Mary Tudor (21 page)

For the next six months, despite repeated efforts, the marriage remained unconsummated. As Henry explained to his physician, “He found her body in such sort disordered and indisposed to excite and provoke any lust in him. Yea, [it] rather minister[ed] matter of loathsomeness unto [him], that [he] could not in any wise overcome that loathsomeness, nor in her company be provoked or stirred to that act.”
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Now he lamented the fact that he would never have any more children for “the comfort of the realm, if he should continue in marriage with this lady.” Cromwell responded that “he would do his utmost to comfort and deliver his Grace of his affliction.”
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By the summer, Henry had decided to sever his ties with the
German princes and to seek an annulment. He could afford to break the alliance. The Franco-imperial entente had become strained, and another phase in the Habsburg-Valois conflict had begun. Some weeks before, he had started an affair with one of Anne’s maids, Katherine Howard, a niece of the duke of Norfolk. “The King is,” the French ambassador reported, “so amorous of her that he knows not how to make sufficient demonstrations of his affection.” He “caresses her more than he did the others” and lavished her with jewels.
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As Henry’s infatuation with Katherine grew, his calls for a divorce from Anne became more strident. The leading religious conservatives, Norfolk and Bishop Stephen Gardiner, saw an opportunity to install a queen supportive of their cause and effecting the downfall of their great enemy, Thomas Cromwell. As Marillac wrote, “The King, wishing by all possible means to lead back religion to the way of truth, Cromwell, as attached to the German Lutherans, had always favoured the doctors who preached such erroneous opinions and hindered those who preached the contrary.” Having been recently warned that he was working “against the intention of the King and of the acts of Parliament,” Cromwell had “betrayed himself.”
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When letters from the Lutheran lords of Germany were found in his house, the chief minister’s fate was sealed. “The King was thereby so exasperated against him that he would no longer hear him spoken of, but rather desired to abolish all memory of him as the greatest wretch ever born in England.”
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AT 3 P.M. ON SATURDAY
, June 10, 1540, Cromwell was arrested in the Council Chamber by the duke of Norfolk. His goods were seized and confiscated, and he was sent to the Tower, charged with heresy and treason and of plotting to marry Mary.
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He had lost Henry’s confidence, and the king had disavowed him.

From the Tower Cromwell wrote to Henry protesting his innocence and begging for mercy, signing himself “with the heavy heart and trembling of your Highness’s most heavy and most miserable prisoner and poor slave.”
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He was condemned on June 29 as “the most false and corrupt traitor, deceiver and circumventor against your royal
person and the imperial crown of this realm that had ever been known in your whole reign.” Cromwell was paying the price for the failed match, for his reformist inclinations, and for the rise in ascendancy of the conservative Howard family. He was kept alive only to recount all that he knew about the king’s marriage to Anne of Cleves and of Henry’s conversations with him as to the nonconsummation of the marriage.

On June 24, Anne of Cleves was ordered to go to Richmond Palace, ostensibly to avoid an outbreak of the plague.
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The convocation of the clergy was instructed to examine the king’s marriage after doubts had been raised about its validity. The investigation concluded that Anne had been precontracted to the prince of Lorraine, that the king had wed her against his will, and that the whole nation desired the king to have more heirs. On the twenty-fifth, the king’s commissioners visited Anne and informed her that her marriage was invalid.
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She consented without protest, agreeing to the divorce proceedings and confirming that the marriage had not been consummated.
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Her acquiescence was rewarded: she was endowed with lands to the value of £4,000 annually and Richmond and Bletchingley manors, and was thereafter known as “the old Queen, the King’s sister.” On July 9, the convocation found their marriage to have been unlawful given its nonconsummation, her precontract with the duke of Lorraine, and the fact that Henry had acted under compulsion. Four days later, Parliament confirmed the verdict and Henry was declared free to remarry.

On July 28, Cromwell was finally taken to the scaffold on Tower Green. Maintaining his innocence to the end, he denied that he had supported heretics but accepted the judgment of the law. He knelt, prayed, and, laying his head on the block, “patiently suffered the stroke of the ax,” it taking a number of attempts to remove his head. Two days later, three well-known reformers, Robert Barnes, William Jerome, and Thomas Garret, were burned as heretics at Smithfield. At the stake, Barnes utterly denied his guilt: he was condemned to die, “but wherefore I cannot tell.”
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The others made similar declarations. On the same day, three defendants of the old faith were put to death: Edward Powell; Richard Fetherstone, Mary’s former schoolmaster; and Thomas Abel, Katherine of Aragon’s chaplain, were
hanged, drawn, and quartered for treason. All had refused to acknowledge the Act of Supremacy. The heretics and traitors were dragged facedown on sheep hurdles through the streets of London, a heretic and a papist strapped to each.
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The king would not tolerate opposition of any kind. A major inquisition for heresy now began.

O
N JULY 28, 1540, THREE WEEKS AFTER THE ANNULMENT OF HIS
marriage to Anne of Cleves, Henry married his fifth wife, Katherine Howard, at Oatlands Palace in Surrey.
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She was the nineteen-year-old niece of Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk. By November, Marillac was writing to the French king, “The new Queen, has completely acquired the King’s Grace and the other [Anne of Cleves] is no more spoken of than if she were dead.”
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Yet Anne was “loved and esteemed” by the people and, having readily accepted her new status as the “King’s sister,” was welcomed at court. She arrived at Hampton Court on January 3 and was admitted to the queen’s presence. “Lady Anne approached the Queen with as much reverence and punctilious ceremony as if she herself was the most insignificant damsel about Court … all the time addressing the Queen on her knees.” Katherine “received her most kindly, showing her great favour and courtesy.” The king then entered the room and, “after making a very low bow to Lady Anne, embraced and kissed her.” They all sat down to supper at the same table with “as good a mien and countenance and look[ed] as unconcerned as if there had been nothing between them,” as the two queens danced and drank together.
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Relations between Mary and Katherine Howard were initially fraught. The new queen was a cousin of Anne Boleyn and five years younger than Mary. On December 5, Chapuys told the emperor’s sister that the queen had tried to remove two of Mary’s attendants because she believed that the princess was showing less respect to her than to
her predecessors. Mary’s behavior evidently improved, as it was soon reported that she had “found means to conciliate” Katherine and “thinks her maids will remain.”
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Though they were too different in temperament and too similar in age to ever be close, relations began to settle down. “A week ago,” on May 17, the imperial ambassador reported, “the King and Queen went … to visit the Prince [at Waltham Holy Cross in Essex] at the request of the [Lady Mary], but chiefly at the intercession of the Queen herself.” It proved a successful visit, and “upon that occasion” the king granted Mary “full permission to reside at Court, and the Queen has countenanced it with a good grace.”
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But ever present were reminders of her father’s vengeance and the price Mary might pay for her perceived disloyalty. The following year, sixty-eight-year-old Margaret Pole, the woman whom Mary had referred to as her “second mother,” was taken to the scaffold on the slope of Tower Hill. She had been attainted in 1539 without ever having been tried. At seven in the morning of May 27, 1541, she was brought out to die. She commended her soul to God, prayed for the king, and requested to be remembered to the “Princess Mary.” She then placed her head on the block. In the absence of the usual Tower executioner, “a wretched and blundering youth … literally hacked her head and shoulders to pieces.”
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Yet unbeknown to the king, Katherine had had relationships before she was married, when she had been part of the household of her step-grandmother the dowager duchess of Norfolk: first in 1536, when she was fourteen, with her music teacher, Henry Manox, and then two years later with Francis Dereham, a kinsman of her uncle the duke of Norfolk. Upon becoming queen, Katherine resumed her illicit liaisons. Dereham returned to court as her private secretary, and Thomas Culpepper, a gentleman of the king’s Privy Chamber, began regularly
meeting with her in her chamber. By October 1541, Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, learned of Katherine’s continuing behavior, and, on November 2, he presented Henry with a written statement of allegations. The king was initially disbelieving, but after Manox and Dereham were questioned, he was forced to accept the fact of Katherine’s adultery.

Five days later, at Hampton Court, Katherine was interrogated by her uncle, Norfolk, and Cranmer. At first she denied the allegations, but then she admitted the truth. In a letter of confession to the king, she begged for his mercy, describing her relationships with Manox and Dereham and explaining why she had not told him before they were married: “I was so desirous to be taken unto your grace’s favour and so blinded with the desire of worldly glory that I could not, nor had grace, to consider how great a fault it was to conceal my former faults from your Majesty.”
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In January, Katherine and Lady Rochford, her lady of the bedchamber, who had arranged illicit meetings, were declared guilty of treason. On February 10, Katherine was moved from Syon to the Tower, passing first beneath London Bridge, where the heads of Dereham and Culpepper, executed the previous year, were still displayed. Two days later, Sunday the twelfth, she was told to prepare herself for death. According to Chapuys, “she asked to have the block brought in to her so that she might see how to place herself, which was done, and she made trial of it.”
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Early the following morning, her preparations complete, Katherine knelt at the scaffold and her head was struck off.
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“This King has wonderfully felt the case of the Queen his wife,” Chapuys wrote. “He has certainly shown greater sorrow and regret at her loss than at the faults, loss or divorce of his preceding wives.”
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By April, it was reported that, since learning of his late wife’s conduct, he had “not been the same man” and was often to be found “sad, pensive and sighing.”
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Following Katherine Howard’s execution, Mary enjoyed far greater favor and presided over court feasts as if she were queen. As a New Year’s gift Henry presented her “with rings, silver plate, and other jewels” among which were “two rubies of inestimable value.”
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However,
during those months, the princess suffered repeatedly from chronic ill health, linked to anxiety, depression, and irregular menstruation, although the symptoms varied widely from one episode to the next. In March and April, she had a “strange fever” that brought on heart palpitations and so afflicted her that at times “she remained as though dead.”
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On April 22, Chapuys told the queen of Hungary, “the princess has been seriously ill, and in danger of her life.”
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Yet Mary recovered and on December 17 was summoned to court for the Christmas festivities “with a great number of ladies … they work day and night at Hampton Court to finish her lodging.”
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Chapuys reported that the king “spoke to her in the most gracious and amiable words that a father could address to his daughter.”
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