The Children of Henry VIII (7 page)

A hidden agenda lay behind this outward show. Henry and Wolsey’s diplomacy in 1521 and 1522 was an elaborate exercise in smoke and mirrors as they busily put the finishing touches to a treaty of alliance with Katherine’s 22-year-old nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain, Charles V, son of the queen’s sister Juana. The treaty would mark a major shift in Henry’s and
Wolsey’s priorities in foreign policy, which since 1514 had been largely pro-French.

Following a secret meeting with Charles at Bruges in 1521, Wolsey sought to detach England from the obligations to Francis I that had been agreed at the Field of Cloth of Gold. Instead, Henry committed himself to joining Charles in what the emperor called his ‘Great Enterprise’—a joint invasion of France by himself and Henry.
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Their plan was to encourage the Duke of Bourbon, the constable of France, to rebel and then to invade Francis’s territories from the north and south in a pincer movement, enabling the victors to divide the spoils.

Linked to the treaty was to be a dynastic marriage alliance with Charles by which Mary and her cousin were to be betrothed. The idea was that she should marry him when she was 12—the minimum age allowed by the Church for a woman to marry—and Henry would pay Charles a dowry amounting to almost half a million crowns.
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Henry, therefore, had not recalled his daughter to Court out of parental affection; she was brought there to be told that she would shortly become engaged to one of the most powerful rulers in Europe, and to learn how to play her part. To this end, she was given a gold brooch to wear on her bosom with her cousin’s name picked out in jewels. She was encouraged to believe she had fallen in love with him, taking him as her ‘valentine’ on St Valentine’s Day. And when wheeled out to meet one of Charles’s ambassadors sent ahead to agree draft terms for the treaty, she duly complied, questioning him ‘not less sweetly than prudently’ about her future husband while ostentatiously wearing her gold brooch.
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To ratify the treaty, Charles undertook a state visit to England lasting a month. On Sunday, 25 May 1522, the Marquis of Dorset
met him at Gravelines and escorted him into Calais, from where he was to embark for England. Next day, the emperor arrived at Dover where Wolsey greeted him to the accompaniment of a deafening salute from the castle guns. A week later, Charles and Henry rode side by side into Gravesend, where thirty barges awaited them, ready to transport them and their courtiers along the Thames to Greenwich in a spectacular river pageant.
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This was not the first time that Henry and Wolsey had sought to extort an advantage from Mary’s future marriage. When she was two and a half, and Wolsey had been brokering the Treaty of Universal Peace, the king had affianced her to the Dauphin of France.
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The cardinal’s revels at which Henry’s mistress, Elizabeth Blount, had partnered Sir Francis Bryan had been arranged to celebrate this betrothal. Katherine, who was Spanish through and through, had never approved of Wolsey’s pro-French diplomacy in those years. She was overjoyed when Charles, already king of Spain, was elected to the imperial throne in 1519, for his election dramatically shifted the balance of power in Europe, making him a better ally and marital prospect than his great rival Francis I of France.

After Wolsey’s secret diplomacy with the emperor at Bruges in 1521, Mary’s betrothal to the Dauphin could be quietly forgotten.

When Charles arrived at Greenwich at the start of his state visit in 1522, Katherine and Mary were waiting for him at the door of the palace’s great hall. As described by Edward Hall, Charles ‘asked [for] the queen’s blessing, for that is the fashion of Spain between the aunt and the nephew. The emperor had great joy to see the queen his aunt, and especially his young cousin … the lady Mary.’
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Charles was lodged in Henry’s own riverside apartments at the
palace which were so splendidly furnished and hung with fine tapestries, that even the worldly Spaniards were impressed.

During the festivities and sports over the next three days, Henry showed off his jousting skills while Charles and Katherine watched from a special pavilion, and in the evenings the queen banqueted with her nephew, while her ladies danced for them. Brushing aside the criticism of some of his stuffier advisers, Charles overcame his natural shyness and entered into the spirit of the occasion by joining in one of Henry’s jousts, riding a ‘richly trapped’ charger. Katherine could watch contentedly as the two most important men in her life behaved like kinsmen and allies.
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On 6 June, while Katherine and Mary stayed behind at the palace, Charles and Henry, dressed identically in cloth of gold, made a triumphal entry into London, riding side by side. After hearing Thomas More, now employed as Henry’s principal secretary, deliver a Latin oration praising them and the bond of friendship between them, the two kings processed through the city, entertained by a series of tableaux laid on by the citizens and merchants, the finest of which was choreographed by More’s brother-in-law, John Rastell, a well-known printer and theatrical impresario.
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The centrepiece of these tableaux was an island representing England set in a silver sea surrounded by waves and rocks surmounted by the stars, planets and a depiction of heaven. Woods and mountains, flowers, birds, animals, ponds and fish could be seen on the island, where statues of Charles and Henry stood immobile, carrying unsheathed swords. It all looked predictable enough, until the astonished spectators saw that the whole scene was a complex mechanical contrivance. As the real Charles and Henry approached, the contraption burst into life. Clockwork birds sang, toy fish leapt from their pools, the animals moved and
the statues turned towards each other, first casting away their swords and then embracing ‘in token of love and peace’.

Rastell’s tableau was a masterpiece of invention and imagination. Except there was no mention of Mary or her betrothal.
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On Whitsunday, 8 June, Wolsey celebrated a special high mass before the two kings at St Paul’s, assisted by twenty mitred prelates. Henry and Charles then travelled by barge to Wolsey’s palace of Hampton Court and onwards to Windsor Castle, where on the evening of the 15th, the theme of ‘love and peace’ was clumsily rammed home again to the visitors in a long, excruciatingly boring play—supposedly a farce ridiculing ‘the king of France and his alliances’ and likening Francis to a wild and unruly horse whom only Charles and Henry were able to bridle.
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The private reaction of one of the imperial delegation, Martin de Salinas, was deep cynicism. With another six years to wait before Mary was 12 and with Charles eager to secure his own dynasty in Spain, it seemed likely that the plan for her marriage was going nowhere. The tell-tale sign at the St Paul’s service was that ‘no betrothal ceremonies were performed, no oath sworn’.
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At Windsor on the 16th, Charles and Henry concluded a general offensive and defensive alliance. Three days later, they swore to observe this treaty before the altar in St George’s Chapel and
Te Deum
was sung. They then signed a secret subsidiary treaty. At last Charles promised to marry Mary as soon as she was 12, Henry promised not to marry her to anyone else, and both promised to invade France before the end of May 1524.
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But by article 28, the terms of the subsidiary treaty were never to be published. And still no formal act of betrothal took place. Everything relating to Mary’s marriage rested on promises and fair words, for Charles too was an expert at diplomacy.

Katherine bade her nephew a fond farewell at Windsor, but within three years things would look very different. In particular, her pilgrimages to Walsingham and her hopes for a miracle such as that granted to the post-menopausal St Elizabeth when her prayers were answered and she gave birth to John the Baptist, were destined to come to nothing. For even as Charles and his entourage set out with their vast baggage train to Winchester on their way to board their fleet at Southampton, Henry had found himself another mistress.

Mary Boleyn had first been invited into Henry’s bed shortly after she appeared in a glittering candlelit masque laid on by Wolsey for the ambassadors sent ahead to finalize the arrangements for Charles’s state visit. Held on the evening of Shrove Tuesday, 4 March 1522, at York Place, the cardinal’s principal London home, the masque entitled ‘the assault on the
Château Vert
’ was preceded by a tournament on the theme of ‘unrequited love’. Mary Boleyn and her sister Anne, the talented and precocious daughters of Sir Thomas Boleyn and his wife Elizabeth, played two of the eight leading female roles in the masque. Mary was cast as ‘Kindness’ and Anne as ‘Perseverance’—prophetically as it turned out.

The masque began after supper, when Henry and Wolsey led the ambassadors into a ‘great chamber’ richly hung with tapestries reflecting the theme of the action, at the far end of which was an elaborate timber castle with battlements covered in green tinfoil. The castle boasted three green towers, each surmounted by a faux-heraldic banner showing the power that women could have: one depicted three broken hearts, one a man’s heart being gripped by a woman’s hand and the third showed a man’s heart being turned
upside down. Standing on the towers were eight damsels, including Mary and Anne, guarded by a posse of choirboys dressed as evil women—the enemies of love—who garrisoned the castle.

After a narrator called ‘Ardent Desire’, dressed in crimson satin embroidered with burning flames in gold, had made a speech, Henry ordered the attack. To the sound of off-stage cannon, he and his companions, dressed in cloaks of blue satin and cloth of gold caps, bombarded the castle and its defenders with dates, oranges and ‘other fruits made for pleasure’ while the boys responded with a desperate hail of rosewater and comfits. Once the damsels had been rescued, everyone danced until the end of the evening when the participants removed their disguises and all ‘were known’.
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As a teenager Mary Boleyn had gone to Paris in the retinue of Henry’s younger sister ‘to do service’ for her (as contemporaries quaintly put it) when she married the decrepit 52-year-old Louis XII, returning with her when Louis died only eighty-two days after the wedding. If a later taunt by Francis I is to be believed, she also ‘did service’ to Louis’s courtiers, earning a reputation as ‘
una grandissima ribalda et infame sopre tutte
’ (‘a very great bawd and infamous above all’).
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On her homecoming, she was found a place in Katherine’s household. On 4 February 1520, Henry attended her wedding to William Carey, one of his gentlemen of the Privy Chamber.
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After her return from Paris, Mary’s morals had not been called into question. And it was not until two years later, after she danced with Henry at Wolsey’s masque, that she became the king’s mistress. Thereafter, the gossip began and William Carey, who prudently chose to lay down his wife for his king, found himself the recipient of a shower of royal patronage, amassing an enviable haul of lands and perquisites.
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