Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [43]
Good Master Secretary,
I do thank you with all my heart, for the great pain and suit you have had for me, for the which I think myself very much bound to you. And whereas I do perceive by your letters, that you do mislike mine exception in my letter to the King’s Grace, I assure you, I did not mean as you do take it. For I do not mistrust that the King’s goodness will move me to do anything which should offend God and my conscience. But that which I did write was only by the reason of continual custom. For I have always used, both in writing and speaking, to except God in all things.
Nevertheless, because you have exhorted me to write to his Grace again, and I cannot devise what I should write more but your own last copy, without adding or [di]minishing; therefore I do send you by this bearer, my servant, the same, word for word; and it is unsealed, because I cannot endure to write another copy.
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.
Your assured bounden loving friend during my life,
Marye.7
Mary copied Cromwell’s draft “word for word” and then addressed the king once more. Having begged “in my most humble and lowly manner” for his “daily blessing” and permission to come into his presence, she continued:
I have written twice unto your highness, trusting to have, by some gracious letters, token or message, perceived sensibly the mercy, clemency and pity of your Grace, and upon the operation of the same, at the last also to have attained the fruition of your most noble presence, which above all worldly things I desire: yet I have not obtained my said fervent and hearty desire, nor any piece of the same to my great and intolerable discomfort I am enforced, by the compulsion of nature, eftsones to cry unto your merciful ears, and most humbly prostrate before your feet.
She signed off by petitioning for “some little spark of my humble suit and desire” and praying God
to preserve your Highness, with the Queen, and shortly to send you issue, which shall be gladder tidings to me than I can express in writing…. Your most humble and obedient daughter and handmaid, Marye.8
The king’s response was direct and unequivocal. Within days he sent a delegation of councillors, headed by the duke of Norfolk, to visit Mary at Hunsdon to demand that she take the oath of allegiance and make a complete submission. The councillors condemned her for her earlier refusal to obey as a “monster in nature,” a freakish departure from the natural obedience of a daughter toward her father. Any other man, they declared, would have sent her away, but, given Henry’s “gracious and divine nature,” he was willing to withhold his displeasure if Mary would now submit to him. Would she accept all the laws and statutes of the realm? Would she accept Henry as supreme head of the Church and repudiate the jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome? Would she acknowledge that her mother’s marriage was invalid and accept all the laws and statutes of the realm?
Her answer to each was no. She was willing to obey her father in all matters except those that injured her mother, her present honor, or her faith, and in this she was steadfast. Norfolk angrily declared that “so unnatural” was she to oppose the king’s will that “they could scarcely believe she was his bastard, and if she were their daughter, they would beat her and knock her head so hard against the wall that it made it as soft as a baked apple.” She was a traitoress and “should be punished.” They left, instructing Lady Shelton to keep her under constant surveillance, day and night, and to make sure she spoke to no one.9
Cromwell had pledged that he would secure Mary’s submission, and he now feared for his own life. He confided to Chapuys that “he considered himself a dead man” for having represented Mary as “penitent and obedient.”10 Writing to Mary, he chastised her over her position:
Knowing how diversely and contrarily you proceeded at the late being