Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  If Henry was at all taken aback by the self-determined woman he now recognized as his daughter he did not show it. From midafternoon until after vespers, when the king and Jane left to return to court, “there was nothing but conversing with Mary in private and with such love and affection, and such brilliant promises for the future, that no father could have behaved better towards his daughter.”6 Much was left unspoken, of course. Henry said nothing about Katherine, who had been in her tomb at Peterborough only five months, or about Anne, whose memory Jane seems quickly to have erased. He expressed deep regret at having kept Mary apart from him for so long, but gave every evidence that he would make up the loss in time, putting a draft for a thousand crowns in her hand for “small pleasures” and telling her there would be more whenever she needed it. Jane gave her a valuable diamond ring, and she was told that in a few days preparations would be made for her permanent return to court.7

  Mary’s return was delayed for several months, until after Henry came back from the long end-of-summer hunting tour he took every year. She stayed on at Hunsdon, surrounded by her growing household and receiving frequent gifts, messages and visitors from Cromwell and other royal servants. Edward Seymour, now Lord Beauchamp and Henry’s chamberlain, asked her to send a list of whatever clothing she needed; Cromwell himself, who returned to his old role as Mary’s chief friend in the Council, sent her a “well favored horse” and a beautiful saddle.8

  Mary spent the long summer days walking in the fields, riding her horse and writing frequent letters to Henry. She took a warm interest in little Elizabeth, who at nearly three years old was as precocious as Mary herself had been. Mary wrote about her to the king, remarking on her unusual gifts and future promise, though remembering to add her customary reference to Henry’s hope for a son. While at Hunsdon Mary received the clothes and jewels that had been taken from her two and a half years earlier. The clothes would have to be recut, the gowns made into kirtles and the trimmings removed to be used again. The jewels Mary put in her jewel chest along with those she had received just after Anne’s death and those Henry and Jane often sent her. The news that the messengers and couriers brought from court along with their letters and packages marked the passing of an era. Henry Fitzroy was dead of tuberculosis; Anne’s father Thomas Boleyn, who had been overheard to say at the time of Katherine’s death that it was a pity her daughter was not keeping her company, was deprived of his lands and title. And Thomas Abel, Katherine’s former chaplain and defender, was in prison for preaching against the royal Council, and no one believed he would ever be released.9

  Ostensibly Mary and Henry were reunited, yet in Chapuys’ phrase there were “a few drachmas of gall and bitterness mixed with the sweet food of paternal kindness.”10 Mary had been made to come to heel in signing the Submission, but her look and demeanor were anything but submissive. She was overtly deferential, and genuinely loving, but disturbingly intelligent. And she was, after all, very like himself, and Henry was guile incarnate. To ease his mind the king met with her again, and this time, believing he had won her confidence through his display of affection, his gifts and the disarming pomp of her new household, Henry asked Mary to tell him privately whether she had signed the Submission voluntarily or merely as a ruse, maintaining the opposite opinions in her heart. He hated nothing more than dishonesty, he said. Sometimes he was advised to conceal the truth from ambassadors, or even to lie to them, but he never did as his councilors told him, preferring to speak the truth at all costs. Mary should now show herself his true daughter, he concluded, by telling him in all confidentiality whether she had dissembled when she agreed to sign the document.

  Mary assured him her submission had been sincere. She had no other choice than to say this, unless she wanted to abandon the course she had decided to follow and return to a sure sentence of death. For weeks she had been writing to Henry in the most self-deprecating terms imaginable,begging him “prostrate at your most noble feet, humbly, and with the very bottom of my stomach,” to believe the sincerity of her repentance.11She declared herself his “bounden slave,” his “most humble faithful and obedient child,” and announced that she would rather be a servant in his chamber, favored with his presence, than an empress away from him.12He could hardly ask anything more of Mary, except that she repeat, in letters to Charles V, the pope and the regent of Flanders, her change of heart about her mother’s marriage and her illegitimacy, telling them that she arrived at her new opinions freely and without coercion. Mary wrote these letters, following drafts the king provided, and declared herself willing to take any other steps he asked to prove her complete loyalty. Finally Henry professed to be satisfied, for the moment at least, but in fact he had gained nothing. Mary was becoming more than a match for her father in the game of deceit. The two dissemblers—the expert and the novice—had squared off in a fresh display of artificial candor, but neither had come away the wiser.

  Of course, Mary protected herself at every step in this latest round of hypocrisy. She had asked for papal absolution from all vows or oaths forced from her against her conscience.13 With every letter she wrote she signed a protest invalidating it. She asked Chapuys to write to the emperor, forewarning him of the false declaration Henry would be forwarding to him on her behalf, and advising him of the reply she felt would serve her interests best. In these maneuverings Mary was firmly at the helm, steering her own course among the obstacles and dangers to her soul, her honor and her political future. Chapuys was involved at every turn, but he was no longer in charge. Mary knew well her danger. She told the imperial ambassador in Rome, Cifuentes, that if the king found out what she was doing it would be as if a knife were placed at her throat. But she persisted, spurred on by the sense of destiny she had discovered earlier in the year and undeterred by the atmosphere of capricious menace that hung over the king’s personal rule.

  Mary’s relations with her father were on a new and dangerous footing. She loved him as a father, but reached a new accommodation with him as her king. She was outwardly obedient, but inwardly defiant. Like all successful diplomats caught between irreconcilable interests she stumbled at last on the one workable policy: say one thing but believe another, relying on a higher morality, a transcendent purpose, to justify the deceit.

  It was among the many ironies of Mary’s situation in the summer of 1536 that she was given a tangible symbol of her new-found posture of submission to wear in token of her change of heart. Cromwell had a gold ring made for Mary, with portraits of Henry, Jane and herself on the top and verses inscribed around the sides. He wanted to give the ring to herhimself, but Henry usurped the honor, perhaps wishing he had thought of the idea first. The Latin verses celebrated obedience and humility, in words which echoed the language of the Magnificat, the song the virgin sang after submitting to the divine purpose in the miraculous conception of Jesus. Christ’s life too, the poem said, was a model of obedience and humility. With these holy patterns to follow Mary could not fall into willfulness and arrogance again. Obedience leads to unity, the verses read, unity to constancy and a quiet mind, and these are treasures of inestimable worth. For God so valued humility that he gave us in his son a perfect exemplar of humility, who in his obedience to his divine father taught us to obey our parents in turn.14

  Through the ring she now wore in commemoration of her reunion with Henry, Mary was being told in yet another way that obedience was her divinely ordained function. But unknown to her father, she had glimpsed another role, sanctioned by the same divinity but leading to a destiny nearer her own choosing.

  XVIII

  God save King Henry with all his power,

  And Prince Edward, that goodly flower,

  With all his lords of great honour-

  Sing in, troll away, sing, troll on away,

  Heave and how, rumbelow, troll on away—

  In October of 1537 Jane Seymour gave birth to a son. He was born at Hampton Court, and because his birthday fell on the eve of St. Edward he was given the sa
int’s name. Within hours of his birth Te Deums were being sung in every parish church in London for Prince Edward, and all the bells were ringing. There were bonfires in every street, and at St. Paul’s all the priests, canons and regular clergy of the city were assembling in their richest robes, with their best crosses and candlesticks carried before them. When the bishops of London and Chichester, the dean of St. Paul’s, the judges and the Lord Mayor and aldermen arrived a public feast was spread and distributed at the choir door of the church, and later a great Te Deum and anthems were sung. The king’s musicians played, and at the Tower, “a great peal of guns” was shot.

  The celebrating lasted well into the night. New fires were lit in every street and lane, and the people in each neighborhood sat around them “banquetting with fruits and wine.” Hogsheads of wine were set out in various places at the king’s order, and at the Steelyard the merchants lit a hundred torches and provided wine and beer to all comers. The mayor and aldermen rode up and down the streets thanking the citizens for their good fortune, and urging them to “praise God for our prince.” It was ten o’clock before the bells stopped ringing, and even later before the Tower guns shot their two thousandth round and fell silent.

  The bishop of Worcester, Hugh Latimer, sat down at the end of this eventful day to record the immense delight of the English people at Edward’s birth. “Here is no less joying and rejoicing in these parts for the birth of our prince,” he wrote, “whom we hungered for so long, than there was, I trow, by the neighbors at the birth of John the Baptist.” Latimer’s rhetoric was unbounded. The prince was, in his view, the gift of “an English god” who was no longer angry with his people. Edward’s birth discouraged traitors and stopped the mouths of those who spoke against the king. The prince was “the stop of vain trusts, the stay of vain expectations.” He defied all the prophets who had pronounced the king cursed with childlessness; he ended the rumors of impotence once and for all. If he proved to be a sturdy child he would become Henry’s most treasured possession, his true heir, the new hope of an aging king.

  The public anticipation of Edward’s birth had begun months earlier. Late in May Queen Jane appeared in the open-laced gown and stomacher of a pregnant woman, and on May 27, Trinity Sunday, a Te Deum was sung “for joy of the queen’s quickening with child.” Then too there had been bonfires and wine for the Londoners, and throughout the summer wagers were made on the sex of the child and on the exact day when he (for it had to be a prince this time) would be born.1 Henry took no chances with this baby. There was no court gossip about new mistresses, no indiscretion of any kind. Though it was prime hunting season Henry stayed close to the queen at Hampton Court, knowing that the birth was expected in October and realizing that his absence might upset his wife and harm his son. The king explained in a letter to Norfolk that though Jane’s “reverend conformity” made her content with anything he asked of her, still, “being but a woman, upon some sudden and displeasant rumors and bruits that might by foolish or light persons be blown abroad in our absence, being specially so far from her she might take to her stomach such impressions as might engender no little danger or displeasure to the infant.” The Council urged Henry not to travel more than sixty miles from the capital, and he concurred.2

  The plague kept Henry away from Hampton Court on the night Edward was born, but he joined his pale, exhausted wife soon afterward. Jane’s labor had lasted more than fifty hours, and she was weaker than anyone realized. Her condition, though, went all but unnoticed amid the attention given to the newborn prince. Overnight Hampton Court became a nursery, and every person and object in the household came under stringent regulations ordered by the king to ensure the health of the prince. Henry’s painful memories of the death of his first son in 1511 still haunted him; there must be no repetition of that tragedy now. The recent outbreak of plague made the need for scrupulous cleanliness and isolation all the greater, and the king gave orders that neither Londoners, country people nor beggars were to be allowed within the palace gates. Every hallway and courtyard was to be washed down and swept daily;every blanket, dish and cushion brought near the baby was to be spotlessly clean. Even the christening had to be planned in accordance with these instructions, though it was to be a splendid celebration nonetheless.

  There had been no christening of a prince in England for more than a quarter century, and every care was taken to make the event as elaborate and impressive as possible. Mary was to be Edward’s godmother, and she ordered a new kirtle of cloth of silver for the ceremony, paying the London cloth merchant an enormous sum for the fabric.3 Every notable of the court and government was present as the christening procession formed in the queen’s apartments. Jane received the courtiers from her bed, and she and Henry watched as the churchmen and officials took their places and walked two by two toward the chapel. The ceremony lasted for hours. Finally the tapers carried by the gentlemen of the court were lighted to indicate that the naming was complete, and the Garter King of Arms proclaimed the child “Edward, son and heir to the king of England, duke of Cornwall and earl of Chester.” Mary stood behind the marchioness of Exeter, who carried the baby in her arms under a canopy. Mary’s christening gift was a golden cup, and to the nurse, midwife and cradle rockers she gave a generous thirty pounds. As the group left the chapel Mary took Elizabeth by the hand and led her out, with Lady Kingston and Lady Herbert bearing their trains. It was after midnight when Edward was brought back to the queen’s apartments to be blessed once more, by his parents and in the name of God, the virgin Mary and St. George, and then food was provided for the entire company, hypocras and wafers for the nobles and bread and sweet wine for the “gentles and all other estates.”4

  Latimer’s hope that the birth of an heir would put an end to rebellion was not mere rhetoric. The spectacle of so many nobles and clerics solemnly assembled to confirm the king’s heir in his rights was meant to give an appearance of popular stability and content, but in fact the king had only recently faced the most dangerous revolt of his reign. It had broken out just twelve months earlier in the north, revealing the true extent of the people’s disloyalty and the precariousness of the royal authority.

  The unrest had been building for years. Economic hardship hit the northern counties very hard in the 1530s, striking at the clothiers of the West Riding, the farmers impoverished by high rents, and all those affected by the suppression of the monasteries. Sentiment against the religious innovations was very high in the north, where distrust and hatred of the king had been widespread since the early days of his divorce from Katherine. When Anne became queen the people cursed her; when Henry declared himself head of the church they refused to accept his supremacy. They swore to uphold the Act of Succession, but it onlymade them more angry, more eager, when the time came, to join forces against the king. “Even the rude people,” Chapuys reported, “said it was evident the statute was of no value, since they were compelled to swear, which had never been seen before.”5 Like Mary they told one another that an oath exacted by force was not morally binding, and besides this they demonstrated their opposition to the new political and religious order in direct and emphatic ways.

  When preachers were sent among them to denounce the pope and the old practices of relic worship and the granting of indulgences they called them seditious. One preacher who presented a play about the pope and his “councilors” Error and Incredulity found the doors of all the parish churches closed to him. At Kendal in Westmorland the parishioners, some three hundred strong, “threatened to cast the curate into the water unless he would proclaim the pope to be head of the church.” Local priests continued to uphold the pope, to maintain the efficacy of the saints and their remains, and to dispense indulgences. They denounced the relaxed Lenten observances instituted by the king as head of the church, and they heard with horror of the Ten Articles, Henry’s redefinition of belief which made no mention of confirmation, matrimony, holy orders or extreme unction. There was no telling how far the destruction of the
traditional faith might go. If the king could annihilate four of the seven sacraments, why not the other three? Already he was ordering his clergy to say that masses had no power to deliver souls from purgatory, and there were rumors that in the near future many churches would be closed and all religious ceremonies taxed.

  The final provocation to rebellion, though, came with the destruction of the monasteries. The rebel leader Robert Aske, when questioned about the grievances of the Yorkshiremen who followed him, spoke eloquently about the different meaning the religious houses had in the northern counties. The abbeys “gave great alms to poor men,” he said, and taught God’s law to unlettered people living in the “mountains and desert places.” The monks had kept up the sea walls and dikes, and had built bridges and highways—something no one else did in the remote regions of the kingdom—and provided weary travelers with food and rest in country where villages were sparse. Moreover the monasteries were the guardians of tradition, both literally and metaphorically. For the nobility they were ancestral graveyards, for the common folk they embodied the past in a way that defied explanation. They were landmarks in both a historical and geographical sense. In Aske’s phrase, the abbeys were “one of the beauties of this realm to all men.”

  As the pulling down of the abbeys accelerated the climate of opposition in the north grew more heated. Priests denounced Cromwell and his assistants as agents of the devil in their thorough and efficient work ofdemolition, and assured their congregations that all who took part in the suppression would be damned. Some clergy urged the monks to resist by force, and when this failed, encouraged their own parishioners to take up arms.