Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age Page 9
Grave studies were the natural diet of an heir to the throne, and Mary learnt her lessons well. In later years her idiomatic command of Latin surprised and pleased the scholars. And to the serious subjects that Vives appointed for her, she added for her own amusement needlework and music. Like her father, she had a real gift for music which she loved and practised all her life, so that good judges thought her the most accomplished royal performer in Europe on lute, virginal or regal.
For Vives, the aim of Mary’s education was not just the acquisition of knowledge, nor a training in government. He believed that the end of man was to glorify God and an education was nothing unless it taught Christian virtue. All writers and all works were made to bear on that point, and Vives’s ideal was the one Erasmus found exemplified in the household of Thomas More: ‘You would say that his house was Plato’s Academy’, he wrote to a friend. ‘I should rather call it a school, or a university, of the Christian religion.’ With the example of her devout mother, supported by the instruction of Vives, and encouraged by the presence at court of such noble men as Linacre, More and Erasmus, Mary from her earliest years showed a strong devotion to the Catholic faith.
In this she was her mother’s daughter. Spain, schooled by the long contest with the Moors, was the sternest of Christian countries, and the great Isabella the Catholic, Mary’s maternal grandmother, the most uncompromising of Christian monarchs. Queen Catherine brought with her to England the sober virtue of the Spanish. She provided for the religious instruction of her daughter, sometimes herself taking Mary through the catechism, and shielding her to some extent from the easy-going immorality of the King. Catherine appointed to Mary’s household a number of Spanish ladies who were as careful and upright as the Queen, so much so that they were in great demand as brides for English lords who valued their sobriety and competence above the more flighty and slovenly girls of the English court. When the emperor asked that Mary should be sent to Spain for her education, according to the marriage contract, the English envoys refused on the grounds that Mary already had in her mother the finest tutor in Christian virtue that Spain could provide.
The religious influence of her mother lasted the whole of Mary’s life. The princess, though learned enough, had a simple, uncomplicated mind which held tenaciously to a few, clear principles. Her upbringing and education had stressed the prime importance of her faith, and the trials which her innocent mother was soon to endure at the King’s hands could only confirm her religion. The shifts of policy in the Reformation that made religion a weapon of the State she could never understand. The profound, unbending religion was already something strange in an English princess; the course of English polity in her lifetime made her conviction seem at first eccentric, then perverse, and at last bloody.
The years passed and Henry’s greatly desired son did not appear. When Mary was ten, the Queen was forty and soon beyond childbearing. The King was worried about the succession. Only one queen had succeeded to the throne since the Conquest, and the reign of Matilda was an unhappy precedent. While the King did his best to prepare Mary for the throne, sending her at the early age of nine to represent the crown in the Welsh Marches, he also looked for other ways to secure the Tudor dynasty. He thought that his little bastard son, the Duke of Richmond, three years younger than Mary, might succeed him, and gave the boy a household worthy of a Prince of Wales. But as long as Queen Catherine and Mary lived and had legitimacy on their side, the chances of a bastard were slight. The King felt the safety of his line threatened by Catherine’s unfortunate inability to bear a son.
Henry had not been faithful to his wife. He was by nature selfish, wilful and amorous, and easily gave way to his desires. His affairs were notorious and his mistresses had their places at court. But like many self-indulgent men he needed the support of a forgiving and capable wife. Catherine ran his household with a careful economy that offset his own extravagance; it was said that she counted the linen with her own hands. He needed her to come home to, to look after his gross body undermined by excess, to bathe his ulcerated leg, to sit by his bed and listen to his complaints and his fears. They had been married so long, since he was a youth of eighteen, that she had become a comfortable habit; and no one could ever deny that she was the most virtuous and loving of wives. The sentiment that Shakespeare put into the King’s mouth in Henry VIII was no more than the truth:
That man i’ the world who shall report he has
A better wife, let him in nought be trusted,
For speaking false in that: thou art, alone.
Once, in the early negotiations over Mary’s betrothal, the French envoy had questioned the validity of a marriage between a man and his brother’s widow and therefore wondered if Mary was legitimate. Other whispers were heard from time to time, and slowly a convenient doubt grew in Henry’s mind. If Catherine, now beyond childbearing, could be put aside and the King marry again, he might yet provide England with a royal son. The scruple about his marriage was aggravated by his new passion. Recently, the cool, quizzical eyes of Anne Boleyn had cast their spell on Henry, and he was writing her hot pleas. But Anne was calculating and her family exceedingly ambitious; she kept the King at a certain distance, aiming to be something more than a royal plaything, and thus inflamed Henry’s desire. Catherine’s age and plainness, Anne’s beauty and perversity joined together with the King’s fear for the succession; Henry decided to divorce his wife.
In the spring of 1527, soon after Mary had celebrated her betrothal to Francis I with dancing, jousting, plays and music, Henry quietly began his proceedings against Catherine: ordered by the King, Wolsey privately cited Henry before a court on the charge of illegally cohabiting with a woman not his wife. Mary was not told of the scheme afoot, but in a court little can be hidden. Catherine was distraught and went to Vives weeping ‘over her fate that the man she loved more than herself should be so alienated from her as to think of marrying another’. Vives, the princess’s fatherly tutor and adviser, left England in disgust. The court was breathless with surprise and anticipation; within a year the King’s ‘secret matter’ was the scandal of Europe. Mary was only an undersized girl of fourteen, but she was intelligent and bred to responsibility. Though the consequences of her father’s brutal act could not be clear, she saw enough to fear the pain and humiliation ahead.
In May 1529 the trial of the King’s cause began in Blackfriars Hall before Wolsey and Cardinal Campeggio, the papal legate. The evidence for Henry, in the most callous way possible, did nothing to spare the Queen’s feelings. Catherine countered with a noble and tragic speech denying the competence of the court, and demanding that the matter should be referred to Rome. Henry had been married by a dispensation of Pope Julius II; he now wanted Pope Clement VII to declare that dispensation void as being beyond the powers of his predecessor. If the cause were tried in England it seemed that the court might be bullied into pronouncing for the King; if the matter were dealt with in Rome, where the Pope only reigned with the consent of the Emperor, who was Catherine’s nephew, Henry had no chance. But the legate had instructions to reach no verdict. The trial went on until July, then the court was adjourned and the cause removed to Rome.
Spoiled, pampered and the darling of all eyes from his earliest years, Henry had no doubts about the righteousness of his cause, and the opposition he now met infuriated him. Behind him, he heard the persuasive, nagging tones of Anne Boleyn and her family, daring him to complete the business he had begun, for they knew that their fates were bound up in this cause. He resolved that he would have his way. If the Emperor could play politics with the Pope, he too could bring pressure to bear on the Pope and gain his point by any means. The obstinacy and outrage of his wife also offended him and the two fell into miserable bickering which only drove Henry to the solace of Anne’s arms. The policy of Anne was to keep the royal family divided, and under her influence Mary was only allowed short and infrequent visits to her mother. Mary was going through puberty, and suffering with it; alre
ady she was showing those symptoms which later caused the French ambassador to ask anxiously if she were capable of bearing children. She was ill, in low spirits, and the doctor bled her too often. She begged to be with her parents, but Henry refused. In the summer of 1531, greatly angered by a summons to appear in Rome, he cut himself off from his obstinate family. Mary was sent to Richmond and Catherine to an insignificant manor called the More. King and Queen never met again. In the five years left to her Catherine was progressively moved to quieter, gloomier, more constricted lodgings, ending finally in one room at Kimbolton Castle, watched at every moment and allowed out for nothing except the Mass. She had with her one or two elderly, unpaid servants. She did her needlework, prayed, smuggled a few letters to her daughter and her friends. She would not give up her claim to be Queen of England. In January 1536 she died; there was some suspicion of poisoning, but death, to one of her faith, could only be a relief from a wretched and tedious existence.
Though Henry had put Catherine away, the influence of the mother on the daughter could not be so easily set aside. The women were too much alike; both were straightforward and courageous, with simple, clear principles undisturbed by subtleties. In a world of shifting policies they inevitably appeared obstinate and bent on self-destruction. At first, Mary was not harassed. Henry’s early concern was to break Catherine and the Pope to his will. From 1529 onwards, with the help of a frightened and subservient Parliament, he began to attack the papal rights and privileges in England. In this fortuitous way he began the Reformation in England, though he himself still failed to get what he wanted from the Pope. In 1533 events forced Henry’s hand. Anne was pregnant and if the Pope would not annul the marriage with Catherine he must arrange a divorce by his own hand. In April he was secretly married to Anne; in May the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Cranmer, pronounced the marriage to Catherine invalid; and on 1st June Anne was crowned to no applause from a sullen populace. On 7th September the baby Elizabeth was born and the King now had the embarrassment of two daughters.
The desperate logic of Henry’s action now made his elder daughter illegitimate in his own eyes. The privileges that Mary had formerly enjoyed were to be transferred to Elizabeth; the household of the elder daughter was dissolved and Mary sent to stay with her baby half-sister at Hatfield. Mary understood the implication of the move, but could not believe that her father had ordered it and earned ‘the King’s high displeasure’ for questioning it. Henry now had both Catherine and Mary opposed to his will, for neither would renounce the title and position they thought were theirs by right; and Henry with his usual heartlessness began to play the two women against each other, threatening Catherine especially that her daughter would be sent abroad, forced into a nunnery, or into a base marriage unless both did what the King wanted. But Catherine, who was beyond fear herself, knew exactly the way to steady Mary’s resolution. ‘Daughter,’ she wrote in the winter of 1533, ‘I have heard such tidings that I do perceive, if it is true, the time is come that God Almighty will prove you; and I am very glad of it, for I trust He doth handle you with a very good love.’ She sent Mary a Life of Christ and the Epistles of Jerome; advised her to play the virginal for her recreation; and cautioned her to be as quiet and obedient as possible: ‘Speak you few words, and meddle nothing.’ For mother and daughter the King’s acts were against the laws of the Church and therefore should be resisted with all the confidence of a serene faith; oppression and suffering were merely the expectations of a good Christian.
The conflict between Henry and Mary was the more pathetic because they kept their affection for each other. The King was exasperated by Mary and threatened ‘to abate her stubbornness and pride’, but even Chapuys, the Emperor’s ambassador and the chief friend and adviser to both Catherine and Mary, noted that he still spoke of his daughter very fondly. Once Mary was removed to Hatfield, Henry left her in peace. But the new Queen, Anne Boleyn, jealous of the hold Mary had on the King’s heart and frightened for the future of herself and her own daughter, persecuted Mary maliciously. Anne boasted, Chapuys reported, ‘that she will make of the Princess a maid-of-honour in her royal household, that she may perhaps give her too much dinner on some occasion,1 or marry her to some varlet’. On Anne’s orders Mary was kept in the house, forbidden to exercise in the garden or to attend Mass. She was spied upon and her papers searched; she was separated from her old attendants, some of whom were imprisoned and interrogated; she was told to eat at the common table or starve; and the special diet ordered by Mary’s doctor was denied her on the grounds that it cost too much—‘at the least to the sum of £26.13.4’. And if Mary was not obedient Anne told her aunt Lady Shelton, the guardian of the household at Hatfield, to administer a few slaps across the face ‘considering the bastard that she was’. All this Mary bore with dignity; she wept in the privacy of her room, but in public held her head high and insisted as well as she could on her rights as a princess.
With misguided simplicity Mary thought that if only she could speak with her father all would be well. Anne was careful to keep them apart, but Mary’s hopes were illusory. Henry was so far gone in despotism that he could see no good but his own desire, and no law but his own will. The only limit on his selfish appetite was a canny instinct for the feelings of the people and what they would stand. State and Church he reformed into his own instruments. In 1534 the Act of Succession declared his elder daughter a bastard; later in the same year the Act of Supremacy made the King Christ’s English vicar. Mary, the most pious Catholic, could not be expected to assent to either of these measures. Yet, like all subjects of the crown, assent she must. Those who refused the oath faced death. Within a very short time the headsman’s axe was busily at work; John Fisher, as saintly a man as there was in England, fell, and not even Sir Thomas More, friend, loyal servant and good companion of Henry’s earlier years, was spared.
The oath was brought to Catherine and Mary, and naturally both refused to take it. But Henry, always the astute politician, knew he could not afford to execute Mary. She had a large following in the country and the King, pressed by foreign enemies, would not provoke a rebellion. The Pope had recently judged the royal matrimonial cause in favour of Catherine and had excommunicated the King when he would not take his wife back. The Emperor Charles, Mary’s cousin, was increasing his power and must not be goaded into an attack on England. The civilized in Europe were horrified by Henry’s barbaric executions, and England had few friends. Henry saw that Catherine and Mary must be made to take the oath, to acknowledge the King’s right and to give their assent to their own indignity. He wanted Mary alive and submissive, and he guarded her carefully so that Chapuys and her friends could not smuggle her out of England.
At the beginning of January 1536, Mary heard of the death of her beloved mother. On 29th January, the day of Catherine’s funeral, Anne Boleyn miscarried of a boy, an event which doomed her. Thomas Cromwell drew up her indictment and on the 19th May she was executed. A few days later Henry married Jane Seymour and began once again the attempt to provide a son for the English throne. Catherine’s death had relieved him from the immediate threat of war, and also of his most embarrassing opponent. In her moving last letter to the King Catherine had commended ‘unto you Mary our daughter, beseeching you to be a good father to her’, but for Henry policy came before fatherly solicitude and he continued the attack on his ill and grief-stricken daughter, delegating to the task Cromwell, his most wily and competent minister.
In June 1536 a second Act of Succession made both Mary and the child Elizabeth illegitimate and demanded Mary’s submission to the Act. By subtle diplomacy, pretending to be the barrier between her and the King’s anger, Cromwell worked his way into Mary’s confidence. On 13th June he sent a commission headed by the Duke of Norfolk with the paper for her to sign, but he had misjudged her resolution; she sent the delegation back with contemptuous arguments. Mary was taken from her companions, held incommunicado and watched night and day. Alone, sick and only twenty years old,
Mary managed to get word to Chapuys asking what he and his master, the Emperor, would have her do. Judging that Henry was now determined to execute her if she refused and thinking her more important to Spain alive than dead, they advised her to sign. That advice from her warmest and most influential friends decided her. She took the document Cromwell had sent her and signed it without reading it, denying the Pope, recognizing her father as the head of the English Church, acknowledging her mother’s ‘incestuous and unlawful’ marriage and her own illegitimacy.
For the first and perhaps the only time in her life Mary acted against her faith and her principles. Her rigid adherence to both in the future may be put down in part to remorse for this one fall. Henry was determined to break her, and who was she to set her puny powers against the full majesty of the King? For four years, in the sensitive time between sixteen and twenty, she was almost a prisoner and treated roughly and spitefully. With her inexperienced mind she had to resist the persuasive arguments of Cromwell. At last, with her mother dead, with her Spanish advisers counselling submission, and with the likelihood of execution if she refused, she gave way. It is a measure of her character that Henry found it harder to tame his daughter than it was to alter the laws and religion of England to his own convenience.