2

Bastard

PRINCESS MARY WAS on the brink of adolescence when the question of her parents’ divorce arose. After being adulated as a princess and a precious only child, she spent her youth – the best part of a decade – in a state of uncertainty, fear, anger, misery and humiliation. It was to embitter her life.

Mary allied herself firmly with her mother over the divorce and took her cue in blaming the whore Anne Boleyn for the transformation of her father’s character and the alienation of his affections. Denied the quick divorce he had taken for granted, frustrated at every turn by papal prevarication and the stubborn refusal of Katherine to co-operate, Mary’s once fun-loving and generous father became cruel and tyrannical, a monster she no longer recognized.

In considering his childlessness, Henry had convinced himself that he was under God’s displeasure. Did it not say in Leviticus 20: 21: ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless’? In vain, Katherine argued that they were not childless, they had Mary. Henry brushed this aside; she was a girl, she did not count. ‘Although we have had the lady Mary, singular both in beauty and shape, by the most noble lady Katherine,’ he pontificated, ‘yet that marriage cannot be legitimate which gives us such pain and torment of conscience.’

Henry’s mistake had been to question the validity of his marriage, rather than laying before Katherine the very real threat – as he saw it – to the peace and unity of the realm if he were to be succeeded by a daughter and gently persuading her to step aside, leaving him free to remarry. Katherine might have been more amenable if it had not been so blatantly obvious that Henry was moved not so much by his conscience as by lust for Anne Boleyn. Stubborn, courageous, implacably convinced of the rightness of her cause, Katherine could never accept that her marriage was invalid, for that would be to imply that she had been nothing but Henry’s whore and her daughter a bastard. She had powerful international allies and the weight of public opinion on her side – particularly the women, for if the King could repudiate his wife, what security did they have? She looked to Rome for justice and, failing that, to God.

Officially, Katherine still presided as queen at court, but Anne had as good as usurped her position and, on her visits to her parents, Mary would have noticed how marginalized her mother had become. The tension was palpable. It was not altogether surprising, therefore, that in the spring of 1531, shortly after parting from her mother, Mary fell ill. The Milanese ambassador reported that she had ‘what the physicians call hysteria’. ‘Hysteria’, in contemporary parlance, indicates a menstrual disorder, but whether it signalled the onset of puberty, or a particular malfunction brought on by stress is not clear. Ever after, Mary would suffer from amenorrhoea, the irregularity or cessation of menstrual periods, which sixteenth-century physicians described as ‘strangulation of the womb’ or ‘suffocation of the mother’. The disorder included depression – ‘heaviness, fear and sorrowfulness’ – headaches, vomiting, palpitations, difficulty in breathing and abdominal swelling. There is also a suggestion that the emotional disturbance of her parents’ divorce caused an eating disorder. In due course, Mary would suffer – like her grandmother Isabella and her cousin Charles – from a profound melancholy.

Concerned for Mary, Katherine pleaded with Henry to bring her to Greenwich. He replied that she might go to her daughter – and stay there. She would not leave him for her daughter or anyone else in the world, she assured him. But Henry had other ideas. On the morning of 14 July 1531, when they were at Windsor, Henry and Anne and their party rode out, ostensibly on a hunting trip, leaving Katherine behind in the suddenly silent castle. They did not return. After twenty-two years of marriage, Henry had not even bothered – or been too shamefaced and embarrassed – to bid her farewell in person. Mary was allowed to go to her mother at Windsor and the two enjoyed one last extended holiday together. Then Katherine was ordered to go to the More, a run-down manor in Hertfordshire, while Mary was to leave for Richmond before Henry and Anne returned to Windsor. During the five years that remained of Katherine’s life, mother and daughter were never to see each other again.

Mary’s circumstances did not immediately alter. Small, but well proportioned, with a pretty face and a beautiful complexion, and a surprisingly gruff and mannish voice for such a delicate girl, the fifteen-year-old held court at Richmond. The Master of the Great Wardrobe was still providing her with clothes fit for a princess: gowns of cloth of silver tissue, purple and black velvet and crimson satin, kirtles of gold and silver, velvet shoes and Spanish gloves, Holland cloth for smocks and ribbon for trim. Henry sent her gifts of pocket money and even contrived to meet her on one or two occasions – furtively, it seems, as Anne’s spies were never far behind. Ironically, just as Mary became ready for marriage, the question of her legitimacy scotched a dynastic match.

In January 1533 Anne, who had withheld her sexual favours until she was sure that marriage would be forthcoming, triumphantly told Henry that she was pregnant. It was imperative that the child – and Henry was sure it would be a son – was born in wedlock, so that they went through a secret marriage ceremony. In May Thomas Cranmer, the former Boleyn chaplain who had been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, held a court at Dunstable, where on his own authority he declared the King’s first marriage null and void. Convocation meekly fell in with royal demands. Katherine had never envisaged that Henry would bypass Rome in his quest for a divorce, but by 1533, under the influence of Anne and the Boleyn faction with their Lutheran sympathies and with legislation masterminded by his new man, the ruthless Thomas Cromwell, he was effectively cutting himself off from the papacy. As the imprisoned Pope ruefully realized, Henry had stumbled on his own solution and England was hastening towards heresy and schism.

Jealous and tempestuous, Anne was relentless in her enmity towards Katherine. Not content with all the jewels Henry had showered on her, she must have Katherine’s too. She knew just where to wound, demanding the beautiful christening robe that Katherine had brought from Spain. Even though Mary was now technically a bastard, Anne saw her as a threat to her unborn child. She boasted that she would make her a maid of honour, or perhaps ‘give her too much dinner’ – poison her – or ‘marry her to some varlet’. Once the child was born, Mary would be expendable.

The Imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, Katherine and Mary’s friend, could hardly contain his glee when on 7 September 1533 Anne gave birth to a girl. Henry was furious. In the sixteenth century it was not understood that the man determined the sex of a child. To Henry, it was another dent on his manhood. ‘Am I not a man like others – am I not? Am I not?’ he shouted at Chapuys, when he had the temerity to suggest that there was no guarantee of children, even with a new wife.

If the child had been a boy, he would have taken precedence without question and Mary would have been relatively safe, but with the birth of another girl, who by rights should take second place to an elder sister, the persecution of Mary began in earnest. Elizabeth was given Mary’s former title: she was to be Princess of England, inheritrix of the realm. A few months later the Act of Succession stated that the children of Henry and his ‘most dearly and entirely beloved wife Queen Anne’ were to be considered the King’s lawful heirs. In lieu of sons, the crown was to devolve upon Elizabeth and her lawfully begotten children. Although Mary was not named specifically in the Act, the implications were obvious. In future she was to be known merely as the Lady Mary, the King’s daughter.

It was hardly a recipe for harmony between the sisters. Two months after Elizabeth’s birth, Anne followed up her threat that the King’s dispossessed daughter should wait upon her child. A deputation led by Anne’s uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, arrived at New Hall, where Mary was staying, and broke up her establishment. She was to be taken to Hatfield, as a member of her sister’s household.

Here, Norfolk asked if she would go and pay her respects to her sister, the Princess. Mary replied that she knew of no other princess in England except herself. ‘Have you no message for the King?’ he asked.

‘None,’ she replied, ‘except that the Princess of Wales, his daughter, asked for his blessing.’

‘That is a message I dare not take,’ Norfolk told her.

‘Then go away, my lord, and leave me alone.’

And so, concluded Chapuys in his report to the Emperor, ‘she retired to weep in her chamber, as she does continuously.’ Mary had been given the worst room in the house, unworthy even of a maid of honour.

She now concentrated all her energies on defying her father. She could never approve the revolutionary doctrine, contained in the Act in Restraint of Appeals, that ‘this realm of England is an Empire … governed by one supreme head and king’, to whom the body politic, both spiritual and temporal, ‘be bounden and owe to bear next to God a natural and humble obedience’. Nor with the Act of Supremacy, which acknowledged Henry, his heirs and successors, to be the Supreme Head of the Church of England, with authority ‘to reform and redress all errors, heresies and abuses of the same’. Still Catholic, her father had severed England’s thousand-year allegiance to the papacy. His power and strength as King of England could only be enhanced by the aggregation of all allegiance, spiritual and temporal, to himself. This meant he held sway not just over his people’s mortal lives, but also their souls. Not only did Mary not agree, but she embraced the Catholic faith and allegiance to Rome with renewed fervour as part of her loyalty to her mother.

Under the tyranny of her father and stepmother, her efforts were expended on the negative. In this way, she was as much an affliction to herself as to those around her. She refused to give up her title of Princess, even when Henry sent Cromwell and other heavies to force her to do so. When Anne heard she was taking her meals in her room, she forced her to dine in public, where she had to sit in an inferior place to Elizabeth. When the household was moving from one residence to another, Elizabeth was given the best litter, while Mary had to follow in a shabbier one. But Mary was never prepared to yield precedence to her sister without a struggle. To do so would be interpreted as a tacit admission of the other’s rights and abandonment of her own.

Whenever Henry came to visit Elizabeth, Mary was confined to her room, but on one such occasion she went up on to the leads of the roof to catch a glimpse of him as he left. Seeing her there on her knees, with her hands joined either in prayer or supplication, Henry bowed to her and touched his hat. His fawning courtiers duly followed his example, saluting her respectfully.

Lady Shelton, Anne’s aunt, had charge of Mary. When Norfolk and Lord Rochford, Anne’s brother, reprimanded her for ‘behaving to the Princess with too much respect and kindness, saying that she ought only to be treated as a bastard’, Lady Shelton replied that ‘even if Mary were only the bastard of a poor gentleman, she deserved honour and good treatment for her goodness and virtues.’ Anne urged her to slap Mary’s face every time she claimed to be the true princess, reminding her of ‘the cursed bastard that she was’.

Once or twice, Anne tried to change tack, inviting Mary to honour her as queen, saying that it would be a means of reconciliation with her father. Mary haughtily replied that she knew of no queen in England except her mother. She had a tendency – which grew more marked with age – to see everything in terms of black and white. She rebuffed Anne’s overtures without considering that Anne had troubles of her own: Henry’s constant philandering which had begun when she was pregnant with Elizabeth, the pressure on her to bear a son – so intense that in 1534 she may have been suffering from a false pregnancy – her knowledge of her unpopularity, and her fear for her daughter’s security in a hostile world.

Fearful that her father would put her to death, as he had many others for refusing to acknowledge the Act of Succession, Mary was pleading with Chapuys to find a way for her to flee the country. Flight was the natural reflex of a young woman goaded beyond endurance and in terror of her life. So desperate was Mary that she told Chapuys that she would cross the Channel in a sieve if necessary. Knowing what a valuable asset Mary would be in the hands of a foreign power, Henry had her and the ports watched, so that there was no realistic possibility of escape.

Two days before her nineteenth birthday, Mary fell dangerously ill. As she lay in pain surrounded by enemies, she heard them say that they hoped she would die. Anne had declared on many occasions that she meant to kill Mary, saying, ‘She is my death, and I am hers; so I will take care that she shall not laugh at me after my death.’ Rumour had it that Mary had been poisoned, but Henry’s physician, Dr Butts, more accurately attributed her condition to her ‘ill treatment’. He advised Henry to send her to her mother, so that he would be freed from all suspicion if she died.

By now, Katherine was in her final place of confinement, Kimbolton in Huntingdonshire – isolated, damp, pestilential and gloomy. She was pleading with Cromwell to send Mary to her, so that she could nurse her in the same bed. A little comfort and cheer would ‘be half the cure’, she promised. ‘I have found this by experience, being ill of the same sickness.’

Henry was not prepared to risk the consequences. His only hope of forcing Mary to renounce her title and claim to the throne was by isolating her, cutting her off from those who loved her. He suspected the worst of Katherine: ‘She is of such high courage,’ he said, ‘that, with her daughter at her side, she might raise an army and take the field against me with as much spirit as her mother Isabella.’ On the contrary, Katherine was tormented by the fact that her principled stand on her marriage had driven Henry and England away from the true Church. She had no intention of harming her adopted country further by inciting civil war.

By late 1535 Anne was expecting another child. A son would mean her final triumph over Katherine, perhaps even the death of Katherine, for did not an old prophecy say that a Queen of England would be burned at this time? She wrote boasting to Lady Shelton that it no longer mattered whether Mary bowed to her father’s wishes or not, ‘for if I have a son, as I hope shortly, I know what will happen to her’. The letter was left lying around for Mary to read.

In January 1536 Katherine died. She had been reduced to living in one room with a handful of attendants; fearing poison, her food was cooked on the fire in front of her. She wrote a last loving letter to Henry, beseeching him to be a good father to Mary. Informed bluntly of her mother’s death by Lady Shelton, Mary retired to her room to mourn alone. Naturally she did not attend the funeral. Katherine was buried at Peterborough as Princess Dowager, with the officiating bishop mendaciously claiming that she had admitted on her deathbed that she had never been legally married to the King.

It was on the day of Katherine’s funeral that Anne lost the child who would have been her saviour. The foetus was about three and a half months old and was judged to be male. When Henry visited her, he told her ominously that ‘he saw clearly that God did not wish to give him male children’. There would be no more chances. In Henry’s mind, God was frowning on a marriage that, given that Anne’s sister had once been his mistress, was every bit as incestuous as the union between Henry and Katherine. While Katherine was alive, Henry could not afford to dispose of Anne without being obliged to take his first wife back. His passion assuaged, he had quickly begun to tire of Anne, muttering that he had been ‘seduced by witchcraft’. At the beginning of May she was suddenly arrested and tried on trumped-up charges of adultery and incest with her brother. The sentence for a queen condemned for high treason was to be burned alive, just as the old prophecy predicted, but in a rare show of mercy Henry had it commuted to beheading.

If Mary felt her stepmother’s death would clear the way for reconciliation with her father, she was sadly mistaken. When Queen Jane Seymour, whom Henry married with indecent haste within days of Anne’s execution, pleaded with him to make peace with Mary, he told her she was a fool and that she should be thinking of the advancement of her own children. Jane replied that she was thinking of them, in that the country could only be at peace if he did right by Mary. The people had always loved her and regarded her as the rightful heir. Only Cromwell really understood that there could be no turning back the clock; that Henry was utterly committed to the royal supremacy. He had no intention of validating his first marriage, or of returning to Rome; indeed, the wealth of the Church in England lay temptingly before him, his for the taking.

Mary had a following in England and powerful relatives abroad; she was a potential figurehead of opposition in an increasingly restless realm. The people were uneasy at the King’s drift away from the religious sureties they had always known and were about to become more so: in 1536 the Pilgrimage of Grace, the most dangerous rebellion of Henry’s reign, was to break out in the North. The destruction of the monasteries had begun: the inmates were being cast out, the beautiful buildings stripped of their valuables and despoiled, their treasures dispersed, leaving barren scars on the landscape. Monastic property, amounting to one-quarter of the land of England, was appropriated by the crown, triggering off the biggest land grab since the Conquest. Now, the aristocracy, the gentry and aspiring lawyers and merchants could literally buy into the Reformation, for which of them would want to return to the Roman allegiance if it meant returning their newly acquired property?

The destruction of the monasteries would be followed by the abolition of pilgrimages, shrines, holy relics and the use of candles or tapers before images. In Canterbury, one of the most famous places of pilgrimage in Europe, the tomb of Thomas à Becket – ‘a rebel and a traitor to his prince’ – would be ransacked, the fabulous jewels that had been the gifts of kings and other pilgrims sent in twenty-six carts to London to be presented to the King, the saint’s bones consigned to a bonfire. In Walsingham, to whose shrine Henry himself had walked barefoot as a young man to offer a great ruby, the ancient wooden statue of the Virgin would be removed and sent to London, where it would be ceremoniously burned along with other notable images.

It was one thing to destroy, another to erase the much loved images and traditions of centuries from the people’s hearts and minds.

Conscious of her symbolic importance, Henry was determined to make an example of Mary. He wanted nothing less than her acknowledgement of the royal supremacy and the invalidity of her mother’s marriage and her own illegitimacy, as reiterated in the new Act of Succession of 1536. It was a matter of state, but also personal. In a patriarchal society, a girl owed her father unquestioning obedience, as she would later do a husband. It irked Henry that Mary had taken her mother’s side in the divorce. If he could not have her love, he would certainly have her abject submission. If it meant breaking her will and threatening her death, so be it.

When Mary did not immediately hear from her father, she wrote to Cromwell, asking him to intercede for her. ‘Nobody dared to speak for me as long as that woman lived,’ she told him, but now she hoped that he would be the means of reconciliation with her father, assuring him of her desire to obey the King as far as her conscience allowed. Oblivious to the fact that she was taking quite the wrong approach in placing her conscience before the King, Mary followed this up a few days later with a letter to Henry himself. She begged his blessing and forgiveness for her past offences, ‘in as humble and lowly a manner as a child can’. It was by no means humble enough. Mary assured him that she would obey him in all things ‘next to God’, ‘humbly beseeching your Highness to consider that I am but a woman and your child, who hath committed her soul only to God, and her body to be ordered in this world as it shall stand with your pleasure’.

To Henry, it sounded like Katherine all over again.

Cromwell drafted a letter of submission which Mary merely had to copy and sign. She returned a letter in which she declared herself ‘most humbly prostrate before the feet of your most excellent Majesty’, his most obedient, repentant and humble child who was ‘ready, next to Almighty God, to put herself totally at his gracious mercy’. In a covering letter, Mary thanked Cromwell and told him she had followed his advice, in so far as God allowed. She had done ‘the utmost my conscience will suffer me’ and could do no more.

Needless to say, Cromwell’s original draft had said nothing about Almighty God – an insertion that rendered the submission useless. Furious, Cromwell warned her that unless she complied he would wash his hands of her for good. Beginning at last to understand how perilous her situation was, Mary faithfully copied the draft again ‘without adding or minishing’ and returned it to Cromwell. She was leaving the letter unsealed, she told him, as she could not bear to write a second copy for Cromwell. ‘For the pain in my head and teeth hath troubled me so sore these two or three days, and doth yet so continue, that I have very small rest, day or night.’

Henry was still not satisfied. He sent a commission, headed by the Duke of Norfolk, to Hunsdon, with a set of articles for Mary’s signature and full authority to use any tactic to bully her into submission. The document stated that ‘the said lady Mary hath sundry times and of long continuance showed herself so obstinate towards the King’s Majesty, her sovereign lord and father, and so disobedient unto the laws … that she seemed a monster in nature.’ She was to renounce the authority of the Bishop of Rome, as the Pope was now called in England, and to recognize and accept the King to be Supreme Head ‘in earth under Christ of this Church of England’. She was to submit to all his laws ‘like a true subject … and maintain them to her power’. Finally, she was to acknowledge the marriage between the King and her mother, ‘the late Princess Dowager’, to have been ‘by God’s law and man’s law incestuous and unlawful’.

For Mary to give in to the last demand would be to dishonour her mother. Nor could she agree to repudiate the Pope. Through all her misery, Mary had clung to the religion her mother upheld to the end, and would continue to do so with increasing ardour. She refused to sign. Norfolk and the other commissioners now turned nasty. She was such an unnatural daughter, said one, that he doubted if she was even the King’s bastard. Another added that if she were his daughter, he would beat her to death. He would knock her head against a wall until it was as soft as a boiled apple. They told her she was a traitor to the King and his laws and would be punished accordingly. Then they left, telling her that she had four days to think it over.

Trapped and in fear of her life, she seemed to have no alternative than to give way to her father’s demands. Chapuys advised her to submit. God looked more at the intentions than the deeds of men, he told her, and perhaps if she swallowed her principles now she would save herself in order to serve Him better in the future. Late on the fourth night, Mary signed, without looking at the paper. She had been beaten into submission, mentally if not physically. To make matters worse, the papal absolution she secretly sought was not forthcoming. Nothing could alter the fact that she had betrayed the mother she loved and revered. The betrayal would haunt her for the rest of her life, while her father’s terror tactics left her psychologically scarred.

Mary’s return to favour was heralded by a meeting with the King and Queen. Henry had not seen his daughter to speak to for five years, since she was fifteen. ‘There was nothing but conversing with the Princess in private,’ Chapuys reported, ‘and with such love and affection and such brilliant promises for the future that no father could have behaved better.’ Jane, who had served Queen Katherine as a maid of honour, was predisposed to treat Mary with genuine kindness, showing her so much deference that she would take her by the hand, so that they could both pass through a door together, rather than take precedence herself. Meanwhile, Henry pressed a draft for 1,000 crowns into his daughter’s hand, for ‘her little pleasures’, with the assurance that there would be plenty more.

Now she was the predominant sister again – for the Act of Succession of 1536 had rendered Elizabeth a bastard as well – Mary did not forget her little half-sister, a motherless child just turned three. Although she could never quite forgive Elizabeth for innocently usurping her place as Princess of England or forget the humiliations she had endured at the hands of Anne Boleyn, she was kind enough to remind Henry of her existence, commending her as ‘such a child toward as I doubt not but your Highness shall have cause to rejoice of in time coming’.

Mary must have been profoundly relieved when in October 1537 Queen Jane, after a labour of fifty hours, gave the King a male heir. The focus of attention moved away from her on to the longed-for son. He was named after St Edward the Confessor and proclaimed Duke of Cornwall and Earl of Chester in a magnificent christening ceremony, at which Mary had the honour of being godmother. It was after midnight when the torch-lit procession reached the Queen’s apartments, where she lay in bed feverish. Mary presented her godson with a gold cup and gave a generous sum to the midwife, the nurse and the rockers.

Days after her great triumph, the twenty-nine-year-old Jane died of puerperal fever. Hating sickness and death and any reminders of it, Henry fled to Hampton Court, leaving Mary to supervise the funeral arrangements and to act as chief mourner, sitting in vigils by the coffin, saying Masses for the departed soul, and following the hearse as it was taken in torch-lit, night-time procession in stages to its final resting place in the Garter Chapel at Windsor.

For the rest of her father’s reign, Mary fulfilled the role of first lady at his court whenever he was between wives. He seems to have been grateful for her company and lavished jewellery on her. Whether or not she ever forgave him for his treatment of her and her mother, she was careful to show him all outward signs of deference and obedience. She helped his last wife, Katherine Parr, nurse him, his temper rendered ever more irascible by the pain of his ulcerous leg. At Christmas 1545 he was touched by her thoughtfulness when she gave him a bespoke wooden chair, beautifully upholstered, to accommodate his giant bulk.

Living mainly at court, Mary’s Privy Purse expenses reveal the serene existence of a high-born lady. She received innumerable gifts for her table: a swan from Lady Butler and a hogshead of wine from Lady Lisle, pears from Chapman the gardener at Hampton Court and a quince pie from Master Parry. The country people left gifts of strawberries, cherries and cucumbers, while the keepers of the Great Park at Windsor presented her with a buck and a stag. Knowing her love of gardening, the King’s gardener at Greenwich offered her herbs and flowers. Someone else gave her roses. There was a gift of rose water, perhaps used to sweeten the closet where her robes were kept. A London woman brought a bird in a cage to please her, while some Venetian visitors left her a looking glass – a great novelty.

Mary’s was a musical household, with money paid to someone ‘comyng from London for mending of my lady graces virgynalle’. Every month there was the expense of ‘shaving of Jane fooles hedde’. This female jester, Jane the Fool, had to be kitted out with new shoes and hose, presumably part of her clown costume. The servant of John ‘Poticary’ – John the Apothecary – was paid for ‘bringing stuff to my lady grace soundry tymes’, while a surgeon would come from London ‘to lett my lady grace bloode’. Christopher, the keeper of Mary’s greyhounds, had to be given money for their meat and, since only ladies’ lapdogs were allowed inside the court, for their kennels. There are many little gifts to Elizabeth – a box embroidered with silver and ‘a pomander of golde with a diall in yt’ – presumably some sort of timepiece. One day Elizabeth received ten shillings ‘to play w’all’. Mary amply fulfilled the obligation of a great lady to dispense alms. There was money to be distributed ‘amonge the prisons in London’, ‘to a scoler of Cambridge’ and ‘to a pore priest’ – perhaps a former monk ejected from his monastery.

Mary loved children and stood godmother to a great many, often those of her servants and quite humble people. She must have profoundly regretted that she was not a mother herself. An unmarried woman was an anomaly, but, as ever, she was powerless to change her fate. Remembering Vives’ instruction that ‘it is not comely for a mayde to desire marriage and moche lesse to shew herselfe to longe therefor’ she must wait for her father to choose a husband for her.

The English candidate for her hand, the one her mother had favoured, Reginald Pole, son of Mary’s old governess the Countess of Salisbury, was in exile. He had publicly criticized Henry and allowed himself to be caught up in a papal scheme for an invasion of England, involving Henry’s overthrow and Pole’s marriage to Mary. Henry, whose cruelty remained undiminished, decided to eliminate the last tiresome remnants of the House of York, whose royal blood, mad-cap schemes and reactionary politics posed a threat to his young heir, Edward. Pole’s elder brother, together with a Courtenay and a Neville, were executed, while his sixty-nine-year-old mother, who had been a second mother to Mary, was hacked to death in a botched execution.

As far as Catholic Europe was concerned, Mary was Henry’s rightful, legitimate heir. Edward, born of a marriage that had taken place while England was in schism, was not considered the legal heir by Catholic purists, but Mary did not agree with this. She loved her little brother and saw no reason why he should not succeed their father. Henry had indeed restored her to her place in the succession, after Edward and before Elizabeth, but, never one to admit a wrong, he did not go so far as to reverse the bastard status of either of his daughters.

He was still using the adult Mary in the diplomatic marriage game, just as he had when she was a small child, first pretending to consider the Emperor’s proposal of Dom Luiz, younger brother of the King of Portugal, then veering off towards a French alliance. Only one man, Duke Philip of Bavaria, a Lutheran, came to woo Mary in person, asking Henry for her hand in marriage and offering to do military service for him. The courtship came to nothing.

As Mary ruefully admitted to one of her chamber women, the marriage negotiations for this husband or that would continue, but ‘nothing would be got from them but fine words, for she would be, while her father lived, only Lady Mary, the unhappiest lady in Christendom’.

Realizing that the world would be a difficult place for his daughters when he was dead, Henry made generous provision for them in his will. When he died in January 1547, Mary discovered that she was a great landed magnate in her own right. Probably considering herself too old at thirty-one for marriage, she no doubt looked forward to a future spent in peace and relative obscurity. In this modest hope she was to be both disappointed and confounded.