'I think you the most obstinate woman that ever was'

Having spent most of her youth as the King’s cherished only child and heir, this sudden change must have been devastating for Mary. But the crisis also strengthened certain aspects of her character and beliefs. As a show of support for her sainted mother, she identified herself strongly with the Spanish cause, becoming closely allied with Katherine’s foremost supporter Chapuys and his Imperial master, Charles V. She also embraced her mother’s Roman Catholic faith even more fervently than before.

Every bit as unyielding as her mother, when a message arrived to say that the King ordered that Mary should no longer use the title of princess, she refused to accept it because it was not delivered by a ‘person of honour’. She maintained that ‘she was the King’s true and lawful daughter and heir’, to which Henry angrily accused her of forgetting her duty as his daughter.  

To make matters worse, when the new Queen Anne heard that Mary had stubbornly refused to pay her daughter Elizabeth (the future Elizabeth I) due reverence as princess, Anne ordered her aunt Lady Shelton to box her ears ‘as the cursed bastard she was’. Undaunted, Mary insisted she ‘knew no other Princess in England except herself’.

In 1536, Katherine of Aragon died, and Anne Boleyn was executed at the Tower of London. But Mary’s luck was changing; her father soon married Jane Seymour, who was much more sympathetic to the Catholic cause and Mary’s situation.

But if Mary thought she would now be automatically restored to her place in the succession and given the title of princess, she was mistaken. Her father persisted in trying to force her to accept her illegitimate status.

At first, Mary refused to give in, even in the face of pressure from Thomas Cromwell, the King’s Chief Minister, and the Dukes of Norfolk and Sussex. The latter two men told her, ‘if she was their daughter, they would beat her and knock her head so violently against the wall that they would make it as soft as baked apples’.

In June 1536, Mary reluctantly gave in. She wrote to Cromwell acknowledging that her parents' marriage had been invalid and her father was the supreme head of the church. 

Along with her sister Elizabeth, Mary was restored to the succession during Henry’s marriage to Katherine Parr, and reconciled with her father. But she never forgot the slight against her mother – when she became Queen Mary I in 1553, she ensured that her very first Parliament passed an act that validated her parents’ marriage.