King Henry VIII & Queen Mary I

Caught in the Middle

Princess Mary, born in 1516, was Catherine of Aragon's sixth child. If father Henry VIII was disappointed that she was not the son he so badly needed to be his heir, he was even more relieved that she survived infancy at all: Catherine's first five children all were either stillborn or died within weeks. "We are both young," Henry told an ambassador to his court; "if it was a daughter this time, by the grace of God the sons will follow."

But the sons did not follow; Mary was Catherine's last child. At first the lack of a brother had no direct impact on Mary's life. Henry and Catherine retained as her tutor a Spanish scholar, Juan Luis Vives, who had the then-radical theory that women should receive a full education. Moreover, although Mary was never officially Princess of Wales, at age 10 she was sent to Ludlow Castle as ceremonial head of the the royal council that governed Wales - a traditional first step in training for rulership.

By this time, though, Catherine of Aragon was no longer young, and the lack of a male heir was weighing on Henry. It weighed even more on him once he fell in love with another woman, Anne Boleyn, who was young and might bear him the son he wanted. Not long after Mary was sent to Wales, Henry decided to dump first wife Catherine and marry young Anne. He wanted a son. So Mary entered her teens with the all-too-modern experience of being caught up in her parents' bitter divorce fight.

Mary was 17 when Henry VIII finally got his divorce, breaking from the Catholic Church to do so. Technically what Henry got was an annulment, not a divorce - but for daughter Mary the consequences were anything but technical. An annulment meant that Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon had never been properly married, which in turn meant that Mary was illegitimate: not a royal princess at all, just a royal bastard. There were legal ways around this. But Mary, who had always been close to her mother, had taken Catherine's side in the divorce fight and refused to concede that she was anything but a royal princess.

Father Henry VIII was furious, and as crowning insult, so to speak, he ordered newly demoted Mary to serve as a lady-in-waiting to her baby half-sister Elizabeth. But Mary had worse to fear than insults. In spite of her demotion, stepmother Anne Boleyn regarded Mary as a threat to her own daughter and made no secret of her preferred solution: Mary's head on the chopping block. At one point things got so bad that Mary's cousin, Emperor Charles V, made plans to spirit her out of England to safety. He even dispatched ships to the English Channel to pick her up from a small boat, but the plan fell through at the last minute.

When Catherine of Aragon lay dying in 1535, Henry did not allow Mary to go to her dying mother's bedside. After her beloved mother's death Mary at last submitted, formally acknowledging her own illegitimacy. But in the end it was Anne Boleyn, not Mary, who lost her head. With Anne Boleyn gone, relations between Mary and her father improved. When Henry's third wife, Jane Seymour, gave him the son he'd so badly wanted, Mary served as godmother at the baptism. Her illegitimacy was never formally reversed, but by the time Henry died, when Mary was 30, she had been restored to her place as second-in-line to the throne, after half-brother Edward and ahead of half-sister Elizabeth.