Mary Tudor (30 page)
Authors: Linda Porter
But in one important respect, Katherine Parr’s final marriage left a gap in Mary’s life. It deprived her of the company of a woman whom she regarded as an equal. Now there was no one to fulfil that role. Margaret Douglas, much more inclined to enjoy the court than Mary and aware of the importance of being seen, came down to London from Yorkshire with her young son, Lord Darnley. Much as she wanted the boy to meet Edward VI and for his role in the English succession to be recognised, she did not stay long.The countess of Lennox shared Mary’s devotion to the old religion and felt uncomfortable among the reformers of Edward’s regime. She soon retired to her husband’s northern estate at Temple Newsam. This left Mary with only her ladies-in-waiting to provide female company.They were loyal and affectionate but they were subordinates, not friends. Her sister might, in other circumstances, have become her confidante. Instead, they grew apart and a tension developed between them that was never resolved.
Though there were many factors that influenced the development of the sisters’ relationship, including the inescapable one of geographical separation, the greatest and most fundamental can be simply stated. Elizabeth was no longer a child, but a person of substance with a mind of her own. Potentially, she was a rival. At 13 years of age she was a highly intelligent young woman who had benefited from a superb education, part of it shared with her brother, and informed by a greater breadth of learning and enquiry than Mary’s. Mary’s education was certainly impressive by the standards of its day, but those standards had changed by the time Elizabeth entered the schoolroom. She was taught by men who had questioned established orthodoxies, and the power of new ideas inclined her away from her older sister intellectually. Mary had been proud of Elizabeth’s precociousness while she was growing up (as indeed she was of Edward’s) but what was attractive in a child was suddenly less so in a woman. Elizabeth shared Mary’s emotional fragility, as did all the Tudors except the founder of the dynasty, Henry VII, but, over time, she learned to use it to better effect. Never having known her mother, she was not encumbered by the sense of loss and resentment that inevitably coloured Mary’s adult life. Her past, her origins, was unspoken, and she lived very much in the present, pampered by her adoring household staff and her foolish but loving governess, Katherine Ashley.
When Mary left Katherine Parr’s household, Elizabeth stayed, unwisely, as it turned out. Henry VIII’s last queen died a few days after giving birth to a daughter (named Mary, after the princess) in September 1548, by which time her younger stepdaughter had already moved out, apparently under a cloud.The whisperings about the real reason for her departure became clear in early 1549, when, suddenly, lurid details surfaced about Thomas Seymour’s behaviour towards Elizabeth while she was under his roof; they were part of the evidence gathered against him which resulted in an accusation of treason. He was never brought to trial but attainted and executed in March 1549, without his brother lifting a finger to save him. Chastened by the knowledge that she had escaped real danger mostly because of her ability to live on her wits, Elizabeth now realised only too well the perils she and Mary faced at the hands of the unscrupulous power-seekers of Edward’s reign.
But the Seymour episode did not bring the sisters closer together - if anything, it pulled them further apart. Elizabeth emerged with a dubious reputation, while Mary’s was unsullied. Mary kept her own counsel about what had gone on, but at the back of her mind was probably the question that increasingly haunted her as Elizabeth grew towards maturity - what was to be expected, seeing that she was Anne Boleyn’s daughter? That thought was more than sufficient to threaten the basis of their relationship and to cancel much of the affection that Mary had once felt.
A chilliness was developing between the sisters, who saw little of each other during the six years that Edward was king.They exchanged letters but were seldom at court together, and there is no record of either having entertained the other at any of the many houses they both owned.They soon came to represent different strands of the political and religious fabric of their brother’s kingdom, and it was Mary’s relations with the young king, rather than Elizabeth, which mattered more. To Edward’s increasing frustration and Mary’s near-heartbreak, they were at odds for most of his reign.
Edward was only nine years old when his father died and had spent much of his short life trying to impress the rather distant figure of his parent, for whom he probably felt as much fear as affection.Yet though often depicted as a cold, even heartless child, he seems to have loved both his sisters. Elizabeth was close to him in age and had shared his lessons and his household. Mary, though, was old enough to be his mother, and she always treated him with respect but as if he were a child. This gave her a convenient excuse for disagreeing with the edicts of his ministers, when, as became more frequently the case, they did not suit her. Edward hated the confrontations with Mary, and on one occasion they both ended up in tears, but he found her tone patronising and was increasingly impatient with it as he grew into his teens. This creeping disenchantment with a difficult woman whom he could not help loving when he was a little boy may explain his attitude towards her when he knew he was dying in 1553.
But six years earlier, there was no reason to suppose that he would never attain his majority. He was a healthy, active child with a good mind and a determination to be a good king, to govern his people with the God-given powers that Archbishop Cranmer had so radically described at his coronation. Perhaps his academic attainments at so young an age were overstated.The imperial ambassador was dismissive of the paragon’s linguistic abilities when introduced to him. He began to greet the king in French, but Somerset told him to address the king in Latin,‘which he said he understood better than French, but, truth to tell,’ added Van der Delft, unkindly, ‘he seemed to me to understand one just as little as the other, although the archbishop of Canterbury had assured me that the king knew Latin as well as he [the archbishop] did himself ’.
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It does not seem to have occurred to Van der Delft (who admittedly was disenchanted with the entire state entry from the Tower into London) that a small boy meeting all manner of dignitaries for the first time in public might be momentarily tongue-tied, or just plain bored.
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It does not seem to have occurred to Van der Delft (who admittedly was disenchanted with the entire state entry from the Tower into London) that a small boy meeting all manner of dignitaries for the first time in public might be momentarily tongue-tied, or just plain bored.
Edward survived the arduous ceremonies of the coronation and the subsequent feasting with a becoming dignity. He did not see much of Mary in the first year of his reign; she went off to Norfolk in mid-July to inspect her estates there and did not return till September. She was expected in London in early November but she was still in Essex at the beginning of the next month, suffering from ill health. The physicians called it melancholy and it seems to have afflicted her, by her own admission, every year at about this same time.When Van der Delft went to see her she told him she did not expect to return to London that winter. But the reasons for her depression (perhaps a form of what would nowadays be known as seasonal affective disorder) may have been intensified by the changes in religious practice that were increasing in England. Mass was no longer being celebrated in the house of the Protector, his brother or John Dudley, now earl of Warwick. But Mary was devoted to the mass, a ceremony central to her daily life. She already knew she would never give it up, even if it meant public opposition to the laws being made in her brother’s name.
So what had once been a comforting ritual, but probably nothing more, became the touchstone of Mary’s life. She embraced it almost ostentatiously, hearing four masses a day as early as June 1547, well before the full extent of Somerset’s religious policy became clear. Mary hated everything the reformers, led by Thomas Cranmer, epitomised: their evangelical support of the vernacular Bible and church services, their unseemly marriages, their acquisition of former Church lands (though many Catholics, including the Howards, had profited equally).To her they were hypocrites and time-servers who sought to overthrow centuries of faith in the pursuit of personal profit and power. But more than anything else, she hated them for their commitment to the communion in both kinds and their assertion that nothing miraculous happened when the host was elevated and the priest received the body of Christ. Doctrinal arguments she eschewed, but the Latin mass and its central mystery were her chief points of reference in an uncertain world. She would not yield on them. Her defiance meant that she became, whether intentionally or not, the focus of opposition to the Edwardian regime.
Perhaps she did not set out to define herself that way and she was certainly not personally implicated in armed opposition, but the Lady Mary became an intractable problem for Edward’s ministers.The reason was straightforward. However much she might storm and protest, she was breaking the laws of the land.This had the most serious of implications: ‘If the king and his sister, to whom the whole kingdom was attached as heiress to the crown in the event of the king’s death, were to differ in matters of religion, dissension would certainly spring up. Such was the character of the nation,’ Somerset informedVan der Delft.‘He hoped the Lady Mary would use her wisdom and conform with the king to avoid such an emergency and keep peace within the realm.’ But he added, significantly for the manner in which the disagreement intensified in the early 1550s,‘he would not enquire into her private conduct if she had not yet come to their way of thinking’.The Protector and the king clung at this stage to the quite unrealistic belief that, left to herself, Mary would come round and embrace religious change. In this, they were completely deluded.Their laws were helping Mary discover, again, her own identity. She would never change. Her conscience transcended statute law and was perfectly clear. Her brother and his advisers were breaking the law of God and propelling England on the road to perdition.
The clash between these two positions was never entirely resolved while Edward lived, but its seriousness ebbed and flowed as other considerations absorbed the attention of the politicians. Mary was not the only influential figure who opposed religious change. Margaret Douglas’s house became a centre for Catholic opposition in the north of England. Other prominent Catholics such as the duke of Norfolk and Edward Courtenay remained as prisoners in the Tower of London. In 1548, they were joined by Stephen Gardiner, the irascible bishop of Winchester. Gardiner had fallen from favour with Henry VIII in the 1540s and been very pointedly cut out of the king’s will. He served early notice that he would not accept the direction Edward’s council was setting. After preaching an uncompromising sermon justifying transubstantiation, he was swiftly deprived of his liberty. Mary seems not to have commented on this herself, and there is no evidence of any communication between them.This may partly be explained by a recognition that it would not be wise, though both Mary and Gardiner were not shy of speaking out. But she had never been really close to him and could not forget that he had changed sides in the 1530s and supported the divorce.
Edward’s councillors, daily beset with the business of running a country, faced difficulties far more serious than the embarrassment of disaffected public figures. Committed to major religious change most of the council certainly was, but it also grappled with huge economic problems: the expense of war, a debased coinage and rising agrarian discontent. Foreign policy was a constant source of pressure. Relations with both France and Scotland were bad.The French wanted the return of Boulogne and the Scots never forgave Somerset for attacking them in 1547. In revenge, they sent the five-year-old Mary Queen of Scots to France.There she was to be betrothed to the dauphin and brought up as a French queen-in-waiting.
All these developments were watched with interest by Charles V.The emperor and his advisers did not derive much comfort from the spectacle of a weak and divided England and were concerned about the triumph of heretics in government, which would only encourage similarly deluded and evil people in the Low Countries. But Charles soon realised that his cousin’s stand on religion gave him a powerful influence over English politics. In supporting her unequivocally he could threaten dire - though mostly unspecified - consequences if she was not allowed to follow her religion. Somerset’s policies would have made him a natural ally of the imperialists except in this one, insuperable respect. It clearly troubled the duke, who expressed concern as early as the summer of 1547, that the emperor reportedly found his government ‘displeasing’. In May 1549, as the country prepared for the introduction of the new prayer-book and service in the vernacular, Somerset emphasised that all that had so far been undertaken was for the good of England: ‘These [religious changes] were greatly needed to repress and stifle the dissensions bred within the realm, and although His Majesty may be convinced that our right course would have been to leave things as they were in the late king’s time until the termination of the Council of Trent, yet if the causes and considerations that moved us to act were known to him, and how soberly we have proceeded in this matter, he would impute less blame to us.’
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