontents presently erupted in the Pilgrimage of Grace. Mary represented the old, familiar ways and she had many friends and sympathizers among the older, more conservative nobility and gentry. Until she herself had renounced her birthright, there was a real enough danger that she might be used as a figurehead for rebellion at home and even invasion from abroad.

This, at least, is the explanation usually given and it is a perfectly viable one - as far as it goes; but it takes no account of the dark undercurrents of pride and passion, fear, hate and guilt flowing beneath the surface. Henry needed to break his daughter for political reasons but he needed to win the battle for other reasons, too. Catherine had defeated and escaped him - he could not endure that Mary should do the same. Nor could he endure any reminder of the past he put behind him, the guilt he had buried and purged. Now everything was all right again and Mary was once more his ‘dear and well-beloved daughter’. And, astonishingly, she really was. Henry was genuinely fond and proud of all his children - so long, of course, as they showed no signs of having minds and wills of their own.

For Mary it was not so simple. She rode back to Hunsdon with a fine diamond ring, a present from Queen Jane, on her finger and a cheque for a thousand crowns from her father, together with an assurance that she need not worry about money in the future. But none of this could help her in the anguish of her remorse. Mary did not possess Henry’s monumental capacity for self-deception and, although she begged Chapuys to ask the Pope to give her secret absolution for what she had done under duress, nothing would ever alter the fact that she had knowingly betrayed the two things which meant most in the world to her - her religious faith and her mother’s memory. That betrayal, made by a frightened girl of twenty, was to haunt her for the rest of her life and help to make her, as she once bitterly described herself, ‘the most unhappy lady in Christendom’.

Meanwhile, the King’s younger daughter, the cause of so much of her sister’s unhappiness, was being bastardized and disinherited in her turn. Parliament met in June and passed a second Act of Succession, ratifying the annulment of Henry’s second marriage and officially declaring Elizabeth to be illegitimate. The succession was now to be vested in the offspring of Jane Seymour. Failing this, the King was given power to appoint an heir by will or letters patent. Such an unprecedented step shows just how acute the problem was becoming and, not surprisingly, there was renewed talk of naming the Duke of Richmond. As the Earl of Sussex remarked, if all the King’s children were bastards, why not choose the boy and have done with it.

But if Henry was seriously considering the idea, he was frustrated, for Henry Fitzroy died on 22 July 1536 ‘having pined inwardly in his body long before he died’ - a victim, almost certainly, of tuberculosis to which the young Tudor males were so fatally susceptible. Richmond seems by all accounts to have been an unusually attractive boy and a loss to the nation. He had been married in 1533 to Mary Howard, the Puke of Norfolk’s daughter, and was a close friend of Norfolk’s son, the Earl of Surrey, who later celebrated in verse an idyllic year the two young men spent together at Windsor Castle.

The wild foreste, the clothed holts with greene;

With reins availed, and swift-y-breathed horse

With cry of hounds and merry blasts betwene

Where we did chase the fearful hart of force.

The voide walls, eke, that harborde us eche night;

Wherewith, alas! revive within my breast

The sweet accorde, such slepes as yet delight

The pleasant dreams, the quiet bed of rest;

The secret thoughtes, imparted with such trust;

The wanton talke, the divers change of play;

The friendship sworne, eche promise kept so just,

Wherewith we past the winter nightes away.

Chapuys thought that Richmond’s death would greatly improve Mary’s chances of resuming her proper place as heiress presumptive, but no move was made to reinstate her. Actually, though, it hardly mattered that her official title remained no more than ‘the Lady Mary the King’s daughter’. Unless and until the King fathered a legitimate son, she would always be regarded as the King’s heir by everyone who mattered. Not that the King had given up hope of fathering a legitimate son - far from it - and when, in March 1537, it was officially announced that the Queen was pregnant, the hopes of the whole country revived.

At two o’clock in the morning of Friday 12 October 1537, after a labour which lasted for three days and two nights, Jane Seymour gave birth to a healthy boy. By eight o’clock the news had reached London and solemn Te Deums were immediately sung in St. Paul’s and every parish church in the city. Bells pealed, two thousand rounds were fired from the Tower guns, bonfires blazed up dangerously among the crowded timbered houses and everyone shut up shop and surged out into the streets to celebrate. Impromptu banquets were organized as bands of musicians went about playing and singing loyal ballads in honour of the occasion, and everyone drank the prince’s health in the free wine and beer which flowed in profusion from the conduits and from hogsheads provided by the civic authorities and by other prominent citizens. Even the foreign merchants of the Steelyard joined in - burning torches and contributing a hogshead of wine and two barrels of beer for the poor.

All that day, through the night and well into the next day the capital rocked and clashed in a great crescendo of thanksgiving and relief that at last England had a Prince of Wales born in undisputably lawful wedlock. Messengers were despatched to ‘all the estates and cities of the realm’ spreading the glad tidings and the whole country went hysterical with joy. As Bishop Latimer wrote to Cromwell from his Worcester diocese: ‘Here is no less rejoicing in these parts from the birth of our prince, whom we hungered for so long, than there was, I trow, at the birth of St. John the Baptist...God give us grace to be thankful.’

The christening of England’s Treasure, ‘Prince Edward that goodly flower’, took place in the chapel at Hampton Court three days after his birth and was, of course, suitably magnificent. The Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk and Archbishop Cranmer were godfathers. The Lady Mary was godmother. The baby’s other sister was also present, carrying the heavily jewelled and embroidered baptismal robe. This burden proved rather too much for the four-year-old Elizabeth, so she herself was carried in the procession by Queen Jane’s elder brother.

During the past decade, while Henry’s personal affairs had been occupying everybody’s attention, the family scene had been changing and the biggest gap at Edward’s christening was caused by the absence of Mary Tudor, Queen of France. Mary never seems to have regretted her tearful ultimatum to Charles Brandon, and that rash runaway marriage in the chapel at Cluny could be counted as a success. But in recent years, although the Duke remained in constant attendance on the King, the Duchess of Suffolk had preferred to spend most of her time down at Westhorpe, the family’s principal residence in East Anglia. She was increasingly preoccupied with bringing up her family and her health had begun to fail. The exact nature of Mary’s long wasting illness remains a mystery - its only recorded symptom was a pain in the side - it may have been cancer, it may have been tuberculosis. Whatever it was, it was usually given as the reason for her non-appearance at Court. Another and equally cogent reason may well have been the Queen-Duchess’s natural reluctance to yield precedence to Mistress Anne Boleyn and revulsion at the way her once dear friend and sister-in-law was being treated.