(Cover image – © The Tudors – Showtime)
As a result of her bitter estrangement and hostility between her and her father, King Henry VIII, the Lady Mary, previously heralded as princess, was starved of the comforts of a maternal bond. Her startling experience with her second stepmother Anne Boleyn often left Mary fearing for her safety. Denied visits to her shunned mother Katherine of Aragon alongside persistent threats of violence and bullying, the cordial and affable relationship she enjoyed with her third step-mother Jane Seymour likely came as a relief for Mary. The security and warmth Jane provided her stepdaughter, in a manner that Antionia Fraser describes as ‘sensible’ was likely the leading contender that reinstated Mary’s place in the royal fold by signing her father’s formal statement of her submission of all she had fought for. Though one shall never decipher whether Jane’s aims in her favour towards Mary were political in reinstating a reconciliation with the Rome and England or whether her motives were entirely maternal, Mary’s experience with her second stepmother was significantly healthier.
Still without his longed-for male heir, Anne’s inability to provide a son reinstated previous doubts within the King’s head. Already having witnessed this downward-spiral before, it would not be long before he started looking elsewhere. Sometime after a second failed pregnancy in July 1534, Henry began conducting an affair with a woman at court, though the identity of this woman remains unclear. Queen Anne reacted to the affair with open animosity, plotting alongside her sister-in-law Jane Rochford to have the woman removed from court. However, Henry reprimanded his Queen and dismissed Jane, reminding his wife that he was entirely responsible for her position and the legitimate contender for Henry’s affections was yet to make her mark.
Two years before her marriage to Henry, devout Catholic Jane had written to the Lady Mary, urging her to ‘be of good cheer,’ assuring her that her troubles would ‘sooner come to an end than she supposed.’ When the opportunity came, Jane pledged to Mary that she would show herself a ‘true and devoted servant.’ However, during her main tenure in the service of Queen Anne, Jane had good mind to remain quiet about such a matter in the face of the Boleyn’s rising authority at court.
Mary’s supporters, namely the Imperial Ambassador Chapuys, Marchioness of Exeter Gertrude Blount and Sir Nicholas Carew began rallying to Jane. These conservative courtiers were confident that, if Jane were Queen, she would encourage the restoration of the Lady Mary. Henceforth, Jane was tutored in how to demurely approach and charm the King. Sir Nicholas and his conservative allies at court specified to Jane that she must not ‘comply the king’s wishes, except by way of marriage’ similarly to her predecessor Anne a decade beforehand.
It is not known when Henry categorically began to consider Jane Seymour for his third wife, but he was certainly sending her gifts and letters in the months leading up to Anne Boleyn’s death and final miscarriage. Like Anne before her, Jane rejected these gifts in exchange for a far more ambitious outcome: marriage. Perhaps this was a result of her thorough training at the hands of the Conservative faction, or this may have been Jane’s own political savvy. Nevertheless, the ambitions of the Conservative’s and Thomas Cromwell would be soon met with triumph: Anne Boleyn was beheaded at the Tower of London on the 19th May 1536, and Jane’s proposal to the king subsequently followed the next day.
The downfall of Anne Boleyn revived an air of enthusiasm within Mary’s supporters in relation to her restoration to the line of succession. According to Eustace Chapuys, the rejoicing of the people of England was ‘not only for the ruin of the Concubine, but at the hope of the Princess Mary’s restoration, but as yet, the King shows no great disposition towards the latter.’
Eleven days later, Henry and Jane were married at the Palace of Whitehall. Jane was proclaimed Queen on the 4th June, but it did not take her long to air her intentions to her new husband, namely in regards to the succession of his estranged eldest daughter. Within days of their marriage, Jane had pressed on the matter of the Lady Mary with her husband, in view of the fact that their great enemy, Queen Anne, was no more. However, in Henry’s eyes, to welcome his previously shunned daughter back into the fold of succession, without utter submission to his cause, would indicate an embarrassing climb-down on the European stage. In a previous interaction with Chapuys, Henry had reputed that as long as Mary ‘would submit […] without wrestling against the determination of our laws’, he would ‘acknowledge her and use her as our daughter.’ For Henry, the presence of Anne Boleyn throughout his dispute with Mary was entirely irrelevant: Henry sought an absolute submission to his new laws. Without her irrefutable yielding to his whims, there would be no air of reconciliation from his side whatsoever.
After the execution of Anne Boleyn, to which she must have felt much relief, Mary wrote to her Father’s Principal Secretary Thomas Cromwell to plead for his intercession. On the 30th May, Mary wrote again, declaring herself as ‘obedient to the king’s grace as you can reasonably acquire of me.’ She congratulated her father in a personal letter, even asking to return to court from Hunsdon to wait on Queen Jane. Though the removal of Anne did not hold notable significance in Henry’s perspective, it certainly initiated Mary’s actions in attempting a reconcile. Despite her opportunistic grab at reconciliation, her submission was finite to all things ‘next to God.’ Before the king, Mary was wholly committed to the Almighty and the matter regarding her parent’s ‘Great Matter’ was prohibited. As Mary provided no indication of any new commitments and visits to Mary’s household made little to no progress throughout the coming weeks. Because of her oscitance to accept her father’s ecclesiastical supremacy, Mary exposed herself to borderline allegations of high treason. Negotiations reached such a hostile climate that, according to Chapuys by the 15th June, the Duke of Norfolk professed that if Mary were ‘his or any other man’s daughter,’ he would ‘beat her to death or strike her head against the wall until he made it as soft as a boiled apple.’
Such animosity likely would have intensified if it were not for the subsequent intercession of Queen Jane. Even dating previous to Anne Boleyn’s demise, Jane had pressed on the topic of Mary’s restoration to the king, but found herself rebuked by him, declaring his eldest daughter to be a ‘fool.’ Rather than attempting to advance the interests of his previously recognised children, Henry encouraged Jane to ‘solicit the advancement of the children between them.’ Sometime after Norfolk’s unruly interaction with Mary, Jane wrote to her eldest stepdaughter, likely counselling her to submit to the pressures of her father rather than face the harsh punishments that would inevitably befall her otherwise. By the 21st June, Mary heartily responded to Jane; thanking her for her ‘most prudent counsel’ and sought her mediation for a long-awaited interview with Henry.
Of course it cannot be conclusively disputed how tantamount Jane’s ‘motherly’ intercession was in healing the rift between Henry and Mary, it certainly seems to have tipped the scales between a subservient climb-down and charges of treason. A few days after Jane’s intervention, on the 26th June, Mary’s signed the formal document that had troubled her conscience for the last number of years. In her statement, Mary acknowledged the illegitimacy of her parents’ marriage withstanding her status of bastard, as well as Henry’s position of Supreme Head of the Church of England.
After signing away the principles which she had fought for during tenure of estrangement, Mary’s scruples must have taken a considerable toll on her inner-integrity. Although Chapuys described Mary has ‘conscience-smitten’ by her submission, she would have likely felt an air of relief from the tight grip of treasonous accusations and threats of death which now ceased to compromise her safety. Mary had returned into the royal fold and her father’s favour. She was offered a new wardrobe at Henry’s expense as well as a plethora of servants at her service, a stark contrast to the years of servitude she had personally spent in the household of her younger sister. Just over a week after her surrender, Henry and Jane visited Mary’s household at Hunsdon where they stayed for two days. During their stay, Henry promised Mary a place in Jane’s household, who gifted Mary a diamond ring. Sometime during this period, a tender and harmonious relationship between Jane and Mary seems to have blossomed. However, Chapuys observed the ‘sweet food of paternal kindness’ initiated by Jane and Henry as interwoven with ‘drachmas of gall and bitterness.’
Henry sought to make Mary’s surrender known across Europe, forcing her to outwardly re-declare the clauses of the oath: she was made to write to her cousin Charkes V, proclaiming herself to be a bastard and her mother’s second marriage as incestuous and unlawful. Despite her ensured security and parental favour, Chapuys wrote to his master that the signing of the oath had ‘tormented her more than you think.’
After her submission to her father’s supremacy, nothing was conclusively agreed in relation to her position in the line of succession. Rumours surfaced that Mary would be fashioned as Duchess of York, although these never came to fruition. Mary re-entered the marriage market as a means for valuable Catholic Euopean houses. During her short tenure as queen, Jane took a keen interest in her stepdaughters martial prospects, meeting with imperial ambassadors to discuss a match with Dom Louis, son of the King of Portugal: a match favoured by Mary’s imperial cousins. The now jubilant family were seen riding through London together, where they spent Christmas at Greenwich.
In March of the succeeding year, the king announced that Jane was pregnant. Such news was met with great relief at the king’s increased prospects of siring a legitimate son. Mary henceforth became one of Jane’s attendants at court up to her confinement, which began on the 16th September. The queen remained in solitude for just over three weeks at Hampton Court, where she undertook a lengthy thirty-hour long labour. Three days after the birth of England’s long-awaited prince, who was baptised Edward, Mary stood as godmother in Hampton Court’s Chapel Royal. Despite a considerably limited audience due to the plague, Edward was provided with a lavish ceremony, led by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. During the baptism’s torch-lit procession to the bedridden Queen’s chambers, Mary led her four-year old sister Elizabeth to their stepmother, where her midwife and Edward’s wetnurse were presented with thirty pounds and a golden cup.
The great celebration’s of Edward’s birth had barely came to an end when Jane fell seriously ill. It is not conclusively understood what Jane’s exact cause of death was, with contemporaries understanding her illness to have resulted from a ‘natural lax.’ Jane died mere days later in the early hours of the 24th October from what can be contemporarily understood as puerperal or ‘childbed’ fever, in similar circumstance to the death of Elizabeth of York in 1503. Jane likely developed a massive haemorrhage leading up to developing septicaemia, rather than contradictory rumours of a caesarean section ordered by Henry, which likely would have killed her a considerably sooner than twelve days after Edward’s birth. Jane’s death hastily transitioned the rejoicing over England’s prince into a period of great mourning. According to chronicler Edward Hall, a grief-stricken Henry ‘kept himself close and secret a great while.’ However, Henry was not the only one to be deeply affected by Jane’s death.
In the days following Jane’s death, Mary was said to have been too inconsolable to participate in early proceedings commemorating her stepmother. So mournful was Mary, that the Marchioness of Exeter was required to take her place. Nonetheless, she remained steadfast in her place as chief mourner at commemorative masses held in the royal chapel. During Jane’s funeral on the 8th November, Mary rode behind Jane’s coffin during the procession from Hampton Court to Windsor, where she was buried inside St. Georges Chapel. Above the vault where Jane would be accompanied by her husband under a decade later, a Latin inscription was engraved which heralded Jane for her vicarious death, likening her to the phoenix emblem she used in life:
Here a ohoenix lieth, whose death
To another phoenix gave breath;
It is to be lamented much,
The world at once n’er knew two such.
After Jane’s death, Mary was left as first lady of the court, presiding over court proceedings alongside her father for the next two years. She frequently paid visits to her brother, acting as his most frequent family caller. Edward resided merely a barge away from his sister at Richmond, who visited him in November 1537, and in March, April and May of the following year, According to Mary’s close confidant Jane Dormer, Edward ‘took special content’ in his sister’s company, asking her questions and carrying resect ‘as if she had been his mother.’ In Jane’s will, Mary was provided a plethora of items, including jewels and perfume. Though her ambitions in reinstating her Catholic stepdaughter may have initially been entirely political, a clear love developed between the two women which evidently continued through her consistent visits to her son.
Now that Henry had been provided a designated legitimate male heir, any rivalry between Elizabeth and Mary cooled (for the time being). All three royal children could harmoniously live under the same roof, and much of this on Mary’s part may well, conceivably, have been down to Jane Seymour’s motherly intercession.
References:
Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen by Anna Whitelock
Jane Seymour: Henry’s Favourite Wife by David Loades
The Six Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser
The relationship between Queen Jane Seymour and Princess Mary | queenmarytudor (wordpress.com)
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