Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  The solemnity of these representations was relieved by a death-defying spectacle played out in the air above St. Paul’s churchyard. A rope was stretched taut from the steeple of the church to a “great anchor” in the yard below. As Edward rode up before the church an Aragonese acrobat, who had been waiting on the roof, lay down on the rope at its highest point and, spreading out his arms and legs, “ran on his breast on the said rope from the said battlements to the ground,” like an arrow out of a bow. Edward paused, delighted, while the Aragonese saluted him and kissed his foot before climbing back up the rope to begin more tricks. When he got halfway up he began to “play certain mysteries” on it, tumbling and hopping from one leg to another, and finally hanging by a second rope tied around his ankle. Edward and his attendants “laughed right heartily” at this entertainment and stayed a long time watching it before going on to Westminster to complete the progress. On the following day, February 20, the young king was crowned, and on successive days the coronation was celebrated by tournaments at which the dashing Thomas Seymour, the Protector’s brother and now Lord Admiral, won the prizes.

  Edward began his reign in a climate of unclouded approbation. His councilors, officials and subjects welcomed him as David, Samuel, and “the Young Josias.” His beauty, wit and amiability were exalted; he was praised as the “gentlest thing of all the world.” His gravity far exceeded his age. “It should seem he were already a father,” said a court observer, “yet passeth not the age of ten years.” Few in the crowd of admirers perceived that Edward would prove to be little more than a symbol of the continuity of Tudor rule, vulnerable to the manipulative ambitions of the men around him and “opportune to treacheries.”

  Mary had always stood next to Henry in Edward’s affections. In his early childhood she never failed to send him gifts—an embroidered coat of crimson satin, a gold brooch with an image of St. John the Baptist set with a ruby—and he sent her in return baskets of vegetables and, when he learned to write, brief, precise letters in elegantly turned Latin. The letters were more schoolroom exercises than outpourings of brotherly feeling, but Edward’s sincere love for Mary was not entirely stifled by the rhetoric. In one letter he worked out the sentiment that, although he did not write to her often, still he loved her most; he wore his best clothes less often than the others yet he loved them more.2 He wrote solicitous notes to Mary when she was sick, and sent greetings to her women. And once, when he was only eight, he felt the need to remind her that “the only real love is the love of God,” and that her inordinate enjoyment of dancing and entertainments imperiled her respectability. He urged her from then on to avoid “foreign dances and merriments which do not become a most Christian princess.”3 According to Mary’s gentlewoman Jane Dormer, who spent a good deal of time in Edward’s company as a child and whose autobiographical memoir contains valuable accounts of his reign and Mary’s, the young king “took special content” in Mary’s company. He treated her with the respect and reverence of a mother, asking her advice and promising to keep secret anything she confided to him.

  Edward’s accession put a barrier of ritual deference between the boy king and his sisters. When they ate with him they had to sit on low benches, not chairs, and etiquette required that they be placed far down the table, so that the cloth of estate which hung above the king did not cover them. Even when talking to him in private in his apartments they did not dare to sit in armchairs but on benches or cushions, and when entering his presence they were required to kneel several times. The barriers of precedence, though, were slight compared to those erected by the Protector and Council. To these politicians Mary represented a diplomatic and confessional liability, and a potential focus of discontent and even of rebellion. As such she had not only to be kept away from the king but from the court as well.

  The authors of this policy toward Mary were committed to a political and religious program far removed from Mary’s beliefs and remote too from the ideals of that large group in the population which was devoted to her. Encouraged by the Protector, Parliament was sweeping away many of the characteristic laws and policies of the last reign. Many of the changes were beneficial. The treason laws, the foundations of Henry’s authoritarian power, were being struck down, making it much more difficult for the sovereign to obtain a treason conviction from the courts. New social legislation aimed at tapping the wealth of the booming cloth industry and restoring the old patterns of farming disrupted by the enclosure of lands for sheep raising was being formulated, and old legislation enforced, with the full approval of the Protector and Council. But where religious legislation was concerned, the changes were alarming to Mary and others like her. The Henrician religious settlement was being swiftly and radically overturned, to prepare the way for thoroughgoing Protestantism.

  For a decade and more English religious life had been prey to royal and governmental assault. The pope had been vilified and his power in England destroyed; the monastic establishment had been uprooted andplundered. The sacraments were reduced to three, and the adoration and invocation of saints condemned. Theology, the exact definition and redefinition of what was to be believed about the mass, the clergy and the process of salvation, was left in confusion. And since many of those who tried to clarify that confusion were burned as heretics, little clarification was attempted.

  The result was a harvest of anticlericalism. Time-honored hatreds of clerical wealth and privilege were unleashed with a vengeance. Everything once held sacred was profaned. The clergy were ridiculed. The “nodding, becking, and mowing” of priests performing mass was compared to the posturing of apes. The saints were insulted, the virgin Mary reviled. The pope was condemned as “the misty angel of Satan” or worse; the Protector claimed that, among ordinary folk, “the name of the pope is as odious as the name of the devil himself.” Penance and Lenten fasting were dismissed as unnecessary practices; purgatory was denounced as a fantastic invention of priests. Christening, it was said, was a superfluous gesture which could be performed just as well by immersing the child in a tub of water at home or in a ditch by the roadside. As for holy water, it made a good sauce for mutton if a little onion was added to it; failing that it was good medicine “for a horse with a galled back.” Praying to the saints for help was like “hurling a stone against the wind,” for saints can do no more to help a man than wives to help their husbands. And priests, the authors and perperuators of all these delusions, were little better than agents of the devil; their tonsures were “the whore’s marks of Babylon.”4

  In Edward’s reign violent insults soon gave way to violence itself. Churches and ruined monasteries were plundered until every holy image they contained was destroyed. Altars were smashed, tombs laid in ruins, stained-glass windows shattered into heaps of colored glass. The hostility spilled over into the streets and public houses. Men were shot at as they went to church, and clerics were assaulted. Innkeepers changed the names of their establishments to avoid attracting the consequences of religious prejudice: the sign of the Salutation of the Angel became the Soldier and Citizen; the St. Katherine’s Wheel became the Cat and Wheel. Even King Edward, eager to purge his institutions of all taint of popery, objected to the association of St. George with the Order of the Garter.

  In a purely negative sense the explosion of anticlericalism laid the foundation for doctrinal change. The condemnation of good works as useless to salvation prepared the way for the Protestant teaching of justification by faith alone. Ridiculing the mass wafer as a “round Robin” or a “jack in the box” and deriding the “roaring, howling, whistling, murmuring, tomring and juggling” of the mass and offices set the stage for the introduction of the simpler English communion service. Thesweeping condemnation of the externals of the old faith—“hallowed candles, hallowed water, hallowed bread, hallowed ashes”—made way for the Protestant emphasis on internal conversion and the devotion of the heart. And by adding to the general bewilderment about belief this furor of invective made at least some in the population
doubly eager for the new orthodoxy when it came at last.

  It was the intention of the Protector and Archbishop Cranmer to ride the crest of this tide of dissatisfaction and to harness its discontent through the formulation of a new creed. The first steps were taken soon after Edward’s accession, when all the legislation regulating the Henri-cian church was repealed. Restrictions on the printing and reading of the Bible were lifted, and Cranmer began work on an English communion service to replace the mass, which would come into use early in 1548. It was essential that there be no organized Catholic opposition to this program, and it was here that Mary presented an embarrassment. As the official faith of England moved further away from Rome, Mary could be counted on to remain loyal to the old faith. While Henry lived her Catholicism had been tolerated, once she renounced allegiance to the pope. But when the new teachings and services came into existence her adherence to the mass, the festivals and the doctrines of Rome would seem an insult to the religious establishment, and would encourage the vast numbers of Catholics who had never been reconciled to any change in the faith to resist.

  And as always, the issue of religion had its diplomatic dimension. Any move toward Lutheranism in England was bound to bring on the disapproval of the emperor, who in the spring of 1547 was stronger than ever after achieving a significant victory over the German Protestants at Miihlberg. The French, always intent on driving a wedge between imperial and English interests, were already at work raising fears of invasion. Within six weeks of Henry’s death the French king was telling the English ambassador in Paris that the emperor planned to make war on the English, on the pretext that Mary and not Edward was the true heir.5Even if he did not invade England Charles was certain to support Mary’s continued fidelity to her Catholic confession, and to back any rebellion against the Protestant government that might take shape as the religious alterations advanced.

  What made matters worst for the Council was that Mary was now heir apparent. It was common knowledge that, should Edward die without an heir, Mary was designated his successor under the terms of the late king’s will. Certain knowledge that a Catholic would succeed should harm come to the king was bound to give rise to assassination plots and political conspiracies both in England and on the continent, where for years the pope had been urging Reginald Pole and others to find the means to destroy Protestanrism and restore the true faith. In the light of these dangers the most influential of Edward’s councilors took varying attitudes toward Mary. The Protector, fearing above all the international complications she might trigger, thought that if she could be kept in the background, away from court and out of the view of the public and the diplomats, the twin problems of her divergent faith and her popular influence would be minimized. Obsessed as he was with waging war against the Scots, he tended to treat Mary as a minor irritant to be dealt with as the need arose. There had never been any personal enmity between Mary and Somerset up to now, and Mary was known to be on good terms with his wife Anne, whom she called her gossip and “her good Nan.” Anne Seymour had been a maid of honor in Katherine of Aragon’s household; apparently this endeared her to Mary, who now wrote her on behalf of several elderly former servants of Katherine. They were infirm and without employment, Mary explained, and she wondered whether Nan would ask her husband to secure them pensions.

  The three Council members who stood next to the Protector in influence—Paget, Dudley and Thomas Seymour—had somewhat different views. Paget, a supple man of impermanent commitments, echoed Somerset’s recommendation at the Council table but privately worried that Mary posed a greater threat than the Protector realized. Paget favored conciliatory talk up to the last possible moment: then expedient action. Mary should be allowed to live and worship as she liked until it gave rise to problems; then she would have to be given an ultimatum and, if necessary, dealt with by force. Dudley, an able, unprincipled soldier who was now the third man in the Council, saw Mary as only one of many components in a rapidly shifting political game. He was prepared to force her to renounce her faith if that became necessary, but his primary concern was taking over leadership of the Council himself, and supplanting Somerset. The last of the leading figures, Thomas Seymour, had the most original suggestion for bringing Mary under the control of the Council: he offered to matry her.

  Thomas Seymour, whose unsavory charm and ambition were as obvious as his transparendy gauche tactics, had like Dudley made up his mind to rise to the top position in the Council. He saw two ways to do this—by winning the heart of his nephew the king and by making a royal marriage. In the admiral’s pay was one Thomas Fowler, a gentleman of Edward’s privy chamber who brought the king presents from his uncle and spoke on his behalf whenever he and Edward were alone. On one occasion Fowler brought up the issue of Seymour’s marriage, and asked the king whom he would recommend as a suitable wife. Edward’s first suggestion, Anne of Cleves, would doubtless have chilled the admiral’s blood,but on second thought Edward told Fowler “I would he married my sister Mary, to change her opinions.”

  Greatly heartened, Seymour next went to gain the approval of his brother the Protector. But far from giving his brother permission to marry the heir to the throne Somerset “reproved him, saying that neither of them was born to be king, nor to marry a king’s daughter.” They must “thank God and be satisfied” with their present honors, and not presume higher. Besides, the Protector added, Mary would never consent. (In fact it was rumored that before approaching either his brother or the king the admiral had proposed to both Mary and Elizabeth, who flatly turned him down.) The admiral, offended, answered that all he sought was approval for the match, and that he would overcome the obstacle of gaining Mary’s consent in his own fashion. But this led to another sharp burst of outrage from Somerset, and the conversation ended with bad feeling on both sides that never fully healed. In a few months Thomas Seymour secretly married his old love Catherine Parr, while she was still in mourning for Henry.

  In keeping with the Protector’s policy Mary was kept away from Edward and the court from the start of Edward’s reign. She moved back and forth from Havering, Edward’s old residence in Essex, to Wanstead House, New Hall and Framlingham Castle in Norfolk, near the estates which now provided her modest income. She saw little of Catherine Parr either before or after her marriage to Thomas Seymour, and was so far from court that the imperial ambassador, Francois Van der Delft (Chapuys had left England in 1545), could not see her easily. He learned indirectly that she was being held in “very little account,” and was upset over some vague slight from the Council; she was also put out, he heard, that the Protector did not write or visit her with the news of Henry’s death for several days after it occurred.6

  When Van der Delft was finally able to speak to Mary at some length in July of 1547, he found her to be in semi-seclusion out of respect to her father. Henry was still “very rife in her remembrance,” she wrote at about this time, and to Van der Delft she explained that in deference to his memory she had not dined in public since his death. She made an exception for the ambassador, and insisted that he dine with her. Mary did not hesitate to put her trust in Chapuys’ successor. “She seemed to have entire confidence in me,” he wrote afterward, and though their conversation was relatively casual he felt and appreciated Mary’s customary openness and lack of formality. They spoke of her income, which Van der Delft thought was far too low considering her standing in the succession; of her father’s will, whose authenticity she doubted, but could not prove one way or the other; of the amount of her dowry, about which she knew nothing; and finally of the marriage of Catherine Parr andThomas Seymour. Mary asked Van der Delft what he thought of it, and after indicating his general approval he alluded to the rumor that the admiral had proposed to Mary first. She laughed, saying that “she had never spoken to him in her life, and had only seen him once,” and made light of the suggestion.7

  The admiral was in fact fast overreaching himself. He had offended the Protector and Council by marrying Catheri
ne without their approval. He was putting pressure on Edward to advance him beyond his brother, and he was known to be searching the lawbooks for a precedent in which, with the king a minor, one uncle governed the kingdom and the other the person of the king. After a year or so his attempts to win Edward over were at least partially successful, but his swaggering efforts to become the first man in the Council made him universally despised. He tried to ride on his wife’s former rank as queen dowager, but fierce confrontations between Catherine and the tenacious duchess of Somerset were the only result. He intrigued to marry Edward to his cousin Jane Grey, a daughter of Edward Grey who had been brought up in the admiral’s household, contrary to the Protector’s cherished plan to marry the young king to Mary of Scotland. And he abused his office with a thorough and imaginative criminality remarkable even in an age of accomplished corruption.

  Among his earliest commissions as admiral was the task of capturing one “Thomessin,” a pirate operating out of the Scilly Isles and preying on the ships of all nations. Seymour returned from his mission without Thomessin, but having discovered a profitable new avenue of self-enrichment. He agreed with the pirate and his confederates that he would not interfere with their trade provided they gave him a share of everything they seized. He made similar agreements with the privateers of the southern coast, and in effect became a pirate himself. Taking advantage of the Protector’s absence in Scotland he tried to organize a force of sworn adherents and boasted that he could call ten thousand men to his aid if need be, and could arm them from a large private cache of weapons and ammunition. Through a confederate he arranged to embezzle funds from the Bristol mint to finance his illegal private army, and by the fall of 1548 he had become the most dangerous man in the kingdom.