Well, the second episode of the second season of Wolf Hall, the Mirror and the Light, gets into some potential drama with rumors that Thomas Cromwell was interested in marrying the Princess Mary. Where did that rumor start, and was there any truth to it? Let’s discuss in today’s YouTube video.
Watch the video, or read a rough transcript below.
Hey, hey, hey, friend. Welcome to the YouTube channel for the Renaissance English History Podcast. I am your host, Heather. I have been podcasting on Tudor England since all the way back in 2009, making my show, the original Tudor History Podcast. This channel is where I put all of my episodes from all of my shows, as well as lots of extra content like this video right here, you know, right here.
Today we are going to talk about was Thomas Cromwell ever really seriously thinking about marrying Mary Tudor? Hmm. Let’s discuss.
So I use Google Analytics on my website, of course, and you know, can see what people are searching for and visiting my, my podcast site. And I noticed that I got a lot of visitors in the last couple of days with the search term was Cromwell going to Mary Mary. That’s interesting, thought I.
And then I watched Sunday’s Wolf Hall, and I realized that of course there was the rumor that Cromwell was going to marry Princess Mary, and that’s probably where you lovely folk who were visiting my website were coming from. So I decided to, you know, make a video about it, which was quite convenient because I can just go back to that blog article I had written in 2019.
The blog article was entitled, Was Cromwell Going to Marry Princess Mary? Question mark, exclamation point. So let’s discuss.
So on the surface, it would appear like, you know, a bit of a weird match, given Cromwell.
It was a lot older, and also had been working so hard, so diligently against the interest of Princess Mary, uh, working to have Anne Boleyn replace Catherine of Aragon as queen. So you know, it would look like a weird match. But by the summer of 1536, things were actually looking a bit better for Princess Mary.
Her mother was gone. But so too was Anne Boleyn. So was Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, who had also died about a month after Anne Boleyn’s execution, her half brother. , there was Princess Elizabeth, and then there was Mary, and there was no Edward yet. So she was, you know, second in line to the throne, really.
Also, there’s a new queen, Jane Seymour, who really wants to try to work to bring the families together. Cromwell was working to bring Mary back into the fold by having her acknowledge that her parents marriage was illegitimate.
And the show does, does show, the show shows, uh, Cromwell working on, you know, having Mary sign that document saying that her father was the head of the church and that her parents marriage was invalid.
After Mary had signed that document, her father welcomed her back into the fold. Now the rumor that there was a potential match between Cromwell and Mary came to us, as so many wonderful juicy rumors do, via Chapuis. He wrote a letter to the French diplomat Thomas Perrineau de Granville on the 23rd of July, 1536.
And it opens with a pretty funny jab at the English where he says, I have always thought the more these people are pressed, the more they grow stubborn like donkeys. I think that’s kind of true for humanity though, isn’t it?
The more you’re pressed, the more you kind of dig in. So not sure that that’s just generally English people, but just kind of humans. Anyway, later in the letter, Chapuys says, Of late, Cromwell got a gold ring made, on one side of which is, in relief, the figure of the king and queen, on the other that of the princess, and round about was a writing in Latin, which you will see by the enclosed bill.
Cromwell meant to make a present of it to the princess, but the king wishes to have the honor of it himself, and Cromwell will have to find other presents. The king is also getting his goldsmith to make a little two headed eagle with plenty of jewels. I know not what he means to do with it. They have begun appointing the household of the princess, and I think she will be magnificently provided for.
The inscription of the ring said, Obediencia unitatem parit, unitas animae quietem et constantiam. which basically urges her to be humble and obedient to her father. And it went on, you know, to say, be humble and obedient to Queen Jane. This isn’t normally something that one would write in a ring that one was planning to give to one’s father.
beloved or a person that one wanted to propose to. Um, I think it’s reading a lot into the inscription of a ring. However, rings, of course, then as they are now, are symbols of kind of I don’t know, there’s just something kind of societally that we associate with rings, right? And um, that was true for the tutors as well. So just the idea of giving a ring is quite a personal kind of gift and not just something that you would just give to a random person.
But the inscription talks about being humble and loyal to your father and to the queen. Not really romantic in nature, right?
Then there’s also the question of what Henry would have thought about Cromwell marrying the princess. And of course, Cromwell was clever enough to know what Henry would have thought. In the footnotes of Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell by Roger Bigelow,
there’s a note that says the episode should have been sufficient to show that even if Cromwell had any idea of marrying the princess, the king’s opposition to the plan would prove insurmountable. The inscription on the ring, moreover, surely indicates that the gift was intended rather as a reminder of the princess to her duty towards her father than as a preliminary to a matrimonial proposal.
Can you imagine, Henry, if Cromwell, his servant, who came from Putney, had proposed to his daughter? I don’t think that would have gone very well.
And then there’s also the idea that maybe this wasn’t a ring at all, but there was a problem with the translation and it was actually a metal. So in Dermot McCullough’s biography of Thomas Cromwell called a Thomas Cromwell a revolutionary life. He says that the translation was incorrect. And it had to be some type of metal, like a, um, a metal, which makes sense with that amount of inscription and the detailed carvings.
I mean, that’s a lot of inscription to put on a ring, isn’t it? Like, how far, Thick was the ring to hold all of it. I didn’t actually read you the whole quote. Let me go back and read you the whole quote. My Latin is, is not very good. So, you know, I’m, I’m gonna butcher it, but it says, the whole quote is, Obedientia Unitatem Parit, Unitas Anime Quietem et Constantiam, Constans Vero Anime Quies Theasaurus, In esti mobilis,
Requi exemplar obedience. Pat I Naura per at Obed. So that’s a lot. And actually I have a personal funny share about this. When my husband and I were getting married many, many years ago. 19 years ago, 18 years ago, a long time. We were, he got his ring made, uh, and had, uh, an inscription put on it and he was doing it online and he didn’t realize, it just didn’t occur to him.
He put a lot on his ring. Like, It’s a lot. I forget. He put all this stuff about, you know, we found each other and we’re so in love and now it’s time to start a family and now we’re going to have, you know, our love will bring about children and the magic of family and this new family that we’re building together.
It went on and on and on. Anyway, so, you know, he’s very happy with it. He sends, he hits submit and away goes the form to get this, uh, engraving on. He gets the ring. And he couldn’t read any of it. And I just laughed. I was looking at it. I was like, didn’t you think about that?
And he’s like, no, we didn’t. So my point is that if it was a ring, that’s a lot of text for a ring. And I don’t know how that could all fit. So maybe there’s even the idea that it was, it wasn’t a ring at all. It was a metal and there’s just a problem with the translation. Later rumors about Cromwell and Mary would actually come out during Cromwell’s downfall, with when his old friend Thomas Wriothesley who in the show in Wolf Hall calls Call Me, Call Me Risley, turned on him and gave evidence to the council that not only did Cromwell make jokes about Henry’s inability to consummate his marriage with Anne of Cleves, but he also wanted to marry Princess Mary and make himself king.
That seems kind of out of character to me. Cromwell seems a lot smarter than that, but it also was part of what helped bring him down. Uh, so it doesn’t really matter if it was out of character or not, if people believed it or if they at least pretended to believe it. So there you go.
So I don’t think that Cromwell ever thought seriously that he could marry Princess Mary. The idea might have struck him for like a second. It might have crossed his mind like, oh, that would be a fun match. And maybe that would be fun. But Do you honestly think that Cromwell would be dumb enough to think that that would work?
Now, I will say, uh, for Cromwell, he managed to have his son Gregory marry Elizabeth Seymour, who was the younger sister to Queen Jane Seymour, which made Thomas Cromwell the father in law to the sister of the queen, which made him related through marriage to the king. So that was, you know, an exciting marriage for him.
I think he probably would have been content with that. A blacksmith’s son from Putney. It was blacksmith, right? Because I always confuse him and Cardinal Woolsey because Woolsey was a butcher’s son, right? Or was it the other way around? Anyway, I’m having a lot of brain farts today.
All right, we will leave it there. Hey, one quick note before I go. Are you looking for a gift for the Tudor file, Tudor Holic in your life, or maybe for yourself? I would refer you to my shop tudor fair.com where we have fun products like this mug, uh, bottle, stainless steel bottle that says in my Tudor era, I really love this.
I also have this in a T-shirt. Which I wear sometimes too, um, it’s a super pretty design in my Tudor era. And you can stay hydrated because, you know, I’m a big fan of telling you to drink your water so you can drink your water with this. with this mug, cup. Um, and there’s also all kinds of fun other gifts there.
So, TudorFair. com, you can check that out. And also, I’d remind you about my Yuletide with the Tudors program that starts December 1st in just 12 days, where we’re going to dive deep every day in short videos, 5 to 10 minutes a day, on different holiday traditions and customs, starting all the way with the Romans and going through the 12 days of Christmas.
It’s going to go till January 6th. We will keep the 12 days of Christmas and we’ll have a call in there, a live Christmas party on zoom with Brigitte Webster from her home, uh, her tutor home, talking about how she keeps the 12 days. She’s a food historian. Uh, she’s amazing. And she lives in a tutor period home.
So englandcast. com for Yuletide with the tutors. I’ll put a link. somewhere up here. And then tutorfair. com for all your fun tutor merch, tutor swag, tutor merch products. All right, friends, look, if you made it to the end of this video and you enjoyed it, I sure would appreciate a press of that like button.
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If you want to keep binging Tudor content, here’s a video about Mary’s relationship with Eustace Chapuis that you might enjoy, and here’s one that YouTube thinks you’ll like. so much for watching. Remember, you are deeply loved. I am so glad I share the planet with you, and I will be back soon.
In the meantime, don’t forget to drink your water. All right, friend. Bye bye.
Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast,  the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop.
She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 30 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history (how exciting when she got to interview Alison for the first time!). In addition to history, she is passionate about travel, and has lived in 3 countries and 4 states (not counting her perpetual state of confusion), and her family (who help her host her YouTube channel occasionally).
