by G. J. Meyer
The death of Catherine early in 1536 brought fresh grief; even at the end Henry would not allow Mary to visit her mother. The political situation, however, was unaffected by the passing of the old queen (who was all of fifty when she died). It was her daughter, not she, who had a claim to the throne and therefore constituted a challenge to the new queen’s security. Everything did change four and a half months later, however, with the nullification of Anne’s marriage followed by her beheading; now the child Elizabeth was no less a bastard than Mary. Suddenly everything seemed open to negotiation and rearrangement. With no woman living who could claim to be his wife, Henry was free not only to marry whomever he chose but to do so with the blessings of the church; a healing of the breach with Rome had become entirely possible. The pope expected this to happen, as, probably, did Mary. Henry, however, appears never to have considered compromising the supremacy that he had taken such extreme measures to achieve. He wed Jane Seymour without so much as a nod in Rome’s direction and proceeded with the consolidation of his power over the church. Nor did he display any interest in reconciliation with his eldest child.
It was left to Mary to seek an end to their estrangement. She began by approaching Cromwell, now the king’s right hand, who replied that nothing would be possible until she showed herself willing to extend to her father the obedience that was his right. Cromwell meant, by this, that Mary must acknowledge that her parents had never been married and that Henry was supreme head of the church. Mary, however, chose to put an easier interpretation on his words, taking them as an invitation to assure her father in general terms that she remained his faithful and loving daughter. She wrote directly to the king, asking him “to consider that I am but a woman and your child, who hath committed her soul only to God, and her body to be ordered in this world as it shall stand with your pleasure.” She assured him of her willingness to submit to him in all things “next to God.”
Clearly she had little understanding of who her father was at this stage—of how convinced he was that the only way to be faithful to God was to be submissive to him. She must have had no understanding of how little the destruction of Anne Boleyn had done to soften his attitude toward anyone who resisted. Her three words “next to God” acted on Henry like a red cape on a bull. Instead of answering Mary’s letter, he sent the Duke of Norfolk and the bishop of Chichester to where she was now being kept, at Hunsdon. They demanded to know whether she accepted the Act of Supremacy and her own illegitimacy. In refusing both points, Mary made herself doubly guilty of high treason. The climactic struggle between father and daughter was joined, throwing Mary into a situation vastly more dangerous than the worst of her earlier experiences.
The king and Cromwell had all the advantages, and they used them to full effect. What Cromwell wanted was not Mary’s death, with its incalculable political risks, but her surrender. Therefore, though he removed members of the Privy Council suspected of being sympathetic to her, at the same time he brushed aside the demands of other members that she be brought to a trial that could only end in her conviction. And though some of her oldest and closest friends were arrested and questioned, this was done not in the expectation of learning anything but simply for the purpose of frightening Mary and anyone inclined to support her. Finally, three weeks after her first hopeful letter to the king, she broke, signing the articles of submission that Cromwell had prepared for her. Thereby she repudiated not only the Roman church but, in a real sense, her mother. Anyone inclined to judge her for this act should remember that she was almost totally isolated, threatened not only with her own destruction but that of her most faithful friends, and barely twenty years old.
It was perhaps King Henry’s most grotesque victory, grotesque not only because he achieved it over his own helpless child but because he seems to have crushed, very nearly to have extinguished, her spirit. Chapuys would claim, in his dispatches, that Mary had yielded without reading the articles of submission, that her motive had been to save not herself but her friends, and that she was prostrate with guilt over having compromised herself so deeply. Other evidence suggests that her surrender was very real and very nearly complete. A letter of effusive thanks to Cromwell for saving her life gives no hint of being anything but sincere. The same is true of Mary’s letters to the emperor Charles and his sister, the regent of the Netherlands; she told them of having been shown by the Holy Spirit that the pope had no authority in England, and that her parents’ relationship had been incestuous. It is possible that she wrote such things in the expectation that her correspondence was being intercepted by Cromwell; there is no way of being certain.
One thing only indicated that the autonomy of Mary’s person had not been utterly destroyed. Ordered to provide the names of those who had advised and supported her in her refusal to submit, she not only declined but said she would die before betraying her friends in any such way. At this point Cromwell—or was it Henry?—decided that the game was at an end, that nothing could be gained by further intimidation or new demands. Though not legitimated, Mary was restored to favor. Henry visited her in company with his bride Jane Seymour, invited her to begin spending time at court, and significantly increased her allowance. The household at Hatfield House was expanded and reorganized so that Mary’s standing was equal to Elizabeth’s.
By late 1536—the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace, which she did nothing to encourage or support—Mary was spending a great deal of time in her father’s presence. She established an affectionate relationship with Queen Jane, who was close to her in age and of similarly conservative religious leanings. The birth of Prince Edward in October 1537 came as an immense relief to Mary: the existence of a male heir reduced her political importance to an extent that she can only have welcomed after so many years of tension. It must also have encouraged hopes that the king might remove the cloud of illegitimacy from over her head. (In fact Henry, in futile pursuit of an understanding with France, offered at about this time to legitimize Mary in order to make possible her marriage to yet another prince of France’s royal house.) Jane’s death appears to have been at least as hard a blow for Mary as for Henry, but it did nothing to disturb her status at court. On the contrary, during the two years that the king remained unattached Mary basked in his favor, emerging as the most important female personage in England. His next wife, Anne of Cleves, came and went too quickly to present difficulties. Even during her father’s marriage to Catherine Howard, Mary remained a significant presence at court. In Catherine Parr Mary found another friend; the fact that the two women became close in spite of Catherine’s evangelical convictions is suggestive of the extent to which Mary was, at this point, unwilling to make an issue of religious differences.
A development of greater importance than Henry’s sixth marriage was the new Act of Succession of 1543. It stated that if Edward died without offspring the crown was to go first to Mary and “the heirs of her body” and then, if Mary, too, died without issue, to Elizabeth and her descendants. This act became law without any effort to legitimate either Mary or Elizabeth (the king’s marriages to their mothers remained null). It meant—bastardy always having been a barrier to succession—that for the first time in history an English king was claiming the right to choose his successors. Though it must have seemed improbable, in 1543, that not one of Henry’s three offspring would leave a child to carry on the dynasty, the act made provision for such an eventuality by giving his Grey and Clifford cousins a place in the order of succession. It is ironic, in light of what history held in store, that the descendants of Henry’s elder sister Margaret were excluded altogether. It is only through Margaret that today’s royal family is related to the Tudors at all.
King Henry’s death at the start of 1547 appeared at first to improve Mary’s position. Now she was not only first in line to the throne but financially independent. Under the terms of her father’s will she inherited property generating an annual income of nearly £4,000, which made her wealthier than anyone else in England aside fro
m the new king and perhaps two or three members of the high nobility. For the first time in her life, and she was entering her thirties now, she did not have to look to the treasury for her support. The fact that much of her property was concentrated in East Anglia, having been taken from the Howards when Henry attainted the Duke of Norfolk and had the Earl of Surrey executed, gave her a base not far from London. She had always had a good relationship with the boy Edward, so the start of his reign appeared to presage good fortune.
The good times in Mary’s life were always brief, however, and now as before, the question of religion brought trouble. It began with the Privy Council’s determination, under the Duke of Somerset’s leadership, to push ahead with innovations that the late king had consistently rejected. A decade had passed since Mary’s acceptance of her father’s supremacy. Since then she had shown herself to be consistently, almost surprisingly comfortable with the church that Henry had brought into existence—a church that conformed in most respects to Catholic tradition. In this she was no different from other leading conservatives, bishops such as Gardiner, Tunstal, and Bonner, and nobles such as Norfolk until his calamitous fall. If a definite settlement of disputed questions had not been achieved under Henry, a fairly solid truce had. It might have endured for years more, might have hardened into something permanent, if the evangelicals led by the increasingly heterodox Thomas Cranmer had not begun campaigning for further change, and if they had not received the full support of Protector Somerset, the council that he headed, and the boy-king himself. We saw earlier how Cranmer, just months after Henry’s death, issued for the use of the entire clergy a book of homilies, sermons, that propounded the archbishop’s acceptance of Lutheran dogma including justification by faith alone. This was, according to the Act of Six Articles passed by Parliament at Henry’s direction in 1539 and still in effect at the time of his death, heresy pure and simple. Not surprisingly the book met with much resistance and much complaint. Some of the more prominent objectors—Gardiner, Bonner, old Tunstal—soon found themselves in prison and deprived of their offices.
Mary, not only of royal blood and popular with the people but heir presumptive to the throne, presented the reformers with a delicate challenge. Without questioning the royal supremacy—doing so would have made her no less a heretic than the evangelicals—she protested that Cranmer and his faction were violating the law of the land, trampling on the terms of her father’s last will and testament, and imposing innovations that could not possibly be acceptable until her brother reached his majority and became capable of leading the church. When Parliament changed the law, nullifying the Six Articles and other obstacles to reform, she again took the position that it had no right to do any such thing during the king’s minority. By 1549, when the new reign’s first Act of Uniformity replaced the mass with Cranmer’s service and ignited the Prayer Book rebellion, Mary protested more vehemently than before and received from the council a letter advising her to be “conformable and obedient to the observation of his Majesty’s laws.” Her response dripped with contempt. She told the councilors that the Act of Uniformity was “a late law of your own making for the altering of matters of religion, which in my conscience is not worthy to have the name of law.”
For much of the next four years she was virtually at war with the government whose head she would become in the event of Edward’s death. With the fall of Somerset and the rise of John Dudley, things grew so much worse that Mary once again believed she was going to have to flee to the continent to save her life. Charles V sent three ships to rescue her by dark of night; at the last moment, though frightened and confused, she decided that duty required her to stay in England. She became the most conspicuously defiant champion of the old ways. Ordered to travel to London and present herself to the king and his council, she entered the city at the head of an entourage of some 150 friends and retainers, every one of whom displayed either a rosary or some other forbidden symbol of the old faith. Ordered by Edward to conform, she reduced him to tears by replying that she would die first. Several of the senior officers of her household, upon refusing to try to persuade her to abandon the mass, were thrown into prison. When representatives of the king arrived to inform her that she would no longer be permitted to hear mass (the delegation was headed by Baron Rich, now lord chancellor and a very wealthy man, the same Richard Rich whose perjured testimony had facilitated the killing of Thomas More and John Fisher two decades before), she dismissed them scornfully.
The conflict ended in a standoff. The law against the saying or hearing of mass continued in effect, but no effort was made to enforce it in Mary’s case. Eventually she was even able to resume her visits to her brother, spending time with him amicably as long as both avoided the subject of religion. It was clear to everyone, however, and to Edward more than to most, that in all of England there was no enemy of his evangelical establishment more dangerous or determined than his heir. Nothing could be less surprising than Edward’s decision, when he knew that his life was ending, to prevent Mary from succeeding him. Or Mary’s commitment, once she had stopped Dudley from putting Jane Grey on the throne, to destroy the Edwardian Reformation root and branch.
20
Another New Beginning
From the hour she entered London as queen, Mary Tudor faced a daunting array of challenges. She had to take charge of a government most of whose senior members—both those who were now her prisoners and those still in office—had actively opposed her succession. She had to assume the headship of a church whose primate publicly condemned her as a heretic and had supported Jane Grey to the end. The treasury she had inherited was not only empty but deep in debt, her kingdom too enfeebled by financial mismanagement to play a weighty role in international affairs, her people confused and divided by three decades of religious convulsion.
Of course she had an agenda of her own and her own priorities. She wanted a regime, a religious settlement especially, that accorded with her view of what was true and false, what right and wrong. To accomplish this she was going to have to decide who were her friends and who her enemies, who could be trusted and who could not. She had had almost no training in government, had in no way been prepared to rule. And, being a thirty-seven-year-old virgin whose heir was both the daughter of her mother’s great enemy and obviously on the evangelical side of the religious divide, she had good reason to want to produce a child. But she had little time in which to do so—her biological clock was approaching sunset.
When she arrived at the Tower, which in keeping with tradition was to be her residence until her coronation, Mary was welcomed by a rather pathetic little collection of eager well-wishers. One was the old Duke of Norfolk, an octogenarian now, who had remained a prisoner since narrowly escaping execution at the end of Henry VIII’s reign. Another was Stephen Gardiner, who had risen high in Henry’s service only to lose his seat on the council, then the Bishopric of Winchester, and finally his freedom. Still another was young Edward Courtenay; like his cousin Mary he was a great-grandchild of King Edward IV, and he had literally grown up in the Tower after being locked away at the time of his father’s execution fifteen years before. For them and for others, Mary’s arrival meant deliverance from what otherwise might have been confinement until death. And for all of them, release meant more than liberty. The bishops deposed during Edward’s reign were soon restored to their sees. Gardiner was not only restored but became chancellor. Norfolk was given back much of the Howard family patrimony and his place on the council. Courtenay was made Earl of Devon and, because of his royal blood and his family’s conservative credentials, found himself put forward as a possible husband for the queen. If they were not all her friends, strictly speaking, at worst they were the enemies of her enemies. That was not nothing.
Mary was generous even with those who obviously were her enemies—at least with most of them. The whole sprawling Dudley connection—John, Duke of Northumberland, his brother Andrew, all five of his sons, his daughter-in-law Jane Grey and Jane�
��s father the Duke of Suffolk—were in custody along with various of their supporters and allies. Most were put on trial for treason, convicted (the guilt of the accused being, for once, certain beyond possibility of doubt), and attainted. But only the duke and two obscure henchmen were executed. Jane and her husband Guildford Dudley, though under sentence of death, were kept in the Tower in comfortable circumstances, as were Guildford’s brothers John, Earl of Warwick, Ambrose, Robert, and Henry. Suffolk was, somehow, released without being charged. Thomas Cranmer, who after initial hesitation had thrown himself fully behind Dudley’s attempted coup, was merely confined to Lambeth Palace, the archbishop of Canterbury’s London residence. He was permitted to preside at King Edward’s funeral ceremony and to use the reformed rites in doing so. Mary declared that she “wished to constrain no man to go to mass” or to “compel or constrain other men’s consciences.” A proclamation informed her subjects that nothing would be done to alter the Edwardian settlement until a Parliament was assembled to address the question. When that old champion of reform John Dudley faced the crowd that had gathered to witness his execution, he professed himself to be a Catholic who prayed for England’s return to the old faith. (He could hardly have meant the Roman Catholic faith, but possibly he was hoping to win favor for all the members of his family whom Mary had in custody.) The conservatives must have thought that a reversion to the traditional ways was going to be accomplished without great pain: Dudley’s conduct would have encouraged them to believe that the evangelical movement was made up entirely of self-seeking opportunists prepared to abandon their heresies as soon as pressure was applied.