Mary’s condition became daily worse. Her position in Elizabeth’s household was rather that of an attendant, than of a lady-in-waiting, and to the humiliations showered upon the unhappy girl was now added the want of the barest necessaries of life. The “pearl of the kingdom” was less well provided for than the meanest of her father’s subjects. Failing all other methods, she was to be starved into a surrender, and if she would not dine at the common table, was to have nothing to eat at all. Anne’s vindictiveness increased, when some peasants, assembling under Mary’s balcony, cheered the poor prisoner, calling her their rightful Princess. Chapuys’ despatch of the 21st February chronicles what is perhaps the high-water mark of her disgrace.
“The Princess,” he writes,[117] “finding herself nearly destitute of clothes and other necessaries, has been compelled to send a gentleman to the King. She ordered him to take money or the clothes, but not to accept any writing in which she was not entitled Princess. He was also charged to ask leave for her to attend Mass, at the church which adjoins the house, but this was not allowed. As the country people seeing her walk along a gallery saluted her as their princess, she is now kept much closer, and nothing done without the leave of the sister of Anne Boleyn’s father, who has charge of her. The Duke of Norfolk, and Anne’s brother lately reprimanded her for behaving to the Princess with too much respect and kindness, saying that she ought only to be treated as a bastard. She replied, that even if the Princess were only the bastard of a poor gentleman, she deserved honour and good treatment for her goodness and virtues. The Princess is well in health, and bears her troubles with patience, trusting in God and your Majesty, and showed no better cheer in her prosperity than now. God grant that this may not irritate this accursed Lady to carry out her detestable imaginations.”
Charles was not unmindful of the perils which surrounded his aunt and cousin, but he was greatly embarrassed for means to help them. Henry was deaf to persuasive arguments; the argument of force still remained to be applied, but this would involve the Emperor in a series of complications, out of which he did not see his way. If he made war on Henry, he would have to reckon with Henry’s ally and his own enemy, the King of France, who was by no means so scrupulous a Catholic, that he would hesitate to take up a hostile attitude towards the Pope, in a matter which was considered by the rest of Christendom as the Pope’s peculiar province. Henry had effected a formal rupture with Rome, and still Francis was as friendly to him as before. Moreover, the French court, although it had professed to be shocked by Anne’s effrontery, was known to favour the new Queen secretly; and dominating all these other difficulties was the Emperor’s accumulated debt to Henry, which his nephew was less than ever in a position to pay. A chess-board policy was therefore all that was possible in the actual state of affairs. Not any amount of sacrifices on the part of Charles would avail to help his aunt’s cause, and the letter which he wrote at this juncture to his ambassador in France, is alike a voucher for the accuracy of Chapuys’ narrative of affairs in England, and a confession of weakness by the Emperor.
“You have done well,” he writes, “to report what you have heard touching practices against the Princess of England, and what the King of France has said to you touching the King of England’s rupture with the Pope and the Holy See, and his making alliance with the Lutherans, and pretending that the Queen our aunt is ill. We have heard the same from our ambassador in England, much to our grief. And you are to tell Francis that the more Henry disowns obedience to the Holy See, the more he ought to support it. As to the report spread by the King of England, that the Queen our aunt is ill, you are to take an opportunity of telling him that she is in very good health of body, notwithstanding her ill-treatment, and that the spreading of such a report is very suspicious—all the more, as they have put her in a very unhealthy habitation, and taken away her physician, and almost all her servants, so that the essai of viands is no longer made. You have done right to inform Cifuentes[118] of this, although our ambassador in England has also done so.”[119]
Whether Chapuys was right in thinking that Anne would make a pretence of friendship with Mary, in order to destroy her more completely, or whether, having tried her utmost to break the Princess’s spirit, she now thought to win her enemy by gentler means, it is certain that in March 1534 she suddenly changed her tactics.
She went to Hatfield, ostensibly to see Elizabeth, but as soon as she arrived, she sent a message to Mary inviting her to come and salute her as the queen she was. If Mary would do so, Anne promised that she would intercede with her father on her behalf.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Mary replied that she knew no queen in England but her mother; but she would be much obliged if the Lady Anne Boleyn would be a means to the King in her favour. Anne tried again, sent a fresh message, but was again repulsed, whereupon she threatened “to break the haughtiness of this unbridled Spanish blood”.[120]
But if Anne’s hatred increased from this moment, her power to influence Henry was visibly on the decline. Her very threats are henceforth indicative of her weakened hold on his inconstant mind. In the course of the year 1534, there was a question of his departure for France, and Anne was more than once heard to say, that when he had crossed the sea, and she remained in England as regent, she would use her authority to put Mary to death, either by starving her or otherwise. When her brother, Lord Rochford represented to her that this would anger the King, she replied that she did not care, even if she were burned alive for it afterwards. “The Princess,” adds Chapuys, “quite expects this, and thinking that she could not better gain Paradise than by such a death, shows no concern, trusting only in God, whom she has always served well, and does still better now. Having spoken to the Queen, by her advice, I will make remonstrances; but I know not if they will do any good.”[121]
In a formal letter of protest, dated 7th June 1534, against the treatment she had received, in being declared illegitimate, and deprived of her title of Princess of Wales, Mary declared that she would not enter a convent, or take any such step at the will of her father, without the free consent of her mother. The strange mixture of firmness, self-reliance and sweetness in her behaviour at this time, was a source of wonder and admiration to all not utterly devoid of human pity, and even strangers were impressed with such conduct in a girl of eighteen, whose whole life appeared to be one perpetual lesson on the “uses of adversity”.
Chapuys told the French Admiral on his visit to England “that those who had shown him the Tower, and several other things, had not shown him the principal gem of all the kingdom, to wit the Princess. He replied that he was as much vexed as possible, that he had no opportunity of seeing her, although he had several times spoken about her, and used means to that effect. I asked if he had been refused a sight of her, and he confessed that he had not expressly requested it, but that the King never would come to the point. He added that he had never heard a lady so praised as the Princess, even by those who were giving her trouble; and certainly he was her devoted servant, both on account of her great virtue, and because she was so nearly related to the Queen his mistress,[122] and that he hoped for certain, soon to do her good service.”[123]