Mary Tudor (18 page)

ON THURSDAY, JUNE
22, under threat of death, Mary signed the formal statement required of her. In “The confession of me the Lady Mary made upon certain points and articles under written,” she acknowledged the illegitimacy of her mother’s marriage, her own bastard status, and her father’s Supreme Headship of the Church of England:

In one stroke she had been compelled to betray the memory of her mother and the Catholic faith of her childhood. She had signed away all that her mother had resisted until her death; all that Mary herself had clung to and fought so hard to defend. It was in this moment of total and agonizing submission that the seeds of Mary’s future defiance were sown.

M
ARY’S CAPITULATION WAS GREETED WITH “INCREDIBLE REJOICING”
at court. Restored to favor, she was acknowledged as the king’s daughter once more and offered a sumptuous new wardrobe and a choice of servants.
²
Cromwell returned to Hunsdon with “a most gracious letter” from the king and, “kneeling on the ground,” begged Mary’s pardon for his former harsh conduct.
³

Three weeks later, Mary journeyed to Hackney for a secret reunion with her father. It was their first meeting for five years. She had been a young teenager when Henry last saw her, and she was now a woman of twenty. Chapuys wrote that the kindness shown by the king to the princess was “inconceivable, regretting that he had been so long separated from her.” He showed her “such love and affection, and such brilliant promises for the future that no father could have behaved better towards his daughter.”
⁴
Jane Seymour gave Mary a diamond ring
and Henry 1,000 crowns for her “many pleasures.”
⁵
They spent one night together and parted on Friday, July 7, with Henry promising that she would be brought to court to take her place immediately after the queen.

Yet beneath the veneer of reconciliation there were, as Chapuys observed, “a few drachmas of gall and bitterness mixed with the sweet food of paternal kindness.”
⁶
Before returning to court, Mary was forced to write to the emperor and his sister, Mary of Hungary, regent of the Netherlands, confirming her submission to her father as head of the Church; her acknowledgment of the statutes declaring her mother’s marriage unlawful; and her decision to freely renounce her right to the throne.
⁷
For Henry it was a means of emphasizing his victory over the emperor. According to Chapuys, he had told the princess “that her obstinate resistance to his will had been encouraged and strengthened by the trust she had in you; but that she ought to know that your majesty could not help or favour her in the least as long as he [the king] lived.”
⁸
Henry gave Mary a ring to celebrate her obedience. On one side was a relief of Henry and Jane, on the other a picture of Mary. The Latin inscription read:

Mary’s submission had cost her dearly. As Chapuys warned the emperor, “this affair of the princess has tormented her more than you think”; she had “escaped from the greatest danger that ever a princess was in, and such as no words can describe.”
¹⁰
She now asked Chapuys to obtain a secret papal absolution, “otherwise her conscience could not be at perfect ease.”
¹¹

On June 30, 1536, just days after Mary’s submission, a new Act of Succession was introduced into the House of Lords. Yet neither Mary’s legitimacy nor her position as heir was restored. The succession was conferred instead on the heirs of Jane Seymour or, as the act declared, “any subsequent wife.” Both of Henry’s first marriages were declared invalid, and Elizabeth was stripped of the title of princess and removed from the line of succession. Henry was granted unprecedented powers to nominate whomever he pleased as his successor, irrespective of illegitimacy, should he have no children with the queen.
¹³
He might have intended to promote his bastard son Henry Fitzroy, duke of Richmond, but three weeks later, just after Parliament was dissolved, Richmond died, probably of tuberculosis. “Few are sorry,” wrote Chapuys to Perrenot de Granvelle, “because of the Princess.”
¹⁴

Those who wished for a return to the old order in England now looked to Mary’s influence to bring it about. “It is to be hoped,” the ambassador wrote to the empress Isabella, “that through the Princess’s means, and through her great wisdom and discretion she may hereafter little by little bring back the King, her father, and the whole of the English nation to the right path.”
¹⁵

In October there was unrest in Lincolnshire, and over the following weeks rebellion spread across the northern counties. Under the leadership of the lawyer Robert Aske, the rebels, some forty thousand in number, demanded the return of the “old faith”; the restoration of the monasteries ransacked in the dissolution of the past year; the return of the old religion; and “that the Lady Mary may be made legitimate and the former statute therein annulled.”
¹⁶
Among the rebels were Lord Hussey, Mary’s old steward, and Lord Darcy, who had for many months been petitioning Charles V to intervene in England. As Aske related in his subsequent examination, “both he and all the wise men of those parts much grudged, seeing that on the mother’s side she came from the greatest blood in Christendom.” The statute declaring her illegitimacy would “make strangers think.” It was “framed more for some displeasure towards her and her friends than for any just cause, while in reason she ought to be favoured in this realm rather than otherwise.”
¹⁷

When news reached Rome of the rebellion, Pope Paul III appointed Reginald Pole cardinal and commissioned him as
legate a latere
to go to England and raise support for the rebels.
¹⁸
Pole was a cousin of the king and a son of Margaret Pole, countess of Salisbury, Mary’s godmother and former governess. He had left England in 1532 following Henry’s break with Rome and in 1536, in answer to Henry’s request for his views, had sent him the treatise
De Unitate Ecclesiae
(In Defense of the Unity of the Church). The tract had turned Pole from Henry’s protégé into his bitterest enemy. In it he appealed to the nobility of England and the emperor to take action, and he called on Henry to repent for having broken with Rome. He warned that the king would not get away with repudiating Mary and that among “such a number of most noble families” any disruption of the succession would lead to sedition.
¹⁹
By the time Pole left for England, the rebellion had been put down. Henry demanded Pole’s extradition from France as a traitor and to have the cardinal “by some means trussed up and conveyed to Calais” and then to England.
²⁰

MARY WAS TO SPEND
Christmas at court for the first time in years. On December 22, Henry, Jane, and Mary rode from Westminster through the City of London to Greenwich, preceded by the mayor and aldermen of the city. In Fleet Street, four orders of friars stood in copes of gold, “with crosses and candlesticks and censers to cense the King and Queen as they rode by.” The choir of St. Paul’s, the bishop of London, and two priests from every parish church in London stood outside St. Paul’s to watch the royal procession.
²¹
“The like sight,” Richard Lee wrote to Lady Lisle, formerly a maid of honor to Jane Seymour and wife of Arthur Plantagenet, “hath not been seen here since the Emperor’s being here [in 1522].” He noted the presence of Chapuys, “the ambassador to the Emperor,” with the royal party, which “rejoiced every man wondrously.”
²²

In April, the Privy Council recommended that Mary and Elizabeth be “made of some estimation” and since Mary was the elder, “and more apt to make a present alliance than the other,” it “might please the King to declare her according to his laws” so that she might be more attractive as a bride, as a means of ensuring that the king “may
provide himself of a present friend.”
²³
Although Charles pressed for a match with Dom Luis of Portugal, the young brother of the king of Portugal, the advice was not taken. Jane was pregnant, and Henry was optimistic that it would be a son. Any negotiation for a betrothal would now depend on public recognition of Mary’s illegitimacy.