Mary was not with her mother.  It had been held desirable to remove her from an influence which would encourage her in a useless opposition; and she was residing at Beaulieu, afterwards New Hall, in Essex, under the care of Lord Hussey and the Countess of Salisbury.  Lord Hussey was a dangerous guardian; he was subsequently executed for his complicity in the Pilgrimage of Grace, the avowed object of which was the restoration of Mary to her place as heir-apparent.  We may believe, therefore, that while under his surveillance she experienced no severe restraint, nor received that advice with respect to her conduct which prudence would have dictated.  Lord Hussey, however, for the present enjoyed the confidence of the king, and was directed to inform his charge, that for the future she was to consider herself not as princess, but as the king’s natural daughter, the Lady Mary Tudor.  The message was a painful one; painful, we will hope, more on her mother’s account than on her own; but her answer implied that, as yet, Henry VIII. was no object of especial terror to his children.

“Her Grace replied,” wrote Lord Hussey to the council in communicating the result of his undertaking,[636] that “she could not a little marvel that I being alone, and not associate with some other the king’s most honourable council, nor yet sufficiently authorised neither by commission not by any other writing from the King’s Highness, would attempt to declare such a high enterprise and matter of no little weight and importance unto her Grace, in diminishing her said estate and name; her Grace not doubting that she is the king’s true and legitimate daughter and heir procreate in good and lawful matrimony; [and] further adding, that unless she were advertised from his Highness by his writing that his Grace was so minded to diminish her estate, name, and dignity, which she trusteth his Highness will never do, she would not believe it.”

Inasmuch as Mary was but sixteen at this time, the resolution which she displayed in sending such a message was considerable.  The early English held almost Roman notions on the nature of parental authority, and the tone of a child to a father was usually that of the most submissive reverence.  Nor was she contented with replying indirectly through her guardian.  She wrote herself to the king, saying that she neither could nor would in her conscience think the contrary, but that she was his lawful daughter born in true matrimony, and that she thought that he in his own conscience did judge the same.[637]

Such an attitude in so young a girl was singular, yet not necessarily censurable.  Henry was not her only parent, and if we suppose her to have been actuated by affection for her mother, her conduct may appear not pardonable only, but spirited and creditable.  In insisting upon her legitimacy, nevertheless, she was not only asserting the good name and fame of Catherine of Arragon, but unhappily her own claim to the succession