1

Journey to the Throne

Princess Mary, who would reign over England, Wales and Ireland between July 1553 and November 1558, was born on 18 February 1516, the daughter of King Henry VIII and his first wife, Queen Catherine of Aragon. Family life can always be unstable, and nowhere more so than in the case of the European royal dynasties of the sixteenth century, whose political and medical ups and downs affected the lives of all their subjects. Among these families, those of Mary’s parents had particular reason to feel insecure. On 28 June 1491 her father was born in Greenwich Palace, east of London, as Prince Henry, the second son of King Henry VII and Queen Elizabeth of York, who had themselves achieved rule by the chance verdict of battle against Richard III, at Bosworth in August 1485. Quite unexpectedly, the young Henry had become heir to the throne when his older brother Arthur, Prince of Wales, had died of a sudden illness in Ludlow Castle, near the Anglo-Welsh border, on 2 April 1502. Just over a year later, on 25 June 1503, Prince Henry was betrothed, in the Bishop of Salisbury’s palace in Fleet Street, London, to his brother’s widow. As he was then only twelve years old, Henry had to wait two more years before he could legally consent to the match.1 Crucially, because Henry was marrying his dead brother’s wife, a papal dispensation had to be obtained, on the grounds of affinity (blood relationship), rather than any general prohibition of such marriages. Pope Julius II did not specify, in the relevant bull, whether or not Catherine was still a virgin when Arthur died, but in a brief (papal letter) to her parents, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, he stated that her first marriage had indeed been consummated.² In future years this would prove to be vitally important, both for Mary and for the kingdom as a whole.

 Mary’s mother Catherine was born at Alcalá de Henares, east of Madrid, on 15 or 16 December 1485, in a palace which belonged to the Archbishops of Toledo. She was the fourth and youngest daughter of Ferdinand (Fernando) II of Aragon (V of Castile) and Isabella I of Castile, who in 1496 would be granted the title ‘Catholic Monarchs’ (Reyes Católicos). Catherine’s parents were both members of the house of Trastámara, which had gained the Castilian throne back in 1369 by means of the murder, by their dynasty’s founder, Enrique, of the legitimate King Peter (Pedro). Ferdinand and Isabella were then in the process of conquering the last part of the Iberian peninsula still ruled by Muslims, the Nasrid emirate of Granada, which would fall to them in January 1492. Having achieved this notable feat on behalf of Christendom, Catherine’s parents sought to expand Spain’s influence further, on the European scene, by means of shrewd dynastic marriages for their children. Two of their daughters, Isabel and María, married into the neighbouring crown of Portugal. Their only son, John (Juan), Prince of Asturias, heir to the crowns of Castile and Aragon, died prematurely in 1497, but by then he and his second-oldest sister, Joanna (Juana), had been married into the Habsburg dynasty, which controlled one of the two great powers of Europe, the Holy Roman Empire (the other being France). John had briefly been married to Margaret of Austria, daughter of the Emperor Maximilian, while Joanna married Maximilian’s son Philip, the future Philip I of Spain (1504–6). These developments would become significant for England when Catherine was betrothed to Prince Henry in 1503 and later produced Mary. At various times between then and 21 April 1509, when King Henry VII died, it looked as though the young Henry and Catherine’s marriage would never take place. There were unseemly wrangles over the Spanish princess’s dowry, and Ferdinand’s ceaseless political manoeuvrings, both in Spain itself and elsewhere in Europe, led him to neglect Catherine’s well-being somewhat and even, on occasions, to threaten to break the tie altogether. Everything would change, however, when her fiancé acceded to the throne of England and Wales, and the lordship of Ireland.3

 Henry VIII became king with an evident desire to make a new start after his father’s nervous and rather oppressive reign. One early sign of the change was his decision, now that he was an independent agent, to marry Catherine. Perhaps out of respect for the late Prince of Wales, the wedding took place quietly. Henry’s brother had married her splendidly, in 1501, in St Paul’s Cathedral, London, but he now chose to tie the knot at Greenwich, where a strict Observant community of Franciscan friars lived alongside the palace. Public ceremony was reserved for the joint coronation of Henry and Catherine, which took place on 24 June 1509, the Feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist, which was customarily kept as Midsummer Day. Everything was done according to the court manual, the ‘Royal Book’, with a stay in the Tower of London and a procession along the north bank of the Thames, through the City of London to Westminster. All accounts, not least those of the king himself, indicate that the first few years of Henry and Catherine’s marriage were generally happy. There were revels, jousts and hunting, and Henry seems to have regarded himself as almost a reincarnation of his Lancastrian predecessor, Henry V, which meant being a war leader. In 1513 he personally led a very expensive expedition across the Channel, capturing the towns of Tournai and Thérouanne. Meanwhile Catherine, as regent, reverted to the role her mother had taken during the Granada war by working in London and organizing the raising of an additional army intended to support the English troops under the Earl of Surrey, which eventually defeated and killed James IV of Scotland at Flodden on 9 September 1513.

 Yet the intimate history of the King and Queen of England was less happy. On 31 January 1510 Catherine miscarried a child, apparently a daughter, though the news did not come out for a few weeks. Henry immediately announced that they would try again, and on 1 February 1511 a son was born and baptized Henry, but he died three weeks later, and the Tudor (and Trastámaran) sense of insecurity over inheritance developed rapidly. During the campaigns of 1513–14 there is no record of any further attempts to start a family, but in January 1515 the queen produced another son, this time stillborn. Thus it was at least a partial relief when Mary was born, on 18 February 1516. Henry had to attempt to conceal, from the eyes of his subjects and of his brother monarchs in Europe, his bitter disappointment at his wife’s failure to produce the vital male heir. There had been quite enough civil conflict in England over the previous century or so. It had started with the deposition of Richard II in 1399, and continued through the violence between various members of the Plantagenet dynasty and their followers in the Wars of the Roses between Lancastrians and Yorkists. It culminated in Henry VII’s usurpation of the usurper Richard III’s throne in 1485. The strains and tensions in the mind of Mary’s father concerning the security of his rule would cast a shadow over the whole of her life, and over both his and her subsequent historical reputations.

 Henry’s early military forays had begun with the Marquess of Dorset’s disastrous expedition in 1512, supposedly aimed at reconquering territory in south-west France which had formerly been English. In fact this embarrassing fiasco, with its mass drunkenness and desertion, merely opened the way to Ferdinand of Spain’s annexation of a large part of the kingdom of Navarre. Then came the Tournai and Thérouanne expedition, but after that Henry VIII more or less settled down to defending what he saw as England’s interests in the complex European politics of the day. Throughout his life, as well as his daughter Mary’s, Italy was the centre of much diplomacy, and often military conflict as well. From 1514 onwards Henry had as his chief minister Thomas Wolsey, a butcher’s son from Ipswich who would become Archbishop of York, Bishop of Winchester and a cardinal of the Roman Church. As well as achieving an extraordinary dominance over the king, Wolsey devoted himself to international politics. Unlike his royal master, he was well aware that England’s limited population and resources would never allow it to be any more than a second-rank power in relation to France and the Empire. In response, he tried to punch above his weight in European diplomacy, though not, after the debacles and the puny, temporary successes of 1512–14, on the field of battle. Much better known for his secular politics than anything religious, Wolsey was none the less fully in tune with the reformist currents of the Catholic Church in the years leading up to the irruption on to the scene of Friar Martin Luther in 1517. In accordance with current Humanist ideas on Church reform, the cardinal closed down some small convents and monasteries in order to fund new educational foundations, a college and school in Ipswich and Cardinal College, later Christ Church, in Oxford.

 From a very early age, Princess Mary became a pawn in Henry and Wolsey’s diplomatic game. Until she was about nine years old her parents still expected to have a son, and it was therefore assumed that she would be betrothed to some European prince whom she would marry once she reached the age of twelve in 1528. Her first betrothal was planned to be to a French prince, but after more political manoeuvrings a new provisional arrangement would soon be made with the Emperor Charles V, who visited England in 1520 as her father’s new anti-French ally. In June 1522 she was betrothed to Charles. Between then and 1525 Mary continued to grow up as a favoured princess, but there were already signs of future trouble. Her mother Catherine’s pregnancies continued to fail, and Henry adopted the traditional royal custom of seeking solace elsewhere. He was at times unfaithful to his wife even before Mary was born, and in 1519 one of his mistresses, Elizabeth Blount, gave birth to their son, who was named, with little subtlety, Henry Fitzroy (king’s son). In a political system in which stable power largely depended on male heredity, it was perhaps inevitable that the new young Henry should be accorded high status even though, unlike his half-sister, he was illegitimate.

 Mary would never escape the effects of her gender, any more than her father could forget the relative weakness of the Tudor claim to the throne. In the wings were various descendants of the old house of Plantagenet, and to the end of his days Henry would regard some of them as a threat, most notably the Stafford, Pole and Courtenay families. It is likely that King Henry never entirely forgot his experience, as a six-year-old, of being holed up in the Tower of London in June 1497 during the revolt of the pretender, ‘Perkin Warbeck’. Henry’s dark thoughts and fears would increasingly surface in acts of judicial violence, beginning with the arbitrary execution in 1510 of two of his father’s councillors, Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, and continuing with the show trial and execution, for supposed treason, of Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, in 1521.

 In the often bewildering European politics of the period, with ever-increasing dynastic and religious conflict, exacerbated by the growing firepower of armies, 1525 proved to be, in many respects, a difficult and ominous year. Since the last years of the fifteenth century, the Empire, Spain and France had fought for control of the rich and strategically vital Italian peninsula. Lesser powers, including England as well as the Italian states, notable among them the Papal States and Venice, endeavoured to keep afloat and involved in affairs by negotiating alliances, which often required the placing of military forces in the field. In February 1525 the Battle of Pavia, in northern Italy, between Imperial and French armies resulted in King Francis I himself becoming a prisoner of the Emperor. Generally speaking, English foreign policy was guided by the current state of Franco-Imperial relations, and 1525 was no exception. In his apparent triumph Charles abandoned his betrothed, Princess Mary, and instead in 1526 married the beautiful Princess Isabel of Portugal, with a wedding in Seville and a honeymoon in the Alhambra Palace at Granada. In reaction, English policy moved towards a new French alliance, but by this time Wolsey’s position of pre-eminence was crumbling, largely because of his failure to satisfy the king’s new desire to divorce Catherine with papal approval. In 1527, as she reached the age of eleven, Mary’s whole life was about to be thrown into upheaval.

 Trouble in Mary’s parents’ marriage seems to have started when her mother reached the age of forty, in December 1525. There is little doubt that, up to then, and despite his occasional infidelities (which were few in comparison with those of Francis I), Henry had genuinely loved Catherine, but they had no living children together apart from Mary. When exactly Anne Boleyn, second daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn, first caught the king’s eye is not entirely clear, but she seems to have had an extraordinarily magnetic personality, as well as possessing the graces of the French court, in which she had spent seven years. King Henry was, or regarded himself as, a very religious man, and his beliefs and scruples would have a huge effect on Mary’s life and that of the kingdom as a whole. Until about 1525, he and Catherine had apparently shared a strong and quite uncomplicated Catholic faith, which was expressed in frequent attendance at Mass and the Divine Office, in private devotions with the help of Books of Hours and in more public and popular aspects of the Christianity of the day, such as pilgrimages to shrines, to Our Lady of Walsingham in particular. Both husband and wife seem to have placed their faith in that north Norfolk shrine as an aid to the birth of a son, but Henry’s emotional and practical vengeance on the traditional Church for its apparent failure in this and other respects would be terrible.

 The traditional remedy for marriage breakdown, as far as the upper classes of Catholic Europe were concerned, was to seek a declaration from the Church that the bond should be ‘annulled’: that is, treated as though it had never existed. Ordinary people referred, more practically and perhaps more honestly, to the ‘divorce’ of the former spouses, and that is how Henry and Catherine’s situation, from 1527 until the queen’s death at Kimbolton in the early hours of 7 January 1536, has been traditionally described by historians. Cardinal Wolsey, on the other hand, had to seek for his master the remedy prescribed by the canon law of the Church, which was an annulment, to be granted by the then pope, Clement VII Medici. The process started when Mary was just eleven years old.

 To begin with, Henry could quite reasonably have expected to receive his annulment, even though, in religious terms, the issue was not simple. Strict attention to Holy Scripture raised a problem, with one book of the Law of Moses (Torah) apparently contradicting another on the subject. Leviticus 20:21 promised childlessness to any man who married his dead brother’s wife, while Deuteronomy 25:9–10 said that any single brother who did not do so would be shamed. European Jews in this period habitually married their dead brothers’ wives in these circumstances, perhaps in part to help ensure survival in a time of persecution. This practice, based on Deuteronomy, was and is known as ‘levirate marriage’. Henry, on the other hand, naturally favoured the Leviticus version which, in the late 1520s, could fairly be regarded as the normal understanding of the papacy. Most relevantly, King Manuel of Portugal, who had first married Catherine’s oldest sister Isabel, had later been given a papal dispensation to marry another of her older sisters, María. Why should the same thing not happen in the case of Ferdinand and Isabel’s youngest child? The answer to this question involved the succession to the crowns of Spain. The essential fact, in Henry’s seeking of a divorce, was that the wife of whom he wanted to rid himself was an aunt of the Emperor Charles V, who was in turn the son of Catherine’s second-oldest sister Joanna and the late Philip I of Spain. With Italy torn by almost ceaseless warfare and political manoeuvring, not least by Charles, Pope Clement would in any case have had great difficulty in granting the English king’s request, but the summer of 1527 found him in a state of particular weakness after the violent ‘Sack’ and occupation of Rome by unpaid Imperial troops, some Spanish and others German (including Lutherans), in May of that year. For the next five years Princess Mary would have to spend her difficult and formative young adulthood on the sidelines of a tortuous legal process which would involve rulers, churchmen and universities all over Europe.

 The 1530s were indeed a painful decade for Mary. Between May 1531 and the death of her mother nearly five years later, her father would not allow them even to see each other. On top of that Henry famously, or notoriously, replaced Catherine with Anne Boleyn, while Wolsey went into a political and physical decline, being blamed for the failure to secure an annulment from Rome and dying in 1530 while on his way to trial in London. Anne was crowned queen on 1 June 1533, giving birth, with notable rapidity, to a daughter, Elizabeth, on 7 September of that year: there was still no son. Catherine was redesignated Dowager Princess of Wales, and her daughter was demoted from Princess to Lady Mary and declared to be illegitimate. In all these developments, religion, personal desires and politics became hopelessly confused with one another, but one thing remained clear: the whole identity of England in relation to the continent of Europe, and of its Church in relation to Rome, was now in question.

 Mary, who had of course been brought up in a traditional Catholic faith, was forced to witness the struggles of her father and his advisers, including, from 1529, Thomas Cromwell and from 1532 Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, both to secure and validate the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn and to reform the perceived abuses of the English Church. These struggles inevitably had a huge impact on the young Mary and would affect her when she eventually reached the throne. Perhaps the most excruciating year in her whole life followed the loss of her mother, after which she was treated with particular callousness by Queen Anne, who seems to have utterly loathed Mary and everything she stood for. In addition Henry himself, and Cromwell, subjected Mary to a battery of pressure which finally brought her to admit that her parents’ marriage had not been legitimate and that she was therefore a bastard.

 Henry’s succession problem was not, of course, solved by the birth of the Princess Elizabeth, though her much older sister had to suffer the bitter humiliation of having her own household wound up and having to join that of the infant. Biographers and commentators have readily condemned the teenage Mary for her supposedly ‘temperamental’, or (that deadly pseudo-medical word) ‘hysterical’, behaviour in the mid-1530s, but this seems unduly harsh. One is sometimes advised by historians, on a rather dubious sociological basis, not to expect close emotional ties between parents and progeny in sixteenth-century Europe, but even if this were an accurate characterization, Mary’s treatment by her father, his second wife and their inner circle seems quite extraordinarily nasty by any criteria. There is no need to indulge in cod psychology to suggest that the events of these years must have made Mary a tougher, and probably an even more determined, person, as well as causing her psychological damage. Her father seems to have had some difficulty in distinguishing between his own authority and that of the God in whom he believed, and Cromwell’s correspondence with Mary, when apparently working to bring her and Henry together, suggests that at times he himself suffered from the same confusion of identity.

 An example of Mary’s language and tone, when writing to her father after receiving Thomas Cromwell’s coaching, may be found in her first letter to him after her mother’s death, dated 1 June 1536:

I beseech your Grace of your daily blessing, which is my chief desire in the world. And in the same humble ways, [ac]knowledging all the offences that I have done, … I pray your Grace, in the honour of God, and for your fatherly pity, to forgive me them for the which I am sorry as any creature living, and near unto God, I do and will submit me in all things to your goodness and pleasure to do with me whatsoever shall please your Grace.

The letter was signed ‘Your Grace’s most humble and obedient daughter and handmaid, Mary.’4 Yet it was rejected by the king, and on 10 June she went even further in her self-abasement. She told her father that she was ‘most humbly prostrate befor[e] your most noble feet, your most obedient subject and humble child’, who placed her obedience to him ‘next to Almighty God’. In her desperation she was still confiding in Cromwell, and now wrote to him again, as ‘one of my chief friends next unto his Grace and the Queen [now Jane Seymour]’, saying that she had fully complied with his previous instructions on how to make peace with her father. She wrote:

Wherefore I desire you, for the Passion which Christ suffered for you and me, and as my very trust is in you, that you will find such means through your great wisdom, that I be not moved to agree to any further entry in this matter than I have done. But if I be put to any more, I am plain with you as with my great friends, my said conscience will in no ways suffer me to consent thereunto.5

Mary must surely have known that mention of ‘conscience’, the defence both of her own mother and of Thomas More, who had been executed for treason in the previous year, would go down badly with her father. From this time onwards she had her letters to the king effectively drafted by Cromwell, but still to no good effect. Even her eventual acceptance, some weeks later, of her father’s view that his marriage to Catherine had not been legal under canon law did not produce a true reconciliation.

 From the execution of Anne Boleyn on 19 May 1536 until Henry’s death in January 1547, Mary had to deal with a further succession of stepmothers. Jane Seymour (1536–7), who produced the long-awaited son, Edward VI, generally treated her kindly, coming as she did from the Seymour branch of the religiously conservative Howard dynasty. Generally speaking, Mary also seems to have got on well with Anne of Cleves, who would eventually attend her coronation on 1 October 1553. Her closest relationship was with Catherine Parr, Henry’s last queen. Catherine Howard, on the other hand, being so close to her in age, was a more difficult proposition, but was only a short-lived problem because of her sad end as a convicted adulteress.

 Mary would have to wait a very long time to be queen. The birth of her half-brother Edward on 12 October 1537 ensured that at best she would be second in line after his descendants, if any, but the consequent demotion of Anne Boleyn’s daughter Elizabeth did not help her in this respect. Both princesses were left in legal limbo as their father never formally revoked their bastardy, though he did have parliament pass a Succession Act in 1544, which ordained that the throne should go first to Edward and any descendants of his, then to Mary and her descendants, and finally to Elizabeth and hers. Fate, of course, decreed that none of Henry’s children would have any progeny, thus producing precisely the dynastic disaster that he obsessively feared, but while the old king was still alive, he himself complicated the legal position further. The 1544 Act, which appeared to be an example of his extraordinary, and constitutionally significant, concern to involve parliament directly in vital matters of state, explicitly authorized Henry to make any changes he wished to the order of succession by means of his will. This loophole would, in the summer of 1553, allow his son Edward and his advisers to attempt to divert the succession out of the Tudor family and into the house of Dudley, through Lady Jane, née Grey.

 In some important respects, the accession of Edward VI at the end of January 1547 improved Mary’s situation. In his will, dictated in December of the previous year, Henry made generous financial provision for both his daughters. Edward’s Council, at first headed by Edward Seymour, who promoted himself from Earl of Hertford to Duke of Somerset and became the child king’s Lord Protector, duly carried out the terms of his father’s will. As a result Mary became one of the richest women in England, acquiring lands and property much of which had been confiscated by Henry VIII from the Howard family, including the dukes of Norfolk. Given the geographical location of much of this land, Mary thereby gained a power base in East Anglia, including Kenninghall in north Norfolk and Framlingham Castle, on the border between Norfolk and Suffolk, which would prove vitally important to her in the summer of 1553.

 In the meantime, both Mary and Elizabeth mostly lived away from court, but Mary came into increasing conflict with Edward and his councillors over religion. She gradually found herself in opposition to the reforms introduced by the Council and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, which were aimed at creating a new Reformed, or Protestant, Church of England. Thus when the first Book of Common Prayer, in English, was brought into general use on Whit Sunday (Pentecost) 1549, Mary refused to use it, as she did the more radical revised Prayer Book of 1552. Her household continued to worship using the Catholic liturgy, and this became a constant source of irritation and friction between her and the king as he grew up, as well as with his lay councillors and bishops. This stalemate continued until Edward died, after a painful illness, on 6 July 1553. By then, the boy king had tried to alter the succession, by means of a legal ‘Device’ which aimed to discard Henry VIII’s will and the Act of Succession, disinheriting both Mary and Elizabeth and transferring the throne to the descendants of the late king’s sister Mary. The dying Edward used his authority and his developing personality, which increasingly resembled that of his father, to force his councillors to give written assent to the Device and Jane was proclaimed queen. In July 1553 it looked as though Catherine of Aragon’s daughter would have to fight for the throne if she wanted it, just as her grandmother had fought for hers in Castile. Isabella had been proclaimed queen in Segovia on 13 December 1474, before her husband Ferdinand had arrived from neighbouring Aragon. It was not until 1479 that they secured complete control of Castile.