Bloody Mary (23 page)

He appealed to her sense of her own destiny, to that future Mary had been protecting when she determined to escape instead of following her mother’s example of passive martyrdom. If she yielded now, he told her, she would be doing much more than saving her own life. She would be preserving the instrument of England’s tranquillity to come. She was the country’s hope. Only if she survived could all the disorders of recent years be reversed and true government and the true faith restored. To dissemble in the small matter of the document of submission was to serve the great matter of her own and her country’s future.
¹⁴

The idealistic hope Chapuys appealed to in Mary had little or no political substance. Few now believed she would ever come to the throne. Her sex, her clouded status in law, and Jane’s unborn children all stood between Mary and the crown. But though Mary saw these things as clearly as anyone else she persisted in the belief that she had up to now been spared in order to perform an important work, and Chapuys made her see that she must not thwart this destiny by refusing to use any means possible to save herself.

Swayed by the ambassador’s urging, and impelled by an inexplicable faith in a hidden future, Mary made up her mind to act. She did not read the Submission—a final protection allowing her to say later that she did not know the contents of what she was endorsing—but she signed it, writing out the protest at the same time and leaving the rest to God.

Weep, weep O Walsingham!

Whose days are nights;

Blessings turrid to blasphemies—

Holy deeds to despites.

Sin is where Our Lady sat,

Heaven is turned to hell;

Satan sits where Our Lord did sway:

Walsingham, Oh, farewell!

Shortly after Mary’s twentieth birthday the destruction of the monasteries began. The monks and nuns were turned out, the convent buildings were plundered of their treasures, and when everything of value had been taken, the walls were thrown down. Old abbeys whose walls were too strong to be breached were mined and then blown up with gunpowder.
¹

Royal officers took possession of each of the houses in turn. All that had belonged to the monks was now the property of the king, to be administered through his new “court of the augmentations of the revenues of the king’s crown,” and nothing of value was overlooked. The treasure in the crypt, the golden vessels, altarpieces and candlabras were packed in chests and carted off to the royal treasure house. The jewels the faithful had given to adorn the tombs and reliquaries of the saints were ripped from their settings and confiscated, and every ornament, bowl, pitcher and wooden trencher was seized, boxed and sent to London. The furnishings and hangings were sold, along with the cows, sheep and pigs and the grain and other foodstuffs in the barns. The crops were harvested and marketed by the royal commissioners, and the outbuildings were emptied of their tools, presses, plows and hayrakes. Even the lead from the roofs was stripped off and melted down for resale. The bells, many of them
cast three or four centuries earlier and each lovingly named and christened by the monks, were taken down from their towers and hauled away.

By July of 1536 the effects of the campaign of destruction were highly visible. Monastic ruins scarred the countryside, and the human detritus too was very much in evidence. “It is a lamentable thing to see a legion of monks and nuns who have been chased trom their monasteries wandering miserably hither and thither seeking means to live,” one observer wrote. Many of these men and women had known no other home but the cloister since childhood; without their religious vocation they “knew not how to live.”
²
More ominous were the social changes brought by the dismantling of the monasteries. They had been important economic as well as religious institutions, renting thousands of acres of land to rural tenants, employing villagers as laborers and servants, and buying locally produced crafts. Their disappearance would radically change rural life, and even those who hated the church admitted with alarm that the passing of the monks would mean hardship for the country people they had lived among for so long.

At first only the smaller houses were suppressed, those with twelve or fewer religious and worth less than two hundred pounds a year in revenues. Some effort was made to find refuge in other houses for the displaced monks and nuns, and a few of the monks became secular clerics. But though the destruction of monastic life would not be complete for several years its course was already clear. It could not be long before the crown seized the larger houses, putting an end to a monastic tradition stretching back to the days of the Venerable Bede in the early middle ages. In 1537 the first of these great old foundations, the Cistercian abbey of Furness, was surrendered to the king by its abbot, and in succeeding months other Cistercian and Benedictine establishments followed the same pattern.

It is thought that fewer than ten thousand religious were affected by the first wave of closings, but numbers alone tell little about what the final interruption of monastic spirituality meant to the population as a whole. The pulling down of the abbeys was evidence of the most startling and immediate kind that England was being swept into a new religious order. To be sure, the king’s breach with the pope had been as radical an alteration in the faith as the destruction of the monasteries, if not more so. But the pope’s influence had been invisible, whereas the monasteries were an immemorial part of the landscape. There were something less than six hundred religious houses in England, one for every ten parishes at least, and few in the population lived far from the sound of monastery bells or the sight of monastery fields. The generation born in the 1530s would grow to maturity amid monastic ruins.

Of course, since medieval times the very ubiquity of the monks and nuns had led to bitter criticism from laymen. The monks were accused of corruption, immorality and spiritual apathy; the nuns were denounced as luxury-loving and immoral. These time-honored criticisms the agents of Henry VIII now proposed to document, in order to provide a moral justification for the suppression. Teams of inspectors, or visitors, traveling in Yorkshire in 1536 found more than enough evidence of spiritual decline. The most obvious abuses were sexual sins. Dozens of monks admitted they had broken their vows of chastity; one monk confessed to incest with his own sister, another, who was prior of his house, told the visitors he had had seven mistresses. Pregnant nuns were not rare, and one religious at Cartemell had six children. Homosexuality was by far the most common sin against the monastic rule. Nearly every monastery had its “sodomites,” and some mature monks were accused by their colleagues of seducing the young boys brought in as novices at the age of thirteen or younger. There was criminality too—theft, assault and, at Pontefract, a conspiracy among three monks to murder the prior.

The official visitors took careful note not only of abuses of this kind but of superstitious practices the religious encouraged among the country people. Every monastery had its relics, its shrines and its saintly images, all of which were severely discredited by the Protestant teachings now sweeping England. The nuns of Wallingwells treasured the comb of St. Edward, the monks of Shelford preserved the candle Mary carried at her purification. At Arden the countrywomen prayed to the image of St. Bride to help them find their lost cows or cure their sick ones. Pregnant women in every parish sent to the local monastery for the girdle of St. Francis—or St. Thomas, St. Peter, St. Bernard or the virgin Mary—to place over their bellies to ease delivery, and touched the wimple of St. Ethelrede when they had sore throats. Simon de Montfort’s foot was also efficacious, as was Thomas of Lancaster’s hat. At Repton, St. Guthlac’s bell was said to relieve headaches, while at Bury St. Edmunds the faithful put the skull of St. Petronilla on their heads, hoping to be delivered from fever. As significant as the corrupt morals and superstitions the visitors reported was the overwhelming evidence that many, in some cases most, of those living the religious life were persisting in it against their will. Everywhere they found men and women who “sought to put off the habit”; at Langley, they noted, “almost all seek release.”
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That so many monks and nuns should long to be delivered from what to them had become a burdensome life was perhaps the most eloquent testimony that monasticism was collapsing under its own weight. The ascetic ideal had not been entirely lost, but it was thriving best among the poor theologians at the universities, who rose before dawn, studied fifteen hours a day, and were content to share a “penny piece of beef” and its
broth among four. These “living saints” had no fires in their rooms, and were forced to run up and down the halls for half an hour before going to bed to make sure they didn’t freeze during the night. By comparison a religious like John Melford, abbot of Bury St. Edmunds, lived the life of a dissolute courtier. He “delights in the company of women,” the York visitors wrote, “and in sumptuous banquets; he delights in cards and dice, lives much in his granges, and does not preach.”
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However fixed their place in English society, the monasteries had clearly fallen on evil days. But if the monasteries were indeed in need of reform, the remedy provided by the royal government was equally harmful to spiritual life. Once the monks and nuns had been expelled, the lands of the church, which may have totaled as much as one-third of all the land in England, were sold off to peers, courtiers, crown officials, industrialists and country gentlemen for just under
£
800,000. A small percentage of the properties were given away to royal servants like Cromwell, who along with his nephew Richard received twelve abbeys, but most were sold outright to finance the growing cost of government. Cromwell, who as vicar general was the chief strategist of the dissolution, was acutely aware of the depleted royal treasury and of England’s precarious diplomatic situation. If there should be war, bankruptcy would come sooner than victory, and no strong Protestant alliance had yet been forged to replace the old ties to France and the empire. Monastic wealth was sacrificed to the fiscal needs of the state, and from the king’s point of view only good could result.

The ultimate outcome of the transfer of monastic properties to secular hands, though, was a harvest of cynicism. Where the cloisters and chapels were not simply left to rot their new owners put them to bizarre or blasphemous uses. One gentleman built a mansion on the site of a former Carthusian house, using the cloister itself for a parlor. A cloth manufacturer, Jack of Newbury, bought up as many abbeys as he could to use as factories. And most enterprising of all, the former prior of the Gilber-tine house of Watton, Robert Holgate, took advantage of the dissolution to strike an unholy bargain with the king. He traded his monastery to Henry in return for the right to keep its revenues for himself as long as he lived. Holgate made himself useful to the king as archbishop of York, bringing some sixty-seven manors into Henry’s hands, all the while amassing greater and greater personal wealth from the profits of the dissolution. In less than ten years he was reputed to be the wealthiest prelate in England.

Holgate’s example was far from unique. In the end Catholics bought more church land and profited more from the spiritual traffic with the crown than Protestants. Overall the destruction of the monasteries unleashed a degree of greed far greater than any the corrupt monks had
ever displayed. It embittered many among the devout without consolidating the loyalty of any segment of the population, while in the north, where rebellion had been in the air for years, it was soon to trigger a massive appeal to religious sentiment and tradition in the rising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace.

As the monastic households disintegrated Mary’s was being reorganized. In the aftermath of her capitulation Henry gave orders that new officers and servants should be chosen for her, and considered, with his Council, the many requests he received from persons hoping to enter her service. There were, first of all, several men and women who had been in Katherine’s tiny suite. One of Katherine’s women, Elizabeth Harvey, asked to be allowed to join Mary’s household but was refused; another, Elizabeth Darrell, had already asked to be taken into Jane’s service some months earlier, as she saw no hope that Mary would ever yield to her father and so despaired of her future. Katherine’s apothecary Juan de Soto, who was to have a long future in Mary’s household, now joined its rolls, as did Anthony Roke, sometime courier for Katherine and, in Mary’s words, “an honest man” whom she “loved well” and wished to repay for his fidelity. Three other women she asked for in particular. These were Mary Brown, her former maid, “whom for her virtue I love and could be glad to have in my company,” and Margaret Baynton and Susan Claren-cieux, two women who according to Mary regretted her former disobedience and were glad when she “inclined to duty.”

Susan Clarencieux deserves particular emphasis. She had served Mary since the latter’s childhood, and along with one or two others was the most long-established member of Mary’s suite. Her name was Susan (or Susanna) Teong, but because her father had been Clarencieux Herald she was always referred to as Mistress Clarencieux. Perhaps because she was someone Mary had loved as a child, she became the unofficial favorite among the ladies and gentlewomen now appointed to attend her. She remained with Mary, “ever in principal place about her,” for the rest of Mary’s life. Familiar faces from Mary’s former household as princess of Wales now reappeared: her cook, restored to her with the help of Henry’s councilor Thomas Wriothesley, and Randal Dodd, an avuncular figure named often in her letters who had been among the last to leave Mary in 1533 and was now among the first to return, with the office of gentleman usher. The rest of those who made up her establishment—the yeomen, grooms, footmen and menials of the kitchen and laundry—are anonymous in the records, though at least one of them, a clerk of the kitchen, came from Henry Fitzroy’s household, disbanded after his death.

Long before the household list was complete the climactic event of Mary’s summer took place. She was brought from Hunsdon, riding at
night with a few attendants, to a country house near the court. Henry and Jane met her there, and in this informal setting Mary and her father met and spoke, not as king and subject but as father and daughter, for the first time in five years. He had last seen her as a girl of fifteen, when to judge from a portrait of Mary painted at about that time she was a wide-eyed, thin-faced waif with a slightly hunted look. He now saw a woman of medium height and trim build who looked arrestingly like himself. She had his fresh coloring, his firm, small mouth, his pale eyebrows and intense gray eyes. Mary’s face was heart-shaped, and dominated by a very wide, high forehead which was made to appear even more prominent by her smoothed hairstyle and domed headdresses. Her face was alert and highly intelligent, and her habitual expression was one of faint amusement that sharpened readily to sarcasm or disdain. Like her father Mary was nearsighted, and what many took to be a look of penetrating scrutiny in both father and daughter was in fact the frown of myopia.