The Forgotten Tudor Women: Margaret Douglas, Mary Howard & Mary Shelton by Sylvia Barbara Soberton

Author:Sylvia Barbara Soberton
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2015-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12: The King’s pawns

Mary Shelton’s feelings about Henry Norris’s tragic death are nowhere recorded, and the absence of her name in the court records for the period of Jane Seymour’s queenship suggests that she had withdrawn from court after May 1536. This notion is further strengthened by the fact that when Henry VIII’s ambassadors were scouring through the European courts in search of a new royal bride for the King after Jane Seymour’s death, they informed Thomas Cromwell that Duchess Christina of Milan resembled Mary Shelton, who was referred to as the lady who used to serve in Anne Boleyn’s Privy Chamber.[151] Had Mary been Jane Seymour’s maid of honour, she would have been certainly referred to as the late Queen’s servant.

Mary Shelton’s name resurfaced again in January 1538 in a curious letter from John Husee to Lord Arthur Lisle:

“The election lieth betwixt Mistress Mary Shelton and Mistress Mary Skipwith. I pray Jesu send such one as may be for His Highness’s comfort and the wealth of the realm. Herein I doubt not but your lordship will keep silence till the matter be surely known.”[152]

The fact that this letter was written a month after Henry VIII’s ambassador mentioned the resemblance between Mary Shelton and Christina of Milan, before the King decided upon a fourth wife, suggests that Henry VIII was contemplating marrying yet another English lady. The reference to “the wealth of the realm” strongly implies that the widowed King considered one of these ladies as his prospective bride rather than a mistress.

The same letter mentioned that Mary Shelton’s uncle, Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire, “is again now in the court and very well entertained”.[153] It has been recently suggested that Boleyn was back in the royal favour because of the King’s affection towards his niece.[154] That may not have been the case, however. Boleyn was an ambitious courtier who had spent his entire life in the royal service. The events of May 1536 clearly show that he abandoned his children and was willing to participate in their trials.[155] At the end of June, he handed the office of Lord Privy Seal to Thomas Cromwell and withdrew from court.

After rusticating in Hever in the summer and early autumn of 1536, he was summoned to quash the Pilgrimage of Grace and was subsequently back in the royal favour, participating in the christening of Prince Edward and the funeral of Queen Jane Seymour in October and November of 1537. By 1538, Thomas Boleyn was back in Henry VIII’s good graces. He was apparently much made of at court since the rumour in London in July 1538 had it that “My Lord of Wiltshire should marry with my Lady Margaret Douglas”.[156]

Whether it was a mere rumour or an actual possibility contemplated by Henry VIII, we may never know, as contemporaries never returned to this subject again. It seems highly unlikely that Thomas Boleyn, whose wife died in April 1538, would have dared to entertain hope of marrying the King’s niece without the

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