Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  Other griefs crowded in on Katherine’s mind during the long months of her isolation. One she had carried on her conscience for more than thirty years. When her marriage to Prince Arthur was being negotiated, her father had objected to the fact that Arthur’s inheritance seemed insecure. The Tudor dynasty was not yet two decades old, and there was a Plantagenet claimant (Edward, earl of Warwick, son of Edward IV’s brother George) whose pedigree was strong enough to make him a threat to Henry VII’s successor. Ferdinand of Aragon’s objection to the earl’s continued existence prompted Henry to have him executed, and the marriage negotiations proceeded to a successful conclusion. Probably the English king would have had the unfortunate Warwick killed eventually even without Ferdinand’s prompting, but Katherine believed to the end of her life that, through her father, the earl’s blood was on her hands, and she told the other surviving representatives of the Plantagenet line-chiefly the countess of Salisbury and her son Reginald Pole—that her troubles were God’s punishment for her father’s sin.18 Along with the old wound of the divorce and the ever fresh pain of her five-year separation from Mary, Katherine wrestled with these guilts until she became convinced that from the start her life had been fated for tragedy. Her state of mind was shown in the way she occasionally signed her letters: “KA-TARINA SIN VENTURA REGINA”-“Katherine, the unhappy queen.”

  On December 30 Chapuys left the court to go to Kimbolton. Katherine had been ill for nearly a month, and Henry had given permission for her to move to a less pestilential house. The ambassador carried this good news, and was in the best of spirits himself. The coming months were to be filled with intrigue and excitement, and he was to be at the center of it all. He could not tell Katherine any of the details, butthe encouragement he gave her during his stay was fed by his own unfeigned enthusiasm. Of course, some of what they said to one another had been arranged beforehand, and was said solely for the benefit of the officials who were present. Bedingfield and Chamberlain, whom Kath-erine had not seen for more than a year, were allowed to be in the room during Chapuys’ first meeting with Katherine, and a “friend of Cromwell’s”—a spy, sent to record all the ambassador did and said during his visit—was also present.

  But when the obligatory statements about Katherine’s high status, powerful relatives and vital significance for “the union and peace of Christendom” had been made, their talk became more personal. Chapuys stayed at Kimbolton for four days, and each day he sat for several hours by her bedside, answering all her questions about Henry’s health, his standing with other rulers, Mary’s health and situation and the new house Katherine would live in as soon as she was well enough to be moved. They spoke too of how no one had yet come forward to defend her cause, and of the heresies that had taken root in England because of Henry’s break with Rome over the divorce. On both these troublesome issues Chapuys felt he was able to console Katherine. He pointed out that even as they spoke the pope was preparing to enforce his sentence of deprivation, and was pressuring the French to abandon their lukewarm alliance with England. As for the spread of Protestant doctrines, the ambassador reminded Katherine that God always uses such weapons to prove the faithful and confuse the wicked, and that she was in no way responsible for the delusions of the few who were taken in by them.

  Chapuys’ presence and the sound of his voice were as much comfort to the bedridden woman as his words. It was the Christmas season, and there was a little gaiety and a few gifts. One of the ambassador’s men loved to tell jokes, and on the night before Chapuys and his party left Kimbolton he made Katherine laugh again and again. She seemed to be much improved, and her physician told Chapuys there was no reason for him to stay. If her condition worsened, he said, he would send word immediately. But as it happened there was no time to summon him back. On January 7, the day after the Feast of the Three Kings, Katherine knew she was dying. She heard mass and spent the morning in prayer, pausing only to dictate a brief will and to write to Henry. She left the small sum of money she had to her servants, begging the king to supplement her small legacy to each with a year’s wages. She asked that someone make a pilgrimage to Walsingham on her behalf, giving money to the poor along the way. She wanted masses said for her soul, beyond the daily prayers being offered in every parish church in Spain, and she left to her daughter her furs and a gold collar that had been part of her trousseau when she came as a bride from Granada.

  Her last message to Henry was full of love. There was no longer any need to remind him of her true title, or of the long conflict that had estranged them. She forgave him everything; she hoped he would look to the good of his soul; she urged him to be a good father to Mary. “Lastly,” the letter ended, “I make this vow, that my eyes desire you above all things.” She prayed for him, and for Mary, until in midafter-noon she died.19

  Even before Katherine’s death there had been strong suspicion of poison. The doctor ruled out the possibility that she had been given “simple and pure poison,” whose sudden and dramatic effect would have made it unmistakable. But he thought a “slow and subtle poison” might have been put into some Welsh beer she drank just before her final relapse, and an elaborate rumor of a poison plot quickly took shape. The poison came from Italy, it was said, and was smuggled into England by a brother of the papal protonotary. It was an inescapably lethal toxin, and its effects were evident in what the chandler of Kimbolton found when he opened Katherine’s corpse. The heart, he reported, was completely black and hideous; it would not come clean in any of the three “waters” he washed it in. Inside it was a cancerous growth, also black in color, which seemed to the doctor who heard the chandler’s account clear evidence of slow poison. None of Katherine’s partisans were willing to be cheated of their revenge by admitting that the old woman they had loved for so long had simply died of grief.

  XV

  Adew, adew, my hartis lust!

  Adew, my joy and my solace!

  Wyth dowbyl sorow complayn I must

  Untyl I dye, alas, alas!

  Four days after Katherine died Lady Shelton went to Mary and, “most unceremoniously without the least preparation,” told her her mother was dead. It had been said at court that Henry might take this excuse to visit his daughter in person at last and bring her the sad news, or that he would at least send one of his principal courtiers, but he did neither. Chapuys was afraid that hearing of Katherine’s death might be too great a blow for Mary to bear, knowing how she “loved and cherished [her] as much, perhaps more than any daughter ever did.”

  No one but Lady Shelton knew how Mary actually took the news, but by the evening of the day she heard it she was composed enough to request that Katherine’s physician and apothecary be allowed to visit her. The king refused at first, saying that if she was sick it was only the “natural affliction” of grief and nothing more serious, but at Chapuys’ urging he relented. What Mary wanted from the two men was not treatment but an account of Katherine’s last hours and of the manner of her death. Like everyone else she wanted to know for certain whether poison was involved, and since the doctor strongly suspected it he must have passed on these suspicions to Mary.1

  Closeted in her room, wearing her black mourning robe and veil, Mary spent the next weeks writing endless letters. Chapuys had given a consoling note to one of the waiting maids, telling her to pass it on to Mary once she had been officially informed of Katherine’s death, and Mary now answered it, eloquently and without bitterness. The ambassador had encouraged her to be brave and persistent, as Katherine had always been; Mary wrote back that she would try, at the same time preparing herself for whatever change in her own situation might come. As she looked out over the bleak winter landscape it was hard for Mary to imagine any but the darkest future as long as she stayed in England, and she felt again a strong desire to escape. Letters from the emperor and his sister made her long to be among her understanding relatives across the Channel, even though she hardly knew them. The letters were intended for Katherine, but arrived too late to be
shown to her. Mary treasured them now, as she did the little gold cross with the relic that her mother had willed to her just before she died.

  This legacy at least had been respected, but few of Katherine’s other wishes were carried out. She had wanted to be buried in a convent of the Observant friars, but as the order had been suppressed several years earlier this wish could not be fulfilled. As for her bequests, Henry weighed them carefully. He wanted to see for himself what her robes and furs were like before allowing Mary and the church to have them, and he later ordered Mary to give up even the gold cross that meant so much to her. At the same time he ordered one of the gentlemen of his chamber to take inventory of Katherine’s furnishings as queen, all of which had been stored away in the London palace of Baynard’s Castle ever since her imprisonment began. Her old beds, hangings, and cushions were still there, embroidered with the arms of England and Spain, along with the painted tables and brazier that bore her picture and Henry’s and their joint monogram. Everything had been preserved, even the smocks that she wore in childbed, the hangings for the nursery and the little cradle trimmed in yellow cloth of gold and crimson velvet. Few of these reminders of Katherine’s past interested Henry, but he did take her ivory chessmen and black velvet writing desk, while Anne helped herself to a money chest, an ivory stool and a beautiful horn drinking cup decorated with antique figures.2

  It was certainly no comfort to Mary to hear that, on learning of her mother’s death, Henry organized a display of rejoicing calculated to impress on the representatives of foreign courts how great an obstacle to peace she had been. When he first heard the news Henry shouted “God be praised, now we are free from all suspicion of war!” and ordered entertainments and jousts to be prepared to celebrate England’s deliverance. The next day he dressed himself as gaily as possible, all in yellow from doublet to stockings, with a white feather in his yellow cap. He went to mass to a loud fanfare of trumpets, carrying Elizabeth in his arms, and then after dinner danced with the ladies of the court “like one transported with joy.” When the dancing ended he went off to the tiltyard and broke a dozen lances with a vigor he had not shown for years. Anne too was happy to hear that her old rival was dead, and generously rewarded the messenger who told her so, but she seemed troubled by the news as well, and did not take a central part in the rejoicings at Greenwich.

  At the imperial court Chapuys’ dispatches describing Katherine’s last days were received with some dismay. The emperor put on black and wept, saying that he still could not understand how Henry could have left “so sage, virtuous and sainted a wife” for a whore.3 With his eight-year-old heir Philip at his side he heard a mass in Katherine’s honor, and announced to the ambassadors at his court that he believed she died like a saint. But if he blamed Henry for her death Charles did not hold a grudge. Within a few months he was welcoming the approaches of English diplomats eager to restore good relations, and was agreeing with them that, since Katherine no longer presented a problem, there was no reason why the old friendship between the Hapsburgs and the Tudors should not be restored. If this rapprochement confirmed Katherine’s former diplomatic significance it also showed just how little Mary counted in the game of continental politics. She might be useful to have at hand in marriage negotiations, or as a pretender installed by a rebel army, but Charles was not prepared to remain estranged from England over the issue of her disinheritance or ill treatment. It was Katherine, not Mary, whose rights had caused an upheaval in European diplomacy.

  Katherine may have died like a saint but she was buried like a princess—to be precise, a princess dowager. An account of her burial arrangements referred to her as “the right excellent and noble Princess the Lady Katherine, Daughter to the right high and mighty Prince Ferdinand, late King of Castile, and late Wife to the noble and excellent prince Arthur, Brother to our Sovereign Lord King Henry the 8th.”4 When the body had been “seared, trammeled, leaded and chested with spices” it lay for some days under a canopy of state before being enclosed in a leaden coffin, and placed before the altar within a “burning chapel,” a display of dozens of wax candles kept alight in a blazing circle. Around the coffin were four crimson banners with the arms of England and Spain, and four great golden standards painted with the images of the Trinity, the virgin, St. Katherine and St. George. Wherever the arms of England appeared they were left ungilded, and the crown that surmounted them was the unclosed circlet of a princess, not the closed crown of a queen.

  After more than two weeks the new mourning clothes were ready, and the mourning procession formed. Katherine’s niece Eleanor, daughter of Mary Tudor and Charles Brandon, was chief mourner; she and sixteen other ladies and fifty of Katherine’s serving women followed the hearse in slow stages to the abbey of Saltry, where another burning chapel was lit and the party rested overnight. Then, accompanied by forty-eight poor men in black hoods and robes carrying long torches, the company madethe final journey to the Benedictine abbey of Peterborough where Katherine was to be interred. Here, surrounded by a thousand candles, by banners of all the great ruling houses to which she was related—those of Spain, Aragon, Sicily, Portugal, and the Holy Roman Empire—and by the aristocratic arms of the house of Lancaster and the white scutcheon of Prince Arthur, Katherine received her final homage. Her symbol, the pomegranate, was represented in several pennons, and her device, “Humble et loyale,” was spelled out in huge golden letters around the walls.

  Her humility and loyalty Henry could afford to celebrate, but not the principles she had maintained in life. Her funeral sermon was an assault on the pope and on her marriage, and the bishop who delivered it was persuaded to say, in exact contradiction of the truth, that on her deathbed Katherine had at last admitted that she had never been England’s rightful queen. The sermon satisfied the king’s conscience, but convinced no one else. All those who truly mourned Katherine knew better, and the six hundred poor women who were given black robes in which to mourn her more conspicuously prayed for her not as princess but as Queen Katherine as the coffin was placed at the lowest step of the high altar, a site unworthy of her place in their memory.5

  Mary found the funeral arrangements such a dishonor that she advised Chapuys not to attend the ceremonial interment. Except for the controller Guildford, Anne’s great enemy, the courtiers judiciously stayed away. Henry found little to say about the affair except to complain about the cost of a memorial to be displayed in Katherine’s honor at St. Paul’s.6Beyond bewailing the expense, he could hardly be bothered with the trivia of his first wife’s funeral when all he could think of was how to rid himself of her successor. Anne had disappointed him again. On the day of Katherine’s burial she miscarried her child, and the midwives who pored over the tiny fetus declared it to be male. Henry showed “great distress” when he was told, and was quite uncivil to his anguished wife. The miscarriage gave substance to the long-standing rumor that since Elizabeth’s birth Anne had been incapable of bearing another child.

  Anne tried to excuse her misfortune by saying that she lost the child through worry over the king. A few days earlier Henry had fallen heavily during a joust. He was mounted on a great warhorse, charging at an opponent in the tiltyard at Greenwich, when suddenly both horse and rider came crashing to the ground. For a terrible moment it looked as though the king was dead, but then his grooms saw that, though unconscious, he was breathing. He was senseless for more than two hours, and when he finally opened his eyes he found himself surrounded by churchmen and distraught courtiers. It was only after he was himself again that Anne was told what had happened, but she blamed the miscarriage on her shock at the news, and took the opportunity to blame Norfolk as well fortelling her too abruptly. With her waiting maids, though, she took quite a different tone. Seeing them in tears over the loss of her child Anne consoled them by saying that all was for the best, since she could now conceive her next child all the sooner. What was more, she added, the new one would be free from any possible taint of bastardy now that the king’s first
wife was dead.7

  Whatever Anne may have thought, Henry believed—or so he said—that her miscarriage was the result of malignant forces. Gertrude Blount got word to Chapuys that the king had told one of his intimates “in great confidence, and as it were in confession,” that he now understood that he had been seduced into marrying Anne against his will, by witchcraft.8Such a marriage was accursed, he said, and could not produce sons. Furthermore it ought to be considered invalid, and he confided that in his own mind he already believed himself free to take another wife.

  Everyone, including Anne, knew the woman he had in mind. She was pale, shy Jane Seymour, a monumental contrast to Anne in every respect, and Henry had been showing her every attention and giving her “very large presents” for months. Anne made a final pitiful effort to win back her husband’s affection, telling him that “her heart broke when she saw he loved others,” but it was too late. The king hardly spoke to her any more, and spent all his time in the palace apartments of Edward Seymour, where he could meet Jane in her brother’s presence and avoid scandal.9