Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  For Mary the months of deliberations were a time of great excitement crowded with hours of preparation. For the first time she was to be a principal performer in the revels, and dances designed to show off herskill and grace were choreographed by Henry’s dancing master and taught, step after step, to the princess and those who would dance with her. She was to be dressed in costumes of cloth of gold and red tinsel, and in jewels more brilliant than any she had ever worn; there were endless fittings of these garments, and of the headgear, hose and slippers to be worn with them. As the bride to be of a prince and the object of a hard-won diplomatic struggle, Henry wanted his daughter to be the center of attention during the celebrations. There must be no doubt that in agreeing to Mary’s betrothal he was giving Francis his most valued possession, his “pearl of the world.” She must be made to seem the most charming and accomplished heiress of her day.

  Of her accomplishments there was certainly no doubt. Her tutor John Featherstone had taken good advantage of her intelligence and aptitude for languages, and had greatly improved her fluency in Latin, French, Italian and Spanish. At barely nine years old she was able to speak Latin “with as much assurance and facility as if she were twelve years old,” and years later a humanist at her court recalled in a dedication to Mary that at eleven “your grace not only could perfectly read, write and construe Latin, but furthermore translate any hard thing of the Latin in to our English tongue.”13 The French envoys found her learning impressive: according to Turenne, she was “very handsome and admirable by reason of her great and uncommon mental endowments.” Sometime during their stay in England Mary acted in a comedy of Terence staged, in Latin, at Wolsey’s gorgeous palace at Hampton Court.

  But no display of erudition, however rare, could compare to the long-awaited banquet and masquing held on the day following the signing of the treaties. The banqueting hall was the scene of a gorgeous array of massive gold plate and serving dishes of silver gilt. Course after course of meat and fish was carried through the gilded arch, while from a balcony above it came the music of viols and sackbuts. Mary did not sit with Henry and Katherine, but at a long table of her own, with the French envoys and “great ladies” of the court. The banquet lasted several hours, and at its conclusion the entire company was assembled in order of rank and ushered into the disguising house, where they quietly took their places in the tiers of seats. The Venetian secretary Spinelli, who was there, noted in his dispatch to the Signory that all this was done “without the least noise or confusion, and precisely as pre-arranged.” The “order, regularity and silence” of public entertainments in England was a thing which amazed him, and he told in detail how the right-hand tiers of seats were reserved for the men, the ambassadors in front, the princes behind them, and the remaining guests at the back. On the left were the women, also in order of rank, “whose beauty,” Spinelli wrote, “enhanced by thebrilliancy of the lights, caused me to think I was contemplating the choir of angels.”14

  The performance began without delay. The children of the king’s chapel sang and recited a dialogue among Mercury, Cupid, and Plutus in which Henry was asked to judge which was of greater value, love or riches. This introduced a mock combat between six men at arms in white armor, fighting at a barrier so furiously that they broke their naked swords. The combat being ended, an old man in a silver beard pronounced the conflict settled; princes, he said, had need of both love and riches—the former to gain the obedience and service of their subjects, and the latter to give as rewards to lovers and friends.

  A painted curtain was now dropped at the other end of the theater and a new group of performers appeared. Eight gentlemen in gold doublets and tall plumed helmets lit with their torches a scene meant to represent a mountain, walled with gilt towers and “set full of crystal corals and rich rocks of ruby.” On a rock were seated eight damsels dressed in cloth of gold, their hair gathered into nets garlanded with jewels, and the long hanging sleeves of their surcoats trailing in deep folds to their feet. Mary was among these maidens, and as she rose to her feet to the sound of trumpets “her beauty in this array produced such an effect on everybody that all the other marvellous sights previously witnessed were forgotten, and they gave themselves up solely to contemplation of so fair an angel.” She shone with jewels, and as she and the others began their dance, Spinelli reported, she “dazzled the sight in such wise as to make one believe that she was decked with all the gems of the eighth sphere.” The eight damsels performed an unusually complex series of steps, executing a dance unique in its variety and intricacy; then the gentlemen danced by themselves, and finally the eight couples danced a lively coranto. After this came another group of masqued dancers, dressed in Icelandic costumes, who “danced lustily about the place,” and at the end of their performance Henry and Turenne and eight other noblemen appeared, all masked and wearing black satin gowns and hoods. For the last several days, ever since he injured his foot playing tennis, Henry had been wearing a black velvet slipper; to prevent him from being recognized, all the maskers now wore slippers like the king’s. The injury, it seems, did not impair Henry’s dancing, for he and the others chose partners from the audience to perform a lavish finale.

  The entertainment was at an end, but Henry had one last trick to play. Mary and the other young girls came up to him as the dancing ended, and, drawing her over to where the French ambassadors were seated, he loosened the net and jeweled bands from her hair, letting her heavy gold curls fall over her shoulders, “forming a most agreeablesight.” This was the image the French took back with them, of a delicate girl nearly out of childhood, dressed in golden robes, her smiling face encircled by masses of golden hair. Turenne had concluded earlier that because the princess was “thin, spare and small” she could not be married for another three years at least. Now he was convinced she would be worth waiting for.

  As Henry and his court were dancing and feasting in celebration of the Anglo-French treaties an atrocity of the greatest magnitude was unfolding at the other end of Europe. The German army of Charles V, joined by Spanish troops under the duke of Bourbon, was fighting in central Italy against the combined forces of the Venetians, the French and the pope. Finding Florence and Siena too well defended to attack, the imperial forces turned southward toward Rome, their food supplies exhausted. The soldiers were mutinous; they had not been paid, there were no spoils to be had, and they were now forced to steal from the Umbrian peasants to survive. Only their loyalty to Bourbon prevented mass desertion, and it was to Bourbon that the officers now turned, urging him to march the army to Rome, besiege the city and force the pope to ransom himself for enough money to pay the troops. The imperial forces camped outside Rome on the fifth of May, and their commander sent a message to the Medici pope Clement VII explaining that he could forestall bloodshed by paying what the besiegers demanded. Bourbon’s message may not have reached Clement, because there was no reply. That evening, as the condition of the hungry men became more and more desperate, they were given scaling ladders. The following morning thousands of them went over the walls, the Spaniards shouting “Sangre, sangre, carne, carne”—“Blood, blood, flesh, flesh”—and, in the name of Bourbon, they began to kill every Roman they could find.

  The sack of Rome might have been less devastating had the duke lived to control his men, but he was killed in the first assault, and the prince of Orange, who tried to take over leadership of the armies, lacked the authority to restrain the two-week orgy of murder and desecration that followed. On the day of the assault a dark fog lay over the Eternal City, making it hard for the attackers and the few defenders to see one another’s faces. What defense there was collapsed in the first two hours, leaving the way open for the imperial troops to enter the Borgo San Sepolcro by the thousands. By noon the mass slaughter had begun. At first the Germans and Spaniards spared only those they could hope to hold for ransom—the wealthiest churchmen and merchants. The terrified Romans, who had been assured until the last moment that the city would be saved
by a relieving army, fled to the churches and convents or tried to take refuge in the fortified castles. The pope, who had done nothing tosecure either himself or his city, now retired with thirteen of his cardinals to the Castel Sant’Angelo across the Tiber, weeping and offering to capitulate on whatever terms the imperialists asked. But the floodtide of destruction, once loosed, could not be halted. Rome, the most venerated city in Christendom, great storehouse of pagan and Christian tradition and bastion of the medieval church, was thoroughly and massively despoiled.

  The readiest booty was to be found in the churches. Companies of soldiers swarmed into Rome’s hundreds of holy places, stripping the altars of their ornaments and throwing to the ground relics of the saints and the bread of the mass. Catholic Spaniards and Lutheran Germans alike dressed themselves in the rich vestments of the murdered clergy and officiated at the ruined altars, bawling out tavern songs and befouling consecrated sanctuaries with excrement. The church of St. Peter and the papal palace were turned into stables, and processions of drunken soldiers and whores wound through their courtyards in imitation of holy processions. At San Silvestro the head of St. John the Baptist was ripped out of its silver reliquary and hurled to the pavement, where an old nun found it later and carried it to safety.

  It was as if all the anticlerical hatred of centuries was released in a single furious burst. Friars were dragged from their convents and beheaded; nuns were beaten and raped. Abbots and cardinals were hung up by their arms or suspended head downward in wells and tortured until they revealed where their wealth was hidden. Others were branded like animals or horribly mutilated, or their mouths were forced open and filled with molten lead. The cardinal of Ara Coeli was seized and carried through the streets on a funeral bier while his captors sang the office for the dead. Fearing for his life, he was made to serve his best wine to his tormentors in the golden chalices reserved for the mass. Clergy and lay men and women alike huddled in Rome’s medieval castles hoping to escape the slaughter. Five hundred nuns were found in one large room of the palace of Pompey Colonna when it was plundered, and hundreds of women were carried off whenever a great house fell to the invaders. Even the palace of the Portuguese ambassador, said to be the best fortified stronghold in the city, could not hold out. All the merchants, nobles and moneylenders who had taken refuge there were brought out and imprisoned, and their goods, which totaled some half a million ducats in value, were divided among the imperial troops.

  As the days passed the soldiers, leaderless and crazed by their crimes, alternated between dazed stupor and unreasoning frenzy. They picked up fortunes in the burning remains of palaces only to lose them in a single throw of the dice. Loyalties to countrymen or coreligionists meant nothing; the houses of Spaniards and Germans in Rome were looted as mercilessly as those of the Italians. And after they had plundered the wealthy, the imperial soldiers plundered the poor, stripping even the hovels of the street sweepers and water carriers. Hearing that the pope had finally paid the wages of the Germans, the enraged Spaniards attacked their allies and demanded their share. The longer the sack continued the more the city’s food supply dwindled, and as the surviving Romans and their invaders sank deeper into disorder the final nemesis of plague and panic set in. In their thoroughness the soldiers had looted the shops of the apothecaries, and there were now no medicines left to fight disease. Famine and pestilence overtook the entire population, and what began as a human tragedy was ended by broader forces of destruction no human agency could control.

  “Everyone considers it has taken place by the just judgment of God,” one imperial official in Rome wrote to the emperor, “because the court of Rome was so ill-ruled.”15 This view of the meaning of the Roman nightmare was not widely shared. As news of events in Rome traveled northward it was received with profound shock and horror. The sack of the papal city was seen as more than the barbarous act of a brutalized army. It was an assault on faith itself. With the desecration of the Eternal City Christian spirituality lost its anchor. The immense power and authority of Rome had been breached as surely as its walls. Christendom had been deeply wounded, not by any external enemy but from within, and would not be the same again.

  PART TWO

  The King’s Troubled Daughter

  VIII

  And wylt thow leve me thus?

  That bathe louyd the so long,

  In welthe and woo among?

  And ys thy hart so strong

  As for to leve me thus?

  Say nay, say nay!

  News of the sack of Rome reached the court of Henry VIII on June I. Letters sent to the king and Wolsey told in bloody detail how the soldiers of Charles V had defiled the venerable city and threatened the pope, who was still a captive of the imperial forces. Wolsey, who saw in Clement VII’s misfortune an opportunity to take over leadership of the church himself, made plans to convene the cardinals at Avignon in France and to preside over a papal court in exile. Henry cursed his nephew Charles as an enemy of the faith, and lamented that “our most holy lord, the true and only vicar of Christ on earth,” had been taken from his flock. Without him the church would surely collapse, the king insisted, and he sped Wolsey on his way.

  Henry’s concern about the condition of the papacy was sincere, but his motives were selfish and, for the time being, secret. Unknown to anyone save Wolsey and a few trusted ecclesiastics, he had made the most fateful decision of his reign. He had decided to divorce his wife.

  Barely two weeks after the celebration of Mary’s betrothal a church court had been called together by Wolsey to consider the validity of the royal marriage; the next step was to persuade the pope to declare it annulled. Henry was preparing to approach Clement about this when he learned of the fate of Rome. His anger at Charles V was both public and personal. The emperor had at once assaulted Christianity and thwarted Henry’s urgent divorce project, and there was no telling when either of these two wrongs would be righted.

  Just when and why Henry made up his mind to put Katherine aside are very unclear, but the legal issues involved were, in Henry’s mind at least, quite simple. Katherine had been the widow of Henry’s brother Arthur. In marrying her he had sinned twice over: once by committing incest and again by disobeying the injunction in the book of Leviticus against “uncovering the nakedness of thy brother’s wife.” Once he realized the enormity of his situation, Henry claimed, the burden on his conscience became intolerable. He had to free himself from the marriage as swiftly as possible—not only to ease his spiritual pain but for the sake of England’s future. For if the marriage to Katherine was invalid, then Mary was a bastard, and unfit to rule. Henry’s new-found scruples deprived him not only of his wife but of his sole legitimate heir, and he owed it to his subjects to remarry and beget a son to secure the succession.

  In the mountains of legal opinions which soon arose to contradict the king’s position several points stood out clearly. First, why had it taken eighteen years for the issues of consanguinity and the biblical prohibition to trouble Henry? Neither issue was obscure, particularly to a man of the king’s vaunted theological knowledge. How could they have escaped his attention all those years? Second, whatever obstacles to the marriage of Henry and Katherine might have existed in 1509 had been removed by the granting of a papal dispensation. The pope’s plenary authority gave him the power to legitimize any union, no matter how unconventional, and only the Lutheran heretics disputed the powers of the pope. Third, Henry’s critics pointed out, if some passages in the Bible outlawed the marriage of a man with his brother’s widow others positively encouraged it, and in any case these were matters best left to the discretion of the experts who advised the pope in Rome.

  In the beginning Henry may have deluded himself in thinking that the divorce would be a simple matter, swiftly accomplished, to be arranged between himself, Wolsey and the pope. After all, European rulers had been ridding themselves of unwanted spouses for centuries by alleging the stain of consanguinity. The procedure was a time-honored one, and
Henry had the best possible excuse—the lack of a male heir—to initiate it. The pope had allowed Henry IV of Castile, married to a childless queen, to divorce her and marry another woman, although he did have to agree to take back his first wife if he had no children by the second. Only a month before Henry began his formal inquiry into the validity of his own marriage he received word that his sister Margaret, whom he had severely criticized as a shameless adulteress, had been granted papal permission to marry the already-married man she had been living with for years.

  Even more influential was the experience of Charles Brandon, the broad-shouldered, bluff courtier who was the king’s lifelong intimate. Before he married Henry’s sister Mary, Brandon had been involved in a bizarre matrimonial situation. He had given a binding pledge of marriage-betrothal “by present consent”—to a woman named Ann Brown, but obtained a papal dispensation to marry one Margaret Mortimer before he had honored his pledge to Ann. Tiring of Margaret, he applied for a second bull of dispensation, claiming that he and his wife were related within the prohibited degrees and that his conscience would not permit him to continue the marriage. That he had been married a long time, he said, only made his torment greater; like Henry, he begged for an immediate divorce. His request was granted, whereupon he married his original fiancee Ann Brown.

  Many years later, at the time rumors of Henry’s impending divorce were circulating, Brandon was completing a new legal action to ensure that the children of his subsequent marriage to his third wife Mary Tudor were not deprived of their inheritance. At this time Margaret Mortimer was still living, and Brandon seems to have been afraid that she might interfere in the rights of his heirs. Wolsey was largely responsible for resolving Brandon’s tangled commitments to the pope’s satisfaction at this time, and there is reason to believe he extricated the duke from further embarrassments in his domestic affairs that have never fully come to light. Henry conceived his plan to divorce Katherine, then, just at the time his best friend was clearing himself of all obligations to his first wife with the capable aid of his chief adviser. Given the king’s dissatisfaction with his marriage and his recently discovered theological objections to it, he could not have had a more; attractive inducement to undertake a divorce suit himself.