Mary Tudor (15 page)

A
T TWO IN THE AFTERNOON OF FRIDAY, JANUARY 7, 1536, KATHERINE
of Aragon died in her chamber at Kimbolton Castle. She was fifty years old. She had suffered with “pain in her stomach” for several months and had begged Henry to allow Mary to visit her.
²
Yet mother and daughter, separated for four years, were not to be granted the solace of a final meeting.

But Eustace Chapuys was given permission to visit. He arrived at Kimbolton on Sunday, the second, seeking to console Katherine as she prepared to die and to assure her, albeit falsely, that “the King was sorry for her illness.”
³
For several hours each day he sat with Katherine, and they talked of the events of the previous years. Katherine thanked the
ambassador for his good services and expressed regret as to “her misfortune and that of the princess,” and for the “delay of remedy by which all good men had suffered.” Chapuys reassured her that the mounting tide of heresy had not arisen because of her defiance, as she feared, but that God sent such trials “for the exaltation of the good and the confusion of the wicked.” In response to the ambassador’s words, “she showed herself very glad, for she had previously had some scruple of conscience because the heresies had arisen from her affair.” Her nephew “could not have done better,” given the “great affairs which had hindered him,” and she declared it was “not without its advantages as the Pope now upon the death of the Cardinal of Rochester and other disorders, intended to seek a remedy in the name of the Holy See.”
⁴

The visit of the ambassador comforted Katherine, and for a while after she rallied a little. She managed to sleep; “her stomach retained her food” and, “without any help, [she] combed and tied her hair, and dressed her head”; but then her health deteriorated once more.
⁵
At dawn on Friday the seventh, she heard Mass, dictated her final letters to Charles and Henry, and prayed “that God would pardon the King her husband for the wrong that he had done her.”
⁶
Having received Extreme Unction, she spent her last hours in calm reflection. By the early afternoon she was dead.

Later that day Sir Edmund Bedingfield, Katherine’s steward, wrote to Cromwell, informing him of her death and detailing the arrangements that were to be made for the preparation of her body: “the groom of the chandlery here can cere [disembowel and embalm] her … and, further, I shall send for a plumber to close the body in lead.”
⁷
Having embalmed the body, the chandler declared that her organs were sound, except for the heart, which was black all through and had “some black round thing which clung closely to the outside.”
⁸
It was most likely a cancerous tumor, but her physician, Soa, concluded that she had been poisoned.

Katherine had been taken ill “about five weeks ago,” according to the imperial ambassador. “The attack was renewed on the morrow of Christmas Day. It was a pain in the stomach, so violent that she could retain no food.” He continued, “I asked the physician several times if there was any suspicion of poison. He was afraid it was so, for after she had drunk some Welsh beer she had been worse, and that it must have
been a slow and subtle poison.”
⁹
Katherine’s supporters needed little persuading.

ACCORDING TO CHAPUYS
, Henry greeted the news of Katherine’s death with great jubilation. “You could not conceive,” read his dispatch, “the joy that the King and those who favour the concubinage have shown at the death of the good Queen.” That Sunday, Henry attended Mass in the Chapel Royal dressed entirely in yellow, signifying joy, except for a white feather in his cap. After dining, he went to Anne’s apartments, “where the ladies danced and there did several things like one transported with joy.” The ambassador continued, “From all I hear the grief of the people at this news is incredible, and the indignation they feel against the King, on whom they lay the blame of her death, part of them believing it was by poison and others by grief; and they are the more indignant at the joy the King has exhibited.”
¹⁰

Yet Henry was celebrating more than the demise of a former wife; Katherine’s death had a far greater significance. On hearing the news he shouted, “God be praised that we are free from all suspicion of war!”
¹¹
With the principal source of enmity between them removed, Henry believed the threat of war with the emperor had ended. He added a postscript to Cromwell’s dispatch to the ambassadors in France to that effect: now that “the Emperor has no occasion to quarrel,” they were to keep themselves “more aloof” and less ready to accede to the French king’s requests.
¹²
Chapuys told the emperor:

Katherine’s death had altered Charles’s position in relation to England. He was not bound to Mary as he had been to her mother, and
now, as he resumed hostilities with France, he looked once again to court English favor. He wrote to Chapuys at the end of February that “a renewal of amity might be more easily effected now … with some suitable provision for the princess than during the Queen’s life.” It would be a means to “abate the insolence of Francis” and win time for Mary.
¹⁴

Mary’s status and welfare were, as they would always be, secondary to Habsburg strategic interests. Charles was not prepared to remain estranged from England over her disinheritance or ill-treatment, and he was soon in more pressing need of Henry’s goodwill. In the spring of 1536, Francis invaded Savoy, triggering an imperial invasion of Provence. Both sides now sought an English alliance. Henry, who had risked war to be rid of Katherine, had apparently been absolved.

FOUR DAYS AFTER
Katherine’s death, Lady Shelton went to Mary and “most unceremoniously without the least preparation” told her that her mother was dead. That evening Mary requested that Katherine’s physician and apothecary be allowed to visit her so she might hear of her mother’s final hours and of the manner of her death.
¹⁵
As Charles told Isabella, his wife, Mary was “inconsolable at the loss she has sustained, especially when she thinks of her father’s past behaviour towards herself, and the little favour she can expect for the future.”
¹⁶
It was feared she would “die of grief” or with Katherine out of the way, Anne Boleyn might hasten “what she has long threatened to do, viz. to kill her.”
¹⁷

But Anne’s intentions were far from clear. Although she had celebrated when informed of Katherine’s death, rewarding the messenger with a “handsome present,” thereafter she “frequently wept, fearing that they might do with her as with the good Queen.”
¹⁸
Ironically, Katherine had been Anne’s best protection. Henry was not likely to question his second marriage while his first wife was still alive. Fearing that Henry’s affection was declining, Anne sought to be reconciled with Mary as a means of securing her own favor. She instructed Lady Shelton to tell Mary that “if she would lay aside her obstinacy and obey her father,” Anne would be “the best friend in the world to her, like another mother, and would obtain for her anything she liked to ask and
that if she wished to come to court Mary would be exempted from holding the tail of her gown.” But Mary would not be swayed. As Lady Shelton informed Anne, she would “rather die a hundred times than change her opinion or do anything against her honour and conscience.”
¹⁹

By the new year, Anne knew that she was pregnant again, and, with her confidence renewed, she changed tack. Lady Shelton, Mary’s governess, was instructed to ease the pressure, not to “further move the lady Mary to be toward the King’s Grace otherwise than it pleases herself.”
²⁰
Anne felt sure she knew Mary’s fate: “If I have a son, as I hope shortly,” she wrote menacingly, “I know what will happen to her.”
²¹

Mary now raised once more with Chapuys the prospect of fleeing to the imperial court in Brussels. If she had something to drug the women with, she told him, she might easily escape and pass under Lady Shelton’s window and then find some means to break or open the garden gate.
²²
As the ambassador reported, “She is so eager to escape from all her troubles and dangers that if he were to advise her to cross the Channel in a sieve she would do it.” Chapuys advised caution. Mary was then at Hunsdon, forty miles from Gravesend, from which she could be taken to Flanders. Any escape plan would necessitate her riding through many villages and towns, and she would be at high risk of discovery or capture. For now it was simply too hazardous an undertaking, and he recommended that she wait until Easter, when she would be moved again, hopefully to somewhere more convenient from which to escape.

In the meantime, Chapuys told Mary she should continue in the semiseclusion of mourning and, if approached by the king’s officers, beg them to leave her in peace to grieve for her mother. If pressed, she might tell them she was thinking of entering a convent when she reached full age to stun them into indecision.
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Mary was becoming increasingly hysterical, he added; “she is continually asking [me to] beg the Emperor to hasten the remedy, which she fears will be too late for her, for which reason she is daily preparing herself for death.”
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J
ANUARY 26, TWO WEEKS AFTER HER DEATH, KATHERINE OF
Aragon’s coffin was taken in procession, amid chaplains, gentlemen, ladies, and maids, on the nine-mile journey from the chapel at Kimbolton to Peterborough Cathedral. Three days later, Mass was said and a sermon preached by John Hilsey, the bishop of Rochester. He claimed that “in the hour of death” Katherine had acknowledged “that she had not been Queen of England.”
¹
In death, Henry claimed that Katherine had submitted to him as she had refused to in life. She was buried as a princess dowager and not as a queen: