Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  Disturbed though the country people were by the unaccountable course of the queen’s fruitless pregnancy their immediate concern was for the price of grain and beer. In the drenched fields the harvest had putrefied. There was no fresh grain to be had, either for bread or for brewing. There was no grass for the cattle, no hay or oats for the horses. In some areas the “greater part” of the sheep had sickened and died, and those that were left were being sold for the price of a small farm.2 In normal times August was a month of abundance, but this year there was only want, and fear of famine in the months to come. As the king and queen rode eastward out of London toward Oatlands on August 3 they saw little but barren farmlands and lean cattle, and the faces of the peasants who called out to wish them godspeed were very thin indeed.

  Who it was that gave the order to remove to Oatlands is unclear. Mary herself may have struggled toward a conscious accommodation with the truth, or a compassionate waiting woman may have helped her to make the difficult decision. According to one account there was at least one among the women of her suite who refused to go along with the delusion of pregnancy. Mistress Frideswide Strelley, “a good honorable woman of hers,” never echoed the comforting words of Susan Claren-cieux and the midwives, and when Mary could no longer endure the strain of her false hopes she sent for Mistress Strelley and thanked her for her constancy. “I see they be all flatterers,” the queen told her, “and none true to me but thou.”8

  Once installed at Oatlands Mary returned to her accustomed routine. The household officials took up their posts again, and the queen resumed her governmental tasks and audiences. She had never entirely stopped seeing ambassadors and other dignitaries, even during the time court observers reported her to be most reclusive. One of these interviews concerned the abortive peace conference. The papal prothonotary Noailles, brother of the French ambassador, spoke with Mary at Hampton Court in July. He found her to be fully informed about the course the talks had taken, and thoroughly disillusioned with the obstinacy of the French. Shetold him “half angrily” that in view of her obligations to her husband and father-in-law she could hardly be expected to remain neutral much longer, adding that if the conference had failed it was not the fault of the English mediators. “She would not lay the blame,” she said, “on anything but our own sins and demerits, and on the evil nature of the times, God’s wrath not having as yet sufficiently vented itself on us.”4

  If Mary had this view of diplomatic affairs it is possible she applied the same logic to her own situation. Her confidence in God’s guiding hand had been badly shaken, but she may have found some justification for her disappointment in the view that the wickedness of the age demanded punishment. If God could use her to drive out tyranny and restore the church, then he could use her barrenness to chastise his people for their sins. Armed with this dark consolation Mary took up her accustomed life once again, showing herself and conversing with her courtiers as usual and finally admitting “with her own lips” that she was not pregnant after all.5

  Philip went to Oatlands disappointed of a son but endowed with a kingdom. Charles V had at last determined to pass on his lands to his heirs, and the choicest of these lands, the kingdom of the Netherlands, was to be Philip’s inheritance. The emperor’s gout and troubled mental state made it impossible for him to go on ruling any longer. He needed rest and sun and quiet, when at Brussels he found only toil and foul weather and the imminent threat of war. His ailments were so severe in the summer of 1555 that he had to treat them with waters from the baths of Liege. Mules were posted at intervals along the road between Liége and Brussels to carry skins of water in relays to the imperial court.6 The emperor’s doctors had prescribed that he bathe in the healing waters at least once every twenty-four hours, and as he could not leave his desk to go to the spa the spa had to come to him.

  Charles’ sister Mary was preparing to lay aside her authority at the same time he did, to make way for Philip’s personal rule. To judge from her later behavior she was by no means anxious to relinquish her power, but did so in deference to her brother. She wrote Charles an official letter informing him of her decision in August, filled with self-apology and polite formulas of subservience. “Having long been burdened with a sense of her inadequacy,” she began, she had decided to follow his example and give up her throne, realizing that if Charles in his wisdom felt the need to retire it was only fitting that she feel the same need “given her inferiority to him in every respect, and the fact that she is a woman.” Her ability, compared to a man’s, was “as black compared with white,” she confessed, and no woman, however gifted, could effectively govern the Low Countries in time of war. As for her future, Mary of Flanders had modest expectations. She would rather “earn her living as best shemight” than go on ruling, she claimed. She had always planned to tend her mother in her old age, but now that Joanna was dead Mary would like nothing better than to live in Spain with her widowed sister Eleanor, queen dowager of France.7

  Philip was as reluctant to take power in the Netherlands as his aunt was to give it up. He was eager to leave England, but not in order to rule over the Flemings, who detested him. What he wanted most, he informed his father through Ruy Gomez, was to go back to Spain as soon after the abdication as possible, and he begged earnestly to be spared a repetition of his tense year in England. But with Charles himself planning to retire to Spain it was more imperative than ever that his son remain in Flanders, especially now that war with France was imminent. All that Philip had gained in England might be lost if he put himself at such a distance from London, while at Brussels he was only four or five days away from his island kingdom. What he had accomplished in England was well worth preserving. In the eyes of the foreign ambassadors he was so obviously the locus of political power there that both the Portuguese and Venetian envoys to the English court offered to follow him to Brussels in order to stay close to the heart of English affairs.8

  Before his leavetaking Philip acted very much like a ruling king. He startled Cardinal Pole by appearing at his door, “very privately in person,” to tell the cardinal he wanted him to assume charge of the government in his absence, and the following day he repeated this request to the entire Council, ordering the Council members “to defer to him [Pole] in everything.” “All public and important business” was to be decided according to the “opinion and advice” of the cardinal, while “private and ordinary matters” were to be handled by the Council alone.9 This left nothing whatever for the queen to do, and indeed Philip did not mention her in his final speech.

  Mary may have had this significant oversight in mind as she prepared to accompany Philip to Greenwich, where he was to take ship for Gravesend and then travel by land to Canterbury and eventually to Dover to embark for the Flemish coast. Philip was to ride through London to Tower Wharf, where he would join Mary in her barge and travel downriver to Greenwich with her. But at the last minute Mary decided not to go by water to the wharf but to ride beside her husband in an open litter, with Pole at her side and the Lord Mayor and aldermen bearing the royal insignia before her. Her instincts were sound, for many Londoners still believed she was dead, and the sight of her created a joyful commotion. The city was full of country folk crowding in for Bartholomew Fair, and the roadway along which the royal procession passed was choked with spectators. When they heard the queen was coming, the people “all ran from one place to another, as to an unexpectedsight, and one which was well-nigh new, as if they were crazy, to ascertain thoroughly if it was her, and on recognizing and seeing her in better plight than ever, they by shouts and salutations, and every other demonstration, then gave yet greater signs of their joy.”10 By her mere appearance Mary had upstaged Philip, though both were applauded heartily all along the length of their route.

  On August 29 Philip embarked from Greenwich. He and Mary said their goodbyes in private, but afterward she insisted on walking with him to the head of the stairs where his gentlemen all kissed her hand. Michiel, who was present, noted that
Mary “expressed very well the sorrow becoming a wife” as well as the dignity becoming a queen. She was evidently “deeply grieved internally,” but she took care not to show it, “constraining herself the whole way to avoid, in sight of such a crowd, any demonstration unbecoming her gravity.”

  Once the king had gone, however, and she was safely back in her apartments, she sat down in front of a window which looked out on the river and began to cry. No one but her women—among them Michiel’s informant—could see her there, and she was free to express her feelings. Her beloved Philip, her dear husband and helpmeet, was going with the next tide. She sat by the window for hours, watching as his trunks and chests and horses were loaded onto the barge, then watching his personal servants, his companions, and finally Philip himself step aboard and go below. She saw the sailors cast off and the ship move off downriver, and to her delight Philip came up on the deck one last time, “mounted aloft on the barge in the open air, in order to be better seen when the barge approached in sight of the window,” and waved his hat in Mary’s direction, “demonstrating great affection.”11 She continued to watch the river until the ship was out of sight.

  Philip and his retinue stayed at Canterbury for several days, waiting for good weather and an escort fleet of Flemish ships. There were many French ships and privateers in the Channel; only a month or so earlier seventeen French vessels had burned and sunk a Flemish fleet in a bloody day-long battle. While he waited Philip read the messages Mary sent him and sent her replies of his own. Gentlemen-in-waiting were on the road between Canterbury and Greenwich nearly every hour, and messengers hung about the courtyard of the palace night and day, “booted and spurred ready for a start.”

  When he was not attending to this correspondence Philip talked with great interest to his traveling companion Francisco de Ribera. Ribera, an adventurer living in Peru, had come back to Europe to strike a bargain with the emperor. He and his fellow landowners wanted to buy the right to their lands in perpetuity in return for enormous sums in Peruvian silver. Ribera came to Philip first, hoping to gain his support for the plan before approaching his father. The more Philip heard of the wealth to be gained the more he was inclined to give his approval. On his journey from the New World, Ribera said, he had lost some fifty thousand ducats in bullion when his ship foundered, but the loss meant nothing since the natives would replace the silver twice over as soon as he returned. Philip needed no more convincing. By the time he and Ribera set sail for Calais they were on the best of terms, and Philip spent the brief voyage calculating his profits—“so considerable a sum that the mere mention of it is alarming.”12

  Once in Flanders Philip wrote to Mary “in his own hand” informing her that he had made the crossing safely in less than three hours. In an effort to deceive the French he had not waited for the Flemish fleet but had gone on ahead with only four vessels. It was a good thing too, he wrote to Mary, for if he had waited another day at Canterbury he would have run into a terrible storm at sea. After giving Mary this news, however, Philip turned all his attention to the situation in his newly acquired kingdom, and sent few letters to England. Mary wrote him long letters every day, in French, but his replies became fewer and fewer. When Michiel saw her on September I 3 she confided in him “very passionately with the tears in her eyes” that she had not heard from her husband for seven days.13 Mary was prepared to endure separation from Philip as a favor to her cousin Charles V, and for reasons of state, provided his stay in Flanders was brief. Not long before Philip left she had written to his father that although “there is nothing in this world that I set so much store by as the king’s presence,” still she had “more concern for your majesties’ welfare than for my own desires,” and would not oppose his journey.14 But her devotion to him was so great that she was in some anguish without him, and the strain of maintaining a cheerful exterior while inwardly worrying about his feelings for her and about when he would return strained her nerves and threatened her health.

  One of Courtenay’s correspondents in England,wrote to him in September to tell him that “the queen is well and merry” despite Philip’s absence, but those closer to Mary saw that she was suffering. Michiel’s informant told him how, when she was alone and “supposing herself invisible to any of her attendants,” Mary mourned as if griefstricken, “as may be imagined with regard to a person extraordinarily in love.”15

  Now more than ever Mary found comfort and sustenance in the presence of Reginald Pole. He moved into lodgings in the palace shortly after Philip left, and took on the duty of providing solace to the queen as part of his general task of serving as regent for Philip in all but name. Pole represented everything Mary treasured. He reminded her of their joint survival of the dark days of Henry VIII. He stood for the church militant, fighting back against the advance of heresy and wickedness. And he was the symbol of England’s reunion with Rome. The very sight of Pole made her spirits rise, and though he had more pity than respect for her she was grateful for his grave and consoling presence.

  Something else that gave her comfort and absorbed her attention during Philip’s absence was the Franciscan monastery at Greenwich. It had been her mother’s special favorite, and Mary herself had been christened there. She meant to make the Greenwich convent a seedbed for the restoration of monasticism in England, and to this end she took the house into her care, spending a great deal of time among the monks and “delighting marvelously” to watch them chant the hours and celebrate mass in the chapel near the palace. Mary installed twenty-five Observant friars at Greenwich, among them Friar William Peto, “an aged man of most holy life” and like Pole a survivor of the Henrician era. Peto had recently been nominated for a cardinalate, but what endeared him to Mary was a childhood memory of being brought, probably by her mother, to say her confession to Friar Peto when she was seven years old.16

  In his letters to Philip Pole described how Mary spent her days as she waited for his return. She “passes the forenoon in prayer,” he wrote, “after the manner of Mary, and in the afternoon admirably personates Martha, by transacting business.” Pole indulgently recorded how the queen “so urged her councilors as to keep them all incessantly occupied,” imagining that she was moved to work with them because she “saw Philip present in their persons.” Though he completely misjudged her motives, Pole found Mary’s diligence in governing impressive. She worked so hard at state business “as to require energy in this matter to be checked rather than stimulated.” After a long day of discussions with her councilors, audiences with petitioners and foreign dignitaries and supervision of the drafting of documents and letters, she liked nothing better than to spend “the greater part of the night” writing to Philip. Pole feared that, combined with the strain of her husband’s absence, these labors might make her sick, especially as it was the time of the year when her chronic illness often appeared. His return would of course cure all, Pole told Philip, and Mary reinforced this message with every letter she sent. When Philip had been gone about five weeks she sent one of her gentlemen to him at Brussels. He brought the king a ring from his wife, and the message that she wished him “health, long life, and speedy return.”17

  Worse than Philip’s absence itself was the fact that Mary had no idea when he would come back. He could not commit himself to a definite time, as he had no idea what conditions he might find in Flanders, Then too there were the abdication ceremonies, which promised to be intricate and prolonged. Philip would be called upon to take part in ceremonial transfers of power in every capital and principal town of the Netherlands, and to spend enough time in each to establish his reputation and authority. Soon after his arrival he began trying to learn to speak Walloon, the only language his Flemish subjects understood and the tongue in which he would have to make himself agreeable, if not loved. His linguistic efforts argued for a long rather than a short stay, since during his year in England Philip had never made any attempt to learn English.

  What fed Mary’s worries most was the slow exodus of Sp
anish persons and goods that went on for months after Philip’s departure. At first he had left the greater part of his household behind in England—his German and Spanish soldiers, his Burgundian cavalry, his physicians and chapel clergy, most of his horses and grooms and even the pages of his chamber. But as the weeks passed the members of his household left, one after another, “with a mind,” Michiel noted, “so far as they themselves are concerned, not to revisit this country for a very long while.”18 Ships carrying the king’s personal effects and those of his chief companions left English ports every day, and worse yet, by mid-September Philip had made arrangements to pay off his creditors. Ten armed caravels arrived from Spain on September I 6, bringing some sixty thousand ducats to be distributed among the English merchants who had supplied his household and the English servants who had helped to staff it. When the Spanish fleet left, though, it carried a far greater sum to Flanders, and it was becoming more and more clear that Philip was making himself very much at home in his new lands.

  Now when Philip wrote to Mary his letters were curt and businesslike. She should revive the peace talks. She should provide ships to escort the emperor to Spain after his abdication. She should look into the prospect of having him crowned. Without being too specific Philip gave Mary “fair hope of soon seeing her,” and when she suggested coming “to some place at the sea side to see him” he offered to journey from Brussels to Bruges to be nearer to her in case she decided to come.19 But he dismissed the ship that had been kept waiting in the harbor, ready to take him to England at any time, and finally on October 19 he sent word to Mary that all his remaining noblemen, soldiers, pages, equerries and horses should be loaded onto ships and sent to him at once. This left only his confessor, two Dominican friars and his chapel clergy in England, and though he explained that he needed the others to replace the emperor’s servants who were embarking for Spain Mary was angry and hurt.20 She began fitting out a fleet to send to Flanders to bring him back, but before it could be victualed and manned word came that the emperor’s formal renunciation of his lands had been postponed, and Philip could not hope to leave Brussels before November.21