The Children of Henry VIII (14 page)

F
IGURE
7
The Old Palace at Hatfield in Hertfordshire, which Henry VIII had appropriated by 1533 chiefly for the use of his children, and which he formally acquired in 1538. Elizabeth secured the house for herself in 1549 and it became her main home until her accession.

In March 1534, for instance, she came to see Elizabeth at Hatfield.
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In April, she and Henry rode the five miles from Greenwich to visit her while she was staying nearby at Eltham, the king’s own childhood home that had just been refurbished. As Sir William Kingston, who accompanied the royal party, cheerfully observes, Elizabeth was ‘as goodly a child as hath been seen, and her grace is much in the king’s favour.’
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The following October, Anne travelled in the royal barge from Hampton Court to see her daughter at Richmond, attended by the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and several ladies of the Court.
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In the early months of 1535, Elizabeth lived at Court for five weeks ‘with divers of her servants.’
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This gave her mother an
opportunity for more extended contact. Yet to Anne’s dismay, her parental role would be restricted just as Katherine’s had been. Convention dictated that her child’s upbringing was to be over-seen by Henry and the Privy Council, not herself. When, for instance, Lady Bryan sought Cromwell’s permission to have the infant weaned at the age of twenty-five months, he forwarded her request to Henry, who instructed Sir William Paulet, comptroller of the royal household, to approve it. In a letter to Cromwell, Paulet tactfully observes that permission had been granted by ‘his grace, with the assent of the queen’s grace.’
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But Anne had only been asked to confirm what Henry had already decided.

This issue swiftly evaporated when compared to the problems caused by the king’s other daughter, Mary. Suddenly confronted after Elizabeth’s birth by a rival for her father’s affection and, even worse, excluded from her place in the succession by one of Cromwell’s acts of Parliament, she now became as defiant as her mother and just as obstinate as her father.

A family feud was about to begin.

M
ARY’S
feud with her father and half-sister began even before the herald cried out Elizabeth’s title as ‘Princess of England’ at her baptism. The seeds were sown three weeks earlier when Thomas Cromwell ordered Margaret Pole, still Mary’s governess, to surrender the elder princess’s jewels and plate to his messenger. Pole indignantly refused, demanding Henry’s written orders. Lord Hussey, Mary’s chamberlain, who was caught in the middle, exclaimed to Cromwell in frustration, ‘Would to God that the king and you did know and see what I have had to do here of late!’
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Mary was determined to retain her royal privileges.
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She had been psychologically stunned when, the moment Elizabeth’s birth was announced, the same herald strode in his ceremonial robes to the gatehouse of Greenwich Palace to proclaim that she had been stripped of her royal title. Once this proclamation was made, the livery badges worn by her servants ‘were instantly removed and replaced by the king’s escutcheon’.
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Then living at her father’s palace of New Hall in Essex, Mary was sick with worry as to what she should do if Henry called Pole’s bluff as she knew he would. ‘Speak you few words and meddle nothing’ was Katherine’s advice.
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But however hard she tried, Mary found it difficult to follow. Uninvited, she tried to deflect the coming storm by writing to her father, ‘saying that she would as long as she lived obey his commands, but that she really could not renounce the titles, rights and privileges which God, Nature and her own parents had given her.’
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The response was at first an ominous silence. Then, in October, Henry ordered Mary to move immediately from New Hall, a place she adored, to a ‘very wretched’ manor house nearby. And in November and December he dismantled her household, dismissing her attendants one by one, beginning with Pole.
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Katherine’s supporters blamed Anne—it was simply to please her, they murmured, that Mary was to be demoted. It was even said that she would be shut up in a nunnery or forced to marry a nonentity.
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And when Henry gave New Hall and its park to Anne’s brother George and his wife Jane as their new country estate, it seemed that such fears might prove all too true.
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For Mary, the ensuing years would be harrowing. To teach her a lesson in obedience, her father decided that—at the age of almost 18—she should go and live with Elizabeth in her nursery as an inferior person to her half-sister. Humiliatingly, he created a joint household for his two daughters, with precedence given to Elizabeth.
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Sir John Shelton and his wife, Lady Anne, were put in overall charge. Once more, Henry’s new queen seemed to be behind the
move, since Anne Shelton was her paternal aunt. How far the Sheltons themselves were happy with the decision may be questioned. The joint household would prove to be an awkward and inconvenient structure. Many times would the Sheltons find themselves trapped in the middle of endless rows between Mary, who was meant to be a subordinate but had no governess appointed, and Lady Bryan, Elizabeth’s governess, who was expected to exercise authority on behalf of her young charge.
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Mary’s health soon buckled under the strain. When first sent in disgrace to Hatfield, she kept to her room and wept continually. In retaliation, Henry ordered that no food or drink should be served to her there and that her best clothes should be given away to punish her.
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In March 1534, after a more than usually abrasive confrontation with Anne conducted through intermediaries, Mary had a breakdown so disturbing that a seriously worried Henry had to relent as far as sending his own physician, Dr William Butts, to attend her.
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Butts’s diagnosis was that Mary was suffering a fresh bout of the menstrual problems she had endured at the onset of puberty. A more conspiratorial theory circulating at Henry’s Court was that Anne—who had urged the king to ‘put down that proud Spanish blood’ by beating Mary into submission—had attempted to poison her.
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Forced to live like a cuckoo in her half-sister’s nest, Mary snubbed her at every opportunity. When Elizabeth began to toddle, Mary would not walk by her side. And whenever they were taken out somewhere, Mary demanded to ride separately, preferably in front. She refused point-blank to share a horse litter with her sibling, and if she was forced to do so by the Sheltons, she vociferously protested.
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She also always expected to sit in the best seat in the royal barge.
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Anne was so incensed with Mary that, one day losing her temper completely, she threatened to kill her if Henry ever went abroad.
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Towards Fitzroy, Anne’s animosity would be less aggressive but equally detrimental, even though he did little or nothing to earn it. Just as Mary had been recalled from Wales, the king’s illegitimate son had been recalled from Yorkshire shortly before Wolsey’s fall. No longer did Henry consider the marginal improvements in efficiency and reliability achieved by the two regional councils sufficient to justify the prodigious expense of coupling them to his children’s households.

And with Fitzroy back at Court where everyone could see him, Anne—fearing him as a potential rival for any child she might have—arranged for her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, to take over his upbringing. In particular, she asked the duke to begin negotiations for the 10-year-old boy’s betrothal to one of the duke’s own daughters, so that he would cease to be available for a royal match.
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Since Fitzroy was so often at Court, he needed company, and at Anne’s instigation, Norfolk made his own eldest son, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, the boy’s constant companion. Three years older than Fitzroy, the young earl was a brilliant student and linguist as well as a fine horseman trained in the skills and ideals of chivalry. The king considered him to be a perfect role model, and in November 1532, when his son was 13, he sent the pair off to France, ostensibly to improve their French and to attend the marriage of Henry, Duke of Orléans to the pope’s niece, Catherine de’ Medici.
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In reality, Fitzroy was sent to boost his father’s ego by showing himself off to the European powers as the living proof of Henry’s ability to father a healthy son. Warmly received at the French Court, the youth was quartered in the Dauphin’s lodgings and took his meals with the prince.

During the winter months, Fitzroy and Surrey stayed in Paris, but in the spring of 1533 they travelled with Francis I to Fontainebleau and on to Lyons, and then to Toulouse and Montpellier. There, in August, they made ready to witness the spectacular entertainments planned to greet Francis and the pope as the prelude to de’ Medici’s wedding.

But when news reached England that Pope Clement had finally passed judgment in Katherine’s suit, declaring Henry’s separation from his first wife to be unlawful and threatening him with a decree of excommunication, the two teenagers were recalled in haste.
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Anne’s hostility towards Fitzroy crystallized after his return: it was said that in a tantrum she threatened to poison him too.
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Her New Year’s gifts to him were paltry and meant to insult him. She constantly badgered Henry to marry him off, until he yielded and obtained the necessary dispensation from the Church. On 26 November 1533, Fitzroy duly exchanged his vows with Mary Howard, Surrey’s younger sister and one of Anne’s most favoured gentlewomen, who had carried the chrism at Elizabeth’s baptism. Both partners were still just 14.
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Since the young couple agreed at the outset that their union would not be consummated, it could hardly have been a love match. This was a far cry from the nuptials of de’ Medici and the Duke of Orléans, who by coincidence were also both 14 and who, after their wedding feast, were led by Queen Eleanor to a
sumptuously decorated bridal chamber, where they enjoyed uninhibited sex watched by Francis, who declared ‘each had shown valour in the joust.’
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