Bloody Mary (21 page)

Hunsdon was badly situated for even the most ingenious escape scheme. It was forty miles by horseback from Gravesend, where Mary would embark for Flanders—a distance requiring several changes of mount and many extra horses and men. Beyond this, the escape party would have to ride through several large villages, where only a sizable armed bodyguard could prevent a hue and cry. The risk of discovery and capture was overwhelmingly great even if, as Mary thought, she was being guarded more lightly than ever. If they made it safely to the river their ship would be subject to repeated searches and the uncertain tides might delay them still further. Mary thought that, if she had a sleeping draught to give her women, she could let herself out of the house without interference, provided she could get past Lady Shelton’s window; once she reached the bottom of the garden it would be easy enough to open the gate—or break it if need be—and join the waiting horsemen on the other side.

Chapuys found the project far too hazardous and recommended waiting until after Easter, when Mary expected to be moved again. In April or May, with better weather and calmer seas, the chance of success would be far greater, and the king’s probable absence from the vicinity of London would only increase the odds.
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In the meantime he told Mary to continue in the semi-seclusion of mourning, and if approached by the king’s officers to beg them to leave her in peace with her grief. If pressed, he suggested she tell them she was thinking of entering a convent as soon as she reached full age, a startling and unprecedented move calculated to stun them into indecision and to give her time to prepare for flight in the spring.
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Before new escape plans could be made, however, Queen Anne’s tortured reign reached its dramatic conclusion. Throughout April Henry was actively looking for a way out of his marriage, hoping that one of his lawyers or theologians would discover a hidden impediment or a flaw in the original proceedings that would prove his union with Anne unlawful. Sensing the impending shift in influence from the Boleyns to the Seymours, the courtiers formed new alliances and began to tell tales on the Boleyns that they had up to now kept to themselves. That Henry
passed over George Boleyn for membership in the Order of the Garter late in April was very significant. The Garter was an honor held by very few men, and only when a member died could a new Garter knight be chosen. The death of the redoutable old Lord Abergavenny created an empty place, and Anne coveted it for her brother. Henry gave it to his Grand Esquire Nicholas Carew, who had recently become openly and stridently critical of the Boleyns and was advising Jane Seymour on how to advance her progress toward the throne.
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Carew and others of the king’s chamber sent word to Mary at about this time telling her to take heart, and boasting that all the Boleyns would soon be forced to “put water in their wine” and learn humility. Geoffrey Pole, a younger son of the countess of Salisbury and hotheaded opponent of Anne and her relatives, spread the word that Henry had asked the bishop of London whether some grounds could be found which would allow him to abandon his wife, and it appeared to be only a matter of time before Anne was, in the crude phrase of the courtiers, “dismounted” and another mare put in her place.

Anne’s spirits had been sinking since January. She was tormented by the gossip about Henry and Jane, and Henry did not spare his wife the sight of his demonstrative affection for his new love. She had to bear the sneers and contempt of all those she had sneered at and abused for so long, and their laughter as well. She was haunted too by an old prophecy that in her days a queen of England would be burned alive. In the early years of her involvement with Henry Anne had assumed that the queen of the prophecy would be Katherine, but now she dreaded that it might well refer to herself. She was badly frightened when a fire broke out in her bedchamber early in 1536, and her satisfaction at Katherine’s death was clouded by fears for her own life. Toward the end Anne seems to have conceived a mystical link between Katherine’s death and her own, and when she heard that the old queen was gone at last she grew increasingly morbid about her future.

When no flaw could be found in the legalities of the marriage Henry determined to rid himself of Anne on political grounds. Alleging that the misconduct of a queen, if it threatened her husband’s security, was treasonous, he ordered Cromwell, Norfolk and a commission of others to investigate her morals. What they found convinced the commissioners, and the twenty-six peers who ruled unanimously against her at her trial on May 15, that the queen was a flagrant adulteress who had conspired with at least one of her lovers against the king’s life. The specific charges against Anne were that she had been unfaithful to Henry with three of his courtiers (Henry Norris, Francis Weston and William Brereton) and with a musician named Mark Smeaton, that she was guilty of incest with her brother George, and that she and Norris had exchanged a vow to
marry after Henry’s death—taken by her accusers as proof of a conspiracy to assassinate the king. There were lesser charges as well: that Anne and Norris exchanged medals implicating her in Katherine’s death by poison; that she gave money to Weston (which she admitted); that she laughed at Henry’s clothes and person, and, with her brother, made fun of the ballads he wrote; and that “she showed in various ways she did not love the king but was tired of him.”
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The most sensational of the indictments brought against Anne and her alleged accomplices revealed the sordid undercurrent of recrimination and bizarre conjecture in sexual matters that had spread through the court during Anne’s reign. George Boleyn was charged with “having spread reports which called in question whether his sister’s daughter was the king’s child.” In other words, it was being said that Anne’s brother had accused his sister of conceiving Elizabeth by someone other than Henry. The accusation was odd in that according to some accounts George Boleyn was himself held to be Elizabeth’s father, but other evidence brought out during the trial made it more plausible. Among the statements George was asked to confirm or deny was that Anne had told her sister-in-law that Henry “was impotent, having neither vigor nor strength [for intercourse].”
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This accusation, which despite stern admonitions the accused read aloud, much to the embarrassment of the court, may have been true, at least when Anne said it, or it may have been her way of attacking the king where he was most vulnerable in a moment of spite. But the suggestion alone was enough to cause a great deal of talk, and every ambassadorial dispatch that left London that week noted it in full.

A final charge accused Anne of a unique form of theological promiscuity. Chapuys recorded that the most Protestant of the bishops taught Anne that “according to their sect, it was allowable for a woman to ask for aid in other quarters, even among her own relatives,” whenever her husband was incapable of satisfying her. This outrageous accusation brought even the church into complicity with the adulterous queen, and showed just how eager Henry was to discredit her.

He was not disappointed. Though both Anne and her brother defended themselves ably—the latter made such a good impression that at one point spectators wagered ten to one he would be acquitted—both were condemned, along with Anne’s four other alleged lovers, who had been tried separately. Anne was sentenced to be beheaded, the first English queen to die on the block for treason. She asked, as a final courtesy, that her head be neatly severed, as in French executions, with a sword.

The evidence at Anne’s trial consisted of little more than the bawdy whisperings of courtiers, yet what made it significant was the inescapable importance of the succession, and the aging king’s reluctant admission
that he might die without leaving a legitimate son. His preoccupation with this problem led the men and women of his court to dwell on his sexual exploits, his married life and his potency with an exclusive fascination which at another court they would have reserved for their own. Anne Boleyn was in a sense a casualty of their collective preoccupation, and perhaps for this reason even her worst enemies found themselves in the end strangely disturbed by her fate and angry at the king for making such a spectacle of his relief at it.

During the two and a half weeks that Anne lay in the Tower Henry gave himself up to the carefree enjoyments of springtime. He banqueted every night in the company of beautiful women, danced lustily, drank until he could not stand, and then made his way back to the palace to the raucous accompaniment of shawms, drums and many choruses of tavern songs. Long after midnight the royal barge could be heard coming back to its mooring at Greenwich, with the king and his chamber singers bawling out songs from the stern, his voice booming loudest of all. The “skinny old hoyden” was out of the way at last, he told his companions with delight, and repeated again and again that Anne had been unfaithful to him with a hundred men, and had only kept his love through her spells and enchantments.
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On Friday, May 19, at eight in the morning, Anne was beheaded on Tower Green, before the great White Tower, by a swordsman from St. Omer. During her imprisonment she had joked about her coming execution, saying she would be known to posterity as Queen Lackhead, but in her hours of serious preparation for death she spoke often of Mary. Chapuys reported that she was genuinely remorseful about mistreating Mary and plotting her death. Charles V’s sister Mary, though, was cynical about the entire affair, and looked forward to the time when Henry, having tired of still a third wife, might order her to execution. “I think wives will hardly be well contented if such customs become general,” she wrote. As a vigorous and capable widow with no intention of remarrying, Mary of Hungary was in no danger from the precedent of Anne’s death, but she joined all women in hoping for deliverance. “Being of the feminine gender,” she wrote, “I will pray with the others that God may keep us from it.”
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Before the high altar at Peterborough the monks were reporting a miracle. The candles near the grave of Katherine of Aragon were lighting and extinguishing themselves of their own accord. The king was notified, and thirty men from his court arrived to witness the remarkable event. When they reported the sign to Henry he chose to interpret it as an occult confirmation, from the one she had wronged most grievously, of the justice of Anne’s execution. In some macabre way the king believed he was receiving permission from his first wife to carry out the ultimate punishment of his second.

My wofull hart in paynfull iveryness,

Which hath byn long plongung with thought unseyne,

Full lyk to droivne in wavis of dystres,

Saffe helpe and grace of my lord and soverayne,

Is nowe be hym so comfortide agayne

That I am bownde above all erthly thyng

To love and dred hym as my lord and kyng.

Anne Boleyn’s death put an end to nine years of uncertainty, danger, constant tension and sorrow. Anne had moved into Mary’s life at its happiest point, when as princess of Wales she was the admired center of her father’s banquets and entertainments and about to become the bride of a French prince. All that was swept away when the cataclysm of the divorce burst over the court, and the king’s outrageous fascination with his new sweetheart pushed Mary and her mother further and further into the background. What began as an indulgent flirtation became an international scandal, then a notorious legal issue and finally a serious influence in European politics. Through it all the princess of Wales was at first ignored, then dislodged from her household and ultimately disinherited. At eighteen she had become a friendless bastard, separated from her mother and living in humiliating subjection to the infant half-sister who was now princess in her stead. For most of the three years that Anne Boleyn was queen Mary lived in fear of death, menaced by her guardians, her terrifying stepmother and her heartless father. The older she grew the more the shocks, tensions and persecutions increased, and the pattern of her life was one of deepening and unrelieved misfortune. Then, as abruptly as it had begun, Anne’s power came to an end. The harm she had done remained, but the shadow of future harm was lifted.

Mary grew to adulthood surrounded by personalities, circumstances
and extremes of emotion exaggerated to the point of caricature. Her father was an outsize man of incalculable, semi-divine authority. Her mother was a heroine of remarkable personal courage whose life became a celebrated martyrdom. The woman who destroyed the calm of her family life was the Great Whore, probably the most reviled woman of her time. The discord in which they were involved became conflated into conflict between nations, creeds and spiritual powers. The contours of English religious life were being vastly changed as a result, and a new sort of Christianity without the pope was being attempted. Living in an ever worsening climate of hostility, mistrust and mortal danger Mary watched events unfold around these figures knowing that her life was at risk to their outcome.

All this amounted to a magnification of experience that predisposed her to see life in monumental proportions. She came to think in terms of absolutes, of overriding forces intervening to shatter, rescue or sustain her. If her life was to be significant, it too would have to be defined with reference to a purpose beyond the ordinary. In the months that followed Anne Boleyn’s death Mary was helped to define that purpose in a way that linked her personal fate to the political future of the English people.

In the first days after Anne died an atmosphere of lightness and gaiety spread over the court and capital, reflecting the general mood of popular rejoicing. “I cannot well describe the great joy the inhabitants of this city-have lately experienced and manifested” at the “fall and ruin” of the queen, Chapuys wrote at the time of her execution. The king appeared dressed entirely in white, as if to belie even the faintest inclination of mourning. Plans for his wedding to Jane Seymour were being finalized, and he set up a temporary residence for her a mile from the palace where she was waited on by officers from the royal household and feasted by the king’s cooks. The king’s stlkwomen and embroiderers had been at work dressing her sumptuously for some time, and her wedding clothes were already being prepared when Francis Bryan arrived to tell Jane the good news that Anne was dead.

A large measure of the people’s delight in the spring of 1536, the ambassador explained, came from their hope that Mary would be reinstated in her rights.
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The years of Anne’s ascendancy had not lessened Mary’s popularity. Few in the country had seen her since she was a child, but she had grown in the folk imagination from the beloved princess of Wales to a forlorn, motherless bastard—a figure deserving not only love but pity and warm loyalty besides. Katherine’s great legacy to Mary was the firm allegiance of the majority of the English people.

Wherever Mary was kept during her years of semi-captivity small crowds of country people always formed to watch her pass in her litter, or to catch a glimpse of her at a window or walking across an open ter
race on her way to mass. They looked for her now, waiting outside the palace and repeating the rumor that she would soon become princess of Wales again. When the countess of Salisbury returned to court it was assumed that Mary would be with her old governess, and a huge throng gathered at the palace gate to watch for her. Henry himself came out to speak to the crowd, explaining that Mary was not yet reinstalled in the palace but that she soon would be. The presence of so great a crowd so close to the palace reminded Henry how potent a political symbol his daughter had become, and made him irritable when his privy councilors brought up the delicate subject of what should now be done with her.

Three days after Anne went to the Tower Mary was moved to a more honorable residence, escorted with marked respect by Elizabeth’s household officers. In the new house dozens of well-wishers came to congratulate her on the reversal of her fortunes, and several members of her own and Katherine’s former households offered to enter her service. Mary was overjoyed to have these old servants near her again. Many of them had been dear to her when she was a child, and others had helped her to bear the hard years of her disgrace. But following Chapuys’ advice she did not take any of them into her service for the present; she would wait until Henry approved them. She must do nothing now to anger the king, who was being pressed from all sides to bring her to court, to give her a large establishment, to restore her to a place in the succession.

Chapuys was systematically visiting the privy councilors one by one and pointing out to each the diplomatic and political advantages of bringing Mary back to court, and was trying, through his contacts outside London, to put pressure on the gentlemen who would be coming to the Parliament summoned for the first week in June. Within the king’s Council the marquis of Exeter and the treasurer Fitzwilliam were urging a complete restoration of Mary’s rights, while even closer to the king’s ear his intended bride was now Mary’s most constant advocate.

Jane Seymour had been pressing for a reconciliation between Henry and Mary for months. Her entreaties were rooted as much in sentiment as in political expediency. She spoke for many who held the naive conviction that a restoration of harmony between the king and his daughter would sweep away all the disruptive changes in government and religion that had arisen out of the rift in the royal family. Henry, however, was looking forward, not back, and told Jane “that she must be out of her senses to think of such a thing,” and that she ought to think instead of her own future children. But Jane insisted that the people could not be content until Mary was returned to her place at her father’s side, and that without their reunion the country would face “ruin and desolation.”

The sincerity and imploring ardor of his new beloved touched the king, who had in any event already determined to recall Mary. In view of
her popularity he had no choice but to give her back some degree of honor, though the issue of her place, if any, in the succession would have to wait until Parliament met and redrafted the Act of Succession. She was recalled to court briefly late in May, and publicly received. There were feasts in her honor, and as an additional mark of favor many of Anne’s jewels were given to Mary. Some of these jewels had almost certainly been Katherine’s, for Anne had taken nearly every gem and chain her predecessor owned. There was an ironic justice in the fact that the jewels now came to Mary, but to judge from what she told Chapuys she was not eager for revenge in any form.
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Throughout Anne’s trial Mary had been hoping grounds for a divorce would be found, but less because of the injuries Anne had done to her mother and herself than for the sake of “the king’s honor and the relief of his conscience.”
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In a message to the ambassador she declared she had “willingly forgiven and forgotten” the past, and hated no one. Using a favorite expression of Katherine’s, she wrote that she “didn’t care a straw” whether Henry and Jane had sons whose succession rights were stronger than her own. Clearly what mattered most to her was the king’s affection—that he accept her, without qualification, as his beloved daughter.

Mary’s appearance at court shortly before the king’s marriage was only a first step toward that acceptance. She now appealed to Cromwell, whom she addressed as “one of her chief friends,” to help her gain the full measure of Henry’s benevolence. “Nobody dared to speak for me as long as that woman lived,” she admitted, but now that Anne was gone she hoped Cromwell would act as her go-between, interceding with the king on her behalf and assuring him of her desire to obey him as far as her conscience allowed. It soon became obvious that nothing less than the most abject submission would satisfy him. By her unshakable resistance to all the overt and subtle pressures to which Henry had subjected her Mary had cost him a good deal of frustration. She and Katherine both had reminded him that there were limits to his power at a time when he was pushing back those limits to an extent undreamed of even a decade earlier. In Henry’s view, his daughter had much to atone for. The price of his restored affection would be Mary’s complete and painful humbling to his will.

Her suit was in any case a peripheral matter, for the king was once again a bridegroom. Eleven days after Anne’s execution he married Jane Seymour at York Place in London, and following a brief country honeymoon brought her back to be proclaimed queen. She was not formally crowned, but in lieu of a coronation procession there was a parade of boats to escort her from Greenwich to Westminster, the king and queen riding in the royal barge and the guardsmen of the king’s bodyguard in a single great barge behind them. The warships and shore guns roared out
as they passed, and at Radcliff they slowed to admire the display and entertainment arranged by the imperial ambassador. A large tent bearing the arms of the empire had been erected on the bank, ornamented with banners that fluttered in the wind and flanked by an impressive display of ordnance. Under the tent stood Chapuys, resplendent in purple satin and surrounded by gentlemen in velvet coats. On his signal two small boats, one full of trumpeters, the other carrying musicians playing shawms and sackbuts, headed out into the river and followed the royal barge as the procession made its way toward the Tower, and the forty cannons he had assembled were shot off to salute the king and his new queen.
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The rise of the Seymours was associated with imperial interests and the cause of the old faith, and Chapuys was eager to maintain close ties with Jane in her new role. Two days after her return to Westminster he went with Henry to her chamber after mass and spoke to her awhile. After congratulating her on her marriage he alluded to Jane’s fidelity to Mary, remarking that of all the recent changes at court the one that pleased the people most was Mary’s return. He elaborated this opinion with the awkward sentiment that, without the pain and anxiety of labor, Jane had gained in Mary a treasured daughter who would please her more than her own children by the king.

Jane assured Chapuys she would do all she could to make peace between her husband and stepdaughter, though it was plain the king was bent on little but amusement. With a zest that recalled the early days of his reign he was passing the time with Jane and her ladies, dicing with his courtiers or honoring favored nobles with his presence at banquets. With a boatload of disguised companions he went one afternoon to a sumptuous entertainment that followed a triple wedding. He was dressed as a Turk, in long garments richly embroidered with gold thread and a black velvet hat with white feathers. After he had danced awhile he took off his mask and received the homage of the wedding guests, and then ordered his cooks to bring in the forty dishes of meat and decorative “subtleties” he had brought with him from the palace.
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Henry could no longer joust; the injuries from his heavy fall and his ulcerated legs now prevented it. But he could enjoy the “jousting and triumph” organized for his amusement in the early weeks of his marriage. Four boats loaded with combatants in full armor met on the river before York Place and exchanged fire from their guns for two hours. When one of the boats was disabled fighting men from the others boarded her, and in the confusion some of them fell in the river. Nearly all of them were fished out again, as it was low tide, but one, a servant of Sir Henry Knevet named Gates, was drowned. After this misfortune the king insisted that all the combatants exchange their metal swords for harmless wooden ones, and put wool and leather tips on the ends of their darts and
pikes. Even so one of the ships sank when a gun exploded on firing, and the experiment was quickly ended. The soggy mariners trotted off somewhat disgruntled to change their armor and prepare for a second joust on land, with Henry and Jane watching from the gatehouse.
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