Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  If Anne detested Katherine, she hated Mary even more. Henry’s affection for Katherine lessened year by year, but in his ambivalent way he continued to be fond of Mary. One summer when she wrote to him asking to be allowed to come and see him before he left for four months of hunting, he not only agreed but traveled to where she was staying, spending an entire day in her company and “showing her all possible affection.”16 The following summer he again “visited her and made great cheer with her,” and spoke of her in his old way as the greatest pearl in the kingdom.17 When he praised Mary in Anne’s presence, though, Anneswore at her and called her names, and Chapuys believed Anne was constantly scheming to have Mary moved as far from the court as possible in order to prevent Henry from seeing her.18

  At fifteen Mary was still being dressed as a princess. In 1531 Henry ordered his master of the Great Wardrobe to provide her with new gowns of cloth of silver tissue, purple and black velvet, and crimson satin, and kirtles of gold and silver. One of the gowns and a “night bonnet” were to be trimmed with ermines, and to go with these new clothes he ordered sixteen pairs of velvet shoes, two dozen pairs of Spanish gloves, French hoods and a cloak of Bruges satin. There was fine Holland cloth and linen for smocks and underclothing, and yards of ribbon for trim.19Beyond what he paid for her wardrobe and household expenses Henry sent Mary sums of money, ten or twenty pounds at a time, to celebrate Christmas, or to distribute in alms in Eastertide, or simply “to disport her with.” But these amounts were no more than he paid out in a single day to people who entertained him or did him small services—the woman who returned his dog Cutte, the man who brought home Ball, another dog that was lost in Waltham Forest, the poor woman who gave him pears and nuts while he was hunting, the dumb man who brought him oranges, the blind woman who played the harp, “the fellow with the dancing dog,” or the visiting acrobat Peter Tremezin, “who rode two horses at once.”20 And what he spent on Mary in a year could not compare to the sums he lavished on Anne in a week.

  Henry showered Anne with clothes, costly trinkets, lands and revenues, and jewels. His jewelers made rings, gem-studded collars and girdles, diamond buttons and sleeve ornaments for her, and he designed extravagant keepsakes for her himself. Such were the “twenty-one diamonds and twenty-one rubies set upon roses and hearts, for Mistress Anne” he bought in 1531, and the “nineteen diamonds set in trueloves of crown gold” he gave her shortly afterward. There were huge diamonds set into hearts to be worn in her hair, and smaller stones meant to adorn its luxuriant thickness when she wore it unbound.21 For himself Henry bought a somewhat sobering gift. He had just turned forty, and was troubled by a painful ulcer in his leg. To ease his pain he needed a walking stick, and had one made in coarse gold, with room inside it for a foot measure, a compass and tongs. The beauty of its workmanship could not distract Henry from the uneasy realization that the walking stick was a first sign of age; to make it appear more a matter of fashion than of necessity he had several others like it made for his younger gentlemen to use.

  Time was pressing the king harder than usual, and so was Anne. Impatient to be queen, she was already setting up a royal household in miniature, complete with almoner and other officers. She surrounded herself with “almost as many ladies as if she were queen,” and took Katherine’s place at the king’s side when he rode to the hunt. She and her servants made themselves at home in the sumptuous quarters in every palace that used to belong to Katherine. In her black satin nightgown, lined with taffeta and velvet, she tried her best to make these rooms her own, and to make the king feel young again when he visited them. By 1532 she had clearly succeeded. In January Katherine sent Henry a gold cup as a New Year’s gift, “with honorable and humble words” attached. He returned it without explanation. At the same time he presented Anne with her New Year’s gift—an entire bedroom newly decorated with beautiful tapestries and a magnificent bed, furnished in cloth of gold and silver, crimson satin and rich embroideries.22

  Month by month Anne was taking on not only the quarters and entourage of a queen but a queen’s power as well. Henry’s treasurer Henry Guildford, once one of the king’s “minions” and always an irreverent wit, had no use for Anne and let her know it. As for the divorce, Guildford found all the theological sophistries on both sides absurd, and once suggested jokingly that “it would be the best deed in the world to tie all the doctors who had invented and supported this affair in a cart, and send them to Rome to maintain their opinion, or meet with the confusion they deserve.”23 Anne found him infuriating, and told him archly that once she was crowned she would see to it that he was sent away from court. He retorted icily that he would leave of his own accord long before that happened, and complained to Henry about the insult. The king frowned and told Guildford he “shouldn’t trouble himself with what women said,” but the bad feeling remained. There was no love lost between Henry’s sister Mary and Anne; Anne accused Mary’s husband Charles Brandon of incest with his own daughter.24 Anne’s aunt, the duchess of Norfolk, who sided with Katherine, was sent away at Anne’s insistence because she spoke her mind too publicly, while her uncle the duke lived under the pressure of Anne’s constant suspicion. She feared he had a plan to marry his son to Princess Mary and one day to make him king; finally to put an end to her oppressive imaginings he made a hastily arranged, disadvantageous match for the boy.

  Anne’s net was spreading ever wider, and soon no one would be immune from her attacks. As Mary waited in fear for the trials to come she knelt often at the altar in her bedchamber and repeated the little prayer of Aquinas she had been given to translate when she was eleven. In keeping with all her education, it was an entreaty for moderation and decorum. “My God, make me humble without feigning, merry without lightness, sad without mistrust,” she begged, “fearing without despair,obedient without arguing, patient without grudging, and pure without corruption.” But it was also a prayer for serenity amid crises, “that in prosperous things I may give thee thanks, and in adversity be patient, so that I be not lift[ed] up with the one, nor oppressed with the other. . . ,”25 Mary would need all the comfort her faith could provide to face the critical years that lay just ahead.

  X

  Who shall have my fayre lady?

  Who but 1, who but 1, who but I,

  Undir the levys grene?

  On the last Thursday in May 1533 a flotilla of royal barges, boats and ships of all sizes assembled at Tower Wharf for the short trip down the Thames to Greenwich. Leading the procession was a swift foist full of ordnance, and mounted in its bow was a great red dragon belching flames into the water. Monsters and wild men disported themselves around the dragon, and behind it, in another foist, was a pageant of the queen’s device, a mount with a crowned white falcon standing on it surrounded by red and white roses. The barge of the Lord Mayor, Stephen Peacock, came next, followed by forty-eight barges supplied by his colleagues in the haberdashers’ company. Each was hung with tapestries and banners and pennons of the arms of the crafts in fine gold. Every barge was equipped with guns, “the one to hail the other triumphantly as the time did require,” and with musicians playing trumpets, shawms, flutes and drums in such harmony that they sounded like “a thing of another world.” They were going to Greenwich to greet Anne Boleyn, and to escort her to apartments at the Tower where she would be prepared for her coronation.

  Anne was waiting at the palace in a bark painted with her colors and rigged with many banners. Another hundred vessels joined the parade for the trip back upriver, each fitted out with masts and rigging ornamented with taffeta flags and gold foil that shone brightly in the sun. All the little boats along the route joined in until the whole river was covered, and as the queen’s barge passed by all the great warships moored at Greenwich, Radcliff, and before St. Katharine’s shot their guns. The cannons at Limehouse and in the Tower itself gave out such a thunderous pounding that in the nearby foreigners’ quarter every pane of glass was broken andthe houses shook so violently it seemed as if they woul
d come crashing down. The blaring of trumpets that cut through the booming guns as Anne stepped ashore at Tower Wharf gave the spectacle an apocalyptic air, and a Spaniard who described it all afterward wrote that “verily it seemed as if the world was coming to an end.”

  Two days later Anne rode in procession through the city, preceded by the great nobles, judges, abbots and ambassadors. The newly created Knights of the Bath rode together in their hooded blue gowns, and the French merchants, their horses trapped in violet taffeta with white crosses, wore doublets of violet velvet with one sleeve in Anne’s colors. Anne rode in a litter covered inside and out with white satin and drawn by two palfreys in white damask. Her surcoat and mantle were of white cloth of tissue, the mantle furred with ermines. Her hair hung loose down her back, and on her head she wore a coif with a jeweled circlet. Constables in velvet and silk marched with the procession, using their great staves to keep the crowds from snatching at the finery, while from every window along the route of march people leaned down to wave and shout to the celebrities as they passed. Following Anne were the principal women of the court: the chief married noblewomen in cloth of gold on horseback, the dowager marchioness of Dorset and Anne’s grandmother, the dowager duchess of Norfolk, in litters, twelve unmarried ladies on horseback in gowns of crimson velvet, and several dozen lesser gentlewomen in black velvet. At the rear came the royal guard, in new embroidered coats of goldsmith’s work.

  Tapestries, carpets and rich cloths of scarlet and cloth of gold were hung from every house and shop, and at each of the stages on the traditional procession route the queen was saluted by pageantry and music. Choirs of children sang ballads in her honor, and at the conduit in Fleet Street was a group of “such several solemn instruments that it seemed to be an heavenly noise, and was much regarded and praised.” At Grace-church, Apollo and his Nine Muses sat on the mount of Parnassus and recited verses to Anne, playing their instruments in accompaniment, and at Leadenhall another group of performers presented an elaborate pageant written by Nicholas Udall, in which a white falcon, representing Anne, lighted on the Tudor rosebush and was crowned by an angel, while St. Anne looked on. At Cornhill she was saluted as worthier than the Three Graces, here called Hearty Gladness, Stable Honour and Continual Success; at the lesser conduit in Cheap a play with music depicted the Judgment of Paris, with the golden apple for the fairest of goddesses and mortals awarded to Anne. Here her nobility, virtue and beauty were praised in verse:

  Queen Anne so gent,

  Of high descent.

  Anne excellent

  In nobleness!

  Of ladies all,

  You principal

  Should win this ball

  Of worthiness!

  Passing beauty

  And chastity,

  With high degree,

  And great riches;

  So coupled be

  In unity,

  That chief are ye

  In worthiness,1

  The mocking reference to Anne’s chastity—she was six months pregnant at the time of her coronation—was not lost on the people who lined the streets to watch Henry’s new wife pass. They called her “a strong harlot” and “a goggle-eyed whore,” and one man was heard to declare that he was neither fool nor sinner enough to ever take “that whore Nan Bullen to be queen.” She was already pregnant when Henry finally married her, earlier in the year, and Katherine at least believed they had been living as husband and wife for much longer.

  There had been no official papal annulment of the marriage to Katherine. Instead, spurred toward a conclusive settlement by Anne’s pregnancy, Parliament declared that all ecclesiastical cases were hereafter to be settled in England, without appeal to Rome or anywhere else. This enabled the convocation of the clergy of southern England, early in April, to declare Henry and Katherine’s marriage invalid, and to make his marriage to Anne, already celebrated in January, a legal and binding union.

  But the Londoners who had greeted Katherine on her coronation progress through the city nearly twenty-five years earlier and still loved her could not find it in their hearts to wish Anne well. Not ten people in the crowd called out “God save the queen!” an eyewitness wrote; instead they pointed to the royal initials H and A painted and stitched into the decorations along the parade route and read them as “Ha ha!” Katherine’s partisans seized on every imperfection in Anne’s appearance as if it were a monstrosity. She wore her dress high up around her throat as if to hide a goiter; the crownlike wreath she wore emphasized the scrofulous scars on her neck; seen from the right angle, the ears of the mule behind her appeared to project from her head “like two sharp horns, making many people laugh.”

  The solemnity of Anne’s coronation on June I did nothing to discour age these jibes, and both before and after their marriage Anne was a source of considerable embarrassment and inconvenience to the king. During the summer of 1532 he took her with him on what was to be an extensive hunting trip to the north, and as his custom was he passed through village after village to show himself to the people and to receive their acclaim. This time, though, for the first three or four days of his journey he met with only shouts of derision and criticism. Anne was roundly hooted and hissed, and the villagers shouted to the king to take back his true wife Katherine. These insults spoiled Henry’s anticipation for the hunt, and he and Anne abruptly returned to London.2

  Justices and magistrates were ordered to take severe action against anyone speaking against the king or Anne. In a country town a sixty-nine-year-old Derbyshire soldier, “sore bruised” in Henry’s early wars, said in a conversation with a vicar and two others that he could not believe the king would forsake “so noble a lady, so high born, and so gracious” as Katherine to marry another woman; a few months later he found himself a prisoner in the Marshalsea.3 All the crafts and guilds assembled in their halls in London were enjoined to say nothing injurious to the king’s dignity, and to prevent their journeymen and servants and, “a more difficult task, their own wives,” from insulting Anne. As the day of the coronation approached, cash rewards were offered to anyone bringing “talkers and slanderers” to the notice of the royal officials, and proclamations ordered the suppression of “fond books, ballads, rhymes and other lewd treatises” disparaging Henry’s second marriage.4 But it was impossible, as the Lord Mayor remarked on the day of Anne’s progress, “to restrain the people’s hearts, and even the king didn’t know how to do it,” and when at a public sermon shortly after the marriage the congregation was asked to pray for Anne’s health and welfare, nearly all who were present left the church “in high displeasure and with sad countenances” without waiting for the rest of the sermon.5

  Within the court the factions supporting Katherine and Anne had recently come to blows. Henry’s sister Mary had affronted Anne by her “opprobrious language.” To avenge the insult, Anne’s uncle Norfolk ordered twenty of his men to assassinate Brandon’s chief followers in the sanctuary of Westminster. Brandon and many of the courtiers were so outraged that they were preparing to invade the sanctuary and drag out the murderers by force. Henry restrained them, but it was only fear of his anger that kept even larger brawls from occurring.

  Meanwhile Anne’s enemies had found a subtler way to assault both her peace of mind and her influence with the king. Anne had gained her power because of the king’s weakness for women; she could lose it in the same way. Young girls, noblemen’s daughters, arrived at court every month to take up residence as waiting maids. The king flirted with themall, and from time to time singled out one for special favor. In 1532 he was said to be “courting” one of these ladies, and was “very much in love” with her. The anti-Boleyn faction gave him every encouragement and help in this new affair, much to Anne’s displeasure, but the new love could not compete with Henry’s abiding infatuation for his “sweetheart.”6 The disgruntled courtiers had to admit Anne’s strength, and consoled themselves by making mean references to her disfigured hand. Growing out of the nail of one of her fin
gers was another, superfluous nail—possibly the stub of an extra finger. It was so slight a blemish that she could easily keep it covered with the tip of the next finger, but all those who hated Anne made much of it, as they did of her every defect and failing.7

  After seven years of Anne’s perilous coquetry Henry was no more blind to her faults than he was entirely faithful to her, but when she told him she was pregnant he forgot everything else in his delight at the prospect of a son. For Henry, this was the climactic event, the ultimate conclusion to the long wranglings of the divorce. All the plans, expectations and celebrations which had greeted the arrival of the New Year’s boy so long ago were now to be revived. Those who for decades had predicted only disaster for England in the absence of a legitimate male heir would be confounded at last. To provide a suitable setting for the birth of his son Henry ordered that the most beautiful bed he owned, “the most magnificent and gorgeous that could be thought of,” be brought from his treasure room to the room where the queen was to be delivered. As Anne’s time drew near, physicians and astrologers were called in to confirm Henry’s hopes about the child’s sex, and armed with their assurances that it would be male Henry proclaimed a splendid tournament to be held soon after the birth. Expecting that the arrival of Anne’s son would silence her detractors once and for all, her relatives and friends prepared to make a triumphant showing at the tournament, and sent to Flanders for the best horses they could find.