Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  Henry’s medicines did not succeed in keeping his household free of infection. His Latin secretary Ammonius died the day before he was to leave for a sweat-free country house. Wolsey barely escaped death shortly afterward, and a number of his servants died. The bishop of Winchester, the ambassador Giustinian and his son were all stricken, and when the pages who slept in Henry’s bedchamber began to die off one by one the king panicked and sent the entire court away. With Katherine and the infant Mary, three of his trusted gentlemen and his favorite organist Dionysius Memo, he traveled to “a remote and unusual habitation” to wait out the epidemic. But even there the infection haunted him, and rumors of deaths from the sweat drove him from one country place to another, keeping just ahead of its ravages. Meanwhile his courtiers too moved from one palace to another in hopes of escaping danger, but in the spring of 1518, when the sweat reappeared more strongly than ever and the measles and smallpox that now accompanied the disease increased its morbidity, the king’s pages again began to die. Now every man or woman who had lost a relative or servant to the disease was ordered not to leave the house without carrying the white rod that symbolized infection, and had to hang wisps of straw from the doorway to warn visitors and others to stay away.

  These rudimentary efforts at quarantine were intended to contain infection, but the more grave agencies of contamination—germ-infected food, water and living conditions—were left alone. London in the early sixteenth century was a medium-sized city rapidly growing into an overcrowded, slum-ridden metropolis. Every decade saw thousands of peasants and villagers from the economically troubled countryside move to the capital, settling into the ramshackle suburbs and putting added demands on the inadequate water supply. Since medieval times water had been available to Londoners in stone cisterns, inspected yearly by the Lord Mayor with much ceremony, but as the city grew those who lived at the outskirts had to buy their water from the growing group of professional water carriers who sold it by the three-gallon tankard. There was barely enough of it for drinking, cooking and perhaps rinsing out the chamber pots; cleaning and bathing were a luxury even in the great houses of the rich. There were fleas and lice everywhere—in the woodwork, the floors, the beds and wardrobes. Bugs of many kinds lived in the food stores and in woolen clothing; spiders invaded the city every spring, and flies every summer. There were public bathhouses (which were also brothels), and fastidious people bathed now and then in wooden tubs in front of the fire. But clothing was really clean only when it was new, for when they came to London country people continued to do their laundry as they always had, with cow dung, hemlock, nettles, and remnants of soap, and clothes may well have smelled worse clean than dirty. Clothing was always in short supply among the poor, and beggars were said to welcome the sweating sickness if only because they inherited the coats and shoes of the dead.

  If the houses of Tudor London were unhygienic its streets were corridors of filth. Unpaved, rutted, alternately muddy and dusty, they were repositories of every kind of leavings, waste and ordure. Household garbage and the outscourings of cooking pots and dye tubs mingled with the droppings of horses, dogs and fowl. Chamber pots from every house facing the street were emptied out of front doors or upper windows into that street every morning. As the mounds of refuse grew they were raked into heaps at street corners and infrequently dumped into the river or along the highways leading out of the city, but not before they had become unimaginably foul-smelling. The heady and lingering perfumes of the age were in part designed to counteract the stench of the streets, putting a sweet-smelling barrier between the wearer and his or her surroundings. The fastidious Wolsey never left the palace without holding a scented pomander to his nose.

  To be sure, there were critics of these conditions who argued that dirt must augment disease. The king was among them, but though he tried to command clean surroundings for himself and especially for his daughter, he did nothing to improve the plight of his subjects. The best-known opponent of unhygienic English customs was the Dutchman and famed humanist Erasmus. In letters to friends he gave careful descriptions of how English houses were built to maximize drafts yet minimize exposure to fresh air and sunlight. The streets, he declared, should be cleaned of mud and urine, and, above all, the dirty habit of spreading rushes over the clay floors of houses to catch food scraps, spilled ale and bones should be abandoned. The rushes were changed when their smell became intolerably sour, but a bottom layer, stuck fast to the floor by years of accumulated spit, vomit and “the leakage of dogs,” remained,according to Erasmus, for decades. He objected to other practices on the grounds that they spread disease: overcrowding in badly ventilated inns, infrequently changed bed linen, communal drinking cups and the propensity of the English to kiss one another when they met. Erasmus’ views met with some sympathy, but some ridicule as well. He went too far, some thought, in claiming that even the hallowed religious customs of confession, the communal baptismal font and pilgrimages to distant shrines spread infection! And besides, his hypochondria was proverbial; he corresponded with numerous doctors on the subject of his own health problems, and sent one of them daily reports on the condition of his urine.3

  Most people connected disease not with unsanitary living conditions but with supernatural forces. For every doctor who treated his patients afflicted with the sweat by bleeding their veins or sealing them (usually with fatal results) in a hot room wrapped in blankets, there were a dozen practitioners of superstitious and occult healing. An act of Parliament complained of a “great multitude of ignorant persons,” including “smiths, weavers and women,” who were undertaking to perform amazing cures involving sorceries and witchcraft and medicines of questionable value, “to the high displeasure of God.” These self-educated healers used the prayers and holy formulas of the church as incantations, invoking the cross of Christ, his “title of triumph” Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews, the Christian mystical sign of the Greek letter Tau, and even estimates of the exact “measures,” or heights, of Mary and Jesus. One spiritual preventive called for the Pater Noster and Ave Maria to be recited by the practitioner under the patient’s right ear, then his left, then under both armpits, at the back of both thighs, and finally over the heart. Biblical or cabalistic words spelled backward were believed to bring about cures by magic, especially when written in certain ways. “Write these words on a laurel leaf,” a charm to break fever begins. “Ysmael, Ysmael, Ysmael, I adjure you by the Angels that you cure this man.” The sufferer’s name was added and the leaf placed under his head. When accompanied by a diet of lettuce and seeds ground in ale, any fever, even the sudden and fiery fever of The Lord’s Visitation, would cool.

  Behind these occult treatments lay a fundamentally providential view not only of disease but of all human affairs. The men and women of the Tudor age accepted the ravages of the sweating sickness as they did the destruction of floods or the mass deaths of cattle and sheep—as part of a vast hidden design. The author of this design was God, but it was only in the broadest sense religious: it was more a matter of faith in the power of order over chaos. No one welcomed the sweating sickness, yet everyone took a morbid comfort in the belief that it had been sent by a higher power for a distinct purpose.

  This belief was strained, though, by the fact that the sweat struck hardest those who should have been least vulnerable to it. The “youngest and likeliest” men and women were carried off, and the “men of middle age and sanguine complexion.” The poorest and weakest in the population were, paradoxically, those most likely to survive. Children, women of childbearing age, exceedingly thin men and laborers of all kinds were either spared or, if they caught the disease, survived its crisis phase and eventually recovered. Men of substance in their middle years died in great numbers.

  That the best fed, wealthiest and most privileged members of society should be most victimized by the epidemic offended the prevailing faith in the order of things. It raised the unnerving possibility that order had only a tenuous advantage over anarchy,
and that the future might hold the unexpected along with the predictable. It touched the most deep-seated phobia of the age—the fear that the entire social order might collapse. This fear gnawed at the English throughout the second season of the sweating sickness, until in the winter of 1518 the sweat receded with the cold weather and, to their unbounded relief, did not return in the spring.

  It was in this time of panic and sudden changes of residence that the Princess Mary spent the early months of her life. She was at first put into the care of a wet-nurse—Katherine Pole, daughter-in-law of the countess of Salisbury. Later Lady Margaret Bryan replaced Katherine Pole with the title “lady mistress.” Lady Bryan was responsible for the small group of servants that made up Mary’s immediate household: her four rockers, Margery Parker, Anne Bright, Ellen Hutton and Margery Cousine, her launderer Avys Woode, and her chaplain and clerk of the closet, Sir Henry Rowte.4 The princess had a state household as well, headed by the countess of Salisbury and including a chamberlain, treasurer and gentlewoman of the bedchamber. The attendants in this state household all wore liveries in Mary’s colors of blue and green. When the sickness threatened the palace, however, the formalities of the official household were forgotten and the king simply packed up his family and a few intimates and moved as far from the infection as he could get. His London residences—the apartments in the Tower, the spacious Baynard’s Castle in Thames Street—were out of the question. His favorite residence, the red brick palace by the Thames at Greenwich with its sprawling lawns and flowering gardens, was too near the heart of the city for safety during the epidemic. The turreted royal apartments at Richmond in Surrey offered refuge for a time, but before long word would reach Henry that a nearby village had been wiped out by the sweat and in a matter of hours he would be on his way again. The magnificent medieval castle at Windsor he disliked intensely, finding it claustrophobic and austere. What Henry liked were parks and gardens, the open country and, if possible, the river at his doorstep. At Greenwich he could walk down to the dock and inspect his ships and talk with the gunners and sailors. At Windsor he was surrounded by paved courtyards and, in the chapel of the Garter, the tombs and monuments of the Garter knights and military relics of the Plantagenet kings. Farther into the countryside the royal residences were small and in some cases dilapidated. Eltham in Kent could accommodate a severely reduced household, but the manor of Woodstock in Oxfordshire, built to house the king while he hunted in the summer and dating back to Norman times, was both cramped and shabby, and was not fit to be occupied for long.

  By the fall of 1518, when Mary was two and a half years old, the court had begun to settle back to its accustomed routine. There were still periodic “removals” from one palace to another, of course. Royalty lived semi-nomadic lives, and rarely spent more than a few weeks in any one palace. But in normal times changes of residence were planned, and followed an established order, and it was to this order that Henry’s court now returned.

  For Mary the readjustment marked her first opportunity to play an important role in affairs of state. Rivalry between France and England was as strong as ever, and Henry now saw a way to put his daughter to use as a diplomatic tool. The new French king, Francis I, was anxious to prove his strength and that of France, and only a war or a flattering gesture of brotherliness from Henry would satisfy him. Francis had a son, Henry a daughter. A marriage alliance between them was the obvious alternative to war.

  In September of 1518 the negotiations were concluded. A treaty of universal peace was to bind England and France, sealed by the proxy marriage of the dauphin and the English princess which would be consummated when the dauphin turned fourteen. Among the provisions relating to her dowry rights was the highly significant stipulation that if Henry died without a male heir, Mary would succeed him—the earliest statement of her right to the throne.5 To the negotiators of the treaty the point was a minor one. There was still a good deal of hope that Henry would have a son—Katherine was pregnant again, and near her term—and in any case no woman had ever been crowned queen of England in her own right. But as evidence of a real if remote possibility the statement was revealing, and prophetic.

  In mid-September ambassadors from the French court arrived in England to sign the treaty and solemnize the marriage. The French made an impressive showing as they rode through London in their silk doublets, surrounded by the Scotsmen of the French king’s guard and a welcoming escort of English nobles and guardsmen, fourteen hundred horsemen in all. At each of the ceremonies and banquets in the following days the French appeared in fresh robes of slashed silk, to the astonishment of the English courtiers. The seemingly inexhaustible wardrobes of the ambassadors were matched by their purses. They gambled heavily, and no state banquet was complete without the card games and dicing the king loved. At a lavish feast given by Wolsey—now a cardinal of the church and papal legate, and rapidly becoming the most powerful man in England next to the king himself—to celebrate the treaty of universal peace, golden bowls of ducats and dice were set out after dinner for the guests to play at mumchance. After midnight, when all the others had left, Henry “remained to play high with some Frenchmen.”

  The treaty arrangements were sworn to by both parties before the high altar of St. Paul’s, and then came the wedding ceremony. At eight o’clock in the morning of October 5 the betrothal parties and their retinues assembled in a hall at Greenwich. Henry stood in front of his throne, with Katherine, his sister Mary, Wolsey and another papal legate, Cardinal Campeggio, at his side. During the bishop of Durham’s long oration in praise of the marriage—at least the third such declamation to which the French visitors had been subjected since their arrival—Mary’s nurse stood at Katherine’s side holding the princess in her arms. Mary was dressed in cloth of gold, wearing over her golden curls a black velvet cap that was studded with jewels. She was small for her age, and delicate, with her father’s fair skin and light eyes. Her coloring and even features made her a very pretty child, and she remained smiling and poised throughout the long ceremony, true to Henry’s proud boast that “his daughter never cried.” When the bishop had finished the ambassadors asked for Henry and Katherine to consent to the marriage, the French admiral Bonnivet consenting on behalf of the dauphin, and Wolsey slid a tiny ring onto Mary’s fourth finger. In it was a very large diamond—his wedding gift to the princess. The admiral, acting for the absent bridegroom, passed it over her second joint in a final solemnity, and then the entire company adjourned to the gorgeously decorated chapel for a celebratory mass. Yet another banquet closed out the festivities, and the dancing that followed it lasted until three in the morning, long after the bride had been put to bed.6

  The visit of the French ambassadors to England was only half of the process of peacemaking and matchmaking; to complete it English ambassadors had to travel to Paris to sign the treaty and stand in place of the princess at a repeat of the proxy wedding. Early in December the English party arrived in Paris, and a few days later the king gave them a public audience. He received them in a large hall whose high ceiling was decorated with the lilies of France. Tapestries covered the walls. Half the room was taken up by an elevated stage several feet higher than the floor. A second platform rising from this stage, at the extreme end of the room, held the throne—a chair covered with cloth of gold under a trailing canopy of gold brocade. King Francis was seated on his throne, wearing a sumptuous silver robe embroidered in flowers and lined entirely in Spanish heron feathers. His feet rested on a cushion of cloth of gold; the dais was carpeted in violet-colored velvet ornamented in lilies. On the stage below the king stood several ranks of great nobles and churchmen, the papal nuncio, and the foreign ambassadors resident at the French court. Far to the king’s left on a lower platform, hidden from the company in the hall by screens, were Queen Claude and the king’s mother, Louise of Savoy, and other gentlewomen.

  The English ambassadors, who had put on their richest doublets, gold chains and jeweled girdles for this reception, were pr
eceded into the audience hall by a guard of two hundred gentlemen carrying battle axes, who brought them up the steps of the raised stage to stand below the king. Francis, who up to this point had maintained his kingly pose un-moving, responded to their deep bows with the warmest courtesy, getting up from his throne and descending to greet them each by name. Their credentials were presented and accepted, speeches of welcome and cordiality were exchanged, and finally Francis came down from his throne once more to embrace each of the English representatives in turn, exactly as Henry had embraced the French ambassadors at their audience two months earlier.

  A few days after this formal reception the two parties swore to uphold the treaty at a high mass in Notre Dame, and afterward Francis and Claude on behalf of their son espoused the Princess Mary, represented by the earl of Worcester. Throughout these proceedings Francis did his utmost to appear magnificent yet approachable—to fulfill the exalted image of sovereignty while being affable and companionable to his English guests. He took them bear hunting and stag hunting; he jousted with them and for them, and he provided food and entertainment on a scale to match and, he hoped, to surpass the ostentatious banquets at Henry’s court. In the open courtyard within the Bastille a wooden floor was built, with a huge space for dining tables and three galleries for spectators around the sides. The entire area was covered with a ceiling of blue canvas to form a pavilion, and hangings in the king’s colors of white and tawny formed the walls. Here Francis gave a splendid feast, sitting under his golden canopy and surrounded by his relatives and courtiers in order of pre-eminence. The English sent detailed accounts of the evening to Henry, describing the wonderful effect of the huge chandeliers, each blazing with sixteen torches, throwing their light across the starry blue ceiling painted in gold with the signs of the zodiac and the planets. The food was served on plates of solid gold and silver, and some of the courses “emitted fire and flames,” to the wonder of the diners. Each dish was presented with a degree of pomp usually reserved for visiting dignitaries. A flourish of trumpets announced its approach, with guardsmen and six attendants following the trumpeters. Five heralds then proclaimed the arrival of the eight seneschals of the king’s household, who ushered in the Lord Steward; his staff of twenty-four pages of honor and two hundred guardsmen carried in the meat or fish or game.