Mary Tudor (3 page)

M
ARY, THE DAUGHTER OF KING HENRY VIII AND KATHERINE OF
Aragon, was born at four in the morning of Monday, February 18, 1516, at Placentia, the royal palace at Greenwich, on the banks of the Thames River in London. Three days later, the nobility of England gathered at the royal apartments to form a guard of honor as the baby emerged from the queen’s chamber in the arms of Katherine’s devoted friend and lady-in-waiting, Elizabeth Howard, countess of Surrey. Beneath a gold canopy held aloft by four knights of the realm, the infant was carried to the nearby Church of the Observant Friars.
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It was the day of Mary’s baptism, her first rite of passage as a royal princess.

The procession of gentlemen, ladies, earls, and bishops paused at the door of the church, where, in a small arras-covered wooden archway, Mary was greeted by her godparents, blessed, and named after her aunt, Henry’s favorite sister. The parade then filed two by two into the church, which had been specially adorned for the occasion. Jewel-encrusted needlework hung from the walls; a font, brought from the priory of Christchurch Canterbury and used only for royal christenings, had been set on a raised and carpeted octagonal stage, with the accoutrements for the christening—basin, tapers, salt, and chrism—laid out on the high altar.
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After prayers were said and promises made, Mary was plunged three times into the font water, anointed with the holy oil, dried, and swaddled in her baptismal robe. As Te Deums were sung, she was taken up to the high altar and confirmed under the sponsorship of Margaret Pole, countess of Salisbury.
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Finally, with the rites
concluded, her title was proclaimed to the sound of the heralds’ trumpets:

Despite the magnificent ceremony, the celebrations were muted. This was not the longed-for male heir, but a girl.

SIX YEARS EARLIER
, in the Church of the Observant Friars, Henry had married his Spanish bride, Katherine of Aragon. Within weeks of the wedding, Katherine was pregnant and Henry wrote joyfully to his father-in-law, Ferdinand of Aragon, proclaiming the news: “Your daughter, her Serene Highness the Queen, our dearest consort, has conceived in her womb a living child and is right heavy therewith.”
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Three months later, as England awaited the birth of its heir, Katherine miscarried. Yet the news was not made public, and with her belly still swollen, most likely with an infection, she was persuaded by her physician that she “remained pregnant of another child.”
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A warrant was issued for the refurbishment of the royal nursery, and in March 1511 she withdrew to her apartments in advance of the birth.
⁷

For weeks the court waited for news of the delivery, but labor did not come. As Katherine’s confessor, Fray Diego, reported, “it has pleased our Lord to be her physician in such a way that the swelling decreased.”
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There was no baby. Luiz Caroz, the new Spanish ambassador, angrily condemned those who had maintained “that a menstruating woman was pregnant” and had made her “withdraw publicly for her delivery.”
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Many councillors now feared that the queen was “incapable of conceiving.”
¹⁰
Fearing her father’s displeasure, Katherine wrote to Ferdinand in late May, four months after the event, claiming that only “some days before” she had miscarried a daughter and failing to mention the subsequent false pregnancy. Do “not be angry,” she begged him, “for it has been the will of God.”
¹¹

Hope soon revived, and while writing letters of deceit to her father, Katherine discovered she was pregnant once more.
¹²
Seven months
later, on the morning of New Year’s Day, bells rang out the news of the safe delivery of a royal baby. It was a living child and a son; England had its male heir. Celebrations engulfed the court and country, and five days later the child was christened and proclaimed “Prince Henry, first son of our sovereign lord, King Henry VIII.” The king rode to the Shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham in Norfolk to give thanks and hold a splendid joust in his son’s honor. But the celebrations were short-lived. Three weeks later Prince Henry died. It did not augur well. Over the next seven years, failed pregnancy followed failed pregnancy, each ending in miscarriage, stillbirth, or infant death.

So when in the spring of 1515 the thirty-one-year-old queen fell pregnant for the seventh time, there was a somewhat subdued response. This pregnancy, however, followed its natural course, and in the early weeks of the New Year the royal couple moved to the royal palace at Greenwich, where Henry had been born twenty-four years before and where preparations were now under way for the queen’s confinement.

The Royal Book
, the fifteenth-century book of court etiquette for all such royal events drawn up by Margaret Beaufort, Henry VIII’s grandmother, outlined the necessary arrangements. The queen’s chamber was to be turned into a tapestried cocoon, the floor covered with thickly laid carpet; the walls, ceiling, and windows hung with rich arras and one window left loosely covered to allow in air and light. The wall tapestries, the queen’s canopied bed, and the bed hangings were to be of simple design, with figurative images avoided for fear of provoking dreams that might disturb mother and child. There was to be a cupboard stacked with gold and silver plate to signify the queen’s status, and crucifixes, candlesticks, images, and relics placed on an altar before which she could pray. At the foot of her canopied bed was placed a daybed, covered with a quilt of crimson satin and embroidered with the king and queen’s arms, where the birth would take place.
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In late January, with all made ready, Katherine began the ceremony of “taking her chamber.” First she went to the Chapel Royal to hear Mass; then, returning to the Presence Chamber, she sat beneath her cloth of estate—the mark of her rank—and took wines and spices with members of the court. Lord Mountjoy, her chamberlain, called on everyone to pray that “God would give her the good hour”—safe delivery—and the queen was accompanied to the door of her bedchamber
in solemn procession. There the men departed, and Katherine entered the exclusively female world of childbirth. As
The Royal Book
stipulated, “All the ladies and gentlewomen to go in with her, and no man after to come in to the chamber save women, and women to be inside.”
¹⁴
She would not be in male company again until her “churching,” the purification after labor, thirty days after the birth. Officers, butlers, and other servants would bring all manner of things to the chamber door, but there the women would receive them.

After days of seclusion and hushed expectancy, the February dawn was broken with bells ringing in the news: the queen had delivered a healthy baby, but a girl. Writing two days later, Sebastian Giustiniani, the Venetian ambassador, assured the doge and Senate that he would offer their congratulations but added that, had the baby been a son, “[he] should have already done so, as in that case, it would not have been fit to delay the compliment.”
¹⁵
Eventually, the ambassador sought an audience with King Henry and congratulated him “on the birth of his daughter, and on the wellbeing of her most serene mother Queen.” The state would have been “yet more pleased,” he added, “had the child been a son.” Henry remained optimistic. “We are both young,” he insisted; “if it was a daughter this time, by the grace of God, sons will follow.”
¹⁶

M
ARY CAME INTO THE WORLD DURING A SEASON OF MOURNING
. Just days before her birth, news reached the English court of the death of Katherine’s father. Solemn requiems were sung at St. Paul’s, but the queen was not informed of her loss until after she had safely given birth.
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Ferdinand’s death marked the passing of the last of Mary’s grandparents, and though she never knew any of them, with her steely determination, Catholic devotion, and strong sense of her right to rule, she would prove to be every inch their heir. She was, unmistakably, both a Spaniard and a Tudor.

Her mother, Katherine, was the daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, her father the son of Henry Tudor (Henry VII) and Elizabeth of York. Both sets of grandparents had brought unity to their war-torn kingdoms after years of disputed successions. Henry Tudor’s defeat of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 had ended thirty-three years of incipient civil war between the Houses of York and Lancaster, two rival branches of the Plantagenet family that had ruled England since the twelfth century. Henry, a Lancastrian, claimed the throne through his mother, Margaret Beaufort, and her descent from John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, the son of Edward III.
Following the accession of the Yorkist king, Edward IV, in 1471, Henry had fled to Brittany for fear that Edward would act against him as the remaining Lancastrian claimant. Twelve years later, after Edward had died, his brother Richard, duke of Gloucester, usurped the throne. He imprisoned, and most likely murdered, his nephew Edward V, and was crowned King Richard III on July 6, 1483. Realizing Richard’s unpopularity, Henry saw an opportunity to win the throne. He set sail from Brittany with French men and ships and landed at Milford Haven in August 1485. On the twenty-second he overwhelmed the king’s forces at Bosworth, near Leicester, and killed Richard III in the midst of the battle. Five months after his accession, Henry married Elizabeth of York, the eldest daughter and surviving heir of the Yorkist king, Edward IV, thereby uniting the warring Plantagenet family. The establishment of the Tudor dynasty was made secure by the birth of their first son and heir, Arthur, on September 19, 1486, a daughter Margaret, and a second son, Prince Henry, five years later, to be followed by another daughter, Mary.

Mary’s grandmother Isabella of Castile had also fought to win her throne, after her father disinherited her. Alongside her husband Ferdinand, king of Aragon, she campaigned for five years in a bitter civil war before emerging triumphant and claiming the crown of Castile. The only queen regnant in fifteenth-century Europe, she doggedly reasserted her position in the face of her husband’s attempts to share her power. It would be a marriage of equals, with both sovereigns ruling in their own right. Ferdinand and Isabella became the foremost monarchs in Europe, with a crusading zeal that characterized the Spanish monarchy. Their shared aim became the Reconquista of Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Spain. The Reconquista was to be the climax of the Crusade, the medieval Christian enterprise against the Muslims that had begun in the twelfth century. Isabella, determined, single-minded, and fervently Catholic, saw the campaign as her divine purpose and rode with her knights, rallying her troops. The war lasted for ten years before finally, on January 2, 1492, the last Muslim leader, Muhammad II, surrendered complete control of Granada. It was the culmination of several centuries of reconquest and a great Christian triumph. In the years that followed, the Spanish Inquisition, established first in Castile and then in Aragon, secured the expulsion of all remaining
Jews and Muslims. “The Catholic Kings,” as they were entitled by Pope Alexander IV, had created a unified Spain and an entirely Catholic kingdom.

Katherine, the youngest of Ferdinand and Isabella’s five children, was born on December 16, 1485, in the midst of the Reconquista at the archbishop of Toledo’s palace northeast of Madrid. She was named after her mother’s English grandmother, a daughter of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, who had married Enrique III of Castile. Following the defeat of the Moors, the Alhambra—the former residence of the Muslim kings—became Katherine’s home, and from there she witnessed the expulsion of the Jews and the activities of the Inquisition.