Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  Chapuys was systematically visiting the privy councilors one by one and pointing out to each the diplomatic and political advantages of bringing Mary back to court, and was trying, through his contacts outside London, to put pressure on the gentlemen who would be coming to the Parliament summoned for the first week in June. Within the king’s Council the marquis of Exeter and the treasurer Fitzwilliam were urging a complete restoration of Mary’s rights, while even closer to the king’s ear his intended bride was now Mary’s most constant advocate.

  Jane Seymour had been pressing for a reconciliation between Henry and Mary for months. Her entreaties were rooted as much in sentiment as in political expediency. She spoke for many who held the naive conviction that a restoration of harmony between the king and his daughter would sweep away all the disruptive changes in government and religion that had arisen out of the rift in the royal family. Henry, however, was looking forward, not back, and told Jane “that she must be out of her senses to think of such a thing,” and that she ought to think instead of her own future children. But Jane insisted that the people could not be content until Mary was returned to her place at her father’s side, and that without their reunion the country would face “ruin and desolation.”

  The sincerity and imploring ardor of his new beloved touched the king, who had in any event already determined to recall Mary. In view ofher popularity he had no choice but to give her back some degree of honor, though the issue of her place, if any, in the succession would have to wait until Parliament met and redrafted the Act of Succession. She was recalled to court briefly late in May, and publicly received. There were feasts in her honor, and as an additional mark of favor many of Anne’s jewels were given to Mary. Some of these jewels had almost certainly been Katherine’s, for Anne had taken nearly every gem and chain her predecessor owned. There was an ironic justice in the fact that the jewels now came to Mary, but to judge from what she told Chapuys she was not eager for revenge in any form.2 Throughout Anne’s trial Mary had been hoping grounds for a divorce would be found, but less because of the injuries Anne had done to her mother and herself than for the sake of “the king’s honor and the relief of his conscience.”3 In a message to the ambassador she declared she had “willingly forgiven and forgotten” the past, and hated no one. Using a favorite expression of Katherine’s, she wrote that she “didn’t care a straw” whether Henry and Jane had sons whose succession rights were stronger than her own. Clearly what mattered most to her was the king’s affection—that he accept her, without qualification, as his beloved daughter.

  Mary’s appearance at court shortly before the king’s marriage was only a first step toward that acceptance. She now appealed to Cromwell, whom she addressed as “one of her chief friends,” to help her gain the full measure of Henry’s benevolence. “Nobody dared to speak for me as long as that woman lived,” she admitted, but now that Anne was gone she hoped Cromwell would act as her go-between, interceding with the king on her behalf and assuring him of her desire to obey him as far as her conscience allowed. It soon became obvious that nothing less than the most abject submission would satisfy him. By her unshakable resistance to all the overt and subtle pressures to which Henry had subjected her Mary had cost him a good deal of frustration. She and Katherine both had reminded him that there were limits to his power at a time when he was pushing back those limits to an extent undreamed of even a decade earlier. In Henry’s view, his daughter had much to atone for. The price of his restored affection would be Mary’s complete and painful humbling to his will.

  Her suit was in any case a peripheral matter, for the king was once again a bridegroom. Eleven days after Anne’s execution he married Jane Seymour at York Place in London, and following a brief country honeymoon brought her back to be proclaimed queen. She was not formally crowned, but in lieu of a coronation procession there was a parade of boats to escort her from Greenwich to Westminster, the king and queen riding in the royal barge and the guardsmen of the king’s bodyguard in a single great barge behind them. The warships and shore guns roared outas they passed, and at Radcliff they slowed to admire the display and entertainment arranged by the imperial ambassador. A large tent bearing the arms of the empire had been erected on the bank, ornamented with banners that fluttered in the wind and flanked by an impressive display of ordnance. Under the tent stood Chapuys, resplendent in purple satin and surrounded by gentlemen in velvet coats. On his signal two small boats, one full of trumpeters, the other carrying musicians playing shawms and sackbuts, headed out into the river and followed the royal barge as the procession made its way toward the Tower, and the forty cannons he had assembled were shot off to salute the king and his new queen.4

  The rise of the Seymours was associated with imperial interests and the cause of the old faith, and Chapuys was eager to maintain close ties with Jane in her new role. Two days after her return to Westminster he went with Henry to her chamber after mass and spoke to her awhile. After congratulating her on her marriage he alluded to Jane’s fidelity to Mary, remarking that of all the recent changes at court the one that pleased the people most was Mary’s return. He elaborated this opinion with the awkward sentiment that, without the pain and anxiety of labor, Jane had gained in Mary a treasured daughter who would please her more than her own children by the king.

  Jane assured Chapuys she would do all she could to make peace between her husband and stepdaughter, though it was plain the king was bent on little but amusement. With a zest that recalled the early days of his reign he was passing the time with Jane and her ladies, dicing with his courtiers or honoring favored nobles with his presence at banquets. With a boatload of disguised companions he went one afternoon to a sumptuous entertainment that followed a triple wedding. He was dressed as a Turk, in long garments richly embroidered with gold thread and a black velvet hat with white feathers. After he had danced awhile he took off his mask and received the homage of the wedding guests, and then ordered his cooks to bring in the forty dishes of meat and decorative “subtleties” he had brought with him from the palace.5

  Henry could no longer joust; the injuries from his heavy fall and his ulcerated legs now prevented it. But he could enjoy the “jousting and triumph” organized for his amusement in the early weeks of his marriage. Four boats loaded with combatants in full armor met on the river before York Place and exchanged fire from their guns for two hours. When one of the boats was disabled fighting men from the others boarded her, and in the confusion some of them fell in the river. Nearly all of them were fished out again, as it was low tide, but one, a servant of Sir Henry Knevet named Gates, was drowned. After this misfortune the king insisted that all the combatants exchange their metal swords for harmless wooden ones, and put wool and leather tips on the ends of their darts andpikes. Even so one of the ships sank when a gun exploded on firing, and the experiment was quickly ended. The soggy mariners trotted off somewhat disgruntled to change their armor and prepare for a second joust on land, with Henry and Jane watching from the gatehouse.6

  While the king enjoyed these pastimes his servants in and out of Parliament had been formulating a new succession act. All of Henry’s children—Mary, Elizabeth and Henry Fitzroy—were now bastards. Fitzroy had been born one, Mary declared one by the 1534 act, and Elizabeth became one when the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, pronounced Henry’s marriage to Anne invalid in May. The new act took account of the absence of a legitimate heir, but instead of conferring the succession on the as yet unborn children of Henry and Jane it took the unprecedented step of giving the king the right to name any heir he chose. For the first time since Henry became king the succession issue was divorced from his domestic life. The continuation of the Tudor dynasty no longer depended on the precarious happenstance of the king’s true wife giving birth to a male heir of undisputed parentage.

  This altered situation put Henry’s marriage and his children’s status in a new perspective. He might now without hesitation name the seventeen-year-old Fitzro
y as his heir instead of waiting for Jane to produce a son. Some of his privy councilors had always favored this course. Robert Ratcliffe, earl of Sussex, remarked at a Council meeting in Henry’s presence that, as both Fitzroy and Mary were now on the same footing, “it was advisable to prefer the male to the female for the succession to the crown.”7 What Henry himself thought is unclear, but Fitzroy was given a prominent place in the formal opening of Parliament in June. He walked just ahead of the king in the ceremonial procession, bearing his cap of maintenance, and was given greater honor than Sussex, who bore the royal sword, or Oxford, who carried the king’s train.8

  Fitzroy had been kept away from court throughout his childhood. He was given the titles, the household and the education of a future king but little else. While Henry made certain that the boy was prepared to step in should an emergency create the sudden need for an heir, he had little to do with Fitzroy personally, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they did not get on well. The endearments, the companionship, the close personal affinity Henry displayed (however fleetingly) toward Mary in her childhood were missing in the king’s relationship with his son. Fitzroy’s marriage to Norfolk’s only daughter, Mary Howard, completed his preparation for power, though his alliance with the Howards was troubled by the hostility of Anne Boleyn. Fitzroy was prominent among the spectators at Anne’s execution, and it was being said that Henry “certainly intended to make him successor,” but by early summer he was in poor health and showing no sign of improvement. Toward the end ofJuly he died. The king ordered Norfolk to arrange an obscure burial for him, with no public mourning and no funeral procession. The sealed coffin was put in a wagon, covered with straw, and taken off to a provincial town to be buried. Henry was determined to keep Fitzroy behind the scenes even in death.

  For Mary the passage of the revised Act of Succession brought on the definitive crisis of her youth. She had asked Cromwell to mediate her reconciliation with her father, and he now undertook to do so in the light of the altered arrangement enacted by Parliament. He drew up a letter for her to copy out in her own hand and sign, full of the most self-abasing phraseology. “In as humble and lowly a manner as is possible for a child to use to her father and sovereign lord,” the letter began, Mary acknowledged all her offenses against her father, “since I first had discretion unto this hour.” She begged him to forgive them all, and professed herself to be “as sorry as any creature living” for what she had done that was contrary to his will. She asked his “fatherly pity” on her frail condition—“I am but a woman, and your child,” was how Cromwell phrased it for her—and added that though her soul belonged to God her body was Henry’s to order according to his pleasure.

  When this letter brought no immediate response from the king Mary wrote again, repeating Cromwell’s formulas of self-abnegation and begging her father to envision her “most humbly prostrate before your noble feet, your most obedient subject and humble child.” This time she signed herself “Your majesty’s most humble and obedient servant, daughter, and handmaid.” When she sent this letter via Cromwell Mary added in a separate letter to the secretary that she hoped she would not have to do more than make a general admission of guilt to unspecified “offenses.” In sending the humiliating letters she had already done as much as her conscience would allow, she told him; she could not bring herself to acknowledge all that the new Act of Succession implied in more explicit terms. She could never recognize the illegality of her mother’s marriage, or her own illegitimacy, or the nullity of papal power in England. She would rather die than displease her father, she told Cromwell, yet “if I be put to any more (I am plain with you as my great friend) my conscience will in no ways suffer me to consent thereto.”9

  But in making a vague and sweeping plea for forgiveness Mary was giving the king free reign to interpret her submission in any way he chose. Taking advantage of her claim “to be ordered according to his pleasure,” he sent several of his privy councilors to obtain her assent to precisely those points to which she could not in conscience subscribe. Norfolk, Sussex and the bishop of Chester, Roland Lee, were deputed to carry out this task. That the king knew his commissioners were likely to encounter resistance from Mary is evident from the written instructionshe prepared for Norfolk before the duke and the others left for Huns-don.

  This document began by condemning Mary’s earlier refusal to obey her father as a “monster in nature”—a freakish departure from the natural obedience of a daughter toward her father. Any other man would have sent such a daughter as Mary away long before, but because of his clemency, his pity, and his “gracious and divine nature” Henry was willing to withhold his displeasure if she swore to submit to him, to his laws and to the all-important official positions on his first marriage and headship of the church. Norfolk’s instructions left no room for compromise. Mary was to be forced to consent to every demand the councilors made. And because Henry recognized the “imbecillity of her sex”—a formula from Roman law describing the intellectual incapacity of women-he wanted his commissioners to find out from Mary who it was that instructed her to be defiant for so long. It was unthinkable that her resistance arose out of inner conviction or loyalty to her mother; someone must have “emboldened and animated” her to defy him.10

  Armed with these directives, the commissioners went to Hunsdon. Mary had been returned there, it seems, in anticipation of the final confrontation with the king’s representatives, and was back under the governance of Lady Shelton. They put the king’s terms to Mary; she repeated her old familiar arguments in reply. She would obey her father in all matters save those that injured her mother, her personal honor or her faith. The commissioners were furious. If they failed this time they, along with Mary, would suffer the king’s violent displeasure. They had no pity for her. She was no longer a fragile girl but a resolute woman of twenty, a woman who now more than ever recalled her mother in her rigorous logic and steadfast defiance. Norfolk and Sussex shouted at her and called her names, and one of them swore he could not believe she was in fact the king’s daughter, for no child of his, not even a bastard, would be as willful and obdurate as she was. In a rage he stormed that if she were his own daughter he would beat her to death. He would pick her up and dash her head against the wall again and again until he cracked it open and “made it soft as a boiled apple.” And he would be more than justified. Any father would do the same.

  There is no doubt that Norfolk—if it was he who made these threats—was fully capable of carrying them out. Shortly afterward he brutally punished his own wife, whose only offense seems to have been that she resented her husband’s mistress. Elizabeth, duchess of Norfolk, wrote to Cromwell explaining her circumstances. Norfolk “chose her for love,” she wrote, and not for her dowry; they had been married for twenty-five years and had five children. But though she had been a good and virtuous wife, serving beside her husband at court for many years and makingmany sacrifices for him, he repaid her by gambling away her jointure and seducing younger women. He fell in love with one of these women, Bess Holland, and when he heard his wife had spoken out against her he “came riding all night” from the court and locked her in a small room, taking away all her clothes and jewels and leaving her only a small allowance to support herself and twenty others “in a hard country.” When she objected he ordered some of the serving women to bind her arms and legs and keep her thus bound and imprisoned until she accepted her situation. And, the duchess wrote to Cromwell, the women bound her until the blood came out at her finger ends, and sat on her breast until she spat blood, and though her husband knew it he did nothing to stop them. Since then she had been plagued by “much sickness and cost in physic,” and could no longer live on the pittance the duke allowed her.11 It was a sordid story, though by no means a unique one, but if nothing else it showed how real Mary’s danger was.

  The three commissioners kept up their barrage of threats for some time, with Lady Shelton adding dire verbal bludgeonings of her own, until it became o
bvious that Mary would not yield. They left her then, giving Lady Shelton strict orders not to allow her to speak to anyone. She was to be watched day and night, and kept in a state of fearful expectation of further persecution.

  When they returned to court and reported that Mary was as adamant as ever the king was beside himself with anger. He was now convinced that a group of conspirators was using Mary to thwart him and wreck the new design for the succession. He lashed out at everyone he suspected, dismissing Exeter and Fitzwilliam from the Council, interrogating a number of aristocratic women and sending Lady Hussey to the Tower, grilling Mary’s principal servant and subjecting the unfortunate Cromwell to an agonizing week of fear for his life. For most of that week, he confided to Chapuys, “he considered himself a dead man” for having represented Mary to her father as penitent and obedient.12

  When he could uncover no conspiracy Henry apparently decided to order Mary to be tried for treason. Jane’s “prayers and exertions” to the contrary were “rudely repulsed.” The judges were commanded to proceed with the legal inquiry into her guilt and to sentence her, in her absence, as contumacious. At the same time the king was heard to say, Chapuys wrote, “that not only Mary but Exeter, Cromwell and many others would suffer” once the judgment was rendered.

  The only thing that saved Mary, it appears, was the squeamishness of the royal justices. They too were threatened with harsh punishments if they failed to indict Mary, but they did not want her blood on their hands. To gain time they proposed that she be given a paper to sign, declaring all that the king wanted her to affirm, and that if she refused tosign it legal proceedings could then be begun. A document, called “Lady-Mary’s Submission,” was accordingly drawn up and sent to Hunsdon. It acknowledged that Katherine and Henry had never been legally married, that their daughter was illegitimate, and that the “pretended authority” of the bishop of Rome had no legal ground in England. The Submission reiterated Mary’s request to be forgiven for her obstinacy and disobedience, and declared that she now swore to these truths “with all her heart” and “inward sentence, belief, and judgment.”