The Boleyn Women: The Tudor Femmes Fatales Who Changed English History (22 page)

Mary was taken to join Elizabeth with only two maids: something that must have been humiliating for a girl who had once been heiress to the crown. Upon her arrival, her defiance continued, declaring when asked if she would like to pay court to the princess that ‘she knew of no other princess in England but herself; that the daughter of Madame de Pembroke was no princess at all’.
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When the Duke of Suffolk refused to carry a message to the king in which she referred to herself as Princess of Wales, she simply told him, ‘Then go away, and leave me alone.’ Lady Shelton and Lady Clere must have realised that they would have their work cut out with Henry’s eldest daughter. As a punishment for her disobedience, Mary’s two maids were discharged, leaving her with only one serving maid to attend her.
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The maid was also forbidden to taste the princess’s food as a safety precaution, something that would later cause Lady Shelton great anxiety.

It is not always possible to determine which of the two sisters was responsible for actions reported in Elizabeth and Mary’s household, with Chapuys, for example, referring to Lady Shelton and Lady Clere simply as Anne’s aunt or the princess’s governess, rather than by name. It appears more likely that his references to Mary’s governess are to Lady Shelton, since he would later refer to a letter received by the governess from the queen which is known to have been addressed to Lady Shelton. Regardless of some uncertainty, it is clear that both were considered loyal by their niece, who sent them direct instructions as to how she wished her stepdaughter to be treated. In one despatch, for example, written in February 1534, Chapuys recorded that

a worthy gentleman of this place has told me that Anne has sent a message to her father’s sister, in whose keeping the Princess now is, that she ought not to tolerate her using her title; should she continue to do so she was to slap her face as the cursed bastard that she was. And because the Princess has hitherto been in the habit of breakfasting in her own room, and, when obliged to go down into the hall, has refused to eat and drink anything, the said Anne is in despair, and has for this reason given orders that no food or drink should be served to her in her chamber.
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In September 1534 Mary became unwell and Lady Shelton sent for an apothecary whose medicines only made the king’s daughter sicker. To Lady Shelton’s horror, there were immediately rumours that Mary had been poisoned, particularly since, in accordance with her orders, she refused Chapuys’s servant permission to see her when he arrived to enquire about Mary’s health. The rumours were treated with such seriousness that the king sent both his own doctor and Catherine’s to attend her, as a mark of his good faith towards his daughter.
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Lady Shelton enjoyed the king’s trust, who would later inform Chapuys that she was an expert in ‘such female complaints’ as Mary was suffering from.
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By February 1535, when Mary was ill again, Lady Shelton was terrified, weeping at the thought that if anything happened to her charge she would be condemned as her murderer. She was particularly unpopular in London where rumours circulated that she was attempting to poison Mary.

If Queen Anne Boleyn hoped that her aunts would enforce a strict regime with her stepdaughter, she soon found herself both disappointed and frustrated. Lady Shelton, in particular, gradually began to befriend her charge, with both she and her daughters featuring regularly in Mary’s accounts when she was back in favour after Anne’s fall, something which must indicate that there was no lingering resentment. For example, in January 1544 Mary gave her former governess two cushion covers worth over 7 shillings.
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Lady Shelton and her daughter-in-law, Margaret, sister of Jane, Lady Rochford, presented New Year’s gifts to Mary in 1528 and 1537, while Mary in her turn made presents of cash in 1537 to Elizabeth and Mary Shelton, two of Lady Shelton’s unmarried daughters.
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The princess may well have first come across Lady Shelton’s daughters during her time under their mother’s charge and she does genuinely seem to have been fond of them. There were further cash gifts to Elizabeth and Mary Shelton in January 1540, while the eldest sister, Amy, received cash in July 1538.
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Amy also received the valuable gift of an antique brooch from the princess on another occasion.
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Not surprisingly, given her links to Lord Morley, Mary was closest to Lady Shelton’s daughter-in-law, Margaret Parker, for example standing as godmother for her child in October 1537 and making her a gift of clothing in January of the following year.
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The gift of a bottle of wine delivered to the princess in June 1543 by ‘Mr Shelton’s servant’ is also likely to have come from his wife.
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There is clear affection for Lady Shelton, however, who gave the princess the rich gift of two cushion covers garnished with gold and silk at New Year 1543.
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Clearly, Princess Mary did not bear a grudge against the Shelton family, suggesting that they at least always treated her fairly during Anne Boleyn’s time as queen, something that seems to have infuriated Lady Shelton’s niece.

There is contemporary evidence that Lady Shelton, while prepared to enforce her niece’s orders, was not prepared to enforce them with malice. In February 1534 Chapuys recorded that Mary was being kept with very little to wear, forcing her to send to her father to request funds. At the same time she requested permission to hear mass in the local church, something which was refused her due to the cheers that she received whenever she was seen by the local population.
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While Lady Shelton was in charge of day-to-day decisions in relation to Mary, she was kept under close scrutiny by other members of the family, with the Duke of Norfolk and her nephew, George Boleyn, summoning her to them to berate her for treating Mary ‘with too great kindness and regard, when she ought to deal with her as a regular bastard that she was’. To this Lady Shelton replied that ‘even if it were so, and that she was the bastard daughter of a poor gentleman, her kindness, her modesty, and her virtues called forth all respect and honour’.

Lady Shelton was forced to spend a great deal of time with her young charge: in March 1534, when Mary refused to travel with the household to a new residence she was forcibly placed in a carriage with Lady Shelton for what must have been a very uncomfortable journey for them both.
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Matters were certainly tense. When, in April 1534, Anne and Henry came to visit Elizabeth, they ordered that Mary be kept in her room with an armed guard at the door.
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The royal couple doubtless had some strong words for Lady Shelton about how they expected her to make Mary behave since she appears to have taken this out on the girl, informing her that ‘the king, her father no longer cared whether she renounced her title willingly or not, since by the last statute she had been declared illegitimate and incapable of inheriting, and that if she were in his (the king’s) place she would kick her (the Princess) out of the king’s house for her disobedience’. Lady Shelton took this harsh line in an attempt to make Mary comply, something that would both make her life easier as governess and protect Mary, given that the king had reportedly threatened her with execution if she would not obey.

As a first cousin of the Holy Roman Emperor Mary was probably safe, although Henry, as her father, was recognised by convention to have absolute control over the disposal of her person. Lady Shelton came under direct pressure from the king to enforce Mary’s conduct. The following month, Henry asked her of Mary ‘whether there were signs of her rebellious spirit and stubborn obstinacy being in any way subdued’, to which the queen’s aunt was forced to reply that ‘she continued the same’.
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Henry then declared, ‘Then there must be someone near her who maintains her in her fanciful ideas by conveying news of her mother to her.’ Lady Shelton, no doubt anxious to avoid any blame herself, named a maid of the princess who was promptly dismissed: for Lady Shelton, governing Mary was a thankless task and one which she does not seem to have relished.

There was another reason for the strained relationship that developed between Queen Anne Boleyn and her aunt. On 25 February 1535 Chapuys recorded that ‘the young lady who was lately in the king’s favour is so no longer. There has succeeded to her place a cousin german of the Concubine, daughter of the present governess of the Princess.’ Chapuys later made it clear that this lady was ‘Madge’ Shelton and that while few other details of the affair are known, this Mistress Shelton remained in the king’s favour, and presumably as his mistress, for six months.

There is a great deal of debate over who this ‘Madge’ Shelton was, with two of Lady Shelton’s daughters, Margaret and Mary, being possible due to the similarity of their names.
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The fact that Margaret Shelton is nowhere mentioned in Princess Mary’s accounts while her sisters, Amy, Elizabeth and Mary are, probably indicates that Margaret was not known to the princess and is therefore unlikely to have stayed with her parents during their time in the princess’s household. This does suggest that it was Mary, rather than Margaret, who was present at court in the household of Anne Boleyn. It is also known for certain that Mary was a member of Anne Boleyn’s household, serving as one of her maids.
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Margaret, on the other hand, is only potentially named by Chapuys as the disputed ‘Madge’. Otherwise, her presence at court can only survive in references to a ‘Mistress Shelton’ who, of course, could just as easily have been Mary.

One thing that might point against the identification of Mary Shelton as Henry VIII’s mistress is contained in a letter written by John Husee, the London agent of Lady Lisle on 3 January 1538:

The election lieth betwixt Mrs Mary Shelton and Mrs Mary Skipwith. I pray Jesu send such one as may be for his Highness’ comfort and the wealth of the realm. Herein I doubt not but your lordship will keep silence till the matter be surely known.
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Given the reference to the ‘wealth of the realm’ and the fact that the letter was written a few months after the death of Jane Seymour and before Henry had decided upon a fourth bride, it is possible to interpret Husee’s comments as suggesting one of the two women was being considered as a bride for the king. When Henry had first raised the possibility of divorcing Catherine of Aragon there had been rumours that he would marry Bessie Blount and legitimise their son, something that Henry himself never countenanced.
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His thoughts had only turned to marriage in relation to Anne Boleyn when she had refused to become his mistress, while the Catherine Howard debacle and Henry’s doubts as to Anne of Cleves’ virginity would later show that he wanted his bride to be chaste. It is therefore improbable that he would consider marrying a woman who had already been his mistress, suggesting that the Mistress Shelton of 1535 was a different sister to the Mistress Shelton of 1538. The lady in 1538 may in fact have been Margaret rather than Mary, as it has now been convincingly argued that ‘Mary Skipwith’ was actually Margaret Skipwith of Ormesby who, confusingly, also had a sister called Mary.
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The evidence suggests that Margaret Skipwith, who was married to Bessie Blount’s second son in April 1539 and effectively pensioned off by the king, became his mistress in preference to Mistress Shelton. It may therefore be that Henry was seeking a mistress rather than a bride all along, particularly as, by January 1539, negotiations had opened for a foreign marriage. Henry, who appears to have resumed his affairs with both Bessie Blount and Mary Boleyn after their pregnancies might well have been prepared to resume an affair with an earlier mistress in 1538, suggesting that both Mistress Sheltons were the same lady. That Mary Shelton, along with Margaret Skipwith (who was by then Lady Tailbois), were part of a group of ladies invited by the king in August 1539 to view his fleet at Portsmouth, strongly suggests that it was Mary Shelton in January 1539. This and the absence of records for Margaret Shelton, alongside the numerous references to Mary at court, implies that, in both cases, the lady who caught Henry’s attention was Mary Shelton.

Margaret may never have been resident at court. Little is known about her life. She married Thomas Wodehouse, Esquire, of Kimberley in Norfolk.
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Wodehouse was from an old Norfolk family which could be traced back to the reign of Henry I. Margaret’s brother, Ralph Shelton, married her husband’s sister, Amy, at the same time as her marriage, creating a double alliance. Margaret lived a comfortable but undistinguished life, bearing four sons and four daughters and surviving her husband.
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The Heraldic Visitations for Norfolk suggest an all too common tragedy for the family, with Margaret’s second daughter, Elizabeth, dying young to be replaced by another child named in memory of her. Margaret herself had died before December 1555, as no mention is made of her in the otherwise full list of her siblings contained in their mother’s will.
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Her husband was still living in 1553 when he served as Sheriff of Norfolk, an indication of his prominence in the county.
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He sat as a Member of Parliament for Great Yarmouth in 1557 and 1558.
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Margaret’s third son, John, was evidently a favourite of his great-uncle, Sir James Boleyn, who left a substantial bequest to him at his death in 1561, on the condition that John married a woman to whom he was already ‘handfasted’.
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Mary Shelton was beautiful, with Henry’s ambassador to the Netherlands later commenting of Christina of Denmark, whom Henry hoped to marry, that ‘she resembles one Mistress Shelton that used to wait on Queen Anne’ – something that was obviously considered desirable.
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A surviving drawing by Hans Holbein, depicting Mary, supports this, showing a thin young woman with a distinguished nose, pointed chin and gable hood – something which may suggest that it was produced following Anne Boleyn’s death at a time when Queen Jane Seymour was insisting that they were worn at court. Mary resembles her cousin, Queen Anne, in the drawing, something which is likely to have drawn the king towards her. She was well educated and intelligent, with her literary endeavours hinting at a spirit as independent and strong-willed as her cousin the queen. She was also at least eleven years younger than Anne and possibly as much as nineteen years younger.
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It is therefore easy to see why the king was interested in her. It has been suggested on a number of occasions that Anne herself supplied Mary to the king, reasoning that, if he was going to take a mistress regardless, he might as well take one favourable to her.
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There is merit in this argument as Henry’s mistress in the summer of 1534, who supported Catherine and Mary, undoubtedly caused Anne’s position harm, while Jane Seymour, who was equally hostile, actually supplanted her. However, there is in fact strong evidence that Anne was anything but happy with her cousin’s relationship with the king.