What clouded the issue was that Mary’s illness did not follow a consistent pattern or conform to a known disease. It was linked to recurrent episodes of amenorrhoea, depression and eventual restoration of the menstrual cycle, but this sequence was not invariably mentioned (though it may have been present) in the brief accounts and references to her bouts of illness. It was roughly seasonal, coming on most severely in the fall and early spring, yet it did not appear every year, or at least not in a severe enough form to be recorded. And it sometimes struck in the winter and summer months as well. The symptoms varied widely from one attack to the next, and the only name given to the disorder, melancholy or melancholia, referred primarily to Mary’s emotional state and did not take into account the wide range of other complaints that accompanied it.
Mary had been seriously ill twice since she entered her twenties. In December of 1537 and January of 1538 she was sick for at least several weeks, falling ill at Christmas and growing steadily worse until by New Year’s Day “she could neither sit nor stand but was fain to go to her bed, for faintness.”15 As usual Dr. De la Sà was cautious in his treatment, asking for “more counsel” before prescribing any medicines and turning to Henry’s physician Dr. Butts for his experienced opinion as “he had been with her in such cases in times past.” She was sick again in March and April of 1542, of a “strange fever” that weakened her and brought on heart palpitations, and so debilitated her that at times “she remained as though dead.”16 According to Chapuys she was in “extreme danger,” and Henry was sending frequently for news of her condition.17 By the first week of May she was out of danger, though by no means completely recovered.18
By the time she was twenty-six, when Marillac was instructed to makeinquiries about Mary’s suitability as a wife for Francis’ son Charles, duke of Orleans, her reputation for weakness and possible incapacity for child-bearing was well established. He was told to find out whether she was able to bear children and to ask her physician, if possible, “if this melancholy which she has so long worn has not brought on some malady which might prevent her having issue, as is said.”19 Marillac went to his usual source, the chamberwoman who had served Mary for years. What she told him added to the confusion about the nature, gravity and frequency of Mary’s disorder. When Katherine was first set aside, the woman said, Mary was “sick with melancholy,” but after being “visited and comforted by the king,” she soon recovered and had shown no symptoms of the affliction since. It is understandable that the chamber-woman would want to minimize Mary’s condition in hopes of enhancing her chances for marriage, but what the apothecary Juan de Soto told Marillac is less easy to reconcile with the other evidence about Mary’s complaints. He never gave Mary anything but the lightest medicines, he told the ambassador, “which she took more often because it was her father’s command than because she needed them.”20 These accounts, plus Mary’s active way of life and personal energy, made Marillac wonder whether the gossip about her debility was exaggerated.
Yet as Mary entered her late twenties the doubts about her health grew greater, and she became more and more convinced that she was destined to live and die a superfluous, unmarriageable spinster. These dark speculations undermined her composure and embittered her view of the future. In time they too would take their physical and emotional toll.
XXII
God save his noble grace,
And grant him a place
Endless to dwell
With the devil of hell!
It took some time for the king and his court to return to normal after the disgrace and execution of Catherine Howard. For months the dejected king remained isolated and withdrawn, nursing his bad leg, listening to his harper and talking to his fool Will Somers. By the summer of 1542, though, he was coming out of his depression and seeking female company. His taste for “carousels and pageants,” and for “paying court to ladies” returned, and Mary was among the first to enjoy his attentions. In September he was “entertaining and feasting her beyond measure,” showering her with jewels, and asking her to come to court to take the place of a queen in entertaining the ladies he meant to invite for the holidays.1 Hampton Court was renovated for the Christmas festivities, and workmen labored day and night to prepare apartments for Mary and the many women who would attend her. On December 21 Mary rode through the city “in triumphal manner,” and was received at Hampton Court gate by nearly all the courtiers and by the king himself, who “spoke to her in the most gracious and amiable words that a father could address to his daughter.”2
The king’s high spirits and enthusiastic cultivation of Mary continued throughout Christmas and New Year’s, and on into the early months of 1543. Amid the feasting and dancing he sought Mary out and “addressed her in the most endearing terms,” while giving her costly rings, chains and silver plate; among his gifts of jewelry were two large rubies “of inestimable value.” Mary was the gracious center of the lively court, overseeing the receiving and lodging of the courtiers and visiting guests and leaving her father free to “rejoice himself.”
Both the king and his daughter suddenly found themselves in unaccustomed roles: he a widower in need of a daughter to be his hostess, and she a twenty-seven-year-old spinster eager to be needed by an effusively affectionate father. Their relationship was cordial rather than intimate, and the old wounds he had given her would never heal, but in this interval between wives Henry was genuinely glad of Mary’s company, and he let her know it. If he behaved more like a suitor than a father, substituting gallantry, charming speeches and gifts for friendship and sincere affection, it was only that he had never learned to be a father to any of his children, and it was far too late for Mary to teach him.
It was being said that the primary object of the round of entertainments at court was to give the king a chance to choose a new wife. To Anne of Cleves, however, it seemed as if her hour had come again. Ever since Catherine Howard’s fall Anne had been hoping that Henry might take her back, and had recently come to live near Hampton Court in that expectation. The ambassador of Cleves, an obscure figure who lived in one room over a tavern with a single servant and was rarely seen at court, was rumored to be working for Anne’s restoration as queen, probably to offset stories of her ill treatment then circulating in the German courts. It was rumored that after her divorce Anne was kept in England against her will, cruelly bound in a dungeon. A woman claiming to be Anne, newly escaped from captivity, appeared at the court of the prince of Coburg, and it was some time before her imposture was discovered. In March of 1543 Anne herself was allowed to visit the court, perhaps to plead her own case. Henry saw her only once during her stay, though, and she spent her time with Mary instead.3 In fact Henry was paying more and more attention to Catherine Parr, a young widow of “lively and pleasing appearance” who not only liked to dance and provide convivial company but shared his taste for learning and Erasmian theology as well.
When he was not in her company, or visiting Mary in her chamber-something he now did two or three times a day—Henry was inspecting the coastal fortifications and choosing the sites or new ports for his warships. France and the empire had gone to war the previous summer, and in February Henry and the emperor became allied against the French. By June Henry was sending thousands of foot soldiers to the continent and putting more ships in the Channel, and war with the French was imminent.
The rapprochement between Charles and Henry had a good deal to do with Mary’s current high standing at court. As usual she kept herself well informed about continental affairs, and passed on to Chapuys anything she overheard that might be of use to the imperial side. Since the outbreak of war she had been sending to the ambassador for news ofCharles and Mary, regent of Flanders, and she toid Chapuys often “how displeased and sorry she was at the troubles and annoyances by which both were surrounded.” Her concern for the regent was especially great. “There is nothing in this world,” Chapuys wrote, “that the princess herself would not sacrifice and throw away for the sake of r
elieving the perilous situation of the queen’s affairs.”4 Beyond praying incessant prayers for their health and prosperity Mary did all she could to help in more practical ways. She kept herself informed about the activities of the French ambassador at court and in the Privy Council, and regularly reported to Chapuys what the king was saying about the French.5
Henry was enjoying himself thoroughly in these months, gearing himself and his forces for war, keeping his enemies and allies alike guessing what his real intentions were and uncertain about how well he guessed theirs. He amused himself with banqueting and entertainments, and surrounded himself with beautiful women, one of whom he had begun to woo in earnest. At fifty-two he was bald and paunchy, and the quantities of game, fowl, breads and sweets which he devoured at every meal had long since begun to make him mountainously fat. Armor made for him two years earlier measured fifty-four inches around the waist, and he was growing stouter every year. He was still vigorous, riding for hours, putting in long days of travel and walking across the fields when the condition of his legs allowed. He “crept to the cross” on Good Friday on his knees—a practice which, with typical inconsistency, he condemned at the very end of his life as romish and superstitious—and sometimes served at mass. He rode up and down the coast and through the countryside of Kent and Surrey, checking the fortresses and the warning beacons to be lit on the hillsides in case of invasion. He still kept as large a stable as ever, with eighty-eight coursers, stallions and geldings besides seventeen carriage and sumpter horses for his personal use.6 But though he continued to be a formidable hunter the game now had to be brought to him; on his progress in 1541 beasts of the northern forests were driven by the hundreds into vast enclosures where the king and his companions were waiting to slaughter them. Hawking replaced the chase as his principal sport, and he kept more fewterers and hawks than ever in his last years. He still loved to go “with his noblemen to the park to shoot the popinjay” and, when in a merry mood, he still “used himself more like a good fellow than a king.” But as he aged his dark moods were fearful, and they were made worse by his phobias and physical complaints.
Henry’s horror of the sweating sickness was now obsessive. When the sweat broke out in the summer of 1543 he gave strict orders that no one who had passed through the infected area of London could come within seven miles of his person. He tried to forestall sickness, and mischance in general, by consulting astrologers and hiring alchemists, and on at least oneoccasion hazarded the deep waters of the occult when a “stranger of Per-pignan” was paid to show the king “quintessences.” But the older he got the more his ailments multipled. The bills from his apothecary lay bare his afflictions. He was dosed with eyebright, stomach and liver plasters, rhubarb pills and “a fomentation for the piles.” He had a stomach bag of red sarcenet to ease indigestion, and took endless varieties of medicinal powders, oils and waters.7 As always Henry acted as his own apothecary as well, dosing himself and those around him, making up plasters to heal swelling in the ankles, ointments “to take away itch,” and an intriguing potion for Anne of Cleves “to mollify and resolve, comfort and cease pain of cold and windy causes.”8 Even his hawks and hounds were treated with horehound water, licorice and sugar candy.
What hampered and tormented the king most were his swollen legs, now so corrupted and sore that they kept him bedridden at times. One leg had to be kept elevated on a stool. The medical evidence indicates that the king’s condition started either as a varicose ulcer or a chronic septic infection of the thighbone. Treated with barbarous inefficacy and abused by constant overactivity for many years, the infection spread to both legs and led to severe complications.9 In 1538 a clot worked loose from one of the fistulas and became lodged in his lungs. He nearly suffocated; he couldn’t speak, went “black in the face,” and was obviously in great danger. The clot dissolved, but the infection continued to flare up time after time, and the compounds he mixed most frequently for himself were those intended to heal ulcers and “excoriations in the legs.” One plaster “to heal ulcers without pain” was made in part from powdered pearls.10
In July of 1543 this hulk of decaying manhood, limping on his throbbing leg, announced that he was about to marry his sixth wife. Catherine Parr was perhaps his best choice since Katherine of Aragon. She was thirty-one and had been twice widowed, and the king felt certain that she was free of the flaws that had destroyed his last two marriages. Unlike Anne of Cleves, Catherine would hold no sour mysteries in store for him in the bedchamber, and she was unlikely to indulge in the girlish indiscretions of Catherine Howard. In appearance Catherine Parr was quite ordinary, and if her portraits show perspicacity they reveal almost no charm. She was an intellectual, a woman of considerable common sense and earnest piety, a good companion and a sympathetic nurse. She was not ambitious, and—much to her credit—she was not afraid to marry a man who had doomed four of her predecessors either to the divorce court or to the block.
The wedding was arranged with impulsive haste. There was no time for the publishing of the banns, and Cranmer was called in to license the ceremony to take place without them. Then on July 12 the king, hisbride and the witnesses gathered in the queen’s privy closet at Hampton Court. Mary and Elizabeth were there, and many of the privy councilors. Anne of Cleves, understandably, was not invited though she made her views about the marriage clear to all who would talk to her. She was humiliated and hurt that Henry should marry Catherine, who in her opinion “was by no means so handsome as she herself is,” and whose barrenness during her two previous marriages seemed to confirm the general opinion that she would have no children by the king. But Anne’s views were little heeded. Henry was satisfied with the son he had, and the Seymours, Prince Edward’s uncles, were much in evidence at court. Jane Seymour’s brother Edward, now earl of Hertford and fast becoming the dominant figure in the Council, attended the wedding with his wife, though his brother Thomas was absent. Thomas Seymour, an extremely handsome man who had won Catherine Parr’s love and would have married her if the king’s preference had not supervened, saw to it that he was away on official business when the king married his sweetheart.
When all the witnesses were present Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, began the ceremony. He first asked whether anyone present knew of any impediment to the marriage—an ironic question in Henry’s case—and then turned to the king and asked him to recite his vows. Taking Catherine’s hand, Henry repeated them, “with a joyous look,” and then Catherine spoke hers. After the giving of the ring, the traditional offering of gold and silver, and the benediction, the witnesses signed the notarial document registering the proceedings and then gave hearty congratulations to the royal couple.11 This marriage, as it turned out, would survive the king’s worsening temper, the factional struggles within his Council, the rumors of new favorites, and even an attempt to accuse the queen of heresy. Catherine Parr was to be Henry’s last wife.
Mary was so solidly in her father’s favor at this time that he insisted she go along on his honeymoon. Henry, Catherine, Mary and their suite started out to spend the summer visiting the king’s favorite hunting parks but before they had gone far Mary became sick and had to turn back. She spent the next months recuperating in the company of Elizabeth and Edward, and looking after her own servants, many of whom were more ill than she was. Her chamber woman Bess Cressy had to be boarded and cared for in a private house, as did Jane the Fool. Mary paid for their care, and looked after her gentleman usher Randal Dodd when he too was bedridden. By February of 1544, though, Mary had rejoined the court, and with a new standing.
Recognizing that he might not live much longer, and that even if he did the chances of his having more children were slim, Henry decided to restore to Mary and Elizabeth their succession rights. If Edward diedwithout heirs, Mary was to become queen, and Elizabeth was to be next in line if Mary had no children. Mary’s readmission to the succession, a change of momentous importance to her future, was accomplished with little fanfare. It was made t
o seem a natural result of Henry’s newfound rapport with his older daughter, and of the closer family feeling Catherine was working to create among the king and all his children. They had never before been brought together to live with him on a more or less permanent basis; now the new queen not only made a home for them at court but set about to make the royal nursery a training ground for the humane rulers the king’s children might someday be. She set them a personal example of serious, studious interest in the life of the mind, and brought in the humanist John Cheke to train them in the classics and in the felicitous if overly elaborate style of speaking and writing at which they all excelled.
As learned women Mary and her new stepmother shared a special bond. They belonged to that growing company of noblewomen that the scholar Nicholas Udall described as “given to the study of devout science and of strange tongues.” Catherine’s treatise The Prayers stirring the Mind unto Heavenly Meditations appeared two years after she became queen, and among her other projects was a translation of Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the Four Gospels. Udall served as editor of the book, and Mary was one of the translators; the queen financed its publication.
A Spanish visitor to Henry’s court in 1544, just before Mary’s twenty-eighth birthday, left a description of his meeting with the queen and princess in the queen’s apartments. He was the duke de Najera, a soldier in the service of the Emperor Charles, who on his way back to Spain came to pay his respects to the English king. The duke wanted to see at first hand this amazing prince, who, he noted, had ordered more executions of those who opposed his opinions than any other ruler “Christian or infidel.”
Arriving at Greenwich the Spaniard was escorted through three large halls hung with tapestry. The first was empty, the second held two long rows of halberdiers of the king’s bodyguard in red livery, and the third, the presence chamber, was full of sumptuously dressed nobles, gentlemen and knights. All of these courtiers paid reverence to an empty chair of estate whose customary occupant was nowhere to be seen. The king never did come into the presence chamber—because he feared assassination, the duke conjectured—but in time the Spaniard and two of his companions were summoned into Henry’s inner chamber. After an audience of half an hour the visitor was taken to the queen’s apartments, where he found Catherine, Mary and Henry’s niece Margaret Douglas flanked by dozens of gentlewomen and other attendants. Although Catherine was “a little indisposed” she wanted to dance “for the honor of the company,” and,taking as her partner her brother William Parr, she led a measure “very gracefully.” Then Mary, Margaret Douglas and the others danced, and a Venetian of the royal household danced some galliards with the spectacular agility the king had displayed twenty years earlier. After several hours of this pastime the duke took his leave. He kissed the queen’s hand and turned to kiss Mary’s, but she offered her lips instead—a gracious familiarity usually reserved for relatives or those of equal rank. In all he found both the queen and princess to be agreeable in their looks, dress and manners, and the impression left by his account is of an orderly court, centered on an increasingly inactive king yet enlivened and ornamented by two distinguished and accomplished women. Catherine was only four years older than Mary, and if as Chapuys noted she “did her all the favor she could,” it was more as a friend than as a stepmother.12
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