Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  On this mortifying note the festivities ended early, and by nine o’clock the last of the guests had retired. Mary and Philip were escorted to their separate apartments, where they dined alone, then met again at the lodgings prepared for their wedding night. On the door Gardiner had ordered these rather insipid verses subscribed in Roman lettering:

  Thou art happy house, right blest and blest again,

  That shortly shalt such noble guests retain.

  The bed was blessed by the chancellor, who then left husband and wife alone, still dressed in their wedding finery and in “great quantities of jewellery.” “What happened that night,” a hopeful Spaniard wrote shortly afterward, “only they know. If they give us a son our joy will be complete.”9

  When Philip’s gentlemen presented themselves outside the royal bedchamber the next morning, Mary’s shocked attendants stood resolutely between the Spaniards and the door and refused to let them in. To call on a newly married woman the morning after her wedding night was “not honest,” they said; furthermore, English queens by custom did not appear in public until the second day after their weddings. What Mary’s gentlewomen did not realize was that in Spain custom required that the rulers be congratulated in bed on the morning following their marriage, and if Philip had been there he might have explained the misunderstanding. But Philip was gone; he got up at seven and worked at his desk until eleven, when he went to mass and then dined alone.

  Flemish affairs were very much on his mind. The French were in retreat—after taking Binche and destroying the regent’s palace—and the emperor’s forces were in pursuit. The raids had been costly, however, and Charles confessed to his son in England that his treasury had been badly drained and his Flemish territories exhausted by the conflict. Heordered Philip to stay with Mary for the time being, “busying himself with the government of England,” and in fact the king had more than enough to do to keep him occupied, as he was readying the fleet that had brought him to England to sail immediately for Flanders. Like Mary he spent a good many hours at his desk each day, and did not see his wife until evening. Mary was left to face the intricacies of exchanging visits with her new Spanish courtiers on her own.

  Courtesy demanded that the queen begin the exchange by inviting into her presence the wife of the principal nobleman, the duchess of Alva. On the third day after the wedding the duchess was escorted to the queen’s apartments by all the lords and gentlemen of the court. She had just come from Southampton the day before, having missed the wedding, and this was to be her first meeting with Mary. The duchess took great care to prepare herself for the interview, dressing in an elegant black velvet gown trimmed in lace and black silk embroidery and having her hair beautifully arranged. Mary, who was doing her best to dress like a Spanish woman, wore black damask with a stomacher of black velvet embroidered with gold. Both women were doubtless apprehensive about the meeting, but the duchess was completely unprepared for the ebullience and girlish eagerness of the queen. Instead of allowing her maids of honor to bring the duchess into the presence chamber Mary waited for her in the antechamber herself. When the Spanish woman entered Mary went up to her at once, and the duchess, not knowing how to make a proper obeisance to a sovereign who was not seated on a throne, sank to her knees and reached for Mary’s hand to kiss. Mary refused to give her hand, and instead stooped over and hugged the duchess as she knelt, lifting her bodily to her feet again and kissing her firmly on the mouth, “as queens of England do to great ladies of their own blood, but to none other.”

  Mary led her uncomfortable visitor in the direction of a high-backed chair raised off the floor, all the while telling her in an animated tone how pleased she was to see her, and asking about her journey and sea voyage. When they reached the chair Mary abruptly sat down on a cushion on the floor and graciously offered the seat of honor to the duchess. This was too much for the Spaniard, who implored the queen to take the chair herself. Mary refused, and ordered two brocaded stools to be brought. But when Mary sat on one of these the duchess would only bow very low and sit on a cushion. At this Mary returned to her cushion again, causing the duchess fresh embarrassment, and the struggle to avoid preeminence continued until the duchess, too exhausted to protest further, agreed that they both should sit on the stools.

  Once the seating etiquette was settled the two women appeared to get on well, and none of the quarrels Renard feared would break out between the Spanish noblewomen and their English sisters actually occurred. As for the royal couple, they were reported to be “bound together by such deep love that the marriage may be expected to be a perfect union.” This platitudinous judgment was somewhat inexact. A closer approximation of the truth was that Philip was doing the job assigned to him—to make himself agreeable to all the English, and especially to their queen—more capably than anyone had thought he would. The English appeared to like him very much indeed. “His way with the lords is so winning,” Philip’s closest friend and confidant Ruy Gomez wrote, “that they themselves say they have never had a king to whom they so quickly grew attached.”7 “The king is certainly a master hand at it when he cares to try,” Ruy Gomez added, and his mastery of the queen’s affections was in no doubt. Mary referred fondly to Philip in letters to the emperor as “my lord and husband,” “him whose presence I desired more than that of any other living being.”8

  Mary favorably impressed the Spaniards fully as much as Philip did the English. “She is so good that we may well thank God for giving us such a bountiful princess to be our queen,” one of them wrote. “God save her!” Ruy Gomez called her “a very good creature,” while another courtier saw her as “a perfect saint.” They were unanimous, though, in concluding that her physical charms had been overrated. The problem was partly her clothes. To the Spaniards, who disliked English clothes intensely, the queen appeared to “dress badly,” but they conceded that if dressed in the Spanish fashion “she would not look so old and flabby.”9

  The real problem, however, was not her clothes. “To speak frankly with you,” Ruy Gomez remarked obliquely in a letter sent to Spain, “it will take a great God to drink this cup.” For a prince of Philip’s youth and endowments, marriage with a painfully inexperienced, sexually un-awakened woman of thirty-eight was bound to be something of a trial, at least at first, but Philip had never expected a passionate match. “He treats the queen very kindly,” Ruy Gomez noticed, “and well knows how to pass over the fact that she is no good from the point of view of fleshly sensuality. He makes her so happy that the other day when they were alone she almost talked love-talk to him, and he replied in the same vein.”10 He was tactful, attentive and gallant; he missed no detail of courtesy, and, when he was not attending to matters of state, never left Mary’s side. Their compatibility was doubtless strengthened by the fact that they could not speak one another’s language. Mary spoke only Aragonese, though she understood Philip’s Castilian Spanish; he in turn understood no English, and relatively little of the French Mary was forced to speak to him.

  The pageantry with which Londoners greeted Philip on his first entry into the city on August 18 seemed to confirm Ruy Gomez’ feeling thatthe English had taken Mary’s husband to their hearts. At London Bridge two giants saluted him as “noble Prince, sole hope of Caesar’s side,/By God appointed all the world to guide,” and at the end of Gracechurch Street, at the Sign of the Splayed Eagle, an equestrian statue of the prince in the antique style greeted him as “worthy Philip the fortunate and most mighty Prince of Spain, most earnestly wished for.” The royal consort was compared in another pageant to Philip the Bold, Philip the Good of Burgundy, the Roman Emperor Philip the Arabian and Philip of Macedonia, father of Alexander the Great, but the most flattering comparison was made in Cheap, where the prince was represented as Orpheus taming the wild beasts with his harp. The sight of the harp player, surrounded by nine “fair ladies playing and singing on diverse sweet instruments”—the nine Muses—and by men and children disguised as lions, wolves, foxes and bears, “da
ncing and leaping with Orpheus’ harp and the Muses’ melody,” delighted Philip and Mary very much, as did the by now traditional appearance of the acrobat sliding down a rope stretched from St. Paul’s steeple to the ground.

  Though large crowds watched the royal couple make their way through the streets, and many people ran about joyfully, “calling and crying ‘God save your graces,’“ still by mid-August the presence of the Spaniards had begun to seem oppressive. Philip himself might be a gentleman, but the rest of the foreigners were distinctly unwelcome. Months before they arrived Mary had issued a proclamation ordering all her subjects to extend “courtesy, friendly and gentle entertainment” to the Spaniards, “without either by outward deeds, taunting words, or unseemly countenance” giving any insult to the visitors. But no proclamation could keep the distrust and hostility of the English in check. “Disagreeable incidents” between Englishmen and Spaniards began almost as soon as Philip arrived, and every inconvenience or disturbance that occurred at court was blamed on the presence of the foreigners. Their actual numbers were very small, but to the English they were everywhere. One English diarist claimed that for every Englishman he saw on the streets of London there were four Spaniards, and the taverns of the capital were full of rumors that thousands more of the strangers were about to disembark at the Channel ports.

  The apparent prosperity of the visitors irritated the English almost as much as their manners and their looks. At court the elegant dress of the Spanish nobles and their satin-clad servants, and the sumptuous bed-hangings, velvet canopies and quilts embroidered in gold and seed pearls they had brought from home aroused the envy of the English courtiers. They seemed never to run out of money, no matter how high the English raised the prices of food and lodging, and when Philip’s treasure was conveyed through the city for storage at the Tower Londoners marveled atits vast extent. Twenty carts rumbled through the streets, carrying ninety-seven treasure chests full of gold, and doubtless creating the impression that the supply was infinite. Money speculators were quick to set up an exchange in St. Paul’s to try to profit from the superabundance of Spanish coin, while the French, hoping to deepen the suspicions of the English toward the Spaniards, put false Spanish coins into circulation.11

  The Spanish, on the other hand, were worried lest the English realize how little money they actually had. “If the English find out how hard up we are,” Ruy Gomez wrote, “I doubt whether we shall escape with our lives.” Money was the key to retaining what minimal good will English officials, servants, merchants and innkeepers showed toward the foreigners; once the Spaniards ran out of money, Gomez feared, they would be abused like pickpockets.12 Philip, whose resources were far from infinite, was alarmed to discover that he had to pay for two households instead of one. The terms of the marriage contract had been interpreted more literally by the English than by Philip and his advisers, and he now found himself having to be served by English counterparts of the men he had brought with him from Spain. Worse still, he found he was expected to pay all these English servants himself, with no part of the cost shared by the queen.13

  These economic difficulties might be solved in time, but more intangible disparities separating the Spaniards from their English hosts grew worse and worse. The longer they stayed the more the Spaniards found to criticize. The English gossiped too much, they said, had no respect for the clergy, and lacked cultural refinement. Their dances were “strutting or trotting about,” and their women immodest and unappealing. Mary’s palaces were large but uncomfortable, “full to bursting” with the servants, lackeys and grooms of her enormous household. Yet the only entertainment to be found there was eating and drinking—“the only pastime they understand,” the Spanish claimed. Eighteen kitchens were kept operating at full blast, one of the Spaniards wrote, “and they seem veritable hells, such is the stir and bustle in them.” Dozens of cooks toiled over the carcasses of eighty to a hundred sheep every day, not to mention a dozen cows, eighteen calves, boar and deer when available, and great numbers of chickens and rabbits. As for the drinking habits of Mary’s courtiers, they consumed enough beer to fill the Valladolid river, and the younger ones, inclined to be amorous on summer nights, “put sugar in their wine, with the result that there are great goings on in the palace.”14Whether it was the copious English food or the climate—or both—by late summer most of the Spaniards had had to take to their beds with bad colds or worse illnesses. Philip caught cold right away, and some members of his Spanish household were sick enough to cause concern for their lives before the summer was over.

  On top of this, the English underworld soon discovered that the Spaniards made easy marks. There were thieves in Spain, of course, but one never saw them; they worked at night, or when the victim’s back was turned or his house empty. English highwaymen were an unexpected danger to the foreigners, who lost large sums to them in their first months in England. In the first week after Philip’s arrival there were several major robberies, in one of which four chests of the prince’s own household furnishings were taken. Bands of twenty or more highwaymen watched the roads for the red and gold liveries of Spanish servants, knowing they carried coins and valuables. “They rob us in town and on the road,” an anonymous Spanish gentleman explained to his correspondent in Spain. “No one ventures to stray two miles but they rob him; and a company of Englishmen have recently robbed and beaten over fifty Spaniards.” If the visitors complained of this treatment, no one listened. As far as the English were concerned, the hated Spaniards were only a temporary curse, to be endured with hostile indifference until Philip had served his purpose as the father of Mary’s children. “When she has children of him, they say, he may go home to Spain,” the Spanish gentleman reported, and he only regretted that Mary did not seem likely to be fruitful.

  To be sure, the Spaniards found much to appreciate in the country itself. England, they believed, was the land where King Arthur had lived and died, the place whose enchanted landscape had formed the backdrop to many a tale of chivalry. “The man who wrote Amadis and other books of chivalry, with all the flowery meads, pleasure-houses and enchantments, must first have visited England,” one of Philip’s gentlemen commented, and he wrote glowingly of the forests, meadows, castles and fresh springs of the countryside. But even these delights could not compensate for the rudeness of the populace, and before long the homesick Spaniards were saying “they would rather be in the worst stubble field in the kingdom of Toledo than in the groves of Amadis,” and one by one they begged Philip to let them leave. The proud duke of Medina-Celi left first, and soon some eighty lesser lords had taken ship, some to join the war in Flanders, others to go home to Spain. It was even suggested that Philip might want to follow them, provided he could be certain he would be allowed into the country again once he returned.15

  But Philip was determined to stay in England for the time being, and a small group of Spanish noblemen and personal servants stayed with him. As the king settled into his routine as Mary’s husband these servants made themselves as comfortable as they could, paying ever-rising rates for their lodging and food and attempting to insulate themselves from the mounting abuse around them. By September Renard was informing the emperor that all the Spaniards would have to be moved either to the palace where the king was staying or else far away in the country, “to protect them from the rapacity of the people.” The foreigners did their best to “move among the English as if they were animals, trying not to notice them,” but it seemed to be impossible to avoid violence.

  By the last week of September there was fighting in the halls of the palace nearly every day, and three Englishmen and a Spaniard were hanged following a murderous brawl. In the midst of the wrangling came the first whispered hints that the queen was pregnant.

  XXXIX

  Nowe singe, noive springe, owe care is exil’d

  Owe virtuous Quene is quickned with child.

  When Mary’s physicians told her in September that in all probability she was pregnant the news wa
s deeply satisfying. Once again God had intervened at a decisive moment, this time lifting her above the limitations of age and health that many said would prevent her from having children. The event was congruent with the fortuitous course of her life, which had been preserved amid danger and prospered in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds. That she had outlived her father was an amazing improbability; that she had come to the throne a near miracle. Her triumph over Dudley, her resolute defiance of Wyatt, her determined accomplishment of the Spanish marriage were feats none of the men around her had believed possible. To Mary these improbable triumphs were ever increasing proof that she was being guided toward the divinely ordained destiny of restoring the true faith in England. The culmination of that destiny would be the birth of a Catholic heir to ensure that Mary’s religious changes would not die with her.

  The immediate effect of the good news was to calm the escalating hostilities between the Spaniards and the English. The rapprochement came none too soon, for the enmity of the English had reached such a pitch that several mass assassinations had been plotted. According to Noailles, one of these plots called for the conspirators to surround Hampton Court in the middle of the night, storm the palace, and slaughter all the Spaniards inside—and the queen and her councilors with them, Noailles felt sure. There were more than enough assaults on a smaller scale to make this rumored conspiracy plausible. The English had begun to carry arquebuses everywhere they went, and at the slightest alarm they rushed through the streets, weapons in hand, falling upon the firstSpaniards they met. Renard reported seeing one of the lower court functionaries attack and beat two Spaniards as they walked in the street at three o’clock in the afternoon. He was no match for them, and soon ran off, but before he did he pulled a gun from under his cloak, pointed it at one of the foreigners, and then, “to show what a brave man he was,” fired it into the air.1 The Spaniards did not take such insults lightly. Three days after this incident occurred the injured parties found their assailant and killed him not far from the palace.