Mary Tudor came into the world in a season of mourning. King Ferdinand, who had been in ill health for some time, died late in January, and the news reached England just before Katherine was delivered. Katherine was not told of her father’s death until after Mary was born, but she must have grieved then to think that he did not live to know of the princess’ birth. Katherine did not love her father: she had not seen him for twenty years, he had treated her more as a piece of merchandise than as a daughter, and in any case he was not a lovable man. But she felt a strong sense of duty toward him, and considerable fear. Besides, his death broke another of her ties to Spain, and to the cherished memory of her mother. Ferdinand’s last illness was too much a tragicomic affair to evoke deep grief, however. Several years earlier he had determined to obtain a son by his second wife, Germaine de Foix. As he was over sixty the task promised to be strenuous, and to give him extra strength his wife had a powerful aphrodisiac baked into his food. The potion gave him convulsions, and attacked his reason. After two years Germaine had had no children but Ferdinand was more or less continuously ill and insane. He still enjoyed his favorite sport of hunting, though, weakening what resistance he had left. Finally in January of 1516 “he expired,” the humanist Peter Martyr wrote, “of hunting and matrimony, either of which are fatal to most men at the age of sixty-three.”5
Ferdinand’s death marked the passing of the generation of Mary’s grandparents: she would not know any of them, though she bore their imprint strongly. Her Spanish grandparents were the more romantic and illustrious. Ferdinand, heir to the Mediterranean kingdom of Aragon, spent his youth fighting alongside his father in the civil war against the rebellious Catalans; after he married the heiress Isabella at eighteen he joined in her campaign to secure her right to the throne of Castile. Competent rather than brilliant as both a soldier and governor, Ferdinand was destined to be overshadowed by his admirable wife. Warrior, conqueror of the Moors, indefatigable administrator and self-taught patron of culture and exploration, Isabella of Castile had the mentality of a feudal knight. She embodied the most hallowed of Spanish ideals: the tradition of the crusade. When her brother, Henry IV, died leaving no legitimate children Isabella refused to recognize the claims of his niece, and fought doggedly for her own rights until she had driven her rival from the country. Her marriage to Ferdinand gave him no control over her kingdom, and she ruled there as an independent sovereign, contending with revolts, the restlessness of the proud Castilian nobility, and the everyday tedium of government. When she was not campaigning she received ambassadors, conferred with her councilors, and attended to matters of law and war from morning till evening, then spent most of the night dictating to her secretaries. She had not been educated to handle affairs of state, and her Latin was poor; in her spare time she studied until she mastered it. By no means a learned woman, Isabella respected knowledge—always provided it remained congruent with piety—and bought many manuscript books and endowed a convent library at Toledo.
Important as they were to Isabella these benefactions went unnoticed by the majority of her subjects, who knew her best as the armor-clad conqueror of the Moors. Since the middle ages the Christian kingdoms of Spain had defined themselves in opposition to the Moorish domination of the peninsula. One by one the territories of the Moors had been conquered, until in Isabella’s time only Granada remained. A decade of sieges and assaults under the queen’s banner, interrupted only when Isabella paused to give birth to her fourth child Katherine, culminated in the fall of Granada in 1492. By their marriage the “Catholic kings,” as Ferdinand and Isabella were called, had created a unified Spain. Now they had made it an entirely Catholic kingdom as well. Two more events rounded out their efforts at purification. They introduced the Inquisition to crush heresy and they expelled the Jews.
From a triumphant heroine Isabella sank in later life to a melancholic recluse. She became inactive and moody, and her tears of religious sentiment were indistinguishable from those she wept over Ferdinand’s infidelities. Over the coarse robes of a lay sister of the Franciscan Third Order she now wore only black gowns. Of her four daughters the eldest was dead, the youngest far away in England, the third at the distant court of Portugal. The fourth daughter, Joanna, the most beautiful and spirited of them all, would soon go mad.
Mary’s paternal grandfather Henry VII never spoke of Ferdinand and Isabella without touching his hat as a sign of respect.6 After Katherine and Arthur were married he liked to say that he and his wife were now “brother and sister” to Ferdinand and Isabella, and in the presence of the Spanish ambassador he solemnly swore, his hand on his heart, that if he heard any of his subjects speak against the Catholic kings “by the faith of his heart he would esteem him no longer.”7 Henry did not expect to be taken completely seriously in his extravagant admiration of Ferdinand and Isabella, but as the parvenu king of a minor country he did feel keenly the difference in their status.
When he seized the English throne in 1485 he was in fact an outlaw under the stigma of attainder—forfeiture of titles and lands. Through his mother he had a claim to the crown, but he was without money or supporters. The attainder drove him to the continent, where at twenty-eight he mustered an invasion force and fought and defeated the king, Richard
III, at Bosworth Field. Henry’s coronation nullified the attainder, and Parliament declared all those who had opposed him at Bosworth to be traitors, yet his title remained precarious. Preserving it meant overcoming the major threat of Perkin Warbeck, who persuaded most of the rulers of Europe that he was the younger of the two murdered sons of Edward
IV, and crushing a minor threat from the Irish pretender Lambert Simnel, who called himself Edward VI. It meant surviving occult intrigues like that of the conspirators who obtained from a Roman astrologer an ointment which, spread on the walls of a passageway in the palace, was supposed to bring about the king’s murder “by those who loved him best.”8 Above all it meant building a new image of the monarchy in England.
This Henry was well equipped to do. He was a handsome man of moderate height whose expression and bearing inspired confidence. He had the irreplaceable gift of winning the hearts of his soldiers, his councilors, and the ordinary people who crowded the roadways and gathered on rooftops to see him wherever he went. The chronicler Hall imagined him on the day of the battle of Bosworth, “his aspect cheerful and couragious, his hair yellow like the burnished gold, his eyes grey shining and quick.” And when he rode through York shortly after his coronation, “a great crowd of citizens” threw gifts of comfits and wheat in his path and shouted their delight at his accession: “King Henry! King Henry! Our Lord preserve that sweet and well favored face!”9 The way to a new image, Henry saw, was to surround himself with magnificence and with the symbols of royal power. Over fifteen hundred pounds was spent on the finery worn at his coronation, and twenty-one tailors and fifteen furriers were kept at their workbenches for three weeks fashioning the liveries for his knights and henchmen. As king Henry kept a personal bodyguard of archers in attendance at all times, and introduced at his court something of the elaborate ceremonial he had observed in France. By the end of his reign he had created an appearance of order and strong personal rule, and bequeathed these, along with a full treasury, to his son. For his audacity, popularity and skillful rule he was to be known in time as “a wonder for wise men.”
Henry VII’s wife, Elizabeth of York, lived the restricted life of a medieval queen, bearing children at regular intervals and adding the prestige of her Yorkist ancestry (she was the daughter of Edward IV) to her husband’s authority. At her splendid coronation she rode in a litter of cloth of gold, in rich robes and with a jeweled circlet crowning her “fair yellow hair hanging down full behind her back.” But afterward, taking as her motto the phrase “humble and reverent,” she retreated into a twilight of confinements and royal nurseries, and saw two of her children die in infancy. In giving birth to her last child, a weak little princess who lived less than a year, the qu
een herself died.
Of the children of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York the sturdiest and most boisterous was the second boy, the one known throughout his childhood as Prince Hal. A round-faced child with a ruddy complexion, he was given an array of titles before he was a year old—Warden of the Cinque Ports, Constable of Dover Castle—and at three he was created a Knight of the Bath and elected to the Order of the Garter. By the time he was four he could sit a horse well enough to ride in state to Westminster Abbey to be created duke of York, as Perkin Warbeck, who claimed the same title, was preparing his invasion on the continent. Erasmus, who met the young prince when he was eight, declared him to possess the qualities of dignity and courtesy in kingly proportion, and thought highly of his prospects. As a younger son Henry was free from the obligations and pressures placed on the heir to the throne, but at age ten and a half his brother’s death suddenly exalted him to the status of prince of Wales. From then on he began to acquire the chivalric skills and popular reputation of a future king. At sixteen Prince Hal was taller than his father, with “limbs of gigantic size.” The Spanish ambassador declared that there was “no finer youth in all the world than the Prince of Wales,” and another observer went even further. “If the names of all the princes who have been called handsome were to be collected,” he wrote, “that of Henry would stand first.”10 The people who had loved Henry VII worshiped his son. Popular ballads about Prince Hal told how he liked to put on rough clothing and seek out the company of common folk; invariably he would be discovered, recognized, and brought in honor to the palace again surrounded by his devoted subjects. The sturdy little boy became a vigorous and beloved youth, and gave every hope of becoming an able king.
Henry’s sisters, Mary’s aunts, could not have been more unlike one another. Margaret, two years older than Henry, was a robust and sharp-witted young girl of fourteen when her father married her to James IV of Scotland. James was twenty-eight, and a man of vast and unscrupulous experience with women. (While his marriage to Margaret Tudor was being negotiated, his beautiful mistress Lady Margaret Drummond died in unexplained circumstances.) Margaret endured her marriage, but not without complaint; homesick and humiliated by her husband, she wrote piteous letters to her father in England. James IV’s death at Flodden freed her from her unhappy marriage, but a second marriage to the earl of Angus led to further conflict and eventually to civil war. Margaret had by now become a heavy and somewhat mutton-faced matron, and a considerable woman of the world in her own right. While still married to Angus she took several lovers, including the man who became her third husband, her Lord Chancellor Henry Stewart.
If Margaret was ill-favored and unfortunate in her domestic life, Henry’s younger sister Mary was probably the most envied woman of her generation. Her portraits confirm the unanimous opinion of contemporaries that she was an extraordinary beauty. Her lovely high forehead and even, delicate features were set off by a complexion fair almost to the point of pallor. Unlike Henry she had dark hair and eyes, and a docile sweetness of expression. She was strong-willed, though, and the knowledge that she was among the most desirable princesses in Europe gave her confidence. She agreed to marry the elderly French king Louis XII (after an earlier betrothal to Charles of Castile, the future Charles V, was broken off) but made the stipulation that her next husband would be of her own choosing. It was well known that her choice would fall on Charles Brandon, Henry’s intimate companion, and when soon after the wedding Louis died, it was Brandon who was sent to France to console the widow. While he was there he and Mary were secretly married. Henry was furious, but was too fond of both Mary and Brandon not to let them return to court. His revenge was to seize Mary’s plate and jewels, and to force her to repay the cost of her expensive French wedding; she was still paying off the debt at the enormous rate of a thousand pounds a year when she died.
Princess Mary’s English and Spanish ancestry was rich in enterprising, combative, courageous and independent men and women. She too would carry those traits, and though raised as an Englishwoman she was also taught to honor her Spanish blood and acknowledge it proudly. She was after all cared for by a mother whose English was never really fluent, and who continued to pray in Spanish all her life. In personality and spirit Mary would most resemble her grandmother Isabella. She would show Isabella’s tenacity, her bravery, her taste for long working hours, her tendency to melancholy. Mary shared something of Isabella’s desire to purify religious belief as well, but in circumstances so different from those of fifteenth-century Spain as to defy comparison. Had she lived amid the archaic honor, piety and religious idealism of medieval Spain Mary might have been a heroine as splendid as her grandmother; amid the crisis-ridden climate of treachery, doubt and religious revolution of Tudor England she was to find obstacles even Isabella could not have conquered.
III
Ipray daily ther paynys to asswage
And sone to sende where they faynest wolde be,
Withoute disease or adversyte.
In the winter of 1517 a great frost struck London in the middle of January. The streets were slick with ice, and the Thames froze solid. Men with business at the courts had to travel from London to Westminster on foot instead of by boat, and when the river showed no signs of a thaw the townspeople cleared a “common way,” or high road, in the ice. The weather was no better in February. Giustinian, who had to go to Greenwich to see the king, complained that going by boat was still impossible and that the “frozen and dangerous roads” made travel of any kind hazardous. The frost came in the midst of a great drought. No rain fell in southeastern England from September to the following May. The lush green pastures turned brown, small streams dried up and farmers had to drive their cattle three or four miles to water.1 And soon after the first long-awaited rains fell, the sweating sickness broke out all over London.
The sweat, now thought to have been influenza with pulmonary complications, struck its victims “with a great sweating and stinking, with redness of the face and of all the body, and a continual thirst, with a great heat and headache.” A pimply rash appeared on the head or body, sometimes accompanied by pricks of blood, and almost before treatment could be applied the sufferer was dead. It was the pitiless suddenness of death from the sweat that horrified survivors. People fell ill on the street, at their work, at mass; they rushed home to collapse and die. A doctor who studied the disease closely wrote that it killed “some in opening their windows, some in playing with children in their street doors; some in one hour, many in two, it destroyed; . . . some in sleep, some in wake, some in mirth, some in care, some fasting and some full, some busy and some idle; and in one house sometime three, sometime five, sometime more, sometime all.”2 Often there was no time to make a will, or to send for the priest, and those who died either intestate or without the last rites were denied burial in consecrated ground.
All who could fled the city at once, but most had to stay—to bury their dead, to guard their goods, to earn their livings. And before long there was nowhere to go, for the countryside was as full of infection as the city. By midsummer Londoners had become acclimatized to the fear of death—to the barred windows and doors, the self-professed healers selling cures and preventives in the streets, and the panic that went through a crowd when a passer-by, moaning and holding his head, stumbled past on his way to die. The French ambassador in London wrote home describing how he saw men and women “as thick as flies rushing from the streets or shops” when they felt ill; the sight of an infected person was enough to clear the street. Tens of thousands died in the summer of 1517; for the survivors it was a return to the nightmare mortality of the medieval plague. Many accounted this affliction worse than the plague, which at least gave warning to its victims and allowed them to linger for days or even weeks before they died. They christened the sweat “Know thy Master” and “The Lord’s Visitation,” and they made black jokes about friends who had been “merry at dinner and dead at supper.” They drank the preventive medicines sent by oth
er friends whose households had escaped infection, and murmured prayers at each sounding of the death bell.
The epidemic of 1517 was not the first of its kind. In the summer of 1485 and again in 1508 the same mysterious disease had swept through southern England, brought on, it was said, by divine displeasure at the severity of Henry VII’s government. Its reappearance in his son’s reign called forth an array of cures, preventives and restoratives; clearly this contagion that had come in with the Tudor line was here to stay. One remedy was compounded of endive, sowthistle, marygold, mercury and nightshade; another called for “three large spoonfuls of water of dragons, and half a nutshellful of unicorn’s horn.” (Swordflsh blades were reverently preserved in English treasuries as unicorns’ horns.) The latter potion was said to have brought Lord Darcy and thirty members of his household safely through one pestilent summer without illness, though they were all exposed to the sweat. A third preventive was called the “philosopher’s egg,” and was made from a crushed egg, its white blown out, mixed shell and all with saffron, mustard seed and herbs, and more unicorn’s horn. This electuary could be kept in glass boxes for twenty or thirty years, and improved with age.
The most thoroughgoing treatment for the sweat was the series of medicinal recipes ascribed to the king himself. Probably because of his phobic dread of illness and in particular of epidemic diseases he became an amateur apothecary, and liked to send remedies for all sorts of ailments to friends and relatives. The first stage in the king’s cure was a preventive made from “sawge of virtue,” herb of grace, elder and briar leaves and ginger; mixed with white wine and drunk in small quantities every day for nine days, this kept one “whole for the whole year, by the grace of God.” If the sweat should strike before the ninth day of the treatment, the second element—water of scabiosa, betony water and a quart of treacle—should be drunk. And if the disease should after all reach the critical stage marked by the appearance of the rash, the ingredients of the first medicine, made into a plaster and applied directly to the skin, would be certain to “draw out all the venom,” and restore health.
Bloody Mary Page 4