Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [38]
But Anne’s intentions were far from clear. Although she had celebrated when informed of Katherine’s death, rewarding the messenger with a “handsome present,” thereafter she “frequently wept, fearing that they might do with her as with the good Queen.”18 Ironically, Katherine had been Anne’s best protection. Henry was not likely to question his second marriage while his first wife was still alive. Fearing that Henry’s affection was declining, Anne sought to be reconciled with Mary as a means of securing her own favor. She instructed Lady Shelton to tell Mary that “if she would lay aside her obstinacy and obey her father,” Anne would be “the best friend in the world to her, like another mother, and would obtain for her anything she liked to ask and that if she wished to come to court Mary would be exempted from holding the tail of her gown.” But Mary would not be swayed. As Lady Shelton informed Anne, she would “rather die a hundred times than change her opinion or do anything against her honour and conscience.”19
By the new year, Anne knew that she was pregnant again, and, with her confidence renewed, she changed tack. Lady Shelton, Mary’s governess, was instructed to ease the pressure, not to “further move the lady Mary to be toward the King’s Grace otherwise than it pleases herself.”20 Anne felt sure she knew Mary’s fate: “If I have a son, as I hope shortly,” she wrote menacingly, “I know what will happen to her.”21
Mary now raised once more with Chapuys the prospect of fleeing to the imperial court in Brussels. If she had something to drug the women with, she told him, she might easily escape and pass under Lady Shelton’s window and then find some means to break or open the garden gate.22 As the ambassador reported, “She is so eager to escape from all her troubles and dangers that if he were to advise her to cross the Channel in a sieve she would do it.” Chapuys advised caution. Mary was then at Hunsdon, forty miles from Gravesend, from which she could be taken to Flanders. Any escape plan would necessitate her riding through many villages and towns, and she would be at high risk of discovery or capture. For now it was simply too hazardous an undertaking, and he recommended that she wait until Easter, when she would be moved again, hopefully to somewhere more convenient from which to escape.
In the meantime, Chapuys told Mary she should continue in the semiseclusion of mourning and, if approached by the king’s officers, beg them to leave her in peace to grieve for her mother. If pressed, she might tell them she was thinking of entering a convent when she reached full age to stun them into indecision.23 Mary was becoming increasingly hysterical, he added; “she is continually asking [me to] beg the Emperor to hasten the remedy, which she fears will be too late for her, for which reason she is daily preparing herself for death.”24
CHAPTER 17
THE RUIN OF THE CONCUBINE
JANUARY 26, TWO WEEKS AFTER HER DEATH, KATHERINE OF Aragon’s coffin was taken in procession, amid chaplains, gentlemen, ladies, and maids, on the nine-mile journey from the chapel at Kimbolton to Peterborough Cathedral. Three days later, Mass was said and a sermon preached by John Hilsey, the bishop of Rochester. He claimed that “in the hour of death” Katherine had acknowledged “that she had not been Queen of England.”1 In death, Henry claimed that Katherine had submitted to him as she had refused to in life. She was buried as a princess dowager and not as a queen:
The right excellent and noble princess the Lady Katherine, daughter of the right high and mighty Prince Ferdinand, late King of Castile, and wife to the noble and excellent Prince Arthur, brother to our Sovereign Lord, Henry the 8th.2
On the day of Katherine’s burial, Anne Boleyn was delivered of a stillborn son.