The House of Tudor

by Alison Plowden

  In his reply to Mary’s last cry for help, the Secretary made his feelings abundantly clear. ‘To be plain with you, madam’, he wrote, ‘I think you the most obstinate and obdurate woman that ever was.’ If Mary did not speedily abandon the ‘sinister counsels’ which had brought her to ‘the point of utter undoing’, Cromwell wanted nothing more to do with her ever again; she had shown herself such an unnatural and ungrateful daughter to her ‘most dear and benign father’ that she was not fit to live in a Christian congregation. All the same, he gave her one last chance, sending her ‘a certain book of articles’ which she was to sign and return with a declaration that she thought in heart as she had subscribed with hand.

  When Cromwell’s letter reached her, Mary knew that she was beaten. For very nearly three years she had fought gallantly to defend her principles and her good name. As long as her mother lived and, for that matter, as long as Anne Boleyn was alive, she had been armoured against all attack but now, utterly alone, ill, exhausted and despairing she gave in. At eleven o’clock on a Thursday night about the middle of June, she signed the ‘book of articles’ recognizing ‘the King’s highness to be supreme head on earth under Christ of the Church of England’ and utterly refusing ‘the Bishop of Rome’s pretended authority, power and jurisdiction within this realm’. She also acknowledged that her mother’s marriage had been ‘by God’s law and man’s law incestuous and unlawful’.

  Her reward came about three weeks later, when she was brought from Hunsdon ‘secretly in the night’ to Hackney for a private interview with the King. According to Chapuys it was impossible to exaggerate Henry’s kind and affectionate behaviour on this occasion. ‘There was nothing but conversing with the princess in private, and with such love and affection and such brilliant promises for the future that no father could have behaved better towards his daughter.’

  Chapuys, of course, was enormously relieved that the crisis had been resolved and so, it is clear, was Henry. Whether or not he would really have treated his daughter as he had treated Thomas More and John Fisher we shall never know, but many people close to him had believed that he might - as the King intended they should. Most likely it had all been a war of nerves - pressure applied relentlessly until the victim finally cracked under it. It is easy to dismiss Henry as a monster for his brutal treatment of Mary, but it was becoming increasingly necessary to secure her capitulation. Serious unrest was brewing in the north, where opposition to the King’s revolutionary policies was strongest and where a variety of social, economic and religious discontents presently erupted in the Pilgrimage of Grace. Mary represented the old, familiar ways and she had many friends and sympathizers among the older, more conservative nobility and gentry. Until she herself had renounced her birthright, there was a real enough danger that she might be used as a figurehead for rebellion at home and even invasion from abroad.

  This, at least, is the explanation usually given and it is a perfectly viable one - as far as it goes; but it takes no account of the dark undercurrents of pride and passion, fear, hate and guilt flowing beneath the surface. Henry needed to break his daughter for political reasons but he needed to win the battle for other reasons, too. Catherine had defeated and escaped him - he could not endure that Mary should do the same. Nor could he endure any reminder of the past he put behind him, the guilt he had buried and purged. Now everything was all right again and Mary was once more his ‘dear and well-beloved daughter’. And, astonishingly, she really was. Henry was genuinely fond and proud of all his children - so long, of course, as they showed no signs of having minds and wills of their own.

  For Mary it was not so simple. She rode back to Hunsdon with a fine diamond ring, a present from Queen Jane, on her finger and a cheque for a thousand crowns from her father, together with an assurance that she need not worry about money in the future. But none of this could help her in the anguish of her remorse. Mary did not possess Henry’s monumental capacity for self-deception and, although she begged Chapuys to ask the Pope to give her secret absolution for what she had done under duress, nothing would ever alter the fact that she had knowingly betrayed the two things which meant most in the world to her - her religious faith and her mother’s memory. That betrayal, made by a frightened girl of twenty, was to haunt her for the rest of her life and help to make her, as she once bitterly described herself, ‘the most unhappy lady in Christendom’.

  Meanwhile, the King’s younger daughter, the cause of so much of her sister’s unhappiness, was being bastardized and disinherited in her turn. Parliament met in June and passed a second Act of Succession, ratifying the annulment of Henry’s second marriage and officially declaring Elizabeth to be illegitimate. The succession was now to be vested in the offspring of Jane Seymour. Failing this, the King was given power to appoint an heir by will or letters patent. Such an unprecedented step shows just how acute the problem was becoming and, not surprisingly, there was renewed talk of naming the Duke of Richmond. As the Earl of Sussex remarked, if all the King’s children were bastards, why not choose the boy and have done with it.

  But if Henry was seriously considering the idea, he was frustrated, for Henry Fitzroy died on 22 July 1536 ‘having pined inwardly in his body long before he died’ - a victim, almost certainly, of tuberculosis to which the young Tudor males were so fatally susceptible. Richmond seems by all accounts to have been an unusually attractive boy and a loss to the nation. He had been married in 1533 to Mary Howard, the Puke of Norfolk’s daughter, and was a close friend of Norfolk’s son, the Earl of Surrey, who later celebrated in verse an idyllic year the two young men spent together at Windsor Castle.

  The wild foreste, the clothed holts with greene;

  With reins availed, and swift-y-breathed horse

  With cry of hounds and merry blasts betwene

  Where we did chase the fearful hart of force.

  The voide walls, eke, that harborde us eche night;

  Wherewith, alas! revive within my breast

  The sweet accorde, such slepes as yet delight

  The pleasant dreams, the quiet bed of rest;

  The secret thoughtes, imparted with such trust;

  The wanton talke, the divers change of play;

  The friendship sworne, eche promise kept so just,

  Wherewith we past the winter nightes away.

  Chapuys thought that Richmond’s death would greatly improve Mary’s chances of resuming her proper place as heiress presumptive, but no move was made to reinstate her. Actually, though, it hardly mattered that her official title remained no more than ‘the Lady Mary the King’s daughter’. Unless and until the King fathered a legitimate son, she would always be regarded as the King’s heir by everyone who mattered. Not that the King had given up hope of fathering a legitimate son - far from it - and when, in March 1537, it was officially announced that the Queen was pregnant, the hopes of the whole country revived.

  At two o’clock in the morning of Friday 12 October 1537, after a labour which lasted for three days and two nights, Jane Seymour gave birth to a healthy boy. By eight o’clock the news had reached London and solemn Te Deums were immediately sung in St. Paul’s and every parish church in the city. Bells pealed, two thousand rounds were fired from the Tower guns, bonfires blazed up dangerously among the crowded timbered houses and everyone shut up shop and surged out into the streets to celebrate. Impromptu banquets were organized as bands of musicians went about playing and singing loyal ballads in honour of the occasion, and everyone drank the prince’s health in the free wine and beer which flowed in profusion from the conduits and from hogsheads provided by the civic authorities and by other prominent citizens. Even the foreign merchants of the Steelyard joined in - burning torches and contributing a hogshead of wine and two barrels of beer for the poor.

  All that day, through the night and well into the next day the capital rocked and clashed in a great crescendo of thanksgiving and relief that at last England had a Prince of Wales born in undisputably l
awful wedlock. Messengers were despatched to ‘all the estates and cities of the realm’ spreading the glad tidings and the whole country went hysterical with joy. As Bishop Latimer wrote to Cromwell from his Worcester diocese: ‘Here is no less rejoicing in these parts from the birth of our prince, whom we hungered for so long, than there was, I trow, at the birth of St. John the Baptist...God give us grace to be thankful.’

  The christening of England’s Treasure, ‘Prince Edward that goodly flower’, took place in the chapel at Hampton Court three days after his birth and was, of course, suitably magnificent. The Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk and Archbishop Cranmer were godfathers. The Lady Mary was godmother. The baby’s other sister was also present, carrying the heavily jewelled and embroidered baptismal robe. This burden proved rather too much for the four-year-old Elizabeth, so she herself was carried in the procession by Queen Jane’s elder brother.

  During the past decade, while Henry’s personal affairs had been occupying everybody’s attention, the family scene had been changing and the biggest gap at Edward’s christening was caused by the absence of Mary Tudor, Queen of France. Mary never seems to have regretted her tearful ultimatum to Charles Brandon, and that rash runaway marriage in the chapel at Cluny could be counted as a success. But in recent years, although the Duke remained in constant attendance on the King, the Duchess of Suffolk had preferred to spend most of her time down at Westhorpe, the family’s principal residence in East Anglia. She was increasingly preoccupied with bringing up her family and her health had begun to fail. The exact nature of Mary’s long wasting illness remains a mystery - its only recorded symptom was a pain in the side - it may have been cancer, it may have been tuberculosis. Whatever it was, it was usually given as the reason for her non-appearance at Court. Another and equally cogent reason may well have been the Queen-Duchess’s natural reluctance to yield precedence to Mistress Anne Boleyn and revulsion at the way her once dear friend and sister-in-law was being treated.

  Mary’s last visit to London was in the spring of 1533, when she came up for the wedding of her elder daughter, Frances, now sixteen, to Henry Grey, Marquis of Dorset at Suffolk House and the betrothal of the younger, Eleanor, to Henry Clifford, the Earl of Cumberland’s heir. Suffolk had to stay in town - he was very busy with preparations for Anne Boleyn’s coronation - and Mary travelled back to Westhorpe alone with Eleanor. On Midsummer Day the loveliest princess in Europe was dead at the age of thirty-eight. In March 1534 her son Henry, Earl of Lincoln, followed her to the grave. Remarkably little is known about this young man, who stood so close to the throne and who lived to the age of eighteen before succumbing, again most probably to tuberculosis. But his death was regarded as a windfall for his cousin, the King of Scotland, since the pundits considered that Henry’s younger nephew, being native born, might be preferred to the elder in the succession stakes.

  Charles Brandon survived this double tragedy with reasonable equanimity. He had made Mary Tudor a faithful and affectionate husband, but he replaced her within a couple of months. To do him justice, financial necessity had something to do with this almost indecent haste. He was, as usual, heavily in debt - Frances’ wedding had cost him over fifteen hundred pounds and there was Eleanor’s still to come. The Duke of Suffolk needed a rich wife and he picked the handiest candidate, his ward Katherine Willoughby, daughter and heir of Lord William Willoughby and Maria de Salinas, one of Catherine of Aragon’s Spanish ladies. The fact that Katherine Willoughby was about the same age as his own younger daughter - fourteen to his forty-eight - and was betrothed to his own son, did not apparently detract from her eligibility in the Duke’s eyes though it did give rise to some unkind gossip. In fact, the marriage proved a very happy one. Young Katherine was an intelligent, high-spirited girl (she later became notorious for her outspoken Protestantism) and quickly gave her husband two more sons. In the same month of the same year that Prince Edward was born there was another addition to the clan and to what was to become known as the Suffolk line, when Frances Grey, nee Brandon, gave birth to a daughter, Jane, named perhaps in honour of the Queen.

  But Jane Seymour was in no condition to appreciate the compliment. A few days after Edward’s christening she became so ill that the last sacraments were administered. She rallied briefly, but by 24 October she was dead. According to Cromwell, her death was due to the negligence of her attendants, who had allowed her to catch cold and to eat unsuitable food. In fact, of course, she died of puerperal sepsis - the scourge of all women in childbed.

  Jane was given a state funeral at Windsor Castle with the Princess Mary officiating as chief mourner. She was the first and, as it turned out, the only one of Henry’s wives to be buried as Queen and perhaps this was fair - she was, after all, the only one who had fulfilled her side of the bargain to his satisfaction. The King ‘retired to a solitary place to pass his sorrows’ and his grief was probably sincere enough, while it lasted. But he was soon back at Hampton Court so that he could see his son every day and make sure that ‘the realm’s most precious jewel’ was being properly cared for.

  Edward spent the first few months of his life at Court under his father’s eye, but with the approach of summer, always the most dangerous time of year for plague and other contagions, the nursery was moved out into the country. The most elaborate precautions against infection were laid down in a series of ordinances, written out in the King’s own hand. No officer of the prince’s privy chamber might go to London without permission and on their return must observe a period of quarantine, in case they had picked up anything nasty. If anyone in the household did fall ill, they were to be removed at once. Everything was to be kept scrupulously clean - all galleries, passages and courts were to be swept and scrubbed twice a day, everything the prince touched or used was to be carefully washed and handled only by his personal servants, no dirty utensils were to be left lying about and all dogs, except the ladies’ pets, had to be confined to kennels.

  Under these sensible hygienic rules, Edward grew and thrived. He was a large, fair, placid baby - a type much admired - and Eustace Chapuys described him as ‘one of the prettiest children that could be seen anywhere’. Details of his progress were minutely recorded: his first teeth appeared without difficulty; at a year old he was a little thinner, but shooting out in length and trying to walk; at eighteen months he threw a rather embarrassing tantrum in front of some queerly dressed foreign visitors, hiding his face in his nurse’s shoulder and howling with rage; at nearly two the Lady Mistress of his household told Thomas Cromwell that his grace was in good health and merry. ‘I would to God’, she went on, ‘the King’s grace and your lordship had seen him yesternight, for his grace was marvelously pleasantly disposed. The musicians played and his grace danced and played so wantonly that he could not stand still, and was as full of pretty toys as ever I saw a child in my life.’ To his father, of course, Edward was perfect and Henry lost no opportunity to hang over the cradle or display the prince to the people.

  But as the prince cut his teeth and began to grow out of the cradle and the King continued to worry in case some disrespectful germs should dare to approach his darling, danger threatened, or seemed to threaten, from abroad. In December 1538 the Pope, encouraged by the Pilgrimage of Grace and other hopeful signs of unrest among the islanders, at last summoned up enough resolution to promulgate his long-delayed Bull of Excommunication against the defiant and irreligious King of England. This somewhat antique weapon which, in theory, deprived an offending monarch of his throne and put him and his subjects outside the Christian pale, had lost most of its teeth by the middle of the sixteenth century, but it still inspired a good deal of superstitious dread among the faithful. This, coupled with the fact that the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of France (on whom, in theory, would fall the duty of deposing the King of England) had temporarily buried the hatchet, gave rise to a short-lived but excitable invasion scare along the south coast. But neither Charles nor François, good papalists though they declared them
selves to be, had any real intention of moving against Henry and the chief result of the Pope’s action was to give the King an excuse to complete the virtual annihilation of his remaining Plantagenet cousins.

  The Holy Father had sent Reginald Pole, son of the Countess of Salisbury, on a mission to both France and the Emperor to rouse them against ‘the most cruel and abominable tyrant’ across the Channel. Pole was a high-minded if not very realistic individual, a Cardinal since 1536 and an exile for his religious principles. His errand was a dismal failure, but, as he might have foreseen, it spelt doom for his family at home. His elder brother Henry, Lord Montague, was promptly executed and his mother arrested. Royal vengeance also fell on the Courtenay family. The Marquis of Exeter with his wife and young son went to the Tower, the Marquis soon leaving it again for Tower Hill and the block. Two years later, Henry finally completed the work of safeguarding his son’s inheritance by carrying out the death sentence on the old Countess of Salisbury herself Margaret Pole, nee Plantagenet, once long ago, the dearest friend of Queen Catherine of Aragon, a second mother to the Princess Mary Tudor and ‘a lady of virtue and honour if there was ever one in England’ was taken out on a May morning to be literally hacked to pieces by an apprentice executioner: an action which more than any other lent considerable point to Reginald Pole’s book in which he had compared the King of England to the Emperor Nero.

  8: THE OLD FOX

  He is an old fox, proud as the devil and accustomed to ruling.

  It was the nervous international situation with England threatened with encirclement by the Catholic powers which propelled Henry into his fourth marriage. To guard against political isolation, the King needed friends among the emergent Protestant nations and so an alliance and a new Queen were sought from the Lutheran states of Northern Europe and finally found in the small duchy of Cleves on the northern Rhine. Anne of Cleves landed at Deal on 27 December 1539, having been delayed for a fortnight at Calais by bad weather and the King, suddenly boyishly impatient for a sight of his bride, dashed down to Rochester ‘to nourish love’. It was quite like the old days, just Henry and a few companions riding incognito on a romantic errand. Unfortunately, though, it ended in an embarrassing fiasco. To begin with Anne, not so well versed as the English ladies in the King’s little ways, failed to realize who he was and was understandably taken aback when this enormous, middle-aged man in a marbled cloak and hood burst unannounced into her room to enfold her in an ardent embrace. But even when the situation had been painstakingly explained to her, she displayed none of the delighted surprise proper to the occasion and would only edge nervously away from her alarming fiancé. It did not help, of course, that she could speak no English, or indeed any other language but her native German and Henry left as soon as he decently could, taking with him the present of expensive furs which he was not going to waste on such an underserving object.