Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  The shrine at Canterbury had long been the object of the king’s greed. Now in a unique if one-sided test of strength with the long-dead saint Henry managed to take Becket’s treasure for his own. First he proclaimed that “Thomas Becket, sometime bishop of Canterbury, and made a saint by the bishop of Rome’s authority, should from hence forth not be esteemed, named, reputed, nor called a saint,” and ordered allBecket’s images removed from the churches. His festival was no longer to be observed, nor were services or offices to be read in his honor, “because it is found that he died like a traitor and rebel to his prince.” Becket had in fact been murdered by agents of his prince, Henry II, but he was now summoned to court as if he were a living traitor and brought to judgment. When he did not appear in answer to the summons he was convicted in his absence of rebellion and treason, and sentenced to be burned. (His bones were thrown into the flames.) As a traitor his goods were forfeit to the king, and royal agents methodically stripped the tomb and altar at Canterbury of their incalculable wealth in jewels.2 The spoils filled two huge chests, each of which could barely be moved by eight strong men. In the twelfth century the martyred Becket had triumphed over his king; in the sixteenth the king reversed the order of power again. No force from within the church was to be allowed to stand in his way, not even the beloved St. Thomas. Now when Henry sat on his throne, he wore in his thumb ring Becket’s flashing jewel, the regal of France.3

  Henry’s extravagant matrimonial conditions, his grandiose building plans and his arrogant humbling of Becket were all part of a cultivated pose of might intended to disguise a growing feeling of vulnerability. The most urgent purpose of his marriage negotiations was to forestall a feared declaration of war from the combined forces of France and the empire. Henry was prepared to go to any lengths to buy off either partner in this dreaded alliance. When the French candidates proved unsatisfactory, or took other husbands, Henry proposed quadruple, even quintuple weddings with Hapsburg partners. One plan would have paired Henry and his three children with four eligible relatives of the emperor; another saw him offer himself, Mary and Elizabeth plus Mary Howard and his niece Margaret Douglas in a similar bid. Meanwhile he tried to use the long-delayed negotiations with Charles over the proposed marriage of Mary and Dom Luiz of Portugal to alienate Mary from the emperor and draw her more securely to him.

  In the spring of 1538 Henry began to speak very disparagingly of Charles’ intentions whenever he saw Mary, telling her the emperor was only pretending to favor the marriage to Dom Luiz while offering such dishonorable terms that Henry could not possibly accept them. On into the summer months he continued to try to turn her against her imperial cousin, until finally at the end of August he urged her to complain about the delays to Chapuys. Cromwell wrote a letter setting out her supposed grievances, and told her to communicate these to the ambassador, “coupled with such gentle terms as her own wisdom and natural discretion might suggest.”

  When Mary saw Chapuys she did as she was told. Following Cromwell’s letter point by point she complained about the emperor’s dissimulation, his failure to show her the cousinly kindness and friendship she expected of him, and his miserly dower. Even merchants give one fourth of their yearly income to their daughters on their wedding day, she said, echoing Cromwell; surely an emperor could offer more than the twenty thousand ducats Charles proposed. Why, after so many fine words had been exchanged, had nothing been settled? She was only a woman, Mary concluded, and could not help saying these things. It was not that she was anxious to have the matter settled for reasons of her own, but that she wanted to obey her father “in whom, after God, she placed all her trust.”4

  Having rehearsed all of Cromwell’s points and arguments Mary told Chapuys her real feelings. She understood that the inconclusiveness of the negotiations was not the result of bad faith on the imperial side. She did not believe what her father said against Charles, and she stood ready to do whatever he asked of her in the issue of her marriage. She had complete trust in Charles, she assured Chapuys, “in whom next to God she placed all her hopes.” Her assurances of loyalty were expressed in language so strong it seemed almost forced. She held the emperor in the place of “father and mother,” and was so affectionately attached to him that “it seemed to her almost impossible to have such an affection and love for a kinsman.”5

  Mary’s effusiveness was almost certainly the product of new uncertainties about her safety. With the possibility of war looming, Henry was restricting her movements and doing his best to direct her thinking as well. If he thought that merely by denouncing his enemy’s bad faith he could destroy Mary’s loyalty to the man who had been the symbol of her hopes for ten years and more, he was deluded. In fact he constantly underestimated Mary’s shrewdness and overestimated both her gullibility and his own charm. But however deep his misreading of her Mary was still in an awkward political position, and Chapuys was uneasy enough about her safety to raise again the old subject of a possible escape. She replied that for the time being she preferred to wait and hope that her situation would improve, and that her father would “show more consideration for her, or cause her to be more respected and better treated than she had been until now.”6

  In the summer of 1538 Mary was uneasy, if not yet fearful, about where she stood in her father’s estimation. She still wrote to him, and to Cromwell (her “sheet anchor next the king”) in the most subservient language imaginable, aware that even the slightest rumor or hint of suspicious behavior might anger them both. A letter she wrote to Cromwell at about this time reveals her state of mind. She had taken some strangers into her house for a brief time—who they were is not recorded—and the incident had been reported to the Privy Council in a way that put Mary’strustworthiness in doubt. Cromwell wrote her a strong letter of warning, ordering her not to do anything in future which “might seem to give any-other occasion than should be expedient” for her. Mary wrote back thanking Cromwell for his “gentle and friendly” letter and assuring him she would never lodge anyone in her household again. She begged him to continue to advise her and to be her advocate with her father, adding that she would rather endure physical harm than lose even the smallest part of the king’s favor.7

  Her reference to physical harm was in keeping with the atmosphere of menace that hung over the court and country in these years. Henry was becoming more and more capricious, and he seemed to take inordinate pleasure in his powers of life and death. Executions, threatened and real, multiplied in the late 1530s and early 1540s, keeping pace with the mounting popular opposition to the king. Ballad makers who put political verses to traditional tunes were arrested and condemned; at least one of them dared to set new words against Henry to one of Henry’s own tunes. In the English-held territory of Calais two priests were hanged and quartered for treason, and the story of how they lived on during their torture was carried back across the Channel to be told and retold all over London. After they were hanged, it was said, they were cut down alive and helped the hangman to take off their clothes. Then, strapped to a board beside the scaffold, their bellies were cut open and their intestines pulled out and burned, and still the priests did not die but “spake always till their hearts were pulled out of their bodies.”8

  Random violence in the London streets seemed to follow the pattern of judicial executions. Citizens on their way to mass or to business were shot or stabbed by anonymous attackers; thieves became bolder than ever. And there was a rash of suicides. One Mrs. Allen, a clerk’s wife, cut her throat with a knife “by the instigation of the devil,” and when the curate and the neighbors burst in to try to save her she could not speak. Because she knocked on her breast and held her hands up as a sign of contrition the priest gave her the last rites, and did not insist that she be given the burial of a suicide in unconsecrated ground. The grisly climax to these events was the execution of the hangman of London himself, a man who had become a macabre celebrity in his own right and who was known as “a cunning butcher in quartering of men.” With t
wo accomplices he had robbed a booth at Bartholomew Fair, and was caught and hanged in his turn.9

  At court too crime seemed to be increasing. Two archers of the guard named Davenport and Chapman were hanged when it was found they had waylaid and robbed a merchant near the palace.10 A serving boy in the pay of one of the privy chamber gentlemen was found guilty of stealing a purse with eleven pounds in coin and one of the king’s jewels. A gallows was built at the end of the tiltyard at Westminster, the noose was placed around the boy’s neck, and the hangman was just taking the ladder from the gallows when the king sent his pardon and the boy was freed.11In some dark way it gave Henry particular satisfaction to order a dreadful punishment, let the victim suffer all the agonies of hopeless anticipation of it, and then set him free at the last moment. When Sir Edmund Knevet struck another courtier the king sentenced him to lose his hand. A chopping block was immediately brought and the hand bound to it. The master cook, always ready to stand in for the executioner in minor mutilations, sharpened his hatchet. The sergeant of the scullery stood by with his mallet, and the irons were placed in the fire to sear the wound before the surgeon bound it with his searing cloth. When all was in readiness the king suddenly postponed the procedure until after dinner and then, when the unfortunate Knevet had sweated away another several hours, just as suddenly pardoned him.12

  In the intervals between episodes of bloodshed there were rumors of impending harm. For the first time since the demise of Anne Boleyn a poison scare swept the court. One of the gentlewomen told a servant of Lord Montague that when the king’s envoy Sir Thomas Wyatt returned from Spain he brought news of a potent poison. Applied to an arrowhead, it caused instant death with the merest pricking of the skin, and the only known antidote was the juice of a quince or peach. When Wyatt asked Henry whether he should bring any back with him the king said no, but the knowledge that such a powerful drug existed in itself gave rise to lurid fantasies of royal assassinations, and greatly increased the discomfort of any courtier who angered the king.

  There can be little doubt that a principal animator of the climate of fear was Cromwell. To be sure, he was not completely heartless, and managed to acquire a particular reputation for helping women. When the much-injured duchess of Norfolk appealed to him for help she said she did so principally because she “heard how good he was to lady Mary in her troubles”; ultimately his aid to the duchess increased his repute.13 But if Mary never tired of assuring Cromwell of her profound gratitude for all he had done for her, her fear of him was as obvious as her reluctant dependence on him, and most courtiers felt the same mixture of fear and inescapable reliance on the Lord Privy Seal as Mary did. Few of them trusted him completely, and many agreed with Chapuys’ assessment when he wrote of Cromwell that “his words are fair, but his deeds are bad, and his intentions much worse.”

  Cromwell came to power at a time of grave crisis, and maintained his influence during England’s most troubled decade since the wars of the last century. But he contributed to the tensions around him by creating a network of spies and informants and then using it to entrap both genuinerebels and harmless malcontents. Believing that kings rule best when their subjects fear them most, he set out to surround the royal power with an aura of magisterial caprice, and he was given to composing memoranda under the rubric “For the putting the king’s subjects and other in more terror and fear.” Certainly he succeeded in making himself both feared and despised, especially by the great aristocrats who considered themselves Henry’s natural advisers and the ambitious officials who coveted his power. He maneuvered Suffolk and Norfolk out of power, and kept lesser men away from the king by sending them on diplomatic embassies or commissions which took them far from court. His enemies found themselves suddenly out of favor, banished from the king’s presence, or worse. Just before New Year’s of 1539 Nicholas Carew, the Grand Esquire who had close ties to the marquis of Exeter and the Poles, was seized without warning and taken to the Tower. Cromwell’s agents entered his houses and took everything of value, including the beautiful diamonds and pearls of Jane Seymour’s which Henry had given Carew’s wife after Jane’s death.14

  Cromwell felt a particular enmity toward Reginald Pole, whom he called “Brainsick Pole,” that extended to everyone associated with the cardinal. (Pole returned the insult by calling Cromwell the “vicar of Satan.”) When the rumors about the Spanish poison were being spread, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Pole was the victim Wyatt and his masters were thinking of. In the summer of 1538, with war in the air and the cardinal’s denunciations of Henry growing more and more shrill, the king and his chief minister decided to make an end of the troublesome family once and for all.

  The weakest of the Poles was used to entrap the others. Geoffrey, brother of Reginald and of Henry Pole, Lord Montague, and youngest son of Margaret Pole, countess of Salisbury, was taken to the Tower. He was a rash, ill-considered young man, sensitive and easily terrified. Under Cromwell’s grilling and the abuse and torture of his agents Geoffrey broke down and told what he knew about his brothers and their friends. What he said was not in itself proof of treason, though his description of Lord Montague’s opinions and behavior told much about the rough hatreds that rankled below the surface gentility of court life.

  Like Henry Courtenay, marquis of Exeter, Henry Pole had grown up with the king from childhood. They had not liked one another as boys-according to Pole, even Henry VII didn’t like his son, “having no affection or fancy unto him.” When Pole became Lord Montague and his royal cousin became Henry VIII, they liked one another no better, and when the king began to pull down the abbeys, choose anti-papal bishops and fill his privy chamber with “knaves,” Montague began to say openlythat his character was changing for the worse. Once when Henry remarked to those about him that “he would go from them one day, and where be you then?” Montague replied without hesitation “If he will serve us so, we shall be happily rid.” Behind the king’s back he was overheard to say that “he had seen more gentleness and benignity in times past at the king’s hands than he did nowadays,” and that “the king never made [a] man but he destroyed him again either with displeasure or with the sword.”

  Remarks of this sort, along with unkind references to Henry’s corpulence and ulcerous leg (“the king is full of flesh and unwieldy,” Montague said, “and he cannot long continue with his sore leg”), may have been irritating but they were hardly treasonous. Nor were the hints of Reginald Pole’s great future and hoped-for marriage with Mary that Geoffrey Pole repeated under threat of death. But Cromwell and his master were satisfied that what evidence they had was proof of Henry Pole’s treason. As for Pole’s ally the marquis of Exeter, the king had been convinced for years that it was the marquis and his wife who had, in Cromwell’s words, “suborned” Mary during Anne’s reign and encouraged her to defy her father. This plus copies of letters exchanged by Exeter and Reginald Pole, and other letters from Katherine and Mary found in the marchioness’ possession, proved to the king’s satisfaction that Exeter planned to take over the kingdom by marrying his son to Mary and destroying Prince Edward; that Lord Montague was in on the conspiracy was substantiated by the messages carried back and forth between them by “a big fellow in a tawny coat.”15

  Montague, Exeter and another alleged conspirator, Sir Edward Neville, were imprisoned, brought to trial, and executed in December of 1538. The marchioness, her son, and Montague’s young heir were also taken prisoner, and though the marchioness was eventually released the two children stayed on in the Tower. Exeter’s son, young Edward Courtenay, would eventually be freed in Mary’s reign; the fate of Lord Montague’s son remains a mystery.

  From a political point of view the elimination of the Poles and Courte-nays was a sound dynastic expedient. All those executed or imprisoned, including Edward Neville, had a claim to the throne, however distant, and the Poles were relatives of an undoubted traitor. In dangerous times such subjects represented a risk too great to be tolerated. In human ter
ms, though, the wreckage of the Pole family left two tragic figures: the cardinal, whose personal grief now lent added urgency to his crusade against Henry, and the wretched brother who in his fear and weakness had betrayed those he loved. Geoffrey Pole was spared execution with the others because of the testimony he gave against them. Armed with aroyal pardon, he was free to live out his days without fear of royal punishment. But his inner peace had been permanently shattered. He tried to kill himself and failed. Utterly miserable in England, he joined his brother Reginald as a continental exile, restlessly wandering from city to city while slowly going mad with grief. Through his brother he was able to gain a papal pardon for what he had done, but he could never forgive himself.

  For Mary the executions were a harsh reminder of her father’s vengeance and seeming omnipotence. His capacity for destruction, already formidable, was increasing, and his hand was not stayed by affection or ties of blood. Even as she mourned the passing of those who had supported her mother and herself so faithfully she grew frightened about her own future. Her father was seeking to eliminate all those who threatened Prince Edward’s right to the throne. In the opinion of many, Mary’s own claim was stronger than Edward’s, despite her degradation by Parliament. What was to prevent the king from suddenly deciding to eliminate her as well?