Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  Charles, who was anything but continent and was by this time considering marrying someone else, made the chivalrous reply the situation called for. He inquired politely about Mary’s health, education and looks, and then, smiling, stuck the emerald ring on his little finger and ordered the ambassadors to say that “he would wear it for the sake of the princess.”

  VI

  My soverayne lorde for my poure sake

  Six coursys at the ryng dyd make,

  Of which four tymes he dyd it take;

  Wherfor my hart I hym beqwest,

  And of all other for to love best

  My soverayne lorde

  It may have been during Mary’s betrothal to Charles V that Henry decided to look seriously into the question of whether her future husband would have a strong legal claim to the throne. He called together the chief justices, along with Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester and the Garter King of Arms and asked them to determine, first, “whether men were by law or courtesy entitled to hold baronies, and other honours, in right of their wives?”

  This point, at least, was beyond dispute. Under English law not only women’s property (saving only their dowries) but their titles and incomes passed to their husbands when they married, along with governance of their persons. This premise of feudal law, supported by the canon law of the church, had been in force since the twelfth century and still governed the customary process of inheritance in England in default of the male line. It had never been tested, however, in the case of the monarchy itself, and for that reason the experts had to decide Henry’s next question without benefit of precedent. “If the crown should descend to Mary,” he asked them, “should her husband use the style and title of king of England?” Here at least one of the chief justices gave a conclusive opinion. Mary’s husband could not call himself king by right, because the crown lay outside the bounds of feudal law. She could grant him the title and style of king, though, if she chose.1

  That Henry raised these issues in a formal way implied two things.First, it meant that, assuming Mary did eventually succeed, it would be as a married woman whose husband would be the real ruler. Her role would be solely that of a dynastic link between Henry and his grandson, a carrier of the bloodline without any presumption to govern in her own person. No provision was ever made to prepare Mary to handle affairs of state; her education, though broad in its scope, was intensely personal. She was trained to govern herself in the most vigilant way, but not to govern others.

  Second, Henry’s inquiry showed that, each year, he was resigning himself more and more to the probability that Mary would be his only legitimate heir. By 1525 it was obvious that Katherine would have no more children. At forty, she was still Henry’s loving companion, for whom he sometimes showed tender affection, but she was no more than that; it is very doubtful whether they slept together. Bessie Blount’s place as royal mistress was now held by Mary Carey, the eldest daughter of Henry’s gentleman Thomas Boleyn. Boleyn had served the king in a variety of capacities, from holding the canopy at Mary’s christening to serving as diplomatic envoy to the French court, and he was honored that Henry should choose his daughter—married though she was—as his mistress. Mary Carey was an obliging if colorless girl who drifted from one unsavory situation to another at the Tudor court without leaving a distinctive impression on her contemporaries. She was not a beauty like Bessie; she was neither accomplished nor witty; she cannot even be given credit for carrying on a successful intrigue behind her husband’s back, for he knew all about the affair from the beginning and was as willing as Mary to comply in order to gratify the king.

  If there were to be more royal children, they would be the children of Henry’s mistresses, it appeared, and not his wife. This realization brought into added prominence Henry’s only son, Henry Fitzroy. Fitz-roy was a handsome and promising boy, blond like his parents, and though Henry did not say so publicly it was evident that he was being prepared to succeed his father if, when the time came, that suited Henry’s plans. When he was six years old he was made a knight of the Garter, and in a lengthy ceremony that taxed his memory he was created earl of Nottingham and duke of Richmond and Somerset. These were the titles of a prince, and were traditionally reserved for the heir to the throne. Richmond had been Henry VII’s title before he became king, and was afterward conferred on Henry VIII before his accession; Somerset designated the legitimized heirs of John of Gaunt.2 The earldom of Nottingham had belonged to Richard, duke of York, younger son of Edward IV. More significant was the fact that these titles gave Fitzroy precedence over every other noble at court, even Princess Mary.3 Here Katherine, who rarely attempted to override Henry’s judgment, objected. No bastard, shesaid, ought to be exalted above the daughter of the queen. Henry was so angry at her protest that he sent away from court the three Spanish gentlewomen Katherine turned to most often for advice, and though she was hurt and offended, she said no more.4

  Fitzroy’s surroundings, household and education were in every respect those of a prince. Like Mary he had a little throne and canopy of estate, made in cloth of gold fringed with red silk.5 He learned to ride a spirited pony and to handle a bow, and in his sixth summer he killed his first buck in one of the royal hunting parks. Fitzroy’s tutor, Richard Croke, taught him Greek and Latin and helped him with the brief letters he wrote to his father in a very large hand. Croke was proud of the boy’s intelligence, and by the time he was eight he was translating Caesar unaided. His progress was in part the result of Henry’s promise that Fitzroy could have a suit of armor like his father’s when he had mastered part of the Commentaries, and from the age of eight or nine he was clearly distracted from his learning by the allurements of hunting and knightly sports. Croke wrote exasperated letters to Henry complaining that Fitzroy’s gentlemen were taking him away from his books and ridiculing his tutor, while wasting the king’s money on expensive food and wine for their riotous companions.6 Fitzroy’s household seems to have had the same climate of disorder as Henry’s before it was reformed, and eventually he was brought to live closer to court.

  Assuming the king lived to enjoy a normal life span, of course, the issue of the succession would remain purely hypothetical for a long time to come. But two incidents that occurred when Henry was in his early thirties reminded him and his frightened courtiers that he was not immortal, and that an unforeseen accident might suddenly make the succession the most urgent problem in the country.

  In the spring of 1524, Henry appointed a joust to be held so that he could try out a new invention of his—a suit of armor “made of his own devise and fashion,” and unlike any jousting armor ever seen in England. Just what the innovations were is not recorded, but they were almost certainly confined to the body armor proper, and not the headpiece, because Henry’s attention was anywhere but on his head as he took up his position at the end of the tiltyard when the joust began. His opponent was Charles Brandon, and Brandon was heard to remark that he could not see the king as he took his spear and moved his horse into position at the opposite end of the lists. Brandon’s vision was obscured because his headpiece, properly in place and with the visor fastened down, blocked out everything but what was immediately in front of him. Henry, though, by his own carelessness and that of his attendants, had not lowered his visor, and the two combatants spurred their horses toward one another at an earthshaking gallop before anyone noticed the king’s mistake.

  The crowd soon saw the danger, though, and cried to Henry andBrandon to stop, but both men rode on, Henry with his face “clean naked” against Brandon’s oncoming spear. It struck his headpiece at its weakest point—the cassenetpiece on the forehead, never made strong enough to resist a blow because it was meant to be covered by the lowered visor. As soon as it hit the spear shattered, sending a hundred sharp wood fragments flying into the king’s unprotected face. Had the spear or even a small splinter entered his eye he would probably have been killed instantly; as it was he narrowly avoided a concussion. His mangled headpiece wa
s full of splinters when he took it off, but he assured the panic-stricken crowd, his horrified attendants and the white-faced Brandon that he was uninjured and that “none was to blame but himself.” To reassure them further he walked about briskly and, calling his armorers to “put all his pieces together,” remounted and ran six more courses without incident, “by which all men might perceive that he had no hurt.”

  A second accident was less spectacular but equally dangerous. Henry was hawking, and in the course of following his hawk he had to cross a ditch full of water. He tried to swing himself across on a pole, but it broke under his weight and he fell head first into the muddy stream. Luckily one of his footmen, Edmund Moody, saw what had happened. He leaped into the water and pried the king’s head loose. Without Moody’s aid, the chronicler wrote, Henry would surely have drowned.

  These two brushes with death, coming within months of one another, may have convinced Henry of how precarious a thing his power was. Certainly they had some influence on the status to which he now elevated his daughter. In the same year that Henry Fitzroy received his titles Mary was officially designated princess of Wales—the first girl to be known by that title.7 In Henry’s early childhood, when his brother Arthur had been prince of Wales, his father Henry VII had sent Arthur to Ludlow in the Welsh Marches, repairing and enlarging Ludlow Castle to be his residence. Now Mary would be sent there, with an “honorable, sad, discreet and expert council,” to preside over a viceregal court that would help to bring the fiercely independent Welsh more closely within the power of English law.

  Wales in the 1520s was to the English a remote and hostile place, populated by a treacherous and foreign people unlike themselves in every respect. Their language was unintelligible, their customs barbarous; what order their chieftain rulers maintained was indistinguishable from violent chaos. English justices saw life in the Welsh Marches as a panorama of criminality. In the words of one official pronouncement, the Marches were the scene of “manifold robberies, murders, thefts, trespasses, riots, routs, embraceries, maintenances, oppressions, ruptures of the peace, and many other malefacts,” and the local population steadfastly refused to accept rule from London as a panacea for these ills.8

  Wales was not yet a part of England, only a dependent territory, andthe Welsh hated the English as unwelcome conquerors interfering in a way of life they made no effort to understand. It was a tense and potentially dangerous situation, and in fact both Mary’s household and her Council would remain very close to the English border throughout their stay. The Council would hold court for the Marches; the justices carried with them into Wales a great triple-locked chest containing the books of landholding records and other documents, and their commission instructed them to verify the Marcher lordships against these records and to bind all the lords in person, clerics and laymen alike, to uphold the conditions of tenure originally imposed by Henry VII.

  Because Wales was full of sanctuaries and liberties—pockets of territory immune from royal jurisdiction—the justices were to scrutinize each of these claimed enclaves and disallow those whose status could not be proven by royal writ or charter.9 Sanctuaries were havens for robbers, murderers and others who had been outlawed; without the protection of these refuges, the offenders could be brought before the court and either pardoned or sentenced. “A chest with irons for keeping the prisoners” was among the Council’s effects. The commissioners were expected to bring some degree of order and respect for English authority into an untamed region whose mountainous hinterland had resisted that authority for centuries. For defense they had only the household guard, two gunners, and an unspecified amount of ordnance and artillery.10 There were arms stored at Cardiff far to the south, but they afforded little security to Ludlow. In all, the undertaking was full of uncertainties and hazards. Writing to the Council members just as their work was beginning, a Shropshire archdeacon noted that he was glad to hear of their commission, since few justices had been sent to Wales for many years. “Our lord send you good assistance,” he wrote, “for there is jeopardy.”11

  In the late summer of 1525 the princess set out for Ludlow. Dozens of carts had to be borrowed from Bewdley, Thornbury and neighboring establishments to carry the furnishings for her greatly enlarged entourage. Mary’s own hangings, furniture, featherbeds and wardrobe, and the wardrobes and belongings of her gentlewomen and Council members were only a small part of the load. Some sixteen hundred yards of damask and less costly cloth, all in the princess’ colors of blue and green, had been purchased for liveries. Dozens of yards of Brussels cloth for tablecloths, towels and napkins were piled into chests and loaded onto carts, plus black velvet for the gentlewomen’s gowns and other cloth for vestments for the chaplains. The chapel furnishings—standing candelabras, heavy mass books with their golden covers and carved stands, kneeling cushions and prayer stools—took up a good deal of space, for there would be three altars in the chapel itself and a fourth in Mary’s bedroom. Even before Mary and her retinue started on their journey repairswere begun at Ludlow. Richard Sydnour, surveyor general to the new court, had hired a crew of Welsh workmen to restore the chamber to be used by the countess of Salisbury and renovate the wardrobe and great chamber, and a locksmith to make a key for the wicket of the great gate. A team of woodsmen were set to work felling trees and sawing timbers in a forest near the castle, and carpenters restored the paneled walls and mended the broken stairs and loose floor boards.

  Mary’s journey north was a leisurely one. She stopped at Coventry and made a formal entry into the city, where a pageant was mounted in her honor. When she left she was presented with a kerchief and a gift of a hundred marks.12 On the way to Ludlow a temporary household was set up at Thornbury, the exquisite manor house that had been the chief residence of the duke of Buckingham until his execution four years earlier, when it was forfeited to the crown. With its gothic windows and turreted walls Thornbury was well suited to house a royal establishment indefinitely, but before long the carts were repacked for the final transfer to Ludlow.

  Ludlow Castle, “a fair manor place, standing in a goodly park,” was just west of the town of Bewdley, “on the very knob of the hill.” It was to be Mary’s home for the next year and a half. Here, from the time she was nine until just after her eleventh birthday, the princess was the center of her own imposing court. For the first time she was more than an incidental adornment of her father’s establishment. Here she was the essential representative of Tudor monarchy, and though she was in fact no more than a figurehead she must have felt very important indeed. Walking through the great galleries or presiding over banquets at Ludlow it was easy for Mary to dismiss the fact that Henry Fitzroy now held the princely titles of duke of Richmond and Somerset, and that there were those who questioned the right of a female to the throne. Mary was now old enough to understand that her dynastic position was unusual, and that though her father treasured her he wished she had been born a boy. But she understood too that in making her princess of Wales he was breaking convention and recognizing her as his heir. That he also appeared to be recognizing Fitzroy troubled her less now that she sat in the presence chamber at Ludlow, surrounded by guardsmen and ushers wearing her livery, and now that she possessed some small degree of authority to issue writs in the king’s name.

  Mary’s court in Wales was in fact nothing less than a miniaturized version of the royal court in England. The major household officers (the steward, Lord Ferrers, the chamberlain, Lord Dudley, who was later to forget his loyalty to Mary and attempt to keep her from the throne, the vice-chamberlain Philip Calthrop, whose wife was one of Mary’s gentlewomen, the treasurer, Ralph Egerton, the controller, Giles Grevile,whose relative Thomas Grevile was marshal of the hall, and the almoner, Peter Burnell), all of whom were members of the Council, directed a full complement of lesser officers and a swarm of servants. Three gentleman ushers, six gentleman waiters, two sewers of the chamber and one of the hall, a herald, a pursuivant and two sergeants-at-arms, a dozen clerks and a
n array of stable, cellar and kitchen personnel complemented one another in following a carefully designed list of household regulations.

  The countess of Salisbury, Lady Governess, was in charge of some fourteen gentlewomen, including Katherine Montague, Elizabeth and Constance Pole, nieces of the Lady Governess by blood or marriage, and Katharine Grey. All the gentlewomen were married, and were ordered to dress in sedate black gowns; there were no waiting maids to distract the gentlemen and undermine the princess’ modesty. Also attached to the household were Dr. Butts, Henry’s physician loaned to Mary while she was in Wales, and his assistant and apothecary, the princess’ schoolmaster Richard Featherstone, a water carrier, a grounds keeper, a minstrel named Claudyon and Thomas, “keeper of the princess’ nag.” They totaled some three hundred and four in all, and it seems clear that the chief impact of the royal establishment on the Marches was not in suppressing disorder but in providing employment and a ready market to the local population. Lists of the chamber, stable and kitchen servants show many Welsh names, and for every man or woman who actually worked in the household there were others who profited from selling their cattle, lambs and eggs to its purveyors.