by David Loades
In 1535 Mary was nineteen, and in normal circumstances would have been married and preoccupied with the running of a great household. As it was, her scope was extremely limited. She had no responsibilities, public or private, and the physical exercise that she craved was inevitably restricted. As she was no great scholar, boredom was probably a serious problem. There is no evidence that she was receiving any systematic instruction, and no reference to exceptional piety or devotional exercises. Several years later, one of the ladies who had served her at this difficult time testified that it had been works of classical literature – literae humaniores – that had been her solace on sleepless nights, rather than books of spiritual guidance, but the lady’s memory was selective in other respects and we cannot be sure.[54] Mary was under constant surveillance, but that was not for the purpose of monitoring her daily routine. Letters to and from Chapuys must have been privileged, because some of the things that she is alleged to have told him would have got her into serious trouble. His messages were carried by his own servants, and although Cromwell occasionally prohibited such visits, the bans were never of long duration. Correspondence with Catherine, which was surreptitious by necessity, may have escaped scrutiny, or may simply have been regarded as innocuous. Those letters that survive are full of affection and encouragement, but have no political significance. Letters from her mother’s friends and allies were, however, rather different, and there was a fuss in September 1534 over an exchange with Sir Nicholas and Lady Carew, which Anne Shelton was ordered to investigate.[55]
Following the final decision of his court in Catherine’s favour, Clement had ordered Henry to take her back upon pain of excommunication. When his ultimatum was ignored, the ban came into effect, although it was never fully promulgated, and neither Charles nor Francis broke off diplomatic relations. In December 1535 Catherine became seriously ill, and on 6 January she died at the age of fifty. In spite of all pleas, the king would not allow his daughter to visit her mother in her last illness, perhaps because he did not take the crisis seriously until it was too late. Inevitably there were rumours of poison, and it was briefly believed in Brussels that Mary was in extremis for the same reason; however, the real reason for Catherine’s death appears to have been coronary thrombosis. Mary was deeply distressed, particularly because she had been unable to say goodbye, but, contrary to what was believed in some quarters, Henry’s attitude (and possibly Anne’s as well) became more indulgent towards her. This was less for humane reasons than because they had both persuaded themselves that the old queen had been responsible for her daughter’s defiant attitude. The threat of the succession oath, which had been allowed to hang in the air since the summer of 1534, was now tacitly withdrawn, and the king sent her a substantial financial gift. All this was wasted upon Mary, sunk in grief at her mother’s death; she probably did not notice, and certainly did not care, that rather different signals were now emanating from the court.
Henry is alleged to have ‘worn yellow for mourning’ when the news of Catherine’s death reached him, and to have publicly rejoiced that the threat of war was now lifted.[56] In fact he is unlikely to have been so simple minded. The pope’s edict was now overtaken by events, but in other respects Henry’s circumstances were unchanged. Anne had still not borne him a son, but she had miscarried, probably of another daughter, in July 1534. There was no estrangement between them, but Henry’s sexual drive was almost certainly erratic. There were other problems. The behaviour that the king had found so fascinating in the young woman he was pursuing had become aggravating in a wife. The emotional scenes and passionate reconciliations were becoming tedious and unnecessary, and the pushy political schemer was becoming a liability. Anne was simply unable to adjust to the changed expectations of the man who was now her husband, and their relationship suffered consequent strains. There was nothing particularly serious in all this, but the queen had many enemies, and the king’s constant favour meant more to her than the chance of procreation.
However, during the summer progress of 1535 Anne was found to be pregnant again, and the shadows (if there really were any) retreated. It was during this progress that the royal couple visited Wolf Hall near Marlborough, the home of Sir John Seymour and his substantial brood. It was subsequently alleged that during this visit Henry’s fancy lighted upon Sir John’s daughter Jane, and that an intrigue resulted that was eventually to be fatal to the queen.[57] In fact, Jane was already at court, and the king must have known her by sight for some time – nor is there any certainty that she was at Wolf Hall at the time of the royal visit – so the story is probably apocryphal. Relations between Henry and Anne were if anything better in the latter part of 1535 than they had been a year before, and that would not have been the case if the queen’s sharp eyes had detected a rival in the undergrowth. However, the policies that Anne’s ascendancy represented remained unpopular, and while the court was in Hampshire there was disobedience at Greenwich that landed Lady Mary Howard and Lady Jane Rochford (the queen’s sister-in-law) in the Tower. Catherine’s death not only simplified matters for the king; it did the same for Mary’s supporters. Anne might now be the undisputed queen, but she was also more exposed. Should she fail again to produce a prince, there was nothing to prevent the king from trying some other lady. As well as being a nuisance, Catherine had also been a shield.
In January 1536 Henry was in high spirits, and making much of Elizabeth, as though to point to his queen’s very obvious condition. And then disaster struck. Although he was now over forty, the king still indulged in his favourite pastime of jousting, but he was no longer as agile or as skilful as he had once been, and on 24 January he took a heavy fall. He was unconscious for over two hours, and if ever he had needed a reminder of the uncertainty of mortality, this was it. Henry recovered, apparently none the worse apart from a few bruises, but five days later Anne was delivered of a stillborn son.[58] She claimed that it had been the shock of Henry’s accident that had brought this about, but there had been earlier signs of difficulty, and it is likely that the true cause was quite different. Shaken as he was, the king again became a prey to superstitious fears. Had he now done something else to offend a God who was proving so unsympathetic? Many years later Nicholas Sanders, who was a bitter enemy of everything that Anne represented, told a story to the effect that the foetus had been deformed, and that Henry convinced himself that he could not have been the begetter.[59] This was plausible in the sense that it represented a view widely held at the time that deformity in a child was the consequence of unlawful procreation; but there is no contemporary evidence either of deformity or of such a reaction on Henry’s part. What is true, however, is that like many passionate relationships, the king’s second marriage had become unstable. He was not ‘tired’ of Anne, nor had he given up hope of a son, but he was in a volatile emotional state in February and March 1536.
This was sufficient to give the queen’s enemies an opening. Mary’s friends were still numerous about the court – not least because she was now a grown woman and Elizabeth still a child. Elizabeth’s position, moreover, depended entirely upon what many privately regarded as the king’s eccentric behaviour – in other words it had been artificially created and could soon be changed by the same means. Mary may well have seemed a better long-term bet. More critically, however, Thomas Cromwell changed sides. He had for several years been turning Henry’s aspirations into political facts by deft jurisdictional engineering, and as long as Catherine had been alive an alliance with the Boleyns had been necessary. Now it was not, and the queen’s Francophilia was becoming a serious embarrassment to his preferred foreign policy. No one knew the fragility of Henry’s mind better than Cromwell, and at some point during April he or his agents managed to sow in the king’s mind the idea that Anne was guilty of adultery.[60]
Exactly how this was done we do not know, and there has been (and still is) much debate about faction and conspiracy. The queen’s own behaviour did not help. She had a feisty, flirtatious element
in her makeup that was probably quite harmless, and which Henry had frequently indulged in the past, but now it suddenly became significant, and in his eyes sinister. An incident with Sir Henry Norris at a joust on 30 April bounced him over the edge into overt suspicion, and a ‘confession’ extracted (probably under torture) from a court musician named Mark Smeaton converted suspicion into irrational certainty.[61] Quite suddenly, no story of Anne’s misconduct became too implausible to be believed. She was arrested, and under extreme pressure became hysterical. She had been guilty of adultery with a hundred men, including her own brother; she had mocked the king’s sexual prowess; even Elizabeth’s legitimacy became suspect. Henry is alleged to have confided to some unnamed person that she was really a witch, and that explained the years of ascendancy that she had enjoyed over him.
With the king in a state of maudlin self-pity, and self-interested enemies ready to exploit any charge against Anne, there was no chance that either the queen or her alleged accomplices would receive a fair trial. The latter were arraigned by a special common law commission (‘oyer et terminer’, in legal French terminology) on 9 May, and the queen and her brother, Lord Rochford, by their peers on the 15th. Although the charge of witchcraft was not mentioned, all were found guilty of treasonable adultery and sentenced to death. On 19 May Anne was beheaded at the Tower.[62]
Although some doubts remain, most of the historians who have studied these events in detail believe that she was ruthlessly framed by people who understood both her own weaknesses and the king’s, and that the motivation that drove most of them was a desire to see Mary restored to her rightful place.[63] However, there has from the time of the tragedy itself been an alternative explanation of Henry’s motivation. Less than a fortnight after Anne’s execution, the king was quietly married to Jane Seymour, and some contemporaries believed that the whole plot had no other end than to enable the king to dispose of a wife who no longer interested him, and obtain a replacement. Cromwell may indeed have had such a thought in mind, because he was not particularly committed to Mary, but was very aware that the king still needed a son. The miscarriage of 29 January may have had a bigger influence on his mind than is usually admitted. Anne was around thirty-five (her exact age is unknown), and had been married to Henry for three years. In that time she had borne one daughter (who had been conceived before the marriage) and one stillborn son. Catherine had last conceived at thirty-three. There was a very strong case for arguing that the king needed a new wife, if only his affection for Anne could be overcome. The method was ruthless, but she was far too skilful a politician to be shunted aside, unlike Henry’s next wife but one, Anne of Cleves. As was later to be said of the similarly formidable Earl of Strafford, ‘stone dead hath no fellow’.
Not content with executing his wife, Henry decided now to repudiate the union altogether, and the marriage that had cost him so dearly only three years before was declared null and void. This could not be done on grounds of adultery, real or alleged, and the impediment that was used was probably consanguinity – the blood relationship established between them by Henry’s previous sexual intercourse with Anne’s sister Mary. We cannot be sure because the trial papers have disappeared. This had been well known to Cranmer all along, and if he claimed to have ‘discovered’ it at this stage, then his claim was disingenuous, which reflects no credit on any of the parties involved.[64] The effect, of course, was to bastardise Elizabeth – something that Eustace Chapuys had been claiming all along – and therefore ostensibly to clear the way for Mary’s rehabilitation in a way that Anne’s execution alone could not have done. However, that did not happen, and it is at this point that the divergence in aim between Cromwell and his conservative allies becomes clear. Whether Henry had really taken a fancy to Jane Seymour early in the year – or even in the previous year – is not relevant. The chances are that the flirtation that was observed and commented upon was no more than a convention of courtly love, and was understood as such by all those who were close to it. However, Henry did take Jane as his wife with remarkable (some thought indecent) speed as soon as he was free to do so. Jane was twenty-seven, and the fact that she was unmarried may have had more to do with Sir John’s inability to find an adequate dowry than with any physical unattractiveness. To the modern observer she looks plain and dumpy,[65] but she had one big thing in her favour: she came of a proven breeding stock. Sir John had a quiverful of both sons and daughters – hence his inability to provide for them all – and although Jane’s own fecundity was a matter of speculation, the omens were good. Cromwell’s intention seems to have been to persuade the king to sweep the past aside and to start again. This was aided by the death in July of the Duke of Richmond. Henry was genuinely distressed by the loss of his only son, but it removed one more complicating factor. He now had no son, illegitimate or otherwise, and two illegitimate daughters, so he was free to make whatever arrangement seemed best to him.
It soon became apparent that this did not include a reconciliation with the pope. Jane and her brothers were religious conservatives at this point – indeed Mary’s supporters thought of them as potential allies – but the one achievement of the last five years that the king was not prepared to abandon was the royal supremacy over the Church. With Catherine and Anne both dead, he could in theory simply have returned to the position of 1529, and Pope Paul III apparently expected him to do no less, but neither Henry nor Cromwell had any such intention. If Mary were to be returned to her father’s favour, it would be on his own terms, and not because her legitimacy had been restored by some wider settlement. The indicators were already there for those that could see them. A few days before the crisis broke over Anne’s alleged misdemeanours (but not necessarily before the king was aware of them), he told Chapuys in response to another of the ambassador’s endlessly repeated petitions:
As to the legitimation of our daughter Mary … if she would submit to our grace, without wrestling against the determination of our laws, we would acknowledge her and use her as our daughter; but we would not be directed or pressed herein.[66]
Anne’s execution made no difference to this determination. Later in May Chapuys wrote that the council, the common people, even Jane Seymour, were urging Mary’s unconditional restoration, but he admitted that the king had given no sign of agreeing to it. Everyone waited and hoped. The pope suspended Henry’s excommunication in the hope of a negotiation; Charles hopefully suggested a marriage with the Infanta of Portugal; and Mary’s old servants began to turn up at her residence at Hunsdon in the hope of being re-employed. This last was particularly tricky, because with Elizabeth’s bastardisation the household lacked any specific status. It was easy to assume that Mary was now the senior partner, but unsafe to do so until the king declared his mind. Chapuys advised Lady Shelton not to take on anyone without the king’s explicit authorisation.[67]
Mary herself was either disarmingly innocent or deeply guileful; and most indications suggest that she was innocent. In spite of a sophisticated education, she had an instinctive tendency to see the world in terms of black and white. When her parents had fallen out, Catherine was white and Henry was black. When the nature of Anne Boleyn’s influence became clear, it was she who became black, and Henry (sort of) white. Consequently, when Anne ended on the scaffold, Mary not only felt totally vindicated, but also expected her father to revert automatically to being the loving indulgent parent she remembered from her early childhood. Without giving any thought to what else had happened in the meantime, she awaited the summons to return to court and to favour. In the latter part of May she was receiving congratulations from everyone except the person who really mattered. No word came from Henry. Realising after a while that she was expected to make the first move, on the 26th she wrote to Cromwell, asking for his intercession, now that ‘that woman’ who had alienated her from her father was gone. The secretary replied, promptly and correctly, informing her that obedience was expected as a condition of reinstatement.[68] Surprising as it may seem, Mary did
not apparently see what he was driving at. On the 30th she wrote again, asking to see her father, and undertaking to be ‘as obedient to the king’s grace as you can reasonably require of me’. It seems that she really believed that the issue that had so fundamentally divided them for the last three years had been no more than the product of Anne Boleyn’s malice. If that was so, then she probably thought that the royal supremacy was equally insubstantial, and would simply go away in the sunshine of a new age.
The disillusionment that followed was cruel, but not the result of any hardening of Henry’s heart. His position remained exactly what it had been. If she would accept her own illegitimacy, and his authority over the Church, he would receive her back into his favour – and if not, not. It was not quite clear what that favour would mean, because a position in the succession was not on offer at this stage; however, an independent household, a place at court and renewed marriage negotiations can reasonably be assumed. Without waiting for a reply to her second epistle to Cromwell, on 1 June Mary wrote directly to the king. She congratulated him upon his (very) recent marriage, and asked leave to wait upon the new queen. She acknowledged her offences in general terms, and begged his blessing and forgiveness ‘in as humble and lowly a manner as is possible’. Unfortunately the effect of this dutiful abasement was marred by an unacceptable reservation. She would obey her father in all things ‘next to God’. She humbly besought ‘your highness 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’.[69] Since this reservation covered both the points at issue between them, she was conceding nothing in spite of her humble tone, and Henry did not even bother to reply. Instead, he caused to be drawn up a set of articles of submission to be presented to her, articles that allowed no room for either evasion or equivocation.