Free A Journey Through Tudor England by Suzannah Lipscomb Page B

have been eitherturning stern-on to face her eight large guns towards the French galleys, or trying to steer out of the way of their shot, but in the violent act of manoeuvring the ship, this great weight may have overbalanced her, causing water to rush in through her open gunports and capsize her.
    Only thirty men were rescued. The vast majority of her crew, including the commander Sir George Carew, the captain Roger Grenville [see B UCKLAND A BBEY ] and 500 other men unable to escape because of anti-boarding nets and heavy chain-mail jerkins, went down with her. From Southsea Common, Henry VIII, with Lady Carew besides him, watched helplessly as the tragedy unfolded. For years afterwards, the tops of her masts remained visible at low tide.
    Their loss is our great gain. The remains of the Mary Rose give us hints of just how impressive Henry’s ships were in their heyday, but what an irony that only by being destroyed can a warship be preserved.

‘She would be, while her father lived … the most unhappy Lady in Christendom.’
    T he soaring, majestic and vast cathedral at Winchester was the setting of one of the most impressive weddings of the Tudor age: Mary I to Philip of Naples (later Philip II of Spain) on 25 July 1554. Built by a kinsman of William the Conqueror, William Walkelin, and transformed into a fine example of Gothic perpendicular architecture in the thirteenth century, this beautiful medieval cathedral would be a place of great hope for Mary, after a lifetime of painful trials.
    Mary’s decision to marry a foreign prince was not popular. Parliament and a number of her councillors had expressed their concerns, and a more violent reaction came in the form of an armed rebellion led Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger, which reached the walls of the Palace of Westminster in the early hours of 7 February 1554. Mary was, however, determined to marry the man of her choosing, and with excellent reason: not only because she wanted to join England to Catholic Europe onceagain, but because she had been moved around like a marital pawn from early childhood.
    Born on 18 February 1516, Mary was the only child of Katherine of Aragon and Henry VIII to survive infancy. Aged just two and a half years old, she was betrothed to the French dauphin, Francis. The ceremony was by proxy (the dauphin was just twenty-eight weeks old, after all), and Mary was given a tiny diamond engagement ring for the occasion. When she was five, the engagement was broken off: it was decided that she would become not a French queen, but instead be betrothed to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. In a miniature by Lucas Horenbout, Mary is shown wearing a brooch over her heart that says simply ‘the Emperor’. However, Mary would not be of marriageable age for another eight years, and after three years of waiting — during which Mary had become quite attached to the idea of her grown-up husband-to-be — Charles decided that he wanted to marry a different cousin, Isabella of Portugal, instead.
    It was a shame, as Mary was developing into a good catch. Highly educated, she spoke Spanish, French and Latin, and read Greek. Her accomplishments as a dancer and musician were demonstrated to the French envoys arriving to discuss a second French engagement in 1527. They praised her ‘silver tresses’ and ‘great and uncommon mental endowments’ but, again, a match could not be engineered.
    If Mary felt rejected after these fruitless betrothals, it was nothing compared to what happened next. In 1531, after her father had determined to marry Anne Boleyn, Mary was separated from her mother, Katherine, in a callous effort to persuade both mother and daughter to accept the new situation. Mary was only fifteen, and although she couldn’t know it, she would never see her mother again. She then suffered the indignity of being downgraded from ‘Princess’ to ‘the Lady Mary, the King’s daughter’ within a weekof her half-sister Elizabeth’s birth in 1533. To