Bloody Mary (43 page)

On October I o Renard delivered a formal proposal from the emperor. It began with a courtly lie. The ambassador was ordered to say first that Charles would be deeply honored to marry Mary himself, if only his age and health would permit it—a sentimental reference to their betrothal in Mary’s childhood. As he was an old and sick man, however, he was obliged to offer his son instead. Mary was happy and relieved to hear at last the proposal she had been waiting for, and thanked her cousin profusely through Renard, insisting that the match was “greater than she deserved.” But her joy was mixed with anxiety. Despite her deep personal satisfaction at the prospect of marrying the emperor’s son, two things worried her. One was the reaction of her subjects to the idea of a Spanish consort. Her first words to Renard after expressing her gratitude were “that she did not know how the people of England would take it.” To satisfy them her husband would have to come and live with her, she said, and she did not see how Philip could do this when he came into his inheritance after the emperor’s death. It was obviously important to her to “weigh the people’s affections” before deciding to accept the proposal, and though she did not say it outright, both Mary and the ambassador had on their minds the extreme antipathy of the English to all foreigners, especially Spaniards.

Mary’s other worries were much more problematic. She had never been in love, and had only an outsider’s knowledge of sex. Mary was not prudish, but she was inexperienced, and almost certainly insecure about how attractive she would be to Philip. She joked to Renard about her age, saying that most of the suitors for her hand were so young she was old enough to be their mother, but behind her humor was the fear that a handsome twenty-six-year-old prince might not find her to his taste. If Philip “were disposed to be amorous,” she told Renard, “such was not her desire,” both because of her age and because “she had never harbored thoughts of love.” Her mother had been six years older than her father, and the age difference, along with the related sorrow of Katherine’s inability to bear a son, had helped to push their marriage toward its tragic end. Mary was eleven years older than Philip, and nearing the threshold of middle age; the shadow of her mother’s great unhappiness surely hung over her as she considered marrying a younger man.

Deeper memories haunted her as well, memories of her mother’s loving, patient instruction in piety and chastity, and of the dangers lying in wait for all young girls who give themselves up to voluptuous pleasures. She remembered Vives’ warnings about how the darts of the devil are always flying on every side, and how a woman can only preserve herself by keeping her mind on Christ. Marriage was sanctioned by the Bible,
but sex was something her father had indulged in; she knew that one went with the other, yet all that she had been taught and much that she had lived through forced her to experience them as distinct.

Among her recollections was a sordid memory of her father and Francis Bryan testing her purity at a court masque. Henry had been told that his daughter “knew no foul or unclean speeches”—something he found hard to believe given the good-natured ribaldry of his courtiers. He told Francis to go up to Mary and find out, probably either by paying her a vulgar compliment or, conceivably, attempting a mock-serious seduction, whether or not the rumor of her innocence was true. Her behavior convinced Bryan of her profound modesty, but the sight of her father and his notorious gentleman amusing themselves over her lack of sophistication stayed indelibly in Mary’s memory. Many years later she told the story to Dormer, whose biographer recorded it in hopes of building a saintly image of Mary.

Closely linked to Mary’s uncertainties about sex were doubts about how her obedience to her husband might conflict with her responsibility to her people. She would wholly love and obey the man she married, Mary told Renard, “following the divine commandment,” and would not act in any way against his will, but if he tried to interfere in the government of the kingdom she would have to prevent it at all costs. Even such minor interference as appointing foreigners to office she would have to oppose, for the people would not tolerate it.

Renard gave Mary no assurances on this crucial and delicate issue, though he saw clearly enough that what lay behind it was the fact that Mary knew virtually nothing about Philip’s character and personality beyond the inflated flattery of the imperial ambassadors and the alarming slanders of his numerous detractors. And the slanders were increasing daily. As the rumor of Mary’s imminent betrothal to Philip spread, unsettling revelations about his precarious authority, personal repugnance and inclination to vice spread with them. It was said that because of Philip’s “sinister and taciturn disposition” he would almost certainly lose Flanders once he tried to rule there, and Mary was worried by new reports that his cousin the archduke was better liked than the prince not only in the Low Countries but even in his native Spain.

Gossip about Philip’s extravagant sex life—which may have prompted Mary’s ladylike reference to his amorous inclinations—flourished at the English court. Paget, who after dropping Emmanuel Philibert became a staunch supporter of the Spanish marriage, was concerned by the fact that “in order to estrange the queen, people have told her that his highness is very voluptuous and has bastard sons and daughters.”
¹⁰
And whatever distressing speculations these reports may have led to were hardly dispelled by the emperor’s virtual admission that there was some truth in
what was being said. “We admit there may be some youthfulness in our son,” he wrote, “though it is far from being as grave a matter as . . . some people have sought to make out.”
¹¹

Without meeting Philip herself Mary could not reconcile the unsettling contradictions in his public image, and shortly after Renard conveyed the official marriage proposal she asked him whether there was any chance the prince might come to England before she committed herself once and for all to becoming his wife. She had heard he was coming to Flanders before long; could he stop in England on his way? Renard hedged, saying he didn’t know whether it would be possible—or proper—for so important a prince to make a detour of that kind, but to lessen her concern somewhat he told her a comforting lie. Philip, he said, had not waited for the emperor to suggest the marriage but, having heard of Mary’s “great virtues,” became eager to woo her on his own. Mary was flattered but not satisfied. Taking Renard by the hand she urged him to tell her whether all the praiseworthy things he had said about the prince up to now were true—“whether he was indeed of even temper, of balanced judgment and well conditioned.” Renard assumed his most effective expression of candor. If his word were enough, he swore, he would back with his oath the assertion that Philip “had qualities as virtuous as any prince in this world.” Again Mary begged him not to lie to her, or to speak as a servant or subject, but to tell her the full truth as he knew it. He begged her in return to take “his honor and his life” as hostages for the utter honesty of his words. Apparently he was convincing enough for, as he wrote to the emperor, Mary then “pressed his hand and said ‘that is well,’“ and went on to discuss other matters.
¹²

While he was reassuring Mary Renard was equally busy with the task of wooing the Council. With Paget as his ally, he visited those Council members he thought he could win over most easily, carrying personal letters from Charles V. (The letters were supplied to him by the dozen from the imperial chancery in Brussels, with the salutations left blank; Renard’s secretary wrote in each councilor’s name as the ambassador made up his mind whom to approach.) Arundel and Petre came around to the imperial point of view fairly quickly, and Rochester, both humbled and impressed by his own personal letter from the emperor himself, was persuaded to abandon Courtenay and throw his weight on the side of Philip. All the leading councilors were given gold chains and other costly gifts. Renard distributed thousands of Spanish
escudos
as well, finding that coins were even more welcome to the English than jewelry or other valuables. In his eagerness to bring off the diplomatic coup of betrothing Mary to Philip, Renard did not scruple to make political promises he had no authority to keep. Bribing the lords with power as well as with money, he told them that, if Mary chose to marry Philip,
four of them would be put in charge of the government any time she left the country—a bald inducement that he found very effective. “The English are so grasping,” he wrote to the emperor, “that if one cares to try them with presents and promises one may do what one likes with them by very simple means.”
¹⁸

Winning over the Council was in the end to prove more difficult than Renard suspected, but Mary had made up her mind once and for all by the end of October, strengthened in her resolve by two of her cham-berers, Jane Russell and Mistress Shirley, and by Susan Clarencieux, who was present every time the queen spoke with Renard and whose aid he valued. Mary also had the encouragement of the wives of at least three of the councilors—the duchess of Norfolk, the countess of Arundel and Lady Rochester—who favored the Spanish match over any other and who Noailles judged “more to be feared than their husbands under these circumstances.” Even so Mary did not arrive at her decision easily. She spent hours deep in thought, and sometimes in tears; she stayed up until midnight writing to Renard, Paget and others about their progress with her councilors; and, of course, she prayed.

On October 27 and 28 the court was informed that the queen was ill. No one saw her but her women, and when on the evening of Sunday the twenty-ninth she called Renard into her presence he half expected her to receive him in bed. Instead he found her up and dressed, if weary, in a room filled up with an altar.
¹⁴
The altar was furnished in every detail, and this plus the affectionate greeting and shining face of Susan Clarencieux told him that he had been summoned to share in a solemn event.

Mary told Renard she had not slept for the past two days, but had spent the time in continual weeping and prayer, asking God to inspire her with the right decision about her marriage. Invoking the sacrament as her “protector, guide and counselor,” she trusted it to show her the way. Then she knelt, and Renard and Clarencieux joined her in repeating the Veni Creator Spiritus. When they had finished she made her announcement. God, “who had performed so many miracles in her favor,” had now performed one more. He had inspired her to make an unbreakable vow in the presence of the sacrament: she promised to marry Philip and to love him perfectly, “and her mind, once made up, would never change.”

Now all shaven crowns to the standard.

Make room! pull down for the Spaniard!

When word spread that the queen meant to marry the prince of Spain the news unleashed a flood of outrage. Londoners claimed to know “Jack Spaniard” well, and they did not like him. They had observed his “pomping pride,” his “lusty liveries,” his pretended courtesy that hid villainy and vice. All Spaniards were thieves, they said, who after they robbed a man liked to “tread his head in the dust.” Every one of them, even the vilest beggar, demanded to be called a lord—
señor
in their tongue—and most of them had titles of honor besides. Their excesses with women were well known, and if Philip married Mary he would soon tire of her and seek his pleasure elsewhere, caring about as much for her as for an old pair of shoes.

Protestants in the capital swore “they would rather die than suffer Spaniards to rule this country,” and Catholics liked the prospect no better. One English traveler who had visited the Spanish court sent back to England a vivid description of what Mary’s palace would be like once Philip and his Spaniards were turned loose in it. The queen’s orderly staff of officials and underlings would be swept away and in its place the Spaniards would bring cobblers, woodmongers, pointers, pinners and peddlers, and “all kinds of lousy loiterers,” each with his open bottle tied around his neck. These drunken wretches would line the courtyards and galleries of the palace, swaying over their work, while the Spanish guardsmen—“bawdy, burly beasts”—left the halls and gates of the palace open to “beggars, slaves and all kinds of wretches.” In no time at all bread and beer would be sold in the stately reception rooms, while the courtyard would be full of oxen, cows, “hoggish old swine,” sheep, goats,
cats, dogs, geese, ducks, cocks and hens, all “rubbing, rooting, digging, delving and donging” before Mary’s chamber window.

If some found the idea of Spaniards at court ludicrous, many found it terrifying. Spanish rule was known to be harsh, Spanish governors cruel. Visions of mail-clad armies marching through the English countryside mowing down English yeomen spread panic throughout the southwest. At Plymouth, where commoners and gentry alike had hoped Mary would choose Courtenay, the mayor and aldermen sent a secret message through Noailles to the French king, asking him to take the town under his protection against the time the prince of Spain might try to land there. The men of Plymouth were resolved not to receive him or to obey his commands, they said, and the gentlemen of the region were prepared to back the townspeople in their resistance.
¹

To the French the possibility of a Hapsburg ruler in England was alarming in the extreme. When Henri II heard rumors of the impending betrothal his “countenance was sad, his words few, and his dislike of the match marvellously great.”
²
He held a long conversation with the English ambassador, Nicholas Wotton, pointing out that “a husband may do much with his wife,” and that it would be very hard for Mary, as for any woman, “to refuse her husband anything that he shall earnestly require of her.”
³
Philip would certainly ask Mary to lend him her ships and fighting men to aid his father in his wars against the French, and before long Philip would be ruling England instead of Mary.

Wotton tried in vain to combat these fears, while in England Noailles attempted to convince Mary herself of the hidden dangers of marrying Philip. He too raised the specter of husbandly tyranny, but she assured him that God would not let her forget the promise she had made to her first husband, England, on her coronation day. Mary repeated this argument often in the last months of 1553, looking down at the ring she had worn ever since her coronation and referring to the pre-eminence of her “first husband.” When other persuasions failed the French resorted to theological objections. Philip and Mary were close relatives—Philip referred to Mary as his “aunt” for want of a better term to describe his father’s cousin—and as such their marriage was forbidden under church law. Marriages between persons related by blood were subject to the “impediment of public honesty,” the accusation that they offended common decency, and their validity could be contested in court. While English courts did not uphold suits of this kind many foreign courts did, and even if no one questioned Mary’s marriage to Philip directly, their children might later be prevented from inheriting their lands on the continent on the grounds that the union between their parents was invalid.

To the English who opposed the marriage these legal complications
were part of a larger concern. They perceived the queen’s marriage to be not unlike the marriage of any other gentlewoman; they assumed, without thinking clearly about it, that England would in some sense be part of Mary’s dowry, and as such would become her husband’s property when she married. Thus Mary’s husband would obtain a vague but ineradicable sovereignty over the country whether or not he actually became king, and Mary proposed to hand over this sovereignty to the heir of the Haps-burg empire. The dilemma of a woman ruler in a society where men controlled property was becoming clear: an unmarried queen was unthinkable, yet a married queen invited fresh political dangers. That Mary might, like her grandmother Isabella, retain her autonomy within her marriage was something none of her subjects thought possible.

Yet she was clearly setting her distinctive stamp on the court and government. Not since the death of Henry VIII had the ruler’s personality, taste and style so dominated court life. Mary put herself to the fore much as her father had, consciously keeping herself the center of attention by the magnificence of her dress and the dignity of her manner. Like Henry she adorned herself with innumerable jewels, setting all who saw her to speculating on their worth and rarity. She was careful to promote her symbolic image as well. One of the first things she did after becoming queen was to have a large portrait of herself painted, and the French ambassador wrote to his queen that the greatest compliment she could pay Mary would be to ask her for her portrait.
⁴
Shortly after her coronation Mary issued her first coins. They too bore her effigy, and on the reverse the legend “
Veritas temporis filia”—
“Truth the daughter of time.” The humanist motto was a metaphor of vindication, a succinct assertion of Mary’s belief that, after the long night of Protestantism and injustice her reign would restore justice and the true religion.

Mary’s courtiers echoed her tastes in dress, food and entertainment. Clothing at Edward’s court had been simple and subdued; Mary’s ladies and gentlewomen wore rich velvets and damasks in bright colors, set off with trimmings and laces and complemented by jewels. Soon after they arrived in England the imperial ambassadors sent word to Flanders that Mary was fond of wild boar meat, and before long hunters were riding regularly through the fields along the Flemish coast, tracking wild boar to send to England. The hunting was best in the French and imperial territories, and when Mary commanded her captain at Guines, Lord Grey, to supplement the regent’s gift of boar meat with some of his own, he nearly caused an international incident by leading his men over the farms of the French pale in pursuit of the queen’s favorite game. The French peasants spoiled the hunt and killed the Englishmen’s hounds, whereupon the English rounded up the countrymen and cut off a piece of their ringleader’s ear. The incident was reported to the French commander at
Ardres, whose complaint led to an airing of pent-up grievances on both sides of the border. The quarrel was settled, though, in time for Lord Grey to send the queen a great baked boar before the end of the year.
⁵

Mary celebrated her first Christmas as queen by ordering the staging of the interlude originally written for her coronation. The action of the play has not survived, but a list of the characters and costumes suggests that it portrayed the suffering of Mankind (in purple satin) at the hands of Deceit, Self-love, Scarcity, Sickness, Feebleness and Deformity (in red, green and ash-colored satin). With the involvement of good and bad angels, Reason, Verity and Plenty (in purple satin) triumphed, to the benefit of Mankind, and a black damasked Epilogue closed out the performance. A more explicitly political play was John Heywood’s
Respub-lica,
performed in London at the same season.
Respublica
described in allegorical form the misgovernment of Somerset and Dudley and the restoration of governmental virtue under Mary. The members of Edward’s Council—Oppression, Insolence, Avarice and Adulation—wronged, tormented and robbed the country mercilessly, until People, “with a wide throat,” roared out against them. With the arrival of “the general Verity, Old time’s daughter”—Mary—the republic was saved and the Vices overthrown, and People rejoiced that he could once again buy himself a new coat and clink a few coins in his purse.
⁶

With playwrights saluting her as the savior of her people, courtiers flattering her and diplomats filling their dispatches with news of her government and her marriage plans Mary was at home with her office by the end of 1553. Her public serenity was more apparent than real, but her private joy at the forthcoming marriage grew greater with each piece of news Renard brought her. By mid-November she was declaring that Renard “had made her fall in love with his Highness,” adding jokingly that “his Highness might not be obliged to him for it, though she would do her best to please him in every way.”
⁷

When a full-size portrait of Prince Philip arrived a few weeks later she became even more enamored of him. It was a Titian portrait, painted some three years earlier, and in it Philip wore a blue coat trimmed in white wolfskin. It was a good if flattering likeness, and Mary was no doubt relieved to see that the man represented to her as uncommonly handsome had, at least, shapely limbs and regular features. Everyone who had lived at the court of Henry VIII remembered the king’s greatest mistake—Anne of Cleves—and knew the dangers of misleading portraiture. The regent, who sent Mary the portrait, told her the likeness was not exact, but made it clear that the prince was even better looking than he had been when he posed for Titian, with a more manly body and a fuller beard.
⁸

At this time too Granvelle sent Antonio Moro to England to paint
Mary’s portrait, but she had little time to spare for sitting idle while he sketched. Matters of diplomacy and administration, large and small, pressed in upon her with greater urgency every month. The French king asked her to mediate his dispute with the emperor. Foreign merchants asked her for licenses to avoid paying customs. Courtiers petitioned for offices, pensions and other favors. A decision had to be made about the title “Supreme Head of the church,” a relic of the two preceding reigns that was part of the royal style but that Mary refused to adopt because it denied papal authority. After consulting with Renard, her councilors and, by letter, with Cardinal Pole, who told her the phrase “misbecame her sex,” Mary got around the problem by putting “et cetera” in place of the actual words of the style.

Criminals of uncommon boldness and notoriety had to be sought out and brought to justice. Thieves robbed Lady Knevet of her plate in the fall of 1553, and because it was assumed they had taken it to Paris to sell, it was up to Mary and the Council to try to find them. The men’s identities were known, and the English ambassador in France, Wotton, sent one of his servants to Paris to ask the French goldsmiths for help in tracking them down. The servant made the rounds of the city, looking “everywhere Englishmen commonly resort there,” but without success.
⁹
Crimes along the Scots border took up more of the Council’s time. On the pretext of fishing in the Tweed, the Scots were grouping under the walls of Norham Castle at night, to the danger of the garrison; the ancient fishing boundaries had to be enforced. The Scots complained that the English were stealing their cattle; the English retorted that the beasts were taken on the English side of the border, and their owners could only get them back on payment of a fine, and the Council concurred. A “lewd Englishman” provoked a quarrel with a Scot, and the Scots claimed it led to murder; the Council believed the report was exaggerated, but in any case the Scots were guilty of so many murders of Englishmen they could not possibly recite them all.
¹⁰

These and similar matters—grievances of merchants, complaints of piracy and border encroachments—made up only a small part of the day to day work of the queen and her Council. It took time for the lax administrative practices of the preceding reign to be corrected. As late as January of 1554 Mary’s clerks were still occasionally sending out official documents sealed with King Edward’s seal instead of the queen’s, leading to delays and added work for the chancery.
¹¹
The most serious issue faced by Mary’s government, however, was a severe financial crisis. The queen admitted to Renard in November that there was no money in the country, and that Dudley’s rule had left the treasury ,©700,000 in debt. Her agent Thomas Gresham was hard at work in Antwerp, trying to raise loans, but here too the dead weight of the previous reign proved to be a
handicap. Gresham had to straighten out the dishonest dealings of his predecessor Christopher Dawntesey while competing with the agents of Charles V and those of the great towns for what little money the bankers had to loan. Once he did negotiate a loan he was faced with the problem of conveying the money safely to England, and finally decided to pack the coins inside suits of armor—a method he had used before with success.