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more than flattery. Her household accounts do not indicate any expenditure at all on books, or on the patronage of scholarship. They may be incomplete, but the signs do not suggest the normal apparatus of an enquiring mind.
    What the accounts do show, however, are renewed health problems. Mary ran up considerable bills with her apothecary, and was often bled. In September 1543 she was reported to be ‘very ill of a colic’, and in June 1544 confided to a friend that she had ‘byn nothing well’ for several days. The nature of these ailments is much less clear than it had been in the days of her house arrest, and may have been mere hypochondria. What they were clearly not is stress related.
    The court, though, was a fairly stressful place in the 1540s, as the conservatives and the ‘evangelicals’ squared up to each other, with the king apparently moving now one way, now another. The conservatives scored heavily in 1539 and 1540 with the Act of Six Articles (asserting several conservative doctrines, such as clerical celibacy), the fall of Cromwell and the Howard marriage; but thereafter the evangelicals struck back. This occurred first through the destruction of Catherine Howard, then through the marriage with Catherine Parr, and then in the frustration of attacks on Cranmer (the ‘Prebendaries’ plot’) and – apparently – on the queen herself. This last (if it ever happened) may explain the king’s increasing distaste for his conservative councillors in the last two years of his life, culminating in the fall of the Howards at the end of 1546. [94]
    All this infighting, however, appears to have left Mary untouched. Even the story of the attack on Catherine, the substance of which was that some on the fringes of the court were burned as heretics, makes no mention of the princess. At this stage of her life her piety was entirely conventional. Like many Christian humanists she approved of the English Bible, and of sermons, and had no particular affection for the shrines and pilgrimages that Henry had abolished. On the now-dissolved monasteries she was silent, and her enthusiasm for the mass was no greater than Henry’s own, who was to ordain 30,000 ‘trentals’ (each trental being a set of 30 requiem masses) for the repose of his soul. Her accounts show dozens of examples of almsgiving, but only a small proportion for the ‘maintenance of God’s service’ and none at all for traditional local pieties. Having, apparently, come to terms with the royal supremacy, she had settled into an orthodoxy which, although conservative, was by no means militantly so – and she wisely steered clear of the partisan politics with which she was surrounded.
    From 1543 to 1546 Henry was at war, and in 1544 he campaigned in person for the last time. The object of his intentions was Boulogne, and the campaign was eventually successful, but given the king’s age and health it was a risky venture. Catherine was named as regent during his absence, and the Parliament that ended in March 1544 again took order for the succession. The Act of 1536, which was still in force, had bastardised both daughters, and settled the crown on any son who might be born to Queen Jane. Edward was therefore the undoubted heir, but what happened if he should die childless? To cope with such an eventuality, the new Act settled the succession first on Mary and the heirs of her body ‘lawfully begotten’, and then upon Elizabeth. In the remote contingency of all Henry’s children dying without issue, the crown was to pass to the descendants of his younger sister, also named Mary, who had died in 1533. [95] This Mary had married, and had had children by Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, the surviving one in 1544 being Frances Grey, the wife of Henry Grey, Marquis of Dorset. The children of Henry’s older sister, Margaret, represented in 1544 by the infant Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, were totally ignored. The Act also empowered Henry to alter this order,