XXI

All you that be at libertie,

and would be void of strife:

I speake it on experience,

ne’re venture on a wife.

By January of 1540 the prolonged marriage negotiations of the past two years had borne fruit-rat least for the king. After considering dozens of princesses and heiresses Henry decided to trust his ambassadors’ recommendation that he marry Anne, daughter of the recently deceased duke of Cleves and sister of the reigning duke.

Anne of Cleves was represented to Henry as a girl of matchless beauty, and the portrait Holbein painted for him from life pleased him well enough. A copy of that portrait shows a girl with a lovely, doll-like face whose delicate eyes, mouth and chin are only slightly marred by a rather large nose. Besides, the match had more to recommend it than Anne’s good looks. Cleves was among those regions which, like England, was neither Catholic nor Lutheran but something in between. In marrying Anne Henry avoided having to cast his lot with either of the warring religious factions on the continent, while lending support to a known opponent of the emperor. Anne’s brother was at odds with Charles V, and the English connection strengthened his hand; for Henry it meant a plentiful supply of sturdy German mercenaries and an ally on the emperor’s doorstep.

Unfortunately, the king’s first sight of his intended bride drove all thought of these advantages from his mind. He rode to Rochester to see her shortly after she landed in England, but instead of falling in love at first sight, as he had hoped, he found Anne disappointingly unlike the woman he had imagined from her portrait. Diplomatic misunderstandings arose too between the German negotiators and the Privy Council, and Henry, who was wildly casting about for a way out of the marriage, declared that he was “not well handled” and cursed the day he let another man choose his wife for him. No way out was found, so rather than waste the elaborate preparations that had already been made, and to avoid “making a ruffle in the world,” the king decided to make the best of the situation. He “put his neck in the yoke,” as he said, took Anne to the altar, and in due course took her to bed. There he found, as he told Cromwell, that “his nature abhorred her.” Her breasts and belly were not those of a virgin, he declared. This discovery “struck him to the heart,” leaving him “neither will nor courage to prove the rest.”¹

Anne took her place at court despite the utter failure of the marriage, settling into her large household and enjoying the king’s generosity. He was not vindictive—the revulsion he felt did not extend to Anne’s personality—and after several months of chaste cohabitation he was still hoping to master his disinclination long enough to beget a child. But though he “did as much to move the consent of his heart and mind as man ever did,” he failed. By spring he was seeking a pretext for divorce. Anne was meanwhile showing herself “willful,” and she and Henry quarreled, at least briefly, over Mary. All things considered the Cleves union was a fiasco. “Before God,” Henry swore, “she is not my lawful wife.”

Henry’s displeasure with Anne was common gossip in foreign courts. The French queen told Cardinal Farnese, who told the pope, that besides being “old and ugly” Anne was not pleasing to her husband in her German dress, and was forced to change her wardrobe to the French fashion.² It was said in Flanders that besides being old (she was thirty-four at the time of her marriage) Anne was overly fond of wine and indulged in “other excesses.”³ But whatever her faults she was remarkably accommodating. She agreed to divorce Henry in return for an annuity and a comfortable private life in England, and she did not mind that her husband’s eagerness to end the marriage was heightened by his infatuation with her nineteen-year-old maid of honor Catherine Howard. In fact, some months after Henry had made Catherine his fifth wife Anne paid a call on the newlyweds at court. She presented herself at the gate of Hampton Court with a New Year’s gift of two large horses trapped in violet velvet for the king and asked to see the royal couple. Catherine received her warmly, embarrassed by Anne’s insistence on kneeling in her presence, and when Henry came in he bowed to Anne and kissed her familiarly. Anne and Catherine stayed up after supper long after the king had gone to bed, dancing together and doubtless comparing notes on his merits as a husband. The next day the three dined together, and when Henry presented Catherine with a gift of a ring and two lapdogs she handed them over to Anne.⁴

In the end Catherine Howard proved to be far more unsatisfactory than Anne of Cleves. For if Henry found Anne distasteful, Catherine broke his heart. In contrast to Anne, Catherine was an earthy girl with a sensual face and expression that invited passion. Like Anne Boleyn before her, she was a niece of the duke of Norfolk, and it was no accident that the king’s fancy should light on her instead of some other girl. The duke arranged for Henry to see Catherine often at his London house, and Lady Rochford, George Boleyn’s widow, advised her on how to behave toward her royal suitor. Norfolk was using Catherine to regain his standing in the king’s favor, knowing that if Henry divorced Anne of Cleves Cromwell’s power would be destroyed. The king’s infatuation took its course; Anne was set aside; and on the day Henry married Catherine Howard Cromwell was beheaded.

It is baffling that Norfolk and his relatives should have urged on the king a girl whose hearty sexual appetites had already disgraced her more than once. Before she came to court she had been the lover of Francis Dereham, who had “lain in bed with her, in his doublet and hose, between the sheets an hundred nights.” Catherine’s liaison with Dereham was so disgraceful—it lasted for three years, and there was “no question nor talk of a marriage between them”—that the maid who also slept in her bed declared she would sleep there no longer “because she knew not what matrimony was.” When she was even younger Catherine had allowed a servant in her aunt’s household to “feel the secret parts of her body,” and he boasted about his knowledge of a “privy mark” there.⁵ These indiscretions were hardly obscure; all of the serving women in the duchess’ household knew the stories, and the duchess herself cannot have been ignorant of what was being said about her niece. Norfolk may not have realized what danger there was in promoting the marriage, or he may have thought that once she was queen Catherine’s nature would change.

Whatever he may have believed, he was deluded about Catherine’s trustworthiness. Henry was delighted with his young bride, but she found him old and unappealing. She contrived to bring Dereham to court, and made him her letter writer and messenger with plenty of excuses to be alone with her in her bedchamber. And by the time Henry began a great progress to the north in 1541 she had taken a new lover, Thomas Culpepper, a gentleman of the king’s chamber who “slept at the bottom of his bed.” With Cromwell and his informers gone for good and the king blinded with love, the queen indulged herself extravagantly with Culpepper while Lady Rochford served as go-between and set her servants to keep watch outside the queen’s chambers. Later Culpepper confessed how he and Catherine met behind the king’s back at Lincoln, Pontefract, York and other places along the progress route. When theroyal party halted for the night at a strange castle the queen would “in every house seek for the back doors and back stairs herself,” and then send for Culpepper.

Catherine seems to have had a naive expectation that she and her lovers could go on as they were forever, though she did warn Culpepper not to reveal their secret to the priest at confession since “surely, the king being supreme head of the church, [he] should have knowledge of it.”⁶Finally, though, a servant in the Norfolk establishment told what she knew of Catherine’s conduct before her marriage, and a series of interrogations eventually brought out the rest.

Henry was wounded to the quick by these revelations. His “heart was pierced with pensiveness,” and his sorrow was so deep he could hardly speak. In the end, when all the evidence had been gathered in great secrecy, “with plenty of tears,” he gave orders that the queen was to be seized and questioned. Catherine was terrified. She wrote out a confession, but finding that to be only the beginning of a grueling inquiry she began to go to pieces. She would not eat or drink, and she paced up and down in her room “weeping and crying like a madwoman.” All the heavy and sharp objects in the room had to be taken away for fear she would “hasten her death” by suicide.

Fearing for their own lives, Catherine’s relatives denounced her more loudly than anyone else. Norfolk bewailed the king’s tragic loss and the dishonor to his family, and declared that his niece deserved to be burned alive.⁷ As Henry got over his grief he too talked wildly, calling for a sword to kill the girl he had loved so much and vowing never to marry again. Doubtless he felt keenly the irony of his situation. At fifty, his young wife was inflicting on him the same humiliation and pain he had brought on Katherine of Aragon many years before. His fury mounted, then gradually subsided into ill temper and then into melancholy as one by one the queen, Lady Rochford, and the guilty lovers were executed. After five wives Henry was a bachelor again.

Mary stood on the sidelines as her third and fourth stepmothers played out their brief reigns. With Anne of Cleves Mary had little to do, though she was among the ladies deputed to welcome Anne on her arrival in England. When Catherine Howard became queen an awkward situation arose. Mary was some five years older than Catherine, and Catherine’s close ties of blood to Anne Boleyn put a barrier between her and her stepdaughter. Evidently Mary made her distaste for Catherine’s parentage obvious in small ways, for after Catherine had been queen for a few months she complained to Henry that his daughter was not treating her with the same respect she had given Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves. Catherine persuaded Henry to dismiss two of Mary’s maidservants, muchto Mary’s concern, but Chapuys found out what the minor furor was about and warned Mary. She attempted to smooth things over by sending Catherine a handsome New Year’s gift, but the insult was not so easily healed.⁸ The girls were not allowed to return to Mary’s service, and one of them, it seems, actually died of grief at being separated from her mistress. Mary was “exceedingly distressed and sad” at this, but later in the year Catherine had apparently forgotten the injury she felt Mary had done her and was giving her valuable presents. By the time the court was following the king on his great progress the two women must have been on civil terms, for at Pontefract Catherine gave Mary a gold pomander set with an enameled clock ornamented with rubies and turquoises.⁹

Mary was hustled off to the country, along with Edward and Elizabeth, when the scandal surrounding Catherine Howard and her lovers became public knowledge, and once there she resumed her now familiar routine of brisk morning walks, riding, reading and improving her skill on the virginals and lute. Occasionally the king would spend an hour or two with her on his way from one palace to another, but her place in his thoughts was small. Chapuys never ceased to look out for her, though he had to acknowledge that her “wisdom and discretion” in handling her own affairs were remarkable.¹⁰

Still the tacit fulfillment of her life, marriage to a foreign prince or a great English nobleman, was continually postponed. In keeping with the expected attitude of a gentlewoman, she affected disinterest in marriage, as Vives’ treatises and her mother had taught her to do throughout her childhood. She was “a young maid and willing to continue so,” she said in one letter, and in another professed to “prefer never to enter that kind of religion, but continue a maid for life.”¹¹ But if these conventional sentiments do not reveal Mary’s true feelings about marriage little evidence of those feelings exists. What she observed of her father’s marital adventures cannot have made her sanguine about taking a husband, though she still cherished the romantic idea of marriage she had conceived as a child. Much later both the anticipation and reality of marriage gave her enormous pleasure, and released a flood of sentimental associations which had almost certainly been nourished over many years. Mary wanted a husband and children; that no marriage was arranged for her disheartened and depressed her.

It was not that there were no suitable candidates for her hand. When Henry was first contemplating an alliance with Cleves he considered proposing Mary as a wife for the young duke, and later, when the emperor became a widower, Henry approached him about reviving his suit.¹² Just before Henry married Anne he was thinking of giving Mary to Duke Philip of Bavaria, who came to England to help prepare for Anne’s reception and marriage. A draft agreement was drawn up, and Mary wastold to receive Philip when he arrived. He sent her a diamond cross as a sign of his love, and if Mary was not delighted with him she did say she would marry him if her father decided she should. The negotiations seem to have ceased abruptly—probably they were a casualty of the dismal Cleves marriage—and the diamond cross went to Cromwell.

Several years later the possibility of a French marriage was again being discussed, but only as a diplomatic ploy. The French ambassador Marillac went through the motions of discussing terms, interviewing the prospective bride and composing long dispatches about the mutual advantages to be gained on both sides, but he was convinced that nothing would come of the matter. “The king will not marry [his daughter] out of England,” he wrote, “lest the crown of England should be claimed for her as legitimate by the church and not for those born since the withdrawal of obedience to the Holy See, like the prince.”¹³ Henry was even more blunt. “I love my daughter well,” he told Marillac, “but myself and honor more.”

No one understood the apparently irresolvable dilemma of her unmarried state better than Mary herself. She saw clearly that in marrying her off, Henry would be undermining the strength of his throne. If he married her to a foreigner he increased the risk, already high, of invasion from the continent; if he gave her to an English nobleman he risked civil war. These two dangers were not new: Henry had faced them when he first betrothed Mary at the age of two and a half. What made them so urgent now was Mary’s disputed dynastic status coupled with Henry’s weak position among the European sovereigns. And as neither of these difficulties seemed likely to be removed, it was becoming more and more evident that, at least during Henry’s lifetime, Mary would remain unmarried, and unhappy.

Mary expressed her predicament neatly to one of her chamberwomen, a reliable informant who, because she had a French husband, was willing to talk freely to Marillac. “It was folly to think that they would marry her out of England, or even in England, as long as her father lived.” She knew all the arguments on her father’s side, as well as the point of view of the emperor and of the French. She considered the French offers the most sincere, for economic reasons; her dowry would help to cancel their enormous debts. But money alone was not a sufficient reason for Francis to marry his son to an illegitimate Tudor, she said bitterly, and in the end “nothing would be got from them but fine words, for she would be, while her father lived, only lady Mary, the unhappiest lady in Christendom.”¹⁴

The high destiny Mary had envisioned for herself was to be thwarted by obstacles beyond her control. She could not marry, and now that Edward was proving himself a sturdy child there was no chance that shewould rule. Her life was comfortable, her relations with her father intermittently strained, but bearable. Yet the thought that she was to live out her days in the genteel backwater of the court, moving from one country house to another, coming to Greenwich or Richmond occasionally but never being useful or important, weighed on her more and more heavily. By the early 1540s it was helping to make her ill again.

The sharpest irony of Mary’s predicament was that the illness brought on by her feeling of uselessness was itself hindering negotiations for her marriage. Every envoy sent to Henry’s court to make an offer on behalf of a continental prince was told to make inquiries about Mary’s rumored weakness and uncertain health. In particular, of course, prospective husbands wanted to be absolutely sure that Mary’s disorder was nothing that might hinder her ability to bear children. Katherine’s repeated miscarriages, stillbirths and fatally weak infants were not forgotten—diplomats at foreign courts kept track of such things—and it was feared that Mary might have inherited her mother’s handicap.

What clouded the issue was that Mary’s illness did not follow a consistent pattern or conform to a known disease. It was linked to recurrent episodes of amenorrhoea, depression and eventual restoration of the menstrual cycle, but this sequence was not invariably mentioned (though it may have been present) in the brief accounts and references to her bouts of illness. It was roughly seasonal, coming on most severely in the fall and early spring, yet it did not appear every year, or at least not in a severe enough form to be recorded. And it sometimes struck in the winter and summer months as well. The symptoms varied widely from one attack to the next, and the only name given to the disorder, melancholy or melancholia, referred primarily to Mary’s emotional state and did not take into account the wide range of other complaints that accompanied it.

Mary had been seriously ill twice since she entered her twenties. In December of 1537 and January of 1538 she was sick for at least several weeks, falling ill at Christmas and growing steadily worse until by New Year’s Day “she could neither sit nor stand but was fain to go to her bed, for faintness.”¹⁵ As usual Dr. De la Sà was cautious in his treatment, asking for “more counsel” before prescribing any medicines and turning to Henry’s physician Dr. Butts for his experienced opinion as “he had been with her in such cases in times past.” She was sick again in March and April of 1542, of a “strange fever” that weakened her and brought on heart palpitations, and so debilitated her that at times “she remained as though dead.”¹⁶ According to Chapuys she was in “extreme danger,” and Henry was sending frequently for news of her condition.¹⁷ By the first week of May she was out of danger, though by no means completely recovered.¹⁸

By the time she was twenty-six, when Marillac was instructed to makeinquiries about Mary’s suitability as a wife for Francis’ son Charles, duke of Orleans, her reputation for weakness and possible incapacity for child-bearing was well established. He was told to find out whether she was able to bear children and to ask her physician, if possible, “if this melancholy which she has so long worn has not brought on some malady which might prevent her having issue, as is said.”¹⁹ Marillac went to his usual source, the chamberwoman who had served Mary for years. What she told him added to the confusion about the nature, gravity and frequency of Mary’s disorder. When Katherine was first set aside, the woman said, Mary was “sick with melancholy,” but after being “visited and comforted by the king,” she soon recovered and had shown no symptoms of the affliction since. It is understandable that the chamber-woman would want to minimize Mary’s condition in hopes of enhancing her chances for marriage, but what the apothecary Juan de Soto told Marillac is less easy to reconcile with the other evidence about Mary’s complaints. He never gave Mary anything but the lightest medicines, he told the ambassador, “which she took more often because it was her father’s command than because she needed them.”²⁰ These accounts, plus Mary’s active way of life and personal energy, made Marillac wonder whether the gossip about her debility was exaggerated.

Yet as Mary entered her late twenties the doubts about her health grew greater, and she became more and more convinced that she was destined to live and die a superfluous, unmarriageable spinster. These dark speculations undermined her composure and embittered her view of the future. In time they too would take their physical and emotional toll.