Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [27]
When Mary was officially told of her father’s remarriage in April, she displayed her developing self-preservation: she was “at first thoughtful” and then, “as the very wise person that she is, dissembled as much as she could and seemed even to rejoice at it. Without alluding in the least to the said marriage, and without communicating with any living soul, after her dinner the princess set about writing a letter to her father.” On receiving the letter, Henry was “marvellously content and pleased, praising above all things the wisdom and prudence of his daughter.”15 As the imperial ambassador remarked, “As to the Princess, her name is not yet changed, and I think that they will wait until the Lady had a child.”16 For the time being Mary would be left alone.
Mary was a young woman caught between estranged parents and a new, hostile stepmother. Her mother, her role model, meanwhile, cast herself increasingly as martyr. In a letter to the emperor, the deeply troubled Katherine declared, “In this world I will confess myself to be the King’s true wife and in the next they will know how unreasonably I am afflicted.”17 But as Chapuys said of Katherine, “wherever the King commanded her, were it even into the fire she would go.”18 Though mother and daughter were forbidden to communicate with each other, they sent letters secretly through trusted servants and the imperial ambassador. On April 10, Chapuys wrote of how Anne openly boasted that “she would have the princess for her lady’s maid; but that is only to make her eat humble pie, or to marry her to some varlet, which would be an irreparable injury.”19 There was now an air of foreboding. Anne knew that both Mary and Katherine were held in great popular affection and that the majority of English people regarded Mary as “the true princess.”
BY APRIL 1533, the imperial ambassador believed England was on the brink of civil war, and he implored Charles to invade:
Considering the great injury done to Madame, your aunt, you can hardly avoid making war now upon this King and kingdom, for it is to be feared that the moment this accursed Anne sets her foot firmly in the stirrup she will try to do the Queen all the harm she possibly can, and the Princess also, which is the thing your aunt dreads most …
I hear that the King is about to forbid everyone, under pain of death, to speak in public or private in favour of the Queen. After that he will most likely proceed to greater extremities unless God and Your Majesty prevent it.20
But Charles was preoccupied with the danger of the Turks in Hungary and the Mediterranean, the unrest in Germany, the intrigues in Italy, and the vengeful attitude of France.21 Though committed in his support of Katherine, the emperor was not prepared to risk war with England; it was a private matter, and Henry had given him no pretext to intervene.22
CHAPTER 12
THE LADY MARY
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