Mary Tudor: The First Queen

by Linda Porter

  Anne’s early belief that she would be queen in a matter of months shows that she did not consider how, or even whether, Katherine would fight. The queen and her daughter were an irrelevance and their fate, which would be decided by the king, did not directly concern her.The combination of Henry’s love and her ambition was a heady one, and Anne already knew too much about court politics to waste any time on remorse. The fact that her elevation would bring untold distress to a blameless woman and a young girl brought up as the heir of England never seems to have troubled her at all. Neither did the realisation that she would certainly make enemies of some of the most powerful men in England. Instead, she began to work on the advancement of her own family, particularly her father, Thomas, and brother, George. She could not succeed with the king’s love alone, though the absolute certainty of his commitment to her gave her the confidence to carry on. When Henry faltered, she remained firm. And she believed she knew who stood in her way.

  After the disaster at Blackfriars, Anne, who had been close by throughout proceedings, though not overtly living with the king, sat down with him to discuss the next steps. Clearly, the approach that Henry’s ministers had been following was not working and a new one was needed.The most convenient explanation for what had gone wrong was not Katherine’s intransigence, or the strength of her legal arguments, but the failure of Cardinal Wolsey, as Henry’s chief minister, to bring about the desired ruling from the pope. Henry was increasingly troubled by being dependent on papal authority for the ordering of his own affairs, and Anne was convinced that Wolsey no longer supported her, if he ever had. So the cardinal became the first major victim of the divorce. During 1529, his position became more and more untenable. Katherine considered him a long-standing enemy who sought to ruin her because he was pro-French. Anne, who for a while saw him as the person most likely to deliver Henry’s annulment, lost faith in him and believed, with some justification, that he had become an obstruction. He was damaging her chances of ever becoming queen.

  Wolsey fought a rearguard action that delayed, but could not prevent, his fall.The king was at first as reluctant to dismiss him as he was to take any irrevocable steps in the domestic sphere against Katherine. Wolsey was accused of having overstepped his legatine authority and deprived of the chancellorship on 17 October 1529. The French and imperial ambassadors concurred in thinking this was the work of Anne Boleyn, and Wolsey himself had no doubts; he knew he had mightily displeased the Lady Anne, but still he hoped some means might be found to regain her good opinion: ‘This’, he wrote, ‘is the only help and remedy. All possible means must be used for attaining of her favour.’13 Wolsey was clutching at straws. He had been so long in power that he could not recognise at first that he had lost it irretrievably.There were others, who had waited long in his shadow, only too pleased that he was gone. Power on the new privy council passed to the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, neither of whom had Wolsey’s political experience, and the Boleyns’ star continued to rise. In December, Anne’s father was created earl of Wiltshire and her younger brother, George, sent as ambassador to France.The French ambassador to Henry’s court, the astute prelate Jean du Bellay, thought George Boleyn’s youth would give rise to some amusement in France. But in England no one was laughing at Anne Boleyn when she celebrated her father’s elevation at a feast attended by the leading nobles of the realm. Their wives, including Henry’s own sister Mary, were required to give precedence to Anne. She is unlikely to have displayed much humility in accepting their curtsies, but she must have felt their contempt. It was one thing to sit by Henry’s side at a banquet and another to become queen.The process by which she would achieve this ultimate goal was still far from clear.

  And Wolsey might be deprived of much of his wealth, of his London palace and his role in government, sent off back to his archbishopric of York, but he would not lie down. Now he harboured a grudge against Anne as deep as her own against him. In the last year of his life he reversed his support for the king’s divorce, espoused the queen’s cause and kept open his channels of communication with the French government and the imperial ambassador.Whether this amounted to treason is not clear but his enemies certainly thought so, and Anne wanted him dead. She got her way, though Wolsey was spared the judicial proceedings and the public executions of other key figures who stood out against the king. On his journey south to face the charges against him he was taken ill at Leicester and died there in November 1530. Henry’s many other victims would have welcomed such a natural end.

  Wolsey had never been much of a mentor to Mary and his concern was only ever for the temporal power he relished for so long, but if he could have evaded Anne Boleyn’s continued wrath, he might, conceivably, have been a useful adviser to the princess. The years were passing and, as Henry’s commitment to Anne did not waver, so Mary’s to her mother was bound to grow. How could it have been otherwise? All of Europe knew that Mary was going to be the chief victim of the divorce, but her father never seems to have wanted to face this truth. Bastardisation did not, in Henry’s mind, mean that she would be treated dishonourably. She would always be his daughter and live the life of a great lady. It would be a diminished role but not necessarily an unpleasant existence. Children must obey and Mary would do as he required because she had no choice. Her opposition did not fit into his plans.

  So outwardly, their relationship proceeded as it had always done; she saw him at regular intervals, attended court when summoned and was treated as a princess. She lived a separate life, still with her own household and finances, still being educated as the king’s daughter. But Henry, for all his apparent paternal affection, did not want her to succeed him. It may not have been acknowledged by either father or daughter, but he had already rejected her. As time went by, and Mary left childhood behind, Anne Boleyn also needed to readjust her thinking. Depending on how Mary behaved, she could pose a threat to Anne just as serious as the one presented by Katherine of Aragon herself.

  While the countess of Salisbury strove to maintain a peaceful and secure environment for the princess, Mary did not live in a bubble. Coming to court as often as she did, she saw the new faces, knew that her godfather had gone, sensed, for all their courtesy, the tension between her parents. By 1531, the stresses and strains were too obvious to be overlooked and Mary succumbed to them, too. In April of that year the Venetian ambassador reported that she had been ill for several weeks with ‘hysteria’.14 This was the first obvious sign that Mary was being affected by the wearying struggle that consumed her parents. She was 15 years old in February 1531 and her illness may have coincided with the onset of menstruation, or, at least, been an indication of menstrual difficulties. She seems to have suffered from painful periods and the accompanying emotional fluctuations that went with this troublesome condition. During the rest of her life, she was beset by what she herself described as times of melancholy, and these bouts of depression brought her low. Concern about the outcome of the divorce only worsened this. When Mary recovered from her illness, Katherine requested that the princess be allowed to visit both her parents at Greenwich. This was refused, possibly vetoed by Anne Boleyn.The imperial ambassador thought that Anne already hated Mary more than Katherine, because she still had her father’s affection. Although all negative developments were imputed to Anne Boleyn, who was very firmly a figure of hatred with the imperialists, it is from about this time that Anne’s attitude to Mary became more defensive. Did she fear that Mary could still salvage her parents’ marriage? For whatever reason, the king was not disposed to have Mary at Greenwich at that point, but he did give Katherine permission to visit her daughter. In fact, he told her very rudely that she could stop there for all he cared, but Katherine continued to ignore these attempts at intimidation. She did spend several weeks with Mary and saw her again later in the summer. But Katherine herself, who had fought so doggedly and never doubted that God and right were on her side, could not avoid the unpalatable truth that the king would not tolerate her presence for much lo
nger. As late as the end of 1530, she was still absolutely convinced that if she could only spend an uninterrupted period of time with him, she could free him from the baleful influence of false ministers and Anne herself. Just before Christmas, she wrote to the pope:‘One thing I should like Your Holiness to be aware of, namely, that my plea is not against the King, my Lord, but against the inventors and abettors of this cause. I trust so much in the natural goodness and in the virtues of the King … that if I could only have him two months with me, as he used to be, I alone should be powerful enough to make him forget the past; but as they know this to be true, they do not let him live with me.’15 So much confidence and such inability to face the truth. Katherine was back in the early days of her marriage, when her very young husband was guided and shaped by her and all the world was good.

  A year went by, and still nothing changed in Katherine’s mind. In June, a 30-strong delegation of nobles and churchmen was sent to try, one last time, to get her to yield on the referral of her case to Rome and accept that her marriage to Henry was invalid. She refused all their arguments and pressure, and they left more overawed by the queen than she was of them. One of them, the king’s old friend, the duke of Suffolk, now set his face against the divorce.

  Henry, however, had had enough. His wife’s stubbornness and refusal to submit to his authority, the persistence of Anne Boleyn, his own resentment of imperial interference and papal vacillation, all provoked him into making a decision that had been years coming. As the summer hunting season gathered pace, he and Anne Boleyn visited a number of places in southern England, without Katherine, who normally went everywhere with Henry but who was now left behind at Windsor. She seems to have been unsure of her husband’s movements, and when she sent him a message expressing regret that she had not taken her leave of him before his departure, he made it quite clear that his patience was exhausted. He could not give a fig for her goodbyes. In a state of great alarm, Katherine sent for Mary and they stayed together till early August. There is no way at this point that Mary could have been shielded from what was happening. Her mother’s anguish must have been all too apparent, and she needed to be sure that Mary understood her side of the story.Yet, even so, the queen would surely not have represented her position (and therefore Mary’s) as hopeless. They must hold firm. They had friends who would not desert them and the king might yet change his mind.

  Sadly for the two women, he only hardened his heart. Katherine was banished from court and told to remove to The More, once Wolsey’s home and the place from which her daughter had set out for the Welsh Marches in 1525. Mary was ordered back to Richmond. When they parted, apprehensive but not despairing, they could not have known that they were saying their final farewells to each other. The queen set up a separate court at The More. It was a considerable size, and she had over two hundred people in her household. But she was removed from the centre of power, marginalised in the country as Henry had wanted four years earlier. Katherine of Aragon never saw him or Mary again.

  Her godfather, with all his power and influence, was dead. Her mother, banished and humiliated, she was not allowed to see any more. Anne Boleyn’s power was growing, and with it came vindictiveness against the princess herself. Mary made Anne nervous, a nervousness that took the form of more open hostility. In April 1531, Anne and Henry quarrelled angrily over Mary, and though they soon made up, the tension that Anne felt in connection with the princess was still there at Christmas, when she demanded that Mary be lodged as far away from court as possible. Though Anne did not always get her way, Mary was becoming increasingly isolated, as her mother’s rival intended her to be. Henry’s motives in keeping the queen and Mary apart, however, may not have been entirely dictated by Anne’s resentment. He had ample reason to think that Katherine was a bad influence on his daughter and he wanted that link broken. But this does not mean that his affection for Mary was spent. For two more years, he continued to see his daughter regularly, sent her New Year’s gifts and appears to have acted as if, from his perspective as a firm but loving father, nothing had changed. Such outward normalcy may have deluded both of them; theirs was a relationship always based on Henry’s terms, and when those terms changed, Mary was expected to accept without demur. Her father’s love was conditional on her obedience, and the example of her troublesome mother was something that the king needed to correct. It is impossible to know what passed between them at their meetings or how much Henry talked to her about his own affairs, but the likelihood is that their time together was largely social and the conversation centred on topics of the king’s choosing. Henry did not need Mary’s approval and his own attitude towards her was bound to be ambivalent. She, like her mother, seems not to have understood how much the father whom she associated with the happy times and grand occasions of her childhood was changing.The dispute with Rome over the divorce was pushing Henry to establish his own theories of regal authority and government, and his ego, at first deflated, was growing. His bonhomie was still there but his hardness increased, and with it came a capriciousness that left many of those around him not knowing where they stood. He was slow to withdraw affection, but when he did, he never looked back. Anne Boleyn herself would find this out in time. Mary, who experienced it first, was wholly unprepared for the emotional damage her father could inflict.

  Meanwhile the familiar rhythms of life continued, despite the official separation of her parents. Mary was allowed to correspond regularly with Katherine and such communications were a great source of mutual comfort. The countess of Salisbury remained constant in her care towards the royal child she had shaped, even though she knew which way the wind was blowing.There were some new faces in Mary’s household, but nothing that suggested that it would be in any way downgraded: Lord Hussey replaced Sir Philip Calthorpe as chamberlain, and his wife, Lady Anne, joined the shrinking circle of those who were later willing to risk royal displeasure in their support for the princess. Richard Wollman, the king’s almoner, left Henry’s service to add his weight to Mary’s education.

  Most welcome was the arrival of her cousin, Lady Margaret Douglas, who took over the role of chief lady-in-waiting in 1530. Margaret was the daughter of Henry VIII’s elder sister (also Margaret), the dowager queen of Scotland, by her second husband. She and Mary were of a similar age and both enjoyed the affection of their aunt Mary, duchess of Suffolk, who used her influence to promote Margaret’s appointment. A strong bond formed between the girls, which lasted all Mary’s life. Margaret’s prospects were uncertain and her background was troubled, but she herself was outgoing and light-hearted. She brought a breath of fresh air into Mary’s life at a difficult time.

  There was even the lingering possibility that Mary could escape altogether from the uncertainty of her situation in England through marriage. Henry, aware that the princess was still useful in diplomacy, had not ruled out finding an appropriate match for her.The likelihood of a French husband was receding, but there were other possible suitors mentioned, in places as far apart as Cleves, Transylvania and Scotland. Nothing came to fruition. Henry’s own marital affairs were his absolute priority and he did not want to consider whether he was ruining Mary’s prospects by the air of uncertainty that now hung over her birth. A king’s illegitimate daughter with no place in the English succession was a far less attractive prospect for a husband in the first rank of European princes. England itself, teetering on the brink of a breach with Rome and now obviously embracing heretical beliefs, was an unattractive source for a royal bride. The lady might be personally devout but her father’s schismatic tendencies were likely to make him a pariah.

  Henry no longer cared. By 1532 his decisions were becoming more focused and his timetable more urgent. It was perfectly obvious that he would not get satisfaction from Rome. The odds were too heavily stacked against him; Katherine’s case was well supported and regarded as legally watertight and Clement VII could defer a decision as long as he wanted. The process of the divorce opened Henry’s eyes to the wider
disadvantages of papal domination in ecclesiastical matters. It moulded his views on the issue of kingship itself and the idea of royal supremacy. The king wanted to control the Church in England. It needed reforming and its bishops should be answerable to him, not some distant Italian who could be pushed around by Charles V. He also still desired Anne Boleyn and he wanted to marry her. Encouraged by Anne, the king saw ways in which he could adapt the new ideas to his advantage. Anne’s supporters, some attached to her by family ties, many others convinced that she was close to winning her long struggle and eager for her patronage, were joined by churchmen such as Thomas Cranmer, who became archbishop of Canterbury at the beginning of 1533, and Thomas Cromwell, a rising politician who had once been on Wolsey’s staff. In a further sign that she was close to achieving her goal, Anne was created marchioness of Pembroke at Windsor, on 1 September 1532. The duchess of Norfolk, defiantly loyal to Katherine of Aragon, refused to demean her Stafford blood by carrying Anne’s train.

  Late in October, Henry took Anne with him for an important meeting with Francis I in Calais. It was Anne’s first time back on French soil since she left the French court in 1521. Superbly dressed and attended like a queen consort, Anne was also now in possession of the jewels of a queen of England. Katherine of Aragon had reluctantly surrendered them only at the king’s express command, not wanting them to ‘adorn the scandal of Christendom’. This was her only public outburst against Anne Boleyn, the woman she would not deign to name.