Bloody Mary (15 page)

No one could have foreseen that, as a result of Henry’s conflict with Pope Clement over the status of his marriage, he would one day be pope in his own kingdom, aspiring to godlike eminence. In the beauty, strength and towering height of his physical presence he had fitted the role for a quarter of a century; his new powers were in one sense only a capstone to a symbolic stature established long before. But he now added to the appearance of semi-divine monarchy all that he had learned from a quarter century of rule. And for the last four years it had been personal rule. The giant figure of Wolsey, once pre-eminent in government and statecraft, had fallen victim to Henry’s impatience in 1530. Caught between the king’s demands and the pope’s indecisive delays, Wolsey was forced to resign his offices, handing over to Henry his great seal, his wealth and his gorgeous residence at Hampton Court.

Henry was not yet conscious of the full extent of his might—that consciousness would require years to mature—but his new glory added another dimension to an ego already monumental in its scope. Against his clerical enemies at least he felt himself to be invincible; when other opponents appeared, he would deal with them in their turn. Certainly he need no longer tolerate resistance from the two friendless women who galled him most: his ex-wife and bastard daughter.

The Act of Succession passed in the first parliamentary session of 1534 transferred to Anne’s heirs the right to succeed to the throne. Mary, already a bastard, was now excluded by every legal mechanism from the succession. If Anne had no son Elizabeth would be the next ruler. More distressing to contemplate was that, under the provisions of the act, if Henry died while his heir was still a minor Anne would become sole regent of the kingdom; there could be little doubt that as regent her first act would be to order the executions of Mary and her mother.

In anticipation of the parliamentary act Mary’s living conditions had undergone a rapid and dramatic change. Late in September of 1533, only a few weeks after Elizabeth’s birth, Mary’s chamberlain John Hussey was ordered to tell her that the time had come for her to abandon her pretensions and to recognize that she was no longer a princess. No one must call her princess in future, not even her personal servants, and to make the distinction between Mary and her half-sister Princess Elizabeth as clear as possible Mary would live in Elizabeth’s household from now on.

Mary immediately protested the informality of this announcement,
with no notification in writing from either Henry or his Council, and wrote to the Council that “her conscience would in no wise suffer her to take any other than herself for princess.” She would obey the king, she said, in moving to any residence he liked, but to confess to her loss of title would dishonor her parents and “the deed of our mother, the holy church, and the pope, who is the judge in this matter, and none other.” The pope had in fact bestirred himself at last. In a decree issued to coincide with the birth of Anne’s child he proclaimed Henry’s marriage to Anne invalid. The vindication Katherine had been seeking for so many years was finally at hand, though it came far too late to bring any change in her status or treatment. It was a moral victory, but as Clement knew perfectly well, it carried no political weight now that Henry had forced through his own solution. It did not prevent Katherine from remarking afterward that she did not know who was guiltier, Henry for initiating the wickedness of the divorce or Clement for hesitating so long in denying it.

Mary’s protest produced an official written order for her to leave her establishment at Beaulieu, referring to her as “the lady Mary, the king’s daughter.” When she saw it she wrote to her father, signing herself “your most humble daughter, Mary,
Princess”
and pretending to believe the omission was an oversight. “I could not a little marvel” at the letter, she wrote, “trusting verily that your grace was not privy to the same.” “For I doubt not that your grace does take me for your lawful daughter, born in true matrimony.”

It was a brave response, if a futile one. Without replying to his daughter Henry gave orders that she was to move at once from Beaulieu to a far meaner and smaller residence, in bad repair and open to the fog and rain of autumn. Beaulieu was given to Anne’s brother George Boleyn, who lost no time in taking possession of it as if he meant never to leave.

At about this time Mary was visited by a team of commissioners like those who had been sent again and again to Katherine. Mary must have heard from several sources, including Katherine herself, how the former queen had met these persecutors head on and how she had learned to maximize her defense against them. Mary knew to summon her entire household—still some hundred and sixty strong—to hear her exchange with the royal representatives, certain that before so many witnesses they would be forced to weigh their words and to treat her with minimal courtesy. She knew to answer their arguments calmly, point by point, leaving them exhausted with frustration when their “prayers, threats and persuasions innumerable” failed. And thanks to Chapuys, who followed everything that happened to Mary with close attention and wrote it all down for the benefit of the imperial court, Mary was learning that to
keep her title she had to watch carefully everything she did and said. The slightest careless word, uttered in the presence of witnesses, might be used later to damage her claim to be called princess; even to acquiesce without protest when others called her by a lesser title could prejudice her rights.

Chapuys drew up for Mary a formal statement of protest, declaring that she had never said, done, or condoned anything detrimental to her status as princess. She was told to keep this document with her at all times, in case she was taken without warning to a place of imprisonment or torture, or compelled to enter a convent or to marry against her will. The ambassador believed that Henry might condemn his daughter to any one of these fates at any time, and besides her written protest he wrote out for her several brief verbal protests which she was to memorize and repeat to anyone who came for her. In essence these statements were elaborations of a single formula which Chapuys hoped would placate Henry yet preserve Mary’s birthright—a formula combining submission and defiance. “If the king wished it to be so,” she was to say, “she submitted, but she protested in due form against whatever might be done to her prejudice.” From now on the repetition of these statements became a part of her daily ritual, like her daily attendance at mass. Surrounded by her most intimate servants, she repeated again and again the words that might make the difference between treasonable disobedience and tolerated self-defense.
⁶

Henry was neither so vindictive nor so foolish as Chapuys feared. For the time being at least he would do with Mary what he had originally decided to do in September. She would live in Elizabeth’s household at Hatfield, deprived of all marks of her former rank, as a maid of honor in Elizabeth’s service. In these surroundings, compelled to show deference to the infant princess and with none of her supporters to turn to, her rebellious spirit would in time be broken.

On December 10 the duke of Norfolk came to carry out the king’s orders. He told Mary she must prepare herself to be taken to the residence of Elizabeth, whom he called “princess of Wales.” “That is a title which belongs to me by right, and to no one else,” Mary replied, pretending to find everything the duke said strange and inappropriate. Norfolk, who saw that the conversation was headed for an impasse, said curtly that “he had not gone thither to dispute, but to see the king’s wishes accomplished,” and Mary, realizing the moment for her written protest had come, asked for a half hour to herself.

Alone in her bedchamber she took out Chapuys’ draft and copied it in her own hand. Returning to Norfolk she handed him the document, and then proceeded to ask what arrangements would be made for her servants when she was transferred to her new quarters. Would her household
officers be given a year’s wages if they had to be dismissed? How many of her household would accompany her when she moved? What of her maids, her chaplain and confessor? The duke told her that she would find plenty of servants in the new household, and would need very few of her own. A number of Mary’s servants had been sent away some weeks earlier, ostensibly for “encouraging her in her disobedience.”
⁷

The one person who, after her mother, meant most to her, would not be allowed to make the journey to Hatfield. Margaret Pole, countess of Salisbury, who had looked after Mary all her life, was told she would not be needed. She offered to continue to serve Mary at her own expense, and to pay the wages of an entire household if necessary, but Norfolk was adamant. Two maids of honor would be a sufficient retinue for the king’s bastard daughter, he said, who had better try to forget her old governess and the hundreds of other familiar faces that had formed a reassuring background to her daily existence for nearly eighteen years.
⁸

Just before Christmas Charles Brandon came to take Mary to her new residence. When they arrived at Hatfield there was a repeat of her exchange with the duke of Norfolk earlier in the month. Mary told Brandon that she, and not Elizabeth, was the true princess, and that though she would call Elizabeth “sister,” just as she had always called Henry Fitzroy “brother,” she would never use the style of princess to refer to anyone but herself. Before he left her, Brandon gave her one final chance to give up her struggle and satisfy her father. He asked whether she had any message for the king. “None,” she replied, “except that the princess of Wales, his daughter, asked for his blessing.” Brandon blustered and frowned, and said he wouldn’t dare deliver that message. “Then,” said Mary, “go away and leave me alone.”

As soon as Brandon left, Chapuys later reported, Mary went into the room she was to live in for the next several years and wept. It was “the worst lodging of the house,” he wrote, and unfit even for a maid of honor.
⁹
He speculated on the “bad designs” of her new caretakers. What they wanted, he said, was “to cause her to die of grief or in some other way, or else to compel her to renounce her rights, marry some low fellow, or let her fall prey to lust, so that they have a pretext and excuse for disinheriting her.” The last suggestion was an odd one, given Mary’s upbringing and complete innocence. She was, to be sure, an uncommonly pretty girl about to turn eighteen, and with another girl of eighteen it might have been reasonable to suppose that a lover might succeed in compromising her where threats failed. But Mary was not just any girl. She was the sharp-witted, resolute daughter of a fearsome father and a courageous mother, and she would not be cajoled into surrendering her title any more easily than she would be persuaded to it by force.

The first eight months of Mary’s life in Elizabeth’s household were
the worst. The constant struggle over privilege and precedent was an exhausting irritant. Every time she heard Elizabeth called “princess” she had to object; every time she was called “the lady Mary” she was obliged to remind the speaker that she did not acknowledge that tide. Because the infant Elizabeth was given the chair of honor in the dining hall and Mary was assigned an inferior place she refused to eat there and took her meals in her chamber. Later, when Anne heard of this and forbade it, Mary repeated her verbal protest every time she sat down to eat. When Elizabeth was carried along the roads in her velvet litter Mary was forced, complaining loudly, to walk beside her in the mud, or on longer journeys, to ride in the leather-covered litter appropriate to a woman of lower rank.

Whenever Mary protested she was punished, first by the confiscation of all her jewels and fine clothes, then of virtually everything she owned. When she found herself “nearly destitute of clothes and other necessaries,” she sent word to Henry of her condition, instructing her messenger to accept either money or clothing if he offered them, “but not to accept any writing in which she was not entitled princess.”
¹⁰
When all else failed force was used. Late in March the entire household left Hatfield for another house, and when Mary, as usual, refused to travel under any conditions which gave Elizabeth the appearance of higher status “certain gentlemen” seized her bodily and pushed her into the litter of her governess Lady Shelton. Mary, who was not accustomed to being manhandled, gasped out her formula of objection and rode the rest of the way in troubled silence.

Lady Shelton, Anne’s aunt, now had complete authority over Mary. If she did not actually come to hate Mary—it is impossible to tell anything of her character from Chapuys’ descriptions—she nonetheless felt a strong enough loyalty to the interests of the Boleyn family to play the role of persecutor with thoroughness and vigor. To her credit she resisted this role at the beginning. When George Boleyn and Norfolk first saw her with Mary they were angry at her for treating the girl “with too much respect and kindness,” when she deserved only a bastard’s abuse. Lady Shelton retorted that even if Mary was only the bastard of a poor gentleman, and not the king, “she deserved honor and good treatment for her goodness and virtues.” That Mary could win such praise from Anne’s aunt is convincing proof that she was less the stubborn and obstinate ingrate Henry complained of than a young woman of impressive piety and purity of life. But under pressure from Anne and her supporters Lady Shelton became their willing tool. Anne urged her to slap and hit Mary whenever she claimed to be the true princess, and to swear at her “as the cursed bastard she is.”
¹¹
Often when visitors came to Hatfield, ostensibly to pay their respects to Elizabeth but hoping to see
Mary as well, her governess locked her in her room and nailed the windows shut.

Beyond this ceaseless mistreatment of her own person Mary’s captors added to her anxieties by harassing those around her. Anyone in Elizabeth’s household who showed her the slightest humanity was sent away. Anne Hussey, the wife of Mary’s former chamberlain John Hussey and a woman who continued to worry over Mary’s health and spirits long after she left her service, was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. Informants reported that on a rare visit she made to Mary at Hatfield she fell back into her old habit of calling her “princess.” On one occasion she asked for “drink for the princess,” and a day later she said the “princess had gone walking.” Under grueling interrogation Mistress Hussey admitted that she had from time to time sent Mary secret notes and received “tokens” from her in return, and she named several others who were sympathetic to her cause. After signing a confession and begging Henry’s forgiveness she was released, but the incident caused Mary nearly as much anguish as it did Anne Hussey herself, and the revelations about clandestine messages led Lady Shelton to keep a stricter watch on her charge.
¹²