Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  It was nearly midnight when Schurts and Dubois reached the outskirts of Maldon. There were twenty men on watch, headed by the bailiff in person, and Schurts had to bribe them to let the secretary pass by promising to give them the grain unloaded from his boat earlier in the day. The boat had been drawn up to the bank, and the tide was rising; just after two o’clock they cast off and started down toward the open sea. As he passed the church tower Dubois looked up to see the lookouts Rochester had warned him of, but there was no one in sight. He had some difficulty on the outward journey—in his haste he had left his best sailor behind on shore—but at nine the next morning he came up to Scep-perus’ ship and reported all that had happened in the last forty-eight hours.

  For five days the Flemish ships hovered near the English coast, waiting out a violent storm that came up as Dubois left Maldon. No English ships challenged them, though the Council in London knew their location and guessed the reason for their coming long before the storm cleared.

  But whether through an informer among Mary’s servants or some other means they also knew that the heir to the throne had not escaped, and were taking precautions to make certain she never tried to leave England again. On July 7 Scepperus gave the orders for the return crossing. The eight vessels set sail for Flanders, with Dubois at work in the vice admiral’s cabin writing a detailed account of his adventure. With them went Mary’s last hope of rescue while her brother lived.

  XXVII

  What remedy, what remedy?

  Such is fortune! What remedy?

  Word of the rescue mission to bring Mary out of England began to leak out almost as soon as the imperial ships arrived back in Antwerp harbor. By mid-July it was being publicly said in Flanders that Mary had escaped, and was living at the court of her cousin the regent. Van der Delft’s deathbed ravings had let the secret out, and the Flemish merchants, always alert to any shift in the diplomatic balance between the Low Countries and England, were telling anyone who asked how the late ambassador had been planning the venture for months before he died, and how others had successfully carried it through on his behalf.

  Partly to counteract these rumors the English Council made public its own version of the story. It was true the emperor had tried to carry off the heir to the throne, they said, but he had not succeeded. They were shocked that he should attempt anything so scandalous; they could not imagine that so exalted a personage could be guilty of so great a wrong against the king and his Council. All the English envoys living at foreign courts were instructed to inform their colleagues of the emperor’s dishonorable conduct and of the Council’s well justified indignation. Unofficially it was being said that Charles had planned to give Mary to his son Philip as a bride, giving Philip a pretext to invade and conquer England in right of his wife.1 Whether he married her to Philip or not, went another speculation, the emperor wanted to remove Mary to safety because he planned to make war on England.

  Charles V was in a belligerent mood. Word reached England of his recent ordinances against heresy—the hated placards—which threatened savage punishments for any hint of heretical beliefs. To read or sell theworks of Luther, Calvin, or any other reformer was of course forbidden, but even to discuss points of doctrine or to speak with a heretic brought severe penalties. To sell indecent or irreverent pictures of the virgin Mary, the saints or the clergy was accounted as serious an offense as preaching heresy. In every case the offender was to lose both his or her life and property, the men to be beheaded, the women buried alive. The English were astonished at the placards, and told one another the emperor meant to revive “the real and thorough Spanish Inquisition.” Twenty English merchant ships that had recently gone to Antwerp returned home abruptly when their captains read the placards, refusing to trust the promise they contained that foreign merchants would not be persecuted for their opinions “unless they gave scandal.”2

  Beyond the emperor’s increasing toughness the English had a further reason to be fearful of war. With the shift of power in the Council had come a shift in diplomacy. Somerset had favored conciliation with the emperor; Dudley made no effort whatever to appease him, and was known to prefer the French. He brought the war with France to a close in the spring of 1550, selling Boulogne to Henri II—who already held its outer fortifications—and arranging for the French king to be made a Knight of the Garter in April. The rapprochement with France was bound to worsen England’s relations with the empire still further, and as if to prepare for an inevitable war against the imperial forces Dudley saw to it that the country was geared for battle. He took advantage of the emergency military arrangements made during the risings of 1549 to create a standing army answerable to himself. An array of “lords lieutenant” replaced the sheriffs as heads of the military contingents in the shires, and certain of Dudley’s trusted followers were put in charge of bands of men at arms paid from the royal treasury.

  To channel the attention of the young king toward feats of arms Dudley ordered military entertainments to be staged for his diversion. On June 19 a water tournament was held on the Thames, organized by the Lord Admiral, Edward Clinton. A floating castle had been constructed, with three walls and a watch tower, defended by fifty soldiers in yellow and black. A galley painted bright yellow held the defenders’ munitions and more men. Four pinnaces stormed the castle, driving off the yellow galley and assaulting the defenders with “clods, squibs, canes of fire, and darts,” until the outer walls gave way. Then after a rally by the soldiers in the castle four more attack ships came alongside, with the admiral in command, and “won the castle by assault, and burst the top of it down, and took the captain and undercap-tain.”3 The militaristic tone at court and in the countryside was unmistakable, and had its effect on the populace. “All these events combine tomake the people fear that a war may follow,” Scheyfve wrote early in August. “Everybody is in great perplexity.”4

  Mary’s perplexity in the weeks that followed the failure of the escape attempt was heightened by the presence of hundreds of soldiers in the neighborhood of Beaulieu. Armed men were sent to every port and harbor in the vicinity, with instructions to scrutinize the ships that went up and down the bays and inlets for any sign of secret intent. The English ambassador at the French court was overheard to say that the Council meant to guard Mary much more strictly than before, and that in the light of her recent behavior her religious idiosyncrasy could no longer be tolerated. “She would have to put up with the new religion introduced by the king,” he said, “or she might rue it.”6 Left with no possibility of retreat to the shelter of the imperial court, Mary had now to stand and fight the Council as best she could. She had few weapons at her disposal, beyond her own resolution. Her greatest asset was the displeasure of her imperial cousin, who had already done more on her behalf than he had for her mother and might well bring greater pressure to bear in the future. But his protection extended only so far, and had to be exerted from a distance, while his agent in England, Scheyfve, was little more than a diplomatic cipher who knew no English. With these resources to fall back on, Mary set about: parrying the fresh assault on her mass that began in July of 1550.

  When Mary was leaving Woodham Walter to return to Beaulieu, she sent one of her chaplains on ahead, so that he could be ready to say mass when she arrived. When she did not come he perfomed the service anyway, with many of her household in attendance. The incident gave the Council the pretext they had been waiting for. William Parr, the ill-tempered marquis of Northampton, was also earl of Essex, and the officials of the shire were under his control. He ordered the sheriff to have the chaplain, Francis Mallet, decried as an offender against “the king’s edicts and statutes concerning religion.” Another of Mary’s chaplains, Alexander Barclay, was similarly indicted. Mallet went into hiding; Barclay stayed in Mary’s house and continued to perform her mass.

  The indictments gave the Council an excuse to hound Mary for months. Would she cooperate with the sheriff in bringing the two men to justice? How could she protest
that she and her chaplains had been promised free use of the mass when no such promise had ever been given? Would she be so gracious as to come to court to visit the king’s majesty her brother? The latter request was carefully phrased. It was an invitation, not a command, but it: was delivered by the chancellor, Richard Rich, and Secretary Petre in person carrying letters of credence from the king and Council. They wanted her away from the coast and nearer thecapital, preferably at court where her movements could be closely watched. Mary asked to be excused for health reasons, and was as usual quite sick with the coming of fall. Her illness was then urged as a reason for making the trip to court, since the change of air might be beneficial. But the contagion was not in the air of Essex, as she pointed out in a letter written toward the end of November, “The truth is, that neither the house nor air is herein to be suspected, but the time of the year being the fall of the leaf, at which time I have seldom escaped the same disease these many years.”6

  Rich tried in every way short of force to persuade Mary to leave Beaulieu. He attempted to talk Rochester into using his influence on Mary, but he gravely misread their relationship. Like others in the Council he was incapable of seeing Mary as a figure of authority in her own house; the controller, he presumed, must stand in lieu of a father to her, or a guardian. Surely Mary did not make her own decisions, and Rochester was the obvious man to make them for her. When Rich approached him the controller made it plain that he had no particular influence over Mary, and that she was not at all likely to change her mind about joining her brother in any case. The chancellor did not believe him, and became very angry, but it did no good. When this approach failed Rich tried a more oblique tactic. He returned to Beaulieu with his wife in tow, and the two of them took Mary hunting. After the hunt he urged her not to let their pastime end, but to come to visit him at his house where he would arrange special entertainments for her. Mary saw through this and declined.7 She did agree to borrow his house while Beaulieu was being cleaned, but that was all.

  In November the attack on her chaplains was renewed. Mallet and Barclay were summoned to appear before the Council, a step which underscored the gravity of their crime. Their guilt or innocence turned on the much-disputed issue of the verbal assurances given to Van der Delft that Mary could practice her religion in peace, and in December Mary and the Council reopened their debate on this point. Mary’s letters were direct, factual and concise. It was her policy, she told Scheyfve, to “write roughly” to the Council in order to convince them she would not waver in her resolution. In keeping with this policy she wrote the plain truth as she knew it, sparing no embarrassment to those in the Council who had once acquiesced in her free use of the mass and were now attempting to take it from her. Those who claimed to have no recollection of the verbal promises were lying, and she knew it; “you in your own consciences,” she wrote to them, “know it also.”

  In the weeks before Christmas Mary visited the court to back up her case. She defended her position as best she could, but found herself arguing in a vacuum. No one listened to her objectively, least of all the king,who opened the discussion with the peculiar statement that “he had heard a rumor that Mary habitually heard mass.” As Mary’s staunch Catholicism had always been public knowledge, it was evident someone had been coaching Edward in what to say to his sister. Instead of the child who had loved her like a son Mary now saw in Edward the unfeeling puppet of his councilors. “But when I perceive how the king, whom I love and honor above all other beings, as by nature and duty bound, had been counselled against me, I could not contain myself and exhibited my interior grief,” she wrote describing this interview. At the sight of her tears Edward’s façade fell away and he too cried, telling Mary to dry her eyes and reassuring her that “he thought no harm of her.” Edward’s councilors intervened before the tender feelings between brother and sister could go any further, and no more was said about religion.

  In the letter she wrote to the Council after this meeting Mary tried to distinguish between her feelings of loyalty and duty to her brother and her wary mistrust of the Council members, to whom she owed no obligation. “To the king’s majesty my brother,” she wrote, “I confess myself to be his humble sister and subject, and he my sovereign lord; but to you, my lords, I owe nothing beyond amity and goodwill, which you will find in me if I meet with the same in you.”8 The distinction was important to her. However Dudley and the others wronged her, as long as Edward kept his old feeling for Mary she had something to hope for. Jane Dormer recorded how strong that feeling was. Whenever Mary came to visit Edward, Jane heard from one who was present, he would “burst forth in tears, grieving matters could not be according to her will and desire.” Edward urged Mary to “have patience until he had more years, and then he would remedy all.” He was always very sorry to see her go, kissing her and asking for something to give her. The jewels he was allowed to present to her were never fine enough to please him, and this plus his regret at her leavetaking made him sadder than before. Realizing that Mary might try to use her influence with the king to the Council’s disadvantage, the men around Edward saw to it that Mary’s visits became more and more rare. Her presence “made the king sad and melancholy,” they said, and affected him too deeply for his good.9 Mary in turn took comfort from her brother’s assurances that, once he was old enough to rule on his own, he would stand up to her persecutors and take revenge.

  In the meantime, Dudley was doing all he could to head off this eventuality by shaping Edward’s opinions and character to serve his own ends, and the young king’s chilling reception of his sister in December was proof of the earl’s partial success. Edward had grown into a slight, delicate youth of thirteen who carried one shoulder higher than the other and had to squint to see at any distance. To his doll-like beauty was now added an incongruous pose of rough majesty—a wholly unconvincing imitation of his hearty, burly father. He put his hands on his hips and strutted about on his thin legs, frowning with dissatisfaction and piping out “thundering oaths.” He cultivated a bad temper that contrasted oddly with the religious doctrine that streamed so readily from his lips. He was very much an unformed boy, but he had the makings of an intellectually fastidious, pedantic king, impressive yet unappealing. And his frailty had become alarming. “He will be the wonder and terror of the world,” Bishop Hooper wrote of Edward in the fall of 1550, “if he lives.”

  Each year Edward took on more of the work of government, though he was far from exercising any real control over affairs of state. In August of 1551 he began to sit in regularly at meetings of the Council, and was giving thought, in a very abstract way, to how the Council and government were organized. He ordered the Great Harry rechristened the Great Edivard, and looked into enlarging her and improving her design. Even the warlike sports the young king practiced at Dudley’s insistence had their political significance; when envoys from foreign courts came to England it was important that they take away an impression of Edward as a vigorous and accomplished athlete. Here he proved to be a marked disappointment. He could hunt, shoot and ride moderately well, but when it came to the skills of the tiltyard he foundered badly. When he tried tilting at the ring—riding at a target instead of a moving opponent-he invariably missed his aim, and after humiliating himself at several small-scale tournaments held against opponents his own age, the king seems to have given up tilting altogether.

  Mary’s adolescence had been an agony of persecution, uncertainty and neglect; Edward knew only adulation, security and constant attention. But both extremes were harmful, and the hypocrisy and servility that surrounded the young king gravely handicapped his development. Pressured by his advisers in a dozen different directions, besieged by intrigues and petty politics, Edward’s own personality—and with it his peace of mind—was all but lost. The outspoken preacher Hugh Latimer warned the king against the influence of the “velvet coats and upskips” that swarmed about him, but he lacked the strength to hold his own. Van der Delft wrote to his master in 1550 that Ed
ward, who was “naturally gifted with a gentle nature,” was being “corrupted” by radical Protestant doctrines, by the behavior of his scandal-ridden Council, and by his own inability to escape the push and pull of factional politics.10 He was learning to “say only what he is told to say,” and to take on the ruthlessness of the men around him. He could not help himself, yet he realized what was happening, and resented bitterly those who were exploiting him.

  According to Cardinal Pole, who heard the story from “people whose testimony should place it beyond doubt,” Edward conveyed his resentment in a particularly cruel and graphic way. In the presence of some ofhis attendants he took the falcon he kept in his bedchamber and plucked its feathers one by one. Then, when it was naked, he tore it into four pieces, “saying as he did so to his governors that he likened himself to the falcon, whom everyone plucked, but that he would pluck them too, thereafter, and tear them in four parts.”11

  It was to this anguished boy that Mary now looked to preserve her right to keep her faith.

  On March 17, 1551, Mary rode toward London in the midst of a great procession of horsemen, gentlefolk and supporters. Fifty knights and gentlemen in velvet coats rode before her, and eighty gentlemen and ladies behind her, and as she neared the city hundreds of Londoners ran out through the fields to meet her and to join her retinue. “The people ran five or six miles out of town and were marvellously overjoyed to see her,” Scheyfve wrote, “showing clearly how much they love her.” By the time she reached the city gates there were four hundred people in her train, but even more striking than their numbers was the badge of religion Mary and all her household and attendants wore. Each of them had hung a large rosary conspicuously around his or her neck, and there was no mistaking the symbolic meaning of the procession. Their loyalty to Mary was inseparable from their loyalty to her faith, and her faith was now on trial.