Authors: Linda Porter
Mary Tudor (21 page)
The year 1536 was the darkest of Mary’s life; a time of violence and rebellion, of political skulduggery on a breathtaking scale and, for Mary herself, irreplaceable loss. It began with death and ended without joy. What happened in between damaged the eldest child of Henry VIII permanently. To understand Mary, it is necessary to relive the events of this murderous year through her eyes.
The New Year was hardly begun when Mary lost her mother. Katherine of Aragon, who had fought so unflinchingly for herself and her daughter, died at Kimbolton Castle on 7 January. Here, on the edge of the Cambridgeshire fenland, she had gone downhill rapidly in the last weeks of 1535, probably as the result of a heart condition. Informed that the princess dowager, as he called his first wife, was very ill, Henry VIII at last allowed Eustace Chapuys to go and visit her. He arrived on 2 January and spent four days with her. She was in pain, eating only with great difficulty and sleeping hardly at all. But she was perfectly lucid, and his presence evidently comforted her.They talked of the past, and when she wondered aloud whether the course of action she had followed was the right one, he offered what words of support he could. She told him she intended to bequeath to Mary her furs and the gold cross she had brought with her from Spain in 1501. Few other possessions remained to her. By the time Chapuys left, she seemed to have rallied, but the improvement was only temporary. Sensing that the end was near, she dictated one last letter to the husband who had cast her aside like an object for which he had no further use: ‘My most dear lord, king and husband,’ she wrote,
the hour of my death now drawing on, the tender love I owe you forceth me, my case being such, to commend myself to you, and to put you in remembrance with a few words of the health and safeguard of your soul which you ought to prefer before all worldly matters, and before the care and pampering of your body, for the which you have cast me into many calamities and yourself into many troubles. For my part I pardon you everything and I wish to devoutly pray to God that He will pardon you also. For the rest, I commend unto you our daughter Mary, beseeching you to be a good father unto her, as I have heretofore desired. I entreat you also, on behalf of my maids, to give them marriage portions, which is not much, they being but three. For all my other servants, I solicit the wages due to them, and a year more, lest they be unprovided for. Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.
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In its dignified pathos and remembrance of a great and, for the writer, enduring love, it is one of the most moving farewells in the English language.
Mary was devastated by grief.The love she always felt for her mother had deepened during their mutual adversity, and the realisation that she would never see her again was enormously painful. While Katherine lived, mother and daughter encouraged themselves with the faint glimmer of hope that Henry would relent and allow them, however briefly, to be together. Now Mary expected that the pressure on her from her father ‘to subscribe to their damnable statutes and detestable opinions’, as Chapuys put it, would intensify. The princess’s vulnerability at this time would make her even more of a target, or so Charles V and Chapuys at first thought.The emperor wrote to his wife, the empress Isabella, that Mary was apparently inconsolable, ‘especially when she thinks of her father’s past behaviour towards herself and of the little favour she can expect for the future’. He hoped that God would take pity on her, a sure indication that he would do little enough himself.Yet the expected pressure did not materialise, and Mary’s situation slightly improved. She seems to have been too absorbed in sorrow to notice this.
Part of the reason for this alleviation was that Katherine’s passing came as a great relief for Henry. It also brought with it the promise of better Anglo-imperial relations, since the emperor’s obligations to Mary were, in reality, no more than polite concern for her welfare.This might be turned to diplomatic advantage at times, but basically Charles did not want to get involved in Tudor family politics. At court, Henry and Anne were reported to have danced for joy when they received the news that Katherine had died.This shocked Chapuys less than the meagre arrangements for the former queen’s funeral and burial at Peterborough cathedral, totally inappropriate, he thought, for her rank and lineage. Royal protocol would have kept Mary away from her mother’s obsequies in any case.The chief mourner at the funeral was Frances Brandon.
Henry, meanwhile, was delighted to have just one wife. He celebrated with Anne Boleyn and paraded little Elizabeth.Vague rumours, picked up earlier but generally dismissed by Chapuys, that the marriage had soured, that Henry’s eye had fallen on another, were apparently scotched by the queen’s third pregnancy. Her position seemed stronger than ever, and Anne sought to capitalise on this where Mary was concerned. Through Lady Shelton, she tried once more for an improvement in her relations with the king’s elder daughter. Again, to her chagrin, she was rebuffed. Anne’s response was to write a letter to her aunt spelling out that the effects of the king’s displeasure could be permanent, especially if Mary eventually took the oaths expected of her under duress. The letter was deliberately left where Mary could find it, an unpleasant form of bullying that showed Anne’s lack of understanding of her quarry. Mary copied the contents of the letter and forwarded them to Chapuys. Then she put the letter back down where she had found it, in her oratory, and carried on as before. She must have seen the hand of God in what happened next. On 29 January, the day Katherine of Aragon was laid to rest, Anne Boleyn miscarried. In that moment, Anne’s hold on her throne became suddenly much less secure.
Various reasons have been proposed for the loss of Anne’s unborn child.
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She may have been agitated by an injury sustained by HenryVIII during a bout of jousting, something that the increasingly heavy king still enjoyed. Four days before the miscarriage he had fallen badly and was unconscious for a while, to the consternation of his courtiers. That Anne was dismayed by the injury to her husband seems likely, more so than the story that went around subsequently that the real cause of her miscarriage was that she had discovered the king with one of her ladies sitting on his lap. She had lost a child late in the first trimester of pregnancy in 1534, however, and given that she herself believed that she was about 15 weeks pregnant at the time, perhaps she had some underlying problem with spontaneous abortion at this stage of pregnancy.Whatever the cause, the outcome was to destabilise Anne’s position. Henry, feeling much more sorry for himself than his wife, began to wonder whether he would ever have a son.The seed of an idea, that God did not favour his second marriage any more than his first, was planted in his mind. Still, not too much should be read at this stage into the king’s musings or the queen’s emotional response to her condition.There were external influences already in play that would destroy their marriage and lead to Anne’s downfall. Of these, one of the most important was the constancy of Mary herself.
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She may have been agitated by an injury sustained by HenryVIII during a bout of jousting, something that the increasingly heavy king still enjoyed. Four days before the miscarriage he had fallen badly and was unconscious for a while, to the consternation of his courtiers. That Anne was dismayed by the injury to her husband seems likely, more so than the story that went around subsequently that the real cause of her miscarriage was that she had discovered the king with one of her ladies sitting on his lap. She had lost a child late in the first trimester of pregnancy in 1534, however, and given that she herself believed that she was about 15 weeks pregnant at the time, perhaps she had some underlying problem with spontaneous abortion at this stage of pregnancy.Whatever the cause, the outcome was to destabilise Anne’s position. Henry, feeling much more sorry for himself than his wife, began to wonder whether he would ever have a son.The seed of an idea, that God did not favour his second marriage any more than his first, was planted in his mind. Still, not too much should be read at this stage into the king’s musings or the queen’s emotional response to her condition.There were external influences already in play that would destroy their marriage and lead to Anne’s downfall. Of these, one of the most important was the constancy of Mary herself.
Katherine’s death meant that Mary became the focus of opposition to Anne. She was a doughty opponent, still fighting and defiant after two and a half years of pressure to deny her birthright. Anne’s threats were an inspiration to Mary to hold firm. If only Henry could be induced to acknowledge that his first marriage was made in good faith, then Mary would take precedence over Elizabeth in the line of succession. Mary’s supporters saw in the queen’s predicament an opportunity to exploit the king’s doubts and destroy the Boleyns.They had waited a long time for the chance that was now presented to them, risking all the while the possibility that the king’s displeasure would take a more extreme turn. Now the Poles and the Courtenays, the families that most wanted to see Mary restored and her position as heir clarified, found a useful ally in Sir Nicholas Carew, one of Henry’s long-standing boon companions. Carew disapproved of the divorce but thought it prudent to hold his tongue while Katherine was alive. Like his fellow-conspirators he was a religious conservative who disapproved of the advance of new ideas in England. This, too, he kept quiet. But from January 1536, he used his influence on the king to turn Henry’s mind against Anne Boleyn. He and his wife had stayed in touch with Mary throughout her ordeal and they were in her confidence.
The conspirators knew that Mary’s tacit support was vital if they were to achieve Anne’s removal; this she was willing to give, without asking too many questions as to the means to be employed. Her friends were careful not to implicate her in the fine detail of their plans. Chapuys, representing the main international guarantor of Mary’s claim, inevitably became involved. He, in turn, set about lobbying Thomas Cromwell.The ambassador had picked up things from conversations with Cromwell, nuances here and there, statements that might or might not be taken at face value, which led him to believe that the minister and the queen had their differences. Chapuys knew that Cromwell had always favoured a better relationship with Charles V. He would use this to bring the minister round to the side of Mary’s supporters. Or so he thought. Only later did he find out that Cromwell had a quite different agenda of his own.
Meanwhile, there were other means of encouraging friction between Henry and Anne. Aware of the king’s roving eye and the passionate but often abrasive nature of his relationship with his wife, the charms of a quieter, more submissive lady were carefully cultivated by Anne’s enemies. It would be a good idea to have a replacement waiting. This rival was Jane Seymour, the daughter of a country gentleman from Wiltshire. Her brother was ambitious, she was tractable and in every way a contrast to Anne Boleyn. She seemed, in short, ideal.
The story that it was Jane Seymour who had been discovered by Anne in a compromising position with the king, thus precipitating the queen’s miscarriage, is unlikely. It was probably made up after the events of 1536. Everything we know about Jane (and she remains the most opaque of Henry’s six wives) points to her being a well-schooled and prim observer of the proprieties, not an abandoned hussy. Her reputation would have been severely dented by involvement in royal horseplay. She and her tutors knew far better than to let her be alone anywhere with the king.
The mystery is why Henry was attracted to her at all. Contemporaries agreed that she was plain. Nor did she have a sparkling personality. Henry’s tastes in women stupefied people at the time as much as they do now. The only surviving portrait of her, by Holbein, confirms the view of Eustace Chapuys, who reported to the emperor that she was ‘of middle stature and no great beauty, so fair that one would call her rather pale than otherwise’.
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The face, under the heavy gable hood that Jane favoured, in contrast to the French hood that Anne wore, looks cross and wary. For someone supposed to be sweet-natured, Jane’s sharp features, with her mean little double chin, come as a surprise. It is just possible that, when animated and smiling, she may have been transformed. No one, except for the woman she supplanted, seems to have actually disliked her. It is easy to think that someone so colourless must also have been lacking in character, a malleable puppet in the hands of others. What we know of her virtuoso performance in winning Henry’s heart suggests otherwise. At the very least, she was an accomplished actress who learned her part well. She could have been under no illusions about the prize. Jane Seymour wanted to be queen every bit as much as those at the court who pushed her into the king’s company.
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The face, under the heavy gable hood that Jane favoured, in contrast to the French hood that Anne wore, looks cross and wary. For someone supposed to be sweet-natured, Jane’s sharp features, with her mean little double chin, come as a surprise. It is just possible that, when animated and smiling, she may have been transformed. No one, except for the woman she supplanted, seems to have actually disliked her. It is easy to think that someone so colourless must also have been lacking in character, a malleable puppet in the hands of others. What we know of her virtuoso performance in winning Henry’s heart suggests otherwise. At the very least, she was an accomplished actress who learned her part well. She could have been under no illusions about the prize. Jane Seymour wanted to be queen every bit as much as those at the court who pushed her into the king’s company.
Chapuys knew her brother, Edward Seymour, who had undertaken an earlier mission to the imperial court.While the Boleyns remained in power, Seymour’s chances of further advancement seemed small. His sister, still unmarried in her late twenties, had been at court since 1529, first as an attendant to Katherine of Aragon and then Anne Boleyn. There was evidently still no prospect of finding a husband, which perhaps tells us indirectly quite a lot about Jane’s charms, though it may also reflect on the Seymour family themselves. Her father had seduced Edward’s first wife and their affair could scarcely have enhanced the chances of his eldest daughter. When she described herself, in rejecting Henry’s clumsy attempt to buy her favours, as the daughter of ‘good and honourable parents’, she must have hoped her father’s peccadilloes were forgotten.
She nearly was herself, until she became the object of ‘courtly’ pursuit by the king, in the early stages of his wife’s third pregnancy. Jane Seymour might have remained the platonic object of these chivalric courtesies had her brother not scented an opportunity. With careful coaching and help from others who wanted to see Anne Boleyn removed, he could turn Jane from a meek lady-in-waiting into a queen. To achieve this, he needed friends at court, and his political intelligence told him that now, while the queen was low and the king uneasy, was the time to begin his campaign. But Jane must be wholly committed in order to play her role to perfection. She could have declined, or muffed the part she was given. Instead, she held her nerve and carried everything off with consummate skill. When Henry sent her a letter and a purse of gold at the beginning of April, she declined to accept the money, telling the king’s messenger, on her knees,‘there was no treasure in the world she valued as much as her honour, and on no account would she lose it, even if she were to die a thousand deaths … if the king wished to make her a gift of money, she requested him to reserve it for such a time as God would be pleased to send her some advantageous marriage’.
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Henry was touched by her modesty, captivated by the quietness she radiated in stark contrast to Anne’s sound and fury. Jane was a clever little mouse.
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Henry was touched by her modesty, captivated by the quietness she radiated in stark contrast to Anne’s sound and fury. Jane was a clever little mouse.
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