She had been so afraid after their near-row on the night that he had failed to come to her and she had gone to him, that he might never come to her again. She could not make a habit of going to him unbidden; that would be most unseemly and would surely give rise to some very unpleasant gossip. But he had come to her just as usual the following night, and every night since, quietly performing his duty, which she now knew was all it was to him.
So she awoke alone every morning, and was on her own until her bedchamber ladies came to assist her in rising and preparing for the day. On this third morning she lay on her side, curled up around the now noisome porcelain bowl, just in case she needed it again.
These attacks of nausea always left her feeling weak and drained; she had almost dropped back off to sleep when she heard the sound of voices outside and then the door to her bedchamber being opened.
“Oh!” exclaimed Susan Clarencius. “Not again! My poor lamb!” Susan strode up to the bed and peered over at Mary, whose back was to her. She reached out a hand and smoothed Mary’s damp hair from her brow; these attacks of nausea were usually followed by a cold sweat. “You are shivering! Your Grace, allow me to cover you.” Mary wore the gauzy white gown in which she still liked to greet her husband every evening; it made for very little warmth, but she had been too weak after her ordeal to pull up the covers.
“Brown!” called Susan to Mary Brown, one of the bedchamber ladies. “Fetch a hot posset at once.” Brown bobbed a curtsey and departed in a swirl of silken skirts.
“Finch!” she called to Mary Finch. “Bring another bowl immediately. Here, Your Grace, allow me to take this one from you; it smells worse than the Thames, I trow! Please, Your Grace…” Mary had a death grip on the bowl, afraid to relinquish it; but she did so as soon as Finch nudged a fresh bowl into its place. Holding the soiled bowl as far away from herself as possible, Finch departed the room.
“Russell! Her Grace is still shivering. Find another blanket and get that fire going!” cried Susan. Mistress Russell dashed off to do as she was bid.
Susan sat on the edge of the bed, tucked the blanket in around her firmly and then stroked Mary’s brow. “There now, my lamb, my pet, is that better? Dormer!”
“Yes, madam?” replied Jane. All of Mary’s servants loved her and they were most distressed to see her so ill; Jane looked worriedly at Mary. All of them wanted to be told what to do, given some task; anything to avoid standing there helplessly as Mary trembled.
At that moment Susan spied Frideswide, Lady Strelly, standing on the other side of the bed, gazing at Mary and nibbling a cuticle. Forgetting the order she had been about to give to Jane, she said, “This is very strange, Lady Strelly. What is your assessment?”
Mary heard the voices floating about her; she longed to speak but did not yet have the strength to do so.
Before Lady Strelly could respond, Susan said, “Oh, Dormer, I have remembered me! Go and fetch Beatrice Ap Rhys, if you please. Now, girl, before the sunset is upon us!” Jane curtseyed, and despite her concern for the queen, she stifled a laugh; the sun was just coming up over the horizon.
Lady Strelly gripped an elbow in each hand and began to pace back and forth beside the massive bed. After the third turn she stopped and asked, “Upon what did Her Grace sup last evening?”
Susan, whose turn it had been to serve the queen and to cut her meat, replied, “Venison.”
“Ah,” said Lady Strelly. “As did I. It was as green as the scum on a moat and should not have been served. I shall speak to the kitchens.”
“But this is the third morning in a row on which Her Grace has been taken ill. It cannot be bad food three nights running.”
Frideswide stopped her pacing. “I do not see why not. The night before it was eels and the night before that, oysters. All could certainly be suspect.”
“I do not think that is what ails Her Grace,” said Susan with a knowing glance.
Mary was still too weak to respond but her mind was active. Poison! she thought. It made sense. She had many enemies.
“Ah!” cried Susan. “Here is Beatrice.”
Beatrice ap Rhys had been Mary’s laundress since the first clout was tied onto her as a baby. Seeing Mary in the bed clutching the porcelain bowl, her eyes grew wide, but she said nothing and bobbed a curtsey to Susan and Frideswide.
“Mistress ap Rhys,” said Susan authoritatively. “What has been the state of the queen’s linen, if you please?” Even amongst the queen’s most intimate companions, one still did not speak directly of some things.
“If you please, my lady,” replied Beatrice, with another curtsey. “For when dost thou wish to know?”
Susan cast her mind back. “July,” she answered.
“Before or after the waxing of the moon, my lady?” asked Beatrice with another bob.
“Oh, bother all that Welsh reckoning,” she said, with an impatient wave of her hand. “Was Her Grace’s linen soiled during the month of July?”
“Yes, my lady,” replied Beatrice, curtseying once more.
“Stop all that bobbing and weaving, Mistress, or I shall need Her Grace’s bowl myself. Before or after Her Grace was wed, if you please?”
“A fortnight before.”
“And since?” asked Susan.
“Nothing since, my lady,” replied Beatrice. She was glad to be absolved of the curtseying; her knees were old and creaky and once down, she was never quite certain of the ability to rise back up again.
“Jesu!” cried Susan. “I know what ails Her Grace. She is with child!”
Mary’s eyes popped open and just as suddenly as the sickness had come upon her, it left. It had been just the same the two mornings before; it came, it stayed, and then left as if it had never been. She stirred and made to sit up.
“Beatrice, take this bowl. Frideswide, put these pillows behind Her Grace’s head, if you please. Oh, my lamb, what welcome news!”
“Let us not be hasty, Susan,” cautioned Lady Strelly. “Let us call the physicians.”
“Physicians!” snorted Susan. “Kindly inform me, what do they know about babies?”
“Perhaps nothing,” said Lady Strelly. “But there may be another cause for this illness.” She had little confidence in Mary’s ability to conceive, as much as it pained her to admit it, even to herself. “Her Grace’s linen often goes unsoiled; that is not a reliable means by which…”
“Oh, all right! Dormer, fetch the doctors,” commanded Susan, and Jane turned swiftly to the door.
“There now, Your Grace, let us make you presentable, shall we?” Susan fetched the basin with the warm water that they had brought when the ladies entered the room to prepare Mary for the day. She wet a cloth and washed Mary’s face; Frideswide handed her a cup of well-watered wine with which to rinse her mouth. As Susan combed back Mary’s hair, Frideswide straightened the bed covers. By the time they had completed their ministrations, Jane peeked into the room and seeing all in order, announced the doctors.
# # #
“Ah, Dr. Wendy, Dr. Owen,” said Susan. “Have you had any complaints these past days about the effects of green venison, bad eels or rancid oysters?”
The two physicians regarded each other for a moment and shrugged, then bowed to Mary, who inclined her head in acknowledgement.
“None, My Lady,” replied Dr. Owen. “I am sorry to find Your Grace indisposed,” he said, turning again to Mary.
“The signs all point to the happy news that Her Grace is with child,” declared Susan, with a haughty look at Frideswide, who kept her own face expressionless.
“Mistress Dormer has explained the situation,” said Dr. Wendy. “But we cannot risk the life of the queen. Perhaps we should bleed Her Grace, just to be on the safe side.”
Dr. Owen nodded his agreement; bleeding was a sovereign remedy for just about everything. “And if it be something that Her Grace has ingested, perhaps a purgative…”
“A pugative!” cried Susan. “Man, have you lost your senses? Her Grac
e has purged enough these past three morns!”
Dr. Wendy rubbed his hands together. “Might we see…”
“Heavens, no!” cried Susan. “It is in the Thames by now, and good riddance!”
Poison, thought Mary again; but no, it couldn’t be. There would be no daily recovery from that, would there? And she felt perfectly well between her morning bouts of nausea. No, it could not be poison, she was certain of it. Could it be…? Could Good Susan be correct in her diagnosis?
“Well,” said Dr. Owen. “Perhaps some poppy syrup, then. Your Grace, I will send along a bottle; I pray you take a small sup in a cup of wine at the first signs of distress.” With this declaration, both men bowed and departed.
As soon as the door closed behind them, Susan threw up her hands and said, “Bleeding! Purgatives! Poppy syrup! I told you that calling in the royal physicians was a waste of time. Her Grace, oh, my precious lamb! …is with child, I tell you!” With this she approached the bed and took both of Mary’s hands into her own. Her eyes swam with tears. “Rest now, my dear. You must rest. You must take better care of yourself now!” She gave Mary’s hands a last reassuring squeeze and cocked her head at Lady Strelly. The drapes on the windows had never been drawn back, and together Susan and Frideswide drew the bed curtains that Mary might be able to go back to sleep after her ordeal.
Once in the outer chamber, with the door to Mary’s room closed behind them, Susan said, “My dear Lady Strelly, I am certain that the queen is with child, and if she is, it solves so many problems! Do you not want to believe it?”
Frideswide sighed and her eyes filled with tears. “Not if it isn’t true.”
Brussels, November 1554
As the cavalcade rode along through the chill autumn air, a watery sun made several unsuccessful attempts to dispel the gloom. The emperor was a great believer in fresh air; so much so that even in the dead of winter he eschewed fires and had never succumbed to the royal trend to modernize his castles and palaces to the extent of glazing their windows. On his left rode a weary Simon Renard, who did not share his master’s penchant for the out of doors; and on his right, in the place of honor, rode Reginald, Cardinal Pole.
The cardinal would have much preferred to be left behind in his apartments with a blazing fire, surrounded by his precious books; he shared Renard’s abhorrence for the hunt upon which they were embarking on this cold morning. Had he but known it, such was probably the only thing he had in common with the detestable Renard. After spending so much of his life in Italy, Reginald Pole could think of few places as dreary as Brussels in November. England, for which he longed, was different; there were usually few extremes of weather there, and if it rained more than in some places, it still had its share of halcyon days. After twenty long years of exile, he just wanted to go home.
All that stood in his way was this silent rock of an emperor. The cardinal regarded Charles from under hooded lids. He knew that the emperor had been obstructing his return to England and he knew why. He sighed. He was no stranger to compromise; he had been negotiating one issue or another for the Vatican for years. But it was different when it was one’s own needs and desires that were being winnowed!
He could not return to England without a royal summons to do so; he was, officially, still an attainted traitor under sentence of death in his native land. What a travesty! Rather than compromise his staunch belief in the Catholic faith, he had chosen voluntary exile from his homeland. He had refused absolutely to succumb to the repudiation of Rome and the pope that his cousin Henry, the King of England, had required of him as the price of his ability to retain his titles, his lands, his revenues, and eventually, even his life. Reginald had steadfastly renounced Henry’s divorce from Queen Katharine of Aragon, and he had refused to assist in any way the king’s desire to rid himself of the queen of whom he had grown weary.
The price for this resolve had been very high. His mother, Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, had been brutally murdered, and all his brothers save one had been executed. He had been stripped of his lands and wealth, and his royal cousin had even sent assassins as far as Italy to do away with him. These attempts on his life had not been successful; he had lived on, under the protection of Rome and the Catholic Church, for over twenty years.
Before all that had happened, a marriage between himself and his cousin Mary had been mooted several times, and had been the heart’s desire of both his mother and her great friend, Queen Katharine. It would have been the perfect solution; the Poles had Plantagenet blood in their veins, and a match with the Tudors would have been another wedding of the White Rose with the Red Rose. It was just such a union that had produced Henry the VIII. But Reginald had been bent upon a religious career, and was sixteen years Mary’s elder. Matrimony was not in his plans, and he had gone off to study in Paris.
All might have been well if the queen had borne the king a son who lived; if Mary had been born a boy; if Anne Boleyn had never been born at all. If, if, if! If the road to Hell was paved with good intentions, then the foundation of that road must surely be all the if's that had never been! Both his life and his cousin Mary’s had been shattered by the King’s Great Matter. They had both lost their mothers to the king’s cruelty, and they had both lived their lives in fear and isolation, suffering torments to uphold their faith. The only thing that had sustained him, and he believed the same could be said of Queen Mary of England, was the belief that their fidelity to God through such extraordinary adversity had preserved them for some higher purpose; that their lives had been spared through all of their travails that they might fulfill some grand destiny.
That destiny now awaited him in England; together with his cousin the queen, he would restore the Catholic faith to unhappy England, and save the souls of their misguided countrymen.
But not until the Emperor Charles said so, for Mary was under the thumb of her Imperial cousin, and in the fleshly thrall, if the rumors could be believed, of her Spanish husband. Women were inherently inferior to men; they were silly, weak, sinful, incapable creatures, and he suspected that his cousin and there is anoterno different, for all that she was a queen. But the fact remained that she was queen, and until she recalled him and reversed his attainder, he could not return home to England.
The boar having been sighted, the horns of the hunt sounded their clarion call and the pursuit was joined. The emperor never participated in the hunt; he simply sat his horse and watched as the riders gave chase and the poor, wretched animal ran for its life, its last moments destined to be ones of terror and dread.
“I have had letters from England,” said the emperor. “I hear that my daughter’s belly waxeth forward in goodly manner.”
Reginald was startled out of his thoughts. He was not sure why, but every time the emperor referred to the Queen of England as his daughter, she was in fact his daughter-in-law, he felt his gorge rise. Still, he supposed that marriage to the handsome prince who was Philip of Spain was preferable to marriage to his father, the Emperor Charles, a match that had been arranged for Mary when she was still a child, but later had been repudiated by Charles himself. Charles must have been handsome when he was young; his father had been Philip the Handsome of Burgundy, but his looks were spoiled by the legendary Hapsburg jaw, and age had not been kind to him. To Reginald, used to the handsome men of Italy, Charles was quite repulsive to look at.
“I rejoice for Her Grace, and of course, for you, Your Majesty,” replied Reginald.
Charles kept his face inscrutable. He knew that the cardinal longed to return to England; he also knew that his ambitions extended to the archbishopric of Canterbury. That office was still held by Thomas Cranmer, but Cranmer was languishing in the Tower of London for his vociferous attacks on the Catholic Church. Many of the erstwhile bishops were in similar case; Latimer, Ridley, and several others were not as willing as some to bend with the prevailing wind.
The emperor had instructed his cousin, now his daughter-in-law, the Queen of England, to refrain from
recalling Pole until “a more auspicious time”, and she had obeyed him. Philip now had the task of reuniting England with Rome well in hand. Their strategy was two-fold and dealt with two distinctly bothersome issues. Until the queen carried Philip’s son in her womb, his influence with his wife was still not complete; this had been proven by her resistance to her husband’s demands for English revenues for his purse and the coronation that would make him King of England in fact instead of just in practice. The queen was now with child, and although the revenues and the coronation still proved elusive, Philip believed the queen to have mellowed in her condition and that perhaps she would become more malleable on those points.
The second issue was more critical and involved both Mary and her cousin Reginald. For both were adamant on the point that the English nobility must return the spoils of the great Dissolution of the Monasteries that had been “redistributed” by Henry the VIII and Cromwell. Charles himself was not pleased to have to concede this point; he had loved his Aunt Katharine and it grieved him that the purpose of this stripping bare of the Church in England had been to bribe good Englishmen to ignore the king’s great lust for Anne Boleyn. It was indeed sad but all too true that once they had been compensated with Church lands and revenues, their consciences had become most flexible in their support of the lie that the King of England had sinned in marrying his brother’s widow. But that was all many years ago in the past; the thing could not now be changed, and the return of England to the Church of Rome was something that mattered greatly in the here and now. He and Philip could see this; Philip could see it first hand in England. Even the pope had relaxed his adamant stand on the subject. But Mary and Reginald could not see that the only way to get the English Parliament to support England’s reunification with the Catholic Church was if the restitution of Church property as a condition were waived.
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