Six Wives (31 page)

    Catherine avoided such bombast in her letter. It was written on 30 March, the day before Henry's, and it told Charles of 'the great pleasure and content I have experienced at hearing of the very signal victory which God Almighty . . . has been pleased to grant to the Imperial arms in Italy'. In thanks, she told him, Henry had ordered prayers and solemn processions; she was sure Charles was doing the same. It was the tone of her own letters about Flodden.
²³

    But Catherine's letter also showed a sharper understanding of political realities than her husband's. She had heard nothing from Charles for a long time. Diplomatically, she attributed Charles's silence to the 'inconstancy and fickleness of the sea'. But she suspected that the real reason was his displeasure with her husband's performance as an ally. So in the rest of her letter Catherine mounted a loyal defence of his performance. Henry, she insisted, 'has never failed to be the constant and faithful ally of your Highness'. Therefore, she begged, 'I humbly beseech your Highness to persevere in the path of friendship and affection towards us'. On her own behalf Catherine pleaded the 'love and consanguinity' which should unite aunt and nephew.

    Charles brushed it all aside. Henry had been captious and demanding. Now he would pay him in his own coin. He affected to take Henry at his word and proposed an immediate joint invasion of France. But there were conditions. Mary must be handed over immediately. Her dowry must be paid in full. And an additional loan, equivalent in size to the dowry, must also be granted. It was an ultimatum that was intended to be refused. And Henry and Wolsey duly rejected it. The Anglo-Spanish alliance was over. Henry's dreams of conquest in France were at an end. And Mary, infatuated Mary, would have to be found another husband.
²⁴

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PART T WO

A
s long ago as 1514 there had been an unsubstantiated rumour doing the rounds in Rome that 'the King of England meant to repudiate his present wife . . . because he is unable to have children by her'. The Duke of Buckingham, speaking about the same time, expressed similar doubts. 'God', he said, 'would not suffer the King's Grace's issue to prosper, as it appeareth by the death of his son, and that his daughters prosper not, and that the King's Grace has no issue male.' Buckingham, who had discussed the matter with his personal soothsayer, the Carthusian monk, Dan Nicholas Hopkins, was confident he knew the explanation. 'The Duke [was] discontented . . . that the Earl of Warwick was put to death and said that God would punish it, and that he had punished it in that he would not suffer the King's Grace's issue to prosper.'
¹

    Catherine, who, we know, was deeply troubled by the execution of Warwick to clear the way for her own marriage to Arthur, may even have shared such doubts herself for a time. But Mary's birth, and Catherine's joy in her child, put an end to them. 'She was', she said under the seal of the confessional, '
and had been for many years
. . . unconscious of guilt in connexion with her marriage.'
²

    But if Catherine had moved from doubt to certainty about her marriage, Henry followed the opposite path. In 1516 he had still been breezily confident that he would have a son; by about 1520 he knew that he would not; by 1525 he was pondering the consequences of his 'childlessness' (as, despite the birth of Mary, he persisted in seeing it); and by 1527 he had decided on the explanation. He had also, though Catherine was one of the last to realise it, fallen in love with another woman.

* * *

Catherine was slow to grasp the changes in her husband's thinking. This was hardly surprising since they no longer confided much in each other and their lives had gone in different directions. She was absorbed in religion, in good works and increasingly in her daughter's upbringing; he busied himself fitfully with the business of government and whiled away endless hours of leisure. He also kept his anxieties to himself, brooding on them until his doubts hardened into conviction. He discussed them with his confessor, Bishop Longland of Lincoln; then, much later, with his minister, Cardinal Wolsey. But he never confided in his wife.

    It therefore came as a brutal shock to Catherine when, in the summer of 1525, she heard that Henry's young bastard, Henry Fitzroy, was to be recognised as the King's son and showered with titles and honours. The boy was installed as Knight of the Garter, created Earl of Nottingham and Duke of Richmond and Somerset (all of them royal titles), and appointed Lord Admiral and Warden-General of the Marches against Scotland. At the same time, his education was put on a formal footing; he was given a great Household, with head officers and a Council, and sent off to Sheriff Hutton Castle in Yorkshire to be nominal head of a regional government for the north. Such a concentration of peerages and great offices had never before been held by a subject, let alone a six-year-old. It could mean one thing only: Henry VIII had decided that gender was more important than legitimacy. Catherine feared that he would recognise Richmond as his heir, and would exclude Mary from her rightful inheritance.
³

    Henry, characteristically, never went quite so far.

    But Catherine was not appeased. Contrary to her usual policy of wifely submission, she let her indignation become public knowledge. 'It seems', reported the Venetian envoy, Lorenzo Orio, in a private letter, 'that the Queen resents the earldom and dukedom conferred on the King's natural son and remains dissatisfied.' According to Orio, Catherine's displeasure had been 'instigated' by three of her Spanish ladies, whom Henry in turn 'had dismissed . . . [from] the Court'.
⁴

    Actually, it seems unlikely that Catherine's indignation would have needed 'instigating' by anybody. Rather, we should see her talking over her feelings with a sympathetic audience. For her Spanish ladies, like Catherine herself, were familiar with a world where female succession was taken for granted. Catherine's mother, Isabella, and her eldest surviving sister, Juana, had inherited the crown of Castile, in turn. And Catherine saw no reason why her daughter, Mary, should not one day inherit England.

    But Henry saw things otherwise. He was familiar with English history, which (we have Erasmus's word for it) had formed a major part of his education. Here the position of women was very different. In England there was no formal exclusion of female succession, as in France; and, again unlike France, women could transmit a claim to the throne to a male descendant. But no woman had actually sat on the English throne. Back in the twelfth century, the Empress Matilda, daughter of Henry I, had tried. But her attempt to enforce her rights had led to civil war. And civil war was a sensitive topic for Henry VIII. In 1497, aged six, he had taken refuge in the Tower with his mother, Elizabeth of York, while the Cornish rebels fought with his father at Blackheath in the name of the Pretender, Perkin Warbeck. If the rebels had won, his father would have been slaughtered on the battlefield, like Richard III, and Henry himself would have shared the fate of the Princes in the Tower. He had never, I think, forgotten that moment and he was determined that it would never recur. That was why Buckingham had gone to the scaffold. And that was why Henry became so reluctant fully to accept Mary as his heir. If Matilda, married to the Emperor Henry V, had failed to make her claim good, why should Mary be any different – especially when the Emperor Charles V had just rejected her as his bride?
⁵

    But the succession of a bastard, like Richmond, was at least as problematical as the succession of a woman, like Mary. Moreover, Henry was just as proud of his daughter as was Catherine, and he was almost as demonstrative. He was not going to disinherit his child lightly.

    Nor would Catherine let him, if she could help it. According to Orio, 'the Queen was obliged to submit and have patience' after Henry had slapped down her objections to Richmond's extravagant advancement and had dismissed her Spanish ladies. My guess is slightly different: I think she simply changed tactics. Instead of confronting Henry, which was rarely successful, she reverted to her usual methods and set herself to persuade him. It seems to have worked.
⁶

    The result was an explicit recognition of Mary's status as heiress to the throne.

* * *

On 26 July 1525, as Richmond began his journey north from Stoke Newington, Wolsey was putting the finishing touches to yet another reorganisation of Mary's Household. This time it was turned into an entourage fit for a Princess. She was given a Steward and Chamberlain, both of whom were barons; a Lady Mistress, who was, once again, the Countess of Salisbury; and a Lord President of the Council, who was a bishop. Under them were about three hundred other officers and servants, including Mr Featherstone, her schoolmaster, two officers of arms, Chester Herald and Wallingford Pursuivant, and two gunners to man Mary's personal ordnance and artillery. The superior officers were attired in black velvet, while the rest wore Mary's livery of green and blue – in silk damask for the middle ranks and in cloth for the lower. The cost, in wages, food and other provisions, was a staggering £5,000 a year.
⁷

    It was a Court in miniature. And, as Mary also had a Council under the Lord President, it was a government in miniature too.

    In August, Henry signed a set of orders transferring the day-to-day government of Wales and the Marches to his daughter and her advisers. The Princess was about to enter into her Principality. The long absence of a resident 'Prince', the preamble began, had led to disorder and maladministration of justice. Therefore the King had decided 'to send at this time our dearest, best beloved and only daughter, the Princess, accompanied and established with an honourable . . . Council, to reside and remain in the Marches of Wales'.

    Catherine could hardly have asked for more. The head officers of Richmond's Household were knights and esquires, Mary's were peers. The President of his Council was an archdeacon, Mary's was a bishop. Richmond's governorship of the north was an established career path for a cadet prince of the royal house. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, had administered the north for his elder brother, Edward IV, and Henry himself, as Duke of York, had almost certainly been intended to take a similar route. But Mary's government of Wales belonged to its titular Prince(ss), the heir. She was following in the footsteps of Prince Edward, the eldest son of Edward IV; of Prince Arthur; and, of course, of her mother when she had gone to join her husband at Ludlow. Whatever her memories of that time, Catherine rejoiced at the recognition of her daughter's position.
⁸

    There were only two drawbacks. The first was that Henry, maddeningly, held back from a formal recognition of his daughter's position. She was always known as Princess, and sometimes as Princess of Wales or Prince of Wales (as when Vives dedicated his
Satellitium
to Mary as
Princeps Cambriae
). But she was never invested with either the title or the lands. (Nor, for that matter, had Richmond been formally legitimated – an omission that Catherine was hardly likely to object to!) It was as though Henry could not choose.

    Catherine's other regret, of course, was that Mary's move to the Marches meant that her daughter was further away and absent longer than ever before. Probably in August, Mary and her entourage began their journey west. Their first base was Thornbury, the great castle to the north-east of Bristol, which, like the rest of Buckingham's possessions, had been seized by the crown after his fall. Mary spent the autumn there while her officers supervised the repairs to Ludlow Castle, which had been neglected since Arthur's death and Catherine's departure, over twenty years before.

    Catherine quickly missed her daughter. Mary, dutiful child that she was, had written to her to 'know how I would do'. Catherine, however, delayed her reply. The reason was not forgetfulness, she assured her daughter when she finally wrote in late October, but depression. 'I am in that case that the long absence of the King and you troubleth me.' She tried to console herself. She hoped that God 'doth it [make Mary absent] to the best', and that He would shortly 'turn [Henry's absence] . . . to come to good effect' also. Meanwhile, she was glad to hear from Mary, to learn that her health was better, and to see that she had written in Latin. Even here there was a note of regret, since it was Catherine who had taught Mary the rudiments. But Catherine put a brave face on it. 'As for your writing in Latin,' she told her daughter, 'I am right glad that ye shall change from me to Mr Featherstone, for that shall do you much good, to learn by him to write right.' But she wished to remain involved and asked her daughter to send her some of her exercises after Featherstone had read them. 'For it shall be a great comfort to me to see you keep your Latin and fair writing and all.'