Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [58]
As Katherine governed from Hampton Court, Mary was with her, and later Edward and Elizabeth too. Both stepdaughters witnessed a woman governing and imposing her authority on her male councillors. It would prove formative for both.
ON JULY 14, HENRY arrived in Calais, ready for the planned siege of Boulogne, which began five days later. After weeks of laying siege, the Council wrote to Katherine on August 4, informing her that “Yesterday, the battery began, and goes lustily forward, and the walls begin to tumble apace.” They anticipated that Boulogne must fall shortly.9 Six weeks later, the town surrendered and Henry entered in triumph. Yet on the same day the emperor, who sought to concentrate his efforts on Germany, had concluded a treaty with the French at Crépy and abandoned England. Henry was left to fight Francis alone. The French king now pledged “to win as much as the Englishmen had on this side of the sea,” to capture a town on England’s southeast coast that could be exchanged for Boulogne, and to send troops into Scotland for an invasion of the north.
On May 31, 1545, a French expeditionary force landed at Dumbarton in Scotland, and on July 19, a French invasion fleet of more than two hundred ships entered the Solent. Fires were lit across England, raising the alarm.10 In the skirmishes that followed, Henry’s warship the Mary Rose was sunk with the loss of 500 men. Two days later, 2,000 French troops landed at Bembridge on the Isle of Wight and burned several villages before being forced to retreat. English shipping in Portsmouth harbor was attacked and the towns of Newhaven and Seaford were sacked until the French forces were driven back across the English Channel. The following day Henry ordered processions throughout the realm and prayers to be said to intercede for victory.11
“We are in war with France and Scotland,” warned Bishop Gardiner;
we have enmity with the bishop of Rome, have no assured friendship here, and have received from the Lansgrave, chief captain of the Protestants, such displeasure that he has cause to think us angry with him. Our war is noisome to our realm and to all our merchants that traffic throughout the Narrow Seas…. We are in a world where reason and learning prevail not and covenants are little regarded.12
By September, as both sides sued for peace, negotiations were revived with the emperor. On October 23, Bishops Gardiner and Thomas Thirlby were commissioned to present a three-pronged plan: Charles V would marry Mary, Edward the emperor’s daughter, and Elizabeth his son, Philip. Charles did not respond favorably.13 It was clear that Henry was seeking better relations with the emperor merely to secure a stronger negotiating position with France, and the proposals came to nothing.
IN MAY 1546, the ailing Eustace Chapuys prepared to leave England after sixteen years as ambassador. On May 4 he went to the palace of Westminster to bid farewell to the queen and Mary. Katherine expressed her desire that the friendship between England and Spain be maintained. “She … begged me affectionately, after I presented to your majesty her humble service, to express explicitly all I had learned here of the good wishes of the King towards you.” Mary, meanwhile, thanked him for the emperor’s “good wishes towards her,” and, “in default of her power to repay your Majesty in any other way, she said she was bound to pray constantly to God for your Majesty’s health and prosperity.”
At a final audience, Chapuys and Henry spoke about future relations between England and France. Henry “observed that he would very much prefer a settled peace to a truce … but, after all, if your Majesty would aid him, in accordance with the treaty, he did not care very much either.” The king stressed “the importance of the treaty of friendship … that I would report very fully and use my best endeavours,