Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  As for her proficiency in languages, she had no regular tutor but continued to read on her own. The works of the Greek and Roman historians, philosophers and poets had occupied a special place in her life for many years. Mary confided to the chamberwoman who was Marillac’s informant that throughout the trying period of her mother’s divorce and even in the darkest months of Anne’s reign she had turned to the classics for comfort. The “humane letters” dear to the Renaissance humanists were Mary’s solace during her sleepless nights at Hunsdon, and they meant a good deal to her on that account.12 Mary was at no time part of a scholarly or artistic circle, but she did maintain close ties with Lord Morley, who presented her with either a translation or an original work of his own every year. At least some of his works were undertaken atMary’s suggestion, and the range of his interests—his translations included patristic, scholastic and humanist treatises—must have coincided with hers at many points. In the doctrinal and scholarly controversies of the 1530s Morley’s tastes placed him among the followers of Erasmus, who though he re-edited and purified the Christian texts did not share the Protestants’ radical reinterpretations of them. Morley translated Erasmus’ treatise in praise of the virgin Mary, and the new edition by the humanist Poliziano of a work by the Greek doctor Athanasius. He also made a new translation of Aquinas’ treatise on the Hail Mary, a biblical passage that was always significant for Mary Tudor.13

  In her talents and cultural preferences Mary was clearly among the most accomplished women of her time, but her temperament was in no sense that of a withdrawn intellectual. She loved the outdoors, and spent hours walking in the gardens and tending plants of her own. Jasper, head gardener at Beaulieu, sent Mary roots and herbs to grow in the gardens of Richmond and Hampton Court, and her household records show her preoccupation with growing things. Riding was another of her delights. She had always ridden for health reasons but in her twenties, with a sizable stable and several very good riding horses, she resumed her old pastime of riding to the hunt. Her mother had taught her to love hunting, and in the last years before they were separated Mary and Katherine had hunted together in the royal parks, forgetting for a few hours the tragedy that was closing in around them. Mary now kept a kennel of hunting hounds, and liked to be painted with Italian greyhounds at her feet.

  In the winter months there were indoor amusements. Mary shared her father’s taste for gambling, and when she played cards with Lady Hartford or Lady Margaret Grey she often lost twenty shillings at a single sitting.14 Most of the entertainment, though, was provided by a jester whose name appears more often in Mary’s household books than any other: Jane the Fool. Jane was one of Henry’s jesters, the only woman fool on a par with his favorite Will Somers. (Anne Boleyn had a woman fool, but what became of her on her mistress’ death is unclear.) Henry provided Jane’s board and paid her wages, and occasionally supplied her with cloth for her gowns and other necessities, but from 1537 on she lived with Mary, and it was Mary who looked after her everyday expenses. She paid for Jane’s hose and shoes (she wore them out every few months), and for the cloth for her smocks, gowns and bed linen; she paid the bills submitted by one “Hogman” who kept Jane’s horse, and found someone to care for her during a long illness she suffered in 1543.

  Jane the Fool must have been a startling parody of a court gentlewoman. She wore damask gowns and silk kirtles, but her hose and shoes were those of a clown. She kept her head shaved as bald as an egg, and a barber came to shave it once a month at a cost of fourpence. Jane had acompanion who was known as Lucretia the Tumbler, and between them they kept Mary amused for hours with their jokes and songs and tricks.15

  But if Mary’s time was spent agreeably enough in these years it was nonetheless time spent in expectation. The natural next step in her life was marriage, and rumors about who Mary’s husband would be were more or less constant at court and in the council chamber. In November of 1536, five months after her submission, Henry told Mary at dinner one night that he was seriously searching for a husband for her, and that he had a very suitable one in mind. He said much the same thing a few days later, now adding that the man he had in mind was Dom Luiz of Portugal, Charles V’s brother-in-law and preferred choice as Mary’s husband. In the fall of 1536 Henry was discouraged about the prospect of Jane’s having a son, and confided to Mary that since his queen would not provide him with a male heir he hoped his daughter would give him one. A legitimate grandson, he said, would be better than a bastard son.

  Reports that the king intended to marry off his elder daughter were commonplace throughout the 1530s. Charles V had seen marriage to a foreign prince as by far the best solution to Mary’s dilemma during Anne’s reign, and recommended King James of Scotland, the French dauphin, and Dom Luiz as honorable matches for her. Henry let it be known that he was considering the voyvode of Poland as a potential son-in-law from 1532 on, and later, when he began to seek new political alliances with the Lutherans, he considered bestowing his daughter on a German prince. There was always the possibility that to punish Mary and remove any threat to his security she represented Henry might marry her to an Englishman of low birth, or to one of his trusted officials. Shortly after Katherine’s death Chapuys heard a rumor, taken seriously by most of Mary’s friends and supporters, that the king meant to marry her to Cromwell. Chapuys could not bring himself to believe it, but he traced the story to “one lord and one gentleman” who sincerely thought Henry was considering giving Mary to his principal secretary.16

  By the fall of 1536, though, the field of candidates had narrowed. As the privy councilors noted shortly afterward, both Mary and Elizabeth were diplomatic assets which ought to be used to make allies. The two great powers on the continent, France and the empire, were currently alienated by England’s Protestant leanings (though both were actively soliciting Mary’s hand). Why not ease the diplomatic strains by means of a marriage alliance? Henry appeared to favor such a policy, and welcomed envoys from both the Hapsburg and Valois courts when they arrived in England empowered to negotiate the terms of a marriage contract. The French negotiator Gilles de la Pommeraye bustled about the court, telling every courtier in sight how advantageous a marriage between Mary and Charles, duke of Orleans and second in line to theFrench throne, was bound to be. To the king’s councilors he repeated again and again Francis’ offer of a dower of eighty thousand ducats in revenues, plus a force of mercenaries to help put down the rebellion then troubling the north of England. Henry pretended not to hear these offers and took little notice of La Pommeraye, but he and his associates persisted, making themselves odious to Mary with their constant attentions and hints that they hoped she would soon be the bride of a Frenchman.17

  In the end the French match fell through, chiefly becaiise La Pommeraye had been instructed to insist that before the marriage contract was drawn up Mary’s legitimacy had to be restored. The issue of her legitimacy and succession rights were to prove an obstacle to any marriage settlement, for several reasons. First, any prospective suitor would obviously prefer a bride with a claim to her father’s throne. But beyond this Mary’s status had a special importance. She was the living symbol of the scandal of Henry’s divorce and repudiation of the pope. To acknowledge her illegitimacy in the terms of a marriage contract would be to approve all that Henry had done to affront Katherine, the pope and the community of Christians. Much as he liked the idea of marrying his son to Henry’s daughter, Francis could not bring himself to accept her without a full restoration of her rights.

  The emperor was less scrupulous, and gave his envoys much more flexibility in coming to terms with Henry. In offering the hand of Dom Luiz, the Portuguese infante, they were simply to make the best bargain they could. If Henry agreed to naming Mary as his successor in default of a male heir, so much the better. But if he would not agree to this, the imperial representatives were to draw up a settlement omitting all mention of the succession, and to be content with a large dowry of lands in England.

  Henry gav
e the impression that he favored the imperial match. The infante was reported to be a “person of mature age, sensible, virtuous, and well-conditioned,” and would on his marriage to Mary be “entirely in the king’s power.”18 He was agreeable to living in England—Henry flatly refused to let Mary leave the country until Jane had a son, which at that time seemed unlikely—and he appeared to have no inconvenient political views or loyalties beyond his allegiance to his relative Charles V. Dom Luiz was a man of princely appearance, whose portraits showed a handsome, resolute, yet benevolent face. He was muscular in build, with a broad chest and strong arms, and he had proven himself fighting alongside Charles V at Tunis. He seemed in many ways the ideal son-in-law for Henry, despite the drawbacks of his staunch Catholicism and fidelity to the pope. But the imperial envoys got no further with Henry than the French. When he demanded that both Charles and the king of Portugaldeclare his marriage to Katherine null as a preliminary to finalizing the betrothal, they balked, and though Dom Luiz remained a potential suitor the negotiators returned to Brussels.19

  From Henry’s point of view the diplomatic rivalries generated by Mary’s availability were far more important than any betrothal that might be concluded. What he feared most was that France and the empire might end their current war and join forces against him, and his principal reason for favoring the candidacy of the infante was the prospect of an Anglo-imperial alliance against the French. His talk was less of dowries and grandchildren than of war and the threat of war. Pie was both frightened and angered by the recent behavior of the French king, who was becoming more and more belligerent and breaking the agreements he had made with the English long before. “Since Francis is trying to strengthen himself with alliances against me,” Henry was overheard to say, “I will take the initiative. I fear him not!” He paced up and down the Council chamber denouncing the French, gesticulating with his hands and swearing he did not give a fig for Francis.20

  But if Henry showed no eagerness to conclude a marriage for his daughter those who opposed him had long known whom she ought to marry. The courtiers who had supported Katherine—the marquis and marchioness of Exeter, the Carews, the Poles and the northern lords who rose in the Pilgrimage of Grace—all favored a marriage between Mary and Reginald Pole. Next to the Emperor Charles, Pole had been Kath-erine’s choice for Mary, and she and Margaret Pole often spoke of uniting the two families both for dynastic reasons and as a way to atone for the judicial murder of the countess’ brother Edward, earl of Warwick, in 1499. Mary was predisposed to like Reginald by her strong affection for his mother, and though he was sixteen years her senior it was said she had been in love with him as a young girl.

  In the mid-15 30s Pole was the most important English exile on the continent. Educated in England and Italy at the king’s expense, he had nonetheless refused to allow Henry to use his prodigious learning to promote the divorce. He did collect the opinions of other scholars for the king—for which he received a handsome remuneration—but would not commit himself against Katherine. As Henry moved closer and closer to a breach with Rome Pole decided to leave England for good, taking up residence in various Italian cities and finally at the Vatican, where Pope Paul III made him a member of a committee organized to reform the church. He had by this time become a celebrated international figure, as well known for his opposition to the divorce as for his learning. Charles V urged him to take a leading role in an English rebellion to overthrow Henry in 1535 and again during the northern rising in the following year, and the pope now made him a cardinal and gave him authority to act aspapal legate in England. Before he could get there the Pilgrimage was crushed, but Pole had shown himself willing to oppose Henry, whose tyranny and heresy he now denounced in the bitterest terms, on the battlefield if necessary. Henry saw him as a dangerous man, and dispatched assassins to kill him. Pole became a fugitive, traveling in disguise and with few attendants in order to escape notice, aware that other English exiles in Italy were being encouraged to regain Henry’s favor by murdering him.

  Despite the highly adventurous life forced on him by circumstances Reginald Pole was the gentlest of men, preferring the quiet of his study to the turbulence of international politics. He was tenderhearted to a fault, and he wept easily; the uprooting of trees in a Roman garden once moved him to floods of tears. He was hardly a dashing figure, but he had courage and carried the blood of the House of York in his veins. He spoke with a moving eloquence that stood out in an age of rhetorical bombast, and he had the wisdom of a reflective thinker. All these qualities, combined with Pole’s stout adherence to her mother’s cause, could not but appeal to Mary. In the minds of a large number of her supporters, the match was already made.

  Apparently Pole himself took the possibility of the marriage seriously, for in the spring of 1537 he confided to the emperor’s agents that he thought the unrest in England might lead to “his marrying the Princess himself.”21 With this eventuality in mind he was careful to take only deacon’s orders, not the full orders of a priest, so that although he was a cardinal of the Roman church he remained free to marry. Chapuys thought that Pole was the only Englishman Mary would accept as a husband, and Pole’s relatives, who were becoming more and more outspoken in their hostility to Henry’s authoritarian rule, began to speak of the union of Mary and the cardinal as a foregone conclusion. Margaret Pole’s two other sons, Henry, Lord Montague, and Geoffrey, put their hopes for a change of government in their famous brother, and believed Mary’s natural place was by his side. A servant of Lord Montague’s reported that he heard his master say “it were a meet marriage for Reginald Pole to have the Lady Mary, the king’s daughter,” and Montague’s principal household officials echoed this judgment. Geoffrey Pole had an even more idealistic vision. He saw the marriage of his brother and the true Tudor heiress as part of a grander scheme for change, with Henry’s perverse innovations swept away and the old order restored. With all the determination he could muster Geoffrey was heard to swear that “the lady Mary would have a title to the crown one day.”

  XX

  Twene hope and drede

  My lyfe 1 lede.

  The search for Henry VIII’s fourth wife had begun within hours of his third wife’s death. The diplomats who conducted it found no shortage of eligible girls. There was the Danish Princess Christina, a captivating sixteen-year-old widow and niece of the emperor; there were other Hapsburg relatives, and the two lovely daughters of the duke of Cleves. There were so many French girls—among them Francis’ daughter Margaret, Anne of Lorraine, and the three daughters of the due de Guise, Marie, Louise and Renée—that Henry decided they should all be brought in a group to Calais where he could inspect them, dine and dance with them, and then make his choice. That anyone else could choose for him was unthinkable. “By God,” he told the French negotiators, “the thing touches me too near. I wish to see them and know them some time before deciding.”

  There was a romantic simplicity in Henry’s attitude toward marriage. His union with Katherine had been a matter of state, but they got on well together during their good years and he was undeniably fond of her. His next two marriages had been love matches, with no diplomatic significance whatever. At forty-six, Henry had no stomach for a cold marriage of state. He wanted someone he could be comfortable with; he wanted to fall in love again. Hence his proposal to disport himself amid the French ladies at Calais. The French found the suggestion insulting and far from chivalrous. “Is this the way the knights of the Round Table treated their women?” they asked sarcastically. Henry would have to make his selection through an intermediary first: then that girl and no others would be brought to Calais for him to see.

  Henry may have been overbearing in his matrimonial dealings, butthen he was generally in a mood to make unreasonable demands. He had just ordered hundreds of workmen to level an entire Surrey village to make room for the grandest palace yet built in England. Henry had never before been able to commission a palace to be constructed from the ground up; he had al
ways lived in renovated royal dwellings built by his predecessors. But the palace he planned to raise in the fields of Surrey would live up to its name—Nonsuch—and would rival even the splendid palace of the French king at Chambord. Craftsmen were brought in great numbers to cut the timbers and build the walls of the huge structure, and Italian carvers, plasterers and sculptors were imported to ornament it. Tents erected for the artisans and laborers to live in for the years they worked at Nonsuch soon formed a new village to replace the one they had demolished, and it was not until 1541 that the king was able to move into the completed wings of the palace. Long before then, however, he came down to the site to watch his sculptors and stonemasons shape mythological and historical carvings around the walls and gates. At the center of the inner courtyard was the most imposing representation of all: a huge statue of Henry himself, many times larger than life, on his throne in a pose of majesty.

  Nonsuch was an architectural metaphor of power. It was built with the spoils from another proof of royal power, the revenues from the sale of monastic lands. The dissolution of the greater monasteries was accomplished in these final years of the 1530s, and the undercurrent of outrage it produced reached its height with the spoliation of the country’s most venerated shrine. The tomb of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, an opulent, gorgeous monument to medieval piety, was as famous for its treasure as for the healing virtues of the martyr himself. The casket which held Becket’s body was encased in sheets of solid gold, and over the centuries pilgrims had brought sapphires, diamonds, emeralds, pearls, small rubies and the great rubies called baleases, coins and semi-precious stones to be fastened into the goldwork as a memorial to the saint. Some of these gems were said to be as large as goose eggs, but the most precious of them was a ruby, “not larger than a man’s thumb-nail,” which had ornamented the shrine for more than three centuries. It was called the “regal of France,” and it had such fire and brillance that even when the church was dark and the weather cloudy it could be seen clearly, glowing in its niche to the right of the altar.1