Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  When Mary’s financial officers made their report it was little more than an admission of disaster. Paget, who acted as spokesman, laced his remarks with recriminations, and admitted in effect that the best remedy he and his colleagues could imagine was to borrow © 100,000 at Antwerp and try to raise another ,©50,000 from the merchants of London. These sums, Feria knew, would barely keep pace with the accumulating interest on current loans, let alone pay the vast cost of warfare. It cost nearly ,©15,000 a month to keep the fleet manned and afloat, and to provide each of the fourteen thousand sailors, gunners and soldiers with his pound of biscuit, two pots of beer and two pounds of beef a day.10 Feria, exasperated by Paget’s obstinacy and by the men around him who “all say that the country is rich and then add that they do not know how to raise the necessary money to defend it,” told the councilors just what he thought of them and appealed to Mary.

  But though she received him with her customary gravity and heard him out, Mary seemed preoccupied and bemused. She told Feria she would “continue to press them about the money” from Greenwich,where she was about to go, but would not consider putting off her change of residence to deal with the financial crisis. At Greenwich she would find solace amid the monks, still waiting and hoping for her labor pains to begin. She had begged Philip to come to England for her delivery, and he had given her some reason to hope that he might. If he came, he could handle Paget and the others; she was rapidly losing her inclination to wrestle with affairs of state. Overwhelmed by the complex role she was called upon to play, deferential to her husband yet sovereign within her own realm, forced to watch England’s interests sacrificed to Philip’s hazardous ventures abroad, Mary was giving in to her anxieties. She was slipping gradually into a world of her own.

  And Pole, it seemed, was keeping her company. She had been governing without his vital aid for months. He was ill and vague in mind, and wandered through the court like a sleepwalker. “The cardinal is a dead man,” Feria told Philip simply, and the tone of Pole’s letters bore out Feria’s judgment that he was no longer in full possession of himself. He wrote to other clerics and to the pope like an abstracted visionary, filling his letters with beatific sentiments and apocalyptic images of vindication for himself and his queen.

  Pole was tormented by the thought that he had caused Mary a near-fatal sorrow. In June of 1557 the pope deprived Pole of his legatine authority in England and summoned him to Rome to appear before the tribunal of the Inquisition on a charge of heresy. Another man, Mary’s one-time confessor William Peto, was appointed to take his place. Mary wrote to Paul IV protesting his action and asking him to “pardon her if she professed to know the men who are good for the government of her kingdom better than his Holiness,” but his only response was visible exasperation. Pole was still archbishop of Canterbury, but in the eyes of the bishop of Rome he was a fugitive heretic.

  Pole’s loss of favor brought home to Mary the irreversible failure of her efforts to rebuild the Catholic church in England. She had once declared that her people’s souls were worth more to her than ten kingdoms. But in the nearly five years that she had been queen she had not been able even to lay the foundations for the restoration of the church. Ruined churches and convents still blemished every town and every country landscape, and whatever spiritual rebuilding had been accomplished in the first years of Mary’s reign had been swept away by the horror Catholics and Protestants alike felt at the grisly burnings that made the queen more hated every day. When Pole sent clerks to visit parishes in Lincoln and Canterbury in 1556 and 1557 they found neither the churches nor the clergy in a state of rehabilitation. Altars were still ruined, and many had no crosses; far too many parishes lacked candlesticks, vestments, service books and stoups for holy water. There were too fewpriests to serve these parishes, and too many of the existing priests were married or undereducated. Despite the laws that ordered attendance at mass and other observances the congregations Pole’s clerks observed were very small, and the evidence of religious enthusiasm slight.11

  Mary and Pole had been convinced from the outset that the physical destruction of the churches was an insurmountable barrier to a revival of Catholic piety, and most of their energies had gone to gathering the lost revenues that had supported the episcopal and monastic establishments in the early years of the century. But it proved to be all but impossible to trace income alienated for nearly a generation; after four years of Catholic rule the bishops had not even been able to submit accurate lists of what had once been owed. In the end both the church and the crown were too poor to accomplish more than token restoration of churches and monasteries, and attempts to regularize worship and doctrine met with much the same result.12

  Neither Mary nor Pole should have expected to undo in a few years all the confusion, disillusionment and destruction brought into being by the two previous reigns. But as Mary watched the cadaverous figure of her archbishop of Canterbury pace the corridors of Greenwich she could not help but give in to defeat. The man who had absolved England from its heresy three and a half years earlier was now a stigmatized heretic himself, presiding over an unregenerate church.

  In his distracted brain Pole could not bring himself to believe that Paul IV, his former friend, had turned against him. He wrote to the pope, begging him to say that he had only been testing Pole’s loyalty, “as Christ is wont to place his dearest children in purgatory to try them.” Even as he wrote he saw a vision of deliverance. He saw God sending his angels to stay the pope’s hand from issuing the accusation of heresy. He saw Mary and Philip, “the Catholic Kings, and Defenders of the Faith,” interceding for him, and a host of pious men, “coming like a legion of angels” to put themselves between the papal sword and Pole’s head.13 With these visions he comforted himself as his wasted body succumbed to the fevers that in time would carry him off.

  XLIX

  Farewell my pleasures past,

  Welcum my present payne,

  I fele my torments so increse

  That lyfe cannot remayne.

  Cease now the passing bell,

  Rong is my doleful knell,

  For the sound my deth doth tell;

  Deth doth draw nye,

  Sound my end dolefully,

  For now I dye.

  In the spring of 1558 Mary’s sworn enemy John Knox shook his dour head over his Bible and muttered to himself about the sorry state of Protestantism in Europe. Apart from the few Lutheran principalities in the empire, Calvin’s Geneva, and a handful of other towns, there were no Protestant bastions left. In France, Scotland, England, and the Netherlands—everywhere the doctrines of Luther and Calvin had won large followings—Protestant populations were being crushed by cruel rulers determined to root them out by fire and flail: Catherine de Médicis in France, Mary of Lorraine (mother of Mary Stuart, the future Mary Queen of Scots) in Scotland, Mary Tudor in England and, until recently, Charles V’s sister Mary in the Netherlands. The more Knox pondered this situation from his refuge in Geneva, the more he became convinced that it was no accident that the sorry fortunes of Protestantism should coincide with an unprecedented concentration of power in the hands of women. That so many women were ruling over men, a condition condemned as unnatural in the Old and New Testaments and highly exceptional in recent European history, seemed a sure sign that the times wereout of joint. It was up to godfearing men everywhere to denounce the plague of females before they utterly destroyed God’s church.

  Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women was published anonymously in the late spring or early summer. It was the most thorough, the most uncompromising and the most venomous assault on female rulership yet published. “To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature, contumely to God, a thing most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice,” Knox wrote. The incapacity of women was self-evident; they we
re, according to Knox’s catalogue of imperfections, “weak, frail, impatient, feeble, foolish, inconstant, variable, cruel and lacking the spirit of counsel and regiment.” If the stern patriarchs of antiquity were to be brought face to face with the female monarchs of the 1550s they would be so astonished “that they should judge the whole world to be transformed into Amazons,” and would conclude that human society in its familiar order was coming to a disastrous end.

  “For who can deny but it repugneth to nature, that the blind shall be appointed to lead and conduct such as do see?” Knox asked. “That the weak, the sick and impotent persons shall nourish and keep the whole and strong, and finally, that the foolish, mad and frenetic shall govern the discreet? “ Whatever minimal competence women possess, compared to men “their sight is but blindness, their strength weakness, their counsel, foolishness, and judgment, frenzy.”1 The prevailing arrangement was clearly a political monstrosity; his treatise was intended to bring “this mon-striferous empire of women” to an immediate end.

  In his wholesale condemnation Knox did not discriminate among the women whose authority he deplored. He went out of his way, however, to denounce the two monarchs who had thwarted him personally. When the crown of Scotland was placed on the head of his nemesis Mary of Lorraine, he said, it was “as seemly a sight as to put a saddle upon the back of an unruly cow.” Mary Tudor was even worse. To the Scotsman she was another Jezebel, Ahab’s wicked wife who tried to annihilate the preachers of God’s word and ended her life wretchedly, her corpse mutilated by dogs. Mary was England’s “wicked Jezebel, who for our sins, contrary to nature and the manifest word of God, is suffered to reign over us in God’s fury.” Her accession to power was doubly objectionable in that she was a bastard and a vicious tyrant, “unworthy by reason of her bloody tyranny of the name of a woman.” Mary surpassed even the worst vices of her sex; her crimes were so unutterable that even the base name of woman was too good for her.

  Knox’s attack was nothing short of treason, since he urged his readers to overthrow the women he condemned. In England the First Blast of the Trumpet was officially prohibited by royal proclamation. Copies of the treatise were to be burned on sight, and anyone failing to carry out this directive was subject to the death penalty. But despite the prohibition Knox’s diatribe was read and reread by English men and women, and his indictment of Mary’s “bloody tyranny” permanently affected public sentiment about the queen. And Knox was, in any case, only one of many writers vilifying Mary. In 1558 their pamphlets and treatises were reaching England in greater numbers than ever before, creating a new vocabulary of slander and robbing Mary of what peace of mind remained to her. They called her “a raging and mad woman,” and nicknamed her “Traitorous Marie” and “Mischevious Marie.” They ridiculed her authority and mocked her false pregnancy. They caricatured her piety as bigotry, her courage as ferocity, her devotion to her husband as a combination of slavery and uncontrollable lust. Crudest of all, they jeered at her tragic marriage. Philip was gone for good, they wrote; his mistresses would keep him company from now on. He had nothing but contempt for his aging wife, and his subjects made her a laughing stock. Spaniards everywhere were wondering why he had married her in the first place, since she was clearly old enough to be his mother. “What shall the king do,” they asked, “with such an old bitch?”2

  Late in May a solicitous letter from Philip arrived at Greenwich. He was sorry he had not been able to join the queen as he had hoped, but he was glad to hear that she took the news “bravely.” Philip thanked Pole for keeping his wife company and “cheering her loneliness,” and referred him to Count Feria for further instructions.3 The letter made no mention of Mary’s pregnancy. It was now clear that her belly bore the distended outline of a fatal dropsy, and Philip’s mind had already moved on to thoughts of her successor. He ordered Feria to visit Elizabeth on his behalf, to present his compliments, and to ingratiate himself with the men around her.4

  Neither the queen nor Pole was in any condition to read Philip’s letter. The archbishop was lost in the fitful dreams of a tertian fever, the queen “suffering from intermittent fever” and wayward mental states. Severe melancholia drove her to her rooms, where she lay as if in a deathlike stupor. In her hours of near-normal consciousness she bemoaned Philip’s absence, the hatred she felt from her fickle subjects, and the loss of Calais. Charles V had once said of the Francophile Pope Paul III that, if his body were opened, three fleurs-de-lis would be found on his heart. Mary adapted the remark to herself. According to Foxe, who got the story at one remove from one of Mary’s most intimate servants, the queen told this man and Susan Clarencieux during her last months of a secret sorrow, “the greatest wound that pierced her oppressed mind.”The two servants thought she meant Philip’s infidelity, and told her “they feared she took thought for King Philip’s departing from her.”

  “Not that only,” Mary answered, “but when I am dead and opened, you shall find Calais lying in my heart.”

  In August Mary’s fever was so grave that she was moved from Hampton Court to St. James. Her physicians and attendants were worried, because she was not ordinarily susceptible to fever, but to satisfy the Council the doctors tried to find some advantage in Mary’s state. “Through this malady,” they declared solemnly, “she will obtain relief from her habitual indisposition,” meaning the complex of symptoms she suffered nearly every autumn. Mary did everything the physicians ordered, and took “the greatest care of herself,” but even though her physical health fluctuated, sinking for a few days and then reviving in what had by now become a chronic pattern, waves of depression came over the queen with greater and greater frequency, and made her illness worse. “The truth is,” one ambassador wrote, “that her malady is evidently incurable, and will end her life sooner or later, according to the increase or decrease of her mental anxieties, which harass her more than the disease, however dangerous it may be.”

  In October Mary was harassed by fresh griefs. Pole was dying, and news came that the two people who had been dearest to her since her mother’s death, Charles V and his sister Mary, were dead. The queen had a relapse. Her doctors, headed by one “Mr. Cesar, Doctor in Physic,” had to use all their skill to bring her back to lucidity. In her gratitude she ordered Dr. Cesar to be paid a hundred pounds, “by way of the queen’s majesty’s reward,” but it was obvious even to Mary herself that she would not live much longer.5 She wrote out a codicil to her will, adding the sad acknowledgment that there would be no “fruit of her body” to whom she could leave her crown and lands. At the same time she assured Susan Clarencieux’s future by further gifts, and gave thought to the welfare of her servants and waiting women.8 Her favorite Jane Dormer falling sick, Mary sent her one of her doctors and took great “care and regard” for her, “more like a mother or sister than her queen and mistress.”7 Jane’s forthcoming wedding was a source of pleasure to Mary in her last weeks. After turning down many other suitors—Mary claimed that Jane “deserved a very good husband,” and “knew not the man that was worthy of her”—she had finally found a man both she and the queen admired. He was none other than Philip’s sometime envoy to England, the count of Feria, a “most perfect gentleman” who was said to be in “great favor” with the queen.8 Mary insisted on giving the couple gifts and endowments worthy of her esteem, but she was too poor to provide them. At first she asked Jane to delay the marriage until Philip came back to England, and then, when she knew she was dying, she lamented that she would not live to see the ceremony.

  Philip kept himself informed about the state of his wife’s health through his envoys and informers and, at least until late September, through the letters Mary wrote him from time to time. When Mary’s letters stopped, Philip worried. “She has not written to me for some days past,” the king wrote on one occasion, “and I cannot help being anxious.”9 What worried him most, aside from the succession question, was that given her present vagueness of mind Mary might become the victim of swindlers. When a request
came to his court from England asking his permission to export eight thousand corselets and an equal number of arquebuses and pikes, he worried about the purpose and destination of the arms. The request was made “in the queen’s name,” but there was no confirming letter from Mary herself, and it was rumored that the entire enterprise was set afoot by “private individuals who intend to make money by selling these arms.” Eventually the request was found to be a genuine order from the queen, and the arms were sent, but Philip remained on his guard “in order that there may be no fraud.”10

  When Philip received news of the queen’s relapse in October he sent Feria back to England to represent him during her last days. Feria took with him a Portuguese physician, Lodovicus Nonnius, a man of wide reputation in imperial circles. Though Mary still enjoyed periods of rationality they were becoming fewer each day; many Londoners believed she was already dead. On November 4 she was still capable of advising her Council about what matters should be brought before Parliament, and urging her councilors to treat with Philip’s peace commissioners—for he was negotiating a truce with the French—about the possible English recovery of Calais. But she was “both sick and very weak,” and could not talk to them for very long. They prayed daily now for God to spare the queen, and gave orders that any subject who said she was dead should be set in the pillory.