Mary Tudor (23 page)

On May 31, 1545, a French expeditionary force landed at Dumbarton in Scotland, and on July 19, a French invasion fleet of more than
two hundred ships entered the Solent. Fires were lit across England, raising the alarm.
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In the skirmishes that followed, Henry’s warship the
Mary Rose
was sunk with the loss of 500 men. Two days later, 2,000 French troops landed at Bembridge on the Isle of Wight and burned several villages before being forced to retreat. English shipping in Portsmouth harbor was attacked and the towns of Newhaven and Seaford were sacked until the French forces were driven back across the English Channel. The following day Henry ordered processions throughout the realm and prayers to be said to intercede for victory.
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“We are in war with France and Scotland,” warned Bishop Gardiner;

By September, as both sides sued for peace, negotiations were revived with the emperor. On October 23, Bishops Gardiner and Thomas Thirlby were commissioned to present a three-pronged plan: Charles V would marry Mary, Edward the emperor’s daughter, and Elizabeth his son, Philip. Charles did not respond favorably.
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It was clear that Henry was seeking better relations with the emperor merely to secure a stronger negotiating position with France, and the proposals came to nothing.

IN MAY
1546, the ailing Eustace Chapuys prepared to leave England after sixteen years as ambassador. On May 4 he went to the palace of Westminster to bid farewell to the queen and Mary. Katherine expressed her desire that the friendship between England and Spain be maintained. “She … begged me affectionately, after I presented to your majesty her humble service, to express explicitly all I had learned here of the good wishes of the King towards you.” Mary, meanwhile,
thanked him for the emperor’s “good wishes towards her,” and, “in default of her power to repay your Majesty in any other way, she said she was bound to pray constantly to God for your Majesty’s health and prosperity.”

At a final audience, Chapuys and Henry spoke about future relations between England and France. Henry “observed that he would very much prefer a settled peace to a truce … but, after all, if your Majesty would aid him, in accordance with the treaty, he did not care very much either.” The king stressed “the importance of the treaty of friendship … that I would report very fully and use my best endeavours, in every way, to induce your Majesty to declare against the French.”
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Finally, on June 7, 1546, French and English commissioners signed a peace treaty in which it was agreed that Boulogne would be returned to France in eight years’ time on payment of 2 million crowns. In the hope of exploiting the new accord, the pope sent an envoy to England, Gurone Bertano, to propose terms for Henry’s reconciliation to Rome. Pope Paul had hoped that the prodigal son might now submit to papal primacy, but Bertano’s overtures were firmly rebuffed.
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I
N FEBRUARY 1546, A PLOT WAS HATCHED TO DESTROY THE QUEEN
. Her evangelical beliefs and her growing influence over the king had made her enemies among the religious conservatives at court. With Henry’s deteriorating health, and his temper growing ever shorter, he became increasingly irritated by Katherine’s debates with him over religion. “A good hearing it is,” he retorted to Bishop Gardiner, “when women become such clerks; and a thing much to my comfort, to come in mine old days to be taught by my wife.”
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Seeing an opportunity to gain the ascendancy at court and halt the progress of religious reform, Gardiner and his fellow conservatives moved to convince Henry that Katherine was to be feared.
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Gardiner murmured to the king that the queen’s views were heretical under the law and that he,

Gardiner secured Henry’s agreement for Katherine to be investigated for heresy and for treason. Her chief intimates, the ladies Herbert, Lane, and Tyrwhitt, were to be questioned and their closets searched for anything that might incriminate the queen.
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In the spring, Anne Askew, a young Lincolnshire gentlewoman who held evangelical opinions and who associated with Lady Hertford and Lady Denny, both high-ranking women at court, was taken to the Tower. There she was interrogated in an attempt to extract information that could be used against Katherine. Did not the ladies of the court share her opinion? Could she not name “a great number of my sect”? She conceded nothing. She was put on the rack and tortured and, refusing to implicate anyone, was revived and racked again. The lieutenant of the Tower would not perform the second torture, so her interrogators, the chancellor of the Court of Augmentations and the lord chancellor of England, “threw off their gowns” and became “tormentors themselves.” As a gentlewoman, Askew should have been protected against torture, and the Council was “not a little displeased” when news of the racking spread. So desperate were the conservatives to implicate the queen that the lord chancellor of England himself had broken the law.

On July 16, 1546, Askew’s broken body was carried on a wooden chair and she was bound to the stake, together with Nicholas Belenian, a priest from Shropshire, and John Adams, a tailor. All were accused of heresy for refusing to accept the Real Presence in the Eucharist, as the Act of Six Articles had decreed.

Although Askew failed to incriminate Katherine, Gardiner managed to procure evidence regarding the discovery of forbidden religious books and a warrant of arrest was issued. Katherine was warned by her physician, Thomas Wendy, of the action to be taken against her and advised to submit before Henry; she should “somewhat … frame and conform herself to the King’s mind.” If she would do so and “show her humble submission unto him … she should find him gracious and favourable unto her.”

Fearing that she faced the same fate as her predecessor, Katherine took Wendy’s advice and acquiesced to the king, protesting her weakness as a woman and the God-given superiority of men: “Must I, and
will I, refer my judgement in this, and all other cases, to your Majesty’s wisdom, as my only anchor, Supreme Head and Governor here in earth, next under God.” Henry relented. “Is it even so, Sweetheart? And tend your arguments to no worse end? Then perfect friends we are now again, as ever at any time heretofore.”
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When Chancellor Wriothesley arrived the following day with a detachment of the guard to arrest the queen, Henry berated him as a “Knave! Arrant knave, beast! And fool!” and ordered him to
“avaunt
[leave]” his “sight.”

THE COLLAPSE OF
the plot against Katherine Parr signaled the end of the conservatives’ brief period of ascendancy. With Henry’s health deteriorating rapidly, the Seymour faction, led by Edward’s uncle Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, acted to destroy its enemies, the Howards and Bishop Gardiner, and take control of the government. “Nothing is done at court,” reported the newly arrived van der Delft, “without their intervention and the Council mostly meets at Hertford’s house. It is even asserted that the custody of the Prince and government of the realm will be entrusted to them; and this misfortune to the house of Norfolk may have come from that quarter.”
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Mary, meanwhile, was untouched by these shifts of power and remained in relative peace at court as Henry continued to show her every sign of favor. One of the last entries in the king’s accounts is the purchase of a horse for Mary, “a white grey gelding.”
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On December 12, Thomas Howard, the foremost peer of the realm, and his eldest son, Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, were arrested on grounds of treason and sent to the Tower. Surrey, a descendant of Edward III, had boasted of his Plantagenet blood and declared that when Henry died, his father would be “metest to rule the prince.” He had planned, it was alleged, to disband the Council, depose the king, seize the young Prince Edward, and display his own heraldry as the royal arms and insignia, an indication of his ambition for the throne. It was upon this last charge that he was tried and found guilty of high treason.
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Meanwhile his father, Norfolk, was questioned and imprisoned in the Tower. On January 12, he confessed that he had “offended the King in opening his secret counsels at divers times to sundry persons to the peril of his Highness … [and] concealed high treason, in keeping secret the false acts of my son, Henry, Earl of Surrey, in using the arms of St Edward the Confessor, which pertain only to kings.”
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Surrey was executed on January 19 on the scaffold at Tower Hill. A week later Thomas Howard was attainted without trial and awaited execution.

ON THE EVENING
of December 26, Henry ordered his will to be brought to him. He wanted to make some changes to the list of executors. “Some he meant to have in and some he meant to have out.” The crown would go directly to Edward and any lawful heirs of his body and in default to Mary “upon condition that she shall not marry without the written and sealed consent of a majority” of Edward’s surviving Privy Council. In the event of Mary’s childless death, Elizabeth would succeed. The succession would then be conferred on the Grey and Clifford families, descendants of Henry’s younger sister, Mary.
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Sixteen executors were to act as Edward’s councillors until he reached the age of eighteen. They included Edward Seymour, the earl of Hertford; John Dudley, the earl of Warwick; Sir William Paget, the royal secretary; and Sir Anthony Denny, chief gentleman of the Privy Chamber. Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, was excluded, and Katherine’s position as regent was revoked. Instead, the voices of all the executors were to be equal and decisions were to be taken by majority vote.