Few figures in history are as maligned as Mary Tudor, the daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon. Born a princess, she was celebrated and betrothed to powerful princes, but following Henry’s break with Rome, she was declared a bastard by her Father, browbeaten into submission, only to rise as England’s first queen regnant who restored Catholicism in what would have been a wildly successful counter-reformation, had it not been cut short by her death. Nevertheless, to the extent Mary is remembered today, she is remembered for burning Protestants at the stake, and has been affixed with the 17th century name of “bloody Mary.”
To help balance the historical record, we will explore the life of England’s first queen regnant and her times, and dispel the propaganda and legends about her reign.
Mary was born on 18 February 1516. At this time, any question of Henry’s marriage to Katherine was still a decade away. She was beautiful, with a full head of red hair like her father. She was also the only one of Henry and Katherine’s children to survive. Henry had a son in 1511, also named Henry, but he died a mere three weeks after birth. Katherine had delivered numerous other still-born children, and after being worn out by perpetual pregnancies, was no longer attractive to Henry. Nevertheless, as the dynamics of their relationship changed, he kept her in reverence, and doted on his daughter, who was loved by the people. Thus, it made sense to treat her as the heir, and Henry seems to have been very intentional in preparing her to be a queen regnant. Katherine made sure she received a brilliant education, guided by the Spanish humanist, Juan Luis Vives. She was precocious, and would become fluent in Latin as well as French, though surprisingly she never had a firm command of Spanish. She is not noted for any extraordinary piety in any of the sources, rather, she would have been properly instructed in religion as even Henry and Katherine were, from simple prayers to participation at the Mass. Catholicism was the air one breathed, which is to say it was normal, whereas the fervency we see later as an adult under the reign of her brother was an intense reaction to persecution. Her state as a princess at this time, however, meant the primary occupation was royal training, and preparation for royal marriage. Furthermore, negotiating Mary’s future in the royal marriage market held a double value for Henry, both in terms of the succession and contemporary power politics.
At the age of two, she was betrothed to François, the infant Dauphin of France (whose father had the same name). This marked an attempt to sure up the shift in national policy, away from the older Anglo-Spanish alliance and toward an Anglo-French alliance, very much to Katherine’s Spanish chagrin. Henry felt betrayed by Ferdinand, Katherine’s father, who still owed him money and had given but muted military assistance during the wars of the league of Cambrai. Henry took the first steps by offering his sister, also named Mary, in marriage to the previous French monarch, King Louis XII; when he died, his daughter would serve as the new soil in which this alliance might take root. Students of medieval history know that alliance between England and France is as unnatural a thing as an honest politician. So, predictably, when the Spanish Katherine protested against the French alliance, her protests were like pushing against an open door with a battering ram. Henry and his chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, were already looking to back the newcomer to European power politics, Katherine’s nephew, Charles, the king of Spain. Charles, the heir to Spain through his mother Juana (Katherine’s oldest sister), and the Netherlands as well as the Holy Roman Empire through his father, was the rising star on the European stage. England simply wasn’t powerful enough to be a major player, but it was powerful enough to break the stalemate between France and Spain, and increasingly, the Spanish half seemed to be the stronger.
So, in 1522, Charles arrived in England, and he and Henry embarked upon the Grand Enterprise. England would join Charles in battle against the perfidious French, Charles would pay Henry tremendous sums of money, and work to elect Cardinal Wolsey as Pope. To seal the deal, Henry betrothed Mary, now 6 years old to Charles, who was her first cousin and sixteen years her senior.
Modern readers will note the oddity of betrothal to an infant, and now to a first cousin in his twenties, but this would not have seemed odd to Henry or Katherine; marriage was ever a political tool. For the young Princess Mary the notion of being the wife of the emperor would have had a very different notion; it meant being pretty, affable, and dancing before the great men of the world.
Nevertheless, it all went up in smoke. Charles had promised the moon, but could he deliver? Henry had troops in the field, but Charles never materialized. In 1525, Henry decided to sit out the conflict, but Charles won total victory over the French at Pavia, where he captured the French King François I. Henry now proposed an outrageous plan to partition the kingdom of France between them. Charles, however, did not just remove one powerful rival so as to create another one. The fact is, Charles no longer needed Henry. He broke the betrothal to Mary, and ignored all of Katherine’s letters. The Anglo-Spanish alliance was over, and Katherine was humiliated.
In the interim, with the future uncertain, Henry had established Mary as Princess of Wales, a traditionally male title, and prepared for her a royal education, but still, he was not completely sure. No woman had ever reigned in her own right in England. What indeed if everything were to be thrown back to the state of affairs during the Wars of the Roses? This was the constant fear of Henry’s reign, even though it was rather unrealistic. The reign of his father, Henry VII, had guaranteed that no overmighty subject could ever challenge royal authority; just the same, he never forgot memories of taking refuge in the tower as a boy during the rebellion of Perkin Warbek. Just the same, the greater issue in considering the succession was the lack of the male heir, and whether something could be done about it. After the failure of the Grand Enterprise, it seemed clear that the dynastic reasoning for Henry’s marrying Katherine, the alliance with Spain, had not done England any good. Perhaps a change in wife from the Spanish to the French would solve matters? This was certainly what Cardinal Wolsey understood when he held the secret trial at Norfolk castle in April of 1527. But after he had gone to France to create support for this scheme, Henry’s purpose seemed to be altered, at least as far as Wolsey was concerned. In reality, it is what Henry had in mind since at least the new year; to marry one of Katherine’s ladies in waiting — Anne Boleyn.
Anne was the daughter of Thomas Boleyn, a squire of lesser gentry. Witty and intelligent, she was raised at a school for noble ladies run by Mary of Ghent, the Emperor’s sister, and would see extensive service in the French court. She was so French in her manners and speech that the French ambassador said to Wolsey that she could hardly be mistaken as English, which is high praise from the French. The first time Mary would have seen her was in 1525, when she appeared at court as one of her mother’s ladies in waiting. At nine years old, she would have only noticed her among many other pretty ladies. When she arrived at court, she was a real dynamo, though it seemed it was some time before Henry noticed. The well-known story, that Anne refused to be Henry’s mistress, and Henry was enflamed with Romanticism, need not be recounted in great detail here. As of the new Year, 1527, Anne had shown Henry that she would be his, provided she were queen, and Henry set out to do it by any and all means, promising her to be his sole mistress. She first publicly appeared with Henry at a reception for the French embassy in Greenwich, where they also danced. Mary, who was particularly honored by the French ambassador on this occasion, did not take any particular notice of Anne, and why would she? She was but a random woman that had a few minutes of fame dancing with the king. Neither Anne nor Mary knew that they were about to enter a struggle which would define their lives, nor did Mary (or her mother, for that matter), know that Henry was already taking the first steps to igniting that conflict.
In due time, Katherine did in fact find out. She maintained a very accurate network of information, and as she became more aware, she was able to stay one step of Henry at every turn. Once Henry had wrung from Pope Clement VII the right to litigate the marriage in England, the first step was to have Cardinal Compeggio offer for her to make the whole thing go away by retiring to a convent. But Katherine would have none of it. She was the daughter of the great Isabella, born to be a queen not a nun, and she would not renounce her birthright nor her marriage. What would this mean for Mary? Mary’s legitimacy might have remained intact had she done so, but really, Mary would not have had it any other way, as we see in the long struggle to defend the legitimacy of her mother’s marriage. At any rate, Katherine’s decision to fight, which brought no end of humiliation and frustration for Henry, meant that Mary would be caught in the crosshairs.
When did Mary find out? The sources are silent on this. At the beginning of the King’s Great Matter, as it were, Mary was but twelve. It has been surmised that Mary came to a gradual understanding of what was taking place, but perhaps had it presented to her as her father working out his conscience. Ambassadors noted that if the conflict were not going on the family’s public behavior would give the appearance of domestic tranquility.
What she knew, or however she came to learn of it, is hidden to history. As the tumultuous movements of the annulment proceedings moved on, Mary is not seen nor are her sentiments recorded regarding the Legatine Court at Blackfriars, or Katherine’s appeal in Rome. Henry had been defeated by his wife at every turn and humiliated on the international stage. Now it was time to fight fire with fire. Wolsey was out, and Anne became the principal mover and shaker behind the scenes. Anne would successively oust Wolsey, gradually turning Henry against his chief minister until he died from the strain. Now it was time to oust Katherine, and Mary would side with her mother, something Henry would not forgive.
In the summer of 1530, Henry shunted Katherine to the side and took Anne along with him hunting. This was an open acknowledgment of Anne’s place, and clearly spelled the writing on the wall. Katherine remained at Windsor, where she summoned Mary, and the two remained together the rest of the summer. Katherine could no longer shield Mary from what was happening, and was still hopeful of help from the Pope, and others within England. Unfortunately, neither mother nor daughter knew that this was their last meeting. The next year, Henry banished Katherine from court, and forbade Mary to see her. Anne was now agitating Henry behind the scenes, and doing as much as possible to keep Mary away from court. It is clear that she now viewed Mary as equal a threat as Katherine was to her prospects of becoming queen, which were not yet certain. Anne had played the long game, but she was not prepared for how long.
From 1529 to 1535, new figures took the reins at court. Thomas More, though no supporter of the divorce, would become the first lay Lord Chancellor in centuries, even if his tenure would be brief. Thomas Cromwell, a secretary for Wolsey, managed to survive his fall and become secretary of letters, and by 1533 Chancellor of the Exchequer. Shortly, he will occupy a chief place in the relations between Mary and her father. Thomas Cranmer, an obscure Cambridge cleric, was also introduced into Henry’s circle, at first to win More over to the side of the divorce, but then he would assume a more important position. He had secretly married, and was very much a Protestant before that term was in vogue. He and Anne found common cause in so-called “reform” opinion, which was a code for some variant or stripe of Lutheranism among the educated, and thus he would become the Boleyn family chaplain. As Henry began seeking support from the universities to present to the Pope, Cranmer suggested a new course along the lines of something like this: Henry had gone about it all wrong. If we look at the bible, there are kings, and bishops, and Popes—oh, never mind, there are no Popes in the Bible, just kings and bishops. Maybe it’s the case that the Pope is merely the bishop of Rome, whereas you are the king, and by ancient privilege the head of the English Church. Thus was born the royal supremacy.
But 1529 also marks the arrival of Eustace Chapuys in London as the new Imperial ambassador. Chapuys was a Savoyard fluent in both Latin and French, as well as a seasoned diplomat with a sharp eye and a keen political sense. He would represent Charles V in England for 15 difficult years, and is also a primary source for Mary’s condition for these difficult years, as he kept the Emperor up to date. Chapuys employed spies and took down all sorts of accounts and gossip, so that his information, though often very useful, is also mixed with items which are false or a misreading of events, and as with all ambassadorial correspondence, we have to sift and compare it with the evidence. Ambassadors were expected to write weekly, which forced them to search for as much information as possible to fill out their reports.
From 1529 to 1535, Henry and his acolytes began moving the legislative machinery to break with Rome and assume control of the Church. The anti-clerical legislation caused Thomas More to resign and retire to private life. In 1533, before the ship of good relations with Rome had sailed, Henry convinced Clement VII to make Cranmer his new Archbishop of Canterbury. One of his first acts was to repudiate the same authority whereby he was appointed, by pronouncing the invalidity of the marriage of Henry to Katherine in 1533 so that Henry could marry an already pregnant Anne. Then came the acts of Succession and Royal Supremacy; all subjects would have to swear that only the marriage between Henry and Anne was valid, only their issue would inherit the crown. The break with Rome and the repudiation of Katherine were complete, and since Cranmer is the only one from these events to survive into the 1550s, Mary will single him out in particular as the locus for all of her suffering.
For the present, Mary watched all of this with trepidation. At first, she dealt with the marriage diplomatically, and did not make much trouble. She and Henry still exchanged gifts, and she was still welcome at court, though she avoided showing Anne any deference. Anne tried her best to keep Mary away from court, but she could not always have her way. As we saw her working behind the scenes inciting Henry to remove Wolsey, and then Katherine, she also argued with him about Mary. It is fair to say that Henry legitimately cared for his daughter, but love in his world was more about what benefit he gained from it. As 1533 drew into the summer, Henry now prepared to disinherit his daughter.
Mary seems to have failed to observe the change in her father and his mood. As bold as she was, she was not experienced politically, and being denied communication with her mother was beginning to put a strain on her emotional state. But she also had reason to hope. Anne was pregnant with Elizabeth, and at thirty-one she could die in childbirth, or give birth to a still born which would diminish her position with Henry. but it wasn’t meant to be. As we shall see in part two, Elizabeth’s birth will become a turning point for both Mary and Anne.
