God save King Henry with all his power,
And Prince Edward, that goodly flower,
With all his lords of great honour –
Sing on, troll away, sing, troll on away
Heave and how, rumbelow, troll on away.
For Anne Boleyn the birth of Elizabeth brought the beginning of fear. In January of 1534 there was a rumour that she was pregnant again but either she miscarried at a very early stage or, more likely, the rumour was a false one. In March the Pope at long last pronounced judgement on the King’s first marriage – judgement in Catherine’s favour. Almost simultaneously Parliament at Westminster passed the Act of Succession recognizing the legality of Henry’s second marriage and entailing the crown on Anne’s children. It now became high treason to question the validity of the divorce by deed or writing and, to drive the point home, every member of Parliament, ‘all the curates and priests in London and throughout England’ and ‘every man in the shires and towns where they dwelled’ were required to swear a solemn oath ‘to be true to Queen Anne and to believe and take her for lawful wife of the King and rightful Queen of England’. In one sense, of course, this set the final seal on Anne’s victory, but it also underlined her obligation to fulfil her side of the bargain and provide the country with a Prince of Wales.
In April the King and Queen were at Eltham with their baby daughter, ‘as goodly a child as hath been seen’ gushed somebody, and my Lady Princess was noticed to be much in her father’s favour, ‘as goodly child should be, God save her’. Henry never could resist babies, but while he fondled and played with the six-month-old Elizabeth there were ominous signs that her mother no longer occupied a similarly favoured position. By mid-summer rumours that the Queen was pregnant were going round again, but again nothing came of it. By September Chapuys was writing that ‘since the King began to entertain doubts as to his concubine’s reported pregnancy, he has renewed and increased his love to another very handsome young lady of this court’. The young lady’s name is not mentioned, but it is possible that Henry was already becoming attracted by pale, prim Jane Seymour.
Anne tried to get rid of the girl, and Chapuys heard that Henry had told his concubine to be satisfied with what he had done for her; that ‘were he to begin again, he would certainly not do as much; that she ought to consider where she came from, and many other things of the same kind’. But although the Emperor’s ambassador lovingly collected scraps of gossip like this, he still believed that no great importance should be attached to them, ‘considering the King’s fickleness and the astuteness of the Lady, who knows perfectly well how to deal with him’. Everyone was so conditioned by this time to the idea of Anne’s power over the King, that at first it was difficult to grasp that her magic had begun to desert her. All the same, by the end of the year, it was clear to any discerning observer that Henry’s grand passion had burnt itself out, leaving only cold, sour ashes behind. Anne’s growing sense of insecurity drove her on into making scenes which bored and irritated him, and the elegant, lively dark-eyed girl was becoming a shrill, haggard virago, who could not always control her hysterical outbursts and made no attempt at all to control her bitter tongue.
But although his domestic problems were potentially worrying, the King had other things on his mind during the winter of 1534. In November the Act which declared the King officially and unconditionally Supreme Head of the Church in England came before Parliament, and as from the following February it would be high treason ‘maliciously’ to deny this startling addition to the royal style. Sir Thomas More, who had a gift for putting things in a nutshell, described the Act of Supremacy as ‘a sword with two edges, for if a man answer one way it will destroy the soul, and if he answer another it will destroy the body’. Neither More nor John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, shared the King’s confidence in his special relationship with God; neither was prepared to recognize Henry Tudor as their supreme earthly authority on spiritual matters, and in the summer of 1535 both paid the penalty. As he stood on the scaffold, Thomas More once again summed up the situation in a single telling phrase. ‘I die the King’s good servant’, he said, ‘but God’s first.’
Thomas More, a scholar renowned throughout the civilized world, and John Fisher, a prince of the Church, were by no means the only men in England who considered their souls more important than their bodies but they were by far the best known and the news of their deaths sent a shockwave of revulsion and dismay around Europe. But Henry had learnt his own strength now. Ironically enough, it was Thomas More who, not long before, had warned Thomas Cromwell ‘if a lion knew his own strength, hard were it for any man to rule him’. In future no man, and no woman either, could rule Henry Tudor. The easy-going, malleable young King had gone forever.
Towards the end of the summer Henry went off on a progress through the south-western counties, during which he stayed three nights at Jane Seymour’s family home at Wulfhall in Wiltshire. Just what his plans were (if indeed he had any at this stage) we do not know, but he was still sleeping with Anne for in November she was definitely pregnant again. Then, in the first week of January 1536, Catherine of Aragon died at Kimbolton Castle, the gloomy, semi-fortified manor house in the Midlands, where she had been living for the past two years in increasingly miserable seclusion. Henry made no pretence of mourning. ‘Thank God we are now free from any suspicion of war’, he exclaimed to the Emperor’s ambassador and a shocked Chapuys reported that on the day after the news reached the Court, Henry appeared dressed in yellow from head to foot, carrying his bastard daughter (Elizabeth was nearly two-and-a-half now) about in his arms, making a great fuss of her and showing her off to all and sundry.
Anne, also wearing yellow, rejoiced with Henry – at least in public. But she was far too intelligent not to have reflected on the possible consequences of Catherine’s death. The King was unlikely to complicate an already complicated situation any further by embarking on a third marriage while his first wife – still regarded, of course, by all orthodox Catholics as his only legal wife – remained alive. He had not dared to kill Catherine as he had killed More and Fisher, and as Chapuys had feared he might, but now that she had at last had the tact to die of natural causes he would find it a great deal easier to make a fresh start.
Catherine was buried at Peterborough on 29 January as Arthur’s widow, Dowager Princess of Wales, the title she had so resolutely refused to accept in life, and on that very day ‘Queen Anne was brought abed and delivered of a man child before her time, for she said that she had reckoned herself but fifteen weeks gone with child’. Henry had just had a bad fall in the tiltyard which, it was said, caused the Queen to take a fright and fall into travail. But according to gossip, it was not so much concern for her husband’s welfare as jealous rage over his continuing attentions to Jane Seymour which had caused that fatal miscarriage – either that, or her own ‘defective constitution’. Whatever the reason, it spelt disaster for Anne who, by a certain rough justice, was now experiencing something of what her predecessor had suffered. Henry showed her no sympathy. He scarcely bothered to speak to her and when the pre-Lenten festivities began, went off to ‘disport himself’ in London without her – an ominous contrast to the days when he could not bear to have her out of his sight for more than half-an-hour at a time. Chapuys heard that the King was telling certain close friends, in the strictest confidence, that he had been tricked into his second marriage by charms and witchcraft and therefore considered it to be null and void. God obviously shared this view and was manifesting his displeasure by denying him male children. By Easter it was obvious that the end would not be long in coming. Anne had failed and, like Thomas Wolsey before her, she must pay the price of failure.
Secretary of State Thomas Cromwell knew what was expected of him. A discreet whisper in a receptive royal ear that treason was brewing and it might be as well to set some enquiries on foot, and the thing was as good as done. The arrests began on 1 May. Mark Smeaton the lute-player, Henry Norris, Francis Weston and William Brereton of the Privy Chamber, and Anne’s brother George were taken to the Tower. On the following day the Queen herself was brought up-river from Greenwich to share the imprisonment of the five men accused of having been her lovers.
Apart from her adultery with ‘divers of the King’s familiar servants’ and incest, inciting her own natural brother to violate her by ‘alluring him with her tongue in his mouth and his tongue in hers’, Anne was charged with despising her marriage and entertaining malice against the King. She and her lovers were said to have conspired the King’s death and Anne was also accused of promising to marry one of them after the King was dead and of affirming ‘that she would never love the King in her heart’.
No shred of evidence was ever produced to substantiate any of these charges – unless a ‘confession’ extorted from the poor terrified musician Mark Smeaton counted as evidence. Anne had undoubtedly been indiscreet, perhaps recklessly so. When Henry began to seek his pleasures elsewhere, relegating her to the role of brood mare, she seems to have turned more and more to the company of the young professional gallants who thronged the Court, allowing, even encouraging them to flirt with her. She may have known she was playing with fire and have enjoyed doing it, but it is hard to believe that she would have deliberately burnt her fingers.
The government was making the most of the horrid scandal of the Queen’s adultery and the stories of her ‘abominable and detestable crimes’ and her ‘incontinent living’ soon became so exaggerated that the more level-headed started to discount them. Henry, of course, believed them all – or said he did. He told the Bishop of Carlisle excitedly that he believed Anne had had to do with more than a hundred men. He had long been expecting something of this sort to happen and had written a tragedy on the subject which he carried about with him in his bosom! ‘You never saw prince or man who made greater show of his horns or bore them more pleasantly’, commented Eustace Chapuys. Certainly for a man who believed he had been cuckolded on such a grand scale Henry appeared to be in excellent spirits and the Court had seldom been gayer. Jane Seymour was now installed in a house on the river and being visited regularly by the King who would return to Greenwich late at night, his barge filled with minstrels and musicians playing and singing lustily. ‘This state of affairs’, wrote Chapuys, ‘has been compared by many to the joy and pleasure a man feels in getting rid of a thin, old, vicious hack in the hope of having soon a fine horse to ride.’ Although no one felt much sympathy for Anne personally (only gentle Archbishop Cranmer showed any real compassion), some people were not happy about the way the proceedings against her were being conducted. Many people felt that Henry’s blatant courtship of another woman while his wife lay in prison awaiting trial for her life was not the sort of behaviour generally expected of a monarch and a gentleman.
Anne’s trial took place on 15 May. It was, of course, a mere formality but the Queen faced her judges with courage and dignity and heard the sentence, pronounced by her uncle Norfolk, of burning or beheading at the King’s pleasure without flinching. She was ready for death, she said, and only regretted that so many innocent men were to die for her sake. The other prisoners died two days later and Anne’s execution was fixed for the eighteenth. But there was a last minute delay, caused by the King’s determination to have his second marriage annulled. Thomas Cromwell had tried to prove a pre-contract between Anne and Henry Percy, but the now Earl of Northumberland denied this so furiously and so categorically that Cromwell had been obliged to fall back on Henry’s own misconduct with Anne’s elder sister. This was embarrassing because, since canon law made no distinction between a licit and an illicit relationship, the King’s intercourse with Mary Boleyn made Anne as much his sister-in-law as ever Catherine of Aragon had been – an inconvenient fact which Henry had always been careful to ignore. However, this was no time to be fussy about details and on 18 May Thomas Cranmer obediently provided a decree of nullity. The fact that Anne was to die for adultery having never been a wife was brushed aside as another unimportant detail.
During the time since her arrest Anne’s moods had fluctuated wildly between resignation, hope and hysteria. ‘One hour she is determined to die and the next hour much contrary to that’, reported William Kingston, Constable of the Tower. But now she was anxious to make an end. The stories of her impatience and her unseasonable high spirits are well known and William Kingston was greatly disconcerted by his prisoner’s shrieks of merriment and the rather tasteless jokes she would keep making about the smallness of her neck. It was not at all what Kingston was used to. ‘I have seen many men and also women executed’, he wrote, ‘and all they have been in great sorrow. But to my knowledge this lady had much joy and pleasure in death.’
Death came at eight o’clock on the morning of 19 May when Anne was brought out on to the little square of greensward where the carpenters had been hammering and shouting all the previous night as they put up the scaffold. The Queen had dressed carefully for her last public appearance, wearing a long robe of grey damask over a crimson underskirt, and looked, according to one eyewitness, ‘as gay as if she was not going to die’. The executioner, specially imported from Calais at a cost of £23 6s 8d, drew his sword from its hiding place in a pile of straw and it was all over. Head and trunk were bundled into a makeshift coffin and buried that same afternoon in the chapel of St Peter-ad-Vincula hard by the execution ground. There were no mourners and it was left to Eustace Chapuys, Anne’s bitterest enemy, to pay her a final tribute. ‘No one ever showed more courage or greater readiness to meet death than she did’, he commented in a despatch to the emperor dated 19 May, and went on to tell his master that he had been told by a reliable source that both before and after receiving the sacrament Anne had sworn, on the peril of her soul’s damnation, that she had never been unfaithful to the King.
The King who had loved her and destroyed her wasted no time on mourning, not even on a decent interval of widowerhood. On 20 May he and Jane Seymour were betrothed in a private ceremony at Chelsea, and ten days later they were married in the chapel of York Place. Henry’s third wife was a small, quiet, colourless blonde in her late twenties, undistinguished by looks or noble birth. She had served both her predecessors as maid of honour, but her loyalties were said to be with Queen Catherine. For this reason Chapuys welcomed the marriage, for he hoped and believed that the new Queen would befriend Catherine’s daughter.
Mary Tudor had suffered cruelly as a result of her parents’ divorce, enduring insult, humiliation, personal sorrow and physical fear which permanently ruined her health and spoilt her disposition. She had always ranged herself beside her mother on the domestic battlefront as, quite apart from her strong natural affections and deep religious convictions, she was bound to do – for if she admitted the justice of her father’s case, she would be admitting her own illegitimacy and denying her rights of inheritance.
During the early years of the struggle Mary had been left more or less alone, living in one or other of the royal manor houses scattered about the Home Counties and still chaperoned by her friend and Lady Governess, Margaret Countess of Salisbury. She had not seen her mother since Catherine’s expulsion from the Court in 1531, but she knew well enough what was happening to her and had been obliged to watch in helpless rage and misery while the wicked – especially Anne Boleyn – flourished and Catherine’s predicament grew steadily worse. This was damaging enough for a sensitive adolescent but it was not until the birth of Elizabeth that Mary’s troubles began in earnest.
Just as the King could not have two rival Queens in his realm without running the risk of looking ridiculous, he could not have two rival heiresses without running even more serious risks. Towards the end of September 1533, Mary’s chamberlain, Lord Hussey, was instructed to inform the Princess of her father’s pleasure ‘concerning the diminishing of her high estate’. Mary, standing full on her seventeen-year-old dignity, froze the embarrassed chamberlain with a cold Tudor eye. She was ‘much astonished’ that Hussey should have the impertinence to declare such a thing without a written authority from the King. A few days later came an order from William Paulet, Comptroller of the Royal Household, that Mary was to leave her present home, Newhall in Essex, for Hertford Castle. Mary demanded to be shown Paulet’s letter and there, for the first time in black and white, she saw herself baldly described as ‘the Lady Mary, the King’s daughter’. She tried sending a letter to her father, in the faint hope that a personal appeal might be able to move him, ‘for I doubt not’, she wrote with pathetic optimism, ‘but you take me for your lawful daughter born in true matrimony. If I agreed to the contrary I should offend God; in all other things Your Highness shall find me an obedient daughter.’
Henry’s response was to send a commission, headed by Dr Simpson, Dean of the King’s Chapel, to visit Mary at Newhall. The King had been surprised and pained to hear that his daughter had so far forgotten her filial duty and allegiance as to ‘arrogantly usurp the title of Princess’ and pretend to be his heir presumptive. The commissioners proceeded solemnly to warn her of the folly and danger of her conduct and to point out that if she persisted, she would worthily deserve the King’s ‘high displeasure and punishment by law’. However, if she repented and conformed to his will, he might be graciously pleased ‘of his fatherly pity’ to forgive her and even to promote her welfare.
Mary may have been prepared for a rebuff, but to be accused of ‘arrogantly usurping’ a title she had held since birth and to be so accused by the one whose paternity had conferred that title on her was something monstrous enough to destroy her sense of identity for ever. But the former Princess of England had inherited stubborn characteristics from both her parents; she had her religious faith and her mother’s indomitable example to support her; she would not conform and so the battle between father and daughter was joined.
Mary did not have long to wait for the first consequence of her defiance. Early in November Eustace Chapuys heard with horror that ‘not content with having taken away from his own legitimate daughter the name and title of Princess’, the King was threatening to make her go and live as maid of honour to his base-born daughter. Not was this an idle threat. A separate household had been set up for the baby Elizabeth at the old bishop’s palace at Hatfield and about a week before Christmas 1533, the Duke of Norfolk descended on Mary at Hertford Castle and bundled her off at half-an-hour’s notice to join the nursery establishment.
Mary had always known her father as a kindly, affectionate figure who used to carry her about in his arms showing her off proudly to foreign visitors and had once teased her at a solemn state function by pulling off her cap, so that her long reddish blonde hair had tumbled down over her shoulders. Now he seemed to have become a totally different person. Like her mother, Mary naturally ascribed this terrifying change to the malign influence of Anne Boleyn and at Hatfield she would be living in a house ruled by Anne’s relations. But if Mary was afraid she never showed it. When Norfolk asked her whether she did not think she should pay her respects to the princess, she answered fiercely that she knew of no princess in England except herself. If, with splendid scorn, the King acknowledged Madame of Pembroke’s daughter as his own, then Mary would call her sister, just as she called Henry Fitzroy brother, but no more. Well then, said Norfolk, had she any message for the King? None, came the immediate retort, ‘except that the Princess of Wales, his daughter, asks for his blessing’. Norfolk told her roundly that he dared not deliver such a message. ‘Then go away’, cried Mary, ‘and leave me alone.’
She was about to learn what it meant to be truly alone. Shut up at Hatfield, given (so Chapuys heard) the worst room in the house and forced to eat all her meals in the crowded Great Hall Mary was also learning the bitter lessons taught by impotence, hatred and injustice. When Henry came to visit Elizabeth, she was kept out of sight. Chapuys believed this was Anne’s doing, that she was afraid the King’s resolution might weaken if he saw his elder daughter. Chapuys also heard that Anne had sent a message to her aunt, Lady Shelton, now Mary’s ‘governess’, telling her to give the girl a box on the ears ‘for the cursed bastard she is’.
If any news was reaching Mary from her mother, it cannot have made her life any easier to bear. At about the same time as she was taken to Hatfield, a deputation headed by the Duke of Suffolk had gone to Catherine, then at Buckden in Huntingdonshire, to make another attempt to bully her into accepting the title of Princess Dowager. But Catherine was not taking anything from Charles Brandon. She told him flatly that she still considered herself to be Henry’s Queen and his legal wife, and that she would ‘rather be hewn in pieces than depart from this assertion’. The Duke had orders to move her to Somersham, a house situated in the marshy wastes of the Fen country and a notoriously unhealthy spot. Catherine refused to go. It would, she declared, be tantamount to conniving at her own death. She locked herself in her bedroom and told Suffolk through a crack in the wall that if he wanted to take her, he would have to break down the door and bind her with ropes. This was too much for Charles Brandon, already a reluctant emissary, and nothing more was said about Somersham, but shortly afterwards the former Queen of England was transferred to Kimbolton. There, ignoring the existence of those household officers sworn to her as Princess Dowager, she confined herself to her own room, waited on by the handful of faithful Spaniards still with her, who cooked her food before her eyes for fear of poison.
While it is impossible to justify Henry’s treatment of his discarded wife and elder daughter in any human terms, he did have some political excuse for his apparent ferocity. Catherine and Mary were both the objects of considerable popular sympathy and, as long as they continued to stand out against him, would make a natural rallying point for all those people who hated his new order. This applied especially to Mary, still regarded as the true heiress by the majority of Englishmen, and it was she who now had to bear the brunt of her father’s ruthless intimidation.
Some time during the spring of 1534 the royal commissioners visited the Princess Elizabeth’s household to exact the Oath of Succession from its inmates – that oath which, among other things, required the lieges to take the Lady Mary ‘but as a bastard and thus to do without any scruple of conscience’. The Lady Mary, of course, refused to swear. Not that it mattered, Lady Shelton told her roughly. It did not matter whether she surrendered her title or not, she was still a bastard whatever she did. But, added the lady, if she were the King, she would kick Mary out of the house for her disobedience and then she said something else which brought a new and colder fear.
Mary at this time had no means of communicating with Chapuys, the only friend she seemed to have, but terror sharpened her wits. She asked to see ‘a physician who formerly was her tutor and usual doctor’ who happened to be staying in the house. A private interview was refused but somehow she had to find a way of using this man as a messenger. She was able to see him in public and told him she had been so long without speaking Latin that now she could hardly say two words correctly. The doctor, unwittingly picking up his cue, suggested she should try and Mary, knowing that no one else in the room would be able to understand, told him that the King had been heard to say, only the day before, that he would have her beheaded for disobeying the laws of the kingdom. ‘Hearing which’, wrote Chapuys, ‘the physician was much astonished and knew not what to answer, except that the Princess’s Latin was not very good and he could not understand it.’ However, the small desperate subterfuge worked. The good doctor had understood enough of what his former pupil was trying to tell him and passed it on to Chapuys.
Lady Shelton’s spite regardless, Mary’s treatment actually improved a little during the summer. She was allowed more servants and, by their means, was able to reopen her secret correspondence with Chapuys. But she saw any improvement as a trap of some sort intended to take her off her guard and told Chapuys – she was eighteen-and-a-half now – that her only hope was to die. She did, in fact, become seriously ill soon afterwards. Thomas Cromwell had been hinting that a lot of problems would disappear if only God would decide to take the Lady Mary to himself; but it would, nevertheless, have been highly embarrassing for the government if she were to die in her present circumstances and one of the royal physicians was sent to visit her. Dr Buttes, a sensible, kindly man, suggested that the girl should be sent to be with her mother who, at least, could not be suspected of trying to poison her. Catherine got wind of this scheme and, grasping at a sudden straw of hope, wrote to Chapuys begging him to try and persuade the King ‘to do such a charity as to send his daughter and mine where I am’. She would nurse Mary herself and the ‘comfort and mirth’ they would have together would be half her cure. But Henry refused to contemplate such a thing. Catherine and Mary were causing him enough trouble separated – let them once be together and all the effort he had been expending on trying to break Mary’s will would be wasted. He also hinted that he suspected a security risk.
Although Catherine indignantly denied any knowledge of a plot, Chapuys had for some time been investigating the possibilities of getting Mary out of the country. He thought it should not be too difficult, provided the princess was somewhere fairly close to London and if an oared boat, independent of the tides and strong enough to fight off pursuit, was ready to take her to the mouth of the Thames, where one of the Emperor’s ships would be waiting.
In April 1535 it looked as if an opportunity had come. Mary had been at Greenwich with Elizabeth but had then been suddenly moved to a house about twelve miles from the river. Chapuys reported that it would be comparatively easy for a party of well mounted men to snatch her while she was out walking (it would be better to make it look like kidnapping for Mary’s own sake) and put her on board a ship below Gravesend. Mary herself was only too willing to co-operate, but the ambassador dared not act without authority. ‘The matter is hazardous’, he wrote conscientiously to the Emperor, ‘and Your Majesty will take it into due consideration.’ The Emperor would have liked to be able to rescue his cousin – he had been doing his best to persuade Henry to allow her to make a suitable marriage – but to abduct the daughter of a brother monarch smacked uncomfortably of brigandage. Charles was a cautious man. He considered too long and the opportunity was lost. There would be no great adventure for Mary – no wild ride across the Essex marches to the sea. She fell ill again. The summer passed and her hopes of deliverance faded.
As autumn approached Chapuys could smell danger on the wind. He could get no access to Mary and all his persistent, nagging protests and enquiries met with the same stonewalling response. There was not the slightest need for anyone to feel anxious about the Lady Mary, Cromwell assured him blandly, since no one was more concerned for her welfare than her own father. But Henry had tasted blood that year and Anne, who feared and hated Mary, was still beside him. Chapuys believed that the concubine would not rest until she had engineered the death of the legitimate heiress. He and Catherine were both afraid that the King meant to put Mary to the test over the Oath of Succession when Parliament met again. Then Catherine died – and even when her illness was known to be mortal Henry would not allow her daughter to go to her. A few months later Anne, too, was gone. For Mary at least this altered everything. She waited a week and then wrote to Thomas Cromwell asking him to open the way for a reconciliation with her father – to obtain for her ‘his Grace’s blessing and favour’. She would have written sooner, she told Cromwell, only she knew that no one would dare to speak for her as long as ‘that woman’ lived.
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 despot 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 minishing’ – 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 politics 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 Duke 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, throughout 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.
Mary’s last visit to London was in the spring of 1533, when she came up for the wedding of her elder daughter, Frances, now sixteen, to Henry Grey, Marquis of Dorset at Suffolk House and the betrothal of the younger, Eleanor, to Henry Clifford, the Earl of Cumberland’s heir. Suffolk had to stay in town – he was very busy with preparations for Anne Boleyn’s coronation – and Mary travelled back to Westhorpe alone with Eleanor. On Midsummer Day the loveliest princess in Europe was dead at the age of thirty-eight, and in March 1534 her son Henry, Earl of Lincoln, followed her to the grave. Little is known about this Tudor boy, who stood so close to the throne and who lived to the age of twelve before succumbing, again most probably, to tuberculosis. But his death was regarded as a windfall for his cousin, the King of Scotland, since the pundits considered that Henry’s younger nephew, being native born, might be preferred to the elder in the succession stakes.
Charles Brandon survived this double tragedy with reasonable equanimity. He had made Mary Tudor a faithful and affectionate husband, but he replaced her within a couple of months. To do him justice, financial necessity had something to do with this almost indecent haste. He was, as usual, heavily in debt – Frances’ wedding had cost him over fifteen hundred pounds and there was Eleanor’s still to come. The Duke of Suffolk needed a rich wife and he picked the candidate closest to hand, his ward Katherine Willoughby, daughter and heir of Lord William Willoughby and Maria de Salinas, one of Catherine of Aragon’s Spanish ladies. The fact that Katherine Willoughby was about the same age as his own younger daughter – fourteen to his forty-eight – and was betrothed to his own son, did not apparently detract from her eligibility in the Duke’s eyes, though it did give rise to some unkind gossip. In fact, the marriage proved a very happy one. Young Katherine was an intelligent, high-spirited girl (she later became notorious for her outspoken Protestantism) and quickly gave her husband two more sons. In the same month of the same year that Prince Edward was born there was another addition to the clan and to what was to become known as the Suffolk line, when Frances Grey, née Brandon, gave birth to a daughter, Jane, named perhaps in honour of the Queen.
But Jane Seymour was in no condition to appreciate the compliment. A few days after Edward’s christening she became so ill that the last sacraments were administered. She rallied briefly, but by 24 October she was dead. According to Cromwell, her death was due to the negligence of her attendants, who had allowed her to catch cold and to eat unsuitable food. In fact, of course, she died of puerperal sepsis – the scourge of all women in childbed.
Jane was given a state funeral at Windsor Castle with the Princess Mary officiating as chief mourner. She was the first and, as it turned out, the only one of Henry’s wives to be buried as Queen and perhaps this was fair – she was, after all, the only one who had fulfilled her side of the bargain to his satisfaction. The King ‘retired to a solitary place to pass his sorrows’ and his grief was probably sincere enough, while it lasted. But he was soon back at Hampton Court so that he could see his son every day and make sure that ‘the realm’s most precious jewel’ was being properly cared for.
Edward spent the first few months of his life at Court under his father’s eye, but with the approach of summer, always the most dangerous time of year for plague and other contagions, the nursery was moved out into the country. The most elaborate precautions against infection were laid down in a series of ordinances, written out in the King’s own hand. No officers of the prince’s privy chamber might go to London without permission and on their return must observe a period of quarantine, in case they had picked up anything nasty. If anyone in the household did fall ill, they were to be removed at once. Everything was to be kept scrupulously clean – all galleries, passages and courts were to be swept and scrubbed twice a day, everything the prince touched or used was to be carefully washed and handled only by his personal servants, no dirty utensils were to be left lying about and all dogs, except the ladies’ pets, had to be confined to kennels.
Under these sensible hygienic rules, Edward grew and thrived. He was a large, fair, placid baby – a type much admired – and Eustace Chapuys described him as ‘one of the prettiest children that could be seen anywhere’. Details of his progress were minutely recorded: his first teeth appeared without difficulty; at a year old he was a little thinner, but shooting out in length and trying to walk; at eighteen months he threw a rather embarrassing tantrum in front of some queerly dressed foreign visitors, hiding his face in his nurse’s shoulder and howling with rage; at nearly two the Lady Mistress of his household told Thomas Cromwell that his grace was in good health and merry. ‘I would to God’, she went on, ‘the King’s grace and your lordship had seen him yesternight, for his grace was marvellously pleasantly disposed. The musicians played and his grace danced and played so wantonly that he could not stand still, and was as full of pretty toys as ever I saw a child in my life.’ To his father, of course, Edward was perfect and Henry lost no opportunity to hang over the cradle or display the prince to the people.
But as the prince cut his teeth and began to grow out of the cradle and the King continued to worry in case some disrespectful germs should dare to approach his darling, danger threatened, or seemed to threaten, from abroad. In December 1538 the Pope, encouraged by the Pilgrimage of Grace and other hopeful signs of unrest among the islanders, at last summoned up enough resolution to promulgate his long-delayed Bull of Excommunication against the defiant and irreligious King of England. This somewhat antique weapon which, in theory, deprived an offending monarch of his throne and put him and his subjects outside the Christian pale, had lost most of its teeth by the middle of the sixteenth century, but it still inspired a good deal of superstitious dread among the faithful. This, coupled with the fact that the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of France (on whom, in theory, would fall the duty of deposing the King of England) had temporarily buried the hatchet, gave rise to a short-lived but excitable invasion scare along the south coast. But neither Charles nor François, good papists though they declared themselves to be, had any real intention of moving against Henry and the chief result of the Pope’s action was to give the King an excuse to complete the virtual annihilation of his remaining Plantagenet cousins.
The Holy Father had sent Reginald Pole, son of the Countess of Salisbury, on a mission to both France and the Emperor to rouse them against ‘the most cruel and abominable tyrant’ across the Channel. Pole was a high-minded if not very realistic individual, a Cardinal since 1536 and an exile for his religious principles. His errand was a dismal failure, but, as he might have foreseen, it spelt doom for his family at home. His elder brother Henry, Lord Montague, was promptly executed and his mother arrested. Royal vengeance also fell on the Courtenay family. The Marquis of Exeter with his wife and young son went to the Tower, the Marquis soon leaving it again for Tower Hill and the block. Two years later, Henry finally completed the work of safeguarding his son’s inheritance by carrying out the death sentence on the old Countess of Salisbury herself. Margaret Pole, née Plantagenet, once long ago, the dearest friend of Queen Catherine of Aragon, a second mother to the Princess Mary Tudor and ‘a lady of virtue and honour if there was ever one in England’ was taken out on a May morning to be literally hacked to pieces by an apprentice executioner: an action which more than any other lent considerable point to Reginald Pole’s book in which he had compared the King of England to the Emperor Nero.