Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  The calm, harmonious atmosphere the duke de Najera observed at court filled Mary’s life as a whole during her father’s final years. Apart from occasional periods of illness, including an episode of what Chapuys called “colic,” she lived the uneventful life of a royal favorite, haunted as ever by the seeming impossibility of marriage but outwardly content within the intimate circle of her women and household staff. She was an advocate for present and former servants in their lawsuits and property settlements. She saw her officials Charles Morley and John Conway well set up with rents and lands, and when her gentleman usher of the chamber, Robert Chichester, married Agnes Philip she arranged for the couple to receive lands and a manor in Suffolk by a royal patent. For her favored gentlewoman Susan Clarencieux she obtained first an annuity of thirteen pounds a year and later the manor of Chevenhall.

  Mary’s contacts outside the court widened during these years. A Spanish nobleman wrote to ask her about an impostor who was traveling through England on the strength of a forged letter of recommendation in the nobleman’s name. An Aragonese noblewoman who heard of Mary’s fondness for Spanish gloves sent her ten pairs, with a letter. And Princess Mary, daughter of King Emanuel of Portugal, wrote to say she had heard so much about Mary’s “virtue and learning” that she hoped they might exchange letters and literary works from time to time. Whenever a messenger was available, she assured Mary, she would try to write again.13

  Mary’s answers to these correspondents were brief and formal. Often she dictated them to be written by others, when the headaches or illness or exhaustion of which she complained made it impossible for her to write herself. Despite the opportunities that now presented themselves for contacts of a more expansive kind Mary preferred to turn her energies inward, above all toward her father. She stood beside him at christenings; she was in his sickroom when he took to his bed. Like Catherine she thought a good deal about his comfort and about how to please him.In the fall of 1543 she ordered work to begin on the most unusual New Year’s gift he would ever receive. She had a joiner build him an enormous chair, big enough to accommodate his girth, and had it upholstered in fine cloth. She hired a French embroiderer, Guillaume Brellont, to decorate it, and paid eighteen pounds for his elaborate designs and skilled craftsmanship.14 Next to his chair of state, Henry must have valued Mary’s gift as much as he did his golden walking stick or the stool on which he set his tortured leg.

  In the spring of 1544 Henry rose above the limitations of his age, bulk and afflictions to lead his army to war against the French. It was agreed that he and his ally Charles would each equip more than forty thousand men and bring them to Calais and the Champagne frontier, respectively. Then Charles’ men would advance through Champagne along the Marne to Paris, while Henry’s forces would make their way south through Artois to meet them there. When he heard that Charles was to lead his army himself Henry made up his mind to do the same. He was still the envious, fiercely competitive monarch he had been a quarter of a century earlier. He considered it “a part of honor to do what the emperor does,” Chapuys wrote, and he begrudged Charles his slight advantage in age and his long experience in campaigning.

  Henry’s advisers were dismayed at his decision. Even in the comfort of his palace his “chronic disease and great obesity” required “particular care.” How could he survive in a military camp, living in an unheated tent, eating and drinking rough food, vulnerable to extremes of weather and to all the hazards of warfare besides? Even if he survived these rigors, and the fatigue they brought, how could he ride into battle when he was reported to be “so weak on his legs that he could hardly stand?”15Everyone around Henry tried to dissuade him from going, both for the sake of his health and because he promised to present the worst kind of liability to the armies in the field. His commanders, Norfolk and Suffolk, threw up their hands; the emperor sent two envoys to urge him to change his plans, but without success. The only way out seemed to be for Charles to hand over command to one of his generals and retire from the campaign himself, allowing Henry to back out without dishonor. But this solution would impugn the emperor’s vigor and ability, and was unthinkable.

  In confident disregard of the fears of everyone connected with the venture Henry continued his preparations for war. Some years earlier he had ordered cast the largest guns ever made in England; now he hired two foreign gunsmiths, Peter Bawd and Peter van Colin, to make mortars and shells. Ten warships, with the flagship the Great Harry, were loaded with the cast-iron pieces and other guns, hackbuts, pikes, baggagewagons and horse harness. Each ship carried hundreds of men, their horses, and much of their food. The beer brewers were told to keep a certain number of vessels loaded with filled casks, ready to sail with the fleet when the call came. To assure a plentiful supply of bread, the other staple of the army on the march, Henry ordered mills for grinding grain to be mounted on wagons, and constructed in such a way that they ground as the wheels of the wagon turned. There were portable ovens too, to be carried on wagons behind the mills.

  Finally in June the “king’s great army on the sea” moved out into the Channel, augmented by long oared vessels of Henry’s own design whose deadly guns were placed for maximum advantage against the French galleys. The main force under Norfolk and Suffolk crossed first; Henry followed. He had decided to split his forces into three contingents, leaving the most burdensome objectives to his two commanders. Norfolk, with a singularly ill-equipped army, would besiege Montreuil; Suffolk, with an army that included two hundred seasoned Spanish troops under Beltrá n de la Cueva, was sent to take Boulogne. Henry would skirmish with the French in the vicinity of his headquarters at Calais.

  He rode out of the city, “armed at all pieces” and mounted on a great courser, on July 25. Mounted drummers, fifers and trumpeters preceded him, and behind him a knight carried his headpiece and spear. The violent thunderstorm that drenched the camp that night left him undaunted. He rode and marched like a young man during the following days, and made the thirty-mile journey from Calais to Boulogne in a single hard day of riding. He spent long hours in the fields, looking over the lay of the ground and planning where to put his troops and guns. He even found time and energy to keep a journal. To the amazement of his men, his captains and the diplomats who watched his every move this arduous life seemed to rejuvenate Henry. After weeks of campaigning he appeared to be in better health than when he started out, and more determined than ever to remain in personal command. All his life, he told the imperial agent De Courrieres, he had been “a prince of honor and virtue, who never contravened his word.” He was “too old to begin now, as the white hairs in his beard testified.” His weeks of effort were rewarded when with the help of de Cueva Suffolk took Boulogne in mid-September. The king entered the city in triumph, reliving his victorious conquest of Thérouanne thirty years before, and stayed on for a week to celebrate his success.

  Then, forgetting everything but that he had spent a season marching and maneuvering on French soil, that he had besieged a city and proven wrong those who said he was too feeble to fight again, Henry returned home. The emperor, for reasons of his own, had already made peace with the French. The campaign ended badly, with Norfolk struggling to keepcommand of his mutinous soldiers and Suffolk abandoning Boulogne when he heard that a French army was about to attack. In the end there was little to show for the staggering cost of the expedition, but Henry, at least, had kept his honor and proved his remarkable stamina.

  Two years later he was dying. In the fall of 1546 his ulcerated leg gave rise to a fever which, though he tried to shake it off by exercising, hunting and meeting with ambassadors as usual, persisted. By December he thought it prudent to make his will.

  His last months had been filled with intrigue, as the men around him prepared for the transfer of power they knew could not be delayed for long. Along with John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, who had become Lord Great Master of the household, Edward Seymour was the controlling presence in the Privy Council. Both the bishop of Winchester an
d the powerful duke of Norfolk had been ousted from their positions of influence, and as the king slowly lost ground to his fever Norfolk lay in the Tower under sentence of death.

  Mary was untouched by these shifts of power. Henry continued to show her every sign of favor, showering her with so many jewels that the French were saying she might rule when Henry died and not the nine-year-old Edward. One of the last entries in the king’s household accounts is the purchase of a horse for Mary, a “white grey gelding.” Catherine Parr was less fortunate. An attempt was made to remove her on the grounds that she held heretical opinions, and the king signed the bill of articles drawn up against her. Catherine fainted from fear when she found out what was being planned, but when she asked Henry to pardon her religious fervor and forgive any erroneous views she innocently held he pardoned her, and protected her when the chancellor Wriothesley came to make the arrest.

  The legend of Henry’s amorous disposition remained with him to the end, and it was rumored that Catherine might be put aside not for her supposed heresy but for another woman. Charles Brandon’s beautiful fourth wife, Katherine, was the object of these speculations. Brandon’s death in 1545 left her a widow, and it was said that the king was showing her “great favor” in her bereavement. The rumors were persistent enough to annoy Catherine considerably, and as far away as Antwerp merchants were wagering “that the king’s majesty would have another wife.”16 Henry and his matrimonial changes had become a fixture of European political life, and it seemed as if both would go on forever.

  The king grew dramatically worse in January of 1547. Very early in the morning of January 28 he died. News of his death was kept from everyone but the Council members for three days. In the banquet hall his meals were brought in to the sound of trumpets as usual, and envoys who requested audiences with him were told that he was overwhelmed withbusiness or indisposed. Finally the announcement came that he was dead, and his will was read out in Parliament. Henry lay in state in the chapel of Whitehall for twelve days, surrounded by candles and mourners, and at the Leadenhall and St. Michael’s churchyard in Cornhill a dole of one groat apiece was given to some twenty thousand paupers of the city.17Next to the coffin was a lifelike waxwork figure of the king, dressed in costly robes covered with jewels. An Italian traveler who left a description of the scene counted nearly five hundred gems on the effigy.

  The funeral procession that followed the corpse to Windsor was four miles long. The wax figure too rode in its own chariot, drawn by eight horses trapped in black velvet and attended by pages in black livery.18According to the terms of Henry’s will he was to be buried with Jane under a monument in the chapel at Windsor. His design for the monument called for a large base with statues of himself and Jane, the latter in repose, “sweetly sleeping.” At the corners of the tomb he wanted the sculptor to carve children, seated, throwing down jasper, cornelian and agate roses from baskets they held in their hands. The monument was begun but never finished. Henry’s long coffin was buried in Jane’s tomb, under the floor of the chapel, in the center of the choir. After it was lowered into place his household officials took their staves of office, broke them over their heads, and threw them into the grave.

  At the news of Henry’s death the French king panicked. He had long since come to believe that his life and Henry’s were mystically linked; if Henry died he would soon follow him. Francis tried to throw off his apprehension by exhausting himself in his hunting park, but he caught a fever and died two months after his lifelong rival of England.19

  The ambassadors who had reviled, feared, mistrusted and yet admired Henry now outdid one another in formulating expansive tributes to his greatness. They called him “a mirror of wisdom for all the world,” and lamented his passing with the sincerity of men seasoned in professional deceit. “He is a wonderful man and has wonderful people about him,” a French envoy had written several years earlier, yet the same man conceded that Henry was “the most dangerous and cruel man in the world.”

  Henry VIII ended his reign as a dark enigma, and it was as such that he entered popular folklore. In the 1540s the English swore “by the king’s life” as if it were sacred, but after Henry’s death they gave his name to the devil. Along with “Old Nick” and “Old Scratch,” “Old Harry” became synonymous with the Evil One in the north of England, among the men and women of York and Lincoln who cursed his memory.

  XXIII

  Sing up, heart, sing up, heart,

  and sing no more down,

  For joy of King Edward, that

  weareth the crown!

  The death of Henry VIII put England’s future into the pale hands of a rather undersized boy of nine. King Edward VI was an intelligent, lively child whose white skin, reddish hair and delicate, elegantly proportioned body gave him the look of an expensive china doll with a slight flaw—one shoulder was higher than the other. He had always been an exceptionally beautiful child. A noblewoman who saw him when he was thirteen months old wrote that he was “the goodliest babe that ever I set mine eye upon,” adding, “I pray God make him an old man, for I should never be weary of looking on him.”1

  Apart from occasional illnesses in early childhood Edward gave his father no worries. Under the tutelage of John Cheke he mastered Latin and had made a good beginning at Greek; he knew French well by the time he came to rule, and could keep up with the other boys in his household at fencing and riding to the hunt. In his religious instruction he was entirely a child of the Reformation. The religion he learned was the hybrid orthodoxy of Henry’s court; the services he heard were conducted in English, and he grew up unencumbered by the nostalgia for the old church and the Latin mass that haunted the generation of his parents. His mother, had she lived, might have been allowed to teach him to revere the least offensive of the old ways and could have told him something of the nature of country faith before the abbeys were pulled down. But she was not there to teach him, and the only other adherent of the old belief he knew well was Mary. Despite the twenty-one-year difference in their ages Edward and Mary were very close, but they did not discuss religion.

  “Imitate your father, the greatest man in the world,” ran verses inscribed on Holbein’s portrait of Edward. “Surpass him, and none will surpass you.” To follow a king such as Henry had been would have overburdened any child, but Edward did not fall short of the challenge merely because of his youth. As a boy Henry had already become a king in miniature. Erasmus, who saw him briefly then, remarked that he had something regal about him. Henry had been a commanding presence at nine; Edward was not. Both his good and bad points were on too modest a scale. He was cheeky but not defiant; alert but not shrewd; gracious but not charming. Worst of all, he had none of his father’s robust vitality or breakneck zest for athletic contests and tournaments. Try as he might, Edward would never imitate, let alone surpass, his fearsome, bellowing father; he could not create the illusion that, in his sacrosanct person, he was the locus of power.

  Of course, Edward was not expected to rule alone. In his will Henry had designated sixteen of his “entirely beloved councillors,” including the chief men in his government, to form an advisory body to guide the young king during his minority. Two of the sixteen, Edward Seymour (who became duke of Somerset soon after Henry’s death) and William Paget, took over at once. They made the decision to withhold news of the old king’s death for three days, and added to it the much more audacious decision to alter the mechanism of rule. At the first full meeting of the Council Paget persuaded his fellow councilors to name Somerset as head of the Council and Lord Protector of the king. Outwardly the change appeared to be both slight and natural; Somerset was Edward’s nearest male relative and natural guardian, and Edward himself approved of the arrangement, signing the commission giving the Protector his powers. But in reality the alteration was fatal. It substituted for the deliberations of a committee of equals bitter squabbling between the supporters and opponents of the increasingly offensive Protector, and it opened the way to an orgy o
f opportunism, corruption and ineptitude in government.

  None of this was yet apparent, however, when Edward made his ceremonial progress through London on the day before his coronation. He was dressed in cloth of silver embroidered in gold, and his belt and cap sparkled with rubies, diamonds and pearls. His horse was trapped in crimson satin, and as he rode through the freshly swept streets he was greeted as a “young king Solomon” who would continue his father’s noble work of restoring “ancient Truth” and suppressing “heathen rites and detestable idolatry.” These pointed references to Edward’s Protestantism were set in elaborate pageants in which children representing Faith, Justice, Grace, Nature, Fortune and Charity spoke to the king and Edward the Confessor and an armored St. George on horseback reminded him of his lineage and patriotic duty. One scene recalled his parentage: a phoenix, representing Jane Seymour, came out of an artificial heaven of “Sun, Stars and Cloudes” to where a crowned golden lion—King Henry—greeted her lovingly. A young lion, their offspring, then appeared, and after two angels crowned him the phoenix and the old lion vanished, leaving him to rule on his own.