Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [65]
IN APRIL 1547, Mary left Katherine Parr, with whom she had remained since her father’s death, and journeyed north to her new estates. Within weeks, Katherine had rekindled her relationship with her old love Thomas, Lord Seymour of Sudeley, and in May they were secretly married. Seymour sought to win Mary’s approval, but she responded with thinly veiled disapproval, declaring that “being a maid,” she was “nothing cunning” about “wooing matters.” Henry was “as yet very ripe in her own remembrance,” and she found it “strange news”: “it standeth lest with my poor honour to be a meddler in this matter, considering whose wife her grace was of late.”6
Initially relations between Mary and the Edwardian regime were distinctly amicable. The lord protector, Somerset, had previously been in the service of the emperor at the imperial court, and Anne, duchess of Somerset, formerly in the household of Katherine of Aragon.7 Mary addressed her as “my good gossip” and “my good nann” and signed off a letter to her “your assured friend to my power, Mary.”8 As Christmas approached, Edward wrote to Mary, inviting her to spend the festive period with him and Elizabeth at court:
Right dear and right entirely beloved sister,
We greet you well. And whereas our right dear and right entirely beloved sister, the Lady Elizabeth, having made suit to visit us, hath sithence [since] her coming desired to remain with us during all this Christmas Holydays, like as we cannot but take this her request in thankful part, so would we be glad, and should think us very well accompanied, if we might have you also with us at the same time.
However, Edward concluded with the suggestion that if Mary’s health was not good, she might postpone her visit to another occasion “when both the Time and your Health shall better suffer.”9
ALTHOUGH THE NEW evangelical establishment was determined to overturn Henry’s Act of Six Articles, at first it proceeded cautiously. Negotiations for peace with France had ended with the French king’s death at the end of March, and in April Charles had defeated the German Protestants at Mühlberg. England was diplomatically isolated; it was not a good time to champion religious reform. But such prudence was short-lived, and the government was keen to press ahead with the process of reformation.
On July 31, 1547, new Church “Injunctions” were issued in the king’s name and a general visitation ordered for the whole Church. Though the wording on the Mass was cautious and conservative—“of the very body and blood of Christ”—it was ordered that “abused” images be destroyed, processions abolished, the ringing of bells and use of rosary beds condemned, and the lighting of candles on the altar forbidden.10 The same year The Book of Homilies, which set out the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone, was written by Cranmer and issued to be read in all churches. A translation of Erasmus’s Paraphrases on the Gospels—which Mary had had a role in translating under the sponsorship of Katherine Parr—was also to be placed in every church. Within three months, each parish was to possess the Bible in English. Sermons were to be preached regularly and priests instructed to recite the Lord’s Prayer, creed, and Ten Commandments in English. When Bishops Edmund Bonner and Gardiner protested against the Injunctions, they were imprisoned. It was the prelude to further change. In Edward’s first Parliament, which opened on November 4, 1547, the Act of Six Articles and Treasons Act were repealed. Marriage was made legal for the clergy, and the laity were to receive Communion in both kinds.
As the practices of the “old religion” came under attack, Mary made her Catholic devotion stridently clear, hearing up to four Masses every day in her chapel at Kenninghall.11 In a dispatch of October 4, 1548, Jehan Dubois, the imperial secretary, described how Mary had just returned from Norfolk, where she had inspected her estates “and was much welcomed in the north country and wherever she had the power to do it she