Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  Unfortunately, Renard’s assessment was premature. Within weeks of his release from the Tower Courtenay was proving to be an embarrassment. He had managed to acquire the intellectual attainments of a gentleman but none of the martial skills; he knew nothing of weapons, armor or riding, and it was said Mary had canceled a tournament planned to coincide with her coronation because she knew Courtenay would disgrace himself there. In fact the tournament, like the revels planned for the same festivities, had been canceled because of threats of disruption, but the preferred explanation was Courtenay’s ineptitude. Noailles called him “as maladroit as can be believed, a young man who has never mounted a big horse.”

  His manners were as gauche as his horsemanship. “He is proud, poor, obstinate, inexperienced and vindictive in the extreme,” Renard wrote when he had observed Courtenay for several months. He liked to give orders and to call attention to his own importance, and he attracted a following from among the most unprincipled of Mary’s courtiers. There seemed to be no doubt in his mind that he would be the one to share Mary’s throne, and it was noticed that those who were most eager to flatter him fell on one knee when they spoke to him, just as they did to Mary. He was obviously bidding for Mary’s favor in every way he could think of. Here he relied heavily on his mother, who spent hours in the queen’s company and slept in her bed at night. He took only Catholics into his service, and attempted to put himself on familiar terms with those closest to Mary. He insisted upon calling Susan Clarencieux “mother” and Bishop Gardiner “father,” and little imagination was required to envision him calling Mary “wife.”

  With his airs, his callow posturing and his alarming popularity Courtenay quickly made himself a nuisance, but by mid-September he was proving to be a menace as well. When Geoffrey Pole came to the English court the would-be bridegroom swore he would avenge the deaths of his father and cousins by killing the man whose testimony had helped to convict them. Courtenay made a dramatic accusation of Pole, and to prevent him from carrying out his vow of vengeance Mary and her Council had to arrange for a special lodging for Pole, with guards inside and out to protect him.12 Worse yet, in his indiscretion Courtenay was said to beconspiring with both Elizabeth and the French ambassador, and Renard feared that “Courtenay’s friends, who include most of the nobility, were hatching some design that might later threaten the queen.”13

  Despite his obvious unsuitability as a husband for Mary and an officer in the government a large and influential group in the Council believed the queen should marry him, and defended his merits vociferously at every opportunity. Chief among Courtenay’s supporters was the chancellor himself, who had spent a number of years as his fellow prisoner in the Tower. Gardiner could not imagine Mary betrothed to a foreign prince; among the English nobles only Courtenay was worthy of her in rank. Most of Mary’s most loyal household officers—Rochester, Wal-grave, Englefield, Derby and the Great Chamberlain John de Vere—concurred, as did the majority of Mary’s subjects. Some of them began to speculate that Mary had secretly been married to “a certain prisoner in the Tower” for years; that prisoner could only be Courtenay.14 Even the Emperor Charles appeared to favor a match between Mary and Courtenay, provided another plan closer to his heart and dynastic interests fell through.15

  The emperor’s apparent approval was the result of diplomatic intelligence circulated by Noailles, who was informed, quite wrongly as it turned out, that Mary was passionately in love with Courtenay and would not consider marrying any other man. Noailles’ misjudgment seemed to be confirmed when Mary created Courtenay earl of Devonshire early in September, and gave him a diamond worth sixteen thousand crowns from among her father’s heirlooms. These tokens of favor made Charles hesitate to go ahead with the alliance he had in mind for Mary. If she decided to marry Courtenay, he wrote to Renard, “nothing would stop her, if she is like other women,” and to urge her to do otherwise would only win her enduring resentment.16 Renard was cautious, but he soon found it was unnecessary. Mary told him she had no wish to marry Courtenay or any other Englishman. She had only spoken to Courtenay once—on the day she pardoned him—and in fact she considered him a serious political liability. She had already decided against allowing him to marry within England, and her suggestion that he go abroad was being ignored. She could only hope that his high birth and the further lands and titles she planned to give him would make him an attractive match for a foreign heiress, and soon.

  For whatever might become of Courtenay, Mary’s affections were turning in an altogether different direction—toward the man she felt sure the emperor would choose for her, the heir to the richest empire in Europe: Prince Philip of Spain.

  XXXIII

  Maddame dangloyse me tell you verye true

  Me be verye muche Enamored wythe youe

  Me love you muche bettro than I cane well saye

  Me teache you purlere the fyne spaniolaye.

  As the year 1553 drew to a close the Emperor Charles V looked out over the vast reaches of his land with a jaundiced eye. He was master of most of Europe and much of the New World. His dominions stretched from Spain through Italy, where he was duke of Milan and king of Naples and Sicily, up across the Franche-Comté to the Low Countries, the wealthiest region in the Christian world, and eastward through the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire. He ruled the Cape Verde Islands and the Canaries, the North African territories of Tunis, Oran and Melilia; on the other side of the world the Philippines were his. Treasure ships brought him gold and silver from the mines and ruined empires of Mexico and Peru in seemingly limitless supply, and his viceroys in the Americas ruled millions of acres of bountiful, trackless wilderness. His soldiers were the most fearsome fighters in Europe, while his Spanish and Flemish ships were more numerous and more powerful than the navies of France and England combined. He had governed these regions and marshaled these forces for nearly thirty-five years with a cautious, unspectacular decisiveness amounting to genius, and he was now a time-honored fixture in European politics. It was impossible for the kings and diplomats who had come to maturity during his long reign to imagine life without him.

  Yet Charles was only too aware of how much of the world he ruled, and for how many years he had kept up the wearisome task of ruling it. In recent years his body had begun to fail him, and he would never againride before his soldiers in golden armor on his bay Spanish jennet, javelin in hand, looking to his well-read commanders like Caesar before he crossed the Rubicon. He had not lost the inscrutability that had always amazed emissaries sent to his court, however. In 1552 the English ambassador Morison noted that neither the emperor’s features nor his complexion showed the slightest emotion. “There is in him almost nothing that speaks beside his tongue,” Morison wrote ruefully, adding that Charles seemed to epitomize the biblical proverb “Heaven is high; the earth is deep; a king’s heart is unsearchable.” But though he still played the game of diplomacy well Charles was losing ground to recurrent fevers and catarrh that affected his speech, sometimes reducing him to silence for days at a time or forcing him to speak so softly he could not be heard by others in the room. Fever blisters covered his protruding lower lip, and he had to chew herbs in order to keep enough moisture in his mouth to talk.1 The gout that had crippled the emperor’s legs for years had now spread throughout his body, so that every nerve and joint ached painfully. When even the back of his neck became affected his doctors pronounced him to be in the final stages of the disease, and did not attempt to treat him further. Hemorrhoids tormented him incessantly, swelling to such a point that he could not turn in his chair without “great pain and tears.”

  In the intervals between attacks of illness the emperor retired to the solitude of an inner chamber, where he passed the time designing fortresses or joking with his Polonian dwarf. He preferred the company of his grooms to that of his courtiers, and his only productive activity appeared to be the ceaseless setting and winding of his hundreds of clocks. “His single care and occupation, day and night
,” one of Charles’ gentlemen wrote to his son Philip, “is to set his clocks and keep them going together; he had many, and they are his chief thought.” The emperor invented a new kind of clock, meant to be set in a window frame, and he was as fascinated by the inner workings of his timepieces as he was by their appearance and accuracy. He was an insomniac, and in the long night hours he liked to call all his servants into a torchlit workroom and set them to helping him take his clocks apart and put them together again.2

  What worried the emperor’s advisers most, though, was that he seemed to be slipping into a fatal melancholy like that which had afflicted his mother Joanna the Mad. By 1553 his “troubles of the spirit” had become so grave they had begun to erode his “kindness of manner and usual affability.” He brooded for hours, then began to “weep like a child.” No one dared to approach him in these states, and the work of government piled up unattended. Ambassadors were kept waiting a month or more before they were granted an audience, and some simply lost patience andwent home, muttering that the emperor must either be dead or “no longer fit to govern.”8

  It was at these times that Charles longed to pass on his enormous task to his son. He saw no reason for the inevitable transfer of power to be delayed until his death; he could teach his son all he needed to know and then, when he was sure Philip had the confidence to govern and the loyalty of his subjects, arrange an orderly abdication. The only flaw in this plan—and it was one which sent the emperor into a “notable pensiveness”—was that Philip of Spain was hated by nearly every population under imperial rule.

  Prince Philip, son of Charles V and Isabella of Portugal, was a somber, stuffy and rather dull young man of twenty-six whose upbringing had left him little scope for orginality or independence. He was slight in build, and quite short, but he carried himself with dignity; it was in fact his grave, reserved Spanish dignity that was so often mistaken for hauteur by the non-Spaniards among his future subjects. His receding hairline made him appear a little taller and older than he really was, but his face had an appealing, almost childlike look of pathos about it. The large, mild eyes gazing out from his portraits reflect superiority and boredom, but also a faint wistfulness; the dark circles under them probably came from the combined effects of dissipation and dyspepsia, but they gave a noble sadness to his expression. He looked in fact as if he wished he were somewhere else, and though he performed the ceremonial courtesies of his rank with precision and exactness, he bore them like a hereditary affliction for which he would have liked to find a cure.

  Philip did his best to enjoy the active pursuits of a young nobleman. He hunted a little, and held his own in the jousts. At one tournament he kept his seat tilting against the Flemish captain Count Mansfeldt, a man much older than he and with vast experience in the wars, and won the prize of the “ladies’ lance,” a brilliant ruby. Another time an opponent’s lance struck his helm with such force that he was unconscious for some hours, but the accident did no lasting harm. The French said Philip was such a poor jouster he could barely find his antagonist, much less hit him, but their reports were too biased to be trusted. In all likelihood Philip jousted like he did everything else: correctly, but without style, feeling or commitment. By the time he reached the age of twenty-six the prince had begun to curtail his exercise for the sake of his health. His constitution was delicate, and his digestion poor; he ate little besides meat, believing that fish, fruit and other foods contained evil humors. He needed plenty of sleep, and his “domestic entertainments” were of the most subdued kind. “His nature,” the Venetian ambassador Suriano wrote of Philip, “is more inclined to tranquillity than to exercise, more suited to repose than to work.”4

  When Charles V brought his son from Spain to Flanders five years earlier he soon found the young man’s presence a distinct liability. He had hoped to persuade the German Electors to choose Philip as the next emperor, but they took an instant dislike to the prince. The longer he stayed in Flanders the more the Flemish grew to hate his aloof manner and uncongenial temperament. Finally, deeply disappointed, Charles ordered his son to return to Spain, knowing he was only postponing an inevitable clash between Philip and his future subjects. When Mary came to the throne in England, however, the emperor immediately saw how he might make use of his son in an unforeseen role. As Mary’s husband and Charles’ heir Philip would rule both England and the Low Countries, a prospect offering great commercial and trade advantages offsetting his distasteful personality. As soon as he heard of Mary’s victory over Northumberland the emperor laid his plans to unite the longsuffering woman who called him “the father of her soul and of her body” with his son.5

  At his very first interview with Mary Renard broached the subject of marriage. He conveyed Charles’ feeling that the “great part of the labor of government could with difficulty be undertaken by a woman, and was not within woman’s province.” Mary would need “assistance, protection and comfort” in her new role; only a husband could provide this kind of support. For these reasons Mary ought to decide on a suitable bridegroom as soon as possible, relying on Charles, of course, to advise her. Nothing was said about Philip, but the suggestion was already in the air. As Edward lay dying the papal legate in Brussels wrote to his counterpart in Paris that the emperor had made up his mind to marry Philip to Mary as soon as she became queen.6

  Mary reacted to the idea of marriage by saying that it had never crossed her mind before she became queen—not a very accurate statement, as she had been involved in marriage negotiations of one sort or another for most of her life. She readily admitted that her “public position” now required that she be married, and declared herself ready to follow the emperor’s advice in choosing a husband. She was confident, she added tactfully, that he would remember that she was a mature woman of thirty-seven and not a young girl, and that he would not expect her to make up her mind before she had seen the man and heard him speak.7

  Though Mary reiterated at this meeting that marriage was “against her private inclination,” and that she would have preferred to live and die a virgin, the next time she saw Renard she showed delight at the prospect of becoming a bride. “I assure you,” he wrote to Charles V’s prime minister Granvelle, “that when I mentioned marriage she began to laugh, not once but several times, giving me a look that plainly said how agreeable the subject was to her.” Renard now saw reason to hope that, if theemperor were to propose a match with Philip, it might prove “the most welcome news that could be given to her.”

  The proposal could not wait much longer, for rival suitors were already making their bids for Mary’s hand. Emmanuel Philibert, duke of Savoy, had been looked on as an eligible candidate for years. A Hapsburg ally, he was an exile from his duchy and would gladly live in England. Paget supported the duke’s suit, but no other councilor did, and he lacked an eloquent advocate to officially plead his cause. The Archduke Ferdinand, on the other hand, had several. The archduke was a nephew of the emperor, the second son of his brother Ferdinand, king of the Romans, and was very popular in the Low Countries. Within weeks of Mary’s accession the king of the Romans sent his great chamberlain to England to propose marriage on behalf of the archduke. Anne of Cleves also came to court to speak on his behalf, but the queen was waiting for the emperor to tell her his choice and hoping, no doubt, that it would be Philip.

  By the beginning of September Mary was trying harder than ever to let Charles know, without actually saying it, that she wanted to marry his son. Her professions of daughterly loyalty and gratitude to the emperor were becoming more and more extravagant. She told Renard that she saw his master as her true father, and was so devoted to him that even if Henry VIII were still alive she would obey Charles in choosing her future husband.8 What lay behind both Mary and Charles’ tactics was the complication of the Portuguese infanta. It was well known that the emperor had been trying to arrange a marriage between Philip and the king of Portugal’s sister for some time, though no one at the English court knew just how deeply com
mitted Philip was. Mary pretended to believe that the two were already married, receiving from Renard the hoped-for assurance that nothing had been concluded. Yet Charles was determined to hold both options open for as long as possible, realizing that as soon as it was known that he favored the English match the Portuguese negotiations would be broken off immediately. By September this problem had resolved itself. Philip was only slightly less unpopular in Portugal than in Flanders, and the Portuguese diplomats were doing everything they could to delay the drawing up of a final contract. Finally the news came that the infanta’s dowry was to be only a little over 300,000 ducats—far less than a prince of Philip’s rank could have commanded. The insult rankled, and when the emperor wrote to Philip informing him that he meant to make him the husband of the queen of England the prince found the directive opportune.

  “If you wish to arrange the [English] match for me, you know that I am so obedient a son that I have no will other than yours, especially in a matter of such high import,” Philip wrote dutifully. The news “arrivedat just the right moment,” he went on, “for I had decided to break off the Portuguese business.”9

  On October I o Renard delivered a formal proposal from the emperor. It began with a courtly lie. The ambassador was ordered to say first that Charles would be deeply honored to marry Mary himself, if only his age and health would permit it—a sentimental reference to their betrothal in Mary’s childhood. As he was an old and sick man, however, he was obliged to offer his son instead. Mary was happy and relieved to hear at last the proposal she had been waiting for, and thanked her cousin profusely through Renard, insisting that the match was “greater than she deserved.” But her joy was mixed with anxiety. Despite her deep personal satisfaction at the prospect of marrying the emperor’s son, two things worried her. One was the reaction of her subjects to the idea of a Spanish consort. Her first words to Renard after expressing her gratitude were “that she did not know how the people of England would take it.” To satisfy them her husband would have to come and live with her, she said, and she did not see how Philip could do this when he came into his inheritance after the emperor’s death. It was obviously important to her to “weigh the people’s affections” before deciding to accept the proposal, and though she did not say it outright, both Mary and the ambassador had on their minds the extreme antipathy of the English to all foreigners, especially Spaniards.