Mary Tudor (11 page)

I
T WAS BUT A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE KATHERINE’S POSITION AS
Henry’s wife was entirely usurped, and steps were now taken to overcome clerical resistance. On May 15, 1532, the English clergy surrendered their last remaining independent legislative power: all new clerical legislation would now be submitted to the king. It was in direct breach of Magna Carta and of the coronation oath by which Henry had sworn that the Church in England would remain free. The following day, Thomas More resigned as lord chancellor in protest. Three
months later, another staunch defender of the pope was lost with the death of the eighty-two-year-old William Warham, archbishop of Canterbury. Within weeks, Thomas Cranmer, an erstwhile supporter of the king’s cause and ex-chaplain of the Boleyn family, was consecrated as his successor.

Henry now began to talk openly about the prospect of his remarriage. Anne Boleyn was made marchioness of Pembroke with a landed income of £1,000 a year. It was an unprecedented step: never before had a peeress been created in her own right. When Anne asked to have Katherine’s jewels, the queen declared that she would never willingly give them up to “a person who is the scandal of Christendom.”
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When Henry sent a direct command, Katherine was forced to relinquish them.

As Henry took the last steps to repudiate Katherine and challenge the power of the pope and the emperor, he moved to shore up his alliance with France, concluded two years before. On June 23, a treaty of mutual aid was signed by which each party promised to send aid to the other if Charles invaded. An attack on England constituted an attack on France, and Henry knew that Charles would not be able to confront both.
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Henry now prepared for a personal meeting with Francis designed to reenact the Field of the Cloth of Gold, to showcase Anglo-French amity and demonstrate to Charles and the pope the strength of their alliance.
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On October 11, Henry and Anne Boleyn set sail for France with an entourage of more than two thousand.
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For ten days the two kings feasted and jousted amid elaborate tents and pageantry. For now, at least, Henry had an ally and a means of applying pressure on the pope.
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Henry and Anne’s six-week sojourn proved momentous. While they were away, Anne finally submitted to Henry’s lustful advances and their relationship was consummated. By the end of December she was pregnant. They were married on January 25 in a secret ceremony presided over by Archbishop Cranmer. The formal dissolution of Henry’s first marriage now became a priority. Katherine realized that time was running out. She wrote again to her nephew Charles:

Chapuys also made an urgent appeal on Katherine’s behalf to the emperor:

ON APRIL
5, 1533, the Convocation of English Bishops ruled that Pope Julius II’s dispensation allowing Henry to marry Katherine had been invalid, “the same Matrimony to be against the law of God,” and therefore “hath divorced the King’s Highness from the noble Lady Katherine.”
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The Act in Restraint of Appeals decreed that England was now an empire, “governed by one Supreme Head and King” and subject to no outside authority.
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There was now nothing to stop Henry from marrying Anne.

On May 23, Thomas Cranmer pronounced the marriage of Henry and Katherine to be null and void. It marked the failure of Katherine’s long battle to save her twenty-four-year marriage. A week after Cranmer passed judgment, the visibly pregnant Anne Boleyn rode through the City of London to be anointed and crowned at Westminster Abbey. Chapuys recorded that along the procession route
no one cried “God save the Queen!” and the “people, though forbidden on pain of death to call Katherine Queen, shouted it loud.”
¹¹

Katherine was ordered to surrender the title of queen; her household was reduced in status, and workmen removed her arms from the walls of Westminster Hall and from the royal barge.
¹²
She was now the dowager princess of Wales, the widow of Prince Arthur. Lord Mountjoy, her lord chamberlain, at Ampthill Castle in Bedfordshire, was ordered to inform her of her demotion. Katherine rejected the title of princess dowager outright: she was and would always be the king’s wife and the mother of his legitimate heir.
¹³
Henry’s patience had run out. Katherine was to move to Buckden in Huntingdonshire, a remote palace of the bishops of Lincoln. The arrangement amounted to house arrest. She was forbidden to leave without the king’s permission and prevented from seeing her daughter.

As Henry anticipated the birth of what he hoped would be his longed-for son, he began to harden his attitude toward his daughter as well. He forbade her to write or send messengers to Katherine, though Mary begged him to change his mind. He might, she suggested, “appoint someone next to her person to give evidence that her messages to her mother are only in reference to her health” and proposed that her own letters and those of her mother first pass through the king’s hands, but Henry refused.
¹⁴

When Mary was officially told of her father’s remarriage in April, she displayed her developing self-preservation: she was “at first thoughtful” and then, “as the very wise person that she is, dissembled as much as she could and seemed even to rejoice at it. Without alluding in the least to the said marriage, and without communicating with any living soul, after her dinner the princess set about writing a letter to her father.” On receiving the letter, Henry was “marvellously content and pleased, praising above all things the wisdom and prudence of his daughter.”
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As the imperial ambassador remarked, “As to the Princess, her name is not yet changed, and I think that they will wait until the Lady had a child.”
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For the time being Mary would be left alone.

Mary was a young woman caught between estranged parents and a new, hostile stepmother. Her mother, her role model, meanwhile, cast herself increasingly as martyr. In a letter to the emperor, the deeply troubled Katherine declared, “In this world I will confess myself to be
the King’s true wife and in the next they will know how unreasonably I am afflicted.”
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But as Chapuys said of Katherine, “wherever the King commanded her, were it even into the fire she would go.”
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Though mother and daughter were forbidden to communicate with each other, they sent letters secretly through trusted servants and the imperial ambassador. On April 10, Chapuys wrote of how Anne openly boasted that “she would have the princess for her lady’s maid; but that is only to make her eat humble pie, or to marry her to some varlet, which would be an irreparable injury.”
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There was now an air of foreboding. Anne knew that both Mary and Katherine were held in great popular affection and that the majority of English people regarded Mary as “the true princess.”

BY APRIL
1533, the imperial ambassador believed England was on the brink of civil war, and he implored Charles to invade:

But Charles was preoccupied with the danger of the Turks in Hungary and the Mediterranean, the unrest in Germany, the intrigues in Italy, and the vengeful attitude of France.
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Though committed in his support of Katherine, the emperor was not prepared to risk war with England; it was a private matter, and Henry had given him no pretext to intervene.
²²

A
T THREE IN THE AFTERNOON OF SEPTEMBER 7, 1533, THE CHILD
that Henry had gone to such lengths to have legitimized was delivered. The king’s physicians and astrologers had predicted that it would be a boy, and letters written in advance announced the birth of a “prince.”

They had to be hastily altered. Anne had been delivered of a girl. As the imperial ambassador reported gleefully, “God has forgotten him entirely, hardening him in his obstinacy to punish and ruin him.”
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She was christened three days later at the Church of the Observant Friars at Greenwich and her name and titles proclaimed by the Garter King of Arms: