Bloody Mary (3 page)

Henry’s pleasurable speculations about his son were understandable, for since his marriage he had had ample reason to doubt whether his wife could give him a son at all. Katherine’s childless first marriage, the frailty of her health and a miscarriage the previous year had all pointed to the possibility of barrenness.

Katherine of Aragon had come to England ten years earlier, when Henry was a boy, to marry his older brother Arthur. The joining of the Tudor heir to a younger daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain raised England’s prestige abroad, but only temporarily. Katherine did not become pregnant—indeed she was to swear later that the marriage had not been consummated—and the death of the consumptive prince left her widowed at sixteen. Kept in England as a hostage until her father paid the final installment of her dowry, something he showed no inclination to do, Katherine spent the next eight years uncertain of her status and her prospects. Apart from the title Princess Dowager she had nothing to show for her time in England. She had no money, no friends outside her small retinue of Spanish servants, and she was an obvious nuisance both to her father-in-law Henry VII and her father Ferdinand. Her beloved mother, the valiant Isabella, was dead; her favorite sister, Joanna, wrote at first infrequently and then not at all.

In her anxious isolation Katherine turned to God. By the time she was twenty she had apparently decided to renounce worldly things and subject herself to the harsh demands of an ascetic life. Someone at the court became concerned enough about the harm this relentless praying and fasting might do to write to the pope. Julius wrote back ordering that her regimen be relaxed, and stating specifically that it threatened to hamper her ability to conceive and bear children in the future. It must certainly have made worse the ailments that had afflicted her since reaching adolescence: tertian fever and a troublesome irregularity in the menstrual cycle which, after her marriage to Henry, led Katherine into repeated misjudgments about whether or not she was pregnant.

When Henry became king on his father’s death in 1509, the same diplomatic advantages that had compelled Arthur’s marriage to Katherine now led Henry to marry her, after receiving the papal dispensation
required to legitimize in the eyes of the church the joining of a man with his brother’s widow. To Henry’s relief, Katherine’s bedchamber women pronounced her pregnant soon after the wedding in June, but late in the following January the child was born prematurely, a stillborn daughter. No one but the king, two Spanish women and Katherine’s physician and chancellor knew of her misfortune; Henry kept up the pretense of her continued pregnancy by ordering sumptuous fittings for the royal nursery for the confinement expected in March. The queen was willing to go to any length to hide the truth, and went through the public ceremony of withdrawing for her confinement knowing she could not prolong the deceit much longer. In a transparent attempt to save face it was given out by Katherine’s confessor that she had been pregnant with twins, only one of which had been stillborn, and that she was confined to await the birth of the second child. But through his spies the Spanish ambassador had learned that she had begun to menstruate again, at least for a time, and from February through the end of May reports of abdominal swelling and deflating, ceasing and returning of the menses succeeded one another to everyone’s confusion. Henry was annoyed and his privy councilors angry, though they had the tact to blame not Katherine but her bedchamber women for the “error.” The ambassador’s own conclusion was that “some irregularity in her eating and the food she takes cause her some trouble, the consequence of which is that she does not menstruate as she should.”

Adding to the queen’s anxieties was Henry’s first recorded infidelity. The woman was a sister of the duke of Buckingham, who lived in the palace with her husband. Another of the duke’s sisters found out about the affair, and told both her brother and her sister’s husband all she knew. A scene between Buckingham and the king followed, and the upshot was that the duke, mortally offended, left the palace and the king’s mistress was shut away in a convent where no one was allowed to see her. Henry took out his anger on the talebearing sister, banishing her permanently from the court. This in turn angered Katherine—the girl was among her intimates—and led to a fiery exchange between the king and queen. Courtiers wrote that the atmosphere was thick with tension between them, and harmony was not fully restored for some time.

Through all these domestic upheavals what Katherine feared most was her father’s displeasure. Late in May she finally found the courage to write him about the stillbirth. She had not written before, she explained, because a stillbirth “is considered here an ill omen.” She begged Ferdinand not to be angry with her, but to look on her ill luck “as an act of God.” And she hurried to add the good news that she believed herself pregnant once again.

This time there was no error. The child came to full term without incident,
and the birth was normal. The doubts about the queen’s capacity for motherhood were laid to rest. On New Year’s Day, when by custom valuable gifts were exchanged at court, Katherine presented Henry with the finest gift of all: a son.

When the jousts were over and the prizes bestowed, the knights retired to disarm and, after evensong, went in to supper. A banquet had been prepared, and all the foreign ambassadors joined the nobles and officials of the court and their ladies in dining with the king and queen. When the tables had been removed, the entire company reassembled in a great hall to see the entertainments. Benches and a scaffolding of wooden railings held a sizable crowd from outside the palace. The gentlemen of Henry’s chapel, whose singing observers called angelic, sang an interlude, and several new songs written for the occasion. After the singing Henry called for O’Donnell, an Irish lord, whom he knighted in the presence of the ambassadors. And then, at his signaling the minstrels to play, the dancing began.

At first the king joined in the dancing (the queen was not yet able to), partnering in turn several of Katherine’s waiting maids while she looked on, smiling at his nimbleness and enthusiasm. In dancing as in jousting, Henry customarily did better than anyone else, especially in the quick hops, turns and double steps of the
saltarello.
At the height of the dancing, the king contrived to slip away; only Katherine and a few others knew that he had gone. It was a favorite amusement of his to leave a group without being noticed, then to return incognito at the head of a troupe of players or musicians, or as the chief performer in a pageant. He loved to confront the courtiers in disguise, then to watch their perplexity—for they never knew which mask hid the king’s face. Catching people off balance was a childlike way of reminding them that behind his affable appearance Henry was always in control of the situation. He meant to be playful, but the habit had more than a hint of menace about it. It was manipulative, and Henry’s actual power to manipulate his subjects gave it the double character of a jest and a threat.

Katherine was a favorite target of this game. Late in her first pregnancy the king and a handful of courtiers strode into her bedchamber very early one morning, dressed as Robin Hood’s outlaws, their faces hidden under hoods of rough cloth. The queen was startled and embarrassed. No one was allowed to enter her private rooms unannounced. The ladies who were attending to her dress and arranging her hair took fright at first—the outlaws were armed with long swords and bows and arrows—but relaxed as the queen regained her composure and went along with the artifice. The outlaws demanded to dance with the ladies;
the queen agreed. Finally after a half hour or so of this Henry pulled off his hood and the dancers laughed with relief.

A few minutes after Henry disappeared from the great hall, the dance music ended and trumpets sounded to announce the entry of yet another pageant on wheels. It was rolled part way into the hall, the rest remaining behind a large tapestry, and a richly dressed gentleman came out of its garden setting to explain the theme of the spectacle. He was standing in a bower of pleasure, he said, and in a golden arbor within the bower were lords and ladies who desired to entertain the queen and her ladies, with her permission. Katherine answered that she and all the assembled company were very anxious to see the performers in the arbor. Immediately the tapestry was removed and the pageant rolled into full view.

For a dazzling instant, in the light of the torches, it was as if the fairytale world of chivalric romance had come to life in the great hall. Growing in the garden of pleasure were hawthorn, wild roses and flowering vines, and beneath them a thick growth of flowers. All were made of green damask, silk and satin, enclosed by pillars covered in cloth of gold. In the gilded arbor stood six ladies in green and silver gowns, their skirts overlaid with a network of golden letters H and K laced together. The dresses and high headdresses of the women and the rich coats of their six companions were covered with glittering spangles, and the caps, hose and purple satin garments of the men bore both the golden monograms and letters spelling out their names: Loyal Heart (the king), Good Valour, Good Hope, Valiant Desire, Good Faith and Loyal Love.

When the crowd had had time to admire them the twelve performers came down out of the pageant, which was rolled into a corner to make room for them to dance. Minstrels in matching costumes began to play, and the six couples paced out the intricate pattern of steps they had been learning for weeks. They had not finished their dance, though, when from the crowd seated on the scaffolding dozens of people suddenly rushed to the pageant and began tearing off the gold and silver ornaments. (On the previous day the forest pageant had been brought into the great hall after the joust, where the king’s own guardsmen and gentlemen of the court had torn it to shreds, carrying off every scrap of valuable cloth and every carefully made tree and shrub. Two of the men set to guard it had had their heads broken, and the others were driven off by force. Nothing but the bare timber, the revels master wrote, was left for the king’s use.) The Lord Steward and head officers of the hall now ran into the crowd and called loudly for the guard, but fearing a brawl if they tried to use force, they stood back as the pleasure garden was stripped to the boards.

Henry, who had gone on dancing during the interruption, finished his
measure and then, overlooking the turmoil at the far end of the room, invited the noblewomen and ambassadors among the onlookers to take the golden letters off his costume and keep them as gifts. But “the common people perceiving,” a chronicler wrote, “ran to the king and stripped him into his hose and doublet, and all his companions in like wise.” One of the dancers, Thomas Knevet, tried to escape the plunderers by climbing up onto a stage, but they climbed after him and he too “lost his apparel.” Not until the crowd began despoiling the ladies did Henry call in his guard. Their abrupt appearance startled the crowd, which was pushed back far enough to let Henry and Katherine and her ladies get away through a side door.

Upstairs, in Henry’s chamber, a midnight supper was ordered for all the survivors of the rout. Henry, more amused than angry at what had happened, “turned all these hurts to laughing and game,” and told his companions to consider all they had lost as largesse, bestowed on the spectators as a mark of honor. Apparently he was convincing, for the supper was an unusually merry one, and the two days of celebration ended in “mirth and gladness.”

There was gladness too among the “rude people” who managed to bring away the golden spangles and other ornaments. With a few exceptions, they were found to be of fine gold, made from the bullion in the royal treasury; Henry had ordered the gold bars to be melted down for the use of the revels master. Many of the adornments were of great value. A sailor who managed to take several of the golden letters from the dancers’ coats sold them afterward to a goldsmith for nearly four pounds—an enormous sum at a time when master mariners earned three pounds a year.

The sailor, the guardsmen and grooms, the Londoners and the courtiers would long remember the tourney for Prince Henry, and the king who had been champion, dancer, playactor and, in the end, helpless victim of the greedy crowd who adored him. But the object of the celebrations, the infant prince, they would soon forget. Despite the care of his nurses and rockers at Richmond Palace, he grew sickly. Eight days after the tourney ended he died.

Katherine, who had been away from her baby for weeks, was inconsolable. Her child was dead, and with him her renewed hope of motherhood. Henry, bewildered and grief-stricken, wept and swore and bellowed at his servants. His grandiose plans for the boy’s future and his own were thwarted. He consoled his wife and then stalked off to tide out his frustrations on the tilting ground.

Whoso that wyll hymselff applye

To passe the tyme of youth joly,

Avaunce hym to the companye

Of lusty bloddys and chevalry.

Two years after the death of the New Year’s boy Henry VIII crossed the Channel and, at the head of a large army, rode to war against the French. He had long since ceased to mourn the tragedy of his son’s death. At twenty-one he was still under the tutelage of the councilors who had guided his government since the beginning of his reign, but more and more his own style was asserting itself. The expedition to France was clear evidence of this. No English army had invaded the continent within living memory, and it had been the considered policy of Henry’s father to gain his diplomatic ends without the expense and risk of war, Henry’s advisers urged the young king not to endanger England by subjecting himself to the hazards of battle, but their arguments were merely logical. Other persuasions touched Henry nearer his heart.

At the start of the sixteenth century the business of war was still central to the chivalric imagination. It was the nature of a great king to be a knight first and a statesman afterward; all of Henry’s most famous predecessors had proved that, from Edward I campaigning in Wales to Edward III and his sons in the Hundred Years’ War. The feudal society that produced the warrior aristocracy had disintegrated generations earlier, but the personal values of the knightly class—fearlessness and hardiness in combat, indomitability, generosity, courtesy to enemies and allies alike, fidelity to a strict code of honor—were all the more fiercely prized as the knights’ purely military usefulness waned. And models of individual valor were more plentiful now than at any time since the days of Richard Lionheart and Saladin. Chief among them was Henry’s older contem
porary the Chevalier de Bayard, whose exploits in the Italian wars were well known at Henry’s court. On one occasion, it was said, he defended a bridge against an assault of two hundred Spanish soldiers, and another time he magnanimously refused a reward of twenty-five hundred ducats offered by a grateful nobleman whose wife and daughters Bayard had saved from dishonor. Until he had proved himself worthy of a similar reputation, Henry would not attain full stature as a monarch. And so, in the spring of 1513, he laid his plans for war.

By June the thousands of bowstaves, arrows, and barrels of flour and beer were assembled and loaded. Suits of armor had been ordered from the armaments factories of northern Italy, and hundreds of tents were sewn and folded for shipment. The larger tents had names: White Hart, Greyhound, Feather, Cup of Gold, Mountain, Gold Hynd, World, Flower de Lyce. The artillery pieces too—the minions, lizards and demi-culverins—had been christened Crown, Garter, Rose and Virago. One of the great curtows was called The Sun Arising. The serpentines bore the heraldic titles of Mermaid, Griffon, Olyvant and Antelope; the largest cannons of all, whose twenty-pound iron shot took so long to load they could only be fired thirty times in a day, were dubbed The Twelve Apostles.

The term was apt, for Henry’s campaign had the official status of a crusade. Julius II’s anger at the French king led him to issue a papal brief taking the kingdom away from Louis and giving it to Henry, to take effect as soon as Henry had made himself master of France by conquest. Late in July Henry’s men filed out of the English-held town of Calais, where they had landed three weeks earlier, and made their way southeastward in alternating rain and suffocating heat toward the town of Thérouanne. The ordnance was carried in the van, setting the pace for the entire force. Then came the king’s household guard, under the banner of the Trinity, the duke of Buckingham with his four hundred soldiers, and three ecclesiastical corps under the bishops of Durham and Winchester and Wolsey, the king’s almoner. Under Henry’s own banner was a picked guard of six hundred men, followed by the priests and singers of his chapel—a small army in themselves, 115 strong—his secretaries, kitchen staff, bedchamber attendants and his lutanist. In the rear marched another large force under the Lord Chamberlain and the earl of Northumberland.

Except for the misfortune of the elderly and sour-tempered bishop of Winchester, who was kicked by a mule en route, the army arrived without incident before the walls of Thérouanne. They set siege to the town, and were soon joined by a band of Burgundians under the Emperor Maximilian, which he offered to put at Henry’s disposal provided the English king paid them. With the arrival of his Hapsburg ally Henry’s siege
force took on the character of a respectable international host which the French could not afford to ignore. It was at least worlds apart from the ill-fated expedition to Spain a year earlier, which had gained no military advantage whatever and threatened permanently to damage the prestige of English arms.

The design of this venture called for a force under the marquis of Dorset to sail to Spain, then move northward with the support of Ferdinand’s Spanish soldiers to retake the former English lands in Guienne. From the outset the undertaking was frustrated by incompetent planning and the notorious unreliability of Ferdinand. There were no tents, no beer, and few other provisions. The tropical weather enervated the English, and the high prices of local goods quickly drained their pockets. Ferdinand capriciously announced that he preferred to fight in Navarre rather than Guienne, and left the English to attack alone. Dorset was not the man to organize a campaign on his own, and like many of his soldiers he soon fell ill. A rebellion among the troops seeking higher pay was put down, but all semblance of military training ceased and a fair number of men deserted. By September quarrels among the commanders allowed the English fighting men to arrange their own affairs. They ordered ships, baked enough biscuit to get home on, and left. Henry was furious, but by the time the disobedient army reached England he had decided to pretend that the entire disgraceful episode never happened.

Now, however, he was in personal command of a loyal, well-provisioned and self-sufficient army, whose successes would atone for Dorset’s fiasco. In the third week of the siege of Thérouanne his first opportunity came. A body of French knights attempted to relieve the town by means of an assault on the besiegers. Driven back by Henry’s cannons, they retreated past a village called Guinegate, with the English knights close behind them. In their panic, the English boasted, the French lost their spurs, and the brief engagement was given the memorable name “Battle of the Spurs.” In fact the French lost several of their standards and a number of French knights were taken prisoner. Among them was the matchless Bayard himself, who graciously yielded his sword to an astonished English knight in acknowledgment of the English triumph. Henry, determined to outdo the gallant Bayard in magnanimity, released him after a brief imprisonment.

Other triumphs quickly followed. Thérouanne fell in a few days, and after taking possession of the town in a splendid ceremonial entry Henry handed it over to Maximilian, who ordered every building but the old church destroyed. The city of Tournai held out only eight days before the English siege, and this prize Henry kept for himself. With two towns taken and a shipload of valuable French prisoners whose ransoms, once paid by their anxious relatives, should repay much of the cost of the campaign,
Henry took his army home. It had been a profitable and even a pleasant crusade—between sieges Henry had stopped for several weeks of feasting and entertainment at the court of the regent of Flanders, and did so again on his way back to Calais. More important, it had given Henry the military reputation he badly needed. The standards and spurs of the French were worthy spoils from a first campaign. His next venture might indeed imperil the French crown.

Paradoxically, the most decisive English military victory of 1513 came about in Henry’s absence, under the nominal command of Katherine. When he went abroad in June he had left her as head of his government and remaining military forces, knowing that his departure would be the signal for at least minor incursions by the Scots. As early as February Lord Dacre, guardian of the northern border, warned Henry that the Scots king James IV was mustering his men in preparation for an invasion. He had provided himself with up-to-date siege artillery, and narrowly missed harm when one of the newly cast guns he was trying out in Edinburgh Castle exploded on firing.
¹

James’ defiance, carried by Ross Herald, reached Henry in the midst of the siege of Thérouanne. He sent the bishop of Durham to London to oversee the organization of defense in the northern counties, but left the major responsibility with Katherine and the Lord Treasurer Surrey, Lieutenant General of the North. Katherine personally handled many of the administrative details, and set her women to sewing banners for the knightly contingents forming under Surrey’s command. A highly intelligent and capable woman, she enjoyed coordinating the enterprise. “My heart is very good to it,” she wrote to Henry. On September 9 the invading Scots met Surrey’s forces in the hills at Flodden just inside English territory, and within three hours they were beaten. The slaughter was terrible. The commanders—the earls, the great churchmen, the king himself—chose to fight to the death though conscious that they were giving ground hopelessly to the English. When the battle was over Flodden Field was strewn with noble corpses; among them was the disfigured body of King James, fallen near his banner. The bishop of Durham praised Surrey and his men, but attributed the victory to the protection of St. Cuthbert, under whose banner the men of Durham had fought. Katherine was overjoyed at the outcome, and sent the Scots king’s bloody shirt to her husband as a trophy.

A week after the carnage of Flodden Katherine gave birth to a stillborn son. A little over a year later she bore a living son who died within a few days. Her father, whose patience with her failures in childbirth had long since run out, sent a doctor and a Spanish midwife to England to ensure
that future sons would survive. What their techniques were we don’t know, but common medical remedies for infertility included drinking the urine of pregnant goats and sheep and treating the cervix with steam, produced by a brass lamp and funneled into the vagina through a pessary. Folk remedies called for the woman to wear herbs and charms—dock seeds bound to the arm, magical or religious names written in amulets—and to suspend from a girdle worn under her clothing the fingers and anus of a deadborn child. To whatever cures her physicians advised Katherine undoubtedly added assiduous prayers for a son. And Henry, whose piety was less fervent than Katherine’s but no less sincere, prayed too for his long-desired heir.

The blame in all cases of childlessness fell by custom on the wife, but Henry could not overlook the evidence that there was weakness on his side of the family as well. He had been one of seven children, three boys and four girls. Three of the children had died in infancy, and a fourth, Prince Arthur, lived only into adolescence. Of course, many women lost half their children in infancy, but Katherine had so far lost them all. And she was nearing thirty.

Katherine’s pregnancy in 1515 was to all appearances normal. The child was expected in February of the following year, and news of the impending birth made the rounds of the diplomatic network. The new king of France, Francis I (Louis XII had just died), felt snubbed because Henry did not personally invite him to send a representative to stand as godfather to the child at the christening; instead he asked his brother-in-law Suffolk to give Francis the message. Francis announced he would send no one; Henry was bound to be very angry. The Venetian ambassador Giustinian, always anxious to preserve good relations between Henry and other monarchs, went to see Henry’s chief advisor Wolsey in an attempt to cushion the insult.

Katherine’s baby was born before dawn on Monday, February 18.
²
It was a girl, but this disappointment was temporarily outweighed by the fact that it did not immediately die. Three days after her birth the child was christened in the friars’ church near the palace at Greenwich. The silver font reserved for royal christenings was brought to the church for the ceremony, but apart from the exalted status of the sponsors and godparents the event was unexceptional. The muddy ground was covered first with a thick layer of gravel and then with rushes, and scaffolding was set up along both sides of the path the christening procession was to take from the court gate to the porch of the church. The princess was carried by her godmother, and she was wrapped so tightly against the cold that not even her face was visible to the spectators. A low wooden archway had been built just in front of the church door and covered
with tapestries. Under it the godparents stopped, and a priest blessed the child and gave her her name. She was called Mary, after Henry’s favorite sister, the beautiful Tudor Rose.

This part of the ceremony over, the company moved into the church itself for further rites. A group of gentlemen and lords filed past the needlework hangings studded with gems and pearls that lined the walls and walked to the high altar, where the accouterments of the christening—the basin, tapers, salt and chrism—were assembled. Four knights carried the gold canopy of estate above the princess, now held by the countess of Surrey. Her sponsors and godparents were of the blood royal or of ducal rank: Katherine Plantagenet, only surviving child of Edward IV, and Henry VIII’s aunt; Margaret Plantagenet, countess of Salisbury, Edward IV’s niece; Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, the baby’s uncle and husband of the Tudor Rose; and the duke and duchess of Norfolk. Immediately after the christening came the ceremony of “bishoping,” or confirmation. At its conclusion the heralds came together at the front of the church and loudly proclaimed Mary’s title and style: