Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  The easiest part of the plan, Chapuys thought, was the Channel crossing. There were Spanish and Flemish merchant ships in the Thames at all times, and imperial warships hovered just off the coast. Even as he wrote a great galleon lay only a short distance downriver, and he knew of “several Spanish ships” which were in a position to take Mary aboard at a moment’s notice.4 He did not worry about those who might try to follow Mary and her abductors. Once she was past the household guard she would encounter only friendly faces between Eltham and the coast. The country people were all on her side, and even those sent in pursuit would, he felt certain, “shut their eyes and bless her saviors,” and would “make no hurry” to catch up with her.5 Apart from her recurrent illnesses Mary herself presented no problem; her passionate desire to escape, combined with her proven “great prudence and courage” convinced Chapuys she would play her part well. “It is very hazardous,” he concluded about the escape plan, “but it would be a great triumph and very meritorious.”6

  The most significant thing about Mary’s desire for flight was that in making up her mind to leave she was for the first time departing from Katherine’s model. Katherine had sworn never to tarnish her honor as queen, never to disobey her husband, and never to leave England. Until this year of 1535 Mary had repeatedly stated her intention to follow Katherine’s example in every way, and the few letters she received from her mother urged her to continue in that resolve. But now, without telling Katherine, she decided to save herself by running away. (That Katherine knew nothing of the plan seems beyond doubt. In a letter to Henry written just at this time Katherine offered to pledge her own life as a guarantee against Mary’s flight if the king would allow their daughter to come to Kimbolton.)

  It would be easy to say that Mary’s decision was nothing more than a simple survival reflex—an overwhelming urge to get away once and for all from an intolerable situation. She was, after all, a semi-prisoner in the hands of pitiless and hostile strangers; her health was breaking under the continual strain and she was in dread of a relapse; she had good reason to believe Anne was trying to poison her; and her father, the murderer of innocent monks, had recently announced that she was his worst enemy. Under such pressures as these anyone might break and run.

  But Mary’s new-found determination did not come from blind panic. It was a well-considered, deliberate choice. And it was a choice which marked a break with many of the strongest influences in her upbringing. It went against her education, which taught her to be helpless, to distrust her judgment, to fear to leave home and above all to obey her father. It went against the object lessons of prayer, patience and martyrdom offered by the saints of the church. It departed from her mother’s lifelong example of heroic masochism. And it was of course a decision which, if carried out, would have represented an act of political defiance of the greatest consequence.

  Mary would never abandon the premises impressed on her in childhood and continually reinforced by her environment. But from now on there would be another force at work, a force impelling her to act decisively and with courage in the face of crises, to arrive at her own opinions, and to be true to a sense of her own destiny that was slowly taking shape in her mind.

  As it turned out, there was to be no escape for the time being. Much as Mary tried to bring it about, the indispensable elements in the scheme—the ships, sailors and armed men on horseback—were beyond her control. And Chapuys, who probably had the means to engineer the adventure, was really not the best man for the job. He was far more at home inthe private recesses of the king’s Council chamber than galloping along the highroads of Kent, and in any case the emperor had not yet ordered him to act.

  Meanwhile the climate of tension increased. Cromwell was openly lamenting the fact that by their very existence Katherine and Mary were preventing good relations between England and the empire. He reminded the emperor’s ambassador that, after all, the two women were only mortal. Katherine was ill and aging, and would probably not live long; if Mary were to die her death would do far less harm than good, since the most immediate result would be a treaty of mutual good will between Henry and Charles.7 It was not hard for Chapuys to see what Cromwell was hinting at, and he tried his best to impress on the chief minister that if Mary were harmed the emperor would be less rather than more disposed to come to an accommodation with her father. But by summer Cromwell’s hints had turned to curses. He now blamed Katherine and Mary for all the king’s troubles in recent years. If only God had “taken them to himself” no one would have questioned Henry’s marriage to Anne or the right of their daughter to succeed him. The entire dispute would have long since been forgotten, and the possibility of internal revolt and war with the emperor would never have arisen.8

  Chapuys hoped that Cromwell’s casuistry was a substitute for more violent assaults on Katherine and Mary, though he could not be sure. He was fairly confident that Cromwell felt no personal malice toward them; they were merely added complications in the difficult diplomatic balance sheet he was trying to maintain. To have them permanently out of the way would have made his job easier, and in his professional capacity Cromwell could not afford to let pity interfere with statesmanship. But if Cromwell would have found the deaths of Katherine and Mary a diplomatic convenience, Anne saw it as a dynastic necessity. When Henry ordered Fisher and More to the scaffold she talked loudly of the injustice of allowing the two royal women to live, calling them worse rebels and traitors than the others. She accused Mary in particular of “waging war” against the king and, in an odd reversal of the truth, of conspiring Anne’s death. “She will be the cause of my death unless I get rid of her first,” Anne insisted. “But I will so manage that if I die before her, she shall not laugh at me.”9 In her mind Anne magnified the conflict over the succession to a final apocalyptic struggle from which only one of them would emerge alive. It was said that to quiet Anne down Henry had promised her that as long as he lived he would not allow Mary to take a husband. Without a husband to help raise a revolt she was less dangerous to Elizabeth and to the son Anne was longing for.

  Anne’s most ingenious stratagem against Katherine and Mary turnedon this most sensitive of all issues: the need for a male heir. Ever since the affair of the nun of Kent the air had been full of revelations and occult messages, and the nun’s accusation that Henry’s second marriage was cursed still rang in Henry’s ears. Now Anne claimed to have discovered a visionary whose messages supported her interests. She paid a man to swear that he had received a revelation about the royal succession. He was clearly shown in a dream, the man said, that Anne would be unable to conceive again as long as Katherine and Mary were still alive. The suborned prophet was sent to Cromwell first and then to the king, and though there is no evidence that Henry took the prophecy to heart it was the sort of thing that bothered him and added to his irritation.10

  He was uneasy throughout 1535 about Mary’s security. He knew perfectly well that an attempt might be made to kidnap her, whether with her consent or against her will. He seems to have believed that her kidnappers would most likely be French and not Spanish or Flemish, however. He was counting on Charles’ studied policy of belligerent noninterference to continue for the time being, but the French might see in Mary a tempting hostage. Everywhere but in England Mary was considered heir to the English throne, and possession of her person might well provide the diplomatic leverage France needed to restore her tarnished influence in Italy and elsewhere. Mary was no longer a minor, and could be married to a prince of the royal house; equipped with an invading army, her husband could then undertake the conquest of England in his wife’s name, confident of the support of the rebellious lords and disaffected courtiers who had been hoping for just such an eventuality for several years.

  In an effort to prevent this alarming possibility Henry saw to it that an armed watch was kept around every house where Mary stayed, and ordered that no one but trusted household servants and known visitors like Chapuys’ men were to be allowed anywhere near
her. Every seaport within a day’s ride of her residence had its armed guardsmen, alerted to look out for a girl taking ship with an escort of foreigners. When Chapuys told Cromwell he might have to go to Flanders on personal business the secretary turned pale, thinking the ambassador’s business might concern the abduction of the king’s bastard.11

  There must have been some reason for optimism now, for despite Henry’s precautions Mary was writing to her cousin Mary, regent of the Netherlands, that she had recently heard “an efficient remedy would be found for these troubles.” The reference was very vague, but the letter had an unmistakably hopeful tone in spite of its ominous close. Above her name Mary signed “written in haste and fear, the 12th of August.”12 The regent must have sent some good news in her own earlier letter, andMary knew from the ambassador that continuous prayers were being said in all the churches of Spain for the safety and health of herself and her mother.13

  In the fall, though, Mary’s hopes fell as her cycle of illness began again. The doctors were called in September to treat a “rheum” in her head, and recommended that she be moved at once to “some place where she may get recreation and pleasure.” Because of her fear of poison she now “detested all sorts of medicine,” and became a difficult patient,14 and when she fell sick again the following month Lady Shelton kept it a secret even from the physicians for twelve awful days,15 probably hoping that this time Mary would not have the resiliency to survive.

  When Mary was well enough to write again her letter to Chapuys had none of the optimism she had shown during the summer. She wanted now to write to the emperor directly, but didn’t dare to, “fearing,” as she told Chapuys, “lest those who are constantly watching me should get hold of the letter.” Instead she wrote to the ambassador, urging him this time to send a personal envoy to Brussels to lay her case before Charles. Perhaps Chapuys’ dispatches were too dispassionate; what she and her mother needed was an eloquent advocate whose description of their plight would soften the emperor’s heart. Surely, she wrote, he could be made to see that saving his wretched kinswomen would be a work “highly acceptable in the eyes of God,” and no less glorious than his current conquest of Tunis. Even the conquest of all of Africa could bring him no greater honor, she added grandiloquently.16

  Mary could not have known as she wrote this that within weeks her plea for imperial aid would be taken seriously. What in fact roused the emperor to action at last was not his cousin’s pitiful message but distressing news from London about the king’s altered state of mind. The news came via an interesting source. Gertrude Blount, marchioness of Exeter and longtime ally of Katherine and her daughter, heard through highly-placed courtiers that early in November Henry had gathered his most valued advisers together and told them bluntly that Katherine and Mary had to be dispatched. He would no longer endure the “trouble, fear and suspense” they caused him, he said, and he wanted them judged once and for all at the next session of Parliament. He was not only firm but angry, the marchioness wrote to Chapuys, and he “swore most obstinately that he would wait no longer.” From his tone and manner the councilors he spoke to understood the seriousness of his purpose, and they linked his meaning to a remark he had made earlier in the month about Mary. Then, in response to some reference to her lack of company, the king snapped that soon he would see to it “that she would not want any company, and that she would be an example to show that no one ought to disobey the laws.” The time had come, he raged, for him to fulfill whathad been foretold of him “that at the beginning of his reign he would be gentle as a lamb, and at the end worse than a lion.”

  When these dark fulminations continued for three weeks the marchioness went to Chapuys in person to underscore the urgency of her earlier messages. She came in disguise, he told the emperor, and would without question have been in danger of her life had she been discovered at his residence. She brought fresh evidence of Henry’s determination to carry out his purpose. Talking openly about how he meant to be rid of his stubborn ex-wife and daughter, the king noticed that some of those who heard him were so upset they started to cry. This made him even angrier. “Tears and wry faces would not move him,” he had said loudly, “because even if he lost his crown he would not change his intention.”17

  These were things “too monstrous to be believed,” Chapuys told the emperor after seeing the marchioness, yet he was certain his informant was trustworthy and that this time the king was in earnest. Henry had clearly become so exasperated by the stumbling block Katherine and Mary represented that he was prepared to go to war over the issue of their execution. He had shown the same impatient severity before the killings in the spring and summer, and those who cared most about Katherine and Mary’s safety had been saying for months that as a result of those executions the king had become too calloused and “inured to cruelty” to shrink from ordering his former wife and daughter to their deaths. Besides, another matter nagged at him. Anne was pregnant, and if her child proved to be a boy his way would be made much smoother by the elimination of his potential rival and her obstinate mother. And it is just possible that, in the back of his mind, Henry recalled the dire prophecy of Anne’s visionary and vowed he would take no chances with the survival of this child.

  Whatever his motives, Henry succeeded in convincing his advisers, Chapuys, and finally the emperor himself that if Katherine and Mary were to be rescued it would have to be done immediately. In December the emperor took the first step toward giving the rebel English lords the support they had been seeking, and then, believing that the success of the venture would hinge on Mary’s role, he laid plans for her abduction. Charles seems to have had a far different plan in mind than simply freeing Mary from captivity and probable attainder. As he saw it, the coming revolt would be carried out in her name. She would be more than an aggrieved victim of Henry’s reckless policies; she would be a pretender to his throne. Once the rebels had seized power Mary would rule, her mother at her side, along with a carefully chosen husband and under the constant supervision and advice of her imperial cousin. England would be brought securely within the orbit of Hapsburg influence, and Henry’s recent break with the pope and alterations in religion would be reversed.

  With this bold plan in mind the emperor told the count de Roeulx, his captain general in the Netherlands, to send the best man he could find to England to make arrangements for bringing Mary to a temporary refuge in Flanders. She would wait there, in constant contact with Charles, while the northern lords were armed and prepared. As soon as the fighting began she would make ready to return to claim the throne. If she expressed any doubts about the justice of the undertaking she would be reassured by the recent publication of a papal sentence of excommunication against Henry, depriving him of his kingdom and declaring him to be outside the community of Christian souls. To take an excommu-nicant’s throne was a worthy act in the eyes of the church, and if Mary did not seize it some foreign prince undoubtedly would.

  In the first days of the new year 1536, the imperial agent arrived in England. He learned all he could from Chapuys, and then drew up his plans. Mary would be taken to Flanders in February; the rebellion would take place in March or April. By the first of May England would be in new hands.

  Though she knew nothing of the impending revolt Katherine too felt the urgency of the political climate in late 1535. She wrote to the pope, entreating him to remember Henry and Mary, and describing England as a land of “ruined souls and martyred saints.” If only the pope would intervene and protect the wayward people, who were straying “like sheep without a shepherd,” she wrote, then the godless tyranny might be brought to an end. “We await a remedy from God and from Your Holiness,” Katherine concluded. “It must come speedily or the time will be past!”

  Part of her continued to struggle against the enduring injustice of which she was a victim, but she was gradually giving in to the mental burdens that oppressed her. Living in a single small room with a dreary view of the ruined moat and unkempt hunting park of Kimbol
ton, Katherine saw only her three maids of honor, her half dozen chamber women and the faithful Spaniards who looked after her material and spiritual well being: her physician, apothecary, confessor and chamberlain. The other members of the household she viewed, quite correctly, as her jailers, and by staying in her tiny apartment she avoided seeing or encountering them. The men Henry put in charge at Kimbolton, Sir Edmund Bedingfield and Sir Edward Chamberlain, were kept at a distance by Katherine’s self-imposed isolation, and most of the guardsmen who watched the gates and grounds never saw their royal prisoner.

  These highly restrictive living conditions helped Katherine to preserve a measure of dignity, but they were hardly conducive to either mental or physical health, and as the year 1535 drew to a close she enteredwhat would be her final illness. What oppressed her most was the terrible thought that in some way she was responsible for all that had befallen England over the last eight years. In maintaining her cause, in refusing to acknowledge that she was now or ever had been anything but queen, Katherine had been true to her conscience and her faith. But what if, fallible as she was, she had misperceived the greater truth that by persisting in her claims she had forced Henry to cut England off from the Roman church and court the Protestant heresy? What if, in doing right, she had done a great wrong? The issue became more poignant still when she recalled the deaths of her beloved supporters Fisher and More, and of the blameless monks who had shared her scruples about the succession. Perhaps by giving in to the king’s demand that she abandon her queenly pretensions and enter a convent she would have done a greater good, both for herself and for the others who had suffered and would suffer in future.