Mary Tudor (7 page)

IN APRIL, AT WOLSEY’S
instigation, Mary sent Charles an emerald ring as a symbol of her “constancy.” Accompanying it was a message that she sought “for a better knowledge to be had when God shall send them grace to be together, whether his Majesty doth keep constant and continent to her, as with God’s grace she will.” The envoys added that Mary’s love for Charles was so passionate that it was confirmed by jealousy, “one of the great signs and tokens of love.”
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Upon receiving the ring Charles put it on his little finger and ordered the ambassadors to say that he would wear it for the sake of the princess for the rest of his life.
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Although his affection for Mary could not be doubted, Charles now looked to disavow her as his future
bride. It was still five years before Mary could marry, and Charles was now in pursuit of another cousin, Isabella of Portugal, who was of marriageable age. He was anxious to be married at once so he could leave his new empress to rule Spain while he traveled to his other territories and sought to break off the English match by proposing unrealistic terms. He would raise an army for the invasion of France provided that Henry would pay for it and that Mary was handed over at once so that she might “learn the Castilian language and the manners of the people.”
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If Henry would not agree to his requests, Charles would demand to be released from the agreement.
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Henry refused, and Wolsey made his excuses. Mary would not be given up on account of “the tenderness of her age” and, given “the respect to be had to her noble person,” it was “not meet as yet” that she “endure the pains of the sea, nor also to be brought up in an other air, that may be dangerous to her person.” Henry agreed to break off the betrothal on condition that Charles made peace with France and pay his debts to England.
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Within days the emperor signed a contract with Isabella of Portugal, whom he married in February of the following year.

The Anglo-Spanish alliance was at an end. To Katherine it was a personal affront, and she protested at her nephew’s behavior: “I am sure I deserve not this treatment, for such are my affection and readiness for your Highness’s service that I deserved a better reward.”
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For Mary, who had quickly become enamored of her Spanish cousin, it meant a painful rejection but the beginning of an attachment that would endure for the rest of her life.

A
LTHOUGH MARY WAS COURTED BY THE RULING FAMILIES OF EUROPE
, Henry remained reluctant to accept her as his successor and continued to hope for a male heir. But Katherine had not conceived since 1518. She was now forty and, as the Venetian ambassador observed, “past that age in which women most commonly were wont to be fruitful.”
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Rumors had circulated in Rome in 1514 that the “King of England meant to repudiate his present wife … because he is unable to have children by her.”
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Mary’s birth had once given Henry reason to hope; now, with no prospect of an heir, he began to reflect on the consequences of his “childlessness.”

On June 16, 1525, Henry’s bastard son, Henry Fitzroy, the product of a brief affair with one of the queen’s ladies, Elizabeth Blount, was recognized as the king’s son and showered with titles and honors. He was installed as a Knight of the Garter and created earl of Nottingham, duke of Richmond, and duke of Somerset. This unprecedented double dukedom was then followed by his appointments as lord high admiral and warden general of the Scottish Marches and, two years later, by his investiture as lord lieutenant of Ireland. Not since the twelfth century had a king of England raised an illegitimate son to the peerage, and never had any subject held such a collection of offices and titles. Fitzroy was now given a great household and sent to Sheriff Hutton Castle in Yorkshire as the head of the King’s Council of the North. Lorenzo Orio, the Venetian envoy, reported that “he is now next in rank to His Majesty, and might yet be easily by the King’s means exalted to higher things.”
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Katherine was indignant and feared that Mary might be excluded outright from her inheritance. “No bastard,”
she complained, “ought to be exalted above the daughter of the Queen.”
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But Henry had not yet resolved to prefer one child to another, and preparations were being made to enhance Mary’s status. The nine-year-old was to be dispatched to the Welsh Marches, one of the most desolate and volatile areas of the kingdom, to preside over the Council of Wales and the Marches. While Henry stopped short of formally investing her with the title “princess of Wales” and thereby explicitly acknowledging her as his successor, Mary’s appointment represented the revival of an association of the king’s heir with the government of Wales that had begun under Edward, the firstborn son of Edward IV, and followed by Prince Arthur more than twenty years before.
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Though Katherine would mourn her daughter’s absence, she would take comfort from the fact that the princess’s status was at last being recognized.
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She was now following the path of the heir to the throne.

ON AUGUST
12, 1525, Mary left Wolsey’s manor, The More, near St. Albans, for the Marches, accompanied by a vast entourage dressed in her livery colors of blue and green. From Woburn, then to Reading, she reached Thornbury Castle in Gloucestershire on or about the twenty-fourth. Dozens of carts had been borrowed from local establishments to carry all the necessary household items and furnishings, ranging from “3 brass pots, one brazen pestle and mortar, a frying pan with a flesh hook and a chest with irons for keeping prisoners” to a throne for the Presence Chamber and all that was necessary to furnish the chapel at Thornbury, including standing candelabras, Mass books with golden covers, carved stands, kneeling cushions, and prayer stools.
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It was to be a court in miniature. Lord Ferrers and Lord Dudley headed the establishment as steward and chamberlain, respectively; Bishop John Voysey was appointed lord president of the Council, and Margaret Pole, the countess of Salisbury, who had been dismissed from Mary’s service in 1521 when her son the duke of Buckingham had been executed for treason, was reappointed lady mistress. Beneath these head officers were three hundred other servants, including Mary’s new schoolmaster, Richard Fetherstone.
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The king’s instructions detailed precisely the expectations and duties of the household and Council and made provision for Mary’s education, welfare, and pastimes. The main responsibility was placed with Margaret Pole, who was entrusted with “all such things as concern the person of the said princess, her noble education and training in all virtuous demeanour.” Mary was to be treated as “so great a princess doth appertain.” Ladies and gentlewomen were to remain in attendance of her and were to “use themselves sadly, honourably, virtuously and discreetly in words, countenance, gesture, behaviour and deed with humility, reverence, lowliness … so as of them proceed no manner of example of evil or unfitting manner or conditions, but rather all good and godly behaviour.” She was to learn to serve God, to take “moderate exercise” in the “open air,” in gardens, sweet and wholesome places, so as to “confer unto her health, solace and comfort” as her lady governess thought “most convenient.” At some seasons she was to pass her time

Her clothes, her chamber, and her body were to be kept “pure, sweet, clean and wholesome.”
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With mother and daughter now apart, they maintained a correspondence, and Katherine resolved to remain closely involved in Mary’s education, writing her:

MARY’S HOUSEHOLD WOULD
become the center of a social elite and of high courtly culture. Full royal ceremony was observed, with Mary practicing the part of queen at the head of her own court. Every day at least “two Gentleman Ushers, two Gentleman Waiters, two Yeoman Ushers, twelve Yeomen and two Grooms” were to attend her in the Presence Chamber, and more were to be added on “Sundays, Saturdays and other principal seasons,” when there “shall be access or recourse of noblemen or other strangers repairing unto that court or that it be as festival days or times or other things requisite to have be great and honourable presence.”
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Such numbers were expected to flock to Tewkesbury to pay homage to the princess that John Voysey, the bishop of Exeter and lord president of the Council, anxiously wrote to Wolsey asking, on account of the “great repair of strangers” anticipated, that “a ship of silver for the almes dish” be sent to hold the princess’s napkin, which afterward would be filled with scraps to be distributed among the poor. Voysey also inquired what provision would be made for the Twelfth Night banquet entertainments and whether they should employ a “Lord of Misrule,” and requested that trumpets and a rebeck (a type of fiddle) be sent to Thornbury.
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At the center of her own court, Mary began to learn the art of governance. Her French tutor, Giles Duwes, later wrote
An Introductory for
to Learn to Read, to Pronouce, and to Speak French
based on his time in the household in the Marches. In it he portrayed Mary as a princely ruler and her court as a center of literary patronage, educated conversation, and gentle manners. Mary features in a number of dialogues about piety, philosophy, and courtly love. In one, Duwes recalled an occasion when the young princess participated in the drawing of names on Valentine’s Day. When Mary drew as her valentine her treasurer, Sir Ralph Egerton—an old man afflicted by gout—she insisted on calling him her “husband
adoptif.”
As his pretend wife, she criticized Sir Ralph for taking better care of his gout “than you do your wife.” She could hardly believe “that the gout might withhold a good husband having some love to his wife” and begged him to teach her what “a good husband ought to teach his wife,” that is, the definition of love.
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She had just turned ten.