by John Guy
CHAPTER 2
Smoke and Mirrors
WITH 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.1
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.2 Wolsey therefore engaged the Calthorpes. By October everything was settled and they were appointed at a joint salary of £40 a year.3
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.4 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.5 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.6 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.7 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.8
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.9 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.10
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.11 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.12
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.13
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.14
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.15 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.’16 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 ladi
es 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.17
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.18
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.19
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.20
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’.21
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 1524.22 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’.23
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’).24 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.25
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.26
Henry’s latest affair became public knowledge when a royal navy ship was named the Mary Boleyn.27 Katherine’s outward reaction was one of stony silence. As with Elizabeth Blount, she believed that Henry would soon tire of his amour. Although finding the liaison a blow to her pride, she did not envisage it encroaching on her own position or her daughter’s inheritance, especially now the princess was pledged to marry the most powerful ruler in Europe.
In private, Katherine threw all her energy into directing Mary’s upbringing, a role her husband had once sought to limit, but was now prepared to tolerate if it stopped his wife from interfering elsewhere. Besides, Henry had so far overlooked his daughter’s education, not regarding it as much of a priority. Convention dictated that, by the age of 6 or 7, a child considered to be next in line for the succession should be given a professional schoolmaster.28 Henry had sent his daughter a goshawk in the summer of 1522 in an attempt to encourage her to take up the princely sport of falconry, but that was all.29
While Margaret Pole—an educated woman and a patron of scholars—had been her governess, Mary had started to learn to read.30 When reciting the ABC, she would have begun by making the sign of the cross and then saying, ‘Christ’s cross me speed’, as all children were taught to do. And if Pole followed the example of Thomas More, who had become famous throughout Europe for giving his daughters the best education that money could buy, she would have read aloud to Mary from books such as William Caxton’
s famous translation of Aesop’s Fables with its graphic woodcut illustrations, ‘sounding and saying’ the individual vowels and letters to build simple words and phrases, and pointing to the pictures in the way children were taught then.31
As one of Mary’s godmothers, Pole had promised at her baptism to help with her religious education. The primer (or early reading book) that another godmother, Agnes Howard, had sent as a New Year’s gift would typically have contained the Lord’s Prayer, the Ave Maria, the Creed and the Ten Commandments—the texts considered to lay the foundations of a Christian education, which children were expected to learn by heart. Often included in such primers were model graces for use before and after meals, an almanac for calculating the date of Easter and a calendar of saints to whom intercessions might be made.
A talented musician who in later life owned three pairs of virginals, Pole must also have arranged for Mary’s earliest music lessons, because the princess was proficient at the virginals by the time she played host in the summer of 1520 to the party of French gentlemen.32 So much so that when Charles’s diplomats who had watched ‘the assault on the Château Vert’ said their farewells in 1522, Katherine, determined to display her daughter’s talents, would not allow them to leave until they had seen her dance and play the clavichord. As the envoys dryly remarked, Mary ‘did not have to be asked twice.’33
It may also have been Pole who taught Mary how to write with a quill-pen. Whoever taught her was not versed in the latest techniques, for among the literary cognoscenti fine penmanship was much more than a mere technique of communication.34 Whereas More’s daughters learned to shape their letters at an early age, using the clear, bold italic script originating in Italy that was iconic of the educational values of the Renaissance and in which each letter is generally formed with at least one separate pen stroke and sometimes with two, Mary was taught to write in the more conventional, cursive, idiosyncratic style familiar to her parents’ generation (see Figure 5).