Mary Tudor (17 page)
Authors: Linda Porter
Of course, Chapuys is far from being totally reliable, though criticisms of him often miss the point. He did not like England or the English and this seems to have offended later commentators on his diplomatic correspondence. But why should he have liked this small, chilly country on the north-west fringes of Europe with a devious and increasingly domineering monarch? The ambassador’s role there, at the time Chapuys took it up, was something of a poisoned chalice, difficult because of the sensitive and uncharted nature of the unfolding domestic drama. From the perspective of those advising the emperor across the North Sea in Brussels, English affairs often seemed peripheral to the multiplicity of considerations faced by CharlesV on the wider European stage. England had strange customs and a greedy, venal and violent ruling class. This was not a plum assignment, but it was a demanding one. Henry may have been concerned about the lack of a son, but Charles and those about him were frequently more worried about the proximity of the Turks and the designs of the French.
Chapuys’ attitude towards the country in which he was to spend the better part of his professional life was no different from that of many educated Europeans who were his contemporaries. It would never have occurred to him to study English because it was not an international language, though by the end of his assignment he must have picked up a reasonable amount, having heard it spoken by servants and in private exchanges between the politicians he frequented.
Besides, when all of those he dealt with spoke Latin, the common language of the day, or French (and sometimes both), he had no need to grapple with the native tongue of the country. Like all ambassadors, he employed spies and informers and he knew that their information was not always accurate. Some of what he passed on to Charles V and to Granvelle, the bishop of Arras, responsible for much of imperial diplomatic policy, was overstated or misguided. Occasionally, it was just plain wrong. Quite a lot of it was repetitive, a common problem when ambassadors were expected to report weekly and in detail. Coding and decoding were time-consuming and isolating, requiring literal burning of the midnight oil in rooms that were stuffy in summer and draughty in winter. Subordinates did some of this work, but the ambassador often did it himself. Chapuys’ grasp of English proper names, the towns and districts and the leading individuals often appears laughable, at least until we remember that there was no uniform spelling at the time. In the 1550s, Elizabeth, Mary’s half-sibling, would variously address her as ‘
Dear Sister
’ and ‘
Dear Sistar
’, so Chapuys can hardly be blamed for getting Jane Seymour’s surname wrong when she was first mentioned in court gossip.
Dear Sister
’ and ‘
Dear Sistar
’, so Chapuys can hardly be blamed for getting Jane Seymour’s surname wrong when she was first mentioned in court gossip.
It is true that he represented what was happening in England almost entirely from the perspective of the central government. He only rarely travelled outside London and knew little of the rest of the country, but he saw no need to stray from the seat of power.Throughout his long stay, he resided near to the court at Greenwich, in the pleasantly rural and green outskirts to the east of London. Always he was close to the River Thames, the main artery of transport. In 1533, when Mary’s need of him suddenly became greater than her mother’s, he was living in the house of Sir Giles Cappel, west of Tower Hill. He was seldom, however, allowed to see the princess. The contacts were through servants and trusted intermediaries, who had greater freedom of movement. Those who came and went, facilitating vital communications between Mary and the ambassador, were almost never named. The king must have known about the existence of these contacts but he let them continue. It would have been difficult to put a stop to them altogether, unless Mary was put under 24-hour watch.
Sometimes Chapuys’ activities and advice could easily have been viewed by the king and his council as fomenting discord and rebellion. Considerable forbearance was exhibited, but he does not seem to have been regarded as a serious threat, even when he advocated invasion by imperial troops to support Katherine of Aragon or made tentative plans for the escape overseas of Mary. How much faith he himself had in these schemes is a moot point.There is a feeling about them that he was occasionally frustrated by his inability to do anything practical to help Katherine and her daughter. Perhaps he also wanted to get Charles’s attention. Whatever the reason, it made no difference. The emperor himself had long since determined that he could be of very little direct assistance to his aunt and cousin.
We owe much to Eustace Chapuys and his sense of duty and commitment to the task he had been given. Sixteen years in a court that was seldom genuinely welcoming, where nothing and no one could be taken at face value, put a premium on resourcefulness and self-discipline. He had few friends in England, particularly after the death in 1532 of Archbishop Warham, but he was consoled by his continued exchange of letters with Erasmus. Without him, we would know far less than we do about this tumultuous period of English history. And Mary would have been deprived of the one figure she believed she could trust when her world crumbled. He tried to support her in a way that he believed appropriate to her rank and condition and to adapt his advice to keep pace with developments, while never losing sight of his imperial role. It was a difficult balance. She, no doubt, saw Chapuys as a wise counsellor, but in his genuine concern for her welfare, his outrage at the treatment she received and his pity for her mother, there is more than a hint of genuine affection. His own family, of many nieces and nephews and one acknowledged illegitimate son, were far away in Annecy, a town that he never saw again after 1529. He, like Mary, was basically alone.
He also shared her distaste for the rise of new religious ideas. By education and temperament, he was attuned to the humanist ideas of Erasmus and other leading thinkers, but he would have no truck with heresy. For much of his long stay in England, Mary was one of his chief concerns. Her father might call her ‘The Lady Mary’; for Chapuys, she was always ‘the Princess’. He saw the changes that tragedy and pressure wrought in her and was dismayed.What he could do for her was, obviously, circumscribed, but he did his best. And it may be that, in the summer of 1536, when her relationship with her own father reached crisis point, he saved her life.
As autumn approached in 1533, Mary moved to New Hall, one of her father’s country houses in Essex.The mansion was known as Beaulieu at the time, and it was one of Henry’s finest residences outside London. It was here that Henry had met his advisers to go over the arrangements for what he thought would be a quick annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, six years earlier. Now, there soon arrived the announcement that was the distant finale to those discussions. Queen Anne had given birth on 7 September. Rejoicing, however, was subdued. The child was a girl. Henry put a brave face on it, but the truth was that his search for a son to succeed him was still unfulfilled. For the time being, he must content himself with another daughter. The baby was named Elizabeth, and it was clear from the outset that she would supplant her elder sister. In Henry’s eyes, Anne’s girl was his heir (though he hoped that brothers would follow) and England’s only princess. Perhaps he did not care to think back to 1516, and his confident remarks that boys would follow after Mary. Anne Boleyn was actually a year older than Katherine of Aragon when she gave birth to Elizabeth, though she did not have her predecessor’s history of failed pregnancies and dead princes.
In fact, Elizabeth’s birth did not solve anything. But its impact on the two women it most directly affected, Anne herself and Mary, was profound. Anne’s position would have been immeasurably strengthened if she had produced a boy, though the assumption that Mary would have recognised the precedence of a prince born of a union she regarded as adulterous is open to doubt. She might well have regarded him as another illegitimate half-brother, like the duke of Richmond. Or she might have bided her time and waited to see how her father treated her. What seems beyond belief is that she would ever have accepted that she was not a princess of the blood. So Elizabeth’s arrival made her decision easier. She simply would not give way to a younger sister.There was no agonising over the course of action to be taken as there was no alternative. Anne Boleyn had destroyed her mother’s life and now Mary, utterly certain that she was the king’s only true heir, set herself up deliberately as the focus of opposition to Anne. She would not go away, she would not back down.There was widespread sympathy for her, inside England and abroad. Anne always suffered from the fact that she never established a broad base of support, either at court or in the country as a whole, and her main source of foreign support was France, England’s traditional enemy. When Anne first came on the scene, Mary did not possess the skills or experience to trouble her and was kept well away from confrontation. Over the years of her mother’s adversity, she had behaved with caution and tact, but she had been learning all the while. It is a mistake to view her reaction to Elizabeth’s birth as a straightforward case of hysteria and
amour propre
. She knew what the stakes were, as did Anne Boleyn.The rivalry between the two women was as implacable as Anne, who was often given to hyperbole, described it: ‘I am her death and she is mine.’
amour propre
. She knew what the stakes were, as did Anne Boleyn.The rivalry between the two women was as implacable as Anne, who was often given to hyperbole, described it: ‘I am her death and she is mine.’
What Mary did not adequately understand was the likely reaction of Henry VIII. And her father, because he was king and all must obey him, did not trouble himself with worries about how she would respond to his commands regarding her. In fact, they showed a wilful lack of mutual comprehension. Mary claimed she would obey her father but defied him for three years.The king would no doubt have preferred not to hurt her (though his affection for her is hard to quantify), but there was no way he could humour her. A king who allowed a daughter to dictate to him on matters of state was no king at all. He sought to make the situation abundantly clear within days of Elizabeth’s birth. Mary was to cease using the title princess immediately and her badges, the green and blue livery her servants had used since she was born, were to be removed and replaced with his own. Mary reacted with an incredulity that was almost sneering, writing to her father:
This morning my chamberlain came and informed me that he had received a letter from Sir William Paulet, controller of your House, to the effect that I should remove at once to Hertford Castle. I desired to see the letter, in which was written ‘the Lady Mary, the king’s daughter’, leaving out the name of princess. I marvelled at this, thinking your grace was not privy to it, not doubting that you take me for your lawful daughter … If I agreed to the contrary, I should offend God; in all other things, you shall find me an obedient daughter.
3
This rebuke, which implied that the king did not keep track of correspondence sent out in his name and was being manipulated, provoked a swift response. If she wanted her father to spell out her change of status, he would meet her challenge. A deputation, led by the earls of Oxford, Essex and Sussex, was sent off to face down this impudent young lady. They delivered a message phrased in unequivocal tones:
The king is surprised to be informed, both by Lord Hussey’s letters and his daughter’s own, delivered by one of her servants, that she, forgetting her filial duty and allegiance, attempts, in spite of the commandment given her … arrogantly to usurp the title of princess, pretending to be heir apparent … declaring that she cannot in conscience think but that she is the king’s lawful daughter, born in true matrimony, and believes that the king in his conscience thinks the same.
To prevent what was called Mary’s ‘pernicious example’ spreading, the earls were commanded to represent to Mary ‘the folly and danger of her conduct and how the king intends that she shall use herself both as to her title and as to her household’. It was further pointed out that she had ‘worthily deserved the king’s high displeasure and punishment by law, but that on her conforming to his will, he may incline of his fatherly pity to promote her welfare’.
4
Though there was a hint of the carrot as well as the stick in this pronouncement, it outlined the relative positions of the king and Mary very precisely. In Henry’s eyes, his elder daughter was illegitimate. She would be treated as a king’s acknowledged offspring, but she was not a princess of England. He had not endured the upheaval of years of argument about his first marriage to leave any doubts unanswered now. Mary’s feelings did not enter into it. His will was law, applicable to all his subjects, without question.
4
Though there was a hint of the carrot as well as the stick in this pronouncement, it outlined the relative positions of the king and Mary very precisely. In Henry’s eyes, his elder daughter was illegitimate. She would be treated as a king’s acknowledged offspring, but she was not a princess of England. He had not endured the upheaval of years of argument about his first marriage to leave any doubts unanswered now. Mary’s feelings did not enter into it. His will was law, applicable to all his subjects, without question.
Yet a challenge to his authority was exactly what Henry now faced. Mary was standing up to him just as her mother had done. If she had succeeded, he would have been weakened in his own eyes and the eyes of the world. In some ways, it is astonishing that he let Mary’s defiance last as long as he did.Yet his patience, or indecision, did Mary no good. She had the spirit of her Castilian grandmother but not her armies.The support, often only tacit, of a handful of courtiers could not help her win her battle. In retrospect, it might have been better for her if Henry’s eventual brutality had been administered at once.The delay raised false hopes and developed in her a pattern of opposition based on conscience and self-identity, where suffering almost became a goal in itself.This was unhealthy and damaging to a woman subject to depression, who never subsequently understood that to be strong, rather than pragmatic, was not always the best option.
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