Bloody Mary (27 page)

In the intervals between episodes of bloodshed there were rumors of impending harm. For the first time since the demise of Anne Boleyn a poison scare swept the court. One of the gentlewomen told a servant of Lord Montague that when the king’s envoy Sir Thomas Wyatt returned from Spain he brought news of a potent poison. Applied to an arrowhead, it caused instant death with the merest pricking of the skin, and the only known antidote was the juice of a quince or peach. When Wyatt asked Henry whether he should bring any back with him the king said no, but the knowledge that such a powerful drug existed in itself gave rise to lurid fantasies of royal assassinations, and greatly increased the discomfort of any courtier who angered the king.

There can be little doubt that a principal animator of the climate of fear was Cromwell. To be sure, he was not completely heartless, and managed to acquire a particular reputation for helping women. When the much-injured duchess of Norfolk appealed to him for help she said she did so principally because she “heard how good he was to lady Mary in her troubles”; ultimately his aid to the duchess increased his repute.
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But if Mary never tired of assuring Cromwell of her profound gratitude for all he had done for her, her fear of him was as obvious as her reluctant dependence on him, and most courtiers felt the same mixture of fear and inescapable reliance on the Lord Privy Seal as Mary did. Few of them trusted him completely, and many agreed with Chapuys’ assessment when he wrote of Cromwell that “his words are fair, but his deeds are bad, and his intentions much worse.”

Cromwell came to power at a time of grave crisis, and maintained his influence during England’s most troubled decade since the wars of the last century. But he contributed to the tensions around him by creating a network of spies and informants and then using it to entrap both genuine
rebels and harmless malcontents. Believing that kings rule best when their subjects fear them most, he set out to surround the royal power with an aura of magisterial caprice, and he was given to composing memoranda under the rubric “For the putting the king’s subjects and other in more terror and fear.” Certainly he succeeded in making himself both feared and despised, especially by the great aristocrats who considered themselves Henry’s natural advisers and the ambitious officials who coveted his power. He maneuvered Suffolk and Norfolk out of power, and kept lesser men away from the king by sending them on diplomatic embassies or commissions which took them far from court. His enemies found themselves suddenly out of favor, banished from the king’s presence, or worse. Just before New Year’s of 1539 Nicholas Carew, the Grand Esquire who had close ties to the marquis of Exeter and the Poles, was seized without warning and taken to the Tower. Cromwell’s agents entered his houses and took everything of value, including the beautiful diamonds and pearls of Jane Seymour’s which Henry had given Carew’s wife after Jane’s death.
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Cromwell felt a particular enmity toward Reginald Pole, whom he called “Brainsick Pole,” that extended to everyone associated with the cardinal. (Pole returned the insult by calling Cromwell the “vicar of Satan.”) When the rumors about the Spanish poison were being spread, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Pole was the victim Wyatt and his masters were thinking of. In the summer of 1538, with war in the air and the cardinal’s denunciations of Henry growing more and more shrill, the king and his chief minister decided to make an end of the troublesome family once and for all.

The weakest of the Poles was used to entrap the others. Geoffrey, brother of Reginald and of Henry Pole, Lord Montague, and youngest son of Margaret Pole, countess of Salisbury, was taken to the Tower. He was a rash, ill-considered young man, sensitive and easily terrified. Under Cromwell’s grilling and the abuse and torture of his agents Geoffrey broke down and told what he knew about his brothers and their friends. What he said was not in itself proof of treason, though his description of Lord Montague’s opinions and behavior told much about the rough hatreds that rankled below the surface gentility of court life.

Like Henry Courtenay, marquis of Exeter, Henry Pole had grown up with the king from childhood. They had not liked one another as boys-according to Pole, even Henry VII didn’t like his son, “having no affection or fancy unto him.” When Pole became Lord Montague and his royal cousin became Henry VIII, they liked one another no better, and when the king began to pull down the abbeys, choose anti-papal bishops and fill his privy chamber with “knaves,” Montague began to say openly
that his character was changing for the worse. Once when Henry remarked to those about him that “he would go from them one day, and where be you then?” Montague replied without hesitation “If he will serve us so, we shall be happily rid.” Behind the king’s back he was overheard to say that “he had seen more gentleness and benignity in times past at the king’s hands than he did nowadays,” and that “the king never made [a] man but he destroyed him again either with displeasure or with the sword.”

Remarks of this sort, along with unkind references to Henry’s corpulence and ulcerous leg (“the king is full of flesh and unwieldy,” Montague said, “and he cannot long continue with his sore leg”), may have been irritating but they were hardly treasonous. Nor were the hints of Reginald Pole’s great future and hoped-for marriage with Mary that Geoffrey Pole repeated under threat of death. But Cromwell and his master were satisfied that what evidence they had was proof of Henry Pole’s treason. As for Pole’s ally the marquis of Exeter, the king had been convinced for years that it was the marquis and his wife who had, in Cromwell’s words, “suborned” Mary during Anne’s reign and encouraged her to defy her father. This plus copies of letters exchanged by Exeter and Reginald Pole, and other letters from Katherine and Mary found in the marchioness’ possession, proved to the king’s satisfaction that Exeter planned to take over the kingdom by marrying his son to Mary and destroying Prince Edward; that Lord Montague was in on the conspiracy was substantiated by the messages carried back and forth between them by “a big fellow in a tawny coat.”
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Montague, Exeter and another alleged conspirator, Sir Edward Neville, were imprisoned, brought to trial, and executed in December of 1538. The marchioness, her son, and Montague’s young heir were also taken prisoner, and though the marchioness was eventually released the two children stayed on in the Tower. Exeter’s son, young Edward Courtenay, would eventually be freed in Mary’s reign; the fate of Lord Montague’s son remains a mystery.

From a political point of view the elimination of the Poles and Courte-nays was a sound dynastic expedient. All those executed or imprisoned, including Edward Neville, had a claim to the throne, however distant, and the Poles were relatives of an undoubted traitor. In dangerous times such subjects represented a risk too great to be tolerated. In human terms, though, the wreckage of the Pole family left two tragic figures: the cardinal, whose personal grief now lent added urgency to his crusade against Henry, and the wretched brother who in his fear and weakness had betrayed those he loved. Geoffrey Pole was spared execution with the others because of the testimony he gave against them. Armed with a
royal pardon, he was free to live out his days without fear of royal punishment. But his inner peace had been permanently shattered. He tried to kill himself and failed. Utterly miserable in England, he joined his brother Reginald as a continental exile, restlessly wandering from city to city while slowly going mad with grief. Through his brother he was able to gain a papal pardon for what he had done, but he could never forgive himself.

For Mary the executions were a harsh reminder of her father’s vengeance and seeming omnipotence. His capacity for destruction, already formidable, was increasing, and his hand was not stayed by affection or ties of blood. Even as she mourned the passing of those who had supported her mother and herself so faithfully she grew frightened about her own future. Her father was seeking to eliminate all those who threatened Prince Edward’s right to the throne. In the opinion of many, Mary’s own claim was stronger than Edward’s, despite her degradation by Parliament. What was to prevent the king from suddenly deciding to eliminate her as well?

Adding to these fears was the king’s rumored instability of temper. He was certainly intoxicated with power; some said he was losing his mind. Among Lord Montague’s remarks about the king was that “he would be out of his wits one day, for when he came to his chamber he would look angerly [sic], and after fall to fighting.”
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The image of King Henry as a snarling, quarrelsome private man who felt himself to be increasingly hated and hateful is in keeping with other details of his life at this time. Mary knew both the charming public figure and the vicious tyrant, and she felt menace from both.

In a sad epilogue to the events of 1538 Mary’s “second mother,” Margaret Pole, now fell under suspicion along with her relatives. She was questioned remorselessly, her possessions and residence searched and finally, despite her age and illness, she was brought to the Tower. Among her things the royal agents found an armorial design symbolizing the union of Mary and Reginald Pole. The painter had joined pansies, the emblem of the Poles, with marigolds for Mary, and from the center of the intertwined flowers grew a tree in token of Christ’s passion. To the king’s deputy the design was treasonous in its intent. The countess had dared to anticipate Mary’s marriage to a Yorkist and a traitor, and hoped for the restoration of “the old Doctrine of Christ.”
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The countess was attainted in June of 1539 but she was not executed until nearly two years later. Then in the spring of 1541, on the pretext that she might somehow have encouraged a minor rising in Yorkshire, Margaret Pole was brought to the block on Tower Green. More than a hundred people came to hear the sixty-nine-year-old woman say her last
words. She asked them to pray for the king, the prince, and for her beloved “Princess” Mary. Then she knelt and put her head on the block. In the absence of the usual Tower executioner the ax was given to a clumsy-fisted boy. Before Margaret Pole was finally dispatched her head and shoulders were hacked nearly to pieces.

All you that be at libertie,

and would be void of strife:

I speake it on experience,

ne’re venture on a wife.

By January of 1540 the prolonged marriage negotiations of the past two years had borne fruit-rat least for the king. After considering dozens of princesses and heiresses Henry decided to trust his ambassadors’ recommendation that he marry Anne, daughter of the recently deceased duke of Cleves and sister of the reigning duke.

Anne of Cleves was represented to Henry as a girl of matchless beauty, and the portrait Holbein painted for him from life pleased him well enough. A copy of that portrait shows a girl with a lovely, doll-like face whose delicate eyes, mouth and chin are only slightly marred by a rather large nose. Besides, the match had more to recommend it than Anne’s good looks. Cleves was among those regions which, like England, was neither Catholic nor Lutheran but something in between. In marrying Anne Henry avoided having to cast his lot with either of the warring religious factions on the continent, while lending support to a known opponent of the emperor. Anne’s brother was at odds with Charles V, and the English connection strengthened his hand; for Henry it meant a plentiful supply of sturdy German mercenaries and an ally on the emperor’s doorstep.

Unfortunately, the king’s first sight of his intended bride drove all thought of these advantages from his mind. He rode to Rochester to see her shortly after she landed in England, but instead of falling in love at first sight, as he had hoped, he found Anne disappointingly unlike the woman he had imagined from her portrait. Diplomatic misunderstandings arose too between the German negotiators and the Privy Council, and
Henry, who was wildly casting about for a way out of the marriage, declared that he was “not well handled” and cursed the day he let another man choose his wife for him. No way out was found, so rather than waste the elaborate preparations that had already been made, and to avoid “making a ruffle in the world,” the king decided to make the best of the situation. He “put his neck in the yoke,” as he said, took Anne to the altar, and in due course took her to bed. There he found, as he told Cromwell, that “his nature abhorred her.” Her breasts and belly were not those of a virgin, he declared. This discovery “struck him to the heart,” leaving him “neither will nor courage to prove the rest.”
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Anne took her place at court despite the utter failure of the marriage, settling into her large household and enjoying the king’s generosity. He was not vindictive—the revulsion he felt did not extend to Anne’s personality—and after several months of chaste cohabitation he was still hoping to master his disinclination long enough to beget a child. But though he “did as much to move the consent of his heart and mind as man ever did,” he failed. By spring he was seeking a pretext for divorce. Anne was meanwhile showing herself “willful,” and she and Henry quarreled, at least briefly, over Mary. All things considered the Cleves union was a fiasco. “Before God,” Henry swore, “she is not my lawful wife.”

Henry’s displeasure with Anne was common gossip in foreign courts. The French queen told Cardinal Farnese, who told the pope, that besides being “old and ugly” Anne was not pleasing to her husband in her German dress, and was forced to change her wardrobe to the French fashion.
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It was said in Flanders that besides being old (she was thirty-four at the time of her marriage) Anne was overly fond of wine and indulged in “other excesses.”
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But whatever her faults she was remarkably accommodating. She agreed to divorce Henry in return for an annuity and a comfortable private life in England, and she did not mind that her husband’s eagerness to end the marriage was heightened by his infatuation with her nineteen-year-old maid of honor Catherine Howard. In fact, some months after Henry had made Catherine his fifth wife Anne paid a call on the newlyweds at court. She presented herself at the gate of Hampton Court with a New Year’s gift of two large horses trapped in violet velvet for the king and asked to see the royal couple. Catherine received her warmly, embarrassed by Anne’s insistence on kneeling in her presence, and when Henry came in he bowed to Anne and kissed her familiarly. Anne and Catherine stayed up after supper long after the king had gone to bed, dancing together and doubtless comparing notes on his merits as a husband. The next day the three dined together, and when Henry presented Catherine with a gift of a ring and two lapdogs she handed them over to Anne.
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In the end Catherine Howard proved to be far more unsatisfactory than Anne of Cleves. For if Henry found Anne distasteful, Catherine broke his heart. In contrast to Anne, Catherine was an earthy girl with a sensual face and expression that invited passion. Like Anne Boleyn before her, she was a niece of the duke of Norfolk, and it was no accident that the king’s fancy should light on her instead of some other girl. The duke arranged for Henry to see Catherine often at his London house, and Lady Rochford, George Boleyn’s widow, advised her on how to behave toward her royal suitor. Norfolk was using Catherine to regain his standing in the king’s favor, knowing that if Henry divorced Anne of Cleves Cromwell’s power would be destroyed. The king’s infatuation took its course; Anne was set aside; and on the day Henry married Catherine Howard Cromwell was beheaded.

It is baffling that Norfolk and his relatives should have urged on the king a girl whose hearty sexual appetites had already disgraced her more than once. Before she came to court she had been the lover of Francis Dereham, who had “lain in bed with her, in his doublet and hose, between the sheets an hundred nights.” Catherine’s liaison with Dereham was so disgraceful—it lasted for three years, and there was “no question nor talk of a marriage between them”—that the maid who also slept in her bed declared she would sleep there no longer “because she knew not what matrimony was.” When she was even younger Catherine had allowed a servant in her aunt’s household to “feel the secret parts of her body,” and he boasted about his knowledge of a “privy mark” there.
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These indiscretions were hardly obscure; all of the serving women in the duchess’ household knew the stories, and the duchess herself cannot have been ignorant of what was being said about her niece. Norfolk may not have realized what danger there was in promoting the marriage, or he may have thought that once she was queen Catherine’s nature would change.

Whatever he may have believed, he was deluded about Catherine’s trustworthiness. Henry was delighted with his young bride, but she found him old and unappealing. She contrived to bring Dereham to court, and made him her letter writer and messenger with plenty of excuses to be alone with her in her bedchamber. And by the time Henry began a great progress to the north in 1541 she had taken a new lover, Thomas Culpepper, a gentleman of the king’s chamber who “slept at the bottom of his bed.” With Cromwell and his informers gone for good and the king blinded with love, the queen indulged herself extravagantly with Culpepper while Lady Rochford served as go-between and set her servants to keep watch outside the queen’s chambers. Later Culpepper confessed how he and Catherine met behind the king’s back at Lincoln, Pontefract, York and other places along the progress route. When the
royal party halted for the night at a strange castle the queen would “in every house seek for the back doors and back stairs herself,” and then send for Culpepper.

Catherine seems to have had a naive expectation that she and her lovers could go on as they were forever, though she did warn Culpepper not to reveal their secret to the priest at confession since “surely, the king being supreme head of the church, [he] should have knowledge of it.”
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Finally, though, a servant in the Norfolk establishment told what she knew of Catherine’s conduct before her marriage, and a series of interrogations eventually brought out the rest.

Henry was wounded to the quick by these revelations. His “heart was pierced with pensiveness,” and his sorrow was so deep he could hardly speak. In the end, when all the evidence had been gathered in great secrecy, “with plenty of tears,” he gave orders that the queen was to be seized and questioned. Catherine was terrified. She wrote out a confession, but finding that to be only the beginning of a grueling inquiry she began to go to pieces. She would not eat or drink, and she paced up and down in her room “weeping and crying like a madwoman.” All the heavy and sharp objects in the room had to be taken away for fear she would “hasten her death” by suicide.

Fearing for their own lives, Catherine’s relatives denounced her more loudly than anyone else. Norfolk bewailed the king’s tragic loss and the dishonor to his family, and declared that his niece deserved to be burned alive.
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As Henry got over his grief he too talked wildly, calling for a sword to kill the girl he had loved so much and vowing never to marry again. Doubtless he felt keenly the irony of his situation. At fifty, his young wife was inflicting on him the same humiliation and pain he had brought on Katherine of Aragon many years before. His fury mounted, then gradually subsided into ill temper and then into melancholy as one by one the queen, Lady Rochford, and the guilty lovers were executed. After five wives Henry was a bachelor again.

Mary stood on the sidelines as her third and fourth stepmothers played out their brief reigns. With Anne of Cleves Mary had little to do, though she was among the ladies deputed to welcome Anne on her arrival in England. When Catherine Howard became queen an awkward situation arose. Mary was some five years older than Catherine, and Catherine’s close ties of blood to Anne Boleyn put a barrier between her and her stepdaughter. Evidently Mary made her distaste for Catherine’s parentage obvious in small ways, for after Catherine had been queen for a few months she complained to Henry that his daughter was not treating her with the same respect she had given Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves. Catherine persuaded Henry to dismiss two of Mary’s maidservants, much
to Mary’s concern, but Chapuys found out what the minor furor was about and warned Mary. She attempted to smooth things over by sending Catherine a handsome New Year’s gift, but the insult was not so easily healed.
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The girls were not allowed to return to Mary’s service, and one of them, it seems, actually died of grief at being separated from her mistress. Mary was “exceedingly distressed and sad” at this, but later in the year Catherine had apparently forgotten the injury she felt Mary had done her and was giving her valuable presents. By the time the court was following the king on his great progress the two women must have been on civil terms, for at Pontefract Catherine gave Mary a gold pomander set with an enameled clock ornamented with rubies and turquoises.
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Mary was hustled off to the country, along with Edward and Elizabeth, when the scandal surrounding Catherine Howard and her lovers became public knowledge, and once there she resumed her now familiar routine of brisk morning walks, riding, reading and improving her skill on the virginals and lute. Occasionally the king would spend an hour or two with her on his way from one palace to another, but her place in his thoughts was small. Chapuys never ceased to look out for her, though he had to acknowledge that her “wisdom and discretion” in handling her own affairs were remarkable.
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Still the tacit fulfillment of her life, marriage to a foreign prince or a great English nobleman, was continually postponed. In keeping with the expected attitude of a gentlewoman, she affected disinterest in marriage, as Vives’ treatises and her mother had taught her to do throughout her childhood. She was “a young maid and willing to continue so,” she said in one letter, and in another professed to “prefer never to enter that kind of religion, but continue a maid for life.”
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But if these conventional sentiments do not reveal Mary’s true feelings about marriage little evidence of those feelings exists. What she observed of her father’s marital adventures cannot have made her sanguine about taking a husband, though she still cherished the romantic idea of marriage she had conceived as a child. Much later both the anticipation and reality of marriage gave her enormous pleasure, and released a flood of sentimental associations which had almost certainly been nourished over many years. Mary wanted a husband and children; that no marriage was arranged for her disheartened and depressed her.

It was not that there were no suitable candidates for her hand. When Henry was first contemplating an alliance with Cleves he considered proposing Mary as a wife for the young duke, and later, when the emperor became a widower, Henry approached him about reviving his suit.
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Just before Henry married Anne he was thinking of giving Mary to Duke Philip of Bavaria, who came to England to help prepare for Anne’s reception and marriage. A draft agreement was drawn up, and Mary was
told to receive Philip when he arrived. He sent her a diamond cross as a sign of his love, and if Mary was not delighted with him she did say she would marry him if her father decided she should. The negotiations seem to have ceased abruptly—probably they were a casualty of the dismal Cleves marriage—and the diamond cross went to Cromwell.