Bloody Mary (9 page)

Charles was an ill-favored man whose narrow blue eyes, lusterless white skin and enormous, disfiguring jaw and chin lent him a vaguely im-becilic air. He had bad teeth and a fragile digestion, and his lifelong habit of gross overeating gave him an expression indicative of perpetual indigestion. He looked best on horseback, where the severe plainness of his dress passed for understated magnificence and his face took on a heroic stubbornness. In the saddle he was convincing as the ruler of European lands significantly larger than those of France and nearly five times those of England. The extent of his subjects and wealth in the New World was only beginning to be estimated, but even leaving them out of account he controlled the financial center of Europe and his fleets and armies made him master of the continent. It was already apparent that Charles lacked brilliance and flair, but he was conscientious and shrewd. His bursts of activity were interrupted by long periods of listless depression during which no state business was conducted and courtiers and ambassadors wondered whether the emperor might slip into a permanent melacholy of the kind that imprisoned the wits of his mother. But then energy would return to his limbs and voice, and to the “greedy eyes” the Venetian envoy saw in his disconcerting face, and the emperor would again confront the task of administering his far-flung empire.

In the fall of 1521 Charles’ energies were directed toward war with France, and Henry was supporting the imperial side of the conflict. Francis had returned to his preoccupation with surpassing Henry—now he was building a ship larger than Henry’s thousand-ton warship the
Great Harry—
and Wolsey was engaged in drawn-out negotiations of a betrothal between the young emperor and Mary. (The French betrothal had been set aside.) There was no doubt in Henry’s mind that the emperor’s forces would defeat the French, but the war news was not encouraging. Letters from France informed the king that the French were sweeping into the territories of the emperor, burning everything in their path and cutting off the fingers of little children as a warning of worse cruelties to come.
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In the midst of the fighting Charles visited England a second time, in June of 1522. London was prepared for his arrival as if for a royal coronation, with buildings along his route of entry newly painted and decorated
with hangings, and pageants staged in several quarters of the city. Charles was greeted by the Lord Mayor and aldermen, and by a Latin oration from Thomas More. All the clergy of Middlesex were assembled to cense him as he rode past, and the members of every occupation and company stood together in their liveries. Two giants welcomed Charles and Henry to London, addressing them as “Henry defender of the faith, Charles defender of the church,” but most of the pageants made no allusion to religion and instead elaborated the themes of the English Order of the Garter and the imperial Order of the Golden Fleece, and the genealogical links between the two rulers. One representation was made in the shape of the island of England, surrounded with rocks and silver waves, and with its mountains and woods full of beasts and fish, trees and flowers. When the emperor passed this pageant the animals began to move, the fish to jump and the mechanical birds to sing, and two armed figures made to resemble Charles and Henry threw away their swords and embraced. At that moment “an image of the father of heaven all in burned gold” appeared above the island, under a banner proclaiming, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.”
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During Charles’ visit the two kings played tennis and rode together, and the English knights jousted against the emperor’s attendants, the prince of Orange and the marquis of Brandenburg. Henry and Charles took the lists themselves in a gorgeous tournament, wearing horse bards of russet velvet depicting “knights on horseback riding upon mountains of gold.” A play was presented in the great hall at Windsor, mocking Francis and celebrating the English and imperial enterprise against him. An untamed horse representing France ran wild across the stage until the king and emperor, in the person of Amity, sent their messengers Prudence and Policy to tame the horse and their envoy Force to bridle him once and for all.
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There were banquets as well during the emperor’s visit, and exchanges of compliments and effusive camaraderie, but this royal meeting was of the utmost seriousness. Despite his youth Charles was a mature ruler on a diplomatic mission of the gravest import. He knew exactly what he hoped to gain in England and what he was willing to give in return. Preliminary meetings had raised and settled most of the major points of dispute months before, and there was agreement on the central issues of the betrothal and the English declaration against France that would follow it. The betrothal contract had been hammered out with some difficulty. Charles’ negotiators first insisted that Mary be delivered to them as soon as she reached the age of seven, so that she could be trained as a lady of the imperial court for some years before her marriage. Wolsey refused, fearing that the princess might in some way be “repudiated, violated or
disparaged” once she arrived in Brussels. Next Wolsey’s request for dower lands in Flanders and Spain to the value of 20,000 marks was refused as excessively large, and he in turn refused an imperial request that England declare against France at once, without waiting for the betrothal to be sworn. Finally compromises were worked out on all these points: Mary would not go to Brussels until she was twelve, her dower lands would total ten thousand pounds in value, and the English declaration would be deferred until the time of Charles’ personal visit. Mary’s dowry of eighty thousand pounds was reluctantly accepted, though the imperial negotiators pointed out that it was less than the king of Portugal was offering to give with his daughter.
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Some months after these negotiations the Spanish ambassador came to Richmond, and while he was there Katherine insisted that he see the emperor’s future bride. Mary was dressed beautifully and brought before him to dance. She danced a slow dance first, “and twirled so prettily that no woman could do better,” and then began the leaping steps of the galliard, “acquitting herself marvellously well.” She played the virginal for the ambassador too, and showed such poise and skill that he marveled at her ability and wrote that she might be envied by a woman of twenty. He pronounced her pretty and, surprisingly, tall for her age—probably implying that she was taller than Spanish girls of six.
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After several weeks of visits and entertainments Charles, Henry and Wolsey closeted themselves to finalize the alliance. Plans were made for the invasion of France and the division of French lands between the two sovereigns afterward. On June 16 war was declared against France. At Windsor the matrimonial treaty was signed, and when Mary kissed Charles goodbye as he left to make his way to the Channel for the return crossing to Brussels it was no longer as his cousin but as his affianced bride. In six years they would marry, and the princess would become Empress Mary, co-ruler of half the known world.

Over the next four years this awesome prospect dominated Mary’s life. She was to be transformed, as rapidly as possible, into a young Spanish lady. To begin with, she was to be dressed “according to the fashion and manner of those parts.” Cloth was sent to the imperial court to be cut into gowns under the supervision of Margaret, regent of Flanders. Margaret was “to devise for the making thereof after such manner as best shall please her,” then return the garments to England.
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Mary spoke her mother’s Spanish; now she was to be trained in Spanish customs and politeness as well. It was strongly urged that Mary be sent to Spain, at least for a time, but Henry would not part with her. Katherine could teach her all that she needed to know, he insisted, and after the marriage Charles could educate her as he wished.

The letters Charles sent to the English court during these years rarely
mentioned Mary; from the emperor’s point of view the betrothal was only a minor detail of a diplomatic alliance. He did ask for news of “my best sweetheart the princess, the future empress” in a letter to Wolsey in 1523, but doubtless she remained very much in the background of his thoughts.
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As for Mary, she seems to have had a strong romantic feeling for Charles—or at any rate for the idea of a husband—and it seems clear that the women around her encouraged her to imitate the behavior and to express the emotions of a lover. When she was nine Mary sent Charles an emerald ring, together with the solemn message “that her grace hath devised this token for a better knowledge to be had (when God shall send them grace to be together) whether his majesty doth keep constant and continent to her, as with God’s grace she will to him.” The ambassadors who were to deliver the emerald were instructed to add that Mary’s love for Charles was so passionate that it was showing itself in jealousy, “one of the greatest signs and tokens of love.” Sending the emerald may or may not have been Mary’s own idea, but it was certainly the kind of thing that Katherine and her ladies encouraged. It was a gesture of playful courtesy, the act of a medieval princess testing the fidelity of her knight. Regardless of its origin, there is every reason to believe that Mary, who in later life took matters of the heart very seriously indeed, meant the gesture sincerely and cared very much about her future husband’s fidelity.

Charles, who was anything but continent and was by this time considering marrying someone else, made the chivalrous reply the situation called for. He inquired politely about Mary’s health, education and looks, and then, smiling, stuck the emerald ring on his little finger and ordered the ambassadors to say that “he would wear it for the sake of the princess.”

My soverayne lorde for my poure sake

Six coursys at the ryng dyd make,

Of which four tymes he dyd it take;

Wherfor my hart I hym beqwest,

And of all other for to love best

My soverayne lorde

It may have been during Mary’s betrothal to Charles V that Henry decided to look seriously into the question of whether her future husband would have a strong legal claim to the throne. He called together the chief justices, along with Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester and the Garter King of Arms and asked them to determine, first, “whether men were by law or courtesy entitled to hold baronies, and other honours, in right of their wives?”

This point, at least, was beyond dispute. Under English law not only women’s property (saving only their dowries) but their titles and incomes passed to their husbands when they married, along with governance of their persons. This premise of feudal law, supported by the canon law of the church, had been in force since the twelfth century and still governed the customary process of inheritance in England in default of the male line. It had never been tested, however, in the case of the monarchy itself, and for that reason the experts had to decide Henry’s next question without benefit of precedent. “If the crown should descend to Mary,” he asked them, “should her husband use the style and title of king of England?” Here at least one of the chief justices gave a conclusive opinion. Mary’s husband could not call himself king by right, because the crown lay outside the bounds of feudal law. She could grant him the title and style of king, though, if she chose.
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That Henry raised these issues in a formal way implied two things.
First, it meant that, assuming Mary did eventually succeed, it would be as a married woman whose husband would be the real ruler. Her role would be solely that of a dynastic link between Henry and his grandson, a carrier of the bloodline without any presumption to govern in her own person. No provision was ever made to prepare Mary to handle affairs of state; her education, though broad in its scope, was intensely personal. She was trained to govern herself in the most vigilant way, but not to govern others.

Second, Henry’s inquiry showed that, each year, he was resigning himself more and more to the probability that Mary would be his only legitimate heir. By 1525 it was obvious that Katherine would have no more children. At forty, she was still Henry’s loving companion, for whom he sometimes showed tender affection, but she was no more than that; it is very doubtful whether they slept together. Bessie Blount’s place as royal mistress was now held by Mary Carey, the eldest daughter of Henry’s gentleman Thomas Boleyn. Boleyn had served the king in a variety of capacities, from holding the canopy at Mary’s christening to serving as diplomatic envoy to the French court, and he was honored that Henry should choose his daughter—married though she was—as his mistress. Mary Carey was an obliging if colorless girl who drifted from one unsavory situation to another at the Tudor court without leaving a distinctive impression on her contemporaries. She was not a beauty like Bessie; she was neither accomplished nor witty; she cannot even be given credit for carrying on a successful intrigue behind her husband’s back, for he knew all about the affair from the beginning and was as willing as Mary to comply in order to gratify the king.

If there were to be more royal children, they would be the children of Henry’s mistresses, it appeared, and not his wife. This realization brought into added prominence Henry’s only son, Henry Fitzroy. Fitz-roy was a handsome and promising boy, blond like his parents, and though Henry did not say so publicly it was evident that he was being prepared to succeed his father if, when the time came, that suited Henry’s plans. When he was six years old he was made a knight of the Garter, and in a lengthy ceremony that taxed his memory he was created earl of Nottingham and duke of Richmond and Somerset. These were the titles of a prince, and were traditionally reserved for the heir to the throne. Richmond had been Henry VII’s title before he became king, and was afterward conferred on Henry VIII before his accession; Somerset designated the legitimized heirs of John of Gaunt.
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The earldom of Nottingham had belonged to Richard, duke of York, younger son of Edward IV. More significant was the fact that these titles gave Fitzroy precedence over every other noble at court, even Princess Mary.
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Here Katherine, who rarely attempted to override Henry’s judgment, objected. No bastard, she
said, ought to be exalted above the daughter of the queen. Henry was so angry at her protest that he sent away from court the three Spanish gentlewomen Katherine turned to most often for advice, and though she was hurt and offended, she said no more.
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Fitzroy’s surroundings, household and education were in every respect those of a prince. Like Mary he had a little throne and canopy of estate, made in cloth of gold fringed with red silk.
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He learned to ride a spirited pony and to handle a bow, and in his sixth summer he killed his first buck in one of the royal hunting parks. Fitzroy’s tutor, Richard Croke, taught him Greek and Latin and helped him with the brief letters he wrote to his father in a very large hand. Croke was proud of the boy’s intelligence, and by the time he was eight he was translating Caesar unaided. His progress was in part the result of Henry’s promise that Fitzroy could have a suit of armor like his father’s when he had mastered part of the
Commentaries,
and from the age of eight or nine he was clearly distracted from his learning by the allurements of hunting and knightly sports. Croke wrote exasperated letters to Henry complaining that Fitzroy’s gentlemen were taking him away from his books and ridiculing his tutor, while wasting the king’s money on expensive food and wine for their riotous companions.
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Fitzroy’s household seems to have had the same climate of disorder as Henry’s before it was reformed, and eventually he was brought to live closer to court.

Assuming the king lived to enjoy a normal life span, of course, the issue of the succession would remain purely hypothetical for a long time to come. But two incidents that occurred when Henry was in his early thirties reminded him and his frightened courtiers that he was not immortal, and that an unforeseen accident might suddenly make the succession the most urgent problem in the country.

In the spring of 1524, Henry appointed a joust to be held so that he could try out a new invention of his—a suit of armor “made of his own devise and fashion,” and unlike any jousting armor ever seen in England. Just what the innovations were is not recorded, but they were almost certainly confined to the body armor proper, and not the headpiece, because Henry’s attention was anywhere but on his head as he took up his position at the end of the tiltyard when the joust began. His opponent was Charles Brandon, and Brandon was heard to remark that he could not see the king as he took his spear and moved his horse into position at the opposite end of the lists. Brandon’s vision was obscured because his headpiece, properly in place and with the visor fastened down, blocked out everything but what was immediately in front of him. Henry, though, by his own carelessness and that of his attendants, had not lowered his visor, and the two combatants spurred their horses toward one another at an earthshaking gallop before anyone noticed the king’s mistake.

The crowd soon saw the danger, though, and cried to Henry and
Brandon to stop, but both men rode on, Henry with his face “clean naked” against Brandon’s oncoming spear. It struck his headpiece at its weakest point—the cassenetpiece on the forehead, never made strong enough to resist a blow because it was meant to be covered by the lowered visor. As soon as it hit the spear shattered, sending a hundred sharp wood fragments flying into the king’s unprotected face. Had the spear or even a small splinter entered his eye he would probably have been killed instantly; as it was he narrowly avoided a concussion. His mangled headpiece was full of splinters when he took it off, but he assured the panic-stricken crowd, his horrified attendants and the white-faced Brandon that he was uninjured and that “none was to blame but himself.” To reassure them further he walked about briskly and, calling his armorers to “put all his pieces together,” remounted and ran six more courses without incident, “by which all men might perceive that he had no hurt.”

A second accident was less spectacular but equally dangerous. Henry was hawking, and in the course of following his hawk he had to cross a ditch full of water. He tried to swing himself across on a pole, but it broke under his weight and he fell head first into the muddy stream. Luckily one of his footmen, Edmund Moody, saw what had happened. He leaped into the water and pried the king’s head loose. Without Moody’s aid, the chronicler wrote, Henry would surely have drowned.

These two brushes with death, coming within months of one another, may have convinced Henry of how precarious a thing his power was. Certainly they had some influence on the status to which he now elevated his daughter. In the same year that Henry Fitzroy received his titles Mary was officially designated princess of Wales—the first girl to be known by that title.
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In Henry’s early childhood, when his brother Arthur had been prince of Wales, his father Henry VII had sent Arthur to Ludlow in the Welsh Marches, repairing and enlarging Ludlow Castle to be his residence. Now Mary would be sent there, with an “honorable, sad, discreet and expert council,” to preside over a viceregal court that would help to bring the fiercely independent Welsh more closely within the power of English law.

Wales in the 1520s was to the English a remote and hostile place, populated by a treacherous and foreign people unlike themselves in every respect. Their language was unintelligible, their customs barbarous; what order their chieftain rulers maintained was indistinguishable from violent chaos. English justices saw life in the Welsh Marches as a panorama of criminality. In the words of one official pronouncement, the Marches were the scene of “manifold robberies, murders, thefts, trespasses, riots, routs, embraceries, maintenances, oppressions, ruptures of the peace, and many other malefacts,” and the local population steadfastly refused to accept rule from London as a panacea for these ills.
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Wales was not yet a part of England, only a dependent territory, and
the Welsh hated the English as unwelcome conquerors interfering in a way of life they made no effort to understand. It was a tense and potentially dangerous situation, and in fact both Mary’s household and her Council would remain very close to the English border throughout their stay. The Council would hold court for the Marches; the justices carried with them into Wales a great triple-locked chest containing the books of landholding records and other documents, and their commission instructed them to verify the Marcher lordships against these records and to bind all the lords in person, clerics and laymen alike, to uphold the conditions of tenure originally imposed by Henry VII.

Because Wales was full of sanctuaries and liberties—pockets of territory immune from royal jurisdiction—the justices were to scrutinize each of these claimed enclaves and disallow those whose status could not be proven by royal writ or charter.
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Sanctuaries were havens for robbers, murderers and others who had been outlawed; without the protection of these refuges, the offenders could be brought before the court and either pardoned or sentenced. “A chest with irons for keeping the prisoners” was among the Council’s effects. The commissioners were expected to bring some degree of order and respect for English authority into an untamed region whose mountainous hinterland had resisted that authority for centuries. For defense they had only the household guard, two gunners, and an unspecified amount of ordnance and artillery.
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There were arms stored at Cardiff far to the south, but they afforded little security to Ludlow. In all, the undertaking was full of uncertainties and hazards. Writing to the Council members just as their work was beginning, a Shropshire archdeacon noted that he was glad to hear of their commission, since few justices had been sent to Wales for many years. “Our lord send you good assistance,” he wrote, “for there is jeopardy.”
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In the late summer of 1525 the princess set out for Ludlow. Dozens of carts had to be borrowed from Bewdley, Thornbury and neighboring establishments to carry the furnishings for her greatly enlarged entourage. Mary’s own hangings, furniture, featherbeds and wardrobe, and the wardrobes and belongings of her gentlewomen and Council members were only a small part of the load. Some sixteen hundred yards of damask and less costly cloth, all in the princess’ colors of blue and green, had been purchased for liveries. Dozens of yards of Brussels cloth for tablecloths, towels and napkins were piled into chests and loaded onto carts, plus black velvet for the gentlewomen’s gowns and other cloth for vestments for the chaplains. The chapel furnishings—standing candelabras, heavy mass books with their golden covers and carved stands, kneeling cushions and prayer stools—took up a good deal of space, for there would be three altars in the chapel itself and a fourth in Mary’s bedroom. Even before Mary and her retinue started on their journey repairs
were begun at Ludlow. Richard Sydnour, surveyor general to the new court, had hired a crew of Welsh workmen to restore the chamber to be used by the countess of Salisbury and renovate the wardrobe and great chamber, and a locksmith to make a key for the wicket of the great gate. A team of woodsmen were set to work felling trees and sawing timbers in a forest near the castle, and carpenters restored the paneled walls and mended the broken stairs and loose floor boards.