by David Cohen
A few weeks later, aware that Anne was losing influence, Chapuys suggested Mary should try to reconcile with her father. Mary finally wrote the letter Henry had wanted for so long in which she stifled her fury and humiliated herself before him. She humbly prostrated herself and begged him to forgive the daughter who had offended him so much and added:
that my heavy and fearful heart dare not presume to call you father, deserving of nothing from your majesty, save that the kindness of your most blessed nature does surmount all evils, offences and trespasses, and is ever merciful and ready to accept the penitent calling for grace, at any fitting time.
Even at the last minute, however, Mary tried to defy her father, saying she accepted his authority under God Almighty, but this was not the wording the King wanted: his daughter had to give him total authority over her. Thomas Cromwell would not send that letter if it contained Mary’s clever proviso. She capitulated and told her father she had not dared write to him before she knew he would forgive her for siding with her mother. In addition, she promised that she would never ‘again offend your majesty by the denial or refusal of any such articles and commandments as it may please your highness to address to me’. She had ‘most unkindly and unnaturally offended’. The penitent daughter begged Henry to forgive her for ‘these things which I have before refused to condescend to’. She abased herself, saying, ‘I wholly commit my body to your mercy and fatherly pity; desiring no state, no condition, nor no manner or degree of living but such as your grace shall appoint unto me.’
The end of the letter was equally abject as Mary signed herself ‘Your Grace’s most humble and obedient daughter and handmaid, Mary’. ‘Handmaid’ was both Biblical and unusual. Henry was not only interested in his daughter’s obedience but also in her complete political submission, so Cromwell made her add:
I do recognise, accept, take, repute and acknowledge the king’s highness to be supreme head on earth, under Christ, of the church of England; and do utterly refuse the bishop of Rome’s pretended authority, power and jurisdiction within this realm, formerly usurped, according to the laws and statutes made on that behalf, and by all the king’s true subjects humbly received, admitted, obeyed, kept and observed.
She also denied her mother, saying she recognised ‘that the marriage formerly had between his majesty and my mother, the late Princess dowager, was by God’s law and man’s law incestuous and unlawful’. This humiliation would affect Mary, her relationship with her younger sister and her attitude towards her people for the rest of her life.
After Anne lost her son, Henry became exasperated with his second wife. The cycle of stillbirths and deaths in infancy which had destroyed his first marriage must have seemed all too familiar. Within a few weeks, Anne was accused of adultery. Some historians believe the charges were trumped up and that Henry always knew they were; others disagree and argue Anne was unfaithful, though perhaps only in the hope of becoming pregnant again. She was put on trial for high treason, found guilty and beheaded in May 1536. Henry did not forgive Mary for defying him, but his attitude towards her became somewhat less hostile.
Princess Elizabeth’s lack of underwear – and other vicissitudes
Elizabeth was only two years old when her mother was beheaded and the King proceeded to totally ignore his young daughter. Her governess, Lady Bryant, wrote to Cromwell to ask ‘what degree she [Elizabeth] is of now I know not but by hearsay. Therefore I know not how to order her nor myself nor her women and grooms I have rule of.’ There were problems of protocol and of basic necessities, such as underwear. Lady Bryant listed every item ‘needful’ for her charge – kirtles or slips, petticoats, mufflers and the nicely named ‘body stitchets’ or corsets – and ‘beseeched’ Thomas Cromwell to give her clear orders – and the money to buy them.
Clothes were not the only issue as Sir John Shelton, who was in charge at Hunsdon, where Elizabeth was living, wanted the child to dine formally ‘at the board of the estate every day’. Lady Bryant thought that absurd for such a young child and wanted the King’s authority to provide a simple ‘mess of meat’ for Elizabeth in her own rooms. She ended her letter with a plea for sympathy for the Princess, whose teeth were hurting badly.
Children need physical and emotional security, modern psychologists agree, and find it hard to cope with separation from their parents or care givers. Nothing suggests they were any different in the sixteenth century, though there has been some debate among historians as to ‘the invention of childhood’, with some arguing that, as so many children died so young, parents did not invest as much emotion in them. A number of sixteenth-century diaries and memoirs suggest otherwise. The French writer Michel de Montaigne in his essay on fatherhood warned that men were all too often too reserved in showing their love for their sons. After his son died unexpectedly young, one of Montaigne’s friends bitterly regretted never having told his son how much he loved him. Henry VIII tended only to pity himself, however. Once she was three, Elizabeth could not rely on the father who had so proudly showed her off the day Catherine died.
The letters that the Edwardian historian Mumby gathered – written by, to and about Elizabeth – unfortunately are silent on a number of key points. No one can be sure whether anyone made any effort to comfort her when she found out that her mother had been executed. Did her father ever explain why he had ordered that? How did her half-sister Mary, who was seventeen years older, behave towards her?
After Anne Boleyn, Henry fell in love with Jane Seymour, who was twenty-eight years old. He married her eleven days after Anne was beheaded. Jane was a good stepmother and tried to bring Henry and his daughters closer together. She became pregnant soon after the wedding, and that gave her more influence. Henry started to take more interest in his little daughter. When Elizabeth was four, Jane gave birth to a son, the future Edward VI. The Queen’s efforts to reunite the family now bore fruit. Elizabeth was given a serious role at Edward’s christening: she had to carry the baby’s robe to the font, quite a task for a small girl. Mary was made one of Edward’s godmothers, a sign of her coming back into favour.
Jane Seymour, however, died when her son was only twelve days old. Mary, who had not been allowed to attend her own mother’s funeral, was given the honour of being the chief mourner at the Queen’s funeral. She impressed Henry, who now granted Mary a household and allowed her to reinstate her favourite lady-in-waiting.
After Edward was born, Elizabeth’s living conditions improved. She was sent with her baby brother to the palace at Hatfield and the two small children became friends. Henry also approved the appointment of Elizabeth’s first governess, Kat Ashley, who took ‘great labour and pain in bringing of me up in learning and honesty’, Elizabeth wrote years later. She said nothing about love and warmth though she did add, ‘We are more bound to them that bringeth us up well than to our parents.’ Given that Elizabeth hardly knew her mother and that her father was erratic in his affections, her view is hardly surprising. It is arguable that the Princess, like a number of clever troubled children, buried herself in books, which gave her some security.
When she was five, Elizabeth started to learn languages, including French, Latin and Greek. Her abilities impressed. At the age of eleven, she could also speak Spanish and the native language of the Tudors: Welsh. She also had to acquire the then essential skills for a woman – how to sew, embroider and dance. Around this time, she became a competent horsewoman, could hunt deer and learned how to shoot well with a bow and arrow (archery was considered an acceptable sport for a woman).
In January 1540, Henry married for the fourth time. It was a diplomatic union and a total disaster. His new wife, Anne of Cleves, was nicknamed ‘the mare of Flanders’ because she was so unattractive; the King claimed he found it hard to have an erection with her. By July, he had divorced her.
A good illustration of Henry’s erratic fathering was that, although Mary might no longer be out of favour, in 1541 he still had her old governess and godmother, Margaret Pole
, the Countess of Salisbury, executed. She was accused of having been involved in a Catholic plot against the King, although the evidence was far from conclusive.
Even before Anne of Cleves had been divorced, Mary and Elizabeth saw their father fall in lust with a fifteen-year-old girl, Catherine Howard, who was nearly ten years younger than Mary herself. Perhaps for the first time in his reign, the narcissist made himself ridiculous. Catherine Howard was flighty and unfaithful, eventually paying for this with her life. For the second time in under ten years, a Queen of England was beheaded. This second execution seems to have reminded Henry of Anne Boleyn, as the angry and disappointed King now took his misery out on Elizabeth. She was exiled from court in the summer of 1542. A clever nine-year-old, Elizabeth was not just upset when her father yet again rejected her. She began to realise the implications too: if she was down, her half-sister was up. Once more, Mary was given an honoured place at court. After the execution of Catherine Howard, the temporarily unmarried King invited Mary to oversee the royal Christmas festivities ‘in default of a Queen’. She did so with some elegance.
A sensible marriage
A year later, at the age of fifty-two, Henry finally made his second sensible marriage. Catherine Parr was thirty-one years old and had already been married twice, so Henry was her third husband and she was his sixth wife. Catherine was devout, well educated, intelligent and, perhaps crucially, had no children of her own. She was more than a good-enough stepmother and set about mending Henry’s relationship with Mary and Elizabeth as Jane Seymour had briefly tried to do.
On 31 July 1544, Elizabeth wrote to Catherine Parr that she was finding a year away from her stepmother hard ‘and in this my exile I well know that the clemency of your highness has had as much care and solicitude for my health as the king’s majesty himself’. For the next five years, Catherine was a vital presence in the young Princess’s life. She quickly persuaded Henry to allow Elizabeth to come back to court.
A number of letters between Catherine and Elizabeth have survived. Despite their ornate formalities, they show a girl of eleven trying to please and impress a stepmother she loves and admires. The first letter was written on the last day of 1544. After many expressions of love, Elizabeth wrote – and it is worth quoting for its sophistication in such a youngster – ‘knowing also that pusillanimity and idleness are most repugnant unto a reasonable creature and that [as the philosopher says] even as an instrument of iron or of other metal waxes soon rusty unless it be continually occupied’.
Elizabeth wanted to prove to Catherine what she could achieve, so she had translated The Mirror of the Sinful Soul from the French. She was showing off and trying to please her learned stepmother, for, although she was sure her translation was ‘all imperfect and uncorrect’, Catherine, with her
godly learning ... shall rub out, polish, and mend (or else cause to mend) the words (or rather the order of my writing) the which I know in many places to be rude, and nothing done as it should be. But I hope, that after to have been in your grace’s hands there shall be nothing in it worthy of reprehension and that in the mean while no other (but your highness only) shall read it or see it, less my faults be known of many.
She finished by wishing her stepmother a happy 1545.
Catherine was not just astute in dealings with her stepchildren but also canny as to the games married couples play – games that could be very dangerous with Henry, She was sympathetic to the ‘New Faith’, as Protestantism was called, and wrote two religious books. The second, Lamentations of a Sinner, argued there was truth in Luther’s concept of justification by faith alone, a doctrine Henry had attacked when he denounced Luther as a heretic. Furious, the King had an arrest warrant drawn up for Catherine, but she was much smarter than Anne Boleyn. She insisted on seeing her husband and told him she had only argued about religion to take his mind off the atrocious pain his ulcerous leg was causing. The King must have loved her because he accepted what she said and they resumed married life. Meanwhile, the court and Henry’s daughters knew of both the King’s familiar fury and his unfamiliar willingness to kiss and make up with his wife.
Having no children of her own, Catherine persuaded Henry to revoke his earlier decisions and restore both Mary and Elizabeth to the line of succession three years before he died. By the end, it is likely he was suffering from syphilis and was so fat that he could not walk and had to be carried through his palaces in a chair.
Jane Seymour’s son, Edward, succeeded Henry in 1547. The new King had a warm relationship with Elizabeth, but a much tenser one with Mary, who was twenty-one years older than he was. Many older sisters would have tried to mother their younger brother, but religious differences made that impossible. Edward had been brought up to be an uncompromising Protestant.
A case of royal child abuse
Soon after Henry died, Elizabeth had to adapt to yet another change. Before she married Henry, Catherine Parr had been in love with Sir Thomas Seymour, the brother of Jane Seymour. Thomas was an opportunist – he went to visit Elizabeth soon after her father died and proposed marriage. The letter she wrote in reply was very poised given that Elizabeth was just fourteen years old. She regarded the honour Seymour had paid her ‘as an evidence of your natural courtesy’ as well as respect for her late father, ‘but I have been forced to perceive by the frequent visits which you have made to me that you have other intentions’. Elizabeth assured him that she had not ‘refused you because I was thinking of someone else’. She promised that she did not have the slightest intention of being married and ‘if ever I should think of it (which I do not believe is possible) you would be the first to whom I should make known my resolution’.
Having been turned down by the Princess, Seymour now proposed to Catherine Parr. She accepted her old flame, but it was only four months since the King had died. Given how short a time that was, Seymour went directly to his nephew, King Edward, and asked for permission to wed. At the end of May, Catherine was able to marry her old love but they had to do so in secret.
In early 1548, Catherine invited Elizabeth and her cousin Lady Jane Grey to live in the couple’s household at Sudeley. She promised to provide education for both girls. Like Elizabeth, Lady Jane Grey was a precocious scholar. In March, Catherine Parr became pregnant for the first time at the age of thirty-five. But now something happened that would not surprise modern experts in step families and this was a very tangled one. Seymour was the brother of Henry’s third wife, the husband of his sixth wife and a kind of stepfather to Edward, Mary and Elizabeth. He now began to take a great deal of interest in the young Princess who had refused to marry him. J. E. Neale, one of the great biographers of Elizabeth I, saw Seymour’s flirting as quite innocent horseplay, but he was writing in the 1930s when child sexual abuse was ignored; Seymour was no innocent.
Today Seymour’s behaviour would be seen as child abuse even if, as some evidence suggests, Elizabeth was flattered, intrigued and did not know how to say no to an older man. Her stepfather came into her bedchamber wearing only his night clothes. She would retreat on the bed away from him but sometimes let him catch her, it seems. The two were seen larking about on the bed together. Then Kat Ashley claimed Catherine had discovered her husband and stepdaughter embracing. Another source suggests Catherine did not just turn a blind eye to her husband’s very physical flirtation but actually assisted him. There is evidence that Catherine held Elizabeth while Seymour cut her black dress to ribbons. Freud would have seen this as a very controlled display of sex and violence, particularly as it took place not in a bedroom but in an English country garden. Catherine would not have been the first wife to try to hold on to her husband by giving him latitude with a stepdaughter. Some historians suggest that Thomas Seymour was being even more opportunistic than usual: if Catherine died in childbirth, he would then marry the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth he had ‘groomed’.
Her husband’s all too sexual behaviour towards Elizabeth finally made Catherine angry. Two months after she
had come to live with Catherine and Seymour, Elizabeth was sent away to live at Cheshunt. She never saw her beloved stepmother again, though the two corresponded. Seymour now demanded to be appointed governor ‘of the King’s person’, which would give him great power. His brother, the Lord Protector, tried to buy Thomas off with a barony in appointing him Lord Admiral and giving him a seat on the Privy Council. All these honours did not satisfy Thomas, who began smuggling pocket money to King Edward, telling him that the Lord Protector was starving him of money and making him a ‘beggarly king’.
After Elizabeth was sent away to Cheshunt, she acquired a new tutor: Roger Ascham, one of the best Greek scholars in the kingdom. Ascham was impressed with her as ‘beside her perfect readiness in Latin, Italian, French and Spanish, she readeth here now at Windsor more Greek every day than some prebendary of this church doth read Latin in a whole week’. He also praised her ‘beauty, stature, wisdom and industry ... she read with me almost all Cicero and great part of Titus Livius [the Roman historian, Livy]: for she drew all her knowledge of Latin from those two authors. She used to give the morning to the Greek Testament and afterwards read select orations of Isocrates and the tragedies of Sophocles. To these I added St Cyprian and Melanchthon’s Commonplaces.’ Ascham’s approval of Elizabeth’s style was ‘because it is suitable and beautiful because it is clear’ and ‘it grows out of her subject’.
In September 1548, Catherine Parr died in childbirth. Elizabeth mourned the woman who had loved her. Ignoring the obvious decencies, Thomas Seymour promptly proposed marriage to Elizabeth once more. She told him sharply that she would not even entertain the question unless the Council approved his advances. Seymour had finally overplayed his hand. In January 1549, the Council had him arrested on a number of charges, including embezzlement and attempted kidnapping. The leader of the Council might have been his own brother, the Duke of Somerset, but he showed no mercy. Since there was insufficient evidence to convict him in court, Somerset had his brother condemned by an Act of Attainder, a procedure in which Parliament passed sentence on an accused person as if it were a court of law. Parliament turned itself into judge and jury. If Elizabeth had any feelings about Seymour’s death, she kept them to herself when he was executed.
