Bloody Mary (22 page)

While the king enjoyed these pastimes his servants in and out of Parliament had been formulating a new succession act. All of Henry’s children—Mary, Elizabeth and Henry Fitzroy—were now bastards. Fitzroy had been born one, Mary declared one by the 1534 act, and Elizabeth became one when the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, pronounced Henry’s marriage to Anne invalid in May. The new act took account of the absence of a legitimate heir, but instead of conferring the succession on the as yet unborn children of Henry and Jane it took the unprecedented step of giving the king the right to name any heir he chose. For the first time since Henry became king the succession issue was divorced from his domestic life. The continuation of the Tudor dynasty no longer depended on the precarious happenstance of the king’s true wife giving birth to a male heir of undisputed parentage.

This altered situation put Henry’s marriage and his children’s status in a new perspective. He might now without hesitation name the seventeen-year-old Fitzroy as his heir instead of waiting for Jane to produce a son. Some of his privy councilors had always favored this course. Robert Ratcliffe, earl of Sussex, remarked at a Council meeting in Henry’s presence that, as both Fitzroy and Mary were now on the same footing, “it was advisable to prefer the male to the female for the succession to the crown.”
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What Henry himself thought is unclear, but Fitzroy was given a prominent place in the formal opening of Parliament in June. He walked just ahead of the king in the ceremonial procession, bearing his cap of maintenance, and was given greater honor than Sussex, who bore the royal sword, or Oxford, who carried the king’s train.
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Fitzroy had been kept away from court throughout his childhood. He was given the titles, the household and the education of a future king but little else. While Henry made certain that the boy was prepared to step in should an emergency create the sudden need for an heir, he had little to do with Fitzroy personally, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they did not get on well. The endearments, the companionship, the close personal affinity Henry displayed (however fleetingly) toward Mary in her childhood were missing in the king’s relationship with his son. Fitzroy’s marriage to Norfolk’s only daughter, Mary Howard, completed his preparation for power, though his alliance with the Howards was troubled by the hostility of Anne Boleyn. Fitzroy was prominent among the spectators at Anne’s execution, and it was being said that Henry “certainly intended to make him successor,” but by early summer he was in poor health and showing no sign of improvement. Toward the end of
July he died. The king ordered Norfolk to arrange an obscure burial for him, with no public mourning and no funeral procession. The sealed coffin was put in a wagon, covered with straw, and taken off to a provincial town to be buried. Henry was determined to keep Fitzroy behind the scenes even in death.

For Mary the passage of the revised Act of Succession brought on the definitive crisis of her youth. She had asked Cromwell to mediate her reconciliation with her father, and he now undertook to do so in the light of the altered arrangement enacted by Parliament. He drew up a letter for her to copy out in her own hand and sign, full of the most self-abasing phraseology. “In as humble and lowly a manner as is possible for a child to use to her father and sovereign lord,” the letter began, Mary acknowledged all her offenses against her father, “since I first had discretion unto this hour.” She begged him to forgive them all, and professed herself to be “as sorry as any creature living” for what she had done that was contrary to his will. She asked his “fatherly pity” on her frail condition—“I am but a woman, and your child,” was how Cromwell phrased it for her—and added that though her soul belonged to God her body was Henry’s to order according to his pleasure.

When this letter brought no immediate response from the king Mary wrote again, repeating Cromwell’s formulas of self-abnegation and begging her father to envision her “most humbly prostrate before your noble feet, your most obedient subject and humble child.” This time she signed herself “Your majesty’s most humble and obedient servant, daughter, and handmaid.” When she sent this letter via Cromwell Mary added in a separate letter to the secretary that she hoped she would not have to do more than make a general admission of guilt to unspecified “offenses.” In sending the humiliating letters she had already done as much as her conscience would allow, she told him; she could not bring herself to acknowledge all that the new Act of Succession implied in more explicit terms. She could never recognize the illegality of her mother’s marriage, or her own illegitimacy, or the nullity of papal power in England. She would rather die than displease her father, she told Cromwell, yet “if I be put to any more (I am plain with you as my great friend) my conscience will in no ways suffer me to consent thereto.”
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But in making a vague and sweeping plea for forgiveness Mary was giving the king free reign to interpret her submission in any way he chose. Taking advantage of her claim “to be ordered according to his pleasure,” he sent several of his privy councilors to obtain her assent to precisely those points to which she could not in conscience subscribe. Norfolk, Sussex and the bishop of Chester, Roland Lee, were deputed to carry out this task. That the king knew his commissioners were likely to encounter resistance from Mary is evident from the written instructions
he prepared for Norfolk before the duke and the others left for Huns-don.

This document began by condemning Mary’s earlier refusal to obey her father as a “monster in nature”—a freakish departure from the natural obedience of a daughter toward her father. Any other man would have sent such a daughter as Mary away long before, but because of his clemency, his pity, and his “gracious and divine nature” Henry was willing to withhold his displeasure if she swore to submit to him, to his laws and to the all-important official positions on his first marriage and headship of the church. Norfolk’s instructions left no room for compromise. Mary was to be forced to consent to every demand the councilors made. And because Henry recognized the “imbecillity of her sex”—a formula from Roman law describing the intellectual incapacity of women-he wanted his commissioners to find out from Mary who it was that instructed her to be defiant for so long. It was unthinkable that her resistance arose out of inner conviction or loyalty to her mother; someone must have “emboldened and animated” her to defy him.
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Armed with these directives, the commissioners went to Hunsdon. Mary had been returned there, it seems, in anticipation of the final confrontation with the king’s representatives, and was back under the governance of Lady Shelton. They put the king’s terms to Mary; she repeated her old familiar arguments in reply. She would obey her father in all matters save those that injured her mother, her personal honor or her faith. The commissioners were furious. If they failed this time they, along with Mary, would suffer the king’s violent displeasure. They had no pity for her. She was no longer a fragile girl but a resolute woman of twenty, a woman who now more than ever recalled her mother in her rigorous logic and steadfast defiance. Norfolk and Sussex shouted at her and called her names, and one of them swore he could not believe she was in fact the king’s daughter, for no child of his, not even a bastard, would be as willful and obdurate as she was. In a rage he stormed that if she were his own daughter he would beat her to death. He would pick her up and dash her head against the wall again and again until he cracked it open and “made it soft as a boiled apple.” And he would be more than justified. Any father would do the same.

There is no doubt that Norfolk—if it was he who made these threats—was fully capable of carrying them out. Shortly afterward he brutally punished his own wife, whose only offense seems to have been that she resented her husband’s mistress. Elizabeth, duchess of Norfolk, wrote to Cromwell explaining her circumstances. Norfolk “chose her for love,” she wrote, and not for her dowry; they had been married for twenty-five years and had five children. But though she had been a good and virtuous wife, serving beside her husband at court for many years and making
many sacrifices for him, he repaid her by gambling away her jointure and seducing younger women. He fell in love with one of these women, Bess Holland, and when he heard his wife had spoken out against her he “came riding all night” from the court and locked her in a small room, taking away all her clothes and jewels and leaving her only a small allowance to support herself and twenty others “in a hard country.” When she objected he ordered some of the serving women to bind her arms and legs and keep her thus bound and imprisoned until she accepted her situation. And, the duchess wrote to Cromwell, the women bound her until the blood came out at her finger ends, and sat on her breast until she spat blood, and though her husband knew it he did nothing to stop them. Since then she had been plagued by “much sickness and cost in physic,” and could no longer live on the pittance the duke allowed her.
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It was a sordid story, though by no means a unique one, but if nothing else it showed how real Mary’s danger was.

The three commissioners kept up their barrage of threats for some time, with Lady Shelton adding dire verbal bludgeonings of her own, until it became obvious that Mary would not yield. They left her then, giving Lady Shelton strict orders not to allow her to speak to anyone. She was to be watched day and night, and kept in a state of fearful expectation of further persecution.

When they returned to court and reported that Mary was as adamant as ever the king was beside himself with anger. He was now convinced that a group of conspirators was using Mary to thwart him and wreck the new design for the succession. He lashed out at everyone he suspected, dismissing Exeter and Fitzwilliam from the Council, interrogating a number of aristocratic women and sending Lady Hussey to the Tower, grilling Mary’s principal servant and subjecting the unfortunate Cromwell to an agonizing week of fear for his life. For most of that week, he confided to Chapuys, “he considered himself a dead man” for having represented Mary to her father as penitent and obedient.
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When he could uncover no conspiracy Henry apparently decided to order Mary to be tried for treason. Jane’s “prayers and exertions” to the contrary were “rudely repulsed.” The judges were commanded to proceed with the legal inquiry into her guilt and to sentence her, in her absence, as contumacious. At the same time the king was heard to say, Chapuys wrote, “that not only Mary but Exeter, Cromwell and many others would suffer” once the judgment was rendered.

The only thing that saved Mary, it appears, was the squeamishness of the royal justices. They too were threatened with harsh punishments if they failed to indict Mary, but they did not want her blood on their hands. To gain time they proposed that she be given a paper to sign, declaring all that the king wanted her to affirm, and that if she refused to
sign it legal proceedings could then be begun. A document, called “Lady-Mary’s Submission,” was accordingly drawn up and sent to Hunsdon. It acknowledged that Katherine and Henry had never been legally married, that their daughter was illegitimate, and that the “pretended authority” of the bishop of Rome had no legal ground in England. The Submission reiterated Mary’s request to be forgiven for her obstinacy and disobedience, and declared that she now swore to these truths “with all her heart” and “inward sentence, belief, and judgment.”

Mary was warned from trusted sources that the Submission represented her last chance to save her life. Cromwell, in a long, self-righteously indignant letter, made it plain that he had lost all sympathy for Mary and would not lift a finger to help her in future unless she signed the document. He echoed the commissioner’s abuse, and said it was a pity Mary had not been given exemplary punishment long before. Cromwell was genuinely shocked by her disobedience, and bewildered by what seemed to him a contradiction: she had signed the groveling letters he wrote for her yet she refused to yield to the king in specific points. The only satisfactory explanation was either that someone else was manipulating her or that, like all women, she suffered from perverse stubbornness. “I think you the most obstinate woman that ever was,” Cromwell wrote, adding that she was an unnatural ingrate and unfit to live in the community of Christians.
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Cromwell’s letter revealed the depth of his insensitivity to Mary’s character. Like the privy councilors and the king himself, Cromwell could not give Mary credit for holding strong convictions on abstract issues of conscience. He could not perceive that, as she wrote him, she was in “great discomfort” because she was torn between two strong desires. She sincerely loved her father and wanted to obey him, yet she believed deeply in the Tightness of her dead mother’s cause and in the old religious order. This belief had sustained her when nothing and no one else had; to abandon it would have meant giving up a vital part of her identity, That a girl of twenty might be capable of such complex loyalties was inconceivable to Cromwell, who would have had little sympathy for them even if he had perceived them. Women were meant to do as they were told, not to ponder the merits of the command. For them to behave otherwise upset the natural order and caused pointless inconvenience. It is odd that Cromwell, who had been such a staunch admirer of Katherine, should fail to see and admire the similarities in Mary’s character, but he did not. And of course he had never come even close to putting his head on the block for Katherine’s sake,

But if Cromwell threw up his hands in disgust at Mary’s behavior, Chapuys did not. He alone understood where her problem lay, and why she felt as she did. He had in fact foreseen the crisis, and had already sent
Mary a protest to sign along with the Submission, explaining that the former invalidated the latter in the eyes of God and preserved her conscience. The ambassador was aware, though, that this time no such stratagem would be sufficient in itself to convince Mary to submit. He would have to appeal to a higher, more all-encompassing logic. And it was here that, summoning all his diplomatic expertise, his persuasiveness in argument and his concern for Mary, Chapuys hit on the key argument that at last induced her to give in.