As soon as Brandon left, Chapuys later reported, Mary went into the room she was to live in for the next several years and wept. It was “the worst lodging of the house,” he wrote, and unfit even for a maid of honor.9 He speculated on the “bad designs” of her new caretakers. What they wanted, he said, was “to cause her to die of grief or in some other way, or else to compel her to renounce her rights, marry some low fellow, or let her fall prey to lust, so that they have a pretext and excuse for disinheriting her.” The last suggestion was an odd one, given Mary’s upbringing and complete innocence. She was, to be sure, an uncommonly pretty girl about to turn eighteen, and with another girl of eighteen it might have been reasonable to suppose that a lover might succeed in compromising her where threats failed. But Mary was not just any girl. She was the sharp-witted, resolute daughter of a fearsome father and a courageous mother, and she would not be cajoled into surrendering her title any more easily than she would be persuaded to it by force.
The first eight months of Mary’s life in Elizabeth’s household werethe worst. The constant struggle over privilege and precedent was an exhausting irritant. Every time she heard Elizabeth called “princess” she had to object; every time she was called “the lady Mary” she was obliged to remind the speaker that she did not acknowledge that tide. Because the infant Elizabeth was given the chair of honor in the dining hall and Mary was assigned an inferior place she refused to eat there and took her meals in her chamber. Later, when Anne heard of this and forbade it, Mary repeated her verbal protest every time she sat down to eat. When Elizabeth was carried along the roads in her velvet litter Mary was forced, complaining loudly, to walk beside her in the mud, or on longer journeys, to ride in the leather-covered litter appropriate to a woman of lower rank.
Whenever Mary protested she was punished, first by the confiscation of all her jewels and fine clothes, then of virtually everything she owned. When she found herself “nearly destitute of clothes and other necessaries,” she sent word to Henry of her condition, instructing her messenger to accept either money or clothing if he offered them, “but not to accept any writing in which she was not entitled princess.”10 When all else failed force was used. Late in March the entire household left Hatfield for another house, and when Mary, as usual, refused to travel under any conditions which gave Elizabeth the appearance of higher status “certain gentlemen” seized her bodily and pushed her into the litter of her governess Lady Shelton. Mary, who was not accustomed to being manhandled, gasped out her formula of objection and rode the rest of the way in troubled silence.
Lady Shelton, Anne’s aunt, now had complete authority over Mary. If she did not actually come to hate Mary—it is impossible to tell anything of her character from Chapuys’ descriptions—she nonetheless felt a strong enough loyalty to the interests of the Boleyn family to play the role of persecutor with thoroughness and vigor. To her credit she resisted this role at the beginning. When George Boleyn and Norfolk first saw her with Mary they were angry at her for treating the girl “with too much respect and kindness,” when she deserved only a bastard’s abuse. Lady Shelton retorted that even if Mary was only the bastard of a poor gentleman, and not the king, “she deserved honor and good treatment for her goodness and virtues.” That Mary could win such praise from Anne’s aunt is convincing proof that she was less the stubborn and obstinate ingrate Henry complained of than a young woman of impressive piety and purity of life. But under pressure from Anne and her supporters Lady Shelton became their willing tool. Anne urged her to slap and hit Mary whenever she claimed to be the true princess, and to swear at her “as the cursed bastard she is.”11 Often when visitors came to Hatfield, ostensibly to pay their respects to Elizabeth but hoping to seeMary as well, her governess locked her in her room and nailed the windows shut.
Beyond this ceaseless mistreatment of her own person Mary’s captors added to her anxieties by harassing those around her. Anyone in Elizabeth’s household who showed her the slightest humanity was sent away. Anne Hussey, the wife of Mary’s former chamberlain John Hussey and a woman who continued to worry over Mary’s health and spirits long after she left her service, was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. Informants reported that on a rare visit she made to Mary at Hatfield she fell back into her old habit of calling her “princess.” On one occasion she asked for “drink for the princess,” and a day later she said the “princess had gone walking.” Under grueling interrogation Mistress Hussey admitted that she had from time to time sent Mary secret notes and received “tokens” from her in return, and she named several others who were sympathetic to her cause. After signing a confession and begging Henry’s forgiveness she was released, but the incident caused Mary nearly as much anguish as it did Anne Hussey herself, and the revelations about clandestine messages led Lady Shelton to keep a stricter watch on her charge.12
Henry had suspected for some time that Mary was being encouraged in her continued resistance by letters smuggled in and out through a go-between. The logical suspect was Mary’s only servant, a young chambermaid whose name has not been preserved but whom Chapuys acknowledged as his channel of news and messages. Through her he sent Mary letters from Katherine and news from his own sources, and received in turn the brief notes Mary wrote him in the moments when she was not being watched. The maid had refused to swear an oath of fidelity to the Act of Succession, and only after she was locked in her room and told she would be sent to the Tower unless she swore to it did she relent.13Less than a month later Henry questioned Lady Shelton about the maid, and this time she was sent away. Mary was “much grieved at this,” Chapuys wrote, since the girl had nowhere to go and no money, and because “she was the only one in whom she [Mary] had confidence.”14
One day in the third month of her time at Hatfield Mary had a most alarming visitor: Anne Boleyn, now Queen Anne. The two women had not seen one another since Anne became queen, and the meeting was traumatic for them both. For Anne, it meant facing the young woman whose mother she had hurt and dishonored, and whose own life and prospects she had all but destroyed. For Mary, it meant confronting the woman who was the “scandal of Christendom,” the woman who had broken up her family and alienated her father’s affection, and whose baby daughter now held the honors that by right were Mary’s own.
Anne was at first civil, asking Mary to come to court and pay her respects, and saying that if Mary would honor her as queen she would attempt to reconcile her to Henry. Anne promised to intercede for Mary and to see that she was “as well or better treated than ever.” Mary’s reply was equally polite, though her face betrayed unspoken rage. “She knew of no queen in England but her mother,” she said, but if Anne was willing to speak to Henry in her behalf she would appreciate it. Anne repeated her offer, emphasizing the benefits of the king’s favors and the dangers of his anger, but Mary was unmoved. In the end Anne became angry, and left swearing that “she would bring down the pride of this unbridled Spanish blood” if it was the last thing she ever did.15
Chapuys’ informers at Henry’s court made it clear that she fully intended to carry out her threat. Not long after the tense interview between Anne and Mary a “person of good faith” told the ambassador that he had heard Anne say more than once that as soon as Henry was out of the country, leaving her as regent, she meant to use her authority to have Mary killed, “either by hunger or otherwise.” When her brother warned her that Henry’s wrath would be monumental, Anne answered defiantly that she would do it anyway, even if it meant the worst conceivable punishment, “even if she were burned alive for it after.”16
Henry’s behavior toward his daughter was on the whole as implacably hostile as Anne’s. He too referred to Mary’s “obstinate Spanish blood,” and gave at least one diplomatic envoy the impression that he hated her thoroughly.17 He tortured her by coming to Hatfield often to see his other daughter and ordering Mary to be shut in her room throughout his stay. From Lady Shelton Mary heard a frightening report that the king had said he would have her b
eheaded for violating the law in refusing to acknowledge the Act of Succession, and according to Chapuys, she was convinced by this news that she must indeed prepare to die.18
But Henry was capricious, if not exactly ambivalent, in his attitude toward his daughter. When he complained of her stubbornness to the French ambassador, who remarked that she was nonetheless a girl of good breeding and virtue, his eyes filled with tears and he had to agree. Like Anne, he tried at least once to bribe Mary, offering to give her “a royal title and dignity” and to restore her to favor if only she would lay aside her claims. She refused, but the offer was tantalizing. Though her loyalty to Katherine was primary, some part of her must have longed to give in to the father she feared, despised and loved. His changeability tortured her, however, just as his well-known insincerity left her bewildered.
One incident haunted her memory for the rest of her months at Hatfield. On one of Henry’s visits Mary, who had been ordered not to go near the room where her father was, sent word to him begging to be allowed to kiss his hand. Her entreaty was denied, but just as he was mounting his horse to leave she slipped away from her guards and wentup to a terrace on the roof to watch him go. Someone may have told him she was there, or he may have caught sight of her by mere chance, but when he looked up to the terrace he saw Mary, on her knees, her hands clasped together in supplication. If he was moved at the sight he did not show it, but he did not ignore Mary either. With a gesture that lay somewhere between simple courtesy and fatherly affection he nodded his head and touched his hat to her before he rode off toward London.19
XII
My thought oppressed, my mynd in trouble,
My body languishing, my hart in payn;
My joyes, dystres; my soroivs dowble;
My lyjfe as one that dye would fayne;
Myn eyes for sorow salt ters doth rayne:
Thus do I lyve in gret hevenes
Withowte hope or comfort off redresse.
Two weeks before her nineteenth birthday Mary Tudor fell desperately ill. Henry waited six days before doing anything to help her, but he finally summoned Chapuys and informed him of her danger. He wanted the ambassador to send doctors of his own choosing to visit Mary along with the royal physicians. If Mary died the king wanted the blame to fall as heavily on the imperial doctors as on his own. He told Chapuys that his physicians had pronounced Mary’s disease incurable, adding that because of this Katherine’s physician had refused to leave his patient in order to diagnose Mary’s condition.
The imperial ambassador was alarmed. He knew of Mary’s illness from his own sources, but the story he pieced together was very different from the account Henry gave. According to Chapuys’ informants, Henry’s chief physician Dr. Butts told the king Mary’s illness was indeed grave, but not incurable. Without good care she might not survive, Dr. Butts said, but all she really needed was to be released from the climate of anxiety and persecution in which Henry kept her. Chapuys had learned too that all the physicians were convinced Henry meant his daughter to die, and that the king was using their fears to forestall a cure. His own doctors refused to treat Mary unless Katherine’s Spanish physician was present and involved in the treatment; the Spaniard in turn refused even to attempt a cure unless Mary was brought to live near her mother, believing that their separation was whatharmed Mary most. Chapuys himself hesitated to send doctors, fearing that their failure might prejudice the imperial cause. Paradoxically, the sicker Mary became the less likely she was to be treated, for no doctor was eager to risk having to take responsibility for her death.
As the days passed Mary’s condition grew worse as a result of neglect and “continued vexation,” and the ambassador feared it might very well “carry her off.” He did what he could from a distance. He was not allowed to see Mary, who was at Greenwich under Lady Shelton’s un-tender care, but he sent his servants every day to find out how she was, and kept himself far better informed than the king about the stages of her illness. He pestered Henry’s chief secretary Cromwell with such persistence that in the end Cromwell arranged for Dr. Butts to attend Mary, At court he tried to counteract Henry’s tale of incurable disease with truthful rumors of his own. But the king chose to be pessimistic, and his courtiers and councilors followed his lead. Several Council members approached Chapuys to remark that since no human agency had been able to reconcile Charles and Henry, God would “open a door” by taking Mary to himself.
Behind Chapuys’ anxiety, the doctors’ hesitancy and the resignation of the councilors was the unspoken fear of poison. Everyone remembered Anne’s threats against Mary all too clearly; no one was willing to be implicated in a poison plot. The suddenness and gravity of Mary’s sickness pointed to a toxic dose of some sort in her food or drink, and the fact that she had no food taster had long been a source of worry to Katherine and Chapuys. Henry’s seeming unconcern about his daughter’s condition—Chapuys believed he was actually pleased at it—certainly meant that, if there was a plot to poison her, he did not oppose it.
Only one person had nothing to lose by nursing Mary in what might be her last illness: her mother. She wrote to Chapuys, asking him to beg Henry to let her care for their daughter at the house where she was staying. Katherine was at Kimbolton, once a duke’s residence but now a decaying ruin with buckling walls and weed-choked grounds.1 She was none too well herself; Kimbolton was a notoriously unhealthy place, and in addition to her real infirmities Henry was spreading rumors that his former wife was both dropsical and demented. But she offered to treat Mary “with her own hands” nonetheless, putting her in her own bed and watching her night and day. Like many at court she “had great suspicion as to the cause” of Mary’s illness, and knew she might not recover. If God took Mary while she was in Katherine’s care, she wrote, “her heart would rest satisfied; otherwise in great pain.”2
Henry’s response was a tantalizing compromise. Mary would be moved nearer Kimbolton, but she and Katherine could not meet. By thetime Mary was moved she was already beginning to improve slightly. The doctors bled her at least twice, and when it looked as though she might recover Katherine’s Spanish apothecary, who had been prescribing Mary’s medicines for four years, came forward with pills and draughts.
When she was able to write Mary sent word to Chapuys, urging him to ask the emperor to intercede with her father on her behalf. Surely after what she had been through he would allow Mary and Katherine the comfort of each other’s company, especially if Charles requested it. What Mary did not say was that, coupled with the strain of her illness, the hostility of her jailers was becoming unbearable. Chapuys heard from his informants how, as Mary lay helpless and in pain, Lady Shelton and others in the household said in her hearing that they hoped she would die. Her death would promote peace, they told one another, while incidentally ridding them of the inconvenience of looking after her.3
It may have been a death threat of a more formal kind that brought on Mary’s malady in the first place. The Succession Act was being enforced with greater rigor than ever, and those who refused to swear to uphold it faced execution. Late in 1534 Mary was told that she must take the oath, and that if she called herself princess or her mother queen even once she would be sent to the Tower.4 Clearly Henry meant to do what he said. Several prominent opponents of the divorce, including John Fisher, bishop of Rochester and the former chancellor Thomas More, were already imprisoned, and their numbers were growing. Throughout January the danger to Mary had increased. Katherine’s physician warned her that Henry was determined to make Mary swear to the statutes passed against Katherine and herself, and that her refusal would mean either death or life imprisonment.5 The warning was passed along to Mary; a few days afterward she fell ill.
Though it was by far the most serious it was by no means Mary’s first serious illness. She had been troubled on and off since 1531 with pains in her head and stomach, and had sometimes been unable to keep her food down for eight or ten days at a time.6 Katherine’s physician and apothecary had a
lways been called in to treat her, except on one occasion when treatment by an unfamiliar doctor led to unfortunate results. In September of 1534 Mary had complained of headaches and indigestion, and an apothecary Lady Shelton brought in gave her pills, “after which she was very sick and he so much troubled that he said he would never minister anything to her alone.”7 Henry’s physician Dr. Butts heard what happened when he came to examine Mary afterward, and wrote to Cromwell explaining the entire matter. Mary, who lived in dread at the best of times, probably thought she had been given poison, and Chapuys was at first certain of it. The apothecary was probably innocent, and Mary’s aggravated condition could have been anything from a simpleallergic reaction to the drug in the pills to a psychosomatic response to an imagined menace. But however innocuous the circumstances actually were, the incident left its mark, and made Mary afraid to get sick again. And because every added fear put added strain on her health, it undoubtedly helped to bring on her grave illness the following February.
Mary did not recover completely from this onslaught. Late in March she was still convalescent, and having to keep a special diet in order to avoid repeated relapses. She needed meat first thing in the morning, and was allowed to take a large breakfast instead of waiting until the middle of the day to eat a meat dish as was customary in Elizabeth’s household.8But although she was permitted this special favor Mary was by no means out of political danger. Cromwell was dropping dark hints to Chapuys, asking the ambassador what real harm Mary’s death might do, even if it did offend the people and temporarily annoy the emperor. After all, Cromwell pointed out, Mary was the cause of all her father’s problems; any sensible observer would understand why he wanted to be rid of her. Cromwell stopped just short of wishing Mary dead, but his meaning was clear.
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