Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  Every imaginable biblical parallel was employed to persuade God to perform the miracle of a safe delivery. If the barren Elizabeth—to whom Mary compared herself—and the ninety-year-old Sarah could bring forth sons, then so could the thirty-nine-year-old queen; the God who “didst safely deliver the prophet Jonas out of the whale’s belly” could surely bring Mary’s child safely into the world. A prayer written by the dean of Westminster for the children of the queen’s grammar school was more a reminder of the curse of childbearing than of the blessing of a royal heir. “O most Righteous Lord God,” the children prayed morning and evening, “which, for the offence of the first woman, has threatened unto all women, a common, sharp, and inevitable malediction, and hath enjoined them that they should conceive in sin, and, being conceived, should besubject to many and grievous torments, and finally, be delivered with the danger and jeopardy of their lives, we beseech thee ... to assuage thine anger for a while.”2 The Protestants, who took no pleasure in the prospective birth of a Catholic heir, prayed more concisely. “God turn the heart of Queen Mary from idolatry, or else shorten her days.”3

  The object of these earnest entreaties was reported to be in radiantly good health. “The queen is in excellent health and three months with child,” one of the Spaniards wrote in mid-November. “She is fatter and has a better color than when she was married, a sign that she is happier, and indeed she is said to be very happy.”4 Her stomach was already visibly distended, and none of her dresses fit her. When she appeared at the opening of Parliament “her belly was laid out, that all men might see that she was with child.”5 At court the mood of reconciliation and rejoicing continued. On the day the queen’s quickening was celebrated there was a masque of “six Hercules or men of war coming from the sea,” who danced with mariners bearing torches. The six Hercules wore helmets made like griffons’ heads decorated with figures of a three-headed Cerberus. Lions’ faces adorned the breasts and backs of their costumes, which were lavishly gilded and silvered.6

  The masque was presented at the queen’s expense, but Philip, not to be outdone, arranged a round of Spanish cane play, designed as a major court spectacle. The tournament was planned on the scale of Henry VIII’s athletic displays, with more than sixty knights on the field, each of them splendidly turned out in matched liveries of green and blue and yellow silk trimmed in silver and gold. Philip had given Mary’s ladies and gentlewomen dozens of yards of crimson and purple velvet and cloth of gold and silver for new dresses, and Mary sat among them in her brocades and jewels, smiling and holding the prizes she would award to the winners. Philip, who rode with Don Diego de Cordova’s band in purple and silver, performed creditably, though rain and the open ridicule of the English spoiled the triumph of the winning band.7 Many months later a shady figure named Lewkner, a purveyor of cards and dice to the court, told the queen’s examiners that only chance had saved Philip and his companions from assault during the cane play. According to Lewkner, some three hundred English guardsmen and others were sworn to kill Mary and all the Spaniards on a prearranged signal during the third round of cane play. Because of the rain the third round was called off, and the plan was thwarted.8

  Philip, Pole informed the pope, now treated Mary with all the deference of a son, but his habitual affability had begun to wear thin.9 He had gone out of his way to please everyone, including the queen; he had disproved all the rumors of Spanish domination; he had fulfilled his primary obligation of begetting an heir. Why then hadn’t he been crowned king? In the feudal law of England a man who married an heiress wasconfirmed in his possession of his wife’s lands when their first child was born. Mary was pregnant. He saw no reason to delay the coronation any longer.

  Certainly the people were on his side. When he and Mary rode to the opening of Parliament, he on horseback and she in an open litter “to expose her to the public view,” all the voices from the crowd were full of approbation. “Oh! how handsome the king is!” “Oh! how kind and gentle he looks!” “Oh! what a good husband he is! How honorably and lovingly he treats the queen!” The Savoyard ambassador heard these exclamations and recorded them, along with the revealing monologue of an old woman who watched the king and queen walk from the church where they heard mass to the Parliament house. “An evil death to the traitors who said our king was misshapen!” she cried out. “Look at him! He is as fair as an angel! And I hear that he is good, holy and pious. God save him and bless us!”10

  Crowned or not, all who favored the imperial position saw Philip moving into unchallenged pre-eminence in the government. When Paget was in Brussels in November he outlined to the emperor his view of Philip’s role. The Council was so out of hand that the country was “now governed by such a crowd that it was much more like a republic” than a monarchy; Philip should choose a half dozen of the best men in the Council—by which Paget meant himself and his allies, with Gardiner excluded—and let them rule while he “took his sword in hand, grew hardened to the heat and cold of campaigning,” and got on with the work of “striking terror into his foes.” Paget’s scenario would remove the hindrance of Mary’s authority while placing the Council under limited obligation to a king absent on campaign. The emperor agreed with Paget up to a point, admitting that it had been “the object of the marriage” that Philip take over the government, but he saw clearly that Mary should retain the appearance of power. Philip’s goal, his father said, “should be so to act that while he in reality does everything, the initiative should always seem to proceed from the queen and her Council.”11

  No one was more pleased than Charles V at the news of the queen’s pregnancy. His son was at the head of affairs in England, the papal legate was about to reunite the country with the church, and on top of this the queen would soon give birth to a Catholic heir. When the English ambassador Mason had an audience with the emperor in November he found him in remarkably good health. He was sitting at a table, looking cheerful and “as lively as I have not of long time seen the like lustiness in him,” Mason wrote. His face, usually pale and puffy, was ruddy and firmer in its contours, and his limbs seemed less sluggish despite a recent bad attack of gout. He sat forward eagerly, and asked the ambassador for the latest information from the English court.

  “How goeth my daughter’s belly forward?”

  “Sir,” Mason answered, “I have from herself nothing to say therein, for she will not confess the matter till it be proved unto her face; but by others I understand, to my great joy and comfort, that her garments wax very strait.”

  “I never doubted of the matter,” the emperor went on, “but that God for her had wrought so many miracles, would make the same perfect by assisting of nature to his good and most desired work.” And since God was arranging all, he would doubtless arrange the child’s sex to greatest advantage. “I warrant it shall be a man child,” Charles observed.

  “Be it man or be it woman,” the ambassador said judiciously, “welcome shall it be, for by that shall we at the least come to some certainty to whom God shall appoint, by succession, the government of our estate.” As long as she remained childless there was grave anxiety in the kingdom, Mason added. “It maketh all good men to tremble to think the queen’s highness must die, with whom, dying without fruit, the realm were as good also to die.”

  But the emperor was so sanguine at that moment he saw no reason for alarm on this or any other grounds. “Doubt not God will provide both with fruit and otherwise,” he told Mason, “so as I trust to see, yet, that realm to return to a great piece of that surety and estimation that I have in my time seen it in.”12 His optimism showed no signs of waning when, a week later, he met with Paget. The good reports out of England were “so pleasant unto him,” Paget wrote to the Council, “as, if he had been half dead, yet they should have been enough to have revived him

  again.”13

  In December and January the first joyous reaction to Mary’s expectant state gave way to greater concern for the security of her throne and government as the time for
the birth approached. Philip was looking forward to taking part in the war against the French as soon as the winter weather ended, and he did not mean to wait until Mary’s child was born before he left. His letters to his father were full of military plans. “I must confess that for some years past I have been desirous of leading a campaign,” he told him, “and I would like it to be as soon as possible. It will be my first campaign, my first opportunity of acquiring or losing prestige; all eyes will be fixed on me.”14 Mary was alarmed, and by mid-January her fears had helped to make her ill. Almost certainly she expected a difficult childbirth, and wanted her husband to be at hand when her time came. By early February she was “very melancholy,” overwhelmed by fear of rebellion in support of Elizabeth or Courtenay, and by the unceasing opposition of the Protestants. Though it was seldom expressed, the possibility that the queen might not survive her pregnancy was never far from the minds of her councilors, and as her spirits sank their disquiet increased.

  The most immediate cause of their concern were the Protestants. They were a minority in the population—very likely a small minority—but they were fiercely committed to their various creeds. The recent official reunion of England with Rome appeared to make them more determined in their opposition, and their religious differences with the crown were inevitably bound up with political opposition in a way that made them by far the most dangerous group in the country. They were never a coherent body. They held widely varied doctrines and, once they left England to form colonies on the continent, they fought bitterly among themselves. But to Mary and her councilors they represented a single, organized threat to the royal and clerical powers, a conspicuous witness to the perilous security of the queen’s government. They mocked the throne. They had to be silenced.

  The opposition took many forms. Small congregations of like-minded believers met together in cellars, in ruined churches, in cemeteries, led in worship by a minister or spiritual guide. Individuals proclaimed themselves to be religious leaders and attracted followers or, like Anne Bokkas, who called herself “the Light of the Faith,” were seized and committed to prison.15 Still others seemed to confound worship with violent attacks on their Catholic neighbors, the clergy, and the queen herself. In a village near London a man spoke out in favor of the mass as he walked in the street; the servant of a Protestant gentleman overheard his remark, stopped him, and stabbed him twice with his dagger.16 In Essex an empty church was burned so that no mass could be celebrated there, and in Suffolk, arsonists set fire to another church “with the entire congregation that was hearing mass inside.”17

  Since the start of Mary’s reign every stage in the return to the old faith had met with ridicule and sabotage. In the spring of 1554 Easter was observed in many London parishes with the full restoration of the time-honored traditions—creeping to the cross on Good Friday, carrying the palms on Palm Sunday—and the royal arms and scriptural verses painted on the rood-lofts were washed out or covered over. The sacrament was hung or set on the altar, and at St. Paul’s, in accordance with old custom, it was laid in a sepulchre at evensong on Good Friday where it was to remain until Easter morning. At high mass on Sunday it was to be taken out of the tomb with the choir bursting into song with the words of the angel at Jesus’ tomb, “He is risen, he is not here.” Sometime between Friday evensong and Sunday mass the host was stolen, and when the climactic moment came the joyous words of the choir’s anthem were disconcertingly true. The host was not there, which led to great embarrassment and some laughter until the priest supplied another in its stead. As soon as the story came out a ballad was printed telling how the God of the papists had been stolen and lost, and a new one put in his place.18 Rewards offered for the identities of the thief and ballad-maker produced no response, but the example was widely imitated. In May a joiner named John Street tried to take the sacrament out of a priest’s hands in Smithfield. Onlookers came to the priest’s defense, and Street was taken to Newgate. There, the chronicler added, “he feigned himself mad.”19

  The coming of Philip provoked fresh rumors of persecution, and a new wave of Protestant response. The pope was coming back, it was said, the monasteries would all be rebuilt and church property given back to the clergy. All those wronged by the changes of Henry VIII and Edward were to be reinstated; the priests, the rumors insisted, “were going to take their revenge.” In anticipation of these horrors assaults on Catholics and the Catholic clergy increased. In Kent a priest had his nose cut off and was made to endure humiliating punishments.20 At Paul’s Cross an assailant fired a handgun at the preacher, Dr. Pendleton, and the tin pellet hit the wall of the church just behind the Lord Mayor and then fell onto the shoulder of a man in the congregation. All the neighboring houses were searched at once, but no suspect was found until six days later, and even then there was not proof enough to convict him.21 And at a house in Aldersgate Street a servant of Sir Anthony Neville persuaded a young girl, Elizabeth Crofts, to speak and make whistling noises behind a wall, and to answer questions put to her by a clerk, an actor and a weaver who were also in the deception. The men drew a huge crowd by saying that the “voice in the wall” was an angelic spirit which could reveal the truth behind appearances and discern religious falsehoods. Prompted by the others the girl gave answers calculated to “raise a mutiny amongst the people.” Asked “What is the mass?” she replied “Idolatry.” Asked about confession, about the queen’s marriage and the coming of the Spaniards she condemned all Catholic practices and implied divine disapproval of Mary and Philip. When the clerk cried out “God save Queen Mary!” the wall was silent, but when he cried “God save the Lady Elizabeth!” it replied “So be it.” Thousands gathered to witness this imposture, and it was not until three months later that Elizabeth Crofts was made to stand on a scaffold near the preacher at Paul’s Cross and confess that the “voice in the wall” was only a trick.22

  Beyond the Protestants whose disruptions exasperated Mary and her Council in England there were others gathering in congregations on the continent, out of reach of royal punishment and free to conduct a large-scale propaganda assault against the Catholic government. In the first months of Mary’s reign the Council and the chancellor had encouraged the most outspoken Protestant leaders to leave the country. Some were given warnings, then left free to make their escapes; many were given official passports. Among those who left were Bishops Ponet and Bale, the future martyrologist John Foxe, already engaged in writing a history ofthe victims of religious persecution in England, and the fiery Scots preacher John Knox.

  Besides these luminaries hundreds of lesser men and women left England to join the congregations in exile in Switzerland and Germany—a growing exodus of farmers, blacksmiths, chandlers, masons, laborers of every kind. They found haven principally at Geneva, Frankfort and Strasbourg, and from these cities scurrilous attacks on the queen, her advisers and her Spanish husband were sent into Kent and Suffolk and were carried by agents of the exiles into London and to the royal court. The French and German printers who set the libels in type rarely knew the meaning of what they were printing, and occasionally the trail from author to printer to transport ship to reader was many hundreds of miles long. In April of 1554 the magistrates of Danzig wrote to Mary about a sheet of invective put out in their city by a printer and his son “who confessed that the work was printed by them in ignorance of the language or the purport of the libel, they only knowing the form and character of the letters required in type.” The printer had been approached by an Englishman in Danzig, who had in turn been asked to have the sheet printed by an English mariner. A third Englishman provided the actual text. The mariner was to have taken the printed sheets by sea to England, where a contact would be waiting to carry them to the capital. Then they “were to be thrown in the streets and highways that people might read them.”23

  Among the exiles Ponet and Bale wrote stinging indictments of every innovation of the Marian church, focusing their sarcasm in particular on “wily Winchester” and “blow bull
” Bonner, bishop of London. But the most vicious attacks came from Knox, who in the months preceding Philip’s arrival in England wrote in his Faithful Admonition to the Professors of God’s Truth in England that Mary was herself “an open traitress to the Imperial Crown of England, contrary to the just laws of the realm, to bring in a stranger and make a proud Spaniard king—to the destruction of the nobility ... to the abasing of the yeomanry, to the enslaving of the commonalty.” Her associates in treason, in particular Gardiner, “brother to Cain and fellow to Judas the traitor,” ought to be assassinated in the name of justice and the true faith, Knox wrote, and his invitation to tyrannicide was published on the day Philip landed at Southampton.

  The shrill criticism from abroad, the rising incidence of disturbances and assaults in the southeast counties and in the close vicinity of the court combined with Mary’s approaching delivery to force a change in the official attitude toward the Protestant heretics. The recent revival of the medieval treason statutes provided the legal mechanism by which men and women could be executed by the state for theological crimes, andthere were learned, decisive judges at hand to condemn them. There were prisoners in the Tower, at the Fleet and elsewhere demonstrably guilty of transgressing the queen’s religious laws, and critics of the government were quick to point out that to allow these notorious offenders to go unpunished encouraged all Protestants in their eagerness to undermine the established authority.