The Children of Henry VIII (6 page)

In December 1517, for example, her household lodged at Ditton Park, a refurbished royal manor house on the north bank of the Thames in Buckinghamshire, chosen because it was just two miles from Windsor Castle, where Henry and Katherine planned to spend Christmas. Although Windsor was on the south bank of the river, a ferry operated at Datchet nearby, and Mary and her servants were twice rowed over for 20 pence a time. Sitting up in bed on New Year’s Day, Mary received gifts of a gold cup from Wolsey, a pomander of gold from her aunt, Henry’s sister Mary, and a primer or first reading book from Agnes Howard, Duchess of Norfolk, another godmother.
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Over the next couple of years Mary lodged at places such as Bisham Abbey in Berkshire, where many of Margaret Pole’s ancestors were buried, The More (now Moor Park) in Hertfordshire, one of Wolsey’s larger houses, and Richmond, where in June 1520—following Henry’s and Wolsey’s diplomacy with Francis I at the Field of Cloth of Gold—a party of French gentlemen came to visit her as part of an escorted tour of the sights of the metropolis organized by Wolsey.

Under the watchful eye of her governess and half a dozen other noble ladies, Mary—rising four and a half—welcomed the Frenchmen and their official minders, who were led by Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and Richard Fox, the septuagenarian, almost blind bishop of Winchester. As the duke informed Henry afterwards, Mary greeted her visitors ‘with [a] most goodly countenance, proper communication and pleasant pastime in playing at the virginals’.
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By then she had some thirty menservants in addition to her female staff, all of whom functioned within a fully fledged household with its own chamber and service departments such as the wardrobe, bakehouse, pantry, buttery and stables. Henry allocated an adequate, but not especially generous budget of £1,100 a year to Mary’s treasurer. Frequent purchases recorded in his accounts, apart from recurrent expenditure on salaries, food, drink and clothing, and special items such as New Year’s gifts, included large quantities of strawberries and cherries, which Mary particularly enjoyed, and ‘hippocras’, a cordial drink made of wine flavoured with spices, for the entertainment of guests.
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After Mary had performed on the virginals for her French visitors, she played host, offering them ‘strawberries, wafers, wine and hippocras in plenty’.
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Mary spent Christmas 1520 with her parents at Greenwich, staying until mid February when Henry rode with Katherine into Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire on the initial stages of another pilgrimage to Walsingham. Among the gifts offered to the princess at this New Year were a second gold cup from Wolsey; two silver-gilt flagons from the princess’s third godmother, Katherine Courtenay, Countess of Devon; a pair of candle-snuffers from the Duke of Norfolk; bags containing a variety of nuts, grapes, oranges and cakes from local well-wishers; ‘rosemary bushes with
gold-painted spangles’ (presumably used as decorations) from ‘a poor woman of Greenwich’; as well as a small purse made of ‘tinsel satin’, a costly silk fabric incorporating tiny brocading wefts of gold, silver or silver-gilt metal, given by ‘Mother Margaret’, Mary’s nurse.
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F
IGURE
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Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, whom Henry VIII executed for treason in 1521, from a nineteenth-century engraving by R. Ackermann.

Henry was now approaching 29 and Katherine 35. It was ‘to fulfil a vow’, as the Venetian ambassador reported, that the queen now headed with Henry for Walsingham—a vow plainly connected to her desire to conceive a son before she reached the menopause.
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But when Henry was within sight of Walsingham, if he even got that far, he abruptly left his wife and returned alone to Essex, perhaps to see Fitzroy.
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Then, alerted to imminent danger by Wolsey, he hastened back to Greenwich, where he planned to strike against the Duke of Buckingham, the most important and the richest nobleman in the country.

By mid April 1521, Henry had decided to put Buckingham on trial at Westminster Hall on a charge of high treason. He accused Buckingham of plotting to depose him, claiming that the duke had listened to the prophecies of Nicholas Hopkins, a Carthusian monk. According to these, Henry ‘would have no issue male of his body’ and Buckingham ‘should get the favour of the commons and he should have [the] rule of all’. The duke also stood accused of slandering Wolsey, calling him ‘the king’s bawd’ for arranging the lying-in of Elizabeth Blount and keeping a watchful eye over Fitzroy. Making matters worse for himself, Buckingham had declared that the death of Prince Henry in 1511 was divine vengeance for Henry VII’s execution in 1499 of the Earl of Warwick, Margaret Pole’s brother, by then the only remaining direct male descendant of Edward III and the strongest Yorkist rival for the throne.

After a show trial in which Henry selected the judges and coached the prosecution witnesses, the duke was found guilty. Sentence of death was pronounced by his fellow peer, the Duke of Norfolk, who was barely able to control his tears as the verdict was delivered. Buckingham’s end was brutal. He died in agony,
beheaded on 17 May by a bungling executioner who took three strokes of the axe to sever his head.
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No sooner was Buckingham condemned than, to Katherine’s dismay, Henry dismissed Margaret Pole as Princess Mary’s governess. As a prominent former Yorkist, she had fallen under suspicion for several reasons: the strongest in Henry’s eyes was that, three years before, Buckingham’s heir, Henry, Lord Stafford, had married her daughter Ursula, and as part of the nuptial settlement, the duke had contracted to pay Margaret the colossal and unexplained sum of £2,000.
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Pole’s best friends were all from prominent Yorkist families such as the Courtenays (the Countess of Devon was one of Edward IV’s daughters), and with Wolsey—the duke’s avowed enemy—constantly privy to the king’s thoughts and urging him on, Henry believed he had detected the beginnings of a menacing dynastic conspiracy of the sort that had scarred his father’s reign.
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Almost fifteen years later, when Mary was ill and at loggerheads with her father, refusing to give him the obedience that he believed to be his due, the Spanish ambassador would remind Henry that she continued to hold Margaret Pole in the greatest affection ‘as her second mother’. When the ambassador asked whether, in the interests of a reconciliation and his daughter’s health, he would consider restoring Pole to her old position, Henry called her ‘an old fool’ and a woman ‘of no experience’. If Mary ‘had been under her care during this illness’, he said, ‘she would have died.’
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By then, the battle lines would be irrevocably drawn over Henry’s break with Rome and divorce from Katherine. But Pole’s removal as Mary’s governess was also a watershed in 1521. Besides reflecting Henry’s enmity to those noble families he suspected of plotting against him, it also signalled the beginning of his rift with his queen. From now onwards, their lives would gradually drift apart.

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Buckingham dead, Henry spent much of the summer of 1521 redistributing the duke’s confiscated lands and supervising the search for Mary’s new governess. While he did so, the 5-year-old princess was brought to Windsor Castle to live with her parents. Bewildered by why a woman she accounted as a ‘second mother’, someone she clearly adored and looked up to had suddenly been taken from her, Mary must also have been perplexed as to why a dozen or so tapestries seized by Henry’s henchmen from the Duke of Buckingham’s castle at Thornbury and still bearing his insignia, should suddenly have arrived to decorate her bedroom.
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Henry’s search ended on 24 July, when he instructed one of his secretaries, Richard Pace, to ask Wolsey to recruit Elizabeth de Vere, Dowager Countess of Oxford, if he could twist her arm. If not, Jane, Lady Calthorpe was to be approached and her husband, Sir Philip, offered the post of princess’s chamberlain. Although active on and off at Court for fifteen more years, the dowager
countess suffered from bouts of ill health and respectfully refused the offer.
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Wolsey therefore engaged the Calthorpes. By October everything was settled and they were appointed at a joint salary of £40 a year.
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Once the new governess and her husband were safely in charge, Mary left Windsor, parting from her parents, who travelled in the royal barge to Greenwich for Christmas, and returning to Ditton Park, where she stayed until the end of January.
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This year, for the first time, Mary—as her sixth birthday fast approached—was to spend the festive season entirely alone. For a royal child, this was part of growing up.

To compensate, the Calthorpes commissioned a full quota of entertainments between Christmas Eve and Twelfth Night, mimicking on a smaller scale her father’s ‘goodly and gorgeous mummeries’ at Greenwich.
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The hall at Ditton Park was decorated with a boar’s head, and one of Mary’s chamber servants, John Thurgoode, was chosen as ‘Lord of Misrule’ to preside over her revels. He, in turn, hired a part-time actor to play a friar, another to play a shipman, another dozen or so to stage a ‘disguising’ involving a hobby horse and Morris men. Props requisitioned included two tabors (or drums), a stock of visors, coats of arms, hats, gold foil, rabbit skins and tails for mummers, coats and pikes for the Morris men, a dozen ‘clattering staves’, bells, frankincense, and a small quantity of gunpowder, possibly for fireworks.

On Christmas Day, the clerks of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, crossed the Thames by ferry to sing a selection of songs and carols for the little princess.
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And on 1 January, one of Henry’s servants arrived to present the king’s New Year’s gift of a heavy solid silver cup filled with money.
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For Katherine, however, the separation
from her daughter was too painful to bear, and she stole briefly away from Greenwich to present her own gift in person.
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In February 1522, Mary moved to Hanworth in Middlesex, a beautiful moated manor house in an idyllic rural setting, where she made an offering on Candlemas day.
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But, to her sheer delight, by the middle of the month she was unexpectedly back at Greenwich and Richmond palaces, reunited with her mother with whom she stayed for the rest of the spring and early summer.

Not just this, but also the Calthorpes, who hitherto had been sufficiently, but not extravagantly provided with furnishings and effects for her, suddenly found Henry willing to give them everything they felt they needed to equip Mary’s household in a manner fit for a princess. Items loaned from Henry’s collections included costly sets of Flemish tapestries on classical or religious themes, such as the labours of Hercules or Christ’s Passion. A ‘bed of estate’ was supplied for Mary’s bedchamber along with multiple sets of bed hangings, canopies and quilts, some of crimson satin embroidered with hearts, lions and falcons, others of cloth of gold or crimson and blue velvet. A ‘chair of estate’ with a canopy was provided for her Presence Chamber so she could sit in state to receive visitors, complete with a ‘cloth of estate of blue cloth of gold’ emblazoned with the royal arms to hang behind the chair beneath the canopy.
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