Mary Tudor (19 page)

A
T TWO IN THE MORNING OF FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1537, JANE
Seymour gave birth to a son at Hampton Court. Born on the Feast of Saint Edward the Confessor, he was named after the royal saint.

By eight o’clock Te Deums had been sung in every parish church in London; bonfires were lit, and the firing of the Tower guns continued well into the evening.
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Messengers were dispatched around the country and to courts across Europe proclaiming the birth. “Here be no news, but very good news,” wrote Thomas Cromwell to Sir Thomas Wyatt, the ambassador to Spain, who had been imprisoned after the fall of Anne Boleyn. “It hath pleased Almighty God of his goodness, to send unto the Queen’s Grace deliverance of a goodly Prince, to the great comfort, rejoice and consolation of the King’s Majesty, and of all us his most humble, loving and obedient subjects.”
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Finally Henry had a legitimate male heir.

Anticipation of the birth had been growing since the spring. On May 23, Jane’s pregnancy was made known at court, and four days later a Te Deum was celebrated at St. Paul’s upon the “quickening” of her child.
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The king added a nursery to the building works at Hampton Court in preparation for the queen’s confinement, and Mary was summoned to attend on the queen.
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On Sunday, September 16, Jane took to her chamber, where she remained for three weeks before going into a prolonged and arduous thirty-hour labor. A solemn procession was made at St. Paul’s “to pray for the Queen that was then in labour of child.”
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On the following morning, Jane was safely delivered. As news of the birth rang out from the bells of St. Paul’s, Henry hurried back from Esher in Surrey, to which he had been forced to move on account of the plague, to begin a round of celebratory banquets.
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Three days after the birth, Mary stood as godmother at the font in the newly decorated Chapel Royal at Hampton Court as Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, performed the rites of baptism over the infant prince.
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Although the plague limited the size of the retinues coming to court, it was a lavish ceremony. Some three or four hundred courtiers, clerics, and foreign envoys formed the midnight procession from the queen’s chamber to the chapel. After the prince had been baptized and confirmed, the heralds proclaimed him “Edward, son and heir to the King of England, Duke of Cornwall, and Earl of Chester.” Amid a torchlit procession, Mary led her four-year-old sister, Elizabeth, back to the queen’s apartments for the giving of the baptismal gifts.
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Mary presented a golden cup, which she gave, along with £30, to Edward’s nurse, midwife, and cradle rockers. Great fires were lit on the streets of London, and bells rung across the country.

WITH THE REJOICING
barely over, Jane fell seriously ill with “a natural lax”—heavy bleeding.
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The week of celebrations ended with a general procession at St. Paul’s for “the health of the Queen,” and the Chapel Royal was filled with courtiers praying for her safety. By the evening of the twenty-fourth, her condition had worsened and she received Extreme Unction. She died in the early hours of the morning of puerperal fever, having suffered a massive hemorrhage and
contracted septicemia. Henry withdrew to Windsor, where, as the chronicler Edward Hall recorded, “he mourned and kept himself close and secret a great while.”
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Writing to Francis I in acknowledgment of the French king’s congratulations on Edward’s birth, Henry described how “Divine Providence … hath mingled my joy with the bitterness of her who brought me this happiness.”
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In the days immediately following the queen’s death, Mary was too grief-stricken—“accrased”—to take part in the initial obsequies, and the marchioness of Exeter had to take her place.
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But as she gathered her composure, she appeared as chief mourner at dirges and Masses in the Chapel Royal, accompanied by her ladies. On November 8, she rode behind the coffin at the head of the funeral cortege, her steed covered in black trappings, as the procession made its way from Hampton Court to Windsor. Upon the coffin was an effigy of Jane in robes of state, a crown upon her head and a scepter in her right hand. Four days later, she was buried between the stalls and altar of St. George’s Chapel. Above the vault the Latin inscription heralded her as a phoenix, her personal emblem, which in death had brought life:

In a letter of condolence, Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of Durham, reminded Henry that though God had taken his queen, Henry should not forget “our most noble Prince, to whom God hath ordained your Majesty not only to be father, but also as the time now requireth, to supply the room of a mother also.”
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Edward spent his first Christmas with Henry at Greenwich and was with him again in May 1538 at the royal hunting lodge at Royston, where the king “solaced all his day with much mirth and joy, dallying with him in his arms … and so holding him in a window to the sight and great comfort of all the people.”
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But it was Mary, then twenty-two, who would be most involved in Edward’s early upbringing. She would be his most frequent family visitor. Residing for much of the time at Hampton Court, she was just
a barge ride across the river from her brother’s nursery at Richmond. She visited him in November 1537 and in March, April, and May the following year.
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As Jane Dormer, one of Mary’s gentlewomen, later noted, when Mary came to see him “he took special content in her company … he would ask her many questions, promise her secrecy, carrying her that respect and reverence, as if she had been his mother.” She would offer him advice “in some things that concerned himself, and in other things that touched herself; in all showing great affection and sisterly care of him.”
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Lady Lisle visited all the royal children at Hampton Court in November. “His grace [Edward],” she wrote to her husband, “is the goodliest babe that ever I set mine eye upon. I pray God to make him an old man, for I think I should never weary of looking on him…. I saw also my Lady Mary and my Lady Elizabeth.”
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Edward was acknowledged as the king’s heir, and the rivalry between Mary and Elizabeth abated. All three siblings were now brought together under one roof.

A
S HENRY MOURNED THE DEATH OF JANE SEYMOUR, THE FRENCH
king and the emperor agreed upon a truce and began peace talks mediated by the pope. Now, with the growing threat of a Catholic offensive against him, the search for a new wife for Henry and a husband for Mary was used in an effort to forge an alliance that would keep France and the empire apart. “Since the King [Francis I] my brother, has already so great an amity with the Emperor, what amity should I have with him?” asked Henry. “I ask because I am not resolved to marry again unless the Emperor or King prefer my friendship to that which they have together.”
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Offers of marriage alliances were made to the empire and France for a match between Mary and either Dom Luis of Portugal or the duke of Orléans. Henry considered the prospect of marriage with the dowager duchess of Milan and for a time with Mary of Guise, though Henry delayed too long and in May she was betrothed to King James V of Scotland, thereby renewing the “Auld Alliance” between France and Scotland. At Nice in June, Charles and Francis came to terms, signing a ten-year truce, and some months later they pledged themselves to cooperate against the enemies of Christendom. Henry now moved to secure his position at home and look for new friends abroad.

Though publicly reconciled, Henry still regarded Mary and her supporters with suspicion. In the summer of 1538, Cromwell sent her a letter of warning. She had taken some “strangers” into her house. The incident had been relayed to the king in such a way to put her trustworthiness in doubt.
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Mary responded, “I fear it hath been reported to the worst, nevertheless I will promise you, with God’s help, from henceforth to refrain [from] it so utterly that of right none shall have cause to speak of.” She assured Cromwell that she would not lodge anyone in her house again and added that she would rather endure physical harm than lose even the smallest part of the king’s favor.
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Amid renewed fears of war, Henry sought to alienate Mary from the emperor and draw her more securely to him. At the end of August 1538, she was instructed to complain to the imperial ambassadors, Chapuys and Mendoza, about the emperor’s failure to conclude the Portuguese alliance and the miserable terms he had offered. Cromwell wrote to Mary outlining the supposed grievances that she was to present to the ambassadors when they visited her at Havering. Upon their arrival on the twenty-sixth, Mary dutifully protested about the “dissimulation” employed by the ambassadors, the offer of a miserly “dower,” and the emperor’s failure to show her the cousinly kindness and friendship she expected of him. “She was a woman only and could not help saying these things.” But “after so many overtures and fine words, nothing had been concluded.”
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Later Mary made clear her real feelings. She told Chapuys that she held the emperor in high esteem, as a “father and mother,” and “was so affectionately attached” to him “that it seemed almost impossible to her to have such an affection and love for a kinsman.” She did not believe what her father said about him, and she stood ready to do whatever he asked of her in the issue of marriage.
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Fearing for her safety, the ambassador raised again the prospect of escape. Mary was hesitant: “It might happen,” she said, that her father “might hereafter show greater consideration for her, or cause her to be more respected and better treated than she had been until now.” If that were the case, “she would much prefer remaining in England and conforming herself entirely to her father’s commands and wishes.”

When quizzed by Cromwell on her meeting with the ambassadors, Mary displayed some political astuteness, saying only that they had
reiterated the emperor’s support for her and had urged her to remain “in the obedience and goodwill of my father.”