Mary Tudor (34 page)
Authors: Linda Porter
The princess had reason to be grateful to Robert Rochester for guiding her away from a course that would probably have made her a permanent exile. Apart from his sincere commitment to his lady, he also, like other members of Mary’s household, must have wondered what would happen to him if she fled. During the following year, he found out to his cost what happened when she stayed.
On the surface, one of the most surprising features of the whole affair was that everyone concerned pretended it had not happened. Maybe it would have suited Warwick and the council better if Mary had slipped away, to become someone else’s problem. It would have been easy to represent her as a traitor to her brother, to point to her history of opposition to her father and dismiss her as a weak and benighted woman who could never be trusted again. Instead of disciplining the princess, other tactics were tried. Mary’s chaplains were targeted for infringing the king’s statutes on religion, though no immediate penalties were enforced against them. At the same time, a charm offensive was launched, whereby Mary found herself the reluctant recipient of invitations to court and visits from the chancellor, Richard Rich, importuning her to join him on hunting trips, to attend a selection of sporting events and generally partake of his hospitality.
Mary knew there was a hidden agenda behind all this sudden attention. But how was she to handle these senior officers of her brother’s government without landing herself in more trouble? Refusing an invitation to court would put her in the most awkward position and might deprive her of the opportunity of going when she felt she really needed to see the king. Privy council secretary William Petre and Rich arrived with letters of credence from the king and his council, signed by twelve of them,‘to the effect that they had special orders and commission to request her to go to court and visit the King’s majesty, her brother’. Professing great astonishment and clearly caught off guard, Mary produced a rambling series of unconvincing excuses:‘… her indisposition, the distance at which she found herself from his majesty’s court, the smallness of the house [whatever that meant - presumably she was suggesting that EdwardVI was not living somewhere spacious enough to receive her] and the fact that she had been with him not long ago’. In fact, it had been six months since she had seen the king, though her visitors seem not to have corrected her on that score. They did, however, counter with the cheery observation ‘that if my Lady were poorly, a change of air and abode would be beneficial to her and improve her health’.To which Mary replied, with much more honesty than political tact, that if she needed a change of air, she would rather go to one of her own houses.
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For the rest of 1550, the council held back from inflaming the situation with the heiress to the throne, and the action against her chaplains was deferred.The hardening of attitude may well have been triggered by the king himself. Mary came to court, as did Elizabeth, for the Christmas season, the last time all three of Henry VIII’s children were together. Elizabeth, who was certainly higher in favour than her sister, arrived with a great show of support and stayed throughout the Twelve Days of Christmas. Mary did not. She left early, distressed and alarmed by an incident that did not bode well for her future.
She must have come with some anxiety, as she had managed to evade the festivities altogether the previous year, and the summons in August 1550 had unnerved her considerably.The attack on her religion that took place over the holiday was not unexpected but the ferocity and source were. Edward VI chose to reprove her for hearing the mass, unequivocally and in public.The king was 13 years old and a child no longer. He had had enough of his sister’s disobedience and condescension, her constant references to his being too young to know his own mind. Now she was with him, he decided that she must be made to understand that enough was enough. She must stop protesting and do as she was told.
Precisely what he said is not recorded, but the manner of its delivery did more than make Mary wince. It made her cry. She later wrote to the council, clinging to the belief that allowed her to keep going throughout the ordeal of Edward’s reign, that her brother was badly advised.They had turned him against her and she could not forgive them. ‘When I perceived how the king, whom I love and honour above all things, as by nature and duty bound, had been counselled against me, I could not contain myself and exhibited my interior grief.’ Then, in an instant, the realisation that he had reduced his sister to tears destroyed Edward’s own composure. He wept himself. He ‘… benignly requested me to dry my tears, saying that he thought no harm of me’.The councillors present also tried to put a positive gloss on Edward’s harshness. Mary was told that her brother intended only to ‘inquire and know all things’, and there, she claimed, matters had rested. But her pride was shattered. She also believed that this row signalled a new onslaught, and she was not mistaken.
On 17 January 1551, the council wrote to Mary that mass must no longer be heard in her household. She sent an uncompromising reply, but her weariness of mind and body and her sense of underlying hopelessness are obvious. ‘My general health and the attack of catarrh in the head from which I am suffering do not permit me to answer them [the letters] in detail, sentence by sentence.’ She disputed their assertion that no promise had been given to Charles V where the exercise of her personal religion was concerned:
God knows the contrary to be the truth: and you in your own consciences (I say to those who were then present) know it also …You accuse me of breaking the laws and disobeying them by keeping to my own religion; but I reply that my faith and my religion are those held by the whole of Christendom, formerly confessed by this kingdom under the late king, my father, until you altered them with your laws. To the king’s majesty, my brother, I wish prosperity and honour such as no king ever enjoyed and I confess myself to be his humble sister and subject and he my sovereign lord, but to you, my lords, I owe nothing beyond amity and good will, which you will find in me if I meet with the same in you…I do not follow the belief in which I have been nourished all my days for love of his Imperial majesty.
This was, she said, her ‘final answer to any letters that you might write me on matters of religion. Were you to know what pain I suffer in bending down my head to write … for love and charity you would not wish to give me occasion to do it. My health is more unstable than that of any creature and I have all the greater need to rejoice in the testimony of a pure conscience.’
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Neither the council nor the king was at all moved by her plea to be left alone. On 28 January she received a stinging rebuke from her brother. Her understanding of the situation, she was told, was ‘fruitless and wayward’. She was his nearest sister and yet she wished ‘to break our laws and set them aside deliberately, and of your own free will’. The leeway she had been given was awarded, for a time, ‘in order that you should do out of love for us what the rest do out of duty’.This approach had clearly failed and Mary was doubly in error. She was ‘using and perpetuating the use of a form of worship to the honour of God, which in truth is more like dishonour’, and she had refused to open her mind to new knowledge.This grieved him more than anything but he would, nevertheless, listen to ‘all you have to say, you and your partisans … you shall be permitted to speak frankly, and what you or they say shall be listened to, provided you undertake to listen to the answers and debates that shall ensue.You perceive that I lay aside my estate of sovereign king and lord and commune with you rather as your brother.’ She would be angry, he asserted, if one of her household openly disregarded her orders, ‘and so it is with us, and you must reflect that in our estate it is most grievous to suffer that so high a subject should disregard our laws.Your relationship to us, your exalted rank, the conditions of the times, all magnify your offence.’ Her constant carping about his age was no argument. ‘In truth, sister, we think our youth is an advantage, for perhaps the evil that has endured in you so long is more strongly rooted than we suppose … If we were to grant you license to break our laws and set them aside, would it not be an encouragement to others to do likewise. These things are so evident that we would have been able to judge them six years ago.’ He could not let pass her impugning of his authority: ‘we hold ourselves to possess the same authority our father had for the administration of the republic, without diminution of any sort … You must forbear being so bold as to offend again in this matter.’ Finally, almost as an afterthought, he commended her to God’s keeping and wished her health as God’s gift. In a kind of postscript written in his own hand, he lost some of the majesty of his expression but none of its impact:‘Sister, consider that an exception has been made in your favour this long time past, to incline you to obey and not to harden you in your resistance.’ It was his reading of the word of God and he would see to it that his laws were loyally carried out and observed because he was himself a true minister of God. He would not ‘say more and worse things because my duty would compel me to use harsher and angrier words. But this I will say with certain intention, that I will see my laws strictly obeyed, and those who break them shall be watched and denounced …’
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Mary was appalled. His comments, a fine example of the eloquence possessed by all the Tudors, struck to her very soul. The contents of his letters ‘have caused me more suffering than any illness unto death…I hope I may in the end prove myself to be as truly loyal to your majesty as any other subject, no matter who he may be. I will in nowise enter into any disputation … but in the humblest manner possible, beseech you for the love of God to suffer me to live as in the past’.
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Did she know, deep down, that she had already lost him? He was not quite a man but no more a boy, and she had offended him more than she ever intended. Robert Rochester had pulled her back from the brink of self-destruction six months earlier but he could not teach her the guile of her sister Elizabeth, that marvellous ability to play with words and say nothing incriminating. She was too frank for her own good and knew no other way. No doubt she did sincerely believe, and perhaps with justification, that a promise had been made to the emperor that she would not be harassed on religion. She could never credit that this would be so flatly denied, or appreciate her brother’s position as an evolving rather than a stationary one. They now represented two opposing sides of a dispute over religion and sovereignty that would not be resolved in Edward’s lifetime, or hers. And their relationship could never really be restored, though an effort was made on both sides. Mary was back at court in mid-March for further discussions with her brother and a punishing exchange with Dudley at a full council meeting, when he accused her of trying to discredit the king’s councillors. ‘How now, my Lady?’ he remonstrated.‘It seems that your Grace is trying to show us in a hateful light to the king, our master, without any cause whatsoever.’
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She was so unwell during this visit that the more conciliatory Dr Petre, trying to assure her a few days later of ‘the cordial affection’ of the king and council, was received by a bedridden princess. By the time she and Dudley met again, the following January, he was an even more over-mighty subject, with the title of duke of Northumberland. But he had not forgotten another aspect of her visit of the previous March, one somewhat at odds with the image of a sickly, defenceless princess. The power behind her was carefully displayed as she rode through London with 50 knights and gentlemen before her and 80 ladies and gentlemen after her. They were all ostentatiously wearing rosaries. And there were many more of their persuasion in East Anglia, and indeed throughout England.
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She was so unwell during this visit that the more conciliatory Dr Petre, trying to assure her a few days later of ‘the cordial affection’ of the king and council, was received by a bedridden princess. By the time she and Dudley met again, the following January, he was an even more over-mighty subject, with the title of duke of Northumberland. But he had not forgotten another aspect of her visit of the previous March, one somewhat at odds with the image of a sickly, defenceless princess. The power behind her was carefully displayed as she rode through London with 50 knights and gentlemen before her and 80 ladies and gentlemen after her. They were all ostentatiously wearing rosaries. And there were many more of their persuasion in East Anglia, and indeed throughout England.
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