Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  Philip stayed in Southampton three days, in apartments hung with tapestries commemorating the deeds of Henry VIII and embroidered with his offensive titles “Defender of the Faith” and “Head of the Church.”7 He slept late each morning, then dressed and met with Mary’s councilors and other lords who presented themselves to kiss his hand. There was little else to occupy him in Southampton—then a small community with only three hundred houses—and it rained incessantly throughout the prince’s stay. Mary had appointed her lord privy seal to report to Philip on “the whole state of this realm with all things appertaining to the same,” and to give him any advice he might ask for, but as yet Philip knew too little of England and her politics even to frame a question. He did make a formal speech to the councilors, assuring them that he had not come to England to enrich himself—for, as God knew, he had enough lands and riches to content any prince living—but because he had been called by the divine goodness to be Mary’s husband. He would live with her and with them, he said, as “a right good and loving prince,” and hoped they would fulfill their promise to be “faithful, obedient and loyal to him” in their turns.

  Philip was well aware that his every word and gesture were being noted and judged by the English, and went out of his way to create an atmosphere of casual good will in order to put them at ease about him. On his first evening ashore he joined a roomful of lords and gentlemen talking informally among themselves. He greeted them genially and then went over to talk to Lord Howard, “to whom he showed great favor.” He even attempted a clumsy pleasantry, remarking to the admiral that he now realized none of the suits he had brought with him was elegant enough to wear on his wedding day, or as rich as “the greatness of the queen deserved.” But he hoped to have a suit made from the trappings of the horse Mary had sent him, he added, meaning to compliment her gift and to disparage his own sartorial splendor. Just then great ewers of wine, beer and ale were brought in, and tall silver drinking pots. Philip turned to his Spanish companions and announced that from now on they must forget Spanish customs and adopt English ones, and that he would show them how. Ordering beer to be brought to him, he drank it down after the English fashion, much to the approval of the Englishmen present.

  The prince gave every appearance of being a carefree young man looking forward to his wedding day, but behind his joviality he was gravely distressed. While he was still at sea word had come from his father that on June 26 the French had seized Marienbourg, a strong fortress on the border of the imperial lands, and that within days they might be in Brussels itself. Already bands of French scouts and arsonists were chasing the peasants off their lands and burning their houses and fields, whileCharles’ own soldiers, taken completely by surprise, were trying to collect themselves for a counterattack. The emperor appealed to his son to come to his aid, to stay in England only long enough to get married and enjoy a brief honeymoon, then sail for Flanders.

  Philip sent word from Southampton that he was willing to do as his father asked, and ordered his servants not to bring his horses ashore as he would only have to order them loaded again in a few days. The French seizure of Marienbourg troubled Mary as well as she waited to meet Philip. She feared Charles might take advantage of the new ties binding England to the Hapsburg lands to ask that English soldiers be sent to the defense of Brussels. But by the time the wedding day arrived the crisis had passed. The French were not prepared to do more than harass the countryside around the imperial capital, and the emperor’s troops eventually gathered themselves to push them back across the border.

  It soon became obvious that Philip would have nothing to combat but the English weather, which grew worse day by day. On his second day in Southampton Philip had to borrow a hat and cape from one of the Englishmen to protect his clothing when he rode to mass. Two days later when he left the port to ride to Winchester, where he was to meet the queen and take his wedding vows, it was raining violently, and the road became a muddy ditch. Philip covered his diamond-studded surcoat with a red felt cloak for the journey, but long before he arrived in the episcopal city he was drenched and his white satin trunks and doublet were stained and splattered. He stopped at a hospital—once a monastery—just outside the city and changed into a suit of black and white velvet covered with gold bugles, and continued on his way, flanked by the sad-looking Spanish guardsmen in their soaking liveries and his bedraggled but faithful noblemen.

  The prince rode into Winchester at dusk, and went directly to the cathedral, where Gardiner and four other bishops met him and sang a Te Deum. The church was crowded with onlookers, packed so tightly “they were all in danger of stifling,” and after the ceremony of thanksgiving was ended the people followed Philip as he made his way to the dean’s house, where he would spend the night. The queen’s guard kept the crowd at a distance from the prince, but he turned and bowed slightly, first to one side, then the other, as he passed them and they “much rejoiced to see his noble personage.” Mary had come that day to the bishop of Winchester’s palace, just across the cloister from the dean’s house, and that night she and Philip were to meet for the first time.

  If Philip felt the self-assurance of a handsome young prince matched with a woman much older and, by repute, less well favored than himself, his preparations for this first meeting did not reveal it. He changed hisclothes once again, after deciding that his gold-embroidered suit and matching hat were not fine enough for the occasion, and put on a doublet and trunks of the softest white kid. Over these went a French surcoat intricately worked with silver and gold threads, and a matching cap with a long plume. Thus arrayed—“and very gallant he looked,” one of his gentlemen observed—the prince and a dozen of his Spanish and Flemish courtiers crossed the narrow lane between the garden of the dean’s house and that of the bishop’s palace, and were admitted into a private garden, full of arbors and plashing fountains, and up a narrow winding staircase to where the queen was waiting.

  Philip came into the room, a “long narrow room or corridor where they divert themselves,” and stood smiling before Mary, the beloved Titian portrait come to life. A Scotsman who saw the prince at this time described how he appeared to British eyes. “Of visage he is well-favored, with a broad forehead and grey eyes, straight-nosed and [of] manly countenance. From the forehead to the point of his chin, his face groweth small; his pace is princely, and gait so straight and upright as he loseth no inch of height; with a yellow head and a yellow beard.” The Scotsman found nothing whatever to complain of in the prince’s appearance. “He is so well-proportioned of body, arm, leg, and every other limb to the same,” he concluded, “as nature cannot work a more perfect pattern.” After all the months of waiting, Philip proved himself worth waiting for.

  Mary, though, was something of a disappointment to the Spaniards. It was not entirely her fault; nearly all Philip’s Spanish gentlemen professed to find English women unattractive, preferring the full-bodied, olive-skinned Spanish women to the porcelain pallor and coltlike proportions of the English. But the queen, looking thinner than ever in a plain, tight-fitting black velvet gown, “cut high in the English style without any trimming,” her complexion almost dead white and her small features drawn into an expression of hopeful anticipation, looked exactly what she was: Philip’s maiden aunt.

  Her first twelve months of rule had left her tired and careworn, and the excitement in her face on this night could not disguise the exhaustion of all she had lived through. She was naturally restless and somewhat high-strung, and the worries of the last few months had made her an insomniac. Near-constant anxiety over the safety of the country and the government, long hours of tedious work and the endless annoyance of living in the same household with an odd dozen squabbling politicians who ate, worked and slept in her immediate surroundings had all taken their toll. The circumstances of Mary’s life over many years had doubtless robbed her of whatever self-absorbed sensuality she may once have possessed, and her romantic feelings for Philip had from the start beentainted by the accus
ation that the man who would be the best husband for her might well be the worst co-ruler for her country.

  She bore the marks of these concerns now as she looked eagerly across the long corridor toward the prince and his party. Ruy Gomez, Philip’s most intimate confidant, described Mary shortly afterward as “rather older than we had been told,” but others in the group minced no words. “The queen is not at all beautiful,” one of them wrote. “Small, and rather flabby than fat, she is of white complexion and fair, and has no eyebrows.”8

  Mary was walking up and down at the opposite end of the room when Philip came in, and as soon as she saw him she ran up to him and kissed her own hand, then took his. He greeted her in the English way, kissing her on the mouth. The only other persons in the room were four or five “aged nobles” and the same number of “old ladies.” Mary had not wanted to risk showing herself to Philip in the company of her young unmarried gentlewomen. The fiances sat down under a cloth of estate and began to talk together, searching one another’s faces for signs of approval, liking, affection. Admiral Howard interrupted this most sensitive of exchanges with coarse reminders of the closeness of the wedding day, the appealingness of the bride, the prodigious capabilities of the groom, and so on, but his loud jokes did not distract Philip and Mary from one another. After a time Philip’s gentlemen came up to kiss Mary’s hand, and she in turn led the prince into an adjoining room where her ladies, two by two, presented themselves to be kissed.

  Good manners demanded that this visit be a brief one, but when Philip was preparing to leave Mary took him by the hand and led him away for another long talk. “No wonder,” the Spaniards remarked as they saw this. “She is so glad to get him and to see what a gallant swain he is.” Finally, though, Mary had to let Philip go, after teaching him the English words “Good night, my lords all.” He forgot it the first time, and had to be taught again, and even then the best he could do was “God ni hit,” but the queen was delighted and her courtiers tolerant, and the interview ended happily.9 Philip went off to his quarters satisfied that he had done his duty, and Mary retired to her bedchamber rejoicing that God had sent her a storybook prince.

  PART FIVE

  The Kings Wife

  XXXVIII

  But I shall do the best 1 can,

  And marry some good honest man,

  And brew good ale and tun.

  Marriage by my opinion,

  It is better religion

  As to be friar or nun.

  On the feast of St. James, patron saint of Spain, Mary and Philip were married in Winchester cathedral. The church was hung with rich tapestries and cloth of gold, and a raised wooden platform was erected at one end for the ceremony itself. On each side of the altar were two canopied seats for the bride and groom, and at the center of the wooden platform was a raised dais, upholstered in purple, where the five officiating bishops were to stand as the wedding mass was performed. Philip arrived first, wearing a white doublet and breeches and a French mantle Mary had sent him as a gift the day before. The mantle was made of cloth of gold trimmed in crimson velvet and lined in crimson satin. Thistles of curled gold were fastened to the gleaming fabric, and each of the twenty-four ornamental buttons on the sleeves was made from four large pearls. Philip also wore the jeweled collar of the Garter the queen had sent him earlier. He entered the church escorted by his principal gentlemen, and took his seat. No symbols of his titles were borne before him, but there had been an important change in his status since his arrival in England. The night before a document had come from Brussels making him king of Naples, and when it was read out, all the nobles present kissed Philip’s hands in token of his royalty. Much to her pleasure Mary discovered that she would be marrying not a prince but a king.

  About a half hour after Philip’s coming Mary arrived at the church, the sword of royalty carried before her by the earl of Derby and thelong train of her gown held by the marchioness of Winchester and the Lord Chamberlain Sir John Gage. She wore a gown of black velvet studded with precious stones, and over it a mantle of cloth of gold to match Philip’s. An observer wrote that the queen “blazed with jewels to such an extent that the eye was blinded as it looked upon her,” and she outshone everyone present. Mary’s fifty gentlewomen, splendid in cloth of gold and silver, followed her, “looking more like celestial angels than mortal creatures.”1

  The most important part of Mary’s wedding finery, though, was completely unadorned. It was her wedding ring, “a round hoop of gold, without any stone.” She was a sentimental bride, and “her desire was to be married as maidens were married in the old time.” The wedding ceremony, too, was in the old fashion, with bidding of the banns and offering of candles and crowns by both spouses. After a high mass the chancellor read the words of the marriage ceremony in English and Latin, assisted by his fellow bishops serving that day as deacon and subdeacon, all mi-tered and in their richest vestments. To calm Mary’s apprehensions about the validity of a marriage performed in a country still officially under sentence of excommunication the emperor had obtained from the pope a dispensation declaring the union a lawful one by papal authority.2 Philip had brought his own priest from Spain to perform the nuptial benediction. The solemnities lasted several hours, and all that time, it was noted, Mary never took her eyes off the sacrament. The Spaniards were uniformly impressed by her unaffected piety. “She is a saintly woman,” one of them wrote admiringly.

  The only tense moment came when Gardiner asked in a loud voice “if there be any man that knoweth any lawful impediment between these two parties,” and invited all who objected to make themselves heard. There was no response, and he hurried on to the last part of the ritual. In place of her father the queen was given away by the marquis of Winchester, the earls of Derby, Bedford and Pembroke, “in the name of the whole realm,” and then the ring was laid upon the Bible, along with the traditional three handfuls of fine gold. At this Lady Margaret Clifford, Mary’s cousin and her only female relative present, opened the queen’s purse and Mary, with a smile, put the gold inside. The trumpets sounded then to signal that the couple were now man and wife, and the earl of Pembroke unsheathed the second sword, to be carried before Philip now that he was Mary’s wedded husband. The mass was concluded, with the spouses taking the sacrament and Philip following the old Catholic custom of kissing the celebrant, and finally the king of heralds then came forward and proclaimed the royal title and style:

  “Philip and Mary, by the grace of God king and queen of England, France, Naples, Jerusalem, and Ireland, defenders of the faith, princes ofSpain and Silicy, archdukes of Austria, dukes of Milan, Burgundy, and Brabant, counts of Hapsburg, Flanders, and Tyrol.”

  The banquet hall in the bishop’s palace was the scene of the wedding feast. Mary and Philip sat at a raised table, and four long tables at floor level were laid for the Spanish and English nobility. The guests ate standing up; only the royal pair were seated, with Mary in the favored place on the right and in a chair noticeably finer than her husband’s. The Spaniards were quick to take note of this, and of the fact that while the queen ate from gold plate, the king was served on silver—a slight they hoped would be corrected once he was crowned. The quantity of valuable plate impressed them greatly. Even the least of the gentlefolk present were served on silver dishes, and tall sideboards full of platters, ewers and serving dishes stood at both ends of the hall. Behind the queen was another large display cabinet filled with more than a hundred great pieces of gold and silver plate, along with a “great gilt clock half as high as a man” and a marble fountain with a rim of solid gold.

  Mary and Philip were served by the English noblemen whose hereditary privilege it was to present the basin, hold the napkin and pour the wine for the sovereign. Only one Spaniard, Don Inigo de Mendoza, was permitted to wait on Philip, and throughout the meal Lords Pembroke and Strange stood before the king and queen holding the sword and staff of state. As each dish was brought in it was saluted with low bows and a fanfare, and as this formal
ity was repeated for each of the four courses of thirty dishes the banquet lasted several hours. Foreseeing this, Mary had ordered her surveyor of the works to arrange a place “for her highness to withdraw herself” from time to time during the afternoon. To do this he had had to break down the wall “at the back side of her table,” marring the bishop’s chamber for the convenience of the queen. There was only one alteration in Mary’s plans for the wedding feast. The surcoat she provided for her consort—another French robe in cloth of gold with the roses of England and pomegranates of Spain intertwined in drawn gold beads and seed pearls—was left behind in the prince’s apartment. With its eighteen huge buttons made from table diamonds it struck the bridegroom as ostentatious, and he chose not to wear it that day. In an inventory of his wardrobe annotated by Philip himself some years after his wedding day he wrote in the margin opposite this robe “This was given to me by the queen for me to wear on our wedding day in the afternoon, but I do not think I wore it because it seemed to me ornate.”3

  When the banquet was over and the queen had drunk a cup of wine to the health and honor of the guests the company went into the presence chamber where Philip’s gentlemen attempted to make gallant conversation with Mary’s ladies. As few of the Spaniards spoke English, they found this difficult. “We had great trouble to make out their meaning,”one Spanish courtier wrote, “except of those who spoke Latin. So we have all resolved not to give them any presents of gloves until we can understand them.” The writer added that, because of the obvious charm of his compatriots, “the gentlemen who speak the language are mostly very glad to find that the Spaniards cannot do so.”4 If conversation was awkward, dancing was virtually impossible, as neither group of courtiers knew the dances of the other. Mary and Philip found a compromise and danced together in the German fashion, though it was said that Mary, who was an excellent and enthusiastic dancer, was not adequately partnered by the unathletic Philip. The Spaniards in general were “greatly out of countenance” at the superior virtuosity of the Englishmen, especially Lord Bray, a spectacular dancer known as “a paragon in court, and of sweet entertainment.”5