Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  But the quality of Mary’s subordination was broader than this. Following a commonplace of sixteenth-century teachings on marriage every wife was told to see in her husband an earthly representative of Christ. Vives, the Spanish humanist who wrote Mary’s childhood schoolbooks, wrote in his treatise On the Duty of Husbands that “If the husband be the woman’s head, the mind, the father, the Christ, he ought to execute the office to such a man belonging, and to teach the woman: for Christ is not only a saviour and a restorer of his church, but also a master.” Mary was as far below Philip, then, as all sinners were below Christ. Mary had somehow to resolve the bewildering paradox that, as queen, she herself carried out healing and sanctifying functions that gave her a cast of divinity, yet at the same time she had to look to her husband as a Christlike figure, remote and awesome, appointed to teach and guide her.

  Cardinal Pole put this special form of wifely piety into words. In the prayers he wrote for Mary to repeat Philip is referred to as “a man who, more than all other, in his own acts and guidance of mine reproduces Thy image, Thy image whom Thou didst send into the world in holiness and justice.”7 The identification of Philip and Christ had a powerful effect on the emotions of a woman of strong faith. Christ and his church were at the center of Mary’s life; Philip was now bonded to that core of her identity and purpose.

  Yet it was becoming harder and harder for Mary to see as Christlike a man who had to all appearances deserted her. By the time Philip had been gone seven months or so she felt abandoned, and wrote to her father-in-law “imploring him most humbly” to permit him to return. “I beg your Majesty to forgive my boldness,” she wrote, “and to remember the unspeakable sadness I experience because of the absence of the king.” She knew he was occupied with important matters, but she feared that unless he simply tore himself away he would never find an opportunity to return, for “the end of one negotiation is the beginning of another.”8

  Mary appealed to the emperor as a bereft woman, but to Philip she was showing herself more and more as an injured queen. In mid-March she sent Mason to Philip in Brussels with orders “to pray the king her consort to be pleased to say frankly in how many days he purposed returning.” Mason was to tell the king that his wife was tired of the expense and inconvenience of keeping a fleet ready to escort him back to England. The ships would leave their moorings at the Thames docks, drop down to the sea, and anchor just off the coast waiting for instructions to sail to Flanders. Then, when their water became foul and their food supplies ran low, they would return upriver to take on fresh provisions and wait for the queen’s order to sail out to sea again. The cycle had been repeated again and again throughout the fall and winter, and as spring approached Mary wanted to know precisely when to send her fleet in order to prevent further futile missions.

  Mason did his best. He urged Philip “to comfort the queen, as also the peers of the realm, by his presence,” and reminded him “that there was no reason yet to despair of his having heirs” by Mary. But all Philip would say was that he intended to come as soon as he could, though his Flemish affairs were demanding more and more of his time. Philip’s advisers were more categorical. The king would have to tour all the Netherlands provinces in the coming months, they said, and they reminded Mason of the bad treatment and enormous cost Philip had endured during his earlier sojourn in England. His wife had shown him “little conjugal affection” while he was there, and the English had treated the Spaniards with shameless contempt and violence. For all these reasons Philip would be ill advised to return to England soon, Ruy Gomez told Mason, but there was another cause for delay. Philip’s astrologer had predicted that a conspiracy would take shape against the king in England sometime in 1556, and he would be foolish to return while this threat persisted.9

  When she found that Mason had failed in his mission Mary was “beyond measure exasperated.” Philip was treating her with disrespect bordering on contempt, and the sovereign in her was angered. She determined to use her most effective envoy, Paget, to try to learn the truth about her husband’s intentions. Paget, whose rehabilitation to royal favor had been crowned by his appointment in January as Lord Privy Seal, was the ideal mediator between Mary and Philip. Because of his new standing at court he was eager to please the queen, and he had always been the foremost advocate of imperial interests on the Council. He was “dear to the king,” and “very subtle” besides; he could be counted on to discover the true reason behind Philip’s long absence.10 Paget came no closer than Mason to discovering the hidden motive behind Philip’s behavior, but he did at least bring back from the imperial court a definite date for theking’s return. If he did not return to Mary by June 30, Philip had said, then “she was not to consider him a trustworthy king” any longer.11

  What Paget did not tell Mary was that, now as always, Philip was acting not out of private inclination but political expediency. Mary, and England, were two counters on Philip’s vast diplomatic gameboard. He knew perfectly well that, as the regent of Milan told the Venetian ambassador during Paget’s visit, it was not to his advantage “that the queen’s angry remonstrances should be converted into hatred.”12 But he also knew that in the long run Mary’s affection might have to be sacrificed for the sake of attaining some more important advantage in the Netherlands. Philip was in any case in close touch with the English Council throughout his absence. Minutes of the Council meetings were forwarded to him regularly, and he returned them with marginal comments in his own hand. Sometimes his comments were no more than a brief sentence of approval—“this seems to be well done”—but sometimes they were more lengthy than the minutes themselves, and there is no doubt Philip kept himself well informed about English affairs and believed he retained a measure of control over them. He asked, for example, that “nothing should be proposed in Parliament without its having been first communicated to his majesty,” and continued to expect that eventually he would receive word that his coronation had been approved.13

  But even this issue had lost some of its importance in the light of recent events. When Philip married Mary in 1554 England was in the forefront of European affairs; now in 1556 it had become a diplomatic backwater. The Hapsburgs and the French were still battling for supremacy on the continent, but England had ceased to be the focus of their rivalry. A new force had arisen to challenge the power of the Hapsburgs: the fiery Neapolitan Pope Paul IV.

  Cardinal Caraffa had become Pope Paul IV in May of 1555, and was devoting his pontificate to the twin goals of annihilating heretics and fighting Philip II with every weapon at his command. He was eighty years old, but he had the vigor of a man of forty. “He is all nerve,” one diplomat wrote of the pope, “and when he walks, it is with a free, elastic step, as if he hardly touched the ground.” Caraffa came from hardy stock. His mother, Vittoria Camponesca, was a bold and dashing horsewoman who liked to ride at a breakneck pace over the mountain passes of southern Italy. Hagiographers recorded that, shortly before her son was born, Vittoria raced past a hermit who called out to her to stop, then urged her to travel at a gentler pace, as the child in her womb was destined to become pope.14 His hot temper, his eccentricity, and his unpredictability made Paul IV a fearsome figure. He was sometimes eloquent and businesslike, sometimes foulmouthed and tyrannical. He shouted at his chamberlains not to dare to disturb him with church business after sunset, “even were it to announce the resurrection of his own father,” and drove out cardinals who troubled him at the wrong time with a torrent of abuse and a raised fist.15 He called himself a “great prince,” and kept a princely table, washing down course after course of delicacies with black Neapolitan wine.16

  As he dined he talked loudly to the cardinals who gathered each evening to watch him, and his conversation was invariably dominated by his hatred of Hapsburg power. The pope had been a young man when the armies of Ferdinand of Aragon swept through Naples, replacing French rule with that of the overbearing Spaniards. In middle age he had watched the forces of Charles V take Milan, and then
sack Rome. Italy had become forfeit to the greedy foreigners from the north; it was time to expel these barbarians, and the pope was the natural leader of any such campaign. Furthermore, Paul IV had a deep personal grudge against Philip II. The king had had the audacity to attempt to prevent Caraffa’s election as pope. His maneuverings had been secret, but after the election was over the truth came out, leaving the newly elected pope violently angry. His anger was only increased by rumors that his election had not been canonical, and he knew that Philip had asked his Spanish lawyers to look into the possibility of deposing him on these grounds. Soon after he assumed the tiara Paul IV began intriguing against Philip, hoping to assemble a coalition strong enough to drive the Spaniards out of Naples. He negotiated a short-lived treaty with the French, and in the summer of 1556 was attempting to revive the French alliance again. In Brussels Philip nervously watched the machinations of the feisty, energetic old man with alarm, and told Mary’s envoys he could not leave Flanders as long as the pope’s menace continued.

  It had not rained in England since early in February. The fields that had been flooded in the previous summer now lay parched under the hot sun. Seeds sown in the spring lay dormant or died for lack of water, and as the summer wore on there were fears of famine and, worse still, of the sweating sickness. Drought had brought the sweat in the past, and might well bring it again. In July Mary ordered daily processions to begin, to intercede with a wrathful God, but though the clergy dutifully processed and anxious Londoners fell in behind them the skies remained cloudless and the heat seemed to grow more intense every day. To escape the oppressive weather Mary joined Pole at Canterbury, comforted, as usual, by his presence and his advice, and “intent on enduring her troubles as patiently as she can.”17

  Her frustration with Philip now showed itself in bursts of anger. A portrait of Philip that hung in the Council chamber, as if representing the king’s authority in his absence, had begun to irritate Mary. She ordered it removed; her enemies said she kicked it out of the room in plain sight ofher councilors.18 She was heard to remark pointedly that “God sent oft times to good women evil husbands,” and though she was speaking of Lady Bray her meaning was clear enough. Yet when Philip fell sick late in June she showed great concern for him, sending messengers to bring news of his condition every few days and insisting that his seventy-year-old physician, still in England, dispatch himself to Flanders at once despite his gout and infirmity.19

  Neither Mary’s anger nor her concern had any effect on Philip or his father. Her pleasure in Philip’s company and her hope for a Catholic heir were, it seemed, to be denied her in future. Yet the diplomatic entanglements resulting from the marriage remained as firm as ever. War between Philip and the French had been temporarily forestalled by the truce signed in February, but either side could disavow that agreement given adequate provocation. And should war break out, England would almost certainly be drawn in on the Hapsburg side. All these things were on Mary’s mind as she sat down to write to her cousin Charles V in July. She sent her regards to the king and queen of Bohemia (who sent her in return a jeweled fan with a crystal mirror on one side and a watch on the other, “richly wrought, highly artistic and of beautiful design”), and then stated frankly her disillusionment with the promises made to her about Philip’s return. “It would be pleasanter for me to be able to thank your majesty for sending me back the king, my lord and good husband,” she wrote, “than to dispatch an emissary to Flanders. . . . However, as your majesty has been pleased to break your promise in this connection, a promise you made to me regarding the return of the king, my husband, I must perforce be satisfied, although to my unspeakable regret.”20 It was as forthright a letter as Mary had ever written to her lifelong protector Charles, yet her hand trembled as she wrote it, and she knew very well it would do no good.

  To those around her it was apparent that Mary’s health was breaking under the strain. “For many months the queen has passed from one sorrow to another,” Michiel noted, adding that “her face has lost flesh greatly since I was last with her.”21 By August she was finding it hard to sleep at night, and appearing at court with a drawn face and dark circles under her eyes. Combined with “the great heat, the like of which no one remembers,” her inner anguish made her ill. She spent the latter part of August in seclusion and, significantly, “was seen no more at Council.”22

  At Yaxley in Huntingdonshire it was being said that the queen was dead. A Protestant schoolmaster and a dozen of his fellow villagers, including the parish priest, imagined that they could stir the surrounding communities to rebellion by a bold imposture. In the parish church the priest announced that Mary had died and that “the Lady Elizabeth is queen, and her beloved bed-fellow, Lord Edmund Courtenay, king.” Aconspirator who claimed to be Courtenay was caught and eventually executed, and twelve others were committed to the Tower.23 But a troublemaker closely associated with the Yaxley plotters become something of a Protestant hero over the next few months.

  This unnamed figure, thought to be “a captain from the other side of the Channel, an arch-heretic well acquainted with Germany,” lived in the northern forests where the queen’s officials were few and her laws ignored. He hid himself for a time, then appeared “with great audacity” in a town, seeking out the Protestants and “preaching to them and encouraging them to remain firm and constant, as they shall soon hear and see great and powerful personages, who will come to replace them in their religion and free them from slavery.” Sometimes he was disguised as a peasant, sometimes as a wayfarer, sometimes as a merchant. After he had eluded the local officials for months a massive effort was made to catch him. Spies were sent into the forests, and the keepers and others tramped through the woods with bloodhounds “as is done to wild beasts and beasts of chase.” But the mysterious woodsman remained out of sight, and finally disappeared altogether, perhaps returning to one of the emigrant colonies abroad.24 His agitation troubled the queen and her councilors in the last weeks of summer, as the sun beat down on the withered crops and on the fires lit daily under the feet of the Protestant heretics.

  XLVI

  Of sectes and of schysmes a riddaunce to make,

  Of horrible errours and heresies all;

  She carckes and cares and great travell dooth take,

  That vertue may flourish and vice have a fall.

  When Mary sent Paget to Brussels in April of 1556 it was only partly to discover the true cause of Philip’s delay in Flanders. Paget also had instructions to talk to the Emperor Charles about the vexed problem of the burning of heretics.

  It had been fourteen months since the first burnings began, and in that time hundreds of suspected heretics had been examined and imprisoned, and many of these had been condemned to the stake. The executions had become commonplace, but not mundane; those who watched the Protestant men, women and children die the slow death by fire found it difficult to forget what they had seen. The spectacle of a man dying in the flames, singing a psalm “until that his lips were burnt away,” was a haunting image, as was the sight of a sixty-year-old widow bound to the stake, or a young blind woman, a ropemaker’s daughter, sentenced to burn by a bishop she could not see.

  The executioners made these grim proceedings even more memorable by their ineptness. All too often the wood for the fire was green, or the rushes were too soggy to burn quickly. The bags of gunpowder tied to the victims to shorten their agony failed to ignite, or else maimed them without killing them. No one thought to gag the sufferers, and their screams and prayers were audible often until the very moment of death. It mattered little that most of them were originally singled out for punishment by their neighbors, the jurymen of their localities, who gave their names to the justices or commissioners who passed them on to the bishops. Or that many of the victims were Anabaptists whom not only Catholics but most Protestants saw as arch-heretics to be destroyed out of’hand, and whom the Protestant King Edward, had he lived, would almost certainly have burned. Or that they were brought to th
e stake in an age habituated to violence and frequent executions, when men and women were hanged for most petty crimes and all two hundred of the felonies recognized under English law.

  What mattered was that day after day new victims, most of them ordinary villagers, were dying amid a climate of legend and martyrdom. Stories of their heroism and joyous deaths had now become as commonplace as the burnings themselves. It was told again and again how John Rogers went to his death promising to pray for his executioner and how, “as one feeling no smart,” he “washed his hands in the flame, as though it had been in cold water” until the fire had consumed him. The story of Laurence Saunders was equally well known. Saunders, it was said, went “with a merry courage” toward the fire, barefoot and dressed in an old gown and shirt, and when he came to the stake he took it in his arms and kissed it, saying “Welcome the cross of Christ! welcome everlasting life!” As his body burned he seemed to “sleep sweetly” in the fire.1

  The burning of Cranmer had done much to foster this atmosphere of dauntless piety. Already condemned by the doctors of the university, he was excommunicated by the pope in November of 1555 and deprived of his archbishopric the following month. In February he was delivered to the queen’s officers as a degraded cleric sentenced to be burned for heresy, yet his execution was postponed for nearly a month. In that time the former archbishop wrote three humble recantations of his Protestant views, disavowing all that he had written and taught about the sacraments and the pope’s authority during a clerical career spanning three decades. He blamed himself for much of the harm done to the faith in England, and submitted himself utterly to the queen’s mercy as a contrite sinner. Mary doubted the sincerity of his penitential writings, believing “that he had feigned recantation thinking thus to save his life, and not that he had received any good inspiration.” He was not worthy of pardon, she said, and ordered the execution to proceed.