Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  The idea of a woman at the head of state was abhorrent on principle. For a woman to rule her husband was unnatural; for her to rule a nation was a monstrous exaggeration of that unnatural condition. Men were strong and prudent, with the force of mind and greatness of soul to govern others; women were weak and thoughtless, lacking the logic, concentration and largeness of vision to guide any political body. It was common knowledge that women, like lunatics, were governed by the moon, making them unstable and capricious. However gifted or well inten-tioned she might be, no woman could escape this influence. Besides, all the imagery of royalty—of all authority—was male. For a woman to mount the throne offended the very concept of majesty. Politically, a woman ruler was a symbol of national impotence. More important, no queen could fill the ruler’s primary function in the larger order of the cosmos: to represent God to her people. Bishop Gardiner had defined this larger function. Kings, he wrote, were “representatives of God’s image unto men.” Their pan in God’s grand design was to reveal him more fully to their subjects. No woman could do that; given the inherent sinfulness of all women, it would be blasphemy for any female ruler to try.

  Mary came to the throne at a time in English history when the idea of the monarch took on new scope. Through the sheer force of his size, his magnetism and his power to dominate others Mary’s father had reshaped the office of king. Put in the simplest terms, to the average English man or woman, a ruler was someone who looked and acted like Henry VIII. It is extremely doubtful whether any man could have stepped into Henry’s shoes—certainly the boy Edward had failed dismally—yet this was what Mary was called upon to do. Her task was made doubly difficult by her ambivalent feelings about her father and by the entire force of her education. During the nearly thirty-one years she had lived under his absolute authority Mary had loved and hated her father with equal force. She would never forgive him for the way he treated her mother, nor could she forget how he had treated her, yet since his death she had often invoked his presence in moments of crisis. He was her benchmark of political power; beside him all other authority faded. Mary-drew strength from the fact that she was Henry’s daughter as well as Katherine’s, and she was aware of having inherited his authority along with his throne and title.

  Yet everything she had been taught since childhood robbed her of that strength and contradicted that authority. She had been trained to mistrust her judgment, fear her weakness, and feel shame for her sinfulness. She had never been taught to confront the world; instead her gaze had been turned inward, to focus on guarding her chastity and cultivating the gestures, expressions and tones of voice that symbolized it. Her intellectual achievement was formidable, but atrophied; its only formal purpose had been to encourage fretful introspection. In short, Mary was now raised to a political status that conflicted with her sexual status at every turn. The interplay between the two was to form an inescapable backdrop to her troubled reign.

  At thirty-seven, Mary was a striking woman, despite her short stature. She was almost boyishly slender, with the bright auburn hair and rosy cheeks of a much younger woman. Her eyes were of an indefinite hazel color, and very large; her nose was “rather low and wide,” and gave her face character as well as a dignified beauty. In her most revealing portraits there is a defiant set to her features, and a faint sarcasm, though what impressed the Venetian Soranzo was Mary’s expression of “great benignity and clemency.” She set off her handsome appearance by “arraying herself elegantly and magnificently,” just as her father had. Like him she changed her clothes often, alternating between the close-fitting, trailing gown and kirtle worn by English gentlewomen and the French-style gown and bodice with huge, full sleeves. She wore the latter on state occasions, but even her everyday dress was sumptuous. She loved rich embroidery and expensive velvets and brocades. She had gowns and mantles made of costly cloth of gold and cloth of silver, and wore with them great quantities of jewels—on her fingers, around her neck, and as trimming for her gowns. Mary took exceptional delight in her jewels, the Venetian ambassador wrote. “Although she has a great plenty of them left her by her predecessors, yet were she better supplied with money than she is, she would doubtless buy more.”10

  Mary’s love of finery was the only sign of self-indulgence in the severely disciplined life she led as queen. She rose at daybreak, said her prayers and heard a private mass and then, without pausing to eat, worked at her desk until one or two in the afternoon, when she took a light meal. She made herself available not only to the members of her Privy Council, from whom she heard “every detail of public business,” but to everyone else who asked audience of her, and went on transacting business and writing and answering letters with exhausting diligence every night until after midnight. Mary’s habit of spending nearly all her waking hours at the work of government was reminiscent of her grandmother Isabella. Nothing was allowed to interfere with her regimen but religious services, which took up several hours a day at least, and at the seasons of the great church feasts, many more. For convenience the leading members of the Council had rooms in the palace; by ancient customsome of them slept there. They met early each morning under the leadership of the chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, and conferred with Mary periodically during the day.

  Visitors to Mary’s court found her intelligence and competence impressive, and judged her to be “more than moderately read in Latin literature, especially with regard to Holy Writ.” To ambassadors she spoke Latin, French and Spanish; she understood Italian, though she did not speak it, and displayed a quickness of mind and an eloquence of expression which left no doubt of her capacity to rule. With her servants and others she was generous—some said too generous—with gifts of money and valuable objects. She also gave them her time and her concern, which soon lent her a reputation for simple goodness that clung to her throughout her reign. But Mary was fiercely proud too, and “inclined to talk about her exalted station.”11 Renard called her “great-hearted, proud and magnanimous,” and she carried with her an air of solemnity that made even ordinary events seem important. Mary’s unshakable belief that she had come to the throne through divine intervention made her deeply serious about her responsibilities. According to Soranzo, her constant exclamation was “In thee, O lord, is my trust, let me never be confounded: if God be for us, who can be against us?”

  Mary’s natural ability, her extraordinary dedication and her confident belief that she was divinely guided helped to sustain her at the outset of her reign. But there were hindrances as well, beyond the everpresent hindrance of her sex. Mary was reported to have a weak constitution, her habitual complaint troubled her from time to time, and her long working hours gave her headaches and sometimes heart palpitations.12 She had found a diet that suited her, but she still had to be bled quite often, and to take various medicines. The first months of her reign were emotionally as well as physically exhausting, and throughout the fall of 1553 Mary was wishing she could get away to Flanders, to visit the regent, the cousin she had never seen. The sight of Mary of Flanders would surely “cure all her natural melancholy,” Mary wrote, “from which she constantly suffered.” With some exaggeration she added that she had “never known what it was to be happy.”13

  Mary’s extremes of confidence and melancholy only confirmed the general impression among her ministers that she was unfit to run her own government. They consistently underestimated her, confusing her deference to their views with helplessness. She was to surprise them again and again with her capacity for hard work, her courage and her leadership in crises, but each time they quickly returned to their original impression. Simon Renard, who came to know Mary as well as anyone in her government, took a very dark view of her future as queen. “I know this queen,” he wrote to Charles V’s chief minister Cardinal Granvelle,“so good, so easy, without experience of life or of statecraft; a novice in everything. I will tell you honestly my opinion, that unless God guards her she will always be cheated and misled either by the French or he
r own subjects; and at last taken off by poison or some other means.”14

  XXXI

  Haile Quene of England, of most worthy fame

  For vertve, for wisdome, for mercy and grace;

  Most firme in the fa[i]th, Defence of the same,

  Christ save her and keepe her in every place.

  A week before Mary made her ceremonial entry into London Dudley and some ten of his captains and accomplices rode into the city under strict and heavy guard. At the head of the armed cortege four standard-bearers carried the royal ensign, then came a large company of mounted men, and behind them an array of archers and men at arms. More guardsmen lined the streets, to prevent the townspeople from breaking through the column of horsemen and attacking the duke. During the journey south from Cambridge he had been wearing a scarlet cloak; at the city gate he was made to take it off to make him less conspicuous among the small group of prisoners, but the crowd knew him well enough. He held his cap in his hand, as if begging for mercy, but the people, “greatly excited,” cried out insults as he passed, and cursed him as a traitor to the crown. “A dreadful sight it was, and a strange mutation,” the imperial ambassadors recorded, for only a few weeks earlier the duke had ridden through these same streets in state, magnificently dressed, escorting Jane Grey to the royal apartments in the Tower. Now he was being taken there to die.1

  Dudley’s trial was brief. The court was assembled at Westminster, where the old duke of Norfolk, as Earl Marshal, sat representing the queen as president of the court. Mary had recently released him from his seven years’ imprisonment in the Tower, and acknowledged his primacy among the peers. Norfolk was among those Mary might well have wanted to punish once she came to power, for the wrongs he had done her in the past. Given his shameless promotion of Anne Boleyn, and hisrepeated cruelties to Mary and her mother during her father’s reign, Mary would have been amply justified in reducing him to penniless obscurity, but she showed no hint of vindictiveness. Instead the duke was given the privilege of overseeing the condemnation of his old enemy Dudley, in a setting which did him much honor.

  He was seated atop a high scaffolding many feet above the floor in a chair bearing the dossal, pall and mantle of majesty. The chief officers of Mary’s government sat at his side—Paulet, Arundel, Paget and even the former chancellor Rich. Four aldermen, and an equal number of lawyers in their scarlet robes and white wigs, completed the personnel of the court. Dudley had made a full confession of his guilt in writing before the trial began; he reiterated it now, falling on his knees and begging the absent queen for mercy, saying that he had acted with the advice and consent of the Council in all he had done. When he had made his appeal Norfolk pronounced the sentence of the court: Dudley was to be hanged, “his heart to be drawn from his body and flung against his face,” and his body quartered. Custom demanded that the traditional barbarous punishment for traitors be invoked; later Mary commuted it to simple beheading.

  During his weeks in the Tower Dudley had undergone an amazing transformation. He was assailed by remorse for all of his sins, political and religious. To ease his conscience he wrote his confession and then, asking that Somerset’s two sons be brought before him, he admitted that he had had their father wrongly condemned, and begged their forgiveness. He asked pardon of others as well, and returned all the money he had amassed from the royal treasury during his years in the government. But what was more astonishing was that, having professed the most radical Protestantism for the last four years, he suddenly recanted and returned to the old faith. He confessed his sins, heard mass with every sign of heartfelt fervor and gave himself up to prayers and devotions. He even went so far as to link his crimes to his abandonment of Catholicism, telling those who came to see him die that “since he had forsaken God and the church to follow the new religion he had done no good.” His final message from the scaffold was to urge his hearers to obey the “good and virtuous” queen, who had “attained the throne miraculously” through the “hand of God.” Then the executioner, a lame swordsman wearing “a white apron like a butcher,” made ready to perform his office, and the duke, with a last prayer, put his head on the block.2

  Some Protestants suspected that Dudley’s change of heart was part of a government plot to discredit the established church, which Mary was eager to replace with her own, but to many Londoners his remarkable conversion was just one more sign that the circumstances surrounding Mary’s accession were nothing short of miraculous. Catholics werepredicting that God would soon “take pity on his people and church in England, through the instrument of a virgin called Mary, whom he has raised to the throne.”3 Protestant pamphleteers tried to refute the argument, widespread among the “common sort,” that Mary’s victory over Dudley confirmed that hers was the only true religion. “This is of God which our queen and old bishops have professed,” they were saying. “For how has God prospered and kept them! What a notable victory has God given them!”4 Ballads told how the duke “went forth full glad” to meet Mary, yet “came a traitor in full sad,” because God subdued all her enemies. New songs welcoming her to the throne were registered at stationers’ hall every few days, some of them addressing her by the old fond nickname of “Marigold.”

  The most eloquent statement of Mary’s providential accession came from Reginald Pole, who in a letter to the new queen marveled at how, “without the aid of any other forces or resistance save that which the spirit of God roused in the hearts of men,” her throne was secured. Her reign was proof that the hand of God ruled human affairs, Pole told Mary, and like the virgin Mary she should rejoice that “her soul did magnify the Lord.” The queen had “more cause than any one” to sing the virgin’s song of praise, “He hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden; he hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.”5

  It was not the first time Mary’s life had been compared to that of Jesus’ mother. After an earlier crisis, in 1536, after signing her formal Submission to her father, Mary had been given a ring signifying her obedience in the words of the virgin’s song, the Magnificat. Now Pole was encouraging Mary again to see her life as a channel for the divine purpose, just as the virgin Mary’s life had been used by God to fulfill his plan for mankind. The parallel could hardly have been more flattering, but the queen was already convinced. For seventeen years she had been living with the certainty that hers was to be a destiny beyond the ordinary. Now that destiny had been made clear. She was to bring England back to the true faith.

  Mary’s initial statements on religion showed considerable tolerance and flexibility. She “wished to force no one to go to mass,” she told the imperial ambassador Renard at their first meeting late in July, but she “meant to see that those who wished to go should be free to do so.”6 She told her councilors it was not: her intention “to compel or constrain other men’s consciences,” merely to provide them the opportunity to hear the truth through “godly, virtuous learned preachers.”7 She was aware that both Protestants and Catholics were waiting to see how resolute she was. In her view the funeral that had yet to be held for Edward provided the first test of her fidelity to the Catholic ritual. A Protestant funeral wouldmake the Lutherans “more audacious,” she told Renard. They would be sure to “proclaim that she had not dared to do her own will.” When she ordered a Catholic funeral her Council would not object, though some members “would only consent out of dissimulation and fear.” She meant to go ahead despite this, relying on her troops to prevent any serious incidents and hoping to use her councilors’ dissimulation “for a great end” later.

  Renard advised Mary to be cautious in making any religious demonstrations for the time being; the emperor, who imagined that she might try to alter the religious settlement overnight, had ordered his envoys to urge caution. There was no need for alarm. Mary was moving slowly though unmistakably toward her ultimate goal, at a pace designed to prevent organized opposition from her Protestant subjects. Her first offici
al announcement on August 12 made it plain that she meant to leave her subjects free to worship as they chose until Parliament could cooperate in bringing about orderly change. “She had so far found no better expedient than to leave each one free as to the religion he would follow,” the announcement read. “If some held to the old, and others to the new, they should not be interfered with or constrained to follow any other course until the coming Parliament should decide by law.”8 As if to confirm this policy Mary decided to authorize two separate funeral observances for Edward—a Protestant service in Westminster Abbey and a requiem mass in the old chapel of the White Tower. But if she saw the virtue of deferring the re-establishment of Catholicism there was no doubt she meant to complete it in time. She told Renard “she felt so strongly on this matter of religion that she was hardly to be moved,” glancing as she said this toward the altar in her chamber.9

  The court set a pious example of adherence to the traditional faith, and one that was followed in many places throughout the kingdom. Six or seven masses were being sung every day in Mary’s chapel, with all the Council members in attendance. (It was noted, though, that neither Elizabeth nor Anne of Cleves had yet attended.) In the major churches of London the altars were being restored, and the crucifixes replaced. Matins and vespers had been recited in St. Paul’s for weeks, and on St. Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, the first Latin mass was sung there.10Elsewhere the Catholic ritual had been restored even earlier. At Oxford a visiting Protestant watched Catholics “dig out as it were from their graves their vestments, chalices and portasses, and begin mass with all speed” as soon as Mary was proclaimed queen. In their exuberance they “had a public festival, and threatened flames, hanging, the gallows and drowning” to all Protestants.11 In some places, of course, secret masses had been performed throughout Edward’s reign, either by daring English priests or by foreign clerics from Normandy or Brittany, many of whom could not speak English.12