Bloody Mary (16 page)

Henry had suspected for some time that Mary was being encouraged in her continued resistance by letters smuggled in and out through a go-between. The logical suspect was Mary’s only servant, a young chambermaid whose name has not been preserved but whom Chapuys acknowledged as his channel of news and messages. Through her he sent Mary letters from Katherine and news from his own sources, and received in turn the brief notes Mary wrote him in the moments when she was not being watched. The maid had refused to swear an oath of fidelity to the Act of Succession, and only after she was locked in her room and told she would be sent to the Tower unless she swore to it did she relent.
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Less than a month later Henry questioned Lady Shelton about the maid, and this time she was sent away. Mary was “much grieved at this,” Chapuys wrote, since the girl had nowhere to go and no money, and because “she was the only one in whom she [Mary] had confidence.”
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One day in the third month of her time at Hatfield Mary had a most alarming visitor: Anne Boleyn, now Queen Anne. The two women had not seen one another since Anne became queen, and the meeting was traumatic for them both. For Anne, it meant facing the young woman whose mother she had hurt and dishonored, and whose own life and prospects she had all but destroyed. For Mary, it meant confronting the woman who was the “scandal of Christendom,” the woman who had broken up her family and alienated her father’s affection, and whose baby daughter now held the honors that by right were Mary’s own.

Anne was at first civil, asking Mary to come to court and pay her respects, and saying that if Mary would honor her as queen she would at
tempt to reconcile her to Henry. Anne promised to intercede for Mary and to see that she was “as well or better treated than ever.” Mary’s reply was equally polite, though her face betrayed unspoken rage. “She knew of no queen in England but her mother,” she said, but if Anne was willing to speak to Henry in her behalf she would appreciate it. Anne repeated her offer, emphasizing the benefits of the king’s favors and the dangers of his anger, but Mary was unmoved. In the end Anne became angry, and left swearing that “she would bring down the pride of this unbridled Spanish blood” if it was the last thing she ever did.
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Chapuys’ informers at Henry’s court made it clear that she fully intended to carry out her threat. Not long after the tense interview between Anne and Mary a “person of good faith” told the ambassador that he had heard Anne say more than once that as soon as Henry was out of the country, leaving her as regent, she meant to use her authority to have Mary killed, “either by hunger or otherwise.” When her brother warned her that Henry’s wrath would be monumental, Anne answered defiantly that she would do it anyway, even if it meant the worst conceivable punishment, “even if she were burned alive for it after.”
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Henry’s behavior toward his daughter was on the whole as implacably hostile as Anne’s. He too referred to Mary’s “obstinate Spanish blood,” and gave at least one diplomatic envoy the impression that he hated her thoroughly.
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He tortured her by coming to Hatfield often to see his other daughter and ordering Mary to be shut in her room throughout his stay. From Lady Shelton Mary heard a frightening report that the king had said he would have her beheaded for violating the law in refusing to acknowledge the Act of Succession, and according to Chapuys, she was convinced by this news that she must indeed prepare to die.
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But Henry was capricious, if not exactly ambivalent, in his attitude toward his daughter. When he complained of her stubbornness to the French ambassador, who remarked that she was nonetheless a girl of good breeding and virtue, his eyes filled with tears and he had to agree. Like Anne, he tried at least once to bribe Mary, offering to give her “a royal title and dignity” and to restore her to favor if only she would lay aside her claims. She refused, but the offer was tantalizing. Though her loyalty to Katherine was primary, some part of her must have longed to give in to the father she feared, despised and loved. His changeability tortured her, however, just as his well-known insincerity left her bewildered.

One incident haunted her memory for the rest of her months at Hatfield. On one of Henry’s visits Mary, who had been ordered not to go near the room where her father was, sent word to him begging to be allowed to kiss his hand. Her entreaty was denied, but just as he was mounting his horse to leave she slipped away from her guards and went
up to a terrace on the roof to watch him go. Someone may have told him she was there, or he may have caught sight of her by mere chance, but when he looked up to the terrace he saw Mary, on her knees, her hands clasped together in supplication. If he was moved at the sight he did not show it, but he did not ignore Mary either. With a gesture that lay somewhere between simple courtesy and fatherly affection he nodded his head and touched his hat to her before he rode off toward London.
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My thought oppressed, my mynd in trouble,

My body languishing, my hart in payn;

My joyes, dystres; my soroivs dowble;

My lyjfe as one that dye would fayne;

Myn eyes for sorow salt ters doth rayne:

Thus do I lyve in gret hevenes

Withowte hope or comfort off redresse.

Two weeks before her nineteenth birthday Mary Tudor fell desperately ill. Henry waited six days before doing anything to help her, but he finally summoned Chapuys and informed him of her danger. He wanted the ambassador to send doctors of his own choosing to visit Mary along with the royal physicians. If Mary died the king wanted the blame to fall as heavily on the imperial doctors as on his own. He told Chapuys that his physicians had pronounced Mary’s disease incurable, adding that because of this Katherine’s physician had refused to leave his patient in order to diagnose Mary’s condition.

The imperial ambassador was alarmed. He knew of Mary’s illness from his own sources, but the story he pieced together was very different from the account Henry gave. According to Chapuys’ informants, Henry’s chief physician Dr. Butts told the king Mary’s illness was indeed grave, but not incurable. Without good care she might not survive, Dr. Butts said, but all she really needed was to be released from the climate of anxiety and persecution in which Henry kept her. Chapuys had learned too that all the physicians were convinced Henry meant his daughter to die, and that the king was using their fears to forestall a cure. His own doctors refused to treat Mary unless Katherine’s Spanish physician was present and involved in the treatment; the Spaniard in turn refused even to attempt a cure unless Mary was brought to live near her mother, believing that their separation was what
harmed Mary most. Chapuys himself hesitated to send doctors, fearing that their failure might prejudice the imperial cause. Paradoxically, the sicker Mary became the less likely she was to be treated, for no doctor was eager to risk having to take responsibility for her death.

As the days passed Mary’s condition grew worse as a result of neglect and “continued vexation,” and the ambassador feared it might very well “carry her off.” He did what he could from a distance. He was not allowed to see Mary, who was at Greenwich under Lady Shelton’s un-tender care, but he sent his servants every day to find out how she was, and kept himself far better informed than the king about the stages of her illness. He pestered Henry’s chief secretary Cromwell with such persistence that in the end Cromwell arranged for Dr. Butts to attend Mary, At court he tried to counteract Henry’s tale of incurable disease with truthful rumors of his own. But the king chose to be pessimistic, and his courtiers and councilors followed his lead. Several Council members approached Chapuys to remark that since no human agency had been able to reconcile Charles and Henry, God would “open a door” by taking Mary to himself.

Behind Chapuys’ anxiety, the doctors’ hesitancy and the resignation of the councilors was the unspoken fear of poison. Everyone remembered Anne’s threats against Mary all too clearly; no one was willing to be implicated in a poison plot. The suddenness and gravity of Mary’s sickness pointed to a toxic dose of some sort in her food or drink, and the fact that she had no food taster had long been a source of worry to Katherine and Chapuys. Henry’s seeming unconcern about his daughter’s condition—Chapuys believed he was actually pleased at it—certainly meant that, if there was a plot to poison her, he did not oppose it.

Only one person had nothing to lose by nursing Mary in what might be her last illness: her mother. She wrote to Chapuys, asking him to beg Henry to let her care for their daughter at the house where she was staying. Katherine was at Kimbolton, once a duke’s residence but now a decaying ruin with buckling walls and weed-choked grounds.
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She was none too well herself; Kimbolton was a notoriously unhealthy place, and in addition to her real infirmities Henry was spreading rumors that his former wife was both dropsical and demented. But she offered to treat Mary “with her own hands” nonetheless, putting her in her own bed and watching her night and day. Like many at court she “had great suspicion as to the cause” of Mary’s illness, and knew she might not recover. If God took Mary while she was in Katherine’s care, she wrote, “her heart would rest satisfied; otherwise in great pain.”
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Henry’s response was a tantalizing compromise. Mary would be moved nearer Kimbolton, but she and Katherine could not meet. By the
time Mary was moved she was already beginning to improve slightly. The doctors bled her at least twice, and when it looked as though she might recover Katherine’s Spanish apothecary, who had been prescribing Mary’s medicines for four years, came forward with pills and draughts.

When she was able to write Mary sent word to Chapuys, urging him to ask the emperor to intercede with her father on her behalf. Surely after what she had been through he would allow Mary and Katherine the comfort of each other’s company, especially if Charles requested it. What Mary did not say was that, coupled with the strain of her illness, the hostility of her jailers was becoming unbearable. Chapuys heard from his informants how, as Mary lay helpless and in pain, Lady Shelton and others in the household said in her hearing that they hoped she would die. Her death would promote peace, they told one another, while incidentally ridding them of the inconvenience of looking after her.
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It may have been a death threat of a more formal kind that brought on Mary’s malady in the first place. The Succession Act was being enforced with greater rigor than ever, and those who refused to swear to uphold it faced execution. Late in 1534 Mary was told that she must take the oath, and that if she called herself princess or her mother queen even once she would be sent to the Tower.
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Clearly Henry meant to do what he said. Several prominent opponents of the divorce, including John Fisher, bishop of Rochester and the former chancellor Thomas More, were already imprisoned, and their numbers were growing. Throughout January the danger to Mary had increased. Katherine’s physician warned her that Henry was determined to make Mary swear to the statutes passed against Katherine and herself, and that her refusal would mean either death or life imprisonment.
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The warning was passed along to Mary; a few days afterward she fell ill.

Though it was by far the most serious it was by no means Mary’s first serious illness. She had been troubled on and off since 1531 with pains in her head and stomach, and had sometimes been unable to keep her food down for eight or ten days at a time.
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Katherine’s physician and apothecary had always been called in to treat her, except on one occasion when treatment by an unfamiliar doctor led to unfortunate results. In September of 1534 Mary had complained of headaches and indigestion, and an apothecary Lady Shelton brought in gave her pills, “after which she was very sick and he so much troubled that he said he would never minister anything to her alone.”
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Henry’s physician Dr. Butts heard what happened when he came to examine Mary afterward, and wrote to Cromwell explaining the entire matter. Mary, who lived in dread at the best of times, probably thought she had been given poison, and Chapuys was at first certain of it. The apothecary was probably innocent, and Mary’s aggravated condition could have been anything from a simple
allergic reaction to the drug in the pills to a psychosomatic response to an imagined menace. But however innocuous the circumstances actually were, the incident left its mark, and made Mary afraid to get sick again. And because every added fear put added strain on her health, it undoubtedly helped to bring on her grave illness the following February.

Mary did not recover completely from this onslaught. Late in March she was still convalescent, and having to keep a special diet in order to avoid repeated relapses. She needed meat first thing in the morning, and was allowed to take a large breakfast instead of waiting until the middle of the day to eat a meat dish as was customary in Elizabeth’s household.
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But although she was permitted this special favor Mary was by no means out of political danger. Cromwell was dropping dark hints to Chapuys, asking the ambassador what real harm Mary’s death might do, even if it did offend the people and temporarily annoy the emperor. After all, Cromwell pointed out, Mary was the cause of all her father’s problems; any sensible observer would understand why he wanted to be rid of her. Cromwell stopped just short of wishing Mary dead, but his meaning was clear.

Henry expressed the same sentiments with a vengeance. When Mary had a serious relapse in mid-March, Henry proclaimed himself anxious to see her “as a father should,” but once he arrived at Greenwich he spoke only with Lady Shelton and the waiting women, not with Mary herself, nor did he consult her doctors. When Dr. Butts took it upon himself to come before the king unbidden Henry accused him of disloyalty; he was exaggerating Mary’s illness, Henry said, in order to promote her political interests and have her moved to Kimbolton. From there the two women would raise a revolt against him. Again the specter of Isabella troubled Henry’s mind. Katherine was so “haughty in spirit,” he blustered, that she might “raise a number of men and make war, as boldly as did queen Isabella her mother.” The idea was not at all farfetched, since both Katherine and Mary had more than enough fortitude to lead an army along with the heroism to inspire it. But even if Katherine had been in good health, which she was not, her announced determination to obey Henry in all things saving her conscience would have prevented her from even the most trivial breach of faith. And without Katherine’s acquiescence it was hard to imagine Mary acting alone.

With his imagination dominated by fantasies of rebellion Henry was in no mood to console his daughter, or to allow her the comfort of his presence. Instead he sent word to her through Lady Shelton that she was his “worst enemy,” and that he knew her behavior was part of a calculated plot to turn his subjects against him. She had already succeeded in turning most of the Christian princes of Europe against him, he raged; what could she expect from him but anger and vengeance?
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To the extent that Henry sensed rebellion in the air he was not far wrong. For a year and more Chapuys had been receiving visits, messages and encouraging indications of other kinds from dozens of nobles eager to take up arms against Henry and in defense of Katherine and Mary. Their grievances ranged from personal injuries and resentments to broad political and religious issues. Thomas Dacre, former warden of the Western Marches, was incensed at his recent trial for treason; his acquittal showed the solidarity of the peers in the face of unpopular royal policies. Lord Dacre was only one of a large group of northern nobles—one lord told Chapuys there were some sixteen hundred of them—pledged to support any armed attempt to force Henry to give up Anne, reverse his blasphemous religious legislation and restore Katherine and Mary to their rightful status.

All those who hoped for an armed rising in the countryside welcomed the news of dissension and dissatisfaction at court. Henry and Anne now quarreled frequently and bitterly, and even those who hated Anne most for what she had done to Katherine and Mary had to admit that she had now entered a purgatory of her own. To say that Henry tired of Anne after Elizabeth’s birth fails to do justice to her enduring attraction for him, an attraction which never really faded and which he eventually attributed to witchcraft. But soon after their marriage Henry had taken up again the round of flirtations, seductions and romantic intrigues that had characterized his life with Katherine. Anne became one love among many, and when she protested Henry simply refused to be moved by her agonized pleas for fidelity and told her to stay in her place.

Anne’s strongest hold on her husband was the possibility that she might give him a son, and in the spring of 1534 she told him she was pregnant again. For a few months their life together resumed its old course, but when in early summer Anne had to admit that she had been mistaken about the child Henry’s vengeance was swift. He took as his mistress an old love, a “very beautiful damsal” of the court whose identity is unclear but whose loyalty to Katherine and Mary suggests that she was allied with the growing anti-Boleyn faction.
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Anne’s sister-in-law tried to break up the affair but the king banished her from court, and Chapuys noted that Anne grew more subdued and unsettled the longer the infatuation lasted.

There can be little doubt that Henry wanted revenge. He felt cheated by Anne’s false pregnancy, and he attacked her both by putting another woman ahead of her in his affections and by insulting her child’s primacy in the succession. For the first time since she joined Elizabeth’s household Mary became the object of an official visit by the principal courtiers. At Henry’s request, “nearly all the gentlemen and ladies of the court” paid their respects to her at the country house where she and Elizabeth were
staying, and when she left for Richmond she was riding in a velvet litter just like Elizabeth’s.
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The significance of the courtiers’ visit and the velvet litter was not lost on Anne, who was “greatly annoyed” at Mary’s temporary promotion in rank and even more put out to learn that Henry’s new favorite had sent the king’s daughter an encouraging message. She was Mary’s true friend and devoted servant, she said, and she urged Mary to look for a favorable change in her circumstances in the near future.
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Anne’s renewed protests at these incidents were received coldly. Henry told his wife that she would do well to feel thankful for her present rank and luxury, adding frankly that if he had it to do over again he would not marry her.
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The implied threat was clear enough. He had divorced one wife; he could divorce another.