Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  Two events, one merely bizarre, the other slightly ominous, marred the final weeks of Anne’s pregnancy. The first was the remarriage, for the fourth time, of Charles Brandon. His wife had died toward the end of June, and barely six weeks after her interment the following month he had taken a new bride, a girl of fourteen. Like the Princess Mary she had a Spanish mother—she was the daughter of one of Katherine’s former waiting women—and was very pretty, but apart from the scandalous difference in the ages of the bride and groom what made the match virtually unprecedented was that the girl was betrothed to Brandon’s ten-year-old son.

  At about the same time Henry indulged his passion for one of the court ladies—her name is not recorded—and took her as his mistress.Anne’s coronation was barely over when their amours began, and in her extreme jealousy Anne “made use of certain words which he very much disliked.” Pregnant though she was, the king did not spare her in his angry reply. She had no right to complain, he snapped. She must simply “shut her eyes and endure as those who were better than herself had done”—a pointed reference to long-suffering Katherine—and would do well to bear in mind who it was that had exalted her to the status of queen. He threatened her with the painful truth that “he could at any time lower her as much as he had raised her,” and resumed his amorous pastimes with a vengeance. Much “coldness and grumbling” between the spouses followed these remarks. Both Henry and Anne were headstrong and inclined to be moody, and now that they were married Anne had surrendered some of her leverage in an argument. Henry reportedly did not speak to Anne at all for two or three days, and she seems to have entered her month-long confinement without the comfort of a reconciliation.8

  Her child was born at midafternoon on September 7. To her intense regret it was a girl, Henry swore and sulked, but did not despair. The child was healthy enough, and when the first disappointment had passed he realized there was every reason to think the next one would be a son.

  It was at first proposed that the girl be named Mary. She would be taking the former princess’ place as heir to the throne; why not let her take Mary’s name as well? No more unambiguous symbol for the supplanting of one daughter by the other could have been devised, but for some reason the idea was discarded. Mary’s downgrading in rank, though, was made almost brutally clear within moments after her half-sister’s birth. As soon as the midwives were certain the child was liveborn and breathing, a herald proclaimed to the courtiers in the adjoining chamber that the old princess of Wales was no longer to be considered such, and as if to finalize her degradation the badges bearing her device worn on the coats of her servingmen were ripped from their sleeves and replaced by the king’s arms. At the christening of the new baby, who was called Elizabeth, a herald again proclaimed her to be princess and rightful heiress of England, and Chapuys, who reported these events to Charles V, added the current rumor that Mary’s household and allowance were soon to be greatly reduced. “May God in his infinite mercy,” he added, “prevent a still worse treatment!”

  Chapuys, Mary and Katherine had all seen the blow coming. There had never been any real question that, in the ambassador’s phrase, “as soon as Anne sets her foot firmly in the stirrup” she would take from both women the last vestiges of their dignity. Anne had been threatening Katherine for years, swearing she would rather see Katherine hanged than acknowledge her rank as queen.9 As soon as she took Katherine’s place as Henry’s wife Anne lost no time in using her new-found authority to take her revenge. As queen, Anne needed her own barge. She took the one that had been Katherine’s, and ordered Katherine’s arms removed from it and “rather ignominiously torn off and cut to pieces.”10 Anne already possessed nearly everything else of value that had once belonged to her rival; all that remained was to remove her person from the vicinity of the court, reduce her establishment, and change her title.

  In July of 1533 Katherine was moved to Buckden in Huntingdonshire, to an old brick palace from Henry VII’s time that loomed forlornly over the great fens. The palace was strong and easily defended, and in a location so remote and thinly inhabited that it made an effective prison. Katherine was allowed to take with her her Spanish ladies in waiting and her faithful Spanish officers—Felipez, head of the household, the physician De la Sa and his apothecary, the chaplain Jorge de Ateca, bishop of Llandaff. But she was under strict guard, and more cut off than ever before from news of Mary and of those who were still trying to help her.

  Ever since the second marriage was made public, Chapuys had been urging Katherine to save herself by escaping, with the emperor’s help. Within England, he told her, there were many “people of quality” who were ready to come to her defense with money and the rudiments of an army. All they needed was encouragement from Charles V or possibly from the Scots, since the people were so angry at the king’s treatment of her that they would aid any army organized to restore her to the throne by force. No king, not even Richard III, was ever hated so thoroughly as Henry now was, these potential rebels insisted. Now was the time to put an end to his wicked treatment of his rightful wife and daughter.11 But though she realized the danger she was in, Katherine was determined to stay in England. Otherwise, as she told Chapuys, she would be “sinning against law and against the king.” What was more, she would be running away from what, in her mind at least, was the most significant question of conscience yet to arise.

  With the judgment of the clerical convocation that Henry’s first marriage was invalid, Katherine lost her claim to the title of queen under English law. She received word that from now on she would be known as “the old dowager princess,” the title she merited as Prince Arthur’s widow.12 She ignored the change, continuing to sign herself as “Katherine the queen” and crossing out the title “princess dowager” wherever she saw it written. After three months of resistance Henry sent orders to those he had placed in charge of Katherine to accuse her of “arrogance, selfishness, and inordinate vainglory” in refusing to abandon a title that was no longer hers, and telling her that stubbornness over this issuewould assuredly lead to civil war and disputes over the succession. “Much blood would be spilt,” they were to say, and “the kingdom totally destroyed,” and the king’s conscience would be “greatly troubled.” If Katherine acquiesced, she would be honorably treated; if she did not, she would feel his displeasure, not only against her but against her friends and companions, and her daughter.

  Without hesitation Katherine answered that, despite all pretended judgments to the contrary, she was Henry’s true wife, and would never be known by any other title than queen. There was no arrogance or vainglory in her attitude, she said, “for she would certainly take greater glory in being called the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella than the greatest queen in the world against her own conscience.”13 The evocation of Isabella was pointed and appropriate. Henry was overheard to admit more than once that he feared Katherine would imitate her famous mother and take the field against him. The image of the, heroic crusader queen, riding armed into battle, still lived to trouble the musings of the powerful king of England nearly thirty years after her death.

  Mary too was immediately affected by Anne’s official designation as queen. On one terrible day she was informed, first, that her parents’ marriage had been, once and for all, pronounced invalid and second, that Henry and Anne were now man and wife. At the same time she was told that she could no longer communicate with the princess dowager either through intermediaries or in writing. Despite the panic she must have felt at these announcements, Mary remained outwardly thoughtful and composed, and seemed “even to rejoice” at the news of Henry’s marriage. She sat down right away and wrote the king a letter which, when he read it later, made him “marvellously content and pleased, praising above all things the wisdom and prudence of the princess.”14

  Henry’s pleasure in Mary was always a source of extreme annoyance to Anne, as was the obvious affection the people had for her. When Mary traveled from one residence to another shortly after Anne’s co
ronation the villagers came to see her and to cheer her as they did Katherine. “As much rejoicing went on as if God Almighty had come down from heaven,” Anne complained, and she planned to punish both the princess and the people who stood behind her.15 Anne boasted that she intended to make Mary wait on her as a maid of honor in her royal household, and that, once she was installed in this position, Anne might perhaps “give her too much dinner on some occasion”—that is, poison her—or “marry her to some varlet.”16

  No threat was as dangerous, though, as the tacit threat of her unborn child. Shortly before Elizabeth’s birth Katherine wrote Mary a letter which shows clearly how fateful she saw Mary’s situation to be and how she advised her to face it. “Daughter,” she wrote, “I heard such tidingsthis day that I do perceive (if it be true) the time is very near when Almighty God will provide for you.” The “tidings” concerned Anne’s menacing remarks, coupled with the nearness of her expected delivery. Anne’s child would make Mary superfluous, and therefore expendable; to protect the succession rights of his new heir Henry might yield to Anne’s pressure and order the princess killed.

  Knowing this might be the last letter Mary received from her, Kath-erine poured into it all the love and encouragement she could put into words. Her overriding message was that of the Christian martyrs she had come to resemble: the message of cheerfulness and rejoicing in the face of danger. “I would God, good daughter, that you did know with how good a heart I write this letter unto you. I never did write one with a better.” She told Mary what Vives had said to her long before, that tragedy and persecution are signs of divine favor and that “we never come to the kingdom of heaven but by troubles.” Whatever happens is God’s will, no matter how men and women deceive themselves that it is their own, she wrote, and this too should be cause for rejoicing, even if his will means suffering and death. “Agree to his pleasure with a merry heart,” Kather-ine told Mary, secure in the “sure armor” of his commandments and with faith that “he will not suffer you to perish if you beware to offend him.” What she meant was not that God would preserve Mary’s life but that he would spare her the eternal death of hell; she might be killed, but she would know everlasting life beyond the grave. The final words of the letter were a resigned yet scornful acknowledgment that, for both mother and daughter, the end seemed near. “And now you shall begin, and by likelihood I shall follow. I set not a rush by it, for when they have done the utmost they can, then I am sure of amendment.”17

  Katherine’s morbid cheerfulness was echoed in the little book she sent to Mary along with her letter. It was an edition of the letters of St. Jerome to Paula and Eustochium, a classic of Christian asceticism for women. In many ways these letters rounded out the education Mary had been receiving since she was a young girl. The treatises Vives wrote for her in childhood were drawn largely from these and other letters of St. Jerome outlining an ideal of female behavior that was not unlike the rule of a professed nun. Now, as Katherine tried to prepare Mary for the greatest danger she ever had to face, she could think of no better examples for her to follow than those of the sheltered, prudish women Jerome described, who shunned all men, feared every sensual impulse they felt, and prayed that they might be rid of their youth and beauty so that they could devote themselves fully to God. Jerome’s letters were exhortations to imitate the stolid asceticism of young Roman women who shrouded themselves in garments that “reminded them of the tomb” and wore out their lives in ascetic disciplines.

  One story must have made a strong impression on seventeen-year-old Mary. It described the holy life of Blesilla, a Roman girl of about Mary’s age who when her husband died so starved and exhausted herself with fasting and prayers that within a few months she had followed him to the grave. Jerome’s theme was the never ending battle of spirit against flesh, Christian self-discipline against the overripe sensuality of the Roman world. Mary’s battle was to be, like Katherine’s, a conflict of mental endurance, pitting the strength of her individual conscience against the shame of disobedience and the fear of death. But Jerome’s rousing persuasion to fight the good fight was filled with biblical exhortations well suited to inspire Mary nonetheless. “Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night nor for the arrow that flieth by day; nor for the trouble which haunteth thee in darkness; nor for the demon and his attacks at noonday. A thousand shall fall at thy side and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.”18 And in her isolation Mary must have found comfort in Elisha’s words: “Fear not, for they that be with us are more than they that be with them.”19

  The popular view of Mary’s circumstances was far different from Katherine’s. To the country people who knew of her chiefly through songs and the stories of travelers, Mary’s life was that of a fairytale heroine, full of romance and peril yet veiled in unreality. Thus the villagers of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire were quite prepared to believe the story of an eighteen-year-old girl who impersonated the princess in the northern counties toward the end of 1533. The girl, Mary Baynton, called herself Lady Mary and told how she had been “put forth into the broad world to shift for her living” by her father, and went from house to house asking alms. To those who took pity on her and welcomed her as if she really were the princess she told a curious story. As a little girl, she said, she had been with her aunt Mary while the latter was in her bath, reading. Looking up from her book her aunt had said to her, “Niece Mary, I am right sorry for you, for I see here that your fortune is very hard; you must go a-begging once in your life, either in your youth or in your age.” “And therefore,” Mary Baynton told her fascinated listeners, “I take it upon me now, in my youth.” And telling them she intended to take ship to join the emperor over the sea, she took the coins they offered and went on to the next town.

  As the real Mary Tudor read and reread her mother’s letter and the exhortations of Jerome in her room at Beaulieu, many a Lincolnshire housewife took comfort in the misguided thought that she had helped to speed the princess to safety in Flanders.

  XI

  Patience, though I have not

  The thing that I require,

  I must of force, god wot,

  Forbere my moost desire;

  For no ways can 1 finde

  To saile against the wynde.

  In April of 1534 a celebrated visionary was hanged at Tyburn. She was Elizabeth Barton, called “the holy maid of Kent,” and she had been convicted of a peculiar sort of treason. She had dared to announce to the world that God found King Henry’s divorce abhorrent, and she had told the king so to his face. Her prophecies threatened Henry’s future and the succession at a time when both were in peril. So along with those who encouraged and, in the end, probably coached her in her revelations, the holy maid of Kent was arrested, tried and eventually hanged.

  The career of Elizabeth Barton is a fascinating enigma. A woman of undoubted spiritual gifts, she came to be surrounded by opportunists who made her a charlatan. Yet she inspired belief and fear in many highly educated, ordinarily skeptical people. And in some occult way she spoke for the thousands of Henry’s subjects who hated what he was doing but had no persuasive means of telling him so. She was both a throwback to an older time and a harbinger of a new era when matters of revelation and faith would once again be central to English life.

  The fame of the holy maid began when, at age sixteen or seventeen, she was struck by a severe illness. As she lay in a semi-conscious state she fell into a trance and saw visions of heaven, hell and purgatory, and was able to recognize the departed souls she glimpsed there. In one of these visions she was told to visit a certain shrine of the virgin, and when she was taken there and laid before the virgin’s statue, “her face was wonderfully disfigured, her tongue hanging out, and her eyes being in a manner plucked out, and laid upon her cheeks, and so greatly disordered.” Witnesses told later how a strange voice was heard coming from her belly, sounding as if it came from within a barrel, speaking “sweetly of heaven and terribly of hell” for som
e three hours. These events attracted a large crowd, and when after a still longer time the girl awoke with no trace of her former illness the onlookers declared they had witnessed a miracle. The clergy too pronounced Elizabeth Barton’s seizure and recovery miraculous, and the story made the rounds of the Kentish countryside both by word of mouth and in the form of a printed book. Further revelations told the holy maid to enter a convent, and shortly after her cure she became a nun at St. Sepulchre’s, Canterbury.

  Retirement to convent life only increased her fame, and before long she was being petitioned by letter and in person to advise and help all sorts of people. Monks asked her for guidance in their spiritual lives, and for her prayers. Katherine and Mary’s supporter Gertrude Blount, marchioness of Exeter, had the “nun of Kent” brought to her to speak of the fate of her unborn child. Her other children had not survived, the marchioness told the nun; she hoped desperately that the one she now carried would live, and asked the holy girl’s intercession. Clerics of all ranks came to St. Sepulchre’s for advice, impressed by the illiterate nun’s ability to speak “divine words” she could only have received through revelations.

  For eight years Elizabeth Barton enjoyed growing repute as a revered local oracle. She acquired a “spiritual father,” a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury named Edward Bocking, who transcribed the visions she received and in time compiled them into a large book. St. Sepulchre’s became renowned through her fame, and she was called upon to give opinions and advice about everything from the spread of the Lutheran heresy to the likelihood of war.