CHAPTER TWO - MARY
Katherine and Henry’s daughter, Mary, was only eleven years old when her parents’ divorce proceedings began in 1527. She was twenty when her mother, and the woman who had supplanted her, both died in 1536. The divorce years, therefore, took place during a critical stage of her life, when she was coming to maturity and forming the traits and opinions which would shape her character in adulthood. Like any child with quarrelling parents, Mary suffered greatly from being caught up in the eye of the storm, and, perhaps naturally, she took a side. That side was Katherine’s.
It is somewhat unusual, then, that Mary is entirely absent from the records of the divorce prior to 1533. There is no evidence of her thoughts or actions during this time. Historians have always assumed, like Carolly Erickson, that ‘one thing is very clear…from the start Mary watched and wept over her mother’s trials, and took her part.’ It would be fitting, given her later attitude, if this were true. However, due to the lack of evidence about Mary from 1527-1533, is it right to automatically conclude she took Katherine’s side from the beginning? Or was it the case that she knew something bad was going on between her parents but did not find out the definitive facts until later? Mary had her own separate household under the supervision of the Countess of Salisbury, her governess, and Lord Hussey, her chamberlain. The Countess, Hussey, and Hussey’s wife were all friends and supporters of Katherine and her daughter. In fact, Lady Hussey was later imprisoned for insisting on calling Mary ‘princess’ when that title belonged to Elizabeth. Consequently, it is likely that Mary formed her first views of the divorce from hearing her mother’s partisans talking of it. Yet it could also be plausible that Mary was shielded from the gritty details until she was older. Unfortunately, this is a historical issue which lack of evidence consigns to the realms of ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’. Historians would be wise to take this into account before making grand statements like Erickson’s.
Why then did Mary ultimately so forcibly side with her mother over the divorce? As shown in the previous chapter, Katherine was passionately concerned with maintaining her daughter’s rights, but had to do so in a way which would not compromise what she saw as her moral stand against Henry. Yet part of her motives for firmly resisting the divorce was that she would not accept Mary’s bastardisation. To have her mother stand up for her hereditary rights, when she was a child and unable to do so herself, would have endeared Mary to Katherine’s cause. James Froude argued that, although Mary’s conduct ‘may and does deserve the highest moral admiration…the fidelity of the child to the mother was the assertion of a right to be next in succession to the crown’ , implying that Mary took Katherine’s side out of merely selfish considerations. Although it would be foolish to think that Mary did not have a deep-rooted desire to preserve her right to the throne, especially as she got older, it is also wrong to assume that her emotional ties to Katherine did not figure somewhere in her reasons for opposing the divorce. Katherine and her daughter were very close. The Queen had supervised Mary’s education when she was young and, when Mary had been moved to her own household, continued to take a great interest in her development. Henry, of course, also held affection for his daughter, but Mary and her mother shared many beliefs and personality traits which would bind them together during the divorce years; piety, pride, and what Henry and his supporters called ‘obstinacy.’ It is also worth noting that any declaration by Mary of her own legitimacy implied recognition of her mother’s claim that her marriage was valid. Judith M. Richards states ‘it is likely that defending her mother’s virtue and reputation was her primary concern.’ Even if it was not her primary concern, Mary’s strong feelings for her mother cannot be discounted as a reason for her resistance to her father.
Mary decisively steps into the accounts of the divorce years in 1533. H.F.M Prescott held the view that ‘when her time came to take a hand, her role was passive.’ This is certainly mistaken. Passive Mary was most definitely not. Perhaps Prescott took her opinion from the first reported instance of Mary’s views on the divorce where, when told of Cranmer’s verdict against her mother and Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, ‘she was a little sad, and then, like a wise woman as she is, she dissembled the matter, showing herself glad.’ Certainly there is no display of anger, no protest, no opposition at all. But Mary was caught off guard. The Pope was still determining the case at Rome; Cranmer’s court and Henry’s second marriage had been conducted in secret. In front of Henry’s messengers, she had to make the best showing she could under the circumstances. It is the last part of the report that is perhaps the most revealing; that Mary appeared ‘glad.’ In her heart, maybe, Mary believed that, with all the duplicity shown by her father’s side, there was now no doubting the righteousness of her mother’s cause. In any case, this would be the first and the last time that Mary did not take the opportunity to object to the divorce and the events that followed.
The real change for Mary came with the birth of Elizabeth in September 1533. After all the years of waiting, Henry still had no son. He now had two daughters, and it was necessary that he make it perfectly clear which one was the rightful heir from his new, lawful marriage, and which one was the bastard from his sinful marriage to Katherine. Up until this point, Mary’s status as heir had not actually been disputed. The case in canon law was that, even if Henry and Katherine did divorce, Mary had been born in ‘bona fide parentum’ (with the good faith of the parents), because they did not know their marriage was invalid at the time. Cranmer, when pronouncing on the divorce, did not declare Mary a bastard for this reason. But for Henry, to even keep silent on Mary’s place in the succession was to acknowledge the validity of the first marriage. Shortly after the birth of Elizabeth, Mary’s servants were required to take off her symbol from their livery and replace it with the King’s , and at the beginning of October Mary received a supposedly routine letter from William Paulet, controller of the King’s household, which addressed her as ‘the lady Mary, the King’s daughter’ and not princess. This is when Mary’s opposition to Henry came to the fore, and in the letter she wrote to her father can be discerned the principles of her argument. The reply is deferential to begin with, stating that the King could not possibly have been ‘privy’ to the first letter, which must have been a mistake. Then the tone changes, and Mary writes that she does not doubt ‘you take me for your lawful daughter, born in true matrimony. If I agreed to the contrary I should offend God.’
Mary’s resistance to Henry was organised around one central point; her parent’s marriage was valid. Thus it was very similar to Katherine’s opposition, which also revolved around this issue. From her belief in the marriage, Mary took her other two principles; she was the only true princess, and her mother was the only true queen. This implied a total rejection of Henry’s marriage to Anne, Anne’s claim to queenship, and Elizabeth’s legitimacy. Through the years 1533 to 1536, Mary never deviated from these points and, in a sense, she never expanded upon them either. Again the comparisons with Katherine’s own opposition can be drawn. Both mother and daughter took clear, principled lines over the divorce which cut through the mass of legal and theological debate about the issue. This has given rise, in the case of Mary’s opposition, to two very different schools of thought. Sympathetic writings such as those by Prescott and Erickson, concerned with ‘rehabilitating’ Mary’s image, portray a young girl persecuted by her father and wicked step-mother. On the other hand, David Loades’ Mary Tudor: A Life epitomises the approach of blaming Mary herself for much of what happened. Perhaps some historians find it more difficult to become detached from the emotion of Mary’s experiences. Others share Henry’s frustration that Katherine and Mary did not chose the easier option of submitting to Henry. Neither of these approaches is totally right, yet neither are they wrong. In reality, as will be shown below, Mary’s opposition over the years was variable. Sometimes she really was the frightened girl ruled by emotion, and sometimes this was just an image.
In October of 1533, the Imperial ambassador, Chapuys, was worried that Henry would make Mary enter a nunnery or ‘marry her against her will.’ Actually, ‘Henry was neither so vindictive nor so foolish as Chapuys feared’ ; he was much more clever, opting to use the same method with Mary that he had used with her mother. Like Katherine, Mary would be isolated from her friends and from court, but there was an added measure; Mary, as Chapuys put it, ‘should come and live as lady’s maid with the new bastard.’ For Henry this was a symbolic gesture as much as anything else. In his eyes, the illegitimate child should serve the rightful heir, even though Elizabeth was only a few months old. The Duke of Norfolk was chosen for the admittedly difficult task of informing Mary of this. During the discussion, he called Elizabeth ‘princess’, to which Mary replied ‘that title belonged to herself, and to no other.’ When Norfolk had managed to remove Mary to Elizabeth’s household, he ‘asked her whether she would not go and pay her respects to the princess. She answered that she knew no other princess in England except herself, and that the daughter of Madame de Penebrok had no such title.’ Mary would, however, call Elizabeth ‘sister’, just as she called Henry’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond, ‘brother’. This was a very explicit rejection of the major points of Henry’s case; that Anne was Queen and Elizabeth was legitimate. The pointed barb of using Anne’s old title of Marquess of Pembroke and the reference to the illegitimate Richmond would not have been lost on Norfolk or those to whom he reported the incident. Indeed, Mary could not have failed to realise that her response would reach her father and Anne Boleyn, and so her tactic at this time was to make a forceful public declaration of her opposition.
From the moment she set foot in the household of Elizabeth, Mary’s strategy was simple; she would not show any deference to Elizabeth as princess. This made arrangements at the household, where she was under the eye of Lady Shelton, Anne Boleyn’s aunt, very complicated. For example, Mary refused to eat in the dining hall so she would not be seated at a lower place at the table, so she had to be given meals in her room. There was also an incident where, expected to follow Elizabeth to another residence, Mary refused and was literally thrown into a waiting litter by some gentlemen. There were many more protests such as these, but they all had the same tone. Historians differ in their interpretation of Mary’s actions during this time, and this is where the two schools of thought mentioned earlier come into play. The question to be considered as regards Mary’s resistance is whether it was the right course of action to take or whether it provoked Henry unnecessarily, causing him to treat Mary worse. Prescott wrote that Mary, ‘by her father’s doing, became all her mother’s child and the Spanish Tudor’ , but it is an oversimplification to solely blame Henry for Mary’s situation. It is obvious that Mary’s troubles at Elizabeth’s household were partly her own fault. Loades recognises this, but makes a crude generalisation when he states that ‘Mary was an affliction to herself, and to everyone with whom she had to deal.’ This ignores the fact that Mary’s life during this time was unpleasant; she was often ill and sometimes denied medical treatment, and she was surrounded by people under orders to treat her harshly. On balance, Mary sometimes pushed her opposition beyond a boundary where it could have been effective, but she was equally capable of using her image as a pitiful young woman to good affect. Once, when Henry was visiting Elizabeth, Mary appeared on the terrace when the King was about to leave, ‘on her knees with her hands joined’ in a clear message of supplication, causing Henry to bow to her and ‘put his hand to his hat.’ Henry never lost affection for his daughter, but his own situation meant he could not be seen to give in to her. It is also easy to see the hand of Anne Boleyn behind Mary’s treatment, but she had her own daughter to protect, and regarded Mary as more and more of a threat each time she failed to give the King a son. These different factors all came into Mary’s opposition, but she herself could not see that she was toughening Henry’s attitude to her each time she resisted. For Mary as much as for her mother, opposition was a matter of conscience and faith not open to worldly considerations.
Was Katherine the force behind Mary’s resistance? Mary and Katherine never saw each other after late 1531, and it is difficult to know what passed between them before then as it is not recorded. After their separation, they were initially permitted to write letters to each other, and one that Katherine wrote several days after the birth of Elizabeth in September 1533 deserves close attention. The tone of the letter is exceptionally pious, saying that ‘the time is come that almighty God will prove you.’ Katherine advises Mary to ‘shrive yourself; first make you clean; take heed of His commandments…for then you are sure armed’ and to obey her ‘in everything, save only that you will not offend God and lose your own soul.’ Here are the echoes of Katherine’s own pronouncements that she would obey the King unless it went against her conscience, but interestingly she does not tell Mary to obey her father, rather Mary should look to her. The purpose of the letter was partly to comfort, and partly to exhort. Katherine is clearly telling Mary not to waver in her opposition and to be confident that God is on their side. She was also steeling Mary for the possibility of martyrdom. Mary M. Luke suspects that this letter, filled with motherly advice and a deep piety, became Mary’s ‘creed.’ However, from the time she was moved to Elizabeth’s household, Mary was cut off from Katherine’s influence, as letters to and from her mother were forbidden. She was now under the supervision of the Imperial ambassador, Chapuys, who visited her and wrote to her when he could. Chapuys was certainly active on Mary’s behalf, interceding with Henry and Cromwell on several occasions to demand better medical treatment, although the assessment by Richard Marius that the ambassador was ‘responsible for the preservation of her very life’ is an exaggeration, as it is doubtful whether Henry ever seriously intended to martyr his daughter. Chapuys sent Mary advice, such as the ‘many fair and gracious remonstrances’ that she could use. After the ‘litter incident’, Chapuys even wrote ‘I should not have advised the princess to have gone to this extreme.’ Consequently, as Loades argues, Chapuys ‘must bear a share of the responsibility’ for the problems that arose from Mary’s opposition.
Chapuys also thought up a plan for smuggling Mary abroad. This was approved by Charles V because, as James V reminded him, ‘she is not in his power, and could not be obtained without great difficulty.’ If Charles managed to obtain Mary, he could use her to cement an alliance against Henry. Yet was there ever a competent plot to smuggle Mary out? Charles told Chapuys to ‘consider if there be any means of getting away the said princess’ but promised nothing in the way of support. Escape largely depended on which residence Mary was at, but some of the plans Chapuys suggested were genuinely foolhardy. He wrote that ‘it would not be difficult if she dwelt at the Tower’ , forgetting that the Tower was mainly a prison, heavily guarded and, in London, too near royal authority and power. What seems most cruel is the way Mary’s hopes were raised when Chapuys talked to her of ‘rescue’ , only to be dashed for lack of the right conditions, or for the ambassador’s worries about needing the proper authorisation. Consequently, Mary was largely left to oppose Henry on her own, and remained in England.
What the interest of Chapuys and his master in Mary does show is that she had become a separate focus for the opposition party away from her mother. Rumours of Mary’s marriage had begun as far back as 1530, when an Imperial agent reported possible negotiations between England and Milan, even though the Duke of Milan had ‘neither feet nor hands’ , and this sort of speculation continued through the divorce years, with Mary insisting in 1535 that the Dauphin was her husband, even though all hope in that alliance (from the 1520s) was long dead. Loades argues that these rumours ‘indicate that Mary was becoming more important than her mother’ , with both sides of the divorce recognising her value in the marriage market, whereas Katherine, taking her stand as Henry’s true wife, could never be used in this way.
How much support did Mary’s opposition have? Richards writes that ‘as her popular mother’s daughter, she had considerable public sympathy, but little interest – let alone support – from courtiers or diplomats.’ Apart from the aforementioned sympathies of her former staff, there are no records of court interest in Mary. Yet this does not strictly mean there wasn’t any, as visits to and favourable opinions of Mary were prohibited. In terms of popular support, there is one incident which illustrates public feeling about Mary. In September 1530, articles were brought against Mary Baynton, accused of impersonating the princess in Boston, Lincolnshire. Baynton (as Mary) had told people, that her aunt, the Duchess of Suffolk, had read her fortune as a child and told her ‘ye must go a-begging once in your life’, so ‘I take it upon me now in my youth’, and that ‘I intend to go beyond the sea to mine uncle the emperor.’ Although this all seems rather unbelievable and harmless, the sight of a homeless Mary had the potential for raising considerable public feeling. Popular thought from this period is almost impossible to measure, but it is likely the public loved Mary in the same way they would love any sad and lonely princess. As Erickson points out, to the rural population who knew of her only through second-hand stories, ‘Mary’s life was that of a fairytale heroine, full of romance and peril yet veiled in unreality.’ The Pilgrimage of Grace, a rising which could be said to have been in Mary’s favour, occurred after both her mother and Anne Boleyn were dead and the divorce was no longer the issue of the day. Support she may have, but of effective support there was none.
In conclusion, the divorce years were a time of incredible emotional strain for Mary. This is reflected in her style of opposition. ‘She came to maturity in an atmosphere of extraordinary stress, and her character emerged as a response to crises.’ Whilst not judging her too harshly, historians need to remember how capable Mary was of presenting herself as a frightened young girl, when in reality she could be strong and manipulative. This was partly from the influence of her mother, and partly from the advice of Chapuys. In the end, however, Mary’s opposition only postponed the inevitable. In 1536, with Henry married to his third wife, Mary was forced to sign a humiliating submission, affirming her parents’ marriage to have been unlawful. Her father had won.
