by Linda Porter
On 2 September, Dr William Butts reported to Cromwell on his examination of Mary:I came to my Lady Mary this day at 7 o’clock, whom I find in a mean state of health, but at the beginning of her old disease [emphasis added]. I have caused her mother’s physician to be sent for, with the apothecary. The cause of this rumour by the ambassador, as I can learn, comes of two things: that she [Mary] being diseased in her head and stomach, my lady Shelton sent for Mr Michael, who gave her pills, after which she was very sick and he so much troubled that he said he would never minister anything to her alone; and thus signified sharply to the ambassador.21
This brief note indicates that Mary, probably suffering from bad headaches and stomach cramps at the start of her period, had been so unwell that Lady Shelton decided to see whether she could get her some medication to ease the discomfort. Mary then suffered a severe reaction to the pills prescribed by the apothecary and was very nauseous. The apothecary, afraid that he would be accused of poisoning the princess, was thoroughly alarmed, as no doubt was Lady Shelton.
It is significant that Katherine of Aragon’s doctor was also consulted by Dr Butts. One of the arguments that Katherine used to try to get permission for Mary to join her was that she could cure her illness:‘The comfort and cheerfulness she would have with me would be half her cure. I have found this by experience, being ill of the same sickness.’ She repeated this request in 1535, saying that she would nurse Mary in her own bed. The queen did not get her wish, but the involvement of her doctor in Mary’s treatment in September helped. Restrictions were applied, however, even in these circumstances. The physicians were not allowed to speak to Mary without witnesses and they were to converse only in English. Nowhere was the precise nature of the illness spelled out. Current medical opinion suggests that Mary suffered from dysmenhorrea (acute period pain).This may have been linked to endometriosis or other conditions such as ovarian cysts, but a precise diagnosis is impossible, given the very fragmentary nature of the evidence. At the time, a mixture of ignorance and embarrassment surrounded the topic.
Mary recovered by the end of the month, but was subjected to recurring bouts of indisposition for the rest of the year and throughout 1535. Though these may have all been caused by her gynaecological condition they were undoubtedly made worse by stress. Dr Butts himself made this clear to the king, when he told Henry that ‘her illness arose only from sorrow and trouble; and that she would be well at once if she were free to do as she liked’.22 This frank assessment troubled the king, who ‘heaved a great sigh, saying that it was a great misfortune that she remained so obstinate, and that she took from him all occasion to treat her as well as he would’. But Henry was ambivalent in his attitude, and the opinion of his medical man that Mary’s health problems, no matter how nasty, were partly self-inflicted was not calculated to bring anything other than a temporary remission of pressure. When Dr Butts boldly advocated sending Mary to her mother, the king was firm in his refusal to countenance such an idea.There would be no way of getting her to renounce her title and claim if he gave way. It was distressing, but the solution was entirely up to Mary herself.
There were times when Mary experienced relief from her symptoms and then she appeared in surprisingly good health and spirits. During 1534, Chapuys saw her twice, each time at a distance. In the late summer, he saw her when she came to Greenwich and commented on her striking appearance: ‘It was a great pleasure to see such excellent beauty accompanied by heroic bearing.’ This was shortly before she became seriously ill, but at the end of October he saw her again.The restrictions on her freedom of movement were temporarily lifted, and she had arranged to be rowed along the Thames, so that Chapuys could see her from his house ‘in the fields by the river between Greenwich and this town’. He reported that she was in good health and seemed to be happy and very cheerful.
Perhaps some of this was bravura, a performance put on to demonstrate to her cousin the emperor that, as a true princess, she was not cowed by months of harassment. Or maybe she was genuinely pleased to be out on the water and to glide in tranquillity for a while. It was only a brief respite and it changed nothing. The king and his daughter remained at loggerheads. The French ambassador even reported that Henry ‘hates her [Mary] thoroughly’, and another French diplomat, visiting London on a special mission with the admiral of France, added that the English king was unrepentant in his attitude. Mary was in his power, and would remain so. There was no chance of her becoming queen or claiming any right to the throne.23 While it is important to remember that Henry wanted to give the impression to the French that Mary counted for nothing (there was already discussion of a marriage between Elizabeth and the third son of Francis I), he never budged from his original position. Mary would be brought to submission. It was never a question of if, only of when.
During 1534 and the following year, Mary watched with growing fearfulness as her father, determined to assert his newly gained authority as head of the Church in England, sent political and religious opponents to their deaths. First to suffer were Elizabeth Barton and those closest to her.The Nun of Kent was made to confess that she was a fraud, manipulated by others. She was hanged and beheaded at Tyburn. The religious orders that had supported Katherine, especially the Carthusians, fared even worse, suffering the horrible traitors’ death of hanging, drawing and quartering. The steadfast Bishop Fisher, her only true champion among the clergy, died on the block, his body emaciated from sorrow and imprisonment. ‘From age and suffering he was more like a shadow than a man’ was the comment of an Italian on his execution.This courageous and honourable churchman was as good as dead already, but Henry wanted his head. He also wanted that of his former chancellor. Thomas More famously put his God before his king and so earned himself a golden place in history.24 Mary and Katherine, in common with much of Europe, were horrified. In Chapuys’ dispatches there is almost an air of disbelief about what was going on in England. It was from this time that Mary began to contemplate escaping to the safety of the imperial court. The notion recurred again at times of crisis, but it appears to have been more of a fantasy than a realistic option. Chapuys dutifully thought about it, but concluded that it would be very difficult. Mary’s health continued to be erratic and Cromwell repeated his view that the death of the princess ‘would do little harm’. Such a coldly pragmatic observation from the king’s closest adviser made Chapuys very uneasy. No doubt this was the intention.
In one respect, however, Henry was still unsuccessful; the original impetus for all this bloodshed and upheaval remained. There was no male heir. Unknown to Mary, Anne Boleyn miscarried in the summer of 1534. It would be more than a year before she conceived again.
The year 1536 was the darkest of Mary’s life; a time of violence and rebellion, of political skulduggery on a breathtaking scale and, for Mary herself, irreplaceable loss. It began with death and ended without joy. What happened in between damaged the eldest child of Henry VIII permanently. To understand Mary, it is necessary to relive the events of this murderous year through her eyes.
The New Year was hardly begun when Mary lost her mother. Katherine of Aragon, who had fought so unflinchingly for herself and her daughter, died at Kimbolton Castle on 7 January. Here, on the edge of the Cambridgeshire fenland, she had gone downhill rapidly in the last weeks of 1535, probably as the result of a heart condition. Informed that the princess dowager, as he called his first wife, was very ill, Henry VIII at last allowed Eustace Chapuys to go and visit her. He arrived on 2 January and spent four days with her. She was in pain, eating only with great difficulty and sleeping hardly at all. But she was perfectly lucid, and his presence evidently comforted her.They talked of the past, and when she wondered aloud whether the course of action she had followed was the right one, he offered what words of support he could. She told him she intended to bequeath to Mary her furs and the gold cross she had brought with her from Spain in 1501. Few other possessions remained to her. By the time Chapuys left, she seemed to have rallied, but the impr
ovement was only temporary. Sensing that the end was near, she dictated one last letter to the husband who had cast her aside like an object for which he had no further use: ‘My most dear lord, king and husband,’ she wrote,the hour of my death now drawing on, the tender love I owe you forceth me, my case being such, to commend myself to you, and to put you in remembrance with a few words of the health and safeguard of your soul which you ought to prefer before all worldly matters, and before the care and pampering of your body, for the which you have cast me into many calamities and yourself into many troubles. For my part I pardon you everything and I wish to devoutly pray to God that He will pardon you also. For the rest, I commend unto you our daughter Mary, beseeching you to be a good father unto her, as I have heretofore desired. I entreat you also, on behalf of my maids, to give them marriage portions, which is not much, they being but three. For all my other servants, I solicit the wages due to them, and a year more, lest they be unprovided for. Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things. 25
In its dignified pathos and remembrance of a great and, for the writer, enduring love, it is one of the most moving farewells in the English language.
Mary was devastated by grief.The love she always felt for her mother had deepened during their mutual adversity, and the realisation that she would never see her again was enormously painful. While Katherine lived, mother and daughter encouraged themselves with the faint glimmer of hope that Henry would relent and allow them, however briefly, to be together. Now Mary expected that the pressure on her from her father ‘to subscribe to their damnable statutes and detestable opinions’, as Chapuys put it, would intensify. The princess’s vulnerability at this time would make her even more of a target, or so Charles V and Chapuys at first thought.The emperor wrote to his wife, the empress Isabella, that Mary was apparently inconsolable, ‘especially when she thinks of her father’s past behaviour towards herself and of the little favour she can expect for the future’. He hoped that God would take pity on her, a sure indication that he would do little enough himself.Yet the expected pressure did not materialise, and Mary’s situation slightly improved. She seems to have been too absorbed in sorrow to notice this.
Part of the reason for this alleviation was that Katherine’s passing came as a great relief for Henry. It also brought with it the promise of better Anglo-imperial relations, since the emperor’s obligations to Mary were, in reality, no more than polite concern for her welfare.This might be turned to diplomatic advantage at times, but basically Charles did not want to get involved in Tudor family politics. At court, Henry and Anne were reported to have danced for joy when they received the news that Katherine had died.This shocked Chapuys less than the meagre arrangements for the former queen’s funeral and burial at Peterborough cathedral, totally inappropriate, he thought, for her rank and lineage. Royal protocol would have kept Mary away from her mother’s obsequies in any case.The chief mourner at the funeral was Frances Brandon.
Henry, meanwhile, was delighted to have just one wife. He celebrated with Anne Boleyn and paraded little Elizabeth.Vague rumours, picked up earlier but generally dismissed by Chapuys, that the marriage had soured, that Henry’s eye had fallen on another, were apparently scotched by the queen’s third pregnancy. Her position seemed stronger than ever, and Anne sought to capitalise on this where Mary was concerned. Through Lady Shelton, she tried once more for an improvement in her relations with the king’s elder daughter. Again, to her chagrin, she was rebuffed. Anne’s response was to write a letter to her aunt spelling out that the effects of the king’s displeasure could be permanent, especially if Mary eventually took the oaths expected of her under duress. The letter was deliberately left where Mary could find it, an unpleasant form of bullying that showed Anne’s lack of understanding of her quarry. Mary copied the contents of the letter and forwarded them to Chapuys. Then she put the letter back down where she had found it, in her oratory, and carried on as before. She must have seen the hand of God in what happened next. On 29 January, the day Katherine of Aragon was laid to rest, Anne Boleyn miscarried. In that moment, Anne’s hold on her throne became suddenly much less secure.
Various reasons have been proposed for the loss of Anne’s unborn child.26 She may have been agitated by an injury sustained by HenryVIII during a bout of jousting, something that the increasingly heavy king still enjoyed. Four days before the miscarriage he had fallen badly and was unconscious for a while, to the consternation of his courtiers. That Anne was dismayed by the injury to her husband seems likely, more so than the story that went around subsequently that the real cause of her miscarriage was that she had discovered the king with one of her ladies sitting on his lap. She had lost a child late in the first trimester of pregnancy in 1534, however, and given that she herself believed that she was about 15 weeks pregnant at the time, perhaps she had some underlying problem with spontaneous abortion at this stage of pregnancy.Whatever the cause, the outcome was to destabilise Anne’s position. Henry, feeling much more sorry for himself than his wife, began to wonder whether he would ever have a son.The seed of an idea, that God did not favour his second marriage any more than his first, was planted in his mind. Still, not too much should be read at this stage into the king’s musings or the queen’s emotional response to her condition.There were external influences already in play that would destroy their marriage and lead to Anne’s downfall. Of these, one of the most important was the constancy of Mary herself.
Katherine’s death meant that Mary became the focus of opposition to Anne. She was a doughty opponent, still fighting and defiant after two and a half years of pressure to deny her birthright. Anne’s threats were an inspiration to Mary to hold firm. If only Henry could be induced to acknowledge that his first marriage was made in good faith, then Mary would take precedence over Elizabeth in the line of succession. Mary’s supporters saw in the queen’s predicament an opportunity to exploit the king’s doubts and destroy the Boleyns.They had waited a long time for the chance that was now presented to them, risking all the while the possibility that the king’s displeasure would take a more extreme turn. Now the Poles and the Courtenays, the families that most wanted to see Mary restored and her position as heir clarified, found a useful ally in Sir Nicholas Carew, one of Henry’s long-standing boon companions. Carew disapproved of the divorce but thought it prudent to hold his tongue while Katherine was alive. Like his fellow-conspirators he was a religious conservative who disapproved of the advance of new ideas in England. This, too, he kept quiet. But from January 1536, he used his influence on the king to turn Henry’s mind against Anne Boleyn. He and his wife had stayed in touch with Mary throughout her ordeal and they were in her confidence.
The conspirators knew that Mary’s tacit support was vital if they were to achieve Anne’s removal; this she was willing to give, without asking too many questions as to the means to be employed. Her friends were careful not to implicate her in the fine detail of their plans. Chapuys, representing the main international guarantor of Mary’s claim, inevitably became involved. He, in turn, set about lobbying Thomas Cromwell.The ambassador had picked up things from conversations with Cromwell, nuances here and there, statements that might or might not be taken at face value, which led him to believe that the minister and the queen had their differences. Chapuys knew that Cromwell had always favoured a better relationship with Charles V. He would use this to bring the minister round to the side of Mary’s supporters. Or so he thought. Only later did he find out that Cromwell had a quite different agenda of his own.
Meanwhile, there were other means of encouraging friction between Henry and Anne. Aware of the king’s roving eye and the passionate but often abrasive nature of his relationship with his wife, the charms of a quieter, more submissive lady were carefully cultivated by Anne’s enemies. It would be a good idea to have a replacement waiting. This rival was Jane Seymour, the daughter of a country gentleman from Wiltshire. Her brother was ambitious, she was tractable and in every way a contras
t to Anne Boleyn. She seemed, in short, ideal.
The story that it was Jane Seymour who had been discovered by Anne in a compromising position with the king, thus precipitating the queen’s miscarriage, is unlikely. It was probably made up after the events of 1536. Everything we know about Jane (and she remains the most opaque of Henry’s six wives) points to her being a well-schooled and prim observer of the proprieties, not an abandoned hussy. Her reputation would have been severely dented by involvement in royal horseplay. She and her tutors knew far better than to let her be alone anywhere with the king.
The mystery is why Henry was attracted to her at all. Contemporaries agreed that she was plain. Nor did she have a sparkling personality. Henry’s tastes in women stupefied people at the time as much as they do now. The only surviving portrait of her, by Holbein, confirms the view of Eustace Chapuys, who reported to the emperor that she was ‘of middle stature and no great beauty, so fair that one would call her rather pale than otherwise’.27 The face, under the heavy gable hood that Jane favoured, in contrast to the French hood that Anne wore, looks cross and wary. For someone supposed to be sweet-natured, Jane’s sharp features, with her mean little double chin, come as a surprise. It is just possible that, when animated and smiling, she may have been transformed. No one, except for the woman she supplanted, seems to have actually disliked her. It is easy to think that someone so colourless must also have been lacking in character, a malleable puppet in the hands of others. What we know of her virtuoso performance in winning Henry’s heart suggests otherwise. At the very least, she was an accomplished actress who learned her part well. She could have been under no illusions about the prize. Jane Seymour wanted to be queen every bit as much as those at the court who pushed her into the king’s company.