Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  As the bells rang and the wine flowed freely, the duke of Suffolk came quietly out of the Tower, unarmed, and ordered his men to lay their weapons down. According to one account, he noisily proclaimed Mary himself before returning to Jane’s apartment and tearing down the cloth of estate that had been hung over her chair.

  In Cambridge, Dudley gave up without a struggle. With his own hands he tore down the sheets proclaiming Jane posted at the street corners, and, waving his white truncheon, shouted “Long live Queen Mary!” and threw down his weapons. That night his chief confederates Northampton and Clinton, and 140 of the knights who had led his troops,made their way to Framlingham to give themselves up to Mary, while Arundel and Paget rode to her camp from London to “ask her pardon for the offense committed in the reception of the Lady Jane.” According to the imperial envoys, they craved pardon in the traditional ritual demanded by so serious a crime, on their knees and with daggers turned toward their stomachs.10

  Arundel’s first act of penance was to seize Dudley, who was by this time a doomed man. All of his associates had deserted him; even his servants were so frightened of sharing his fate that they “tore his badge from their arms in order not to be known as his men.”11 The earl of Pembroke had gathered several hundred armed horsemen to oppose the duke if he had tried to resist, but they were not needed, and precautions were now taken to secure the capital against any disturbance that might be caused by his troops as they straggled back southward. All the weapons that had been in private hands were taken back and stored in the Tower; the municipal guard had been reinforced, and roadblocks were set up to control access to the city.12 Everything was in readiness for the triumphal entry of the true queen.

  She came on August 3, having stayed at Framlingham until all the rebels had been taken and sent on under guard to the Tower. Then, disbanding her army but keeping several thousand men to guard her on her way to London, she set out toward the capital. From Cornwall Sir Peter Carew sent seven hundred horsemen to form part of the royal guard; Elizabeth rode out to join her sister with another thousand gentlemen, knights and ladies in her retinue. On the day of her entry Mary stopped at a house in Whitechapel to exchange her dusty clothing for the finery she loved so well. She put on a gown of purple velvet, cut in the French fashion, with velvet sleeves. Under it was a kirtle of purple satin, thickly set with goldsmith’s work and large pearls. Her foresleeves were covered with rich stones, and over one shoulder she wore an ornamental baldric of gold, covered with pearls and gems. The stones on her headdress were even more dazzling, and her horse’s trappings were of cloth of gold, embroidered in rich designs. The train of her gown was so long that it had to be carried by Sir Anthony Browne, riding behind her and “leaning on her horse, having the train of her highness’ gown hanging over his shoulder.”13

  Thus arrayed Mary rode through London, preceded by more than seven hundred mounted men, with “a great number of strangers all in velvet coats.” All the king’s trumpeters, heralds and sergeants at arms rode with her, and behind her, splendidly dressed and with guards of their own, came Elizabeth, the duchess of Norfolk, the marchioness of Exeter, and the rest of her ladies. The spectacle loosed another wave ofemotion, nearly as great as that which had greeted Mary’s proclamation two weeks earlier. As she passed through the streets they were “so full of people shouting and crying Jesus save her grace, with weeping tears for joy, that the like was never seen before.” At Aldgate she was met by the Lord Mayor and Recorder, who knelt to welcome her and presented her with the scepter of her office, “in token of loyalty and homage.” She returned it with a gracious speech of thanks, “so gently spoken and with so smiling a countenance that the hearers wept for joy.” After this Mary made her way toward the Tower, past the waits playing on the battlements of the gate, and other musicians playing and singing “which rejoiced the queen’s highness greatly.” As she neared the Tower the guns shot continually “like great thunder, so that it had been like to an earthquake,” and at Tower Gate she greeted Norfolk, Gardiner and Courtenay, who were kneeling to ask her pardon. Then in a last gesture of good will “she came to them and kissed them, and said, these be my prisoners.” She went into the royal apartments then, where she would stay awaiting her coronation.

  In the weeks since the remarkable collapse of Dudley’s attempt to make Jane queen the staunchest Protestants in London had begun to predict calamity in the religious life of the nation. “Several preachers, certain Scotsmen in particular, have preached scandalous things of late to rouse up the people,” Charles V’s ambassadors reported, “going so far as to say that men should see Antichrist come again to life, and popery in the land.”1* That Mary associated her amazing triumph with God’s purposes for herself and England was certainly true. One account of the climactic events of July, 1553, told how, as soon as Mary heard the news of her proclamation, “she caused a crucifix to be placed in her chapel, being the first which had been set up publicly for several years,” and sang a Te Deum with her followers.

  But the overwhelming sense of pious gratitude she felt was mixed with a more complex emotion. It was a dawning confidence in the harmonious blending of divine will and popular politics—a growing certainty that her reign was to be the agency for bringing England back to a spiritual equilibrium it had not known since the early years of the century. Along the roads between Framlingham and London she had seen time and again the same inscription at every crossroad; it was repeated in the placards and banners that decorated London at the time of her royal entry. The phrase expressed perfectly the conviction she now claimed: “ Vox populi, vox Dei”—“The voice of the people is the voice of God.”

  XXX

  Here is my hands,

  My dere lover Englande.

  I am thine with both mind and hart;

  For ever to endure,

  Thou maiest be sure,

  Untill death us two do depart.

  A traveler to England in Mary’s reign described the country as “a long, narrow gut of land, situated in the great sea at the extremity of the world.” To visitors from the continent the island kingdom appeared a remote place, insignificant in a sense yet somehow admirable. The same traveler, the Frenchman Etienne Perlin, remarked that England was, “if compared with other small kingdoms, great”—a backhanded compliment that contradicted the more succinct judgment of the diplomat Antoine de Noailles, who always referred to England as “this nasty island.”1 Perlin admired English men, whom he found to be “large, handsome and ruddy, with flaxen hair“; English women were, quite simply, “the greatest beauties in the world, as fair as alabaster,” and also “cheerful and courteous, and of a good address.” Their delightful custom of kissing everyone, even strangers, when they met had sent Erasmus into raptures. “If you were once to taste them, and find how delicate and fragrant they are,” he wrote, “you would certainly desire ... till death to be a sojourner in England.”

  The people Mary now set herself to rule spoke a tongue foreigners found ungainly. To speak it they had to “inflect the tongue upon the palate, twist words in the mouth and maintain a sort of gnashing with the teeth,” an Italian wrote, and they spoke it with a vengeance, outdoing any other nation in the range and vehemence of their swearing. Even children and young people swore astonishingly, and no one seemed tocomplain or punish them for it. Their parents, though, had a worse habit. They loved to belch, “without reserve or shame, even in the presence of persons of the greatest dignity” and no meal was complete without a belching contest.

  This national pastime undoubtedly had something to do with the heady beer the English consumed in such quantities. Strong beer, brewed from native wheat and barley and hops imported from Flanders, replaced ale as the cheapest and most abundant drink in the reign of Henry VIII. Known as “angels’ food,” “dragon’s milk,” “stride-wide” or “lift leg,” it went down well with the soft raisin-filled saffron cakes served in taverns, and no diversion was more agreeable to Mary’s subjects than to resort to the Magpi
e and Crown, the Whale and Crow, the Bible and Swan or the Leg and Seven Stars to drink “till they be red as cocks and little wiser than their combs.” The “double beer” they favored was as strong as whisky; it soon made men and women “stark staring mad like March-Hares,” and left them “drinking, brawling, tossing of the pitcher, staring, pissing and beastly spewing until midnight.”

  The English climate was as insalubrious as the prevailing drinking habits. It was as a rule free of extremes of heat and cold, so that people wore furs all year round, but the “thickness of the air” bred diseases. There was “some litde plague” every year, and at least once in a generation the “atmospheric putrescence” gave rise to the terrors of the sweating sickness.

  The effects of “thick air,” disease and poverty were most apparent in London, a city whose remarkable growth resulted in part from the grim want that had devastated rural England over the last twenty years. The uprooted, the unemployed and the starving all made their way to the capital, where they formed a “common abhorring” to offend respectable citizens. In the year before Mary’s reign began the Hospital of St. Bartholomew, a charitable institution organized to relieve the poor and ill, reported that it had either cured or buried nearly a thousand indigents “who would otherwise have stank in the noses of the city.”

  But if visitors from Europe avoided London’s sprawling outskirts with their festering slums, they were impressed by its landmarks, its prosperity and brisk commercial life. The towering spires of St. Paul’s, London Bridge with its twenty arches and its shops with flowers in every window, the royal residences and noble houses along the river all charmed newcomers. They marveled at the numbers of ships that sailed up the river, and at the wonderful variety of goods that came from their holds. Tudor London was a merchant’s town, where both foreign and native tradesmen appeared to prosper even when the government was struggling to pay its creditors. The power of the guilds was unmistakable, and those who aspired to membership provided another conspicuous characteristic of the city. “In London you will see the apprentices in their gowns,” Perlin wrote, “standing against their shops and the walls of their houses bare-headed, in so much that passing through the streets you may count fifty or sixty thus stuck up like idols, holding their caps in their hands.”

  Below the public mainstream of London life flourished another society: the Tudor underworld. This world had its own etiquette, its guilds, its social hierarchy, with carefully observed distinctions between rufflers, rogues, vagabonds and lower orders of evildoers. Highest in rank were the rufflers, ex-soldiers or servants turned out of their jobs to “wretchedly wander” the streets of the capital, flaunting self-inflicted wounds and pretending to be maimed soldiers returning from the wars. As only the flintiest heart could resist the sight of such noble misery, rufflers made almost as much in alms as the beggars who feigned epilepsy or the “Abraham-men” who danced and sang at street corners pretending to be mad. Below the rufflers were the rogues, more ordinary thieving beggars who extorted money by such underhanded means as attaching horse-locks to the outstretched arms of people who offered them money, and demanding larger sums to let them go.

  Still lower in the hierarchy were the hookers or anglers, who spent their days walking from house to house, taking careful note of what in the way of clothing or linen the householder kept near the second-story window; the same night they returned, carrying a tall staff with a hook at one end, and plucked down everything of value. Hookers were said to be able to lift the bedclothes off unsuspecting citizens as they slept by their open windows, leaving them to wake cold and naked in their nightshirts and suppose that they had been the victims of goblins or elves. On good days these professionals made very good money—as much as three, four or five shillings—but on bad days they barely scraped by, or fell to robbing each other, and few escaped the hazards of their calling—the pillory, prison or the gibbet—for long. The luckiest of them got off with nothing more serious than the public humiliation of being “ridden about London” in a cart, wearing around their necks a placard listing their offenses, while householders emptied chamber pots on their heads or threw rotten eggs in their faces.2

  With crime flourishing, rebellion frequent and public order non-existent, England had become a nation in arms. Knights and gentlemen went armed by custom, but common folk now followed their example. Churchmen too ordered their servants to carry shields, and farmers, when they plowed their lands, left their swords or bows in a corner of the field in case of need. “In this land,” Perlin wrote, “every body bears arms,” and he blamed the government for creating the climate of violence. Justice in England is “tyrannically administered,” he observed. The kingdomappeared to be governed by “shedding human blood in such abundance as to make it run into the rivulets,” and for the aristocracy, beheading had become an ancestral disease. “In this country you will scarcely find any nobleman, some of whose relations have not been beheaded.”

  Even more shocking to visitors, though, than the arbitrary destruc-tiveness of the government was the physical destruction of the churches of London. “The city is much disfigured by the ruins of a multitude of churches and monasteries belonging heretofore to friars and nuns,” the ambassador Soranzo reported to the Venetian Senate. The devastation marred every street. Wrecked convents, parish churches with their naves gutted and their windows broken, vestiges of demolished shrines, graveyards and statues were the striking remains of the attempted obliteration of the old faith. The ruinous condition of English churches was not entirely unknown on the continent. For years boatloads of statues and paintings salvaged from their ruins had been arriving in French harbors, to be sold at Paris, Rouen and elsewhere.3 The French bought them eagerly, treasuring them as relics of the martyrdom of the faith in England and murmuring about sacrilege and desecration. Nothing could prepare devout Catholic visitors for the spectacle of the dismantled, dishonored churches of London, however, or for the gaunt Protestant divines, burning with conviction, who had been Edward’s preachers, and who still preached in the first weeks of Mary’s reign. Men like Latimer, Lever and John Knox cut sinners to ribbons with their tongues, lashing out at pride, greed and vanity in sermons that went on for two hours or more. What was less apparent to visitors from abroad, though, was that large groups within the population held only a marginal place in the community of believers. There were many English men and women whose outward observance of the ceremonies of the church covered a profound inward indifference. And there were others, in hamlets and villages and farms distant from any settlement, whose religious ideas were not far removed from the heathendom of their remote ancestors.

  This heterogeneous population, archaic and conservative yet caught up in rapid change of every kind, was now to be ruled by England’s first crowned queen, Mary Tudor. The advent of a female ruler was in itself a remarkable innovation. There had been a woman ruler in England in the twelfth century, Henry I’s daughter Matilda, but she was not crowned during her brief reign and did not call herself queen. Matilda’s title was “daughter of king Henry and lady of England”; she avoided the Anglo-Saxon term cwen (queen) because it meant “wife,” and implied that she did not hold the throne in her own right.4 Matilda had not been able to hold her crown securely, and her reign set an unfortunate precedent. Happily for Mary the twelfth-century queen was all but forgotten. The most recent example of a woman holding political power in the BritishIsles was in Scotland, where Henry VIII’s sister Margaret had been regent for her infant son. Margaret was a genuine ruler, not just a figurehead; she controlled the appointment of officials and kept the treasury in her own hands. But her power provoked sharp criticism. Lord Dacre, ruler of the English lands along the Scots border, complained that the Scots “let any woman have authority, especially her,” and he spoke for nearly all the men Margaret encountered.5 Henry VIII spent the greater part of his reign avoiding the unthinkable eventuality of leaving a female heir. He had not trained either of his daughters to rule; certainly he never mean
t them to. All his life Henry’s idea of a ruler was a strong man leading a large army into battle, and the battlefield, he once remarked, was “unmeet for women’s imbecilities.”

  Yet Henry had been forced to admit the capability of some women. Early in his reign he had left Katherine of Aragon to rule in his stead while he was on campaign in France, and later, when he believed he had made an enemy of her, he had no difficulty imagining Katherine at the head of an army, leading an armed rebellion against him. The sixteenth century was in fact an era of women rulers, and Mary had to look no farther than to Flanders to observe a highly capable one at work.

  Her cousin Mary, regent of Flanders, had been ruling there for more than twenty years, ever since Charles V appointed her to succeed her aunt Margaret in the regency. Mary was short and delicately built, like her cousin in England, with the distinctive Hapsburg disfigurement of a thick lower lip, but at fifty she was as awesome as she had been in her thirties, when she regularly outrode, outshot and outhunted her male courtiers. Once when the humanist Roger Ascham was traveling in the German lands he met the regent on the road. She was riding alone, miles ahead of her retinue of thirty gentlemen, having accomplished a journey that invariably took seventeen days in thirteen. “She is a virago,” Ascham wrote admiringly. “She is never so well as when she is flinging on horseback [sic], and hunting all the night long.”6

  The diplomats of the time unanimously conceded the regent’s intelligence and her shrewdness in statecraft. She “had courage enough for anything,” they noted; in character they compared her to her progenitor Charles the Bold.7 Yet despite her prodigious capabilities she was denied a place at the diplomatic table. During crucial peace negotiations with the French in 1555 the emperor sent an urgent message to his sister, asking her to join him and give him advice on exactly what concessions should be made. She came, she gave excellent advice in private, yet to the Venetians at the conference she sent her regret “at being prevented by her sex from attending ... as she earnestly desired.”8 As a younger woman even the ambassadors with greatest admiration for her put her biological function first in their dispatches, speculating that “by reason of her naturalvolatility, and from too much exercise and motion, she will have no posterity.” Her own final observation on her authority was both judicious and tragic. “A woman is never feared or respected as a man is, whatever her rank.”8