Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [29]
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