Bloody Mary (26 page)

But if Mary’s time was spent agreeably enough in these years it was nonetheless time spent in expectation. The natural next step in her life was marriage, and rumors about who Mary’s husband would be were more or less constant at court and in the council chamber. In November of 1536, five months after her submission, Henry told Mary at dinner one night that he was seriously searching for a husband for her, and that he had a very suitable one in mind. He said much the same thing a few days later, now adding that the man he had in mind was Dom Luiz of Portugal, Charles V’s brother-in-law and preferred choice as Mary’s husband. In the fall of 1536 Henry was discouraged about the prospect of Jane’s having a son, and confided to Mary that since his queen would not provide him with a male heir he hoped his daughter would give him one. A legitimate grandson, he said, would be better than a bastard son.

Reports that the king intended to marry off his elder daughter were commonplace throughout the 1530s. Charles V had seen marriage to a foreign prince as by far the best solution to Mary’s dilemma during Anne’s reign, and recommended King James of Scotland, the French dauphin, and Dom Luiz as honorable matches for her. Henry let it be known that he was considering the voyvode of Poland as a potential son-in-law from 1532 on, and later, when he began to seek new political alliances with the Lutherans, he considered bestowing his daughter on a German prince. There was always the possibility that to punish Mary and remove any threat to his security she represented Henry might marry her to an Englishman of low birth, or to one of his trusted officials. Shortly after Katherine’s death Chapuys heard a rumor, taken seriously by most of Mary’s friends and supporters, that the king meant to marry her to Cromwell. Chapuys could not bring himself to believe it, but he traced the story to “one lord and one gentleman” who sincerely thought Henry was considering giving Mary to his principal secretary.
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By the fall of 1536, though, the field of candidates had narrowed. As the privy councilors noted shortly afterward, both Mary and Elizabeth were diplomatic assets which ought to be used to make allies. The two great powers on the continent, France and the empire, were currently alienated by England’s Protestant leanings (though both were actively soliciting Mary’s hand). Why not ease the diplomatic strains by means of a marriage alliance? Henry appeared to favor such a policy, and welcomed envoys from both the Hapsburg and Valois courts when they arrived in England empowered to negotiate the terms of a marriage contract. The French negotiator Gilles de la Pommeraye bustled about the court, telling every courtier in sight how advantageous a marriage between Mary and Charles, duke of Orleans and second in line to the
French throne, was bound to be. To the king’s councilors he repeated again and again Francis’ offer of a dower of eighty thousand ducats in revenues, plus a force of mercenaries to help put down the rebellion then troubling the north of England. Henry pretended not to hear these offers and took little notice of La Pommeraye, but he and his associates persisted, making themselves odious to Mary with their constant attentions and hints that they hoped she would soon be the bride of a Frenchman.
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In the end the French match fell through, chiefly becaiise La Pommeraye had been instructed to insist that before the marriage contract was drawn up Mary’s legitimacy had to be restored. The issue of her legitimacy and succession rights were to prove an obstacle to any marriage settlement, for several reasons. First, any prospective suitor would obviously prefer a bride with a claim to her father’s throne. But beyond this Mary’s status had a special importance. She was the living symbol of the scandal of Henry’s divorce and repudiation of the pope. To acknowledge her illegitimacy in the terms of a marriage contract would be to approve all that Henry had done to affront Katherine, the pope and the community of Christians. Much as he liked the idea of marrying his son to Henry’s daughter, Francis could not bring himself to accept her without a full restoration of her rights.

The emperor was less scrupulous, and gave his envoys much more flexibility in coming to terms with Henry. In offering the hand of Dom Luiz, the Portuguese infante, they were simply to make the best bargain they could. If Henry agreed to naming Mary as his successor in default of a male heir, so much the better. But if he would not agree to this, the imperial representatives were to draw up a settlement omitting all mention of the succession, and to be content with a large dowry of lands in England.

Henry gave the impression that he favored the imperial match. The infante was reported to be a “person of mature age, sensible, virtuous, and well-conditioned,” and would on his marriage to Mary be “entirely in the king’s power.”
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He was agreeable to living in England—Henry flatly refused to let Mary leave the country until Jane had a son, which at that time seemed unlikely—and he appeared to have no inconvenient political views or loyalties beyond his allegiance to his relative Charles V. Dom Luiz was a man of princely appearance, whose portraits showed a handsome, resolute, yet benevolent face. He was muscular in build, with a broad chest and strong arms, and he had proven himself fighting alongside Charles V at Tunis. He seemed in many ways the ideal son-in-law for Henry, despite the drawbacks of his staunch Catholicism and fidelity to the pope. But the imperial envoys got no further with Henry than the French. When he demanded that both Charles and the king of Portugal
declare his marriage to Katherine null as a preliminary to finalizing the betrothal, they balked, and though Dom Luiz remained a potential suitor the negotiators returned to Brussels.
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From Henry’s point of view the diplomatic rivalries generated by Mary’s availability were far more important than any betrothal that might be concluded. What he feared most was that France and the empire might end their current war and join forces against him, and his principal reason for favoring the candidacy of the infante was the prospect of an Anglo-imperial alliance against the French. His talk was less of dowries and grandchildren than of war and the threat of war. Pie was both frightened and angered by the recent behavior of the French king, who was becoming more and more belligerent and breaking the agreements he had made with the English long before. “Since Francis is trying to strengthen himself with alliances against me,” Henry was overheard to say, “I will take the initiative. I fear him not!” He paced up and down the Council chamber denouncing the French, gesticulating with his hands and swearing he did not give a fig for Francis.
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But if Henry showed no eagerness to conclude a marriage for his daughter those who opposed him had long known whom she ought to marry. The courtiers who had supported Katherine—the marquis and marchioness of Exeter, the Carews, the Poles and the northern lords who rose in the Pilgrimage of Grace—all favored a marriage between Mary and Reginald Pole. Next to the Emperor Charles, Pole had been Kath-erine’s choice for Mary, and she and Margaret Pole often spoke of uniting the two families both for dynastic reasons and as a way to atone for the judicial murder of the countess’ brother Edward, earl of Warwick, in 1499. Mary was predisposed to like Reginald by her strong affection for his mother, and though he was sixteen years her senior it was said she had been in love with him as a young girl.

In the mid-15 30s Pole was the most important English exile on the continent. Educated in England and Italy at the king’s expense, he had nonetheless refused to allow Henry to use his prodigious learning to promote the divorce. He did collect the opinions of other scholars for the king—for which he received a handsome remuneration—but would not commit himself against Katherine. As Henry moved closer and closer to a breach with Rome Pole decided to leave England for good, taking up residence in various Italian cities and finally at the Vatican, where Pope Paul III made him a member of a committee organized to reform the church. He had by this time become a celebrated international figure, as well known for his opposition to the divorce as for his learning. Charles V urged him to take a leading role in an English rebellion to overthrow Henry in 1535 and again during the northern rising in the following year, and the pope now made him a cardinal and gave him authority to act as
papal legate in England. Before he could get there the Pilgrimage was crushed, but Pole had shown himself willing to oppose Henry, whose tyranny and heresy he now denounced in the bitterest terms, on the battlefield if necessary. Henry saw him as a dangerous man, and dispatched assassins to kill him. Pole became a fugitive, traveling in disguise and with few attendants in order to escape notice, aware that other English exiles in Italy were being encouraged to regain Henry’s favor by murdering him.

Despite the highly adventurous life forced on him by circumstances Reginald Pole was the gentlest of men, preferring the quiet of his study to the turbulence of international politics. He was tenderhearted to a fault, and he wept easily; the uprooting of trees in a Roman garden once moved him to floods of tears. He was hardly a dashing figure, but he had courage and carried the blood of the House of York in his veins. He spoke with a moving eloquence that stood out in an age of rhetorical bombast, and he had the wisdom of a reflective thinker. All these qualities, combined with Pole’s stout adherence to her mother’s cause, could not but appeal to Mary. In the minds of a large number of her supporters, the match was already made.

Apparently Pole himself took the possibility of the marriage seriously, for in the spring of 1537 he confided to the emperor’s agents that he thought the unrest in England might lead to “his marrying the Princess himself.”
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With this eventuality in mind he was careful to take only deacon’s orders, not the full orders of a priest, so that although he was a cardinal of the Roman church he remained free to marry. Chapuys thought that Pole was the only Englishman Mary would accept as a husband, and Pole’s relatives, who were becoming more and more outspoken in their hostility to Henry’s authoritarian rule, began to speak of the union of Mary and the cardinal as a foregone conclusion. Margaret Pole’s two other sons, Henry, Lord Montague, and Geoffrey, put their hopes for a change of government in their famous brother, and believed Mary’s natural place was by his side. A servant of Lord Montague’s reported that he heard his master say “it were a meet marriage for Reginald Pole to have the Lady Mary, the king’s daughter,” and Montague’s principal household officials echoed this judgment. Geoffrey Pole had an even more idealistic vision. He saw the marriage of his brother and the true Tudor heiress as part of a grander scheme for change, with Henry’s perverse innovations swept away and the old order restored. With all the determination he could muster Geoffrey was heard to swear that “the lady Mary would have a title to the crown one day.”

Twene hope and drede

My lyfe 1 lede.

The search for Henry VIII’s fourth wife had begun within hours of his third wife’s death. The diplomats who conducted it found no shortage of eligible girls. There was the Danish Princess Christina, a captivating sixteen-year-old widow and niece of the emperor; there were other Hapsburg relatives, and the two lovely daughters of the duke of Cleves. There were so many French girls—among them Francis’ daughter Margaret, Anne of Lorraine, and the three daughters of the due de Guise, Marie, Louise and Renée—that Henry decided they should all be brought in a group to Calais where he could inspect them, dine and dance with them, and then make his choice. That anyone else could choose for him was unthinkable. “By God,” he told the French negotiators, “the thing touches me too near. I wish to see them and know them some time before deciding.”

There was a romantic simplicity in Henry’s attitude toward marriage. His union with Katherine had been a matter of state, but they got on well together during their good years and he was undeniably fond of her. His next two marriages had been love matches, with no diplomatic significance whatever. At forty-six, Henry had no stomach for a cold marriage of state. He wanted someone he could be comfortable with; he wanted to fall in love again. Hence his proposal to disport himself amid the French ladies at Calais. The French found the suggestion insulting and far from chivalrous. “Is this the way the knights of the Round Table treated their women?” they asked sarcastically. Henry would have to make his selection through an intermediary first: then that girl and no others would be brought to Calais for him to see.

Henry may have been overbearing in his matrimonial dealings, but
then he was generally in a mood to make unreasonable demands. He had just ordered hundreds of workmen to level an entire Surrey village to make room for the grandest palace yet built in England. Henry had never before been able to commission a palace to be constructed from the ground up; he had always lived in renovated royal dwellings built by his predecessors. But the palace he planned to raise in the fields of Surrey would live up to its name—Nonsuch—and would rival even the splendid palace of the French king at Chambord. Craftsmen were brought in great numbers to cut the timbers and build the walls of the huge structure, and Italian carvers, plasterers and sculptors were imported to ornament it. Tents erected for the artisans and laborers to live in for the years they worked at Nonsuch soon formed a new village to replace the one they had demolished, and it was not until 1541 that the king was able to move into the completed wings of the palace. Long before then, however, he came down to the site to watch his sculptors and stonemasons shape mythological and historical carvings around the walls and gates. At the center of the inner courtyard was the most imposing representation of all: a huge statue of Henry himself, many times larger than life, on his throne in a pose of majesty.

Nonsuch was an architectural metaphor of power. It was built with the spoils from another proof of royal power, the revenues from the sale of monastic lands. The dissolution of the greater monasteries was accomplished in these final years of the 1530s, and the undercurrent of outrage it produced reached its height with the spoliation of the country’s most venerated shrine. The tomb of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, an opulent, gorgeous monument to medieval piety, was as famous for its treasure as for the healing virtues of the martyr himself. The casket which held Becket’s body was encased in sheets of solid gold, and over the centuries pilgrims had brought sapphires, diamonds, emeralds, pearls, small rubies and the great rubies called baleases, coins and semi-precious stones to be fastened into the goldwork as a memorial to the saint. Some of these gems were said to be as large as goose eggs, but the most precious of them was a ruby, “not larger than a man’s thumb-nail,” which had ornamented the shrine for more than three centuries. It was called the “regal of France,” and it had such fire and brillance that even when the church was dark and the weather cloudy it could be seen clearly, glowing in its niche to the right of the altar.
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The shrine at Canterbury had long been the object of the king’s greed. Now in a unique if one-sided test of strength with the long-dead saint Henry managed to take Becket’s treasure for his own. First he proclaimed that “Thomas Becket, sometime bishop of Canterbury, and made a saint by the bishop of Rome’s authority, should from hence forth not be esteemed, named, reputed, nor called a saint,” and ordered all
Becket’s images removed from the churches. His festival was no longer to be observed, nor were services or offices to be read in his honor, “because it is found that he died like a traitor and rebel to his prince.” Becket had in fact been murdered by agents of his prince, Henry II, but he was now summoned to court as if he were a living traitor and brought to judgment. When he did not appear in answer to the summons he was convicted in his absence of rebellion and treason, and sentenced to be burned. (His bones were thrown into the flames.) As a traitor his goods were forfeit to the king, and royal agents methodically stripped the tomb and altar at Canterbury of their incalculable wealth in jewels.
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The spoils filled two huge chests, each of which could barely be moved by eight strong men. In the twelfth century the martyred Becket had triumphed over his king; in the sixteenth the king reversed the order of power again. No force from within the church was to be allowed to stand in his way, not even the beloved St. Thomas. Now when Henry sat on his throne, he wore in his thumb ring Becket’s flashing jewel, the regal of France.
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Henry’s extravagant matrimonial conditions, his grandiose building plans and his arrogant humbling of Becket were all part of a cultivated pose of might intended to disguise a growing feeling of vulnerability. The most urgent purpose of his marriage negotiations was to forestall a feared declaration of war from the combined forces of France and the empire. Henry was prepared to go to any lengths to buy off either partner in this dreaded alliance. When the French candidates proved unsatisfactory, or took other husbands, Henry proposed quadruple, even quintuple weddings with Hapsburg partners. One plan would have paired Henry and his three children with four eligible relatives of the emperor; another saw him offer himself, Mary and Elizabeth plus Mary Howard and his niece Margaret Douglas in a similar bid. Meanwhile he tried to use the long-delayed negotiations with Charles over the proposed marriage of Mary and Dom Luiz of Portugal to alienate Mary from the emperor and draw her more securely to him.

In the spring of 1538 Henry began to speak very disparagingly of Charles’ intentions whenever he saw Mary, telling her the emperor was only pretending to favor the marriage to Dom Luiz while offering such dishonorable terms that Henry could not possibly accept them. On into the summer months he continued to try to turn her against her imperial cousin, until finally at the end of August he urged her to complain about the delays to Chapuys. Cromwell wrote a letter setting out her supposed grievances, and told her to communicate these to the ambassador, “coupled with such gentle terms as her own wisdom and natural discretion might suggest.”

When Mary saw Chapuys she did as she was told. Following Cromwell’s letter point by point she complained about the emperor’s dissimula
tion, his failure to show her the cousinly kindness and friendship she expected of him, and his miserly dower. Even merchants give one fourth of their yearly income to their daughters on their wedding day, she said, echoing Cromwell; surely an emperor could offer more than the twenty thousand ducats Charles proposed. Why, after so many fine words had been exchanged, had nothing been settled? She was only a woman, Mary concluded, and could not help saying these things. It was not that she was anxious to have the matter settled for reasons of her own, but that she wanted to obey her father “in whom, after God, she placed all her trust.”
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Having rehearsed all of Cromwell’s points and arguments Mary told Chapuys her real feelings. She understood that the inconclusiveness of the negotiations was not the result of bad faith on the imperial side. She did not believe what her father said against Charles, and she stood ready to do whatever he asked of her in the issue of her marriage. She had complete trust in Charles, she assured Chapuys, “in whom next to God she placed all her hopes.” Her assurances of loyalty were expressed in language so strong it seemed almost forced. She held the emperor in the place of “father and mother,” and was so affectionately attached to him that “it seemed to her almost impossible to have such an affection and love for a kinsman.”
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Mary’s effusiveness was almost certainly the product of new uncertainties about her safety. With the possibility of war looming, Henry was restricting her movements and doing his best to direct her thinking as well. If he thought that merely by denouncing his enemy’s bad faith he could destroy Mary’s loyalty to the man who had been the symbol of her hopes for ten years and more, he was deluded. In fact he constantly underestimated Mary’s shrewdness and overestimated both her gullibility and his own charm. But however deep his misreading of her Mary was still in an awkward political position, and Chapuys was uneasy enough about her safety to raise again the old subject of a possible escape. She replied that for the time being she preferred to wait and hope that her situation would improve, and that her father would “show more consideration for her, or cause her to be more respected and better treated than she had been until now.”
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In the summer of 1538 Mary was uneasy, if not yet fearful, about where she stood in her father’s estimation. She still wrote to him, and to Cromwell (her “sheet anchor next the king”) in the most subservient language imaginable, aware that even the slightest rumor or hint of suspicious behavior might anger them both. A letter she wrote to Cromwell at about this time reveals her state of mind. She had taken some strangers into her house for a brief time—who they were is not recorded—and the incident had been reported to the Privy Council in a way that put Mary’s
trustworthiness in doubt. Cromwell wrote her a strong letter of warning, ordering her not to do anything in future which “might seem to give any-other occasion than should be expedient” for her. Mary wrote back thanking Cromwell for his “gentle and friendly” letter and assuring him she would never lodge anyone in her household again. She begged him to continue to advise her and to be her advocate with her father, adding that she would rather endure physical harm than lose even the smallest part of the king’s favor.
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Her reference to physical harm was in keeping with the atmosphere of menace that hung over the court and country in these years. Henry was becoming more and more capricious, and he seemed to take inordinate pleasure in his powers of life and death. Executions, threatened and real, multiplied in the late 1530s and early 1540s, keeping pace with the mounting popular opposition to the king. Ballad makers who put political verses to traditional tunes were arrested and condemned; at least one of them dared to set new words against Henry to one of Henry’s own tunes. In the English-held territory of Calais two priests were hanged and quartered for treason, and the story of how they lived on during their torture was carried back across the Channel to be told and retold all over London. After they were hanged, it was said, they were cut down alive and helped the hangman to take off their clothes. Then, strapped to a board beside the scaffold, their bellies were cut open and their intestines pulled out and burned, and still the priests did not die but “spake always till their hearts were pulled out of their bodies.”
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Random violence in the London streets seemed to follow the pattern of judicial executions. Citizens on their way to mass or to business were shot or stabbed by anonymous attackers; thieves became bolder than ever. And there was a rash of suicides. One Mrs. Allen, a clerk’s wife, cut her throat with a knife “by the instigation of the devil,” and when the curate and the neighbors burst in to try to save her she could not speak. Because she knocked on her breast and held her hands up as a sign of contrition the priest gave her the last rites, and did not insist that she be given the burial of a suicide in unconsecrated ground. The grisly climax to these events was the execution of the hangman of London himself, a man who had become a macabre celebrity in his own right and who was known as “a cunning butcher in quartering of men.” With two accomplices he had robbed a booth at Bartholomew Fair, and was caught and hanged in his turn.
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At court too crime seemed to be increasing. Two archers of the guard named Davenport and Chapman were hanged when it was found they had waylaid and robbed a merchant near the palace.
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A serving boy in the pay of one of the privy chamber gentlemen was found guilty of stealing a purse with eleven pounds in coin and one of the king’s jewels. A gal
lows was built at the end of the tiltyard at Westminster, the noose was placed around the boy’s neck, and the hangman was just taking the ladder from the gallows when the king sent his pardon and the boy was freed.
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In some dark way it gave Henry particular satisfaction to order a dreadful punishment, let the victim suffer all the agonies of hopeless anticipation of it, and then set him free at the last moment. When Sir Edmund Knevet struck another courtier the king sentenced him to lose his hand. A chopping block was immediately brought and the hand bound to it. The master cook, always ready to stand in for the executioner in minor mutilations, sharpened his hatchet. The sergeant of the scullery stood by with his mallet, and the irons were placed in the fire to sear the wound before the surgeon bound it with his searing cloth. When all was in readiness the king suddenly postponed the procedure until after dinner and then, when the unfortunate Knevet had sweated away another several hours, just as suddenly pardoned him.
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