Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [48]
WITH THE REJOICING barely over, Jane fell seriously ill with “a natural lax”—heavy bleeding.10 The week of celebrations ended with a general procession at St. Paul’s for “the health of the Queen,” and the Chapel Royal was filled with courtiers praying for her safety. By the evening of the twenty-fourth, her condition had worsened and she received Extreme Unction. She died in the early hours of the morning of puerperal fever, having suffered a massive hemorrhage and contracted septicemia. Henry withdrew to Windsor, where, as the chronicler Edward Hall recorded, “he mourned and kept himself close and secret a great while.”11 Writing to Francis I in acknowledgment of the French king’s congratulations on Edward’s birth, Henry described how “Divine Providence … hath mingled my joy with the bitterness of her who brought me this happiness.”12
In the days immediately following the queen’s death, Mary was too grief-stricken—“accrased”—to take part in the initial obsequies, and the marchioness of Exeter had to take her place.13 But as she gathered her composure, she appeared as chief mourner at dirges and Masses in the Chapel Royal, accompanied by her ladies. On November 8, she rode behind the coffin at the head of the funeral cortege, her steed covered in black trappings, as the procession made its way from Hampton Court to Windsor. Upon the coffin was an effigy of Jane in robes of state, a crown upon her head and a scepter in her right hand. Four days later, she was buried between the stalls and altar of St. George’s Chapel. Above the vault the Latin inscription heralded her as a phoenix, her personal emblem, which in death had brought life:
HERE A PHOENIX LIETH, WHOSE DEATH
TO ANOTHER PHOENIX GAVE BREATH:
IT IS TO BE LAMENTED MUCH,
THE WORLD AT ONCE N’ER KNEW TWO SUCH. 14
In a letter of condolence, Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of Durham, reminded Henry that though God had taken his queen, Henry should not forget “our most noble Prince, to whom God hath ordained your Majesty not only to be father, but also as the time now requireth, to supply the room of a mother also.”15
Edward spent his first Christmas with Henry at Greenwich and was with him again in May 1538 at the royal hunting lodge at Royston, where the king “solaced all his day with much mirth and joy, dallying with him in his arms … and so holding him in a window to the sight and great comfort of all the people.”16
But it was Mary, then twenty-two, who would be most involved in Edward’s early upbringing. She would be his most frequent family visitor. Residing for much of the time at Hampton Court, she was just a barge ride across the river from her brother’s nursery at Richmond. She visited him in November 1537 and in March, April, and May the following year.17 As Jane Dormer, one of Mary’s gentlewomen, later noted, when Mary came to see him “he took special content in her company … he would ask her many questions, promise her secrecy, carrying her that respect and reverence, as if she had been his mother.” She would offer him advice “in some things that concerned himself, and in other things that touched herself; in all showing great affection and sisterly care of him.”18
Lady Lisle visited all the royal children at Hampton Court in November. “His grace [Edward],” she wrote to her husband, “is the goodliest babe that ever I set mine eye upon. I pray God to make him an old man, for I think I should never weary of looking on him…. I saw also my Lady Mary and my Lady