Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  “Now, loving subjects,” she went on, “what I am ye right well know. I am your queen, to whom at my coronation, where I was wedded to the realm . . . you promised your allegiance and obedience unto me. And that I am the right and true inheritor of the crown of this realm of England, I take all Christendom to witness. My father, as ye all know, possessed the same regal state, which now rightly is descended unto me.” As to her marriage, Mary assured her subjects that she had been moved to take a husband not out of lust or self-will, but “to leave some fruit of my body behind me, to be your governor.” If she thought for one moment that her marriage would harm any one of her subjects, or any part of the realm, she said, she would remain a virgin for life.

  It was a masterful speech, delivered without notes and seeminglywithout any preparation but the constant preoccupation of a loving sovereign with her people’s welfare.

  “I cannot tell how naturally the mother loveth the child,” Mary told the Londoners, “for I was never the mother of any, but certainly if a prince and governor may as naturally and earnestly love her subjects, as the mother doth love the child, then assure yourselves that I, being your lady and mistress, do as earnestly and tenderly love and favor you.”

  At these “so sweet words,” a chronicler wrote, the people took comfort, and many of them were weeping.

  “And now, good subjects,” the queen concluded, “pluck up your hearts, and like true men, stand fast against these rebels, both our enemies and yours, and fear them not, for I assure you I fear them nothing at all!”21

  Cheers of “God save Queen Mary!” rang through the hall as the queen took her leave, and some were heard to add “and the prince of Spain!” Mary’s councilors were dazzled, and her chancellor openmouthed in admiration. “Oh, how happy are we,” he exclaimed, “to whom God hath given such a wise and learned prince!” Renard, cynical to a fault and grudging in his compliments, stated the simple truth when he wrote that “there never was a more steadfast lady than this queen.”

  XXXVI

  Remember well, o mortall man, to ‘whom god geveth reason,

  How he truly, most ryghtfully, doth alivayes puny she treason.

  On the morning of Saturday, February 3, Wyatt and his men entered Southwark. They met no resistance. Some of the soldiers raised to oppose them joined them instead, and the people of the suburb entertained the rebels “most willingly with their best” out of fear. Only the river now lay between the Kentishmen and the heart of London, and in the city proper all was rumor and panic. “Then should you have seen taking in wares off the stalls in a most hasty manner,” wrote one Londoner. “There was running up and down in every place to weapons and harness; aged men were astonished, many women wept for fear; children and maids ran into their houses, shutting the doors for fear.” All the boats in the river were withdrawn to the Westminster side, and in every quarter of the city Mary’s speech was read and reread to the people to give them courage in the difficult hours that lay ahead.

  Wyatt set up two cannon against London Bridge, but the citizens had placed four against him, while arquebusiers fired on his men from the White Tower and the Water Gate. The great guns of the Tower were trained on Southwark, but when one of the Tower captains came to Mary to ask whether his gunners should fire on the rebels she refused to give the order. “That were pity,” she said, “for many poor men and householders are like to be undone there and killed.” In the end the threat of bombardment was enough to drive Wyatt to the desperate gamble of marching his men upriver to Kingston, crossing over by night to the opposite bank, and coming into the city from the west at dawn on February 7.

  The musters had been ordered for six o’clock, but it was only four when the streets were filled with the “noise and tumult” that Wyatt wasonly a few miles off. Mary was at Westminster, very near the rebels’ path; her councilors met in her bedchamber, and begged her to save herself by taking her barge to the Tower. But putting her faith in her captains—Pembroke and Clinton—and in the gentlemen pensioners and guardsmen who surrounded the palace she announced that “she would tarry there to see the uttermost.” Her courage was so great many believed she might take the field against Wyatt herself.1

  Throughout the day the rebels and the defending bands marched back and forth through the city, with Wyatt gaining Ludgate after encountering only slight resistance from the chamberlain, Sir John Gage, and his men at Charing Cross and from Pembroke at what is now Hyde Park Corner. Sir William Howard held Ludgate against him, however, and he had to turn back, only to find that all the routes out of the city were now blocked off by troops loyal to Mary. To prevent more bloodshed Wyatt surrendered, and by five o’clock he was the queen’s prisoner.

  No one in the court knew until the end of the day how the battle for the city was going, and alarming rumors of defections, rebel victories and treasonous behavior from the queen’s captains set the servants of the royal household to pacing the galleries anxiously and arming themselves as best they could. Mary’s women expected the worst, wringing their hands and swearing “We shall all be destroyed this night. What a sight is this, to see the queen’s bedchamber full of armed men!” As the day went on, one of the guardsmen wrote in his diary, there was “such a running and crying of ladies and gentlewomen, shutting of doors, and such a shrieking and noise as it was wonderful to hear.”

  Through it all Mary remained serene, assuring everyone around her that her captains would not deceive her, and even if they did, God would not, “in whom she placed her chief trust.”2 When one of Wyatt’s lieutenants came to the court gate at Whitehall and shot arrows into the court itself, wounding one of the defenders, an attorney of Lincoln’s Inn, in the nose, some of Mary’s soldiers came running to her crying “All is lost! Away! Away! A barge! A barge!” But even then “her Grace never changed her cheer, nor removed one foot out of the house,” and instead asked all of her courtiers to pray for victory. “Fall to prayer!” she told them, “and I warrant you, we shall hear better news anon.”

  By this time it was late in the afternoon, and Mary’s guard, fearing an attack on the court in force, asked her to let them open the gate and de-fend it as long as they could. Mary agreed, after the guardsmen promised “not to go forth out of her sight,” as they were “the only defense of her person this day.” The soldiers marched out to take their places, and as they passed under a gallery window the queen leaned out and spoke to them again, requiring them, as “gentlemen in whom she only trusted,” not to go out of her sight. But they had been at their post less than anhour when the news came that Wyatt had been captured, and the queen and her courtiers breathed easily once again.3

  At Tower Gate a crowd of dazed spectators, bewildered first by the pre-dawn alarm of Wyatt’s onslaught and again only twelve hours later by the news of his sudden surrender, watched as the traitor was led past them in his mail shirt, velvet cassock and lace-trimmed velvet hat. As he passed into the compound a knight who had fought against him seized his collar and addressed him loudly.

  “Oh! thou villain and unhappy traitor!” he shouted menacingly, shaking Wyatt as he spoke, “how could you find it in your heart to work such detestable treason to the queen’s majesty?” “If it were not that the law must justly pass upon you, I would strike you through with my dagger.”

  The knight’s hand was on his dagger as he finished, but the prisoner made no stir to defend himself. He kept his arms at his side, and, “looking grievously with a grim look” at the other man, said quietly “It is no mastery now,” and passed on into the fortress.4

  Wyatt’s confederates were less resigned to their fate. William Thomas, the man who had suggested assassinating the queen, tried unsuccessfully during his imprisonment to kill himself by “thrusting himself under the paps with a knife.” Another of Wyatt’s captains escaped to Hampshire, where he was finally captured disguised as a sailor, “his face disfigured with coals and dirt.” The duke of Suffolk, Jane Grey’s father, was found hiding in a hollow tree where a dog had sniffed
him out.5

  For months after the rebellion London was a city of corpses. New gallows were built at every city gate and at the principal landmarks, and in Cheapside, Fleet Street, Smithfield, Holborn, on London Bridge and at Tower Hill the bodies of those who had followed Wyatt swung and rotted and stank. The soldiers who had gone over to join the rebels were hanged at the very doors of their houses in the city, and the executions seemed to go on for weeks. “There has never been seen such hanging as has been going on here every day,” Noailles wrote, and those who were pardoned had good reason to thank their luck and cheer the queen. Perhaps as many as a hundred of the rebels were hanged; the rest, bound with cords and wearing nooses around their necks, went in double file to the tiltyard at Westminster, where they knelt in the mud before Mary. There she pardoned them, and their ropes were cut and their nooses thrown off. A diarist who described the scene of the mass pardons wrote how the freed men rushed out into the streets, throwing up their caps and shouting “God save Queen Mary!” while bystanders picked up the nooses as souvenirs, sometimes collecting as many as four or five before going home.6

  In the wave of official retribution Jane and Guilford Dudley, who hadtaken no part in Wyatt’s revolt but who nonetheless represented a threat to the security of Mary’s government, were condemned and executed on February 12. Wyatt himself was kept alive until April, when he was beheaded on Tower Hill, his “bowels burnt” and his head set on the gallows on Hay-Hill beside Hyde Park. His corpse was taken to Newgate to be parboiled, after which it was quartered and the four quarters displayed in four parts of the capital. Wyatt’s lands were parceled out among the gentlemen of Kent who had helped to suppress his rebellion, but Mary took pity on his widow and five children. At first the queen allowed the woman an annuity, and later permitted her to redeem her husband’s goods and a little of his property.

  In the dispatches of the resident ambassadors in England the Kentish rebellion took on the proportions of a monumental uprising. All the rumors of the early days of Wyatt’s threat—of large-scale unrest in Cornwall and Wales, of mass desertions from the queen’s forces and of imminent, country-wide revolt—were reported in detail and sent to the imperial, Venetian and French courts with all haste. Before these exaggerated accounts could be corrected they had given rise to further distortions, until it was being said that Mary was about to be overthrown and “all England” was in turmoil. The French king circulated reports that thousands of rebels in many parts of the kingdom had seized the major fortresses, backed by the majority of the people, who preferred death to subjugation to a foreign prince. To the pope, the Venetian Signory and the rulers of the Italian states he wrote that there were hundreds of Spanish troops fighting against the rebels, and his letter was given such credence in Venice that the English ambassador there, Peter Vannes, had to send out a letter of his own explaining that the current reports went far beyond the truth.7

  The colony of English merchants in Antwerp was thoroughly frightened, not least because local creditors would lend no more money to the English government once they got wind of the rebellion. Egmont and his colleagues, who had left London as Wyatt moved into Southwark, substantiated the worst of the rumors by claiming that the rebels were massed against the capital twenty thousand strong. When the news of the queen’s victory over Wyatt finally arrived on February 14 every Englishman in the city joined in a huge celebration, lighting bonfires, providing tuns of wine to all who would drink and setting off a “great peal of guns.”8

  Though more accurate reports of the size and menace of the Kentish revolt eventually reached continental sovereigns the episode put both Mary and her government in a bad light. The revolt itself was attributed to the weakness of a woman ruler, yet its suppression was in no way credited to her strength. The royal defeat of Wyatt was in any case aclouded triumph, for the collapse of his rebellion was to an extent his own doing. In going ahead without the promised support of the other conspirators Wyatt had shown determination but scant judgment. He had not been able to recruit enough followers to guarantee success, nor had he proved competent to lead a swift and decisive attack on London. More worrisome to the queen and her councilors was that many of her subjects, though indifferent to Wyatt’s nebulous program to change Mary’s advisers, were equally unwilling to take up arms against the rebels. In the long run this stubborn lack of concern might prove more dangerous than any rebellion.

  The leniency with which Mary treated three of the conspirators—Courtenay, Elizabeth and Noailles—was particularly hard for foreign rulers to comprehend. Courtenay had been in on the plot from the start, but had not carried out the role assigned to him, and had actually fought on Mary’s side—where he was a distinct liability—during the final days of the revolt. He was allowed to go abroad, though he did not leave for some months. Elizabeth, who was strongly suspected of being in communication with Wyatt and the French about the revolt, was imprisoned in the Tower for three months but then released under close guard. And Noailles, though endlessly harassed and annoyed by Renard and his men, received no official punishment.

  Noailles was made thoroughly uncomfortable throughout the spring of 1554. He found his spies suborned, his agents threatened, and his dispatches missing. He suspected, with good reason, that Mary and Renard were reading everything he wrote, aided by a cipher key provided by a double agent. When a new house was made available to him in London—Mary’s residence of Bridewell—he found to his chagrin that it was Renard’s old house, and that his predecessor had taken every door, window and lock with him when he left. The only thing Renard did leave behind, in fact, was one of his own informers, who reported everything Noailles said and did and kept all important visitors away from his door.

  There were no serious aftershocks to Wyatt’s rebellion, but the drawn-out executions and prominent gallows kept the events of February fresh in the memories of Londoners. Foreigners living in the city became more and more apprehensive about their safety, and some, observing mysterious marks on their houses, believed they had been singled out for assassination and left the country.9 With the first days of warm weather children playing in the open fields at the outskirts of the city carried out a chilling re-enactment of the drama their parents had lived through. Armies of boys and girls, hundreds on each side, played “queen against Wyatt” so roughly that some on both sides were hurt. One boy took the part of the prince of Spain; he was taken prisoner and hanged, and thesimulation was so authentic that he was nearly strangled by the rope. Mary ordered those who had organized the mock combat to be whipped and imprisoned briefly, and no more games of “queen against Wyatt” were reported during her reign.10

  After the collapse of the rebellion Noailles remarked wryly that “perhaps God is permitting her marriage to this prince in order to punish them both.” It was the only viewpoint left for a defeated conspirator, but in seeing that the forthcoming marriage would cause Mary a good deal of anguish in the months ahead Noailles was right. She was being encouraged from all sides to reconsider her decision to marry Philip. The burghers of Flanders, while they saw clearly the commercial advantages of a closer political union with England, hated Philip with such intensity that they condemned the marriage. One of Cardinal Pole’s principal servants, William Peto, wrote Mary a long letter advising her on both spiritual and practical grounds not to marry. According to Renard, Peto warned Mary repeatedly that “she would fall into the power and become the slave of her husband,” and added the dark prediction that “at her advanced age she cannot hope to bear children without the peril of her life.”

  The latter point, Renard noted, was being made over and over again when the marriage was discussed, much to Mary’s chagrin. Peto’s letter arrived on her thirty-eighth birthday—an opportune moment to point out one of the principal shortcomings in the prospective marriage—and coincided too with new rumors of violent attacks on Philip once he arrived in England.11 Renard was beginning to recommend that Philip delay his arrival until fall, and was even hinting that
he wished “the whole matter” could be reconsidered. Mary, though, was unshaken in her resolution to fulfill her vow to marry Philip, and as quickly as possible. (She would not agree to marry during Lent, as it was against church law, but was prepared to have the ceremony as soon after Easter as it could be arranged.) As for Renard’s fears for the prince’s safety, she told him “with tears in her eyes” that she would rather never have been born than to have harm come to Philip. She would guarantee his safety personally, and he must not postpone his arrival on account of rumors of danger.

  Philip had not been idle in communicating with all those involved in arranging his marriage, but his only message to his intended bride was the indirect news, conveyed through Renard, that he was pleased at the prospect of marrying her. Mary sent word back that “she would fulfill towards him all the duties which ladies were bound to discharge where their husbands were concerned,” though she did not commit this involuted sentiment to writing, believing that etiquette demanded that the man be the one to begin the correspondence.12 She did add a more down-to-earth piece of advice to Philip, recommending that he bring his ownphysicians and “trustworthy cooks” from Spain. Since physicians and cooks were the usual conveyers of poison this advice would ordinarily have been alarming to Philip, but he knew from other sources that the queen was preoccupied with planning every detail of his household and retinue, and he simply did as she asked.

  The arrangements were complex and time-consuming. Price lists of food for men and horses had to be drawn up, so that Philip could estimate his expenses and bring an adequate sum with him when he came. Precise exchange rates for Spanish and Italian crowns and Portuguese ducats had to be determined in advance, to prevent exploitation of the Spaniards by English merchants and to discourage the growth of an illegal money market. To prevent incidents between the English and Spaniards during Philip’s initial journey from the coast inland, and on ceremonial occasions, an English marshal had to be appointed. Together with Philip’s Spanish marshal, this man was to prevent the exchange of insults on both sides and to make sure the English didn’t “push up against foreigners as they are accustomed to do.” All the officers and lesser servants of Philip’s household had to be selected and approved, a gargantuan task whose completion in late March was marked by a solemn ceremony. The entire group was assembled before Mary’s great master and chamberlain and made to swear an oath of loyalty, along with the hundred archers who were to join the Spanish guardsmen Philip would bring with him. The archers were chosen from Mary’s personal guard, on the basis of their proven loyalty and skill in languages. It had been hoped that they could be outfitted with liveries to match their Spanish counterparts, to promote greater unity among the two contingents, but no sample of the Spanish livery could be found in time.13