Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  These dark imaginings were offset by the sunlit pleasures of riding and hawking. At six Mary rode well, and Lord Abergavenny sent her a horse of her own. Henry sent her a goshawk, and she seems to have spent many hours in the summer of 1522 learning to hunt with her. One entire August day Mary and her attendants rode in the forest near Windsor Castle, picnicking on bread and ale.8 The princess’ household establishment was quite large by the early 1520s. At age six she had seven gentlemen, ten valets and sixteen pages, plus stableboys, kitchen urchins, her laundress and woodbearer. The lists of goods supplied to her bakehouse, butlery, kitchen, and accatry grew longer each year, until her table was costing the king nearly twelve hundred pounds annually.9 Among the members of Mary’s growing household were two who would be in her service for decades, Beatrice ap Rice, her “lavender” or laundress and David ap Rice, who was at first a page but soon became yeoman of the chamber. More ephemeral are the names of minstrels who were in her pay for only a few months at a time, English and French names in most cases but occasionally a Welshman like Elandon, who joined her establishment when she was nine.

  Music was the most intimate of the links between Henry and Mary. Among Henry’s prodigious talents was the ability to play, with the bravado of a gifted amateur, on a good many musical instruments—among them the gittaron, lute, cornet, and virginal. He liked nothing better than to follow up an afternoon of strenuous jousting with an impromptu evening concert, where he performed in alternation with the professional musicians of his court and often played nearly as well as they did. He collected instruments, and was always looking for advancements in design and sonority; in his collection was a mechanical virginal, described as operating “with a wheel without playing upon.”10 His serious compositions—motets and masses—were no less praised than his lighter songs, and among the popular tunes of Mary’s childhood—“Hay the Eye,” “Maugh Murre,” “Bonny Wench”—was the king’s own “O My Heart.”

  Henry collected musicians as he did instruments. In 1519 he had at least three very distinguished soloists at his court, a French clavichordist, a German keyboard player who so impressed the king that he took him along on his summer progress to entertain him at Woodstock, and the famed Venetian organist Dionysius Memo.11 Memo, who was organist of St. Mark’s, arrived at Henry’s court with his own organ, “brought hither with much pain and cost,” and a group of virtuosi; the king promptly made him chief of his musicians and chaplain. He almost certainly became Mary’s teacher as well, for his stay at court coincides with her early childhood and by the time she was three or four she was playing the virginal for visitors. Mary shared both Henry’s love of music and his natural aptitude. As a child in arms she learned to recognize Memo across a room full of dignitaries and would call out loudly to him to play for her.12 She became a skilled player in her own right, with a facility for rapid and intricate passagework, and when she grew older she taught the women and girls in her household to play.

  Mary resembled her father in many ways besides her musical gift and fair coloring, but her formal education took no account of this resemblance. Instead she was taught to deny in herself all traces of Henry’s spontaneous flamboyance and self-assertion, and to perceive the overriding truth that for her, as for all women, life must be a grim battle against temptation and weakness, a battle she was destined to lose.

  We know a good deal about what and how Mary was taught in her childhood. At Katherine’s request the Spanish humanist Vives designed a plan of study for her, set out in several educational treatises. One of these prescribed a curriculum in the classics, describing how the princess was to acquire the rudiments of pronunciation and grammar and then read simple Greek and Latin stories before going on to Plato, Plutarch, Cicero and Seneca. The Christian Latin poets and the writings of the church Fathers were to be emphasized, and, of course, Mary was to read passages from the scriptures every morning and evening. For recreation she was to read stories about self-sacrificing women. Vives recommended in particular Livy’s account of the virtuous Roman matron Lucretia, who after being raped by the son of Tarquin the Proud, stabbed herself to death, and the story of the patient Griselda, whose husband put her through endless trials to assure himself of her devotion. These were to be her models, in addition to the suffering holy women whose lives she knew intimately from the legends of the saints.

  More important to Vives than Mary’s mastery of Greek and Latin was her education in virtue. Every young girl, he wrote in his work On the Instruction of a Christian Woman, ought to keep constantly in mind that she is inherently “the devil’s instrument, and not Christ’s.”13 To Vives as to most humanists the central dilemma of female education was the inherent sinfulness of women. This negative premise was the foundation of Mary’s training, and everything she learned was to be chosen in the light of whether it was likely to palliate or entrench the inescapable perversity of her nature. When Katherine asked Vives to draw up a plan of education for Mary, she envisioned it primarily as a form of protection for the young girl, to guard her “more securely and safely than any spearman or bowman whatever.”14

  The protection she referred to was, first and most obviously, protection of Mary’s virginity. Erasmus, who at first saw no point in education for women, was persuaded in England that “nothing so completely preserves the modesty” of young girls as learning, for without it “many from simplicity and inexperience have lost their chastity before they knew that such an inestimable treasure was in danger.”15 At courts where the learning of girls is ignored, he wrote, they spend their mornings dressing their hair and painting their faces, showing themselves off at mass, and gossiping. In the afternoon they lie about on the grass in fair weather, joking and flirting, “with men leaning over on to their laps.” Their days are spent among “sated and indolent servants, very squalid, and of impure morals.” In this atmosphere modesty cannot thrive, and virtue has little meaning. Vives hoped to keep Mary from these influences, and in consequence he devoted as much attention to the environment in which the princess was to be educated as he did to the content of what she learned.

  From earliest infancy, he insisted, she should be kept away from the company of men, lest she become attached to the male sex. Since “a woman that thinketh alone, thinketh evil,” she was to be surrounded at all times with “sad, pale and untrimmed” servants and taught to weave and spin when her lessons were over. Weaving Vives recommended as inducing a “love of sober sadness,” an approved frame of consciousness likely to discourage the sensual musings native to all females. Of the “foul ribaldry” of popular songs and books the young girl should know nothing, and should beware of romances “as of serpents or snakes.” Lest she trust herself too much, he advised, she should be encouraged to fear being alone; she should be trained to require the company of others and rely on them for everything. Vives’ recommendations amounted to a deliberate programming for helplessness, with the feelings of inferiority and depression that accompany it.16

  But his warnings against sensuality were even more harmful. The child’s movements should be watched, he noted, to prevent “uncomely gestures or moving of the body.” Only the blandest food should be served, which would not “inflame the body.” He recommended that as an adolescent Mary should fast to “bridle the body and press it down, and quench the heat of youth.” Fasting, always a mark of the ascetic life, became in the early sixteenth century the special hallmark of young female saints. Popular pamphlets told of the prodigious fast of one young girl in the Netherlands, Eve Fliegen, who gave up all food and drink and subsisted for years entirely on the scent of roses.17 Weak wine was permissible, Vives thought, but water was best, since “it is better that the stomach ache than the mind.”18 All adornment of the body was of course hazardous. Like the sight of men, perfumes and ointments “fire the maid with jeapardous heat” and were to be avoided, and Mary’s guardians were to impress on her that an alluring woman is “a poisoner and sword” to all who see her.

  Mary’s education w
as intended to provide her with an intellectual chastity belt—a view of herself and of the spiritual dangers facing all women that would frighten her into an attitude of withdrawn virtue. For it was a vital corollary to this concept of self that it was only compatible with a life of domesticity. Public life in any form was impossible for women, for it meant loss of chastity and good repute. Vives’ model of female behavior envisioned a woman at home and silent, with “few to see her and none at all to hear her.” Leaving the house was full of perils; it demanded that she “prepare her mind and stomach none otherwise than if she went to fight.” In streets and public places “the darts of the Devil are flying on every side,” Vives insisted, and her only defenses were the good examples she had been taught, her determination to remain chaste and “a mind ever bent toward Christ.”19 To forestall prying eyes she should cover her neck and veil her face, leaving “scarcely an eye open to see the way.”

  Vives’ educational doctrines called for claustration, cultivated prudery and an exaggerated horror of sensuality in every form. They were more the product of Spanish than English attitudes toward women, but Vives took many of his teachings directly from the works of St. Jerome, whose views on female education had been a respected part of Christian culture since antiquity. That women were morally inferior to men was a commonplace of theology, and the fathers and scholastics of the middle ages had elaborated dozens of antifeminist formulas. The traditional starting point of these arguments was the Christian story of creation itself, in which Adam was made directly by God but Eve was made only indirectly, by means of Adam’s flesh. Eve was thus not made in God’s image but in Adam’s, and was inferior to him. It was Eve, too, who tempted Adam to disobey God and was responsible for mankind’s fall. To these sins scholastic theologians added the Aristotelian teaching that all female creatures are “misbegotten males”—biological accidents and imperfections. Man was seen as the norm of humankind, woman as the abnormal exception, and some Christian writers wondered whether, at the last judgment, women would rise from the dead in female form or whether they would be resurrected in the perfect form of men.

  What gave these teachings their enduring authority was that they were biblical in origin and thoroughly integrated with the other doctrines of the church. St. Paul had written that “the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church,” and had forbidden women to speak in the Christian congregation; women, he taught, should reverence men and remain in proper subjection to them. Several New Testament passages implied that men were to serve as mediators between their wives and Christ, just as Christ served as mediator between man and God. Male superiority was in an important sense essential to salvation—a part of the revealed truth of Christianity. To doubt the inferiority of women, then, was to doubt salvation itself.

  Social doctrines also supported this view of women. English men and women of the Tudor age believed that society was held together by a complex network of relationships between superiors and inferiors. Each individual had a preordained place in this network, and only by staying in that place could the social order be maintained. Women were ranked in the social hierachy according to the status of their fathers, first, and later according to that of their husbands; if they presumed to throw off their subservient role they risked upsetting the entire social structure.

  Of course, Mary had only to read and to look around her to see contradictions to the principle of female weakness and inferiority. Medieval women had worn armor and led feudal armies; they had conducted sieges and organized the defense of towns and castles. Fist fighting was known in fifteenth-century England as “fighting like women,” and the chronicles of the age were full of accounts of embattled women. In her grandfather Henry VII’s reign, during fighting in Flanders a small group of English soldiers were left to guard Nieuport against the French. Many of the soldiers were wounded, and the others proved too sick or exhausted to defend the town when the French attacked. Just as they entered the gates, however, a shipload of English archers from Calais landed, and the women of the town joined them in pushing back the attackers. Crying “Help, Englishmen!” they rushed on the French with knives and cut their throats as fast as the archers could shoot them.20

  Examples of learned women were equally numerous. Mary’s great-grandmother Margaret Beaufort translated French works into English and was praised as a “right studious” woman with an “upholding memory”; she kept an apartment at Cambridge and founded Christ’s College there. On the continent, the Italian courts were noted for their learned women, and the daughters of the German humanist Pirckheimer were famous throughout Europe for their scholarship. Closer to home, Thomas More’s daughter Margaret was a brilliant scholar whose treatise on the Four Last Things More pronounced superior to his own.

  The most obvious exemplar at Henry’s court of female strength, courage and intellect was the queen. Born in a military camp as her mother’s forces were besieging Granada, Katherine had survived a bitter adolescence in a strange country, suffered the deaths of a young husband and all but one of her children, and now lived with the ignominy of her husband’s infidelities. Yet she did not give way to frustration or resignation. She took pride in her ancestry, her capabilities as a ruler in Henry’s absence, her imperturbable dignity and her ever gracious smile. She took pride also in her learning, for which Erasmus called her “a miracle of her sex.” Vives concurred in this judgment, but here the compliment to Katherine the woman ended and the insistence on woman’s weakness began again. For Vives’ highest praise of the queen was that it was only an “error of nature” that she was not a man. “There was in her feminine body a man’s heart,” he insisted.21 “But for her sex,” Thomas Cromwell would say of Katherine later, “she would have surpassed all the heroes of history.”22

  Both Mary’s education and her observation taught her in childhood that as a woman she must fear her nature for its weakness and her character for its tendency to sin. Her wit might be considerable, but it would never be trustworthy or profound. She must fear to think or judge or act on her own, and must limit her aspirations to a retired life of quiet obedience to a husband chosen for her by others. If she surpassed herself, she might someday, like Katherine, be compared to a man—but only in a way that pointed to lost opportunities and futile hopes.

  V

  O heresy, thou walkest a-wrye,

  Abrode to gadde or raunge;

  Like false brethren, deceave children,

  This Churche nowe for to chaunge:

  Her praier by night to banish quight,

  With new inventions straunge.

  On April 17, 1521, a thickset young monk with the coarse features of a peasant stood before the German Diet at Worms. The emperor, Charles V, was present, along with the leading figures in the German church and state. The young monk, Martin Luther, was confident yet overawed by the assembly. For he had been summoned to Worms in hopes that he might take back the heresies he taught—that the pope was only a fallible man, and that salvation did not come through the seven sacraments of the church.

  The pope, who saw Luther as just another heretic, had excommunicated him, but in the empire he was already a popular hero. His writings were eagerly received by Germans of all classes who resented the political and economic stranglehold of Rome and saw in his teachings a rallying point for rebellion. North of the Alps, Luther was a dangerous man. Rather than force him into open revolt by publishing the papal bull of excommunication the emperor summoned him to Worms. Here he was shown a pile of his books. Would he stand by everything he had written, he was asked, even where it went against the age-old teachings of the church? How could he be certain that he was right and all those who had gone before him were wrong?

  Luther appeared to falter under the pressure of his examiners and the solemn weight of the occasion. He asked for time to prepare his reply. He went back to the freezing attic that was the only lodging he had been able to find in the city and pondered whether he might have overstated his views. T
he next day he returned to face the Diet, convinced that he could alter none of what he had written. If he did not yield, the officials warned him, the only possible outcome would be bitter division and civil war throughout the German lands. But Luther was adamant. He had to follow scripture and his conscience, and no one else. Charles V left the room, unconvinced. Luther was outlawed, and left Worms in fear of his life. In the following year the first in a wave of bloody revolts that would devastate German society in the 1520s was under way.

  On the day the Diet of Worms ended Henry VIII’s secretary Richard Pace found the king in his chamber reading one of Luther’s works. It was his new treatise On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, in which he argued that there ought to be only two sacraments, the Lord’s Supper and baptism, and not the seven defined by Rome. The treatise provided Henry with just the focus he needed for a project he had long had in mind. Since 1515 he had been at work on and off on a theological treatise of his own. Now he would turn it into an assault on Luther. The grateful pope would, he hoped, reward him by giving him another clause to add to his official title. A medieval pope had conferred on the line of French kings the title “Most Christian.” Henry wanted a similar designation for himself and his heirs.

  As a preliminary to his personal assault against Lutheran doctrines Henry and Wolsey planned a formal denunciation. The king was not able to preside in person—a tertian fever confined him to his bed—but the cardinal conducted the proceedings with impressive solemnity. He sat under a golden canopy on a platform in the churchyard of St. Paul’s, and his magnificence was awesome—worthy of the pope himself, in the view of one eyewitness. The proceedings were opened by John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, who spoke for some two hours to the assembled clergy, lay lords and commoners, praising Wolsey and announcing that Henry was at work on a theological refutation of Luther’s heresies. Wolsey then rose to promulgate the papal bull excommunicating Luther and cursed him and all his followers. To dramatize the condemnation he ordered quantities of Lutheran writings heaped up in the churchyard and set on fire, and the smoke from the burning books and pamphlets rose over the platform as he spoke.1