Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  Once he knew he must die Cranmer took back everything he had said and written and, to dramatize his true belief, threw his recantation into the flames. He asked the crowd to forgive him for having tried to save himself; he had only done it, he said, so that he might be of use to them all at some future time. Then, thrusting his right arm and hand into the fire, he said “This, which has sinned, having signed the writing, must be the first to suffer punishment.”2 Cranmer’s recantation was published by the government, but instead of strengthening Catholicism it put Mary and her Council in a bad light. Londoners remembered only Cranmer’s final gesture, not his forced surrender to royal coercion; they denounced the published recantation as a hoax, and condemned the queen and the bishop who had subscribed his name to the book as liars.3

  The bishop, Edmund Bonner, was already thoroughly hated. Himself imprisoned in the Marshalsea during Edward’s reign, and then in the Tower, Bonner had become the leading public symbol of the Marian persecution. At the start of Mary’s reign her Catholic subjects had knelt to receive Bonner’s blessing when he was released from prison. Now the children sang out “Bloody Bonner” as he passed, and their parents vilified him as a “beastly belly-god and damnable dunghill” whose “butcherly, bloody proceedings” made him no better than a murderer. He was so bigoted, it was said, that he would have condemned even St, Paul to the flames, and so bloodthirsty that his “great fat cheeks” were glutted with the flesh of the martyrs.4

  Bonner was in fact a gross, corpulent man who liked vulgar jokes and carried out his grisly duty toward the condemned heretics of the London diocese with inhuman relish. But the stories told of his sadism—stories that in all probability went far beyond the truth—made him a monster. He liked to flog his prisoners, it was said, and to see them tortured. He tormented a blind man, and held the hand of another sufferer in a candle flame until the skin cracked open, Bonner represented all that was odious in the government’s religious policy with none of the sincere faith that made that policy tragically plausible. He was a figure of ridicule and contempt, and in an odd way he provided the Protestants with the dark comfort of a villain they could dismiss as a savage fool,

  As great a tragedy as the burnings themselves was the fact that so many innocuous villagers were condemned to the flames for holding such relatively harmless beliefs. To be sure, a sizable number of the victims in Kent and Essex were stout sectaries who preached their heretical doctrines openly and lured ignorant country people away from the church. At Colchester priests were “hemmed in at the open streets, and called knaves,” and seditious talk was as common as heresy in every alehouse and tavern.5 But in many other places the men and women singled out for destruction were only unlettered peasants or craftspeople, confused by twenty years of shifting orthodoxy and by the conflicting voices of clergymen who had changed their doctrines at least once in every reign. Young people who had grown to maturity hearing only evil of the pope were now punished for reviling him; villagers who had heard their own priests denounce the mass and the Catholic sacraments were now ordered to the stake for holding imprecise opinions on the nature of the Eucharist. Four of the women burned at Essex “could not tell what a sacrament is.” One of these women, “a young maid unskilled,” thought she had heard tell of one sacrament, but could not name it.

  And it was almost invariably the ordinary working people, the artisans and the laboring poor, who came to the attention of the commissioners. Apart from the Protestant bishops there were few gentlemen among thevictims, and only one gentlewoman. The rest were weavers, fullers, tailors, hosiers, brewers, tanners, bricklayers and their wives. There were serving men and serving women, day laborers and workers in the fields, widows and farm wives.8 It was obvious to the officials operating the search for heretics that their procedures were entrapping those who least deserved to suffer. “I do see by experience,” one of Bonner’s assistants wrote, “that the sworn inquest for heresies do, most commonly, indict the simple, ignorant and wretched.” The populace at large was greatly disturbed, he added, “when they see the simple wretches (not knowing what heresy is) to burn.”7

  It was as obvious to the queen as it was to her servants that the rigorous campaign to root out heresy was failing of its object. Instead of instilling devotion and a love of good doctrine the executions were creating impiety and resentment. The most notorious of the Protestants who had not fled to the continent were still at large, and error flourished in areas remote from royal control. Worse still, many good Catholics were refusing to believe that the holy work of preserving the true faith could take the unholy form of roasting human flesh. The burnings were “the evil church’s persecution of the good church,” some were saying. And others, who said little, simply turned from religion altogether in their disgust. One Protestant woman wrote to Bonner warning him that he had “lost the hearts of twenty thousand that were rank papists these twelve months,” and she may not have been far wrong.8

  The dawning realization that in her zeal to defend the faith she might be harming it irretrievably weighed on Mary and made her wretched. She was doing her best to rebuild the church, restoring monastic communities, renewing the clergy, giving her support to the reforming efforts of Cardinal Pole. Yet her subjects were not settling back into the familiar Catholicism of her childhood. She had believed for so long that she was destined to preside over a people happily restored to their ancestral belief. Why was that restoration so long in coming?

  If Mary hoped for insight from her cousin in Flanders, her hope was vain. What Charles V told her envoy Paget in the spring of 1556 was not recorded, but the religious situation in the Netherlands was no less tense than in England. Here too the official policy of persecution was failing to discourage the spread of Protestantism. Only a short time before Paget arrived in Brussels a house full of Anabaptists was raided; three men and a woman were taken into custody, along with the woman’s son, a boy of fourteen. The boy was spared, after receiving a public christening in the town square, but the four others were tortured until they revealed the names of many of their coreligionists, and then burned. Such incidents were common, yet the number of Protestants in the population was growing. The president of the Council in Brussels had begun to questionthe wisdom of the mass burnings, hangings and drownings of heretics. Over thirteen hundred such executions had bloodied the Netherlands provinces in the last eighteen months, he was saying, with little positive result. “For the avoidance of greater cruelty,” he now suggested, “the execrable intentions of these sectarians must be tolerated as much as possible, they being in too great number.”9

  The problem of heresy had been driven into the background of the emperor’s thoughts by an event of cosmic magnitude. For seven days and nights a huge comet was visible in the skies over northern Europe, arching its way across the heavens and “shooting out fire to great wonder and marvel to the people.” The comet was half the size of the moon, and much brighter, with beams like bursts of flame from a torch. The “blazing star” amazed the emperor, who took it as an omen of his approaching death. “These signs speak to me of my fate,” he was heard to say, and he told his servants to hurry their preparations for his departure for Spain.10He had given up all his powers now, but had not lost either his fascination with statecraft or his instinctive hatred of the French. He liked to mutter to ambassadors about how the French had “ever sought to dominate not a part, but the whole of the world,” punctuating his remarks with graphic gestures and repeating himself for emphasis. The French king’s current warlike demands, he told the Venetian ambassador, were like “stamping on his throat,” and as he said it he “placed his right hand on his neck, and with great vehemence explained this conceit, and repeated it twice.” But Charles was clearly near his end. The incessant pains from his gout had become so severe that at times he “gnawed his hand and longed for death,”11 and he did not want to die in Brussels. Finally on September 16 he left for Spain, taking with him his sister Mary, his household and the accumulations of a long
and turbulent reign.

  Just after he left a letter arrived from his daughter-in-law in England. He never saw it—his ship had already embarked when the messenger reached the imperial court—but he could have guessed its contents. Mary was writing yet again to plead with her father-in-law to send Philip back to her. “I wish to beg your majesty’s pardon for my boldness in writing to you at this time,” she began, “and humbly to implore you, as you have always been pleased to act as a true father to me and my kingdom, to consider the miserable plight into which this country has now fallen.” Philip’s “firm hand” was needed to stop the mounting unrest and criticism of the government that seemed to reach its climax as the scanty harvest was gathered in. “Unless he comes to remedy matters,” Mary wrote, “not I only but also wiser persons than I fear that great danger will ensue.”12

  The danger appeared to be coming closer and closer. Servants in herhousehold were no longer to be trusted, and her personal guard was doubled. William Harris, one of Mary’s carpenters, was overheard to slander his mistress as he sat at an alehouse. “She hath undone us,” he declared, “and hath undone this realm too, for she loveth another realm better than this.”13 One of the officers of the queen’s pantry, William Cox, had to be committed to the porter’s lodge for receiving a seditious handbill claiming that King Edward was still alive; the matter was serious enough to come to the Council’s attention and Cox was dismissed. Worst of all, while Mary was staying in the apartments Pole kept in readiness for her at Croydon someone with free access to her presence littered her rooms with copies of the ugliest and most insulting libel yet to appear. It caricatured Mary as a wrinkled hag, her shriveled bosom suckling a crowd of greedy Spaniards. Circling the drawing were the words “Maria Ruina Angliae,” and the text of the bill was an expose of how Mary, “England’s Ruin,” was plundering her subjects in order to send money to her faithless husband in Brussels.

  Mary might have found this injury easier to bear had Philip been true to his latest promise to return. He had told the English ambassador Mason that he was “setting his stable and a part of his house in order to be sent to England,” and that he would make the journey himself in August. But the summer months found him at a “house of pleasure” outside the capital, seeking refuge from the plague, and when September came and still he had not taken ship for England Mary’s disappointment deepened. By now even Cardinal Pole was “beginning to be incredulous,” as he told the Venetian ambassador, though he tried not to let Mary see his disillusionment.14

  If she had known what changes Philip had undergone during his year in Flanders Mary might have been less eager for his return. For if the lighter side of his temperament had found an outlet in masquings and tournaments, his innate seriousness had also deepened. Observers now saw in him “the very image and portrait of the emperor his father,” and noted the resemblance in complexion, features and even in “habits and mode of life.” He was no longer the affable prince whose primary concern was to obey his imperious father; he was now a powerful ruler in his own right, consumed with affairs of state and revealing a rare taste for the tedium of administration. He sat with his councilors for four or five hours at a time, made himself available to petitioners whenever they requested it, and relished combing through every clause of the reports and dispatches of his ministers with the crawling thoroughness of the born functionary.

  It was said that Philip was already becoming a very old young man, prey to infirmities and with the mentality of an invalid. His natural languor drained him of vigor and his attacks of indigestion had become more and more frequent.15 Harassed by bowel complaints, his brow furrowed by hours of deliberations and paperwork, his dapper figure hunching prematurely into the slouch of middle age, Philip was no longer Mary’s storybook prince. What was more, he had had to mortgage the income from the Netherlands provinces in order to satisfy his creditors and, like Mary, was taxing his subjects so heavily they were on the point of rebellion. And he was being pushed from all sides into war. In November Philip wrote to Mary that he saw no way of coming back to her as long as the pope continued to “injure his affairs” and the French king continued to prepare his armies and increase his arsenal. Belligerent adversaries, not indifference or amorous adventures, were keeping Philip from his wife’s side.16

  As Philip wrote to Mary his general, Alva, was leading his cavalry up to the walls of Rome. The pope had insolently imprisoned several imperial ministers in the Castel Sant’Angelo, and Alva and his troops were threatening to besiege the city. Panic-stricken Romans geared themselves to withstand the siege, tearing down churches and convents and bolstering the walls as best they could. Nearly thirty years earlier the armies of Charles V had destroyed the papal city with a vengeance; spurred by the memory of that devastation monks and nuns joined the lay citizens in digging trenches and fortifying the strongest buildings, rooting out every growing thing the hated soldiers might feed on and hoarding food and water. Pope Paul, secure in his renewed alliance with the French, was defiant. He excommunicated Philip, calling him the “son of iniquity” and accusing him of trying to “surpass even his father Charles in infamy.” Philip, who had neither the money nor, below his surface bravado, the stomach for war, was forced to look to England to fill his treasury.

  A rapprochement with his wife was now essential. To prepare the way Philip sent his pages, his stable, and his personal armory to England. When Mary heard that they had landed at Dover she was overjoyed, and when, shortly afterward, several Spanish shopkeepers disembarked with their goods she felt sure Philip would soon be on his way at last.17 Two weeks later Michiel reported that the queen was “pacified” about Philip’s absence, and that she was “enduring this delay better than she did.”18 In fact the threat of war was bringing out all Mary’s instinctive loyalty to her husband. The fact that he was in danger made her forget his neglect, his threats and his callousness. Mary was at her best in a crisis, and she responded now by bringing every resource of her government to Philip’s aid.

  Messengers began to carry letters back and forth between Mary and Philip far more frequently than ever before. They kept one another informed of everything, with Philip notifying his wife of every move Alva made and Mary passing on war intelligence gathered from English agents abroad. She sent him valuable descriptions of new French war devicesbeing deployed on the Picardy border—instruments to sap and break down walls, a specially constructed bridge made to span even the widest ditch, and a special file which could cut through the thickest chains without making a sound.19 Philip sent “very copious letters” apologizing for his inability to return, and Mary responded with descriptions of the emergency Council meetings she called to persuade her ministers to support Philip in his time of need. Through forced loans she amassed 150,000 ducats, and sent them to Philip, along with a promise of naval support against the French. Within a few weeks so much freshly coined money was put into circulation that the merchants, remembering the drastic fiscal measures of Henry VIII and Edward, feared a massive depreciation of the coinage. By December there were signs of financial panic in London, with wildly fluctuating exchange rates and debtors scrambling to pay their alarmed creditors before they found that the coins in their pockets were worthless.20

  By January of 1557 England was being drawn closer and closer to war. The sheriffs in the counties nearest the capital were summoned to court to report on the numbers of fighting men they could supply, and the royal guard was newly outfitted. Ships were repaired and manned, and the garrison at Calais received fresh troops and was put in a state of alert. After holding off as long as possible the Council agreed to send Philip the six thousand foot and six hundred horse soldiers which England was obligated to provide in the event of a French attack on the Netherlands, and on January 20 a muster of the royal pensioners was held at Greenwich Park before the queen.

  The men at arms rode past her three abreast, mounted on great war horses and carrying spears painted in white and green. Every pensioner had three hired soldie
rs with him, wearing the Tudor colors of green and silver-white, and as Mary stood on a high platform they rode up and down in front of her at the park gate, their trumpeters blowing and their standards waving in the wind. The standards bore a new design, one which combined Philip and Mary’s arms and symbolized the union of the two powers against their common foe. On one side the Castilian colors of red and yellow surrounded the white hart of England; on the other was the black eagle of the Hapsburgs with gilded legs. The pensioners hired a tumbler to perform before Mary, and as they rode by he “played many pretty feats” before her, “so that her grace did laugh heartily.” When the muster ended Mary “thanked them all for their pains” and went back into the palace much heartened.21 She and her loyal guardsmen had no need to fear the French. The combined forces of England and Spain would be more than a match for the pope and his allies.

  The new French ambassador in England, François de Noailles, took a far different view of Mary’s preparations for war. Like his brother Antoine, whom he officially replaced as ambassador in November of 1556, he saw the coming war as the ultimate tragedy of Mary’s unwise marriage. Mary’s authority was already strained to the limit; war with France would surely lead to her overthrow. “I do not know,” he wrote, “whether, if she tries to bend the bow still further, the wood and the string may not fly into fragments.” Noailles saw more clearly than Mary herself the mental anguish the war would cause her. “She is on the eve of bankrupting either her own mind or her kingdom,” he insisted. “It is impossible that the crown will not fall from her head and roll so far that someone else may pick it up before she has wept for her sins.”

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