Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  Three days later the crowd witnessed an even stranger spectacle. The spare, ascetic bishop of Rochester, John Fisher, was brought to Tower Hill to face the executioner’s sword. Thousands came to see him die, few of them believing him capable of the treason for which he had been condemned. Fisher was in fact guilty of the treasonable act of writing letters to Charles V inviting him to invade England, but in his own view he was acting in response to a higher logic than that of the law. Summoning an imperial invasion was a means of saving the lives of Katherine and Mary and, even more important, saving the Catholic church in England. As Fisher told those who crowded around the scaffold, “Christian people, I come hither to die for the faith of Christ’s holy Catholic church.”2

  In executing the bishop of Rochester Henry was committing the greater sacrilege of killing a cardinal of the Roman church; Fisher had been raised to the cardinalate during his imprisonment. Londoners who looked up at the bishop’s bony head, impaled on a pike on London Bridge, believed their king had killed a saint as well. The head did not decay. Day after day the sober features continued to look down “sadly and constantly” on passers-by with the same expression the bishop had worn in life. Another grisly execution came and went, this time the killing of the revered humanist Thomas More, and still Fisher’s skull-like head kept its reproving vigil. Finally, when the inevitable talk of a miracle began, the head was taken down and dropped in the river.

  From a procedural point of view the nine victims were unarguably guilty of treason. They had refused to take the required oath to uphold the succession, thereby making their loyalty to the king and his designated heir, the Princess Elizabeth, open to serious question. It made no difference that what the nine men objected to was not Parliament’s right to change the succession but the phraseology of the oath. Its wording contained an explicit denial of papal authority, and this, they pointed out, was a matter unrelated to the succession and offensive to their consciences.

  Yet their protest came at a time when the oath was being enforced with greater rigor than ever. In November of 1534 a parliamentary edictspecified its wording in greater detail and spelled out the procedures surrounding its enforcement. To refuse to swear, this new law stated, was tantamount to being convicted of treason, since a certificate of refusal signed by two of the commissioners administering the oath had the same weight as a treason indictment arrived at by twelve jurors. Fisher and More, who were already in prison, had been unmoved by this new threat, and when the Carthusian priors met at the London Charterhouse near Smithfield and announced their opposition to the oath Cromwell had them arrested and taken to the Tower. They were accused, along with the learned Bridgettine Richard Reynolds, of denying that Henry VIII was head of the English church. They argued at their trial that to affirm the king’s headship of the church was to challenge the pope’s authority. Yet papal primacy was essential to the salvation of every believer. No manmade law could cancel out this overriding truth of the church, they claimed, and they were prepared to die rather than sin by forswearing it. At the monks’ trial the lines were clearly drawn on both sides. The king and the royal Council, who until now had stopped short of carrying through their threats to punish with death those who refused to swear, decided not to hesitate any longer. From early in May to the middle of July the news out of England was filled with accounts of trials, executions and martyrs to the faith.

  On the continent, churchmen and devout laymen were horrified. In Italy, the bishop of Faenza, papal nuncio, recorded the account that reached him, describing how the English king had caused “certain religious men” to be “ripped up in each other’s presence, their arms torn off, their hearts cut out and rubbed upon their mouths and faces.”3 This outrageous king who had badly mistreated his wife and daughter and made his brazen mistress queen now made it plain that he was capable of monstrous cruelty to religious men as well. Opponents of Lutheran and other reforming doctrines condemned Henry for assaulting the true church, while even ardent Lutherans deplored the executions of Fisher and More. Fisher had after all agreed with Luther in upholding the validity of Henry’s marriage to Katherine, while More’s humanist writings and teachings were held in the highest respect by the scholars of the Protestant movements. And believers of every sort found the executions of the monks repugnant in the extreme. That peaceful, withdrawn men of prayer who wore hair shirts, denied themselves meat and drank wine so watered it had no color presented a threat to the security of Henry’s throne was beyond credibility. The only possible explanation was that Henry was mad.

  A form of madness, it seemed, hung over all the sovereigns of Europe in the middle 1530s. The specter of religious dissent, first conjured by Luther at the Diet of Worms, was growing ever larger and more menacing. There were now not only Lutherans to contend with but Zwinglians, Calvinists, and a swarm of nameless congregations each claiming to possess theological truth. The established governments saw in each of these pockets of unorthodox belief an incitement to political rebellion, and as they proliferated government servants, clerics of the old faith and the rulers themselves grew more and more severe in their response. Only a few days after the martyrdom of the English Carthusians three Lutherans were burned at the stake in Paris, and one of them, a Fleming who insisted to the end that he was right and his persecutors wrong, was slowly roasted alive. The French king Francis reportedly joined a religious procession marching to the site of a mass execution of Protestants and, with his sons, had stayed on to watch the torturing and burning. His presence was taken to be a sign of complete royal approval of the policy of burning heretics, and his example was followed in other capitals.4

  In Catholic countries the Inquisition was called upon to step up its age-old process of weeding out the tares in. the spiritual vineyards, and the numbers of those holding erroneous opinions who were “relaxed” to secular governments for burning leaped upward in the third and fourth decades of the century. But even in regions where the Protestants made themselves a majority—as in Calvinist Geneva, the Zwinglian cantons of Switzerland and the Lutheran territories under Charles V’s rule—men and women of differing views were subjected to savage repression. Of all these dissidents the most feared were those their opponents called Anabaptists, congregations whose belief in the necessity of adult baptism radically alienated them both from the faith of Rome and the doctrines of other Protestants. In Catholic and Protestant lands alike Anabaptists were mutilated, drowned, garroted, burned and suffocated without mercy. Their lands were seized, their houses torn down, their children driven off to beg their bread.

  The fear the Anabaptists attracted was increased manyfold by their remarkable reign over the town of Miinster in Westphalia in 1534 and 1535. Here a group of Anabaptists led by a Haarlem baker and a tailor from Leyden took over the town council and expelled all citizens who refused rebaptism. The fleeing townspeople had to leave behind all their goods, and after the enforced exodus a minority of perhaps fourteen thousand of the regenerate, most of them laborers or craft workers, found themselves in possession of a large town and an even larger armory and treasury. The baker, Jan Mattys, immediately set about to organize the defense of the new community of saints, which was under attack by its nominal overlord the bishop of Münster. Filled with a sudden certainty that he could repeat the miracle of Gideon in the book of Judges and defeat the besieging armies with only twenty men, Mattys left theprotection of the town walls and assaulted the enemy. He was killed on sight, but his death did nothing to decrease the enthusiasm of the Anabaptist flock. Instead it brought into prominence the more colorful and charismatic figure of Jan of Leyden, a fascinating opportunist who soon turned Münster into a spectacular parody of contemporary government and religion.

  In a matter of days Münster became a biblical city, ruled by elders and committed to Old Testament morality. All existing laws, authorities and family relationships were swept away, and a new order brought in. Jan of Leyden proclaimed polygamy to be the natural state of mankind, sanctioned by the prop
hets, and set an example to his followers by taking seventeen wives. Among them was the widow of his predecessor Jan Mattys, a former nun named Divara, who was said to be the most beautiful woman in the city. Superimposed on this patriarchal society was an elaborate imitation of the regalia and ceremonial of a royal court. Jan of Leyden became King Jan, and his principal wife Queen Divara. There were chamberlains, stewards and marshals of the court, and the king’s sixteen lesser wives served as matrons of honor to the queen. Plundered vestments and hangings from all the churches of the town provided the finery for the courtiers, and when King Jan rode through the town on one of his thirty-one splendid horses he wore a gown of cloth of silver, lined with crimson and ornamented with gold thread. Two pages, one bearing a Bible and the other a naked sword, formed his mounted escort; one of these boys was a son of the bishop of Munster, captured when the Anabaptists first seized the town. King Jan wore a rich gold crown and a jeweled orb, the insignia of royalty, with the motto “King of justice for the whole world,” and both he and his attendants spoke in the most grandiose terms about the day when his rule over the remnant population of a Westphalian town would be transformed into sovereignty over the entire world.

  That Henry was known to be pleased by the Anabaptist take-over in Münster made his own recent alterations in religion seem all the more radical. Henry did not sympathize with the theological views of the Münster rebels, but the fact that they were an irritant to Charles V’s sister Mary, regent of the Netherlands, made them useful allies in his enduring contest with imperial interests. He came very close to making overtures to King Jan during that monarch’s brief reign, and lost much of his credit with more moderate Protestant leaders in the process. In the same month that he began executing Catholics he tried to restore that credit by burning fourteen Anabaptist refugees who had recently come to England from Holland, but the gesture was forgotten in the uproar that followed the more scandalous executions.5

  However hard he might have tried to temper or disguise it Henry wasswiftly making England a Protestant country, and the deaths of the Catholic martyrs were a harsh but inescapable milestone along that path. The king’s own views had certainly changed. The onetime arch-opponent of Luther now regretted his harsh stand, and fostered the view that he had written his treatise against Luther under duress. He ordered the distribution of a letter by Luther arguing that Wolsey and other clerics had been behind the entire venture, and tried to clear himself of involvement in the affair.6

  To be sure, Henry’s altered attitude toward Lutheranism was rooted in political expediency. He was seeking allies among the enemies of the empire; many of those enemies were Lutheran. In the summer of 1534 he welcomed embassies from the Lutheran free cities of Hamburg and Lübeck with great pomp, and as they rode upriver in the royal barge Londoners remarked on the bright red liveries of the Ltibeckers, with their motto of indomitability, “If God be for us, who can be against us?” In breaking with the pope and casting his lot with the continental Protestants Henry was putting English trade and commerce in jeopardy, and even risking the possibility of food shortages among his subjects. The commercial repercussions of English diplomacy were widespread. English merchants in Flanders, Spain and France found their markets so hostile they had no choice but to sell their wares and come home. Those who stayed were abused, boycotted or robbed, and their rights under the law of nations governing international trade were ignored. Even the English fleets that fished off Iceland and Newfoundland were liable to be attacked or sent home by agents of the Danish king.

  There were those who argued that until the conflict between England and the pope was ended the English people forfeited their place in Christendom. This highly abstract view had little direct impact on the practical lives of the English, but it did lend support to continental debtors who withheld payments from their English creditors, and to foreign merchants, who engaged in reprisals—legalized piracy—against English ships. Most damaging of all was the policy of the Hanseatic merchants, who now refused to supply England with grain. In a year of poor harvests, this put the country at the severe disadvantage of having to turn to grain suppliers in the unfriendly territories of France and the Low Countries.

  The harvest of 1535 was among the worst within living memory. The rain began falling, so the people said, on the day the Carthusians were hanged, and it showed no sign of stopping. God was taking vengeance on his faithful for the wickedness of their ruler. The king ordered the preachers to say that God was merely testing his chosen people, but they knew better. It was Henry, they said, who was testing the Lord, and he had finally gone too far. When the fields were harvested the barns were less than half full. There would not be enough corn to last the winter.Everywhere the king was blamed and reviled, and bitter songs about his impiety, his tyranny and his despised wife were sung at every bride-ale and wake.

  The constant rain irked Henry as much as it did his unloving subjects. It spoiled the summer’s hunting, and kept him cooped up with his reproachful, neurotic wife. It spoiled his temper as well. When his favorite fool, Will Somers, chose the wrong moment to joke about the king’s “ribald and bastard”—meaning Anne and Elizabeth—Henry struck him so hard he nearly killed him, and the terrified Somers had to take refuge in a nobleman’s house until the incident blew over.7

  Henry had a great deal on his mind that summer. His legs were bothering him, he was starting to put on weight, and he had recently ordered nine men of conscience to their deaths. One of them, Thomas More, had been among his few genuine friends in earlier years, a man whose wit had amused him and whose unfailing good sense he had relied on completely. And there was Anne, now grown querulous and vengeful, and still barren of sons. He was thinking of ridding himself of her, except that he might then have to take back [Catherine and face the ridicule of every petty priest and royal servant in the Christian world. Meanwhile the new pope, Paul III, was showing himself to be a much more vigorous enemy than Clement had been. The execution of Cardinal Fisher had spurred him to launch a fresh assault on Henry’s power. The pope wrote to the European rulers announcing his intention to deprive Henry of his kingdom and asking their aid. His only weapon was the loyalty of the Catholic sovereigns, but that loyalty could be counted on to injure England in a hundred ways short of war. And as the rainy summer dragged on Henry felt more and more disinclined to bestir himself to retaliate.

  It was while these troublesome thoughts were plaguing him that Henry slipped away one night on a whim. He heard that a play mocking the clergy was to be presented in a village far from the censorious eye of the London clergy, and taking nothing but a swift horse and a two-handed sword he set out for the place on his own. He rode the first twenty miles but had to walk the last ten, trying to forget the ulcers on his legs and the weight of the sword against his thigh. He walked most of the night, until he finally came to the house where the play was in progress. He was in disguise, of course, but once he saw himself represented on the stage he could hardly keep silent. He was so delighted when the actor who represented him “cut off the heads of the clergy” that “in order to laugh at his ease, and encourage the people,” he made his identity known.8 To most of Europe he might be a monster, but to the handful of Protestant sympathizers who had gathered on that summer night to revile the church, he was their hero once again.

  XIV

  By me al women may beware,

  That se my wofull smart:

  To seke true love let them not spare,

  Before they set their hart,

  Or els they may become as I,

  Which for my truth am like to dye.

  The executions of 1535 made Mary desperate to escape. In the week the Carthusians suffered, Lady Shelton was “continually telling her to take warning by their fate,” and reminding her for the hundredth time that she was a superfluous nuisance who had long ago been marked for death herself. A servant of the imperial ambassador Chapuys who visited Mary during that week reported to his master that escape was on her mind day a
nd night, and “she thinks of nothing else than how it may be done, her desire for it increasing every day.”1

  The idea of escape was not new. Chapuys had brought it up from time to time, and every plan for political revolt brought to him over the last year had included the kidnapping of Mary and Katherine, who were to be taken to a safe hiding place to await the outcome of the rising. When Mary fell sick in February the ambassador was in the process of designing another escape plan, and each time the tension mounted around her he recalculated the distances, the obstacles and the means necessary to carry Mary to freedom in Flanders. So far each crisis had eased before the escape plans matured, but that was no guarantee she would not have to escape in the future. In the spring of 1535 Mary felt her danger to be greater than ever. She sent word to Chapuys “begging him most urgently to think over the matter [of her escape], otherwise she considered herself lost, knowing that they wanted only to kill her.”2 She was at Eltham when she sent the ambassador this message, and was still troubled by illness. Shesuffered another relapse in mid-April, but remained so intent on escape that she talked long and urgently to Chapuys’ man about it from her sickbed, and what she said was very affecting. “If I were to tell you the messages she sent me,” the ambassador wrote to Charles V’s chief minister Granvelle, “you could not refrain from tears, begging me to have pity on her, and advise her as I thought best, and she would obey.”

  On first consideration the ambassador thought Eltham might be the ideal site for Mary’s escape. In the Kentish countryside about five miles south of the Thames at the nearest point, it was far enough from London to be inaccessible by the king’s guard yet near enough to the river to provide swift access to the Channel ports. Mary felt certain it would be impossible for her to get out beyond the walls at night, but flight might be possible during the daytime. It seems she was now permitted, probably for health reasons, to walk in the grounds and perhaps even to go hawking, for Chapuys suggested that she could be carried off while “going out to sport” at some little distance from Eltham. There she could be seized, put on horseback, and escorted to the river somewhere below Grave-send, where a rowboat would be waiting to take her to a Spanish or Flemish ship. A gunboat would provide what protection would be needed, and within hours Mary would be within sight of the Flemish coast. They would need a favorable wind, of course. But if the wind drove them back against the coast the armed escort vessel could hold off any pursuing English ships, while any wind that might favor the pursuers would also drive Mary’s ship all the faster toward Flanders.3 And once ashore there she would be taken to Brussels, to become a celebrated guest at the court of her imperial cousin, honored in her exile as Princess Mary, sole heir to the throne of England.