Mary Tudor (13 page)

ALTHOUGH MARY LOVED
and respected Henry as her father, she refused to submit to his will as king, and at the vulnerable age of seventeen, this meant painful rejection. In January, when Henry visited the household at Hatfield, Mary was ordered to stay in her chamber.
Instead, Thomas Cromwell and the captain of the Guard were sent to Mary to urge her to renounce her title. Mary responded that she had already given her answer and it was useless trying to persuade her otherwise. She still craved her father’s favor, however, and begged for permission to see him and kiss his hand. When she was refused yet again, she went out onto the terrace at the top of the house as her father prepared to leave. As he was mounting his horse he spotted her and, seeing her on her knees with her hands together, bowed and touched his cap.
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Mary would not see him again for more than two and a half years.

Upon his return to court, Henry explained that he had refused to see Mary on account of her obstinacy, which “came from her Spanish blood.” But when the French ambassador mentioned how “very well brought up” she was, “the tears came into his [Henry’s] eyes and he could not refrain from praising her.”
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Anne continued to resent Henry’s clear affection for his elder daughter and persisted in conspiring against her. When she heard of Mary’s defiance, she railed that “her answers could not have been made without the suggestion of others” and complained that Mary was not being kept under close enough surveillance.
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When Anne went to visit her daughter at Hatfield in March, she wasted no time in humiliating her. She “urgently solicited” Mary to visit her and “honour her as Queen,” saying that it “would be a means of reconciliation with the King, and she would intercede with him for her.” Mary replied that “she knew no other Queen in England except her mother” but that if Anne would do her that favor with her father she would be much obliged. Enraged, Anne departed, swearing that “she would bring down the pride of this unbridled Spanish blood.”
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According to a source close to Chapuys, Anne had been heard to say more than once that as soon as Henry was out of the country, leaving her as regent, she meant to use her authority to have Mary killed, “either by hunger or otherwise,” even if she, Anne, was “burnt alive for it.”
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O
N MARCH 24, 1534, POPE CLEMENT VII PASSED FINAL SENTENCE
on the marriage of Henry and Katherine. It “was and is valid and canonical.”
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Katherine’s cause had triumphed, but it was a hollow victory and had come too late to alter events. A week later, the Act of Succession received royal assent, endorsing exactly what the pope’s sentence had rejected. Thomas Cranmer decreed in favor of Henry’s marriage to Anne, and the succession was now transferred to Henry’s male heirs by Anne or any subsequent wife. In default of a male heir, the throne would pass to Elizabeth. Mary was excluded from the succession. An oath to the act’s contents was to be sworn by all the king’s subjects, with refusal to swear treated as high treason:

On April 20, the Henrican regime made a very public display of its intent when Elizabeth Barton, known as “the Holy Maid of Kent,” and five Carthusian priests met their deaths at Tyburn, a village just outside the boundaries of London. Tied to wooden planks, they were dragged behind horses through the streets of the city for the five-mile journey from the Tower of London. Barton, a nun famous for her prophecies,
had made clear her sympathy to the cause of Katherine of Aragon and had foretold plagues and disaster if the divorce went ahead. She declared that by marrying Anne, Henry had forfeited his right to rule: in God’s eyes he was no longer king, and the people should depose him. Among the charges made against her was that she had declared that “no man should fear” taking up arms on Mary’s behalf and that “she should have succour and help enough, that no man should put her from her right that she was born unto.”
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Barton had been used by opponents of the divorce, particularly by a number of monks of the Observant and Carthusian orders, who circulated accounts of the nun’s prophecies. Now they were all to be made an example of. Elizabeth Barton died first, followed by her “accomplices,” who, as priests, suffered all the penalties of the law of treason. The monks were hanged in their habits until they lost consciousness, then revived so that they could watch as they were castrated and disemboweled. Their entrails were burned in front of them and then each body was quartered and beheaded.
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On the same day the citizens of London were required to make the Oath of Succession.
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The executions were intended as a warning to those who opposed the king’s policies and reforms. Barton’s head was impaled on a railing at London Bridge, and the heads of her followers were placed on the gates of the city.
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AS THE ACT OF
Succession was passed, Thomas Cromwell, the king’s principal secretary and chief minister, made a note to “send a copy of the act of the King’s succession to the Princess Dowager and the Lady Mary, with special commandment that it may be read in their presence and their answer taken.”
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Commissioners were sent to Katherine at Buckden and directed to beseech her to have, above all, “regard for her honourable and most dear daughter the Lady Princess. From whom … the King’s highness … might also withdraw his princely estimation, goodness, zeal and affection, [with] no little regret, sorrow and extreme calamity.”
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In response to this clear threat made against her daughter, Katherine reiterated that Mary “was the King’s true begotten Child, and as God had given her unto the King, as his daughter, to do with
her as shall stand with his pleasure, trusting to God that she will prove an honest woman.”
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After refusing to sign the oath, Katherine told the commissioners, “If any one of you has a commission to execute this penalty upon me, I am ready. I ask only that I be allowed to die in the sight of the people.” Weeks later, she was moved from Buckden to Kimbolton in Huntingdonshire, another gloomy fortified manor house, with thick walls and a wide moat.
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Meanwhile, Mary stood firm. As Chapuys described it, “Some days ago the King asked his mistress’s [aunt], who has charge of the Princess, if the latter had abated her obstinacy, and on being answered ‘No,’ he said there must be someone about her who encouraged her and conveyed news from the Queen her mother.” Lady Shelton suspected one of the maids of the household, who in turn was quickly dismissed. “The Princess has been much grieved at this,” Chapuys reported, “for she was the only one in whom she had confidence, and by her means she had letters from me and others.”

Faced with Mary’s intransigence and realizing that he could get his way “neither by force nor menaces,” Henry changed tack and began to beg her to “lay aside her obstinacy” on the promise that she would be rewarded with “a royal title and dignity.” But Mary refused to yield: “God had not so blinded her as to confess for any kingdom on earth that the King her father and the Queen her mother had so long lived in adultery, nor would she contravene the ordinance of the Church and make herself a bastard.” As the ambassador explained, “She believes firmly that this dissimulation the King uses is only the more easily to attain his end and cover poison, but she says she cares little, having full confidence in God that she will go straight to Paradise and be quit of the tribulations of this world, and her only grief is about the troubles of the Queen her mother.”
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WHEN EMPEROR CHARLES V
complained once more to Henry about his ill-treatment of Mary and Katherine, the king responded scathingly, “It is not a little to our marvel that, touching the fact, either the Emperor, or any of his wise council learned, or other discreet person would in anything think us, touching our proceeding therein, but that which is godly, honourable and reasonable.”
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But the ill-treatment continued. By the middle of May, Katherine’s household and Mary’s remaining servants were made to swear to the act. Several men and women were committed to the Tower charged with holding private conversations with the Lady Mary and styling her “Princess.” Of these, Lady Anne Hussey, formerly one of Mary’s gentlewomen, was interrogated on August 3.
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Questions were asked about her contact with Mary “since she lost the name of princess.” Did she know that the Lady Mary was justly declared by law not to be a princess and yet she had called her so? Had she received any messages or tokens from the Lady Mary? She had, she explained, visited Mary only once since the king had discharged her from the lady’s service the previous Whitsuntide. Hussey admitted that she had inadvertently addressed Mary as “Princess” twice, not from any wish to disobey the law but from having long been accustomed to doing so. She also confessed that she had received a present from Mary and that she had sent Mary secret notes and received tokens from her in return. After signing a confession and begging forgiveness, Hussey was released.
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The conditions of Mary’s house arrest grew more restrictive. She received fewer and fewer visitors, and those who did visit her were heavily scrutinized and reported to the Privy Council. Often when people came to pay their respects to the infant Elizabeth, Mary was locked in her room and the windows were nailed shut. In February 1534, as she walked along a gallery, she was spotted by some local people, who called out to her as their princess and waved their caps, after which she was watched more closely.
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Lady Shelton continued to torment Mary, saying that if she were Henry she would throw her out of the house for disobedience and that “the King is known to have said that she would make her lose her head for violating the laws of his realm.”
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