by David Loades
Chapuys, who had remained sceptical about the king’s good intentions, was by early June seriously alarmed. Cromwell showed him a draft of the articles, ostensibly to invite his cooperation, but really in the hope that the knowledge of them would be communicated to Mary and that she would wake up to the gravity of her situation. Chapuys may not have succeeded, or his cautiously worded warning may have been misunderstood, because on 7 June Mary wrote again to Cromwell, clearly thinking that the problem between herself and her father had been resolved. She expressed her joy at the news that he had ‘withdrawn his displeasure’, and asked for some token before she would come to court. Three days later she also wrote to the king, copying the letter to Cromwell with a covering note begging not to be pressed in submission further than her conscience would bear.[70]
Mary’s state of mind at this point is hard to reconstruct, because she seems to have realised that she had not satisfied her father, but believed that her reservation had been accepted. Given what he knew, Chapuys can hardly have given her that impression, so it may have been derived from some unidentified (and unreliable) courtier. No reply was sent to either of these letters, and on or about 15 June the inevitable happened. The Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Sussex and the Bishop of Chichester arrived at Hunsdon, bearing the king’s commission. Mary was to be asked two questions. Would she repudiate the ‘Bishop of Rome’ and accept her father’s ecclesiastical supremacy? And would she accept the nullity of her mother’s marriage? In a stormy and emotional confrontation she rejected both demands.
This was a crisis of the first importance, because the king’s daughter was now guilty of treason on at least two counts, and the judges whom Henry consulted recommended that she should be proceeded against by law.[71] This was not Cromwell’s doing, because right up to the last minute he had been in correspondence with Mary trying to find an acceptable formula – and believed that he had succeeded. Norfolk’s mission blew any such possibility out of the water, and a few days later Cromwell penned a furious letter of reproach, castigating her for obstinacy, and lamenting his own folly in attempting to help her. It was probably never sent, but was a fair reflection of his frustration at the time. The council immediately went into emergency session. Meanwhile, setting his anger aside, the secretary worked furiously to find some solution. Mary’s execution for treason formed no part of his plans, and although it would have deprived the conservative malcontents of their figurehead, it would also have given them a martyr, and ruined any hope that he may have had of a rapprochement with the Emperor. Only if she could be forced into submission could the malcontents be sidelined and a volatile political situation stabilised. Mary’s known sympathisers, such as the Marquis of Exeter and Sir William Fitzwilliam, were excluded from the council during these emergency debates. Other friends – Sir Anthony Browne, Sir Francis Bryan and Lady Hussey – were arrested and interrogated. Apart from the last, who had openly referred to her as ‘princess’, their only offence seems to have been to speculate on what a splendid heir Mary would be – if she would only submit. The crisis lasted about a week.
It was solved eventually by a mixture of chicanery and psychological torture. Cromwell succeeded in convincing both Chapuys and Mary herself that she was within a whisker of arraignment and execution. Given Henry’s long record of hesitancy and emotional confusion in his dealing with his daughter, it is by no means certain that this was the case, but the secretary was making the most frightening noises of which he was capable – and it worked. When it came to the point, Mary did not have her mother’s steely resolve – but then Catherine had never been threatened with the axe. It was probably Chapuys who mediated the deal. Once he was convinced that Henry was serious about proceeding to extremes, he began to urge Mary to submit in order to save her life. A martyred princess might make a potent symbol, but a live one (even if slightly tarnished) was more useful. For several days the unfortunate young woman suffered from insomnia, neuralgia, toothache and other stress-related symptoms. Finally, on 22 June, she surrendered. The ever thoughtful Cromwell had apparently provided a comprehensive set of articles of submission, which she signed, and a covering letter, remitting her whole life and estate to the king’s discretion, absolutely and without condition. Chapuys believed, or pretended to believe, that she had signed these documents without reading them, but in view of the effusive letter of thanks that she wrote to Cromwell a few days later, it is clear that she was perfectly well aware of the contents.[72] Her gratitude was rather pathetic, given that all he had done was to persuade her into an unconditional surrender – but she believed that he had saved her life, and he was certainly not going to disabuse her.
MARY’S SUBMISSION
Undated, but probably 22 June 1536
The confession of me, the Lady Mary, made upon certain points and articles underwritten, in the which, as I do now plainly and with all mine heart confess and declare mine inward sentence, belief and judgement, with a due conformity of obedience to the laws of the realm; so minding forever to persist and continue in this determination, without change, alteration, or variance, I do most humbly beseech the King’s Highness, my father, whom I have obstinately and inobediently offended in the denial of the same heretofore, to forgive mine offence therein, and to take me to his most gracious mercy.
[Letters and Papers …, x, 1137, taken from Thomas Hearne, Sylloge Epistolarum (Oxford, 1716). The original does not survive.]
The great crisis therefore ended with a whimper rather than a bang, and Mary’s state of mind is hard to assess. According to Chapuys, she was prostrated with grief and remorse at having betrayed both her principles and her mother, but he was bound to say that, if only to obscure his own role in the proceedings. His object now was to preserve some credibility for her, both with the Emperor and among her own supporters, so he asked Charles to obtain a special dispensation from Rome to ease her conscience. Significantly, he did not represent her as having dissimulated her submission. This may have been for fear lest his despatches should be intercepted, but he had made far more damaging revelations in the past and, in view of his generally pro- Imperial stance, Cromwell would not have authorised such interference. He presumably knew that such a statement would have been untrue. In later life, Mary was to be deeply ashamed of her actions at this time, but in July 1536 the overwhelming impression is one of relief.
On 6 July Henry and Jane visited Hunsdon and stayed for two days. Mary was much closer in age to the new queen than she was to her own sister, or Anne Shelton, or her faithful Margaret Pole, and the two young women quickly became friends. Jane seems to have been a peaceful soul, who had a calming influence on everyone around her, and that included Mary, who was much in need of tranquillity after the trauma of the past three years.
The news of Mary’s return to favour spread like wildfire, and far outweighed any tidings of how that state of affairs had been achieved. In Rome it was thought that she would be restored to the succession, and that the English schism was about to come to an end. Elsewhere it was believed that she would be created Duchess of York, and it was reported that great crowds had greeted the Countess of Salisbury when she visited the court, on the assumption that Mary would be with her. In fact nothing dramatic happened at all, but her rehabilitation was steadily put in place. Within a few days, and before Henry’s visit, she had been invited to suggest appointments to her restored chamber, and she named three women who had been in her service before, including Susan Tonge, better known as Clarencius.[73] By mid-August her new establishment was in place, headed by four gentlewomen, and numbering a total of twentynine. There was no chamberlain, and no lady governess. In fact it was not an independent household at all. What happened was that the joint household, which had existed in principle since 1533, was reconstructed to reflect the equal status of its two mistresses. At the same time that Mary was restored, the provision for Elizabeth was reduced, and Sir John Shelton, the controller, reported on 16 August that it was now ‘served on two sides’. He estimated
that the cost of this ménage would be in the region of £4,000 a year.[74] The great advantage of such a set up from Mary’s point of view was that her chamber was ‘detachable’, and that if she wanted to go to court, or to another royal residence on her own, she could do so. In the latter event, she would have taken a proportion of the ‘below-stairs’ servants with her, but they would have continued to be paid by Shelton, who also both hired and dismissed them as circumstances required. Mary had no control over the service departments – and, more importantly, no land or money of her own. Her whole allowance came from the privy purse, and although she was scrupulously consulted over her chamber appointments, she did not make those either.
Another sign of rehabilitation was renewed talk of marriage. Early in August the Emperor sent a special envoy to suggest a match with Dom Luis, the younger brother of the King of Portugal, who had featured in earlier speculations. Chapuys, a little put out by this intervention, did not believe that Henry would allow his daughter to marry outside the realm, but would rather provide her with a suitable husband himself in order to enhance his control. No doubt aiming to frustrate such a development, he persuaded her to renew her pledge to him not to marry without the Emperor’s consent. She was, he reported, not inclined to matrimony at all, ‘save for some great advantage to the peace of Christendom’.[75] The ambassador was probably wrong in his assessment of the king’s attitude. As far as Henry was concerned, his daughter was now free again to be deployed in whatever way he thought fit. On 12 September he wrote to his ‘brother of France’, suggesting a match with the young Duke of Angoulême. Henry would legitimate his daughter, and include her in the succession – in default of male heirs – in return for Angoulême’s residence in England. How seriously this was intended we do not know. Nothing came of the suggestion, but it indicates that Mary was now back on the European marriage market, and that her status was negotiable.
Meanwhile Chapuys’ suggestion of a secret dispensation had been greeted with contempt in Rome. It was pointed out that even if secrecy were permissible in such a matter (which it was not), Henry would be bound to find out, and if he became convinced that his daughter had deceived him, her last state would be worse than her first. For his part, the ambassador made no further mention of conscientious scruples, but reported in early October that Mary had written both to the Emperor and to Mary of Hungary, his regent in the Low Countries, professing to have been enlightened by the Holy Spirit. She now realised that her mother’s marriage had been unlawful, and that the pope’s power was usurped. Of course Chapuys claimed that she had been forced to write these letters by her father, and the letters themselves do not survive, so there must be an element of uncertainty. The ambassador was writing to explain away the arrival of these unexpected (and unwelcome) epistles, putting the best gloss that he could upon the situation. If we abandon hindsight, and look only at the evidence from the autumn of 1536, it looks very much as though Mary had undergone a genuine conversion to her father’s point of view. The effect of extreme psychological pressure is often called brainwashing, and it may be either temporary or permanent. In this case it was not permanent, because years later, as queen, Mary was to use her public policies to reverse and undo most of what her father had done, including the repudiation of her mother. However, for the rest of his life, and well into her brother Edward’s reign, Mary gave not the slightest hint of dissent from Henry’s proceedings, and given the number of people on the look out for such signs, we must conclude that, for the time being at least, her conversion was genuine.
4
RESTITUTION
During August and September 1536, Mary remained at Hunsdon, exchanging friendly notes with Jane Seymour. Her father sent her £20, Cromwell the gift of a horse. She wrote to Henry commending her ‘sister Elizabeth’ – ‘such a child toward as I doubt not but your highness shall have cause to rejoice of in time coming’. This was little short of a revolution. She had never had a good word to say about the ‘little bastard’ before, and had never acknowledged her as a sister.[76] There is no sign that this letter was either forced or constrained, and it seems that Chapuys’ fretting about her bruised conscience had more to do with his agenda than hers. In October she visited the court, and Cardinal Du Bellay reported that she was ‘first after the Queen’ in precedence. While revolts against Henry’s religious policies in Lincolnshire and the north (the latter known as the Pilgrimage of Grace) were taking her name in vain, demanding her reinstatement in the succession, she made not the slightest move that could be interpreted as encouragement. As Henry and Cromwell were struggling with the biggest protest movement of the reign, she was pottering about at Hunsdon or Richmond as though nothing was happening, and not even Chapuys pretended otherwise.[77] Before Christmas she was sufficiently sure of herself to ask for an increase in her allowance, and she spent the festival itself at court, apparently quite at ease with Jane, her father and herself.
At the end of 1536 Chapuys was withdrawn. This had nothing to do with any deterioration in Anglo-Imperial relations, which were better than they had been for some time. He was simply deployed elsewhere; but the removal of his special brand of inquisitiveness and partisanship diminishes our ability to follow Mary over the following years. Early in 1537 Charles was pressing the Portuguese to make a further proposal for her hand on behalf of Dom Luis. This seems to have been primarily a negative move on his part, designed to block any attempt by the French to woo her, or any temptation on Henry’s part to diminish her status with a domestic marriage. The Emperor seems not to have been much interested in her legitimacy, but we do not know enough about the negotiation to be sure whether the Portuguese were equally indifferent. A bid was made, but collapsed during the summer.
Diego de Mendoza, who replaced Chapuys as Imperial ambassador in March 1537, came armed with ambiguous instructions, because on the one hand he was to maintain ‘amity’, while on the other hand pursue the possibility of a marriage between Mary and her strongly Catholic cousin, Reginald Pole. Had Henry known about this he would certainly have regarded it as hostile, because Pole had denounced the king as a schismatic and been condemned as a traitor.[78] Pole had also been in northern Europe with the intention of persuading Charles to support the Pilgrimage of Grace. By March 1537 the Pilgrimage had long since collapsed, but Henry’s feelings towards Pole had not changed – and were not likely to change. From the Emperor’s point of view it would have been a suitable match. Pole was an Englishman of royal blood, being a younger son of the Countess of Salisbury and a great-nephew of King Edward IV. Moreover, although he was a cardinal, he was only in deacon’s orders, and therefore not beyond the reach of a dispensation to marry. He was sixteen years older than Mary, and if they had ever met neither remembered the fact. Mendoza soon appreciated that such a suggestion would be extremely undiplomatic, and the matter was never raised in public. It remained in the back of the Emperor’s mind for a number of years, but there is no sign at this stage that Mary was aware of it. Chapuys had once claimed that Pole was the only man that she was interested in, and his statement may have caused the idea to germinate, but in truth what Mary felt was irrelevant.
More interestingly, Henry was apparently becoming aware of the new ways in which the power of statute could be applied. The second succession Act, of 1536, had not added to the Act of 1534, rather it had repealed it. Whereas it had been possible (with a little creative imagination) to believe that all the Reformation statutes down to 1535 had been simply declaring the law of God, it was no longer possible to say that when one of them had been repealed. (Nor could it logically be argued that the repeal was ‘ultra vires’, that is, beyond the power of Parliament if the original statute had been accepted.) Consequently it might be possible to arrange the succession to the throne without reference to the technical legitimacy of the candidates – a totally new concept, which if it had been around in 1460 might have prevented the Wars of the Roses.[79] The king had apparently terminated his negotiation with the Emperor by decl
aring that the argument that Mary might be legitimate because she had been born in bona fide parentum – that is while her parents were ignorant of the bar between them – did not apply because the bar was part of the law of God. He had also suggested that this issue could be resolved by having any treaty ratified by Parliament which was altogether too bizarre a concept for the very conventional Charles. The whole idea of a ‘constitutional’ solution to the succession issue was so strange to contemporaries that a similar negotiation which was being pursued with the French at the same time collapsed when Francis realised that the way things had gone in England left Mary’s rights at the mercy of the estates of the realm, so that any son of his who might marry her could have no certain prospect of the crown matrimonial.[80]
In late 1536 and early 1537 Mary seems to have spent more time in her father’s company than she had since her childhood. After Christmas she was in and out of the court, visiting Hatfield and New Hall as well as Greenwich and Westminster. Most of the early summer she was at Greenwich, before moving round the royal residences in the Home Counties during July and August. A modest ‘service establishment’ must have travelled with her, although it seems clear from the way in which the money was deployed that this remained a part of Sir John Shelton’s responsibility. Her wanderlust must have added significantly to the cost. This money all came from the treasury of the chamber, much to the occasional discomfort of the treasurer (Sir Brian Tuke); but Mary was also receiving about £450 a year in ‘spending money’ from the privy purse. This she deployed mainly on rewards to her own servants, and on gifts to the numerous servants of other noblemen, ladies and courtiers, who sent her presents.[81] She kept a band of minstrels, and her long serving jester ‘Jane the Fool’ first appears at this point. Her privy-purse expenses give the impression of a full and varied life, but there are also some surprises. Pious offerings appear only at Easter and Candlemas; there are hardly any references to hunting, or to her own musical instruments, and no mention at all of books or scholarship. It is possible that such expenses were passing through other accounts, but the impression given is that of a friendly, outgoing young woman, well liked by all who came in contact with her, but lacking any desire for either selfimprovement or political influence. In spite of her acknowledged status, Mary had no clientage, no body of dependents, and seems instead to have come to a modus vivendi with Thomas Cromwell, whereby he catered for her whims and controlled appointments to her staff. Apart from one episode in June 1537, there are no further references to her sickness, and although she employed her mother’s former physician and apothecary (both Spaniards), neither appears to have lived in her household, and they were summoned only occasionally, usually (it would appear) to one or other of the servants rather than to Mary herself.