Tudor Queen, Tudor Crown

by Jennifer Peter Woods

  They say your father has consulted his counselors on how he might repudiate Anne Boleyn without having to return to your ladyship’s mother, those who dared to send her word had writ.

  Her father was never going to take her mother back. He was done and the only person who didn’t know was Katherine. Mary imagined her mother, alone with her confessor, two of her ladies and a cook, clinging to at Kimbolten Castle, waiting for the day Henry would come for her.

  Kimbolten is nothing but a shell of a castle, draft filled, crumbling and all but inhabitable. Chapuys who had been granted audiences with Katherine was clear in his description of the dwellings to which the former Queen was banished. He had taken the Dowager Princess what earthly comforts he could but her mother was in strife.

  Her body was weakening. They said she complained of a pain in her heart night and day. Her body was no longer her own. She swelled, sweating and tossing, day after day, with no reprieve from her pains. They said she called for her beloved daughter constantly.

  In her hour of despair, Katherine wrote to Henry, beseeching him for mercy, begging him to send their daughter to her in her hour of need.

  She wrote to him, again and again. She was not long for this world and she wanted the comfort of having their daughter by her side when her time came. But Henry denied her, again and again. They said her father feared what Katherine and his daughter would do if they were ever reunited. He suspected a plot. He would give the Papists no chance to congregate around Katherine and Mary. He saw the hand of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, in everything, in every act and word that Katherine chose to send.

  Pretty words and lies! He thundered to his privy council when Chapuys went to seek the king’s benevolence on Katherine’s behalf. Tell her to repent as we have asked of her and when she submits herself to our will, we will look upon her with mercy!

  And so her mother died alone on the seventh day of January, in the Year of the Lord, 1536.

  Mary would never forgive her father. He had denied her the right to tend her mother, to offer her mother a daughter’s comfort, to be by her side when she made her final passing. She hated him. Despite everything that had come to pass, this was the first time Mary had ever hated him.

  She despised what he had become.

  Her mother was dead now, beyond all earthly cares and all recourse. There would never be justice for Katherine of Aragon. She would forever be the wife Henry abandoned, repudiated and banished. He had killed with his heartlessness. It was as good as if he had wielded the knife himself.

  They said that the King and his new Queen had worn mourning for the Dowager Princess of Wales. They had donned yellow for her death.

  Yellow, Mary knew, meant mourning in Spain, but her father, while garbed in yellow had spent the night with his new queen, dancing and celebrating, feasting the day away.

  Mary clenched her jaw. She wondered if her father had shed a tear for his faithful Katherine. But then mayhap to her father his women were like his garments, to be donned then discarded when the fashion and fancy passed. And now he had a taste for Jane Seymour.

  He had given Queen Anne three years in which to fulfill her vow to him. Throughout that time Anne tried, forging on with attempt after attempt, but she failed. She miscarried and miscarried again and the king despaired. It was as if his nightmares were being resurrected.

  Anne’s last miscarriage however had been brought on by an accident. The king had taken a fall before the whole court while jousting and Anne had swooned at the sight. Five days later, she miscarried a boy and that was when everyone knew Anne was done.

  The Queen had miscarried of her savior indeed.

  It did not take the king long to carry through his plans to rid himself of his once beloved Anne. His lust for her was spent.

  He used to serenade her with songs, write her poems, order her the most costly of jewels, send her flowers and honor her with everything that he was. He had given her a crown. He had loved Anne with an unrivaled passion that bordered on insanity. But now the king’s sanity had returned and his loins were afire for someone else.

  From a distance, Mary watched as the vultures descended upon the once invincible Anne Boleyn.

  This time, they could not question the validity of the marriage, not when the king had gone through such lengths to legitimize it. The king’s ministers then, Cromwell chief amongst them, suggested adultery as the fastest way. The people already called Anne the ‘Great Whore’ and they thought to use the ruse. It was afterall, most convenient.

  For Anne Boleyn was no Katherine of Aragon. The Dowager Princess’ dignity was so great and her character so pious, no one would have ever credited such a charge. Anne Boleyn’s repute however was entirely different.

  The people did not love Anne.

  To them, she was the Great Whore, the Great Interloper and the Great Harpy. As for her family, they were far from formidable. True, she belonged to a great house but the Boleyns and the Howards were the king’s subjects. They were no Ferdinand and Isabelle of Spain. Anne had no champion. Where Katherine of Aragon had her nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor, to advocate her case at every turn, Anne’s families were mere subjects. They were without armies. They were the king’s to command.

  The complications this time, the king was happy to note, were few. Thus, fearing nothing, Henry moved forward, fast and swift.

  They arrested the men first. Mark Smeaton, Anne Boleyn’s musician was the first to go into the Tower. Then the others followed, Thomas Wyatt, Henry Norris, Francis Weston and William Brereton.

  The queen was to be accused. Her charge: adultery.

  But Cromwell, remembering how troublesome Queen Katherine had been in court, supplied one further suggestion: Anne Boleyn had to be denied all chance of rising from the trials like Lazarus, thus, they arrested George Boleyn and accused her of incest too.

  At the king’s orders, the queen’s uncle led the court she was tried in. It was said that over two thousand people attended the trial, bearing witness to Anne Boleyn’s spectacular fall. They said she stood firm, argued her case and protested her innocence. All the same, the verdict had been a foregone conclusion.

  Guilty.

  Anne’s uncle, the Duke of Norfolk was the one who read out the sentence. To save himself from the king’s disfavor, he did so, condemning his niece to death.

  As a final blow, moments before she laid her head down on the block, Anne Boleyn was advised of the annulment of her marriage to the king. They said she laughed, a bitter, brittle laugh, her black eyes hard.

  With both marriages annulled, Elizabeth was now a bastard too. Her father had declared them all bastards. The daughters of Henry the king and his queens were now no better than the children he had sired on his Bessie Blounts and Mary Boleyns.

  He has declared us thus, debasing and denouncing both Elizabeth and I, Mary stared at the page until her eyes stung. Two queens had fought bitterly, dueling to the end to secure the legitimacy of their children. But it was all for naught, all for naught.

  Anne Boleyn and Katherine of Aragon, the refrain ran and ran in Mary’s mind. The two queens were counter points, one against the other, their lives irrevocably enmeshed, their ends entwined. Mary stared down at Chapuys’ letters. Amongst them, laid her mother’s final testimony. He had managed to procure Mary a copy of her Katherine’s will.

  Her mother had loved her father to her last breath. She had asked him to look after Mary but at the end of all things, Katherine had desired, above all else, to behold her husband one last time.

  It was a wish that Henry did not grant.

  Mary shook her head. Shifting her eyes she saw there beside her mother’s will Chapuys’ description of Anne Boleyn’s execution. She pushed it away. She had no wish to read it.

  The two Queens, Katherine and Anne had fought bitterly for the love of one man and they were both of them dead now. The only one from the bitter triangle to survive was her father and joyous was it for him. He had married Jane Seymour. His belo
ved Anne had been executed on the nineteenth of May. By the thirtieth, Henry was wed once more.

  And now King Henry had two motherless daughters.

  He has made us such.

  As such, Mary was determined now, more than ever, to harden her heart against her father.

  He has made me thus, she thought. For he was a man who could love you one day then condemn you in the next. Her belief in her father was dying, puttering out its last pitiful breathes.

  The time was come. Mary steeled her heart. The time has come. Before her laid her letter to her father. The ink on the parchment was scarcely dry. She had copied out each word with careful precision.

  It was her letter of submission. At last, she had penned it, the letter her father desired. In it, she formerly recanted her right to the succession while recognizing her father as the supreme leader of the Church of England. She had written it, knowing that finally, for her, there would be no more turns.

  She needed to concede. She needed to preserve herself. The king had now made disagreement with his sovereign will treason. The Act of Supremacy gave her father the powers he sought, while the Treasons Act as well as the Oath of Supremacy, which every Englishman had to take, sealed his powers as law.

  Pressing the palm of her hands to her eyes, Mary tried to will the burning tears behind them away. Crying would avail her of nothing.

  These days, her father had little time for mercy and by his desire many had died. For all those who had suffered at her father’s hand, she offered them her fervent prayers. Many had died and many would hereafter.

  So the folly of my father’s church grows.

  Her father’s disgrace knew no bounds and his acts against the great religious houses of this realm were multiplying. Skipping her hands over the communiqués littering her desk, she retrieved a letter.

  The Carthusian monks, the words made her heart lurch, hanged, drawn and quartered.

  Her father had first approached the monks, wishing to secure their compliance, willing them to swear fealty to him as the leader of the Church of England. Henry had chosen his targets well. There were many from amongst the Order whom he counted as his friends and he had been eager to use them to legitimize his Church of England.

  The Carthusian Order had being serving God and England since the time of Henry II. Their devotion to God was absolute. With their austere and unwavering piety, the Carthusians were revered, respected and venerated, far and wide.

  When word reached her ears of her father’s tactics, Mary knew trouble was afoot. The monks were men of conviction. They would not support the king’s Church of England.

  Just as she predicted, the monks refused to offer the king their vows. They would not renounce God and the one true church. They would not recognize the king’s Church of England.

  Shamefaced and furious at being denied, her father decided to exert his powers and show the monks the force of his displeasure. He charged them with treason and had them tried, but the monks never wavered and as the trials reached their inevitable end, so came the executions.

  A month ago, word of the first deaths reached Mary. The men had died at Tyburn. The monks had been from the Carthusian Houses in Lincolnshire and London. They went to their execution wearing their habits, singing psalms, praying to God. One by one, they were hanged, drawn and quartered.

  Mary had prayed that day. She had knelt and prayed until her knees were raw. She prayed for their souls and she prayed to God too to lessen their suffering. And now, less than a month later, she had received word yet again, this time of a second group of monks executed once more at Tyburn. Her eyes traced the page, stopping on the name of Sebastian Newdigate from the London House of Carthusians. The man was one of her father’s closest confidants. Mary felt her heart fall into the pit of her stomach.

  They say that the king visited his old friend in prison with pretty words and promises, willing the monk to recant the words he had uttered against his sovereign. But it was all to no avail. The monk kept his silence and went to his death.

  Mary wondered if her father was sorry for Newdigate’s death. They said he was. No doubt, he was as sorry as he had been when he sent Thomas More to his death. But just like before, Henry the king was sorry but not sorry enough to recant his order for his friend to be spared a traitor’s fate.

  Her eyes went lower as she read, faster and faster, as the second half of the letter revealed yet more.

  The monks were not the only ones to defy their king. The people, Henry’s steadfast Englishmen, had also begun to fume with fury. Their king’s barbarity and his execution of good honest men had pushed them over the brink and there had been rebellion.

  There has been rebellion in my father’s England.

  The people were disgusted by their king’s deeds. Their monasteries had been closed and dismantled; good men and holy ones too were dead. They saw the pillars of their faith pillaged and their saints spat upon. They were angry. They wanted their old church and none of the changes their king was making.

  Lincolnshire had been the first to erupt. Led by one Robert Aske, the fires of rebellion raced, from the spark in Lincolnshire to the blaze in Yorkshire. Men came to oppose their king, their numbers swelling and growing until her father found himself faced with an opposition of Englishmen numbering some thirty thousand, all of them livid and ready to fight the king and his new religion.

  Her father had never seen the like. To placate them, he smiled, promising them all pardons, pledging to call parliament so that the men’s fears and qualms regarding his church could be addressed. The men, placing their trust in their sovereign promptly dispersed. All the while, her father gathered his armies, and when the chance came, he acted, retracting his pardons, hanging and executing some seven hundred good English people, Aske amongst them, putting out the flames of rebellion by dousing it with blood.

  Mary crunched the parchment in her hands. She now feared her father from the depths of her soul.

  Her mother was dead, Anne Boleyn was dead and those that he had professed to love, his friends as well as his people had their heads hung high on the Tower Gates. She stared at the page. It was time she recognized the truth, he was no longer her father; he was her king. He was the king of England and he was the Head of the Church. He would have no one doubt his divine authority in these lands.

  He had no mercy to spare, not for anyone.

  She despaired over what her father had done. She despaired too for the people of England who wished to return to Rome and to the Pope, they had fought for it, bled for it and died for it. Discontent, it roamed the width and breadth of England and yet her father refused to be swayed from his course. Death, death and more death, England reeked of death and still her father refused to abandon the ruse that was the Church of England.

  Anne Boleyn was dead. Her mother was dead. He was free of all his Queens. He could marry again. Indeed, he had married again where he wanted and just as he pleased. But he refused to abandon his Church, Mary thought sadly, because he had pride, a king’s pride. Her father would sooner sever his arm than renounce his Church of England. All across Europe, kings, queens and emperors were watching Henry and his new church. To return to the Pope would be too much shame for her father to bear. It would place him in the wrong. It would tarnish his repute and humiliate him.

  To return to Rome would be to return to my mother and the days where I am his only heir, nay, Mary thought, her father wanted another clean slate. He wanted a new canvass and a new beginning, free from the taint of all which came before. So he continues to repudiate me, she wanted to laugh. He still has no use for his daughter Mary.

  She touched her fingers to the page in front of her. Soon, she would have to send him her letter of submission, his patience, she knew, was almost at an end. She needed to cede to his will and submit to his removal of her name from the line of succession.

  She was giving in for one simple reason: she wanted to live. She wanted to survive. She had learnt from her father, her mother an
d Anne Boleyn too. It was more politic to survive. Live, and hope would follow. She needed to keep herself in her father’s good graces. In such a path laid life and the hope for better things.

  Pragmatism. Chapuys had written to her, will avail your ladyship of much.

  A sob rose in her throat, choking her with the fury running through her. Snatching up the parchment, Mary burst into activity, tearing it to pieces. The paper cut into her hands, making them bleed. Faithless. Her father was faithless. She wheezed, clutching her side. She had been ill since her mother’s death. She couldn’t eat, she couldn’t sleep and she could find no reprieve from her endless torment.

  She looked down, seeing her blood smeared across the scattered papers she had torn. Not a word in that cursed letter came from her heart.

  She had been inconsolable at her mother’s death. She had shed an endless torrent of tears. At the end, it had been Henry himself who broke the sternest brow in England. But eventually, as the days came and went, Mary staunched her tears. She picked herself up from her bed, dressed and went about her day.

  Soon, she was going to leave Hatfield. She was no longer to attend little Elizabeth and though she would never admit it, she was going to miss her days by her sister’s side. But Mary’s days at Hatfield were over.

  She was alone now, truly alone and she had to fend for herself. As for her father and his new Queen, Mary wished Jane Seymour luck and a long and happy life as the wife of the most heartless man in England.

  JANE SEYMOUR

  1537

  God send us a Prince! The prayer had been answered, at last.

  The king now had a son of legitimate issue. The death of Henry Fitzroy, the Duke of Richmond earlier in the year had thinned the king’s line of succession even more, but she had given him a son, a legitimate son. A prince.

  She tried to smile. It was meant to be a happy occasion. She was, she reminded herself, most happy indeed. She shifted listlessly as her ladies and her physicians milled around her.