The Tudors (60 page)

It was left to Mary to seek an end to their estrangement. She began by approaching Cromwell, now the king’s right hand, who replied that
nothing would be possible until she showed herself willing to extend to her father the obedience that was his right. Cromwell meant, by this, that Mary must acknowledge that her parents had never been married and that Henry was supreme head of the church. Mary, however, chose to put an easier interpretation on his words, taking them as an invitation to assure her father in general terms that she remained his faithful and loving daughter. She wrote directly to the king, asking him “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 assured him of her willingness to submit to him in all things “next to God.”

Clearly she had little understanding of who her father was at this stage—of how convinced he was that the only way to be faithful to God was to be submissive to him. She must have had no understanding of how little the destruction of Anne Boleyn had done to soften his attitude toward anyone who resisted. Her three words “next to God” acted on Henry like a red cape on a bull. Instead of answering Mary’s letter, he sent the Duke of Norfolk and the bishop of Chichester to where she was now being kept, at Hunsdon. They demanded to know whether she accepted the Act of Supremacy and her own illegitimacy. In refusing both points, Mary made herself doubly guilty of high treason. The climactic struggle between father and daughter was joined, throwing Mary into a situation vastly more dangerous than the worst of her earlier experiences.

The king and Cromwell had all the advantages, and they used them to full effect. What Cromwell wanted was not Mary’s death, with its incalculable political risks, but her surrender. Therefore, though he removed members of the Privy Council suspected of being sympathetic to her, at the same time he brushed aside the demands of other members that she be brought to a trial that could only end in her conviction. And though some of her oldest and closest friends were arrested and questioned, this was done not in the expectation of learning anything but simply for the purpose of frightening Mary and anyone inclined to support her. Finally, three weeks after her first hopeful letter to the king, she broke, signing the articles of submission that Cromwell had prepared for her. Thereby she repudiated not only the Roman church but, in a real sense, her mother. Anyone inclined to judge her for this act should remember that
she was almost totally isolated, threatened not only with her own destruction but that of her most faithful friends, and barely twenty years old.

It was perhaps King Henry’s most grotesque victory, grotesque not only because he achieved it over his own helpless child but because he seems to have crushed, very nearly to have extinguished, her spirit. Chapuys would claim, in his dispatches, that Mary had yielded without reading the articles of submission, that her motive had been to save not herself but her friends, and that she was prostrate with guilt over having compromised herself so deeply. Other evidence suggests that her surrender was very real and very nearly complete. A letter of effusive thanks to Cromwell for saving her life gives no hint of being anything but sincere. The same is true of Mary’s letters to the emperor Charles and his sister, the regent of the Netherlands; she told them of having been shown by the Holy Spirit that the pope had no authority in England, and that her parents’ relationship had been incestuous. It is possible that she wrote such things in the expectation that her correspondence was being intercepted by Cromwell; there is no way of being certain.

One thing only indicated that the autonomy of Mary’s person had not been utterly destroyed. Ordered to provide the names of those who had advised and supported her in her refusal to submit, she not only declined but said she would die before betraying her friends in any such way. At this point Cromwell—or was it Henry?—decided that the game was at an end, that nothing could be gained by further intimidation or new demands. Though not legitimated, Mary was restored to favor. Henry visited her in company with his bride Jane Seymour, invited her to begin spending time at court, and significantly increased her allowance. The household at Hatfield House was expanded and reorganized so that Mary’s standing was equal to Elizabeth’s.

By late 1536—the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace, which she did nothing to encourage or support—Mary was spending a great deal of time in her father’s presence. She established an affectionate relationship with Queen Jane, who was close to her in age and of similarly conservative religious leanings. The birth of Prince Edward in October 1537 came as an immense relief to Mary: the existence of a male heir reduced her political importance to an extent that she can only have welcomed after so many years of tension. It must also have encouraged hopes that the
king might remove the cloud of illegitimacy from over her head. (In fact Henry, in futile pursuit of an understanding with France, offered at about this time to legitimize Mary in order to make possible her marriage to yet another prince of France’s royal house.) Jane’s death appears to have been at least as hard a blow for Mary as for Henry, but it did nothing to disturb her status at court. On the contrary, during the two years that the king remained unattached Mary basked in his favor, emerging as the most important female personage in England. His next wife, Anne of Cleves, came and went too quickly to present difficulties. Even during her father’s marriage to Catherine Howard, Mary remained a significant presence at court. In Catherine Parr Mary found another friend; the fact that the two women became close in spite of Catherine’s evangelical convictions is suggestive of the extent to which Mary was, at this point, unwilling to make an issue of religious differences.

A development of greater importance than Henry’s sixth marriage was the new Act of Succession of 1543. It stated that if Edward died without offspring the crown was to go first to Mary and “the heirs of her body” and then, if Mary, too, died without issue, to Elizabeth and her descendants. This act became law without any effort to legitimate either Mary or Elizabeth (the king’s marriages to their mothers remained null). It meant—bastardy always having been a barrier to succession—that for the first time in history an English king was claiming the right to
choose
his successors. Though it must have seemed improbable, in 1543, that not one of Henry’s three offspring would leave a child to carry on the dynasty, the act made provision for such an eventuality by giving his Grey and Clifford cousins a place in the order of succession. It is ironic, in light of what history held in store, that the descendants of Henry’s elder sister Margaret were excluded altogether. It is only through Margaret that today’s royal family is related to the Tudors at all.

King Henry’s death at the start of 1547 appeared at first to improve Mary’s position. Now she was not only first in line to the throne but financially independent. Under the terms of her father’s will she inherited property generating an annual income of nearly £4,000, which made her wealthier than anyone else in England aside from the new king and perhaps two or three members of the high nobility. For the first time in her life, and she was entering her thirties now, she did not have to look to the treasury for her support. The fact that much of her property was
concentrated in East Anglia, having been taken from the Howards when Henry attainted the Duke of Norfolk and had the Earl of Surrey executed, gave her a base not far from London. She had always had a good relationship with the boy Edward, so the start of his reign appeared to presage good fortune.

The good times in Mary’s life were always brief, however, and now as before, the question of religion brought trouble. It began with the Privy Council’s determination, under the Duke of Somerset’s leadership, to push ahead with innovations that the late king had consistently rejected. A decade had passed since Mary’s acceptance of her father’s supremacy. Since then she had shown herself to be consistently, almost surprisingly comfortable with the church that Henry had brought into existence—a church that conformed in most respects to Catholic tradition. In this she was no different from other leading conservatives, bishops such as Gardiner, Tunstal, and Bonner, and nobles such as Norfolk until his calamitous fall. If a definite settlement of disputed questions had not been achieved under Henry, a fairly solid truce had. It might have endured for years more, might have hardened into something permanent, if the evangelicals led by the increasingly heterodox Thomas Cranmer had not begun campaigning for further change, and if they had not received the full support of Protector Somerset, the council that he headed, and the boy-king himself. We saw earlier how Cranmer, just months after Henry’s death, issued for the use of the entire clergy a book of homilies, sermons, that propounded the archbishop’s acceptance of Lutheran dogma including justification by faith alone. This was, according to the Act of Six Articles passed by Parliament at Henry’s direction in 1539 and still in effect at the time of his death, heresy pure and simple. Not surprisingly the book met with much resistance and much complaint. Some of the more prominent objectors—Gardiner, Bonner, old Tunstal—soon found themselves in prison and deprived of their offices.

Mary, not only of royal blood and popular with the people but heir presumptive to the throne, presented the reformers with a delicate challenge. Without questioning the royal supremacy—doing so would have made her no less a heretic than the evangelicals—she protested that Cranmer and his faction were violating the law of the land, trampling on the terms of her father’s last will and testament, and imposing innovations that could not possibly be acceptable until her brother reached his
majority and became capable of leading the church. When Parliament changed the law, nullifying the Six Articles and other obstacles to reform, she again took the position that it had no right to do any such thing during the king’s minority. By 1549, when the new reign’s first Act of Uniformity replaced the mass with Cranmer’s service and ignited the Prayer Book rebellion, Mary protested more vehemently than before and received from the council a letter advising her to be “conformable and obedient to the observation of his Majesty’s laws.” Her response dripped with contempt. She told the councilors that the Act of Uniformity was “a late law of your own making for the altering of matters of religion, which in my conscience is not worthy to have the name of law.”

For much of the next four years she was virtually at war with the government whose head she would become in the event of Edward’s death. With the fall of Somerset and the rise of John Dudley, things grew so much worse that Mary once again believed she was going to have to flee to the continent to save her life. Charles V sent three ships to rescue her by dark of night; at the last moment, though frightened and confused, she decided that duty required her to stay in England. She became the most conspicuously defiant champion of the old ways. Ordered to travel to London and present herself to the king and his council, she entered the city at the head of an entourage of some 150 friends and retainers, every one of whom displayed either a rosary or some other forbidden symbol of the old faith. Ordered by Edward to conform, she reduced him to tears by replying that she would die first. Several of the senior officers of her household, upon refusing to try to persuade her to abandon the mass, were thrown into prison. When representatives of the king arrived to inform her that she would no longer be permitted to hear mass (the delegation was headed by Baron Rich, now lord chancellor and a very wealthy man, the same Richard Rich whose perjured testimony had facilitated the killing of Thomas More and John Fisher two decades before), she dismissed them scornfully.

The conflict ended in a standoff. The law against the saying or hearing of mass continued in effect, but no effort was made to enforce it in Mary’s case. Eventually she was even able to resume her visits to her brother, spending time with him amicably as long as both avoided the subject of religion. It was clear to everyone, however, and to Edward more than to most, that in all of England there was no enemy of his evangelical
establishment more dangerous or determined than his heir. Nothing could be less surprising than Edward’s decision, when he knew that his life was ending, to prevent Mary from succeeding him. Or Mary’s commitment, once she had stopped Dudley from putting Jane Grey on the throne, to destroy the Edwardian Reformation root and branch.

Another New Beginning

F
rom the hour she entered London as queen, Mary Tudor faced a daunting array of challenges. She had to take charge of a government most of whose senior members—both those who were now her prisoners and those still in office—had actively opposed her succession. She had to assume the headship of a church whose primate publicly condemned her as a heretic and had supported Jane Grey to the end. The treasury she had inherited was not only empty but deep in debt, her kingdom too enfeebled by financial mismanagement to play a weighty role in international affairs, her people confused and divided by three decades of religious convulsion.