by David Loades
Shortly after Mendoza’s arrival, Mary informed him that she had written again to the Emperor, re-emphasising the point that she had made the previous autumn, that she would not allow herself to be used in any way against her father. The ambassador, at whom this warning was clearly aimed, discreetly praised her wisdom, and tactfully let the matter drop.[82]
In the summer of 1537 Queen Jane was visibly pregnant, and the coronation that had been proposed for her was postponed. For the same reason there was no royal progress that summer, and as the autumn came on the king became increasingly edgy. Unlike Anne, Jane’s behaviour had given him no cause for either irritation or anxiety. In assuring the Duke of Norfolk that it was his own decision not to travel to the north that summer, and that Jane had not pressed him, he claimed that she:
… was in every condition of that loving inclination and reverend conformity that she can in all things well content satisfy and quiet herself with that thing which we shall think expedient and determine.[83]
Even such a paragon, however, was subject to the vagaries of nature, and Jane seems to have been uncertain when her own time was due. It was late September when she withdrew into the customary seclusion at Hampton Court, which suggests that she expected to give birth towards the end of October. However, she went into labour on the 9th.
After an easy pregnancy, the birth was hard and bitter. Special prayers and intercessions were made in London, and Henry was deeply worried. Finally, after two days and three nights, on 12 October, a son was born, who was named Edward and christened with great splendour on the 15th, with Mary standing as godmother. The whole realm rejoiced, in a way that it had not done since the early days of 1511, and on the 18th the new prince was proclaimed Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall and Earl of Caernarvon. The whole court held its breath, but the child seemed healthy. Unfortunately the same could not be said of his mother. The long struggle had exhausted her, and by the 18th she had developed puerperal fever, also known as childbed fever, a contagious disease often spread by the poor hygiene of attendants and physicians. After the christening she had been well enough to sit in her chamber and receive congratulations, but by the 23rd septicaemia had developed, and she died late on the 25th. Henry had greeted the deaths of both Catherine and Anne with relief, but this time he was genuinely distressed. Jane had not only given him his longed-for son, she had been such a gentle and loveable creature. The chronicler Edward Hall recorded of her death: ‘of none in the realm was it more heavily taken than of the King’s Majesty himself’. The king immediately moved to Westminster, ‘where he mourned and kept himself close and secret a great while’.[84] Henry had described Jane as his only true wife, and it was to be over two years before he married again.
These events affected Mary in a number of ways. Jane had been a good friend to her, and she was too distressed to attend the first stage of her funeral rites, which took place on 30 October. Mary was also no longer the heir to the throne by any English reckoning. Strictly by canon law, Edward’s birth made no difference, because Henry and Jane had been married while the realm was in schism, and no marriage conducted in those circumstances was valid. However, the total invalidity of all weddings since 1535, and the consequent bastardisation of all children under two years old, was not something that could be contemplated, let alone insisted upon. For all practical purposes Edward was his father’s heir, and was recognised as such. A splendid household was established for him, even more magnificent than that which Mary had enjoyed in the marches of Wales. Unless or until her father married again, Mary was the first lady of the kingdom, but she was a long step further from the centre of events. By 12 November she was sufficiently recovered to take her place at Jane’s actual interment, but the Christmas was spent in mourning, so there were no splendid festivities to preside over – which was probably a relief.
By March 1538 the Sheltons had ceased to preside over the joint household of Mary and Elizabeth, but it is not known exactly when they were replaced. Anne Shelton was succeeded by Lady Mary Kingston, the wife of Sir William, who probably acted as controller before moving on to the king’s household in 1539.[85] In April 1539, when Sir William was promoted, the Kingstons were replaced by Sir Edward and Lady Baynton. None of this seems to have made much difference to the domestic arrangements, and Mary’s chamber staff showed a remarkable stability throughout this period. The same servants, Susan Clarencius, Richard Baldwin, Randall Dodd, Beatrice ap Rice and others are constantly referred to.
As long as Henry remained unmarried – that is from October 1537 to January 1540 – there was a great deal of flexibility between the households. In March 1538, for example, Henry was at Hampton Court, Edward and Elizabeth about three miles off and Mary at Richmond, but this did not mean that Edward and Elizabeth were sharing a household, or that Mary was now independent. It would no doubt have been more convenient to have the two children (six months and four and half years) together, but protocol dictated otherwise. Mary attended her father’s fourth wedding, but does not seem to have spent much time at court during Anne of Cleves’ brief and problematic reign.[86] Anne was a mistake. The wedding came about because Cromwell wanted some leverage against the Emperor, and Cleves Julich was a significant cluster of territories with reformist Catholic tendencies to Henry’s taste. Anne, who was the young Duke William’s sister, was reputedly beautiful and virtuous. Holbein was sent across to paint her portrait, Henry was convinced, an agreement was signed, and the new bride arrived in January 1540. Unfortunately her descriptions (and Holbein) had flattered to deceive. Anne may well have been virtuous – indeed she was a total innocent – but she was not beautiful and had neither education nor any courtly accomplishments. Henry was profoundly disappointed, and went through with the ceremony only because he could find no immediate way out. He professed himself quite unable to consummate the union, and the couple shared the same bed for only a few nights, with polite frustration on his side and ignorant bewilderment on hers. The marriage was dissolved on grounds of non-consummation in July 1540, but Anne remained in England with a generous settlement. Later Mary seems to have developed a soft spot for this cast-off queen, who was otherwise neglected by all, but there is little evidence of that from the early part of 1540.
Nor is it known how Mary reacted to the fall of Thomas Cromwell, which occurred at almost exactly the same time. The two events are customarily linked, because it is claimed that Cromwell was responsible for subjecting his master to a disagreeable and humiliating ordeal. In fact this seems not to have been the case, because the marriage had been Henry’s decision, and Cromwell was fully prepared to provide the annulment later secured by others. He rather seems to have been undermined by a coalition of enemies (of which he had many), who succeeded in convincing Henry that he was destabilising the religious settlement by patronising heretics. Once that conviction had lodged in the king’s mind, everything that had gone wrong recently – including Anne of Cleves – suddenly became Cromwell’s fault. On 10 June he was arrested, condemned by Act of Attainder, and executed on 28 July.
Mary had no known connection with any of this, and what she may have thought we do not know. For a time, in the winter of 1536–7, she and Cromwell had been on friendly, almost convivial terms, but as Mary’s relations with her father stabilised, he disappears from the picture. Intensely busy about all manner of things, the lord privy seal (as Cromwell now was) seems to have confined himself to occasional friendly gestures. In 1538 he was occupied countermining some of those to whom Mary had been closest, but who now found themselves incriminated by the activities of Reginald Pole. Pole’s brother, Lord Montague, and Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, were arraigned and executed, while his mother Margaret, Mary’s long-time mentor, was consigned to the Tower.[87] Reginald was certainly committed to the idea that Edward was a bastard, and that Mary remained the king’s only legitimate child. It is quite possible that those with whom he was in touch in England shared that view, which was the king’s conviction and the reason wh
y he was prepared to allow Cromwell to act. He seems to have been convinced that the conspirators intended to kill Prince Edward, a charge for which the evidence was purely hearsay. However, her own priority in the succession was a position that Mary herself had ostentatiously abandoned, and she remained in the king’s favour, untouched by the so-called ‘Exeter conspiracy’. Whether she was in any way shielded by Cromwell, or simply never under suspicion, we do not know. She is bound to have viewed the fall of her erstwhile friends with sorrow, and that may have distanced her from the lord privy seal, but there is no sign of the kind of emotional crisis that followed her mother’s death. Cromwell’s own fall was also brought about by those who were in some sense Mary’s friends, but she was not implicated in their intrigues, and his removal did not affect her position in any discernible way.
After Henry married his fifth wife Catherine Howard in July 1540, Mary appears to have spent an increasing amount of time at court, and to have been living ‘on the Queen’s side’ at the time of Catherine’s fall. This was not because of any great affection between them. They were too similar in age and too different in temperament. Catherine, as it subsequently transpired, had a great deal of sexual experience, and a considerable appetite. Mary had no experience at all, and although her appetite remains a matter of speculation, ostensibly she regarded the whole business with distaste. Mary’s presence at court must have been by Henry’s wish, although the reason is uncertain. He may have hoped that the two women who were now closest to him would grow to like each other, or he may have wanted Mary to assume some of those court functions for which his much-adored young wife was temperamentally unsuitable. When the crash came, and Henry became convinced of Catherine’s infidelity in November 1541, she was arrested and her household dismissed. Mary was then conducted ‘to My Lord Princes with a convenient number of the Queen’s servants’.[88] There is no mention of her own servants, or of Elizabeth, which presumably means that the old joint household, while remaining in theory, had in fact reverted to serving Elizabeth only. Mary’s chamber certainly remained in existence, and was presumably taken for granted in this relocation. Whether Mary did not wish to rejoin her sister, or was not allowed to do so, is not clear. Her situation over the next few months is uncertain, but presumably it became peripatetic again. In March 1542 she fell ill; not this time with her usual trouble, but with ‘a strange fever’. Henry wrote, and sent his physicians, but she was not at court and he did not visit her. He was still very depressed following the revelations about Catherine Howard, and was always morbidly afraid of infection.[89] She was obviously not very far away, perhaps at Hunsdon or Richmond, but we cannot be sure.
It was not until the end of November that the king’s spirits began to revive. This was probably because of the thrashing that his forces had given the Scots at the Battle of Solway Moss, but it may also have been partly inspired by the prospect of a new Imperial alliance. Eustace Chapuys was back in England, and his chatty despatches again become a prime source for illuminating events. On 17 December he reported that Mary and ‘a great number of ladies’ had been bidden to the court for Christmas. Henry had now been a widower for almost a year, and the prospect of a new ‘petticoat presence’ was clearly a cheering one. On the 21st Mary arrived, ‘accompanied and met in triumphal manner’. She stayed for several months. This probably signalled the final break-up of the joint household with Elizabeth, because by the following summer the latter had been relocated to Edward’s establishment, and with Mary normally resident at court there was no longer any reason to keep up two fully independent houses.[90]
In the spring of 1543 Mary was again close to her father, his black mood having finally departed. Chapuys was even at one point dependent upon her for information about the intentions of the French, and she was able to reassure him about the progress of negotiations with the Emperor. A treaty was signed on 11 February 1543, which committed Henry to a new war in France. It is unlikely that his daughter, now aged twenty-seven, had any influence on the negotiations, but the favour that he was now showing her was a useful sweetener from the Emperor’s point of view, and the question of her status was not allowed to interfere. The king was, Chapuys reported, calling at her rooms in the court two or three time a day.
On 12 July 1543 the king married for the sixth and last time. Catherine Neville, Lady Latimer, had begun to interest him early in the year. Her husband was still alive at that point, but was known to be very ill, and he conveniently died in February. Catherine, better known by her maiden name of Catherine Parr, was thirty-one and had been twice married. As far as we can tell from her portraits she was no great beauty, and totally lacked the avid sexuality of her predecessor; rather she was a calm and dignified matron.[91] After Lord Latimer’s death she was sought in marriage by Sir Thomas Seymour, the brother of the late Queen Jane, who may (or may not) have been in love with her, but who was certainly on the lookout for a rich widow. The king, of course, took precedence. He probably was not ideal for her, because she had already endured two almost sexless marriages, and Henry’s fires were now spent, his once magnificent body an unwieldy hulk. She, however, was ideal for him. He no longer needed an energetic bedfellow, nor a sharp and idiosyncratic wit like that of Anne Boleyn. What he needed was a calm companion, who could become a nurse when the circumstances dictated. She had no great intellect and was certainly no scholar, but during Lord Latimer’s last illness she had begun to learn Latin, probably to enable her to read devotional works in that language. She was already friendly with Mary through mutual acquaintances at court, and the princess helped her with her studies. Mary was no great intellect either, but she was an accomplished Latinist, and the two had become close even before the king decided to make Catherine his next bride. The fact that Mary was devoted to the mass and to the ‘old ways’ in the Church, while Catherine was sympathetic to the ‘evangelical’ movement (as the proto-Protestants have been termed), never seems to have come between them. In her later and fiercer mode, Mary would probably have regarded her stepmother as a heretic, but theology was not in question at this stage and at their level of discourse, and the mass was not yet an issue.[92]
Mary was therefore one of that very select band of those who attended the royal nuptials on 12 July. Shortly after, she moved back again into the ‘Queen’s side’ of the court, and seems not to have left until after her father’s death. As a scholar, Catherine developed all the zeal of a convert, and it was she who commissioned a new translation of Erasmus’ Paraphrases into English. The humanist Latin was a bit beyond her, but Mary undertook one section. She did not complete it, allegedly because of ill health, but Nicholas Udall, the general editor, praised her efforts in his introduction:
A peerless flower of virginity doth now also confer unto [us] the inestimable benefit of furthering … the more clear understanding of Christ’s gospel …[93]
Mary attracted similar eulogies from Henry Parker, Lord Morley, in works dedicated to her, but we have no first-hand evidence of her accomplishments. From Elizabeth we have a few translation pieces, and from Catherine herself the Prayers and Meditations (in English), but from Mary nothing. This was not because she lacked the time, so it must have been a question of inclination, and we do not know whether the eulogies were anything more than flattery. Her household accounts do not indicate any expenditure at all on books, or on the patronage of scholarship. They may be incomplete, but the signs do not suggest the normal apparatus of an enquiring mind.
What the accounts do show, however, are renewed health problems. Mary ran up considerable bills with her apothecary, and was often bled. In September 1543 she was reported to be ‘very ill of a colic’, and in June 1544 confided to a friend that she had ‘byn nothing well’ for several days. The nature of these ailments is much less clear than it had been in the days of her house arrest, and may have been mere hypochondria. What they were clearly not is stress related.
The court, though, was a fairly stressful place in the 1540s, as the conservatives an
d the ‘evangelicals’ squared up to each other, with the king apparently moving now one way, now another. The conservatives scored heavily in 1539 and 1540 with the Act of Six Articles (asserting several conservative doctrines, such as clerical celibacy), the fall of Cromwell and the Howard marriage; but thereafter the evangelicals struck back. This occurred first through the destruction of Catherine Howard, then through the marriage with Catherine Parr, and then in the frustration of attacks on Cranmer (the ‘Prebendaries’ plot’) and – apparently – on the queen herself. This last (if it ever happened) may explain the king’s increasing distaste for his conservative councillors in the last two years of his life, culminating in the fall of the Howards at the end of 1546.[94]