Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  Henry expressed the same sentiments with a vengeance. When Mary had a serious relapse in mid-March, Henry proclaimed himself anxious to see her “as a father should,” but once he arrived at Greenwich he spoke only with Lady Shelton and the waiting women, not with Mary herself, nor did he consult her doctors. When Dr. Butts took it upon himself to come before the king unbidden Henry accused him of disloyalty; he was exaggerating Mary’s illness, Henry said, in order to promote her political interests and have her moved to Kimbolton. From there the two women would raise a revolt against him. Again the specter of Isabella troubled Henry’s mind. Katherine was so “haughty in spirit,” he blustered, that she might “raise a number of men and make war, as boldly as did queen Isabella her mother.” The idea was not at all farfetched, since both Katherine and Mary had more than enough fortitude to lead an army along with the heroism to inspire it. But even if Katherine had been in good health, which she was not, her announced determination to obey Henry in all things saving her conscience would have prevented her from even the most trivial breach of faith. And without Katherine’s acquiescence it was hard to imagine Mary acting alone.

  With his imagination dominated by fantasies of rebellion Henry was in no mood to console his daughter, or to allow her the comfort of his presence. Instead he sent word to her through Lady Shelton that she was his “worst enemy,” and that he knew her behavior was part of a calculated plot to turn his subjects against him. She had already succeeded in turning most of the Christian princes of Europe against him, he raged; what could she expect from him but anger and vengeance?9

  To the extent that Henry sensed rebellion in the air he was not far wrong. For a year and more Chapuys had been receiving visits, messages and encouraging indications of other kinds from dozens of nobles eager to take up arms against Henry and in defense of Katherine and Mary. Their grievances ranged from personal injuries and resentments to broad political and religious issues. Thomas Dacre, former warden of the Western Marches, was incensed at his recent trial for treason; his acquittal showed the solidarity of the peers in the face of unpopular royal policies. Lord Dacre was only one of a large group of northern nobles—one lord told Chapuys there were some sixteen hundred of them—pledged to support any armed attempt to force Henry to give up Anne, reverse his blasphemous religious legislation and restore Katherine and Mary to their rightful status.

  All those who hoped for an armed rising in the countryside welcomed the news of dissension and dissatisfaction at court. Henry and Anne now quarreled frequently and bitterly, and even those who hated Anne most for what she had done to Katherine and Mary had to admit that she had now entered a purgatory of her own. To say that Henry tired of Anne after Elizabeth’s birth fails to do justice to her enduring attraction for him, an attraction which never really faded and which he eventually attributed to witchcraft. But soon after their marriage Henry had taken up again the round of flirtations, seductions and romantic intrigues that had characterized his life with Katherine. Anne became one love among many, and when she protested Henry simply refused to be moved by her agonized pleas for fidelity and told her to stay in her place.

  Anne’s strongest hold on her husband was the possibility that she might give him a son, and in the spring of 1534 she told him she was pregnant again. For a few months their life together resumed its old course, but when in early summer Anne had to admit that she had been mistaken about the child Henry’s vengeance was swift. He took as his mistress an old love, a “very beautiful damsal” of the court whose identity is unclear but whose loyalty to Katherine and Mary suggests that she was allied with the growing anti-Boleyn faction.10 Anne’s sister-in-law tried to break up the affair but the king banished her from court, and Chapuys noted that Anne grew more subdued and unsettled the longer the infatuation lasted.

  There can be little doubt that Henry wanted revenge. He felt cheated by Anne’s false pregnancy, and he attacked her both by putting another woman ahead of her in his affections and by insulting her child’s primacy in the succession. For the first time since she joined Elizabeth’s household Mary became the object of an official visit by the principal courtiers. At Henry’s request, “nearly all the gentlemen and ladies of the court” paid their respects to her at the country house where she and Elizabeth werestaying, and when she left for Richmond she was riding in a velvet litter just like Elizabeth’s.11 The significance of the courtiers’ visit and the velvet litter was not lost on Anne, who was “greatly annoyed” at Mary’s temporary promotion in rank and even more put out to learn that Henry’s new favorite had sent the king’s daughter an encouraging message. She was Mary’s true friend and devoted servant, she said, and she urged Mary to look for a favorable change in her circumstances in the near future.12 Anne’s renewed protests at these incidents were received coldly. Henry told his wife that she would do well to feel thankful for her present rank and luxury, adding frankly that if he had it to do over again he would not marry her.13 The implied threat was clear enough. He had divorced one wife; he could divorce another.

  Chapuys’ dispatches during this period show Anne as a calculating murderess with limitless opportunities to strike out at her enemies. He reported her conflicts with Henry, but he always added that she knew so well how to handle the king that in the end she invariably came out ahead. Other observers, who were not so severely biased by loyalty to Henry’s ex-queen, saw Anne differently. Behind her scheming they saw desperation and fear; behind her mistreatment of Mary they perceived a struggle to preserve the rights of her own child. Anne was queen and Elizabeth princess, but only at Henry’s sufferance. No European sovereign acknowledged Anne’s title, and at every court where Katherine was pitied Anne was called “the Concubine” or “the Great Whore.” If Henry decided to put her aside, no church, no government, no lawyer would come to her defense. Her relatives would disown her, and her few remaining friends at court would denounce her more loudly than her enemies. A French envoy who visited Henry’s court in the month of Mary’s severe illness, February of 1535, wrote that Anne was severely restricted in her movements and in some fear for her safety. Her looks betrayed anxiety and nervous exhaustion, he said. He described how she had sought him out and confided to him that her position had become even more tenuous than it had been before her marriage. She was being watched so closely she could neither speak freely nor write to anyone, she whispered, and then left him so abruptly that he felt certain she was not exaggerating her predicament.14

  Anne’s relations had begun to treat her as shabbily as the king did. In their determination to preserve their own interests they brought to court Margaret Shelton, daughter of Lady Shelton and Anne’s cousin, hoping that she would become Henry’s next mistress. Margaret did supplant the unknown girl who had encouraged Mary, but not for long. New flirtations followed, including Henry’s revived fascination with the daughter of a Wiltshire gentleman, Jane Seymour. Henry did not abandon Anne entirely, of course, but though she still gave him pleasure at times he wascoming to feel trapped by his marriage, and disappointed that his wife had produced only a daughter. Anne knew where her salvation lay. More than anything in the world, she told a lady of the French court, she wanted a son.

  Heartened by every sign of discord and especially by Henry’s disfavor toward Anne, dissatisfied nobles pressed Chapuys harder than ever. Lord Bray asked the ambassador to obtain for him the exact wording of a prognostication circulating in Flanders to the effect that Henry would face a widespread revolt in 1535. He meant to send the prophecy to all the conspirators, and with it a code they might use to correspond secretly with one another. All they needed was a show of military support from the emperor. The appearance of a few imperial ships at the mouth of the Thames, filled with seasoned troops, would send the government into a panic. Meanwhile a tough company of German mercenaries, led by trusted officers and backed up by arms and ammunition, could be landed in the north to signal the start of the rising.

  Chapuys forwarded the urgent pleas of the rebel lor
ds to his master, knowing that for the time being, Charles’ own military situation did not permit him to intervene in English affairs. He was currently engaged in a dramatic attempt to reconquer lands seized by the Ottoman Turks in central Europe and North Africa, and he had continually to be on the alert against the French. Neither his sympathies nor his political interests were directed toward England, and the family ties Katherine and Mary counted on so heavily were for Charles only one small piece in an intricate political puzzle. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, where Katherine was concerned, the emperor saw little reason to take any action whatever, particularly now that Henry had married Anne and started a new family with her. As for Mary, there were remedies short of war which could solve her difficulties. Marriage to a respectable prince—preferably one with strong ties to imperial interests—would accomplish several objectives without leading to conflict. It would remove her from her semi-captivity, it would help to initiate a rapprochement between Henry and Charles, and it would shut the mouths of those who continued to criticize Henry for dishonoring his daughter.

  Chapuys did not pass on Charles’ true strategy to the English rebels. Instead he gave them every encouragement short of what they wanted most to hear: that imperial ships and arms were on the way. In actuality there was no need for help from any continental power. There were more than enough disaffected nobles and commoners within England to make a strong showing against Henry’s forces. But they lacked leadership. Katherine, their natural leader, refused to abandon her oath of obedience to Henry, and no other figure appeared with the determination orquickening energy to trigger the revolt. The moment came and, through inaction, was lost.

  As the lords of the Marches were struggling to bring the revolt into being the pivotal figure in their plans fell ill. Like the emperor’s potential involvement in the rising, Mary’s health was among the imponderables of the insurrection. She had not been entirely well since about the age of fourteen, when with the onset of puberty she began to experience symptoms of a disorder known to Renaissance doctors as “strangulation of the womb” or “suffocation of the mother.” These violent terms described several distinct complaints grouped together in a paramedical theory about female sexuality. The separate symptoms were, first, the irregularity or cessation of menstrual periods, or amenorrhea. A depressed mental state characterized by “heaviness, fear and sorrowfulness” was another indication of the general disorder, as were difficulty in breathing and swelling and pain in the abdominal region.

  In young unmarried women like Mary any one of a wide range of symptoms could point to strangulation of the womb: “headache, nau-seousness, vomiting, want of appetite, longing, an ill habit of body, difficulty of breathing, trembling of the heart, swooning, melancholy, fearful dreams” and “watching, with sadness and heaviness.”15 Sixteenth-century doctors, like their predecessors in antiquity, believed that these afflictions were brought on by sexual abstinence. Every woman, whatever her age, rank or degree of virtue, was at the mercy of her voracious uterus—what for centuries had been called the “raging womb.” Widows, or wives suddenly deprived of the “company of a man,” fell into an aggrieved state of melancholy and were troubled with amenorrhea. Even young girls who were kept strictly away from men suffered pain, mental anguish and irregular menstruation, and the only satisfactory cure was marriage.

  Widows suffering from strangulation of the womb were urged to marry again; wives were advised to engage in “wanton copulation” with their husbands. Physicians told the parents of young girls to arrange matches for them without delay, and in the meantime to send them out riding for several hours a day. More bizarre remedies were also recommended. A woman in a near-catatonic state was laid on her back, her clothes loosened and her hair hanging free around her shoulders. Calling her name in a loud voice, the doctor seized her by the hair and yanked it until she regained consciousness. At the same time he pulled at her pubic hair, both to increase the pain and to “draw downwards” the “sharp and malign vapor” that was ascending from the womb and threatening to damage the other organs. Another common treatment was uterine fumigation. A medicated pessary, a curved cylindrical tube, rounded at oneend, made of gold or silver and perforated at the closed end with a number of small holes, was inserted into the patient’s vagina, closed end first. Fastened in place by means of cords tied around the waist, it allowed steam from a vessel of boiling liquid to reach the mouth of the uterus and, so the doctors thought, alleviate its unnatural state. Along with horseback riding, fumigation was the method of treatment most often prescribed for “bashful and shamefaced” young maidens; matrons underwent the horrifying treatment of having horse-leeches inserted into the neck of the womb.16

  As Mary lived through her adolescence, along with the racking anxieties of her own and her mother’s situation she had to come to terms with the dangers and indignities of recurrent strangulation of the womb as well. No record of the specific treatments she was given survives, but it is certain that she followed the recommended therapy of daily horseback rides, and that when she joined Elizabeth’s household these rides stopped. Her horses were taken away along with her fine clothes and jewels, and this change in the pattern of her daily exercise cannot have improved her general health.

  The fact that Katherine knew at first hand what her daughter’s illness meant made their separation especially painful. In a letter to Cromwell Katherine said she had been “ill of the same sickness” as Mary, and a curious document unearthed during the legal battle over the divorce confirms her claim. It was a memorandum headed “Questions to be asked of those persons who know the circumstances of the marriage of queen Katherine of England,” and it listed specific points to be raised with legal witnesses who had reason to know whether or not Katherine came to Henry as a virgin. Among the queries was one asking whether, after Arthur’s death, Katherine was “weak and crippled, and discharged humors from her mouth.” Weakness in the limbs and some sort of oral discharge were among the symptoms of strangulation of the womb, and the physicians who examined Katherine after her marriage to Arthur agreed on the common diagnosis of the “raging womb,” its passion unassuaged because the girl was still a virgin. Their recommendation, according to the document, was that Katherine marry a “competent person,” namely Henry; the disappearance of her symptoms after her marriage to Henry showed that their prognosis was correct.17

  Remembering her own discomfort, and the obstetrical complications linked with it that plagued her during the first fifteen years or so of her marriage, Katherine knew what Mary was going through and what reassurance she could offer her. If Mary came to Kimbolton, she wrote to Cromwell, “the comfort and cheerfulness she would have with me would be half her cure.” “I have found this by experience,” she added, hoping to add a slightly clinical tone to her request.

  But Henry was firm. Mary was not allowed to go to her mother, or even to come within thirty miles of her forsaken residence during the critical weeks of her illness in February of 1535. Katherine was half prepared to hear that her daughter had died when the news finally reached her that Mary had passed the crisis point and was recovering at Greenwich.

  XIII

  They did robe and spoule al the Kynges frendes

  They called them heretikes with spight and disdayne

  They toffled a space lyke mantes and F[e]indes

  They put some in preson and sume to greate payne.

  It was during Mary’s convalescence that the most outrageous executions of the English Reformation were carried out. The priors of three Carthusian monasteries and a Brigittine monk of Sion were tried and convicted of treason, taken to Tyburn and hanged. They were hanged in their religious dress, an unheard-of affront to the entire religious community and an unprecedented departure from judicial custom. The brutality of their treatment was also unusual, even in an age of brutal executions. They were cut down from the gallows still living; their torsos were slit open and their vital organs torn out. Afterward their beheaded corpses we
re paraded through the streets, the severed heads and feet displayed at the city gates and the remains burned.

  The execution of the traitorous monks was given highly visible endorsement by the court. The duke of Norfolk, Thomas Boleyn (now earl of Wiltshire), and Henry Fitzroy were prominent among the spectators, along with other courtiers, and the notables were careful to stand near the scaffold where they could be seen to greatest advantage by the crowd. The king’s chamberlain Henry Norris clattered into the throng with an escort of forty mounted men. Five strangers disguised as Scots Borderers, their visors lowered to hide their faces, watched the bloody proceedings from a distance. When one of them temporarily lost his visor and was recognized as the duke of Norfolk’s brother speculation began about the identity of the others. It was noticed that all the courtiers showed unusual reverence to the disguised men, and this, plus the persistent rumor that the king wanted to witness the event in person, led to the widespread belief that one of the Borderers was Henry himself.1

  The four monks were only the first in a series of victims of judicial murder. Within weeks three other Carthusians were apprehended and imprisoned, and awaited their trial fastened in a standing position against the dungeon wall. Iron collars pinned them at the neck and iron fetters bound their feet. For seventeen days they could neither sit nor lie prone, and their chains were never “loosed for any natural necessity.” Finally they too were tried, condemned and hanged.