Bloody Mary (48 page)

Mary favorably impressed the Spaniards fully as much as Philip did the English. “She is so good that we may well thank God for giving us such a bountiful princess to be our queen,” one of them wrote. “God save her!” Ruy Gomez called her “a very good creature,” while another courtier saw her as “a perfect saint.” They were unanimous, though, in concluding that her physical charms had been overrated. The problem was partly her clothes. To the Spaniards, who disliked English clothes intensely, the queen appeared to “dress badly,” but they conceded that if dressed in the Spanish fashion “she would not look so old and flabby.”
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The real problem, however, was not her clothes. “To speak frankly with you,” Ruy Gomez remarked obliquely in a letter sent to Spain, “it will take a great God to drink this cup.” For a prince of Philip’s youth and endowments, marriage with a painfully inexperienced, sexually un-awakened woman of thirty-eight was bound to be something of a trial, at least at first, but Philip had never expected a passionate match. “He treats the queen very kindly,” Ruy Gomez noticed, “and well knows how to pass over the fact that she is no good from the point of view of fleshly sensuality. He makes her so happy that the other day when they were alone she almost talked love-talk to him, and he replied in the same vein.”
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He was tactful, attentive and gallant; he missed no detail of courtesy, and, when he was not attending to matters of state, never left Mary’s side. Their compatibility was doubtless strengthened by the fact that they could not speak one another’s language. Mary spoke only Aragonese, though she understood Philip’s Castilian Spanish; he in turn understood no English, and relatively little of the French Mary was forced to speak to him.

The pageantry with which Londoners greeted Philip on his first entry into the city on August 18 seemed to confirm Ruy Gomez’ feeling that
the English had taken Mary’s husband to their hearts. At London Bridge two giants saluted him as “noble Prince, sole hope of Caesar’s side,/By God appointed all the world to guide,” and at the end of Gracechurch Street, at the Sign of the Splayed Eagle, an equestrian statue of the prince in the antique style greeted him as “worthy Philip the fortunate and most mighty Prince of Spain, most earnestly wished for.” The royal consort was compared in another pageant to Philip the Bold, Philip the Good of Burgundy, the Roman Emperor Philip the Arabian and Philip of Macedonia, father of Alexander the Great, but the most flattering comparison was made in Cheap, where the prince was represented as Orpheus taming the wild beasts with his harp. The sight of the harp player, surrounded by nine “fair ladies playing and singing on diverse sweet instruments”—the nine Muses—and by men and children disguised as lions, wolves, foxes and bears, “dancing and leaping with Orpheus’ harp and the Muses’ melody,” delighted Philip and Mary very much, as did the by now traditional appearance of the acrobat sliding down a rope stretched from St. Paul’s steeple to the ground.

Though large crowds watched the royal couple make their way through the streets, and many people ran about joyfully, “calling and crying ‘God save your graces,’“ still by mid-August the presence of the Spaniards had begun to seem oppressive. Philip himself might be a gentleman, but the rest of the foreigners were distinctly unwelcome. Months before they arrived Mary had issued a proclamation ordering all her subjects to extend “courtesy, friendly and gentle entertainment” to the Spaniards, “without either by outward deeds, taunting words, or unseemly countenance” giving any insult to the visitors. But no proclamation could keep the distrust and hostility of the English in check. “Disagreeable incidents” between Englishmen and Spaniards began almost as soon as Philip arrived, and every inconvenience or disturbance that occurred at court was blamed on the presence of the foreigners. Their actual numbers were very small, but to the English they were everywhere. One English diarist claimed that for every Englishman he saw on the streets of London there were four Spaniards, and the taverns of the capital were full of rumors that thousands more of the strangers were about to disembark at the Channel ports.

The apparent prosperity of the visitors irritated the English almost as much as their manners and their looks. At court the elegant dress of the Spanish nobles and their satin-clad servants, and the sumptuous bed-hangings, velvet canopies and quilts embroidered in gold and seed pearls they had brought from home aroused the envy of the English courtiers. They seemed never to run out of money, no matter how high the English raised the prices of food and lodging, and when Philip’s treasure was conveyed through the city for storage at the Tower Londoners marveled at
its vast extent. Twenty carts rumbled through the streets, carrying ninety-seven treasure chests full of gold, and doubtless creating the impression that the supply was infinite. Money speculators were quick to set up an exchange in St. Paul’s to try to profit from the superabundance of Spanish coin, while the French, hoping to deepen the suspicions of the English toward the Spaniards, put false Spanish coins into circulation.
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The Spanish, on the other hand, were worried lest the English realize how little money they actually had. “If the English find out how hard up we are,” Ruy Gomez wrote, “I doubt whether we shall escape with our lives.” Money was the key to retaining what minimal good will English officials, servants, merchants and innkeepers showed toward the foreigners; once the Spaniards ran out of money, Gomez feared, they would be abused like pickpockets.
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Philip, whose resources were far from infinite, was alarmed to discover that he had to pay for two households instead of one. The terms of the marriage contract had been interpreted more literally by the English than by Philip and his advisers, and he now found himself having to be served by English counterparts of the men he had brought with him from Spain. Worse still, he found he was expected to pay all these English servants himself, with no part of the cost shared by the queen.
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These economic difficulties might be solved in time, but more intangible disparities separating the Spaniards from their English hosts grew worse and worse. The longer they stayed the more the Spaniards found to criticize. The English gossiped too much, they said, had no respect for the clergy, and lacked cultural refinement. Their dances were “strutting or trotting about,” and their women immodest and unappealing. Mary’s palaces were large but uncomfortable, “full to bursting” with the servants, lackeys and grooms of her enormous household. Yet the only entertainment to be found there was eating and drinking—“the only pastime they understand,” the Spanish claimed. Eighteen kitchens were kept operating at full blast, one of the Spaniards wrote, “and they seem veritable hells, such is the stir and bustle in them.” Dozens of cooks toiled over the carcasses of eighty to a hundred sheep every day, not to mention a dozen cows, eighteen calves, boar and deer when available, and great numbers of chickens and rabbits. As for the drinking habits of Mary’s courtiers, they consumed enough beer to fill the Valladolid river, and the younger ones, inclined to be amorous on summer nights, “put sugar in their wine, with the result that there are great goings on in the palace.”
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Whether it was the copious English food or the climate—or both—by late summer most of the Spaniards had had to take to their beds with bad colds or worse illnesses. Philip caught cold right away, and some members of his Spanish household were sick enough to cause concern for their lives before the summer was over.

On top of this, the English underworld soon discovered that the Spaniards made easy marks. There were thieves in Spain, of course, but one never saw them; they worked at night, or when the victim’s back was turned or his house empty. English highwaymen were an unexpected danger to the foreigners, who lost large sums to them in their first months in England. In the first week after Philip’s arrival there were several major robberies, in one of which four chests of the prince’s own household furnishings were taken. Bands of twenty or more highwaymen watched the roads for the red and gold liveries of Spanish servants, knowing they carried coins and valuables. “They rob us in town and on the road,” an anonymous Spanish gentleman explained to his correspondent in Spain. “No one ventures to stray two miles but they rob him; and a company of Englishmen have recently robbed and beaten over fifty Spaniards.” If the visitors complained of this treatment, no one listened. As far as the English were concerned, the hated Spaniards were only a temporary curse, to be endured with hostile indifference until Philip had served his purpose as the father of Mary’s children. “When she has children of him, they say, he may go home to Spain,” the Spanish gentleman reported, and he only regretted that Mary did not seem likely to be fruitful.

To be sure, the Spaniards found much to appreciate in the country itself. England, they believed, was the land where King Arthur had lived and died, the place whose enchanted landscape had formed the backdrop to many a tale of chivalry. “The man who wrote
Amadis
and other books of chivalry, with all the flowery meads, pleasure-houses and enchantments, must first have visited England,” one of Philip’s gentlemen commented, and he wrote glowingly of the forests, meadows, castles and fresh springs of the countryside. But even these delights could not compensate for the rudeness of the populace, and before long the homesick Spaniards were saying “they would rather be in the worst stubble field in the kingdom of Toledo than in the groves of Amadis,” and one by one they begged Philip to let them leave. The proud duke of Medina-Celi left first, and soon some eighty lesser lords had taken ship, some to join the war in Flanders, others to go home to Spain. It was even suggested that Philip might want to follow them, provided he could be certain he would be allowed into the country again once he returned.
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But Philip was determined to stay in England for the time being, and a small group of Spanish noblemen and personal servants stayed with him. As the king settled into his routine as Mary’s husband these servants made themselves as comfortable as they could, paying ever-rising rates for their lodging and food and attempting to insulate themselves from the mounting abuse around them. By September Renard was informing the emperor that all the Spaniards would have to be moved either to the palace
where the king was staying or else far away in the country, “to protect them from the rapacity of the people.” The foreigners did their best to “move among the English as if they were animals, trying not to notice them,” but it seemed to be impossible to avoid violence.

By the last week of September there was fighting in the halls of the palace nearly every day, and three Englishmen and a Spaniard were hanged following a murderous brawl. In the midst of the wrangling came the first whispered hints that the queen was pregnant.

Nowe singe, noive springe, owe care is exil’d

Owe virtuous Quene is quickned with child.

When Mary’s physicians told her in September that in all probability she was pregnant the news was deeply satisfying. Once again God had intervened at a decisive moment, this time lifting her above the limitations of age and health that many said would prevent her from having children. The event was congruent with the fortuitous course of her life, which had been preserved amid danger and prospered in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds. That she had outlived her father was an amazing improbability; that she had come to the throne a near miracle. Her triumph over Dudley, her resolute defiance of Wyatt, her determined accomplishment of the Spanish marriage were feats none of the men around her had believed possible. To Mary these improbable triumphs were ever increasing proof that she was being guided toward the divinely ordained destiny of restoring the true faith in England. The culmination of that destiny would be the birth of a Catholic heir to ensure that Mary’s religious changes would not die with her.

The immediate effect of the good news was to calm the escalating hostilities between the Spaniards and the English. The rapprochement came none too soon, for the enmity of the English had reached such a pitch that several mass assassinations had been plotted. According to Noailles, one of these plots called for the conspirators to surround Hampton Court in the middle of the night, storm the palace, and slaughter all the Spaniards inside—and the queen and her councilors with them, Noailles felt sure. There were more than enough assaults on a smaller scale to make this rumored conspiracy plausible. The English had begun to carry arquebuses everywhere they went, and at the slightest alarm they rushed through the streets, weapons in hand, falling upon the first
Spaniards they met. Renard reported seeing one of the lower court functionaries attack and beat two Spaniards as they walked in the street at three o’clock in the afternoon. He was no match for them, and soon ran off, but before he did he pulled a gun from under his cloak, pointed it at one of the foreigners, and then, “to show what a brave man he was,” fired it into the air.
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The Spaniards did not take such insults lightly. Three days after this incident occurred the injured parties found their assailant and killed him not far from the palace.

Renard had felt for some time that the one certain remedy for these disorders would be the announcement of the queen’s pregnancy, and as soon as he heard of her condition he spread the word as widely as he could, “in order to keep the malcontents within bounds.” A visitor to Mary’s court, an ambassador sent by the duke of Savoy, spread the story further. “The queen is with child,” he wrote in a dispatch. “I have personal reason to believe it, as I have noticed her feeling sick to her stomach.” Like Renard the Savoyard talked to the royal doctor, who gave him “positive assurance” of the pregnancy, adding that “if it were not true all the signs described by physicians would prove to be fallacious.”
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By October the mood of the court had changed. Courtiers who had been at each other’s throats mellowed, and returned to the guarded courtesy they had shown one another on Philip’s arrival in July. The Spaniards showed their good will by staging a tournament in the Iberian style—a “cane play” or joust in which canes took the place of lances. The English found the sport bland, but joined in anyway, and it was noticed that the two groups of courtiers no longer kept to themselves at banquets and dances but had begun to mingle again. At one of these dances Admiral Howard presented a masque performed by eight sailors in particolored trousers of cloth of gold and silver with jerkins and hoods to match. They danced a vigorous hornpipe, and then were joined by all those present, including the king and queen. Both were “in health, and merry,” and appeared to be enjoying themselves.

Mary’s pregnancy brought into sharper relief the question of her joint sovereignty with Philip. Strictly speaking he was the queen’s husband and nothing more. He had not been crowned king. Whatever royal prerogative he possessed would not outlast Mary’s lifetime, and those of her subjects who saw him as the future father of the queen’s children and nothing more were in a sense not far wrong. But tradition was stronger than legalities, and tradition called for the wife to defer to her husband’s authority in all things. How a reigning queen, a sovereign recognizing no superior on earth, might be expected to take second place to her much younger husband, a king in name but not in function and a man with few legal rights of any kind within her country, was a dilemma outside the concerns of Mary’s advisers. What mattered was that, to preserve his
dignity, Philip had to be given at the very least the appearance of primacy, and something of its substance as well. For to put Philip second in any way was an insult, while to put Mary second was in accord with scriptural teachings, the norms of society and the unquestioned truism that women were less capable than men.

In the months following her marriage Mary found that her delight in Philip’s comforting presence had been acquired at a considerable cost. In the eyes of the men in her government she had become the king’s wife, the lesser partner in the monarchy, who was expected to settle comfortably into a role heretofore denied her only because of the dynastic peculiarities of the house of Tudor. It was as if the cohesive leadership she had shown during the first year of her reign—leadership that had never failed to amaze them, and that had been forgotten by the time the next crisis arrived—was a mere aberration in the continuity of male sovereignty in England. Now that she was married this sort of authority was no longer needed.

Two things made this shift in perception both insidious and devastating. One was that it was not overt but tacit: an unspoken, all-pervasive, commonly held belief about the natural status of the king’s wife. There was no malice in it either; Mary was to be subordinate to Philip less because of her personal inadequacy than because of the ponderous, impersonal weight of custom centuries old. The other was that from now on Mary had to contend with conflicting forces within herself. In childhood she had learned to expect marriage, to abhor yet emphasize her attractive powers and to esteem herself below men. In adolescence this deep conditioning had been shaken by the tormenting spectacle of her parents’ divorce and her own disgrace, and since the age of twenty Mary had been sustained by an alternative vision of her future. Instead of expecting the conventional destiny of marriage she had come to believe that she would fulfill a more exalted role. This higher destiny did not preclude marriage, but it was hardly compatible with a life of passive subordination.

For the time being, however, this conflict had been resolved by the joyous compromise of Mary’s pregnancy. For if in the view of those around her her condition underscored the inappropriateness of her supremacy in the government it nonetheless satisfied both her childhood expectations and her adult hopes. The child she carried fulfilled her earliest image of herself, while at the same time it reaffirmed her conviction in the divinely guided course of her life. She could afford to let Philip bear more than his share of authority while she undertook the all-important responsibility of nurturing the Catholic heir to the throne.

Even before Philip landed at Southampton Mary’s courtiers were speaking of him as if they expected him to rule them as well as reign over them. The proverb “
Novus Rex, Nova Lex”—“New
King, New
Law”—was repeated at the Council table and in the letters of courtiers to one another, and English diplomats at foreign courts sent nervous inquiries about whether they should expect to be recalled once the new king arrived. There was no outward change in the procedure of government, apart from an order from the Council that a brief summary of state business should be drawn up from time to time, in Latin or Spanish, and given to whomever Philip appointed to review it on his behalf. Documents bearing the names of both sovereigns were to be signed by both, it was decided, but this too was a simple and obvious matter of administrative routine. Coins struck with Mary’s image alone were replaced by new ones with the profiles of both the king and queen in mid-September, by which time Philip appeared, to foreign visitors at least, to be in command of affairs. The Savoyard ambassador reported that “the king hears and dispatches all state affairs, as it befits his dignity and authority that he should.” Philip seemed to be as approachable and friendly with the English as if he were an Englishman himself, the ambassador remarked, adding significantly that “he already has the same authority as his predecessors on the throne of England.”
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Correspondence between Philip’s retainers and his councilors in Spain puts his situation in England in quite a different light. Late in August Philip was asking that a ship be sent from Spain to be “placed at his disposal so that he may return without delay.” Correctly or not, the Spanish Council took this to be an urgent appeal for rescue. The Council members were anxious, and the admiral, presuming Philip to be in grave danger, drew up an escape plan. He would quickly equip a fleet, ostensibly to take soldiers to Flanders but in fact to bring Philip back to Spain. The Spanish fleet would anchor off an English port, and then, on the pretext of inspecting it, Philip would be rowed out to the flagship. Once aboard he would be safely out of English hands. He could leave without a word, or he could strike a bargain with the English under which he would agree to come ashore on condition that they “arrange matters so as to permit him to live there as befits their Sovereign Lord.”
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Whether or not Philip was on satisfactory terms with Mary’s councilors, on one point at least the queen, king and Council were agreed. Now that Mary was pregnant it was more important than ever that England be reconciled with the church of Rome.

On November 20, 1554, Cardinal Reginald Pole landed at Dover and made his way to London, where the third Parliament of the reign had been convened several weeks earlier. He had been appointed legate by the pope, Julius III, fifteen months before, but his coming to England had been repeatedly postponed. Mary had written him several times, urging him to be as patient and deliberate as she was in the work of returning
England to the Catholic fold, and though he could not agree with her policy he had no choice but to wait at Brussels until he received the formal summons from the queen. In the twenty years since he left England Pole had become a changed man. He was no longer the witty courtier whose urbanity and keen mind had won him the favor of Henry VIII. He had become “sad and grave” in appearance, and his long, somewhat drawn face with its solemn, widely-spaced eyes and feline features was that of a fastidious ascetic. It was also the face of a man deeply scarred by family tragedy and, behind the mildness and melancholy in his eyes, animated by revenge.

Pole had become a great churchman, a principal figure in the movement of reform that had been renovating the Roman church since the 1530s. Appointed to the college of cardinals by Paul III, first of a series of popes concerned with purifying the lives of the clergy and restoring to Rome the spiritual leadership of the Christian world, Pole had worked for two decades to rid the church of the worldliness and institutionalized greed that fed anticlericalism and helped Protestantism to flourish. His commitment to the cause of the church was deepened by the evident success of his efforts and by his increasingly high standing among his peers. In the papal election of 1549 a group of cardinals offered to make him pope “by adoration,” but because he hesitated to accept the honor he lost the election by two votes. He made light of his lost opportunity, largely because, like Mary, he believed he was being saved for some higher purpose.

Pole’s years in exile had deepened not only his faith but his bitterness. He blamed Henry VIII for the tortured course of his personal life. It was Henry’s willful breach with the pope which had first sent Pole into exile, and later, when he had become the king’s hated enemy, it was Henry’s cruelty which brought Pole’s entire family to the block. The one brother who had been spared, the pitiable Geoffrey Pole, brought the cardinal more shame than comfort, and only made the loss of his other relatives more poignant.

In the aftermath of this loss Pole seems to have conceived a sanguinary view of his experience. He envisioned the execution of his blameless old mother as a martyrdom to be compared to the deaths of Christ and the saints of the early church. He called himself the “son of a martyr,” and referred to his injuries at the hands of the king as if they were physical wounds. His pain and grief he called the “stigmata of his obedience” to the church, and he clearly believed his life had to be sacrificed to God in order to avenge the wrongs done to his relatives.
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The appropriate victim of his vengeance would have been Henry VIII, but Henry was dead. The Protestant doctrines he had helped to bring into England were still in existence, however. By helping to root them
out Pole would be destroying a substantial part of the king’s legacy while serving the interests of the church and ensuring the salvation of the countrymen from whom he had been estranged for so long. This, he believed, was the work God intended him for—the preordained purpose for his life.