Bloody Mary (17 page)

Chapuys’ dispatches during this period show Anne as a calculating murderess with limitless opportunities to strike out at her enemies. He reported her conflicts with Henry, but he always added that she knew so well how to handle the king that in the end she invariably came out ahead. Other observers, who were not so severely biased by loyalty to Henry’s ex-queen, saw Anne differently. Behind her scheming they saw desperation and fear; behind her mistreatment of Mary they perceived a struggle to preserve the rights of her own child. Anne was queen and Elizabeth princess, but only at Henry’s sufferance. No European sovereign acknowledged Anne’s title, and at every court where Katherine was pitied Anne was called “the Concubine” or “the Great Whore.” If Henry decided to put her aside, no church, no government, no lawyer would come to her defense. Her relatives would disown her, and her few remaining friends at court would denounce her more loudly than her enemies. A French envoy who visited Henry’s court in the month of Mary’s severe illness, February of 1535, wrote that Anne was severely restricted in her movements and in some fear for her safety. Her looks betrayed anxiety and nervous exhaustion, he said. He described how she had sought him out and confided to him that her position had become even more tenuous than it had been before her marriage. She was being watched so closely she could neither speak freely nor write to anyone, she whispered, and then left him so abruptly that he felt certain she was not exaggerating her predicament.
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Anne’s relations had begun to treat her as shabbily as the king did. In their determination to preserve their own interests they brought to court Margaret Shelton, daughter of Lady Shelton and Anne’s cousin, hoping that she would become Henry’s next mistress. Margaret did supplant the unknown girl who had encouraged Mary, but not for long. New flirtations followed, including Henry’s revived fascination with the daughter of a Wiltshire gentleman, Jane Seymour. Henry did not abandon Anne entirely, of course, but though she still gave him pleasure at times he was
coming to feel trapped by his marriage, and disappointed that his wife had produced only a daughter. Anne knew where her salvation lay. More than anything in the world, she told a lady of the French court, she wanted a son.

Heartened by every sign of discord and especially by Henry’s disfavor toward Anne, dissatisfied nobles pressed Chapuys harder than ever. Lord Bray asked the ambassador to obtain for him the exact wording of a prognostication circulating in Flanders to the effect that Henry would face a widespread revolt in 1535. He meant to send the prophecy to all the conspirators, and with it a code they might use to correspond secretly with one another. All they needed was a show of military support from the emperor. The appearance of a few imperial ships at the mouth of the Thames, filled with seasoned troops, would send the government into a panic. Meanwhile a tough company of German mercenaries, led by trusted officers and backed up by arms and ammunition, could be landed in the north to signal the start of the rising.

Chapuys forwarded the urgent pleas of the rebel lords to his master, knowing that for the time being, Charles’ own military situation did not permit him to intervene in English affairs. He was currently engaged in a dramatic attempt to reconquer lands seized by the Ottoman Turks in central Europe and North Africa, and he had continually to be on the alert against the French. Neither his sympathies nor his political interests were directed toward England, and the family ties Katherine and Mary counted on so heavily were for Charles only one small piece in an intricate political puzzle. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, where Katherine was concerned, the emperor saw little reason to take any action whatever, particularly now that Henry had married Anne and started a new family with her. As for Mary, there were remedies short of war which could solve her difficulties. Marriage to a respectable prince—preferably one with strong ties to imperial interests—would accomplish several objectives without leading to conflict. It would remove her from her semi-captivity, it would help to initiate a rapprochement between Henry and Charles, and it would shut the mouths of those who continued to criticize Henry for dishonoring his daughter.

Chapuys did not pass on Charles’ true strategy to the English rebels. Instead he gave them every encouragement short of what they wanted most to hear: that imperial ships and arms were on the way. In actuality there was no need for help from any continental power. There were more than enough disaffected nobles and commoners within England to make a strong showing against Henry’s forces. But they lacked leadership. Katherine, their natural leader, refused to abandon her oath of obedience to Henry, and no other figure appeared with the determination or
quickening energy to trigger the revolt. The moment came and, through inaction, was lost.

As the lords of the Marches were struggling to bring the revolt into being the pivotal figure in their plans fell ill. Like the emperor’s potential involvement in the rising, Mary’s health was among the imponderables of the insurrection. She had not been entirely well since about the age of fourteen, when with the onset of puberty she began to experience symptoms of a disorder known to Renaissance doctors as “strangulation of the womb” or “suffocation of the mother.” These violent terms described several distinct complaints grouped together in a paramedical theory about female sexuality. The separate symptoms were, first, the irregularity or cessation of menstrual periods, or amenorrhea. A depressed mental state characterized by “heaviness, fear and sorrowfulness” was another indication of the general disorder, as were difficulty in breathing and swelling and pain in the abdominal region.

In young unmarried women like Mary any one of a wide range of symptoms could point to strangulation of the womb: “headache, nau-seousness, vomiting, want of appetite, longing, an ill habit of body, difficulty of breathing, trembling of the heart, swooning, melancholy, fearful dreams” and “watching, with sadness and heaviness.”
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Sixteenth-century doctors, like their predecessors in antiquity, believed that these afflictions were brought on by sexual abstinence. Every woman, whatever her age, rank or degree of virtue, was at the mercy of her voracious uterus—what for centuries had been called the “raging womb.” Widows, or wives suddenly deprived of the “company of a man,” fell into an aggrieved state of melancholy and were troubled with amenorrhea. Even young girls who were kept strictly away from men suffered pain, mental anguish and irregular menstruation, and the only satisfactory cure was marriage.

Widows suffering from strangulation of the womb were urged to marry again; wives were advised to engage in “wanton copulation” with their husbands. Physicians told the parents of young girls to arrange matches for them without delay, and in the meantime to send them out riding for several hours a day. More bizarre remedies were also recommended. A woman in a near-catatonic state was laid on her back, her clothes loosened and her hair hanging free around her shoulders. Calling her name in a loud voice, the doctor seized her by the hair and yanked it until she regained consciousness. At the same time he pulled at her pubic hair, both to increase the pain and to “draw downwards” the “sharp and malign vapor” that was ascending from the womb and threatening to damage the other organs. Another common treatment was uterine fumigation. A medicated pessary, a curved cylindrical tube, rounded at one
end, made of gold or silver and perforated at the closed end with a number of small holes, was inserted into the patient’s vagina, closed end first. Fastened in place by means of cords tied around the waist, it allowed steam from a vessel of boiling liquid to reach the mouth of the uterus and, so the doctors thought, alleviate its unnatural state. Along with horseback riding, fumigation was the method of treatment most often prescribed for “bashful and shamefaced” young maidens; matrons underwent the horrifying treatment of having horse-leeches inserted into the neck of the womb.
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As Mary lived through her adolescence, along with the racking anxieties of her own and her mother’s situation she had to come to terms with the dangers and indignities of recurrent strangulation of the womb as well. No record of the specific treatments she was given survives, but it is certain that she followed the recommended therapy of daily horseback rides, and that when she joined Elizabeth’s household these rides stopped. Her horses were taken away along with her fine clothes and jewels, and this change in the pattern of her daily exercise cannot have improved her general health.

The fact that Katherine knew at first hand what her daughter’s illness meant made their separation especially painful. In a letter to Cromwell Katherine said she had been “ill of the same sickness” as Mary, and a curious document unearthed during the legal battle over the divorce confirms her claim. It was a memorandum headed “Questions to be asked of those persons who know the circumstances of the marriage of queen Katherine of England,” and it listed specific points to be raised with legal witnesses who had reason to know whether or not Katherine came to Henry as a virgin. Among the queries was one asking whether, after Arthur’s death, Katherine was “weak and crippled, and discharged humors from her mouth.” Weakness in the limbs and some sort of oral discharge were among the symptoms of strangulation of the womb, and the physicians who examined Katherine after her marriage to Arthur agreed on the common diagnosis of the “raging womb,” its passion unassuaged because the girl was still a virgin. Their recommendation, according to the document, was that Katherine marry a “competent person,” namely Henry; the disappearance of her symptoms after her marriage to Henry showed that their prognosis was correct.
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Remembering her own discomfort, and the obstetrical complications linked with it that plagued her during the first fifteen years or so of her marriage, Katherine knew what Mary was going through and what reassurance she could offer her. If Mary came to Kimbolton, she wrote to Cromwell, “the comfort and cheerfulness she would have with me would be half her cure.” “I have found this by experience,” she added, hoping to add a slightly clinical tone to her request.

But Henry was firm. Mary was not allowed to go to her mother, or even to come within thirty miles of her forsaken residence during the critical weeks of her illness in February of 1535. Katherine was half prepared to hear that her daughter had died when the news finally reached her that Mary had passed the crisis point and was recovering at Greenwich.

They did robe and spoule al the Kynges frendes

They called them heretikes with spight and disdayne

They toffled a space lyke mantes and F[e]indes

They put some in preson and sume to greate payne.

It was during Mary’s convalescence that the most outrageous executions of the English Reformation were carried out. The priors of three Carthusian monasteries and a Brigittine monk of Sion were tried and convicted of treason, taken to Tyburn and hanged. They were hanged in their religious dress, an unheard-of affront to the entire religious community and an unprecedented departure from judicial custom. The brutality of their treatment was also unusual, even in an age of brutal executions. They were cut down from the gallows still living; their torsos were slit open and their vital organs torn out. Afterward their beheaded corpses were paraded through the streets, the severed heads and feet displayed at the city gates and the remains burned.

The execution of the traitorous monks was given highly visible endorsement by the court. The duke of Norfolk, Thomas Boleyn (now earl of Wiltshire), and Henry Fitzroy were prominent among the spectators, along with other courtiers, and the notables were careful to stand near the scaffold where they could be seen to greatest advantage by the crowd. The king’s chamberlain Henry Norris clattered into the throng with an escort of forty mounted men. Five strangers disguised as Scots Borderers, their visors lowered to hide their faces, watched the bloody proceedings from a distance. When one of them temporarily lost his visor and was recognized as the duke of Norfolk’s brother speculation began about the identity of the others. It was noticed that all the courtiers showed unusual reverence to the disguised men, and this, plus the persist
ent rumor that the king wanted to witness the event in person, led to the widespread belief that one of the Borderers was Henry himself.
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The four monks were only the first in a series of victims of judicial murder. Within weeks three other Carthusians were apprehended and imprisoned, and awaited their trial fastened in a standing position against the dungeon wall. Iron collars pinned them at the neck and iron fetters bound their feet. For seventeen days they could neither sit nor lie prone, and their chains were never “loosed for any natural necessity.” Finally they too were tried, condemned and hanged.

Three days later the crowd witnessed an even stranger spectacle. The spare, ascetic bishop of Rochester, John Fisher, was brought to Tower Hill to face the executioner’s sword. Thousands came to see him die, few of them believing him capable of the treason for which he had been condemned. Fisher was in fact guilty of the treasonable act of writing letters to Charles V inviting him to invade England, but in his own view he was acting in response to a higher logic than that of the law. Summoning an imperial invasion was a means of saving the lives of Katherine and Mary and, even more important, saving the Catholic church in England. As Fisher told those who crowded around the scaffold, “Christian people, I come hither to die for the faith of Christ’s holy Catholic church.”
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In executing the bishop of Rochester Henry was committing the greater sacrilege of killing a cardinal of the Roman church; Fisher had been raised to the cardinalate during his imprisonment. Londoners who looked up at the bishop’s bony head, impaled on a pike on London Bridge, believed their king had killed a saint as well. The head did not decay. Day after day the sober features continued to look down “sadly and constantly” on passers-by with the same expression the bishop had worn in life. Another grisly execution came and went, this time the killing of the revered humanist Thomas More, and still Fisher’s skull-like head kept its reproving vigil. Finally, when the inevitable talk of a miracle began, the head was taken down and dropped in the river.

From a procedural point of view the nine victims were unarguably guilty of treason. They had refused to take the required oath to uphold the succession, thereby making their loyalty to the king and his designated heir, the Princess Elizabeth, open to serious question. It made no difference that what the nine men objected to was not Parliament’s right to change the succession but the phraseology of the oath. Its wording contained an explicit denial of papal authority, and this, they pointed out, was a matter unrelated to the succession and offensive to their consciences.

Yet their protest came at a time when the oath was being enforced with greater rigor than ever. In November of 1534 a parliamentary edict
specified its wording in greater detail and spelled out the procedures surrounding its enforcement. To refuse to swear, this new law stated, was tantamount to being convicted of treason, since a certificate of refusal signed by two of the commissioners administering the oath had the same weight as a treason indictment arrived at by twelve jurors. Fisher and More, who were already in prison, had been unmoved by this new threat, and when the Carthusian priors met at the London Charterhouse near Smithfield and announced their opposition to the oath Cromwell had them arrested and taken to the Tower. They were accused, along with the learned Bridgettine Richard Reynolds, of denying that Henry VIII was head of the English church. They argued at their trial that to affirm the king’s headship of the church was to challenge the pope’s authority. Yet papal primacy was essential to the salvation of every believer. No manmade law could cancel out this overriding truth of the church, they claimed, and they were prepared to die rather than sin by forswearing it. At the monks’ trial the lines were clearly drawn on both sides. The king and the royal Council, who until now had stopped short of carrying through their threats to punish with death those who refused to swear, decided not to hesitate any longer. From early in May to the middle of July the news out of England was filled with accounts of trials, executions and martyrs to the faith.

On the continent, churchmen and devout laymen were horrified. In Italy, the bishop of Faenza, papal nuncio, recorded the account that reached him, describing how the English king had caused “certain religious men” to be “ripped up in each other’s presence, their arms torn off, their hearts cut out and rubbed upon their mouths and faces.”
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This outrageous king who had badly mistreated his wife and daughter and made his brazen mistress queen now made it plain that he was capable of monstrous cruelty to religious men as well. Opponents of Lutheran and other reforming doctrines condemned Henry for assaulting the true church, while even ardent Lutherans deplored the executions of Fisher and More. Fisher had after all agreed with Luther in upholding the validity of Henry’s marriage to Katherine, while More’s humanist writings and teachings were held in the highest respect by the scholars of the Protestant movements. And believers of every sort found the executions of the monks repugnant in the extreme. That peaceful, withdrawn men of prayer who wore hair shirts, denied themselves meat and drank wine so watered it had no color presented a threat to the security of Henry’s throne was beyond credibility. The only possible explanation was that Henry was mad.

A form of madness, it seemed, hung over all the sovereigns of Europe in the middle 1530s. The specter of religious dissent, first conjured by Luther at the Diet of Worms, was growing ever larger and more menac
ing. There were now not only Lutherans to contend with but Zwinglians, Calvinists, and a swarm of nameless congregations each claiming to possess theological truth. The established governments saw in each of these pockets of unorthodox belief an incitement to political rebellion, and as they proliferated government servants, clerics of the old faith and the rulers themselves grew more and more severe in their response. Only a few days after the martyrdom of the English Carthusians three Lutherans were burned at the stake in Paris, and one of them, a Fleming who insisted to the end that he was right and his persecutors wrong, was slowly roasted alive. The French king Francis reportedly joined a religious procession marching to the site of a mass execution of Protestants and, with his sons, had stayed on to watch the torturing and burning. His presence was taken to be a sign of complete royal approval of the policy of burning heretics, and his example was followed in other capitals.
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In Catholic countries the Inquisition was called upon to step up its age-old process of weeding out the tares in. the spiritual vineyards, and the numbers of those holding erroneous opinions who were “relaxed” to secular governments for burning leaped upward in the third and fourth decades of the century. But even in regions where the Protestants made themselves a majority—as in Calvinist Geneva, the Zwinglian cantons of Switzerland and the Lutheran territories under Charles V’s rule—men and women of differing views were subjected to savage repression. Of all these dissidents the most feared were those their opponents called Anabaptists, congregations whose belief in the necessity of adult baptism radically alienated them both from the faith of Rome and the doctrines of other Protestants. In Catholic and Protestant lands alike Anabaptists were mutilated, drowned, garroted, burned and suffocated without mercy. Their lands were seized, their houses torn down, their children driven off to beg their bread.

The fear the Anabaptists attracted was increased manyfold by their remarkable reign over the town of Miinster in Westphalia in 1534 and 1535. Here a group of Anabaptists led by a Haarlem baker and a tailor from Leyden took over the town council and expelled all citizens who refused rebaptism. The fleeing townspeople had to leave behind all their goods, and after the enforced exodus a minority of perhaps fourteen thousand of the regenerate, most of them laborers or craft workers, found themselves in possession of a large town and an even larger armory and treasury. The baker, Jan Mattys, immediately set about to organize the defense of the new community of saints, which was under attack by its nominal overlord the bishop of Münster. Filled with a sudden certainty that he could repeat the miracle of Gideon in the book of Judges and defeat the besieging armies with only twenty men, Mattys left the
protection of the town walls and assaulted the enemy. He was killed on sight, but his death did nothing to decrease the enthusiasm of the Anabaptist flock. Instead it brought into prominence the more colorful and charismatic figure of Jan of Leyden, a fascinating opportunist who soon turned Münster into a spectacular parody of contemporary government and religion.

In a matter of days Münster became a biblical city, ruled by elders and committed to Old Testament morality. All existing laws, authorities and family relationships were swept away, and a new order brought in. Jan of Leyden proclaimed polygamy to be the natural state of mankind, sanctioned by the prophets, and set an example to his followers by taking seventeen wives. Among them was the widow of his predecessor Jan Mattys, a former nun named Divara, who was said to be the most beautiful woman in the city. Superimposed on this patriarchal society was an elaborate imitation of the regalia and ceremonial of a royal court. Jan of Leyden became King Jan, and his principal wife Queen Divara. There were chamberlains, stewards and marshals of the court, and the king’s sixteen lesser wives served as matrons of honor to the queen. Plundered vestments and hangings from all the churches of the town provided the finery for the courtiers, and when King Jan rode through the town on one of his thirty-one splendid horses he wore a gown of cloth of silver, lined with crimson and ornamented with gold thread. Two pages, one bearing a Bible and the other a naked sword, formed his mounted escort; one of these boys was a son of the bishop of Munster, captured when the Anabaptists first seized the town. King Jan wore a rich gold crown and a jeweled orb, the insignia of royalty, with the motto “King of justice for the whole world,” and both he and his attendants spoke in the most grandiose terms about the day when his rule over the remnant population of a Westphalian town would be transformed into sovereignty over the entire world.

That Henry was known to be pleased by the Anabaptist take-over in Münster made his own recent alterations in religion seem all the more radical. Henry did not sympathize with the theological views of the Münster rebels, but the fact that they were an irritant to Charles V’s sister Mary, regent of the Netherlands, made them useful allies in his enduring contest with imperial interests. He came very close to making overtures to King Jan during that monarch’s brief reign, and lost much of his credit with more moderate Protestant leaders in the process. In the same month that he began executing Catholics he tried to restore that credit by burning fourteen Anabaptist refugees who had recently come to England from Holland, but the gesture was forgotten in the uproar that followed the more scandalous executions.
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However hard he might have tried to temper or disguise it Henry was
swiftly making England a Protestant country, and the deaths of the Catholic martyrs were a harsh but inescapable milestone along that path. The king’s own views had certainly changed. The onetime arch-opponent of Luther now regretted his harsh stand, and fostered the view that he had written his treatise against Luther under duress. He ordered the distribution of a letter by Luther arguing that Wolsey and other clerics had been behind the entire venture, and tried to clear himself of involvement in the affair.
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