Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [46]
The princess is every day better treated, and was never at greater liberty or more honourably served than now … she has plenty of company, even of the followers of the little Bastard, who will henceforth play her court. Nothing is wanting in her except the name and title of Princess, for all else she will have more fully than before.12
On June 30, 1536, just days after Mary’s submission, a new Act of Succession was introduced into the House of Lords. Yet neither Mary’s legitimacy nor her position as heir was restored. The succession was conferred instead on the heirs of Jane Seymour or, as the act declared, “any subsequent wife.” Both of Henry’s first marriages were declared invalid, and Elizabeth was stripped of the title of princess and removed from the line of succession. Henry was granted unprecedented powers to nominate whomever he pleased as his successor, irrespective of illegitimacy, should he have no children with the queen.13 He might have intended to promote his bastard son Henry Fitzroy, duke of Richmond, but three weeks later, just after Parliament was dissolved, Richmond died, probably of tuberculosis. “Few are sorry,” wrote Chapuys to Perrenot de Granvelle, “because of the Princess.”14
Those who wished for a return to the old order in England now looked to Mary’s influence to bring it about. “It is to be hoped,” the ambassador wrote to the empress Isabella, “that through the Princess’s means, and through her great wisdom and discretion she may hereafter little by little bring back the King, her father, and the whole of the English nation to the right path.”15
In October there was unrest in Lincolnshire, and over the following weeks rebellion spread across the northern counties. Under the leadership of the lawyer Robert Aske, the rebels, some forty thousand in number, demanded the return of the “old faith”; the restoration of the monasteries ransacked in the dissolution of the past year; the return of the old religion; and “that the Lady Mary may be made legitimate and the former statute therein annulled.”16 Among the rebels were Lord Hussey, Mary’s old steward, and Lord Darcy, who had for many months been petitioning Charles V to intervene in England. As Aske related in his subsequent examination, “both he and all the wise men of those parts much grudged, seeing that on the mother’s side she came from the greatest blood in Christendom.” The statute declaring her illegitimacy would “make strangers think.” It was “framed more for some displeasure towards her and her friends than for any just cause, while in reason she ought to be favoured in this realm rather than otherwise.”17
When news reached Rome of the rebellion, Pope Paul III appointed Reginald Pole cardinal and commissioned him as legate a latere to go to England and raise support for the rebels.18 Pole was a cousin of the king and a son of Margaret Pole, countess of Salisbury, Mary’s godmother and former governess. He had left England in 1532 following Henry’s break with Rome and in 1536, in answer to Henry’s request for his views, had sent him the treatise De Unitate Ecclesiae (In Defense of the Unity of the Church). The tract had turned Pole from Henry’s protégé into his bitterest enemy. In it he appealed to the nobility of England and the emperor to take action, and he called on Henry to repent for having broken with Rome. He warned that the king would not get away with repudiating Mary and that among “such a number of most noble families” any disruption of the succession would lead to sedition.19 By the time Pole left for England, the rebellion had been put down. Henry demanded Pole’s extradition from France as a traitor and to have the cardinal “by some means trussed up and conveyed to Calais” and then to England.20
MARY WAS TO SPEND Christmas at court for the first time in years. On December 22, Henry, Jane, and Mary