Mary Tudor: The First Queen

by Linda Porter

  The countess had assumed the role of lady governess by May 1520, when Mary was four years old. Her appointment seems to have been at the express wish of the queen, who counted Margaret Pole among her closest friends. Margaret’s son, Reginald, a key figure in Mary’s reign, claimed that Katherine had been so keen for Margaret to take on the role of lady governess that she had been willing to go to his mother’s house in person with Henry to implore her to take on the burden.6 This does not seem to have been necessary. Margaret Pole knew her duty and was devoted to the queen.They had known each other since Katherine first came to England. Margaret’s late husband, Richard Pole, had been Prince Arthur’s Lord Chamberlain, and she had accompanied him to Wales during the brief five-month marriage of Katherine and her first husband. There a bond seems to have been forged between the two women, despite the fact that Katherine spoke little English and was 12 years younger than Margaret. Arthur’s premature death at Ludlow parted them, but they continued to correspond until Henry VIII’s accession rescued Katherine from penurious widowhood and made her the queen consort she had always expected to be. Margaret had also known financial distress during this period (her husband died in 1504), but her loyalty and friendship were not forgotten. She came to court with her eldest son to attend Katherine’s coronation and was soon appointed one of the queen’s chief attendants. In 1512, possibly at his wife’s behest, Henry VIII granted Margaret’s petition for restoration of the earldom of Salisbury and she became a countess in her own right.7 This made her one of the most influential and powerful women in England. Her estates covered 17 counties as well as land in Wales, the Isle of Wight and Calais. It has been estimated that this placed her among the top five wealthiest nobles in early 16th-century England. She had four main residences in the south of England, one of which, Bisham in Berkshire, was sometimes used as a summer residence for Mary when she was a baby. Margaret’s London house, Le Herber, stood on the site of what is now Cannon Street station.

  Mary’s lady governess was one of the foremost women of the realm, an entirely fitting choice for a difficult task. But, as the daughter of the disgraced duke of Clarence, she had grown up in perilous times, well aware of the dangers of proximity to the throne.The countess had much experience, even if it was indirect, of violence and intrigue. Her father was murdered on the orders of his brother, Edward IV, in 1478. He had also fallen out with his younger brother, the future Richard III. His demise left the five-year-old Margaret and her younger brother, the earl of Warwick, as the orphaned children of a traitor. Edward IV made them his wards but their future hung in the balance when he died. They certainly presented a threat to Richard III, because they could not be declared illegitimate like Edward’s own sons.The children may well have escaped a similar fate to that which befell the princes in the Tower of London. Instead, they were sent north to Yorkshire. Henry VII placed Margaret and her brother in his mother’s household on his accession and they returned to court. Margaret was married probably the following year to Richard Pole. She was a very young bride but the marriage seems to have been happy and gave Margaret security and stability, both of which had been lacking in her life until then. Her approach to the job of bringing up Princess Mary demonstrated how much she valued those aspects of her life. She certainly fared better than her brother, who was put in the Tower of London and later executed when he tried to escape with the pretender Perkin Warbeck.

  When the countess of Salisbury entered Mary’s life she was 47 years old and still an imposing woman. ‘Tall, thin and elegant, she boasted the auburn hair of the Plantagenets and the pale skin which accompanied such colouring.’8 She had five children of her own, including one daughter, Ursula, and she was intelligent, virtuous and pious. No stain attached to her person or behaviour and she had the considerable advantage of knowing the court and its etiquette inside out. A better choice for Mary’s welfare or role as a princess could not have been made.

  Her influence appears to have been quickly established. On 13 June 1520, the Lords of the Council wrote to Henry, who was in France with Katherine to attend that ostentatious display of one-upmanship between himself and Francis I known as the Field of Cloth of Gold, that Mary was ‘daily exercising herself in virtuous pastimes and occupations …’9 This was, of course, to be expected. No parent, and certainly not a king, wants to hear that his child is misbehaving, and playtime was probably not a 16th-century concept. But this does not mean that Mary was always treated as a miniature adult.The pattern of her year changed with the seasons, but the main excitement came at Christmas. Then the countess of Salisbury and other members of the princess’s entourage made sure that there was plenty to entertain a little girl.

  The household accounts give us a glimpse of the type of Christmas that Mary experienced. It is a far cry from the Germanic Christmases that were introduced into Victorian England and seems closer to a medieval celebration. But it was lively and very visual. The content did not differ greatly over time, but Mary may well have found such familiarity enjoyable as she grew older. In 1521 there was a Lord of Misrule, a kind of master of ceremonies, to lead Mary’s festive entertainment. He was one of Mary’s valets, John Thurgoode. Three boars,‘furious and fell’, were purchased for the proceedings and the highlight was the ceremonial introduction of the boar’s head,‘crown’d with gay garlands and with rosemary, smoak’d on the Christmas board’. The boar’s head was an impressive sight, and painters and decorators were brought in to gild and decorate it.

  Thurgoode was paid 40 shillings (around £700) for the costumes and entertainments he devised that Christmas.These involved a considerable number of players and props and a lot of activity and noise.There were two tabourets, a man who played the Friar and one who played the Shipman, a stock of visors, coat-armour, gold foil and coney-skins and tails for mummers. It is not clear precisely how these were used but there appear to have been a succession of tableaux or short plays. As well as the Shipman and the Friar, Thurgoode ordered four dozen ‘clattering staves’, two dozen morris pikes, 12 crossbows, gunpowder, four gunners, ten dozen bells, a hobby horse and enough straw ‘to cover twelve men in a disguising’. Finally, in what seems to a modern reader a distressingly heartless role, there was ‘a man to kill a calf behind a cloth’.10

  There is every reason to suppose that Mary liked these raucous interludes. She loved such entertainments when she grew up and they figured significantly at her own court. She probably found them, as did her contemporaries, amusing and diverting. Her father was an inveterate japester who loved the old chivalric tradition of surprise and disguise. It is not hard to imagine the young princess laughing out loud at the comic antics played before her. So much of her life as a child seems to the modern eye to have been serious and dutiful, but it was not without times of relief and pleasure. Music became an early and abiding pastime and her delight in it was something she shared with her father. It may have been the earliest part of her education, and her precocious enthusiasm was noted when she was just two years old. On one of her visits to court she heard the Venetian organist, Dionysius Memo, playing for her father’s guests and ran after him calling, ‘Priest, priest!’, not because she was interested in his religious role but to encourage him to play more.11 Henry was proudly indulgent of this slight lapse in his child’s otherwise dignified behaviour. Her taste he could not fault, since it had been Henry himself who brought Memo, the organist of St Mark’s, to England not long after Mary’s birth. Memo would give concerts after dinner, sometimes lasting up to four hours,‘to the incredible admiration and pleasure of everybody’. It seems likely that he was Mary’s first music teacher. No young princess could have had finer.

  The combination of lighter pastimes with an orderly existence would not in any way have deflected the countess of Salisbury’s prime objective, which was to prepare her charge for the life of an English princess and a European queen. For even if there were, in the future, to be a male heir to Henry VIII, Mary’s potential on the European marriage market was scarcely
diminished. Henry always wanted a son, but now he had a daughter he was determined to use her as a diplomatic tool, early and often. This was not heartless, it was just good international relations. Accustomed to command from the moment she acquired speech, Mary found out not long afterwards that there would always be a string of suitors for her hand and that her appearances at court would often coincide with some new marriage negotiation. By the time she became queen, there had been so many suitors and betrothals that it seems unlikely that she could have kept track of them all herself.

  The first of these came before Margaret Pole was part of her life. At the age of two and a half, Mary was betrothed to the dauphin of France and went through a form of marriage ceremony at Greenwich with her future husband’s proxy, the French admiral, Bonnivet. Wearing cloth of gold and a bejewelled black velvet cap, she behaved impeccably during a long ceremony in which the bishop of Durham preached about marriage for the edification of the adults present. Henry may have been serious at the time but the power games of mainland Europe made it improbable that his daughter would ever be delivered to France. She was not expected until the dauphin was 14 and could consummate the marriage. As shrewd a participant in the ebb and flow of diplomacy as Henry VIII would at least have suspected that the path ahead was not straight. But, for the time being, it looked like a glorious match, even if Katherine of Aragon privately preferred one of her own relatives as a husband for Mary.

  The first sign that all was not well with this Anglo-French union came when Mary failed to accompany her parents to the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520. The meeting had been postponed from 1519, when Mary was expected to attend, but when it finally took place, she was not there. Her absence may have been regretted by Francis I’s plain but intelligent wife, Queen Claude. As Mary’s prospective motherin-law she had already sent a jewelled cross worth six thousand ducats and a portrait of her son, the dauphin, but she was not rewarded with a sight of his child bride. There could have been any number of reasons for this, of course. There was tension between Queen Katherine and Cardinal Wolsey, a deterioration of what was often a difficult relationship. Perhaps Katherine did not want her daughter, still so young, caught up in this, or maybe she and Henry felt that a camp, no matter how luxurious, was not the right place for their child to be introduced to her in-laws and the devious world of diplomacy.We shall never know whether Henry would have shown off a son, if there had been one. As it was, Mary was spared any awkwardness and Henry did not have to face any potentially difficult questions about the succession.

  The king of France, however, was not to be so easily deterred. Before Henry had even returned to England, Francis sent three of his gentlemen to see the princess. No doubt he wanted to make sure that she was in good health and did not have some physical or mental defect that had been concealed. Their coming was unexpected and their reception demonstrates how much importance was attached to the occasion and how the political and social establishment rallied round the princess. ‘Notwithstanding the short warning’, they were banqueted by the mayor of London, shown the major sights of the capital and entertained by the duke of Norfolk.

  The countess of Salisbury would have explained to Mary who the gentlemen were and what was expected of her during their visit, perhaps even rehearsing the princess in what to do and say. Mary handled the situation with great aplomb for one so young, surrounded as she was by all the great and the good of England who were not accompanying her father to France. ‘There were with her divers lords spiritual and temporal; and, in the Presence chamber, besides the lady governess … the duchess of Norfolk, her three daughters’ and several other titled ladies. The princess was a credit to herself, her parents and the probably anxious Margaret Pole. Her behaviour and demeanour were completely appropriate to the occasion. She entertained her visitors graciously on 2 July at Richmond, ‘with the most goodly countenance, proper communication and pleasant pastime in playing at the virginals’.12 The French deputation left suitably impressed by their royal hostess, after further generous hospitality: ‘goodly cheer was made unto them … strawberries, wafers, wine and ypocras [a kind of cordial] in plenty’.Yet by the time the year 1520 was out Henry, concerned by the implications of French aggression against Katherine’s nephew, the emperor Charles V, was already considering a new match for Mary. The prospective bridegroom was Charles himself.

  Charles was 16 years older than Mary and would have to wait another six years before she could reside with him, and perhaps two beyond that before they could cohabit as man and wife. Still, it was a wonderful opportunity for the English princess. Her marriage prospects had become even grander, and no one remarked on the irony of her first suitor having been a toddler and her second a man old enough to be her father. Royal marriages had nothing to do with sentiment and only rarely with suitability.The negotiations, the hammering out of carefully considered clauses, the tactical advantages, however brief, that might accrue to the parties, these were the aspects that mattered.They certainly exercised the minds of Henry and Wolsey on the English side and Charles and his advisers across the Channel. But it was not just Henry’s underlying doubts about relations with France which made him think about other options for his daughter. In his instructions for the treaty negotiations, Henry pointed out: ‘it is to be considered that she [Mary] is now our sole heir; and may succeed to the crown’.13 This made his daughter a very valuable bargaining tool:‘We ought to receive from the emperor as large a sum as we should give with her if she were not our heir.’ It also shows that Henry did not baulk at an alliance that would surely have major dynastic implications for England if Mary did become queen in her own right. It was never suggested that Mary should marry an Englishman. She was only six years old but she already knew that her destiny was to marry a foreign prince.

  Despite the age gap, Charles was not necessarily an unsuitable husband for Mary. After all, he was family. He was her first cousin and papal dispensation was necessary for marriages with such close relations, but that was no more than a minor bureaucratic hurdle. It was precisely because Charles was her nephew that Katherine of Aragon, quietly triumphant at the disappearance of the French match, wanted him also as her son-in-law.

  Charles was a tall, lanky, rather serious young man, not at all prepossessing physically. He was no storybook prince in this respect. If Mary expected him to rival her father in appearance, she must have been very disappointed. The emperor’s prominent chin was the precursor of the famous Habsburg jaw that came to disfigure his descendants by the end of the 18th century. His father and mother had brought together Spain and the Low Countries, a union that was to prove as unhappy as their own marriage. When Charles’s father, the inveterate womaniser Philip of Burgundy, died young, he left the Spanish wife he had never loved a disconsolate widow. She lived on for another 30 years but never wanted to govern. They called her Juana la Loca (Juana the Mad), but her main problem seems to have been chronic depression. In 1519 Charles’s grandfather, Maximilian I, died and the young prince inherited Austria and Germany, as well as the ancient title of Holy Roman Emperor. It was a heavy mantle to bear. The problems that came with these vast territories, so soon to be the prey of social and religious unrest, were innumerable and, ultimately, insoluble. Charles’s life was already dedicated to ceaseless hard work and the merry-go-round of diplomacy and war. Henry VIII’s task as king of part of a small island must have seemed easy in comparison.

  In 1522, as any dutiful fiancé should, Charles came to visit England. The treaty of Bruges, in which he and Mary were affianced and Henry promised him support in his continental struggles, had been signed the year before. Charles may have wanted to reinforce Henry’s commitment by putting in a personal appearance. Perhaps he was at least curious to see his young cousin, though neither he nor Henry privately thought that there was much likelihood of her ever becoming his wife.We do not know how Mary felt.The idea of marriage can mean little to a six-year-old, especially one brought up an atmosphere as rarefied as Mary experienced. S
he would have associated her parents’ marriage with being at court for great occasions, with the reverence they received and the power they evidently enjoyed. But since she had known only privilege herself, this may all have seemed perfectly natural. No doubt the importance of what was being arranged for her would have been explained in general terms and emphasis laid on the way she was to behave when she met the emperor. It has been suggested that Katherine may have put romantic ideas into her head about Charles and fed childish fantasies about the thrilling prospects of the imperial bridegroom who awaited her. But who knows what Mary’s fantasies were? The pony and goshawk she was given about the same time may well have been more attractive preoccupations. Katherine was not an excitable woman by nature and though she would have wished - expected, indeed - for Mary to behave with all the aplomb that a carefully prepared little princess could muster, reminding her daughter of her dignity and underlining her importance are not the same as encouraging the child to think she was in love.

  The visit was a great success at the time and both Mary and Charles played their parts perfectly. He had already had favourable reports on Mary’s musical and dancing skills from his ambassador, who was invited to inspect the prospective bride’s abilities in these courtly pursuits. On this occasion, Mary played the spinet and performed a French dance, the galliard.14 Perhaps when Charles arrived she wore some of the jewellery that had been specially made for her, an impressive brooch with the name Charles on it, or another with The Emperour picked out in lettering. We do not know whether she danced in person for her cousin, but it seems probable that her parents would not have missed the opportunity for Mary to impress.