CHAPTER 12
AT THREE IN THE AFTERNOON OF SEPTEMBER 7, 1533, THE CHILD that Henry had gone to such lengths to have legitimized was delivered. The king’s physicians and astrologers had predicted that it would be a boy, and letters written in advance announced the birth of a “prince.”
They had to be hastily altered. Anne had been delivered of a girl. As the imperial ambassador reported gleefully, “God has forgotten him entirely, hardening him in his obstinacy to punish and ruin him.”1 She was christened three days later at the Church of the Observant Friars at Greenwich and her name and titles proclaimed by the Garter King of Arms:
God of his infinite goodness, send prosperous life and long to the High and mighty Princess of England, Elizabeth.2
For some, however, like Chapuys, she would always be “the Concubine’s little bastard,” the living symbol of England’s breach with Rome.
Within a week of Elizabeth’s birth, Mary’s chamberlain, Sir John Hussey, received instructions “concerning the diminishing of her high estate of the name and dignity of the princess.” Mary was to cease using the title immediately; her badges were to be cut from her servants’ clothing and replaced with the arms of the king.3 She was now to be known only as “the Lady Mary, the King’s daughter”: she was a bastard and no longer acknowledged as the king’s heir.
Incredulous, Mary immediately wrote to her father:
This morning my chamberlain came and showed me that he had received a letter from Sir William Paulet, comptroller of your household … wherein was written that “the lady Mary, the King’s daughter, should remove to the place aforesaid”—the leaving out of the name of princess. Which, when I heard, I could not a little marvel, trusting verily that your grace was not privy to the same letter, as concerning the leaving out of the name of princess, forasmuch as I doubt not in your goodness, but that your grace doth take me for his lawful daughter, born in true matrimony. Wherefore, if I were to say to the contrary, I should in my conscience run into the displeasure of God, which I hope assuredly your grace would not that I should.
And in all other things your grace shall have me as, always, as humble and obedient daughter and handmaid, as ever was child to the father …
By your most humble daughter
Mary, Princess.4
She had signed herself “Princess.” Henry’s response was immediate. A deputation led by the earl of Oxford was sent to visit her at the king’s manor at Beaulieu (New Hall), in Essex, with a clear message:
The King is surprised to be informed, both by Lord Hussey’s letters and his daughter’s own … that she, forgetting her filial duty and allegiance, attempts, in spite of the commandment given … arrogantly to usurp the title of Princess, pretending to be heir-apparent, and encourages others to do the like declaring that she cannot in conscience think she is the King’s lawful daughter, born in true matrimony, and believes the King in his own conscience thinks the same.
To prevent her “pernicious example” spreading, the earls were commanded to make clear “the folly and danger of her conduct, and how the King intends that she shall use herself henceforth, both as to her title and her household.” She has “worthily deserved the King’s high displeasure and punishment by law, but that on her conforming to his will he may incline of his fatherly pity to promote her welfare.”5
In spite of the threats, Mary stood her ground.6 When the delegation left, she wrote to her father, telling him that “as long as she lived she would obey his commands, but that she could not renounce the titles, rights and privileges which God, Nature and her own parents had given her.” Compliance for Mary would mean acknowledging her own illegitimacy and the invalidity of her mother’s marriage, and that she would not do.
ON DECEMBER 10, three months after her birth, Elizabeth was taken from court to Hatfield in Hertfordshire, a house some seventeen miles from London. Although there was “a shorter and better road … for great solemnity and to insinuate to the people that she is the true Princess,” she was carried through the City accompanied not only by her new household but also by a distinguished escort of dukes, lords, and gentlemen.7
The following day, Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk, was sent to Beaulieu to inform Mary that her father desired her “to go to the Court and service of [Elizabeth], whom he named Princess.”8 Mary responded that “the title belonged to herself and no other.” Norfolk made no answer, declaring “he had not come to dispute but to accomplish the King’s will.” When Mary was told that she would be allowed to take very few servants with her, Margaret Pole—her longtime governess and godmother, who had been in Mary’s entourage since the princess was three—asked if she might continue to serve Mary at her own expense and pay for the whole household. Her request was refused.9 Henry wanted Mary, like Katherine, to be separated from those she trusted to encourage her submission. As Chapuys surmised, Pole would have prevented them from
executing their bad designs, which are evidently either to cause her to die of grief or in some other way, or else to compel her to renounce her rights, marry some low fellow, or fall prey to lust, so that they may have a pretext and excuse for disinheriting her and submitting her to all manner of bad treatment.10
Mary was to be isolated in a household under the stewardship of Anne Boleyn’s uncle and aunt, Sir John and Lady Anne Shelton.11 Such was to be the princess’s humiliation: she was to be little more than a servant—“lady’s maid to the new bastard,” as the imperial ambassador described it12—and prisoner.
As she prepared for her departure, Mary copied a protest, drafted for her by Chapuys, that declared that nothing she might do under compulsion should prejudice her status as princess:
My lords, as touching my removal to Hatfield, I will obey his grace, as my duty is, or to any other place his grace may appoint me; but I protest before you, and all others present, that my conscience will in no wise suffer me to take any other than myself for princess, or for the King’s daughter born in lawful matrimony; and that I will never wittingly or willingly say or do aught, whereby any person might take occasion to think that I agree to the contrary. Nor say I this out of any ambition or proud mind, as God is my judge. If I should do otherwise, I should slander the deed of my mother, and falsely confess myself a bastard, which God defend I should do, since the pope hath not so declared it by his sentence definitive, to whose final judgement I submit myself.13
On arriving at Hatfield, the duke of Norfolk asked her “whether she would not go and pay her respects to the Princess?” She responded that she “knew no other Princess in England except herself and the daughter of my Lady Pembroke [Anne Boleyn] had no such title.” She might call her only “sister,” as she called the duke of Richmond, Henry Fitzroy, “brother.” As the duke departed, Mary requested that he should carry to the king the message that the princess, his daughter, begged his blessing. Norfolk refused, and Mary “retired to weep in her Chamber,” which, Chapuys noted, “she does continually.”14
Mary, like her mother, was now under house arrest. She was forbidden to walk in the garden or the public gallery of the house or attend Mass at the adjoining church lest the neighboring populace see her and cheer for her. Henry reproached Norfolk for going about his task “too softly” and “resolved to take steps to abate the stubbornness and pride” of the princess.15
Mary’s resolve would prove hard to break; such were her love and commitment to Katherine. With the tenacity worthy of any Tudor, she determined to be as difficult as possible. For days she remained in her chamber, “the worst lodging of the house” and a place “not fit for a maid of honour.”16 She would eat a large breakfast to avoid having to eat dinner in the hall and often pleaded sickness as an excuse to have supper brought to her chamber. As soon as Anne Boleyn came to hear of this, she quickly stepped in, instructing her aunt that if Mary continued to behave in this way she was to be starved back into the hall, and if she tried to use the banned title of princess she was to have her ears boxed “as the cursed bastard.”17
Over the next two years at Hatfield, Lady Anne Shelton would be repeatedly reprimanded for not being harsh enough and for showing Mary too much respect and kindness. Whenever Mary protested, she was punished: by the confiscation first of her jewels and then of almost everything else. By February 1534, she was “nearly destitute of clothes and other necessaries” and was compelled to ask her father for help. But even then she remained defiant: the messenger was instructed to accept money or clothing if they were offered, “but not to accept any writing in which she was not entitled princess.”18 Such was the hostility toward Mary that Sir William Fitzwilliam, treasurer of the king’s household, was able to say with impunity of the king’s daughter that if she would not be obedient, “I would that her head was from her shoulders, that I might toss it here with my foot,” at which point, according to two witnesses, he “put his foot forward, spurning the rushes.”19