Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  But the affair of the royal divorce had long since ceased to be a quarrel of the English court in which the people of London took sides. It had quickly become an international scandal. Henry commissioned legal experts at the leading European universities to pass sentence on the merits of his cause, and Charles V paid others to refute them. In the process of collecting favorable legal judgments large sums changed hands, and the case was clouded by new ramifications of procedure and precedent. Wol-sey was still urging a papal settlement, but the legatine court had been adjourned before a decision was reached, and Clement VII’s future as arbiter was in peril. Wolsey had been warning Campeggio that, if the pope did not act soon, England might slip out of his grasp just as Germany had when Luther received no satisfaction from the pope. Like Luther’s demands for reform in Germany, Henry’s demand for a divorce had become the most urgent matter in England. If the pope continued to delay a settlement, or if he pronounced against Henry, Wolsey assured the Italian legate, “the authority of the See Apostolic in the kingdom will be annihilated.”8

  IX

  That was my joy is now my woo and payne;

  That was my bliss is now my displesaunce;

  That was my trust is now my wanhope playne;

  That was my wele is now my most grevaunce.

  What causeth this but only yowre plesaunce

  Onryghtfully skewyng me unkyndness,

  That hath byn your fayre lady and mastress.

  For Mary the tortuous years of the royal divorce were a time of shocks, disillusionment and anguish. One month the court had been taken up with the joyous celebration of her betrothal; the next month she was all but forgotten as news of the king’s decision to divorce Katherine became the dominating preoccupation of the entire court. One moment she was the adored child of loving parents; the next she was caught up in the emotional turmoil that wrenched the little family apart and destroyed all her expectations. From the time she was eleven and a half until she turned sixteen Mary lived in a constant state of uncertainty and suspended hopes, always looking for the imminent vindication of her mother’s cause yet living under constant strain as that vindication was further and further delayed.

  In the meantime everything old and familiar was falling away. Her father, though he still took occasional pleasure in Mary, was now capricious and cruel. Her mother was a beleaguered woman struggling to maintain her dignity as her husband abused her and another woman gradually took her place. The court became a wasp’s nest of enmities, petty jealousies and backbiting, and at its center, instead of the gracious and smiling queen, Mary saw a shameless, petulant woman who by her scheming ambition had destroyed the old order of things.

  Worst of all, Mary herself, once the radiant pearl of her father’s courtand his presumed heir, was now only the daughter of his castoff queen. As long as Katherine remained queen Mary would still be princess, but her father and the powerful men who served him were attempting to dethrone Katherine with every means at their command, and if they succeeded, Mary would be no more than the king’s bastard. Like Henry Fitzroy she would be of royal blood, but baseborn, and a baseborn female would be of little use or standing in the royal court. As the dispute over the divorce dragged on, Mary’s adolescence became a stormy and anxious interim between an idyllic childhood and a dubious future.

  Much of what she endured during these years must be presumed, for she largely drops from sight in the official records, dispatches and letters of the divorce era. One thing is very clear, however: from the start Mary watched and wept over her mother’s trials, and took her part. Katherine’s heroism was the one fixed point in the shifting circumstances of Mary’s life, and what she learned from her mother about wifely obedience, steadfast fidelity to conscience and resignation in the face of suffering was a lesson she would never forget.

  “My tribulations are so great, my life so disturbed by the plans daily invented to further the king’s wicked intention, the surprises which the king gives me, with certain persons of his council, are so mortal, and my treatment is what God knows, that it is enough to shorten ten lives, much more mine,” Katherine wrote to Charles V.1 By the time she wrote this letter in November of 1531 she had lived through nearly five years of what she called “the pains of Purgatory on earth.”2 Time and again she had been confronted, without warning, by deputations of royal councilors sent to browbeat her into submitting and relinquishing her stand on the divorce. They accused her of disobedience, stubbornness, ill temper, shrewishness. They insulted her and tried to trick her with words. They taunted her with the old pain of her stillborn children, saying that God had shown his abomination of her marriage “by the curse of sterility.”3

  The queen stood up bravely to each assault, trying to ignore the insults while using the arguments of her accusers to support her own position. As she grew more heated she told them all to go to Rome, with as much contempt as if she were telling them to go to hell. She answered them not only convincingly but with a sharpness of intellect and logic that at first startled them and later, or so the imperial ambassador Chapuys believed, won their sympathies and made them “secretly nudge one another when any point [she made] touched the quick.”4Those who claimed that Henry’s lawyers and churchmen were “confounded by a single woman, and all their designs turned topsy-turvy,” were not far wrong. Henry, who knew well the queen’s articulateness and skill in debate, waited anxiously to hear the outcome of these encounters, and each time he found that Katherine had come off thevictor he shook his head, saying he feared as much and “remaining very pensive.”

  In the early years of the conflict he had taken Katherine on in person. One night toward the end of 1529 they dined together and disputed the issues of the divorce throughout the meal. Henry lost ground at every turn, and finally tried to take refuge behind the most recent of the expert legal judgments he had bought. Katherine, who had an impressive list of experts on her side, dismissed his point with a laugh and boasted that she could collect a thousand opinions favorable to her for every one of Henry’s. At this he left the room suddenly and appeared “very disconcerted and downcast” for the rest of the day. At supper Anne realized what had happened, and was angry.

  “Did I not tell you that whenever you disputed with the queen she was sure to have the upper hand?” she asked him reproachfully. “I see that some fine morning you will succumb to her reasoning and that you will cast me off. I have been waiting long, and might in the meanwhile have contracted some advantageous marriage, out of which I might have had issue, which is the greatest consolation in this world.”

  Anne played on his depression, his shame at losing the argument, his ever present concern about the succession. Then came her ultimate barb.

  “Alas! Farewell to my time and youth spent to no purpose at all.”5Anne had every advantage in the tug of war with Katherine, but still Henry continued to argue with the queen. Even after he stopped seeing Katherine they continued to quarrel by letter, with Henry’s letters composed by teams of secretaries and officials and revised over and over before they were sent. Henry had allowed himself to become caught between two very shrewd women, and would need more than strong logic to extricate himself from his uncomfortable position.

  Other forms of pressure were, of course, being applied to sway Katherine. One was Henry’s maddeningly capricious behavior toward her. In person and through messengers he conveyed the most alarming threats and warnings, yet until the summer of 1531 he made a point of dining with the queen at all the great festivals of the year. He was sometimes surly and vicious, sometimes good tempered and even affectionate. He kept Katherine off balance, never allowing her to accurately guess his intentions or his true feelings. He wa9 angry when she showed concern about Mary, yet more angry when she did not. She risked increasing his displeasure with everything she did, and there was no discerning when or how his next blow would fall.

  His crudest tactic was to keep Katherine and Mary in separate yet neighboring establishments, letting them see one ano
ther just often enough to make their loneliness unendurable when they were apart. Or he would force Katherine to choose between his company and Mary’s,telling her in no uncertain terms that if she visited the princess she might be forced to stay with her permanently and lose what little claim she still had on Henry’s companionship.6 The queen tried to remain undisturbed by heart-rending choices of this kind, saying only “that she would not leave him for her daughter nor anyone else in this world,” but she was inwardly distraught. “If you had experienced part of the bitter days and nights which I have endured since the commencement of this sad affair,” she told one of her tormentors, the dean of Henry’s chapel, “you would not have considered it precipitation to desire a sentence and determination of this affair, nor would you have accused me so carelessly and inadvertently of pertinacity,”7

  But if Henry’s treatment afflicted and grieved the queen, even cruder attacks came from Anne. She saw to it that the few men who had been in the habit of visiting Katherine and bringing her news from court were kept away, and sent her own spies to augment those Wolsey had placed in the queen’s household some years earlier. She spoke of disgracing and harming Mary, and was overheard to remark that she “wished all Spaniards were at the bottom of the sea.” She persuaded Henry to give her Katherine’s jewels, and though at first Katherine refused, arguing that “it was against her conscience to give her jewels to adorn a person who is the scandal of Christendom,” in the end she obeyed Henry even in this.8Anne was reported to be involving herself in the diplomatic issues raised by the divorce. She tried to persuade Henry that Charles V, who was himself guilty of breaking church law in marrying his cousin Isabella of Portugal, could not in good faith complain of Henry’s attitude to Katherine, and would certainly not go to war on her behalf. And if he did, Anne added, her relatives would pay for ten thousand soldiers for the king’s army for a whole year, forming the core of an invincible army of defense.9

  Katherine’s purgatory was a solitary one. She was by no means friendless, but there was little her friends could do. The emperor’s verbal protests lost their effect after it became clear he would not back them up with force. His ambassador Chapuys was some comfort, but his visits were infrequent and he brought more bad news than good. Allies at court occasionally got news to Katherine by surreptitious means—the duchess of Norfolk sent her some poultry dressed with oranges, and in one of the oranges, a letter from a papal official in Rome—but there were too few of these gestures to alleviate the queen’s growing certainty that she would have to endure her agony alone.

  This view of her situation was confirmed by the priests in her household and by the only other Spaniard to whom she opened her heart, Mary’s onetime tutor Vives. Katherine turned to Vives, he wrote in a letter to a friend, as both a countryman “who spoke the same language” and as one well read “in matters of morals and consolation.” She confided to him her anguish that “the man whom she loved more than herself should be so alienated from her, that he should think of marrying another, which was the greater grief the more she loved him.” His reply subordinated the human conflict to the higher design of Christian martyrdom. Katherine’s torment proved that she was dear to God, he told her, for God only tests those he cherishes, in order to strengthen their virtues.10

  As time went by Katherine slipped easily into the role of a martyr, willingly submitting to injustice in this world and trusting that her self-sacrifice would be rewarded in the next. She ceased to expect vindication during her lifetime, and instead transferred her hopes to the broader arena of eternal justification. “In this world I will confess myself to be the king’s true wife,” she wrote, “and in the next they will know how unreasonably I am afflicted.”11 She adopted the vocabulary of self-immolation, declaring that “wherever the king commanded her, were it even to the fire, she would go.”12 Her admirers had cast her in this role for a long time. One imperial diplomat wrote to the empress urging her to preserve all the letters she received from Katherine, for in the years to come they would surely be valued as relics.13

  It was while these traumas were unfolding that Mary’s adult personality was beginning to take shape. She came to maturity in an atmosphere of extraordinary stress, and her character emerged as a response to crises. She was jolted painfully out of childhood and forced to come to terms with a confusing and deeply tragic situation. Understandably, she looked to Katherine as her model during these disturbing years, but in patterning herself after her mother she was taking on the behavior of a desperately troubled woman. The marks of this unique rite of passage would be with Mary all her life.

  Katherine had come to an agonizing crossroads in her own character. She was being pulled three ways. She was attempting to fulfill her duty as a wife, to honor her conscience, and to retain her dignity as queen. In her present circumstances, these three compulsions demanded different, contradictory reactions, and no small part of her distress came in struggling to reconcile them. As a wife her first duty was to be ruled by her husband, yet her conscience also had its imperatives; as a queen, strictly speaking, she ought not to be ruled at all but should rule others. As a wife she was bound to submit to punishment, even torture, by her husband yet her conscience forbade her to comply with unmerited punishment, and her royal dignity was incompatible with mistreatment of any kind. Wives suffered ignominy and humiliation in silence; a woman of conscience stood up and fought against these to protect her good repute, while amonarch took swift and terrible vengeance against the slightest insult. Katherine was called upon to be an obedient inferior, a heroine and an exalted ruler all at the same time, though any one of these roles demanded all the strength she had. Had she taken her obligations as a wife less seriously, had she been more flexible in matters of conscience, had she not been the proud daughter of Queen Isabella of Castile, Katherine would have found her ordeal far easier to bear. As it was the warring selves kept up their battle within her almost to the end of her life, and without understanding clearly what she was seeing Mary saw and imitated them all.

  That conscience ought to take precedence over all other considerations was a premise supported by Mary’s careful, exhaustive religious instruction. But no instruction had prepared her for the more complex conflict between Katherine’s roles as wife and queen. Mary must have heard, for example, how when Katherine made her dramatic exit from the legatine court she acknowledged and deplored her disobedience to Henry at the very moment she defied him. “I never before disputed the will of my husband,” she declared, “and I shall take the first opportunity to ask pardon for my disobedience.” The same duality marked Katherine’s behavior toward Henry in less climactic circumstances. She endured every assault on her worth and peace of mind and said only loving words in return. She continued to adore and honor Henry no matter what he did, and she urged Mary to continue to love him too. But she would not allow him to rob her of her status and regal poise. She took refuge in magnanimous self-mutilation, and found in willing masochism a perfect compromise between her self-respect and her obligation to Henry. Because it was voluntary, it allowed her to preserve the illusion that she and not Henry controlled her life; because it meant abasement and abuse, it satisfied the demands of wifely subservience.

  Up to the age of eleven Mary had been a romantic little girl, encouraged to dream of marriage to a prince or emperor and to think of the way men and women treated one another as an affair of love tokens, gallantry and blushing excitement. She mistook the pleasureful pastime of flirtation for the deep bonds of love; certainly she perceived nothing of the emotional intricacies of a marriage of state, made and, if need be, broken to satisfy the arbitrary logic of power. Now, without abandoning her romantic images, Mary added another, far darker dimension to her understanding of how men and women treated one another. She watched her beloved father turn against her adored mother and injure her in a hundred ways. She watched her mother respond by treading a tortuous emotional path that ultimately resolved itself into voluntary self-destruction. She observ
ed her mother’s wretchedness in the face of her father’s flagrant infidelity and the other woman’s cruelty. Mary came awayconvinced that when she married she must expect torment, obey and honor her tormentor, maintain a serene exterior in all crises, and turn inward all her feelings of hatred and lust for revenge.

  There was reason to believe that Mary’s married life might not be far off. Her imminent debasement in status did not discourage all offers for her hand, and Henry, whose plans for his daughter seem to have fluctuated widely, sometimes saw marrying her off as a way of eliminating her from the miasmic tangle of the divorce. The Scots king was among her suitors, and it was rumored Henry was negotiating a betrothal to a potentate somewhere in southeastern Europe. The son of the duke of Cleves was another possibility, though his value as a potential son-in-law was offset by the fact that the duke was reputed to be insane and the son on his way to the same infirmity. When the princess was fourteen it was suggested that she might marry Francesco Sforza, duke of Milan, though he was “without feet or hands, or had lost the use of them, which comes to the same thing.”14 A marriage of this kind would dishonor Mary and break Katherine’s heart, putting it squarely in line with the king’s general policy toward his wife and daughter, but Henry continued to defer settlement of any marriage contract until long after Mary had reached marriageable age. This left room for some hope that he might in the end arrange an honorable marriage for her, or in some way involve her in the succession. Some of his advisers continued to urge him to choose his preferred successor, then marry him to the princess. This would certainly please the people, who from the time the divorce question first arose had insisted “they would acknowledge no successor to the crown but the husband of the Lady Mary.” When the princess was sixteen Norfolk was assuring Chapuys that Mary was “still heiress of the kingdom,” and that if Henry died without a male heir she would take precedence over any other daughters he might leave.15 But these reassurances were little more than matters of form, and the ambassador was well aware that Mary’s status would not be secure as long as Anne was doing her best to turn the king against her.