Princess Mary forced to sign the submission

Princess Mary Tudor’s forced submission was a political and personal capitulation extracted under threat of treason proceedings. Held at Hunsdon, she signed a document accepting Henry VIII’s authority, his supremacy over the English Church, and the invalidity of his marriage to her mother, Katherine of Aragon. The act made Mary’s own signature serve a royal settlement she had resisted, while the lives of men accused of trying to rescue her depended on what she chose—or was compelled—to do.

Causes and Political Context

The submission followed a widening struggle over who had authority to determine the status of Henry VIII’s marriage and the succession. Katherine of Aragon maintained that her marriage to Henry was valid; Henry claimed that it was not, and treated the resulting changes to his household and dynasty as matters the Crown could settle. At an earlier confrontation, Margaret Pole had been pressed to affirm that Prince Arthur and Katherine had shared a bed, and that the marriage had been consummated. Margaret acknowledged that the weekly visits ordered by the king’s mother had taken place, but that fact alone did not resolve what had happened between the couple. The dispute over consummation thus fed a larger contest over whether Katherine’s marriage could be set aside and whether Mary remained a legitimate princess.

The conflict had become institutional as well as marital. When Thomas Cromwell summoned the peers to Westminster Palace in spring 1534 to administer the succession oath, the Pope had publicly ruled that Henry and Katherine’s marriage was valid. Yet Henry claimed that papal authority did not govern in England. The king’s position turned royal declarations into a test of obedience: those called to swear had to decide whether to accept the Crown’s account of the marriage and succession or hold to a contrary religious judgment. Thomas More refused the oath as presented, while Margaret regretted that she had not stood with him. Henry had promised More he would not be tested on the matter, but did not keep that promise. Against this background, Mary’s later submission was not an isolated family disagreement; it was another demand that personal and religious convictions yield to the king’s account of law and authority.

Confinement and the Demand to Sign

By the time the judges considered Mary’s case, she was twenty years old, separated from her friends, and held at Hunsdon as a prisoner. A panel convened to examine her disobedience prepared a document known as The Lady Mary’s Submission. The judges gave her a stark choice: sign it or face a treason charge, for which the stated penalty was death. The threat was sharpened by the situation of half a dozen men held in the Tower of London on accusations that they had plotted to rescue her. Their fate, as well as her own, hung over the decision.

Mary had little access to help. Margaret describes her as unable to be reached or rescued, while the men who might have acted had already been detained. Mary feared that her father would order her execution if she refused; she also believed that her mother had been poisoned by Henry’s wife. Those beliefs intensified her sense of danger, but the immediate coercion was plain even without them: the state had isolated her, linked her refusal to a capital charge, and placed other lives in the balance. Her signature came under those conditions, not as a free reconciliation with the king’s position.

The Three Clauses

Mary signed three clauses, each extending the reach of the submission. First, she accepted Henry as King of England and undertook to obey his laws. The document therefore required more than compliance with a single order: it made recognition of the king’s authority the foundation of her declared position.

Second, she acknowledged Henry as supreme head on earth of the Church of England. This clause brought the church settlement directly into her submission. The struggle Margaret had witnessed in the realm—the king’s rejection of papal authority and his claim to govern the church—was now demanded from the daughter whose mother’s marriage lay at the center of the dispute.

The final clause required Mary to recognize her parents’ marriage as unlawful under both divine and human law. In signing it, she accepted the conclusion that made her not a princess but illegitimate. Margaret understands the cost as more than a change in rank: Mary had to put her name to an account that condemned her mother’s marriage and disavowed her own standing. The clauses moved from political obedience, to ecclesiastical allegiance, to the destruction of the family status Mary had defended.

Consequences and Significance

After signing, Mary accepted the designation Lady Mary rather than princess and the claim that she was illegitimate. Margaret reports the act to Geoffrey Pole, who reacts with anger that the family did not remove Mary before the lawyers reached her. Margaret answers that they had delayed while Mary was ill, then believed she was safe after Anne Boleyn’s death; by the time the rescue plot was exposed, they were fortunate not to have been imprisoned alongside the others. The account makes the failed rescue effort part of the submission’s immediate aftermath: the decision was made in a landscape where resistance had become dangerous not only for Mary but for her potential allies.

The Crown continued to reshape succession through law. Thomas Cromwell put before Parliament an act allowing the king to nominate his own heir, whether from Jane Seymour or a later wife. This measure extended the same struggle over who could define legitimate inheritance, while Mary’s signature supplied a coerced acknowledgment of the king’s position. Her submission did not establish that the competing claims had been reconciled; it recorded what she was forced to accept under threat. In Margaret’s telling, its three clauses reveal the mechanism of royal power at close range: authority over the church, the family, and the succession converges in a document that the king’s daughter signs to protect herself and others.