Bloody Mary (30 page)

At the news of Henry’s death the French king panicked. He had long since come to believe that his life and Henry’s were mystically linked; if Henry died he would soon follow him. Francis tried to throw off his apprehension by exhausting himself in his hunting park, but he caught a fever and died two months after his lifelong rival of England.
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The ambassadors who had reviled, feared, mistrusted and yet admired Henry now outdid one another in formulating expansive tributes to his greatness. They called him “a mirror of wisdom for all the world,” and lamented his passing with the sincerity of men seasoned in professional deceit. “He is a wonderful man and has wonderful people about him,” a French envoy had written several years earlier, yet the same man conceded that Henry was “the most dangerous and cruel man in the world.”

Henry VIII ended his reign as a dark enigma, and it was as such that he entered popular folklore. In the 1540s the English swore “by the king’s life” as if it were sacred, but after Henry’s death they gave his name to the devil. Along with “Old Nick” and “Old Scratch,” “Old Harry” became synonymous with the Evil One in the north of England, among the men and women of York and Lincoln who cursed his memory.

Sing up, heart, sing up, heart,

and sing no more down,

For joy of King Edward, that

weareth the crown!

The death of Henry VIII put England’s future into the pale hands of a rather undersized boy of nine. King Edward VI was an intelligent, lively child whose white skin, reddish hair and delicate, elegantly proportioned body gave him the look of an expensive china doll with a slight flaw—one shoulder was higher than the other. He had always been an exceptionally beautiful child. A noblewoman who saw him when he was thirteen months old wrote that he was “the goodliest babe that ever I set mine eye upon,” adding, “I pray God make him an old man, for I should never be weary of looking on him.”
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Apart from occasional illnesses in early childhood Edward gave his father no worries. Under the tutelage of John Cheke he mastered Latin and had made a good beginning at Greek; he knew French well by the time he came to rule, and could keep up with the other boys in his household at fencing and riding to the hunt. In his religious instruction he was entirely a child of the Reformation. The religion he learned was the hybrid orthodoxy of Henry’s court; the services he heard were conducted in English, and he grew up unencumbered by the nostalgia for the old church and the Latin mass that haunted the generation of his parents. His mother, had she lived, might have been allowed to teach him to revere the least offensive of the old ways and could have told him something of the nature of country faith before the abbeys were pulled down. But she was not there to teach him, and the only other adherent of the old belief he knew well was Mary. Despite the twenty-one-year difference in their ages Edward and Mary were very close, but they did not discuss religion.

“Imitate your father, the greatest man in the world,” ran verses inscribed on Holbein’s portrait of Edward. “Surpass him, and none will surpass you.” To follow a king such as Henry had been would have overburdened any child, but Edward did not fall short of the challenge merely because of his youth. As a boy Henry had already become a king in miniature. Erasmus, who saw him briefly then, remarked that he had something regal about him. Henry had been a commanding presence at nine; Edward was not. Both his good and bad points were on too modest a scale. He was cheeky but not defiant; alert but not shrewd; gracious but not charming. Worst of all, he had none of his father’s robust vitality or breakneck zest for athletic contests and tournaments. Try as he might, Edward would never imitate, let alone surpass, his fearsome, bellowing father; he could not create the illusion that, in his sacrosanct person, he was the locus of power.

Of course, Edward was not expected to rule alone. In his will Henry had designated sixteen of his “entirely beloved councillors,” including the chief men in his government, to form an advisory body to guide the young king during his minority. Two of the sixteen, Edward Seymour (who became duke of Somerset soon after Henry’s death) and William Paget, took over at once. They made the decision to withhold news of the old king’s death for three days, and added to it the much more audacious decision to alter the mechanism of rule. At the first full meeting of the Council Paget persuaded his fellow councilors to name Somerset as head of the Council and Lord Protector of the king. Outwardly the change appeared to be both slight and natural; Somerset was Edward’s nearest male relative and natural guardian, and Edward himself approved of the arrangement, signing the commission giving the Protector his powers. But in reality the alteration was fatal. It substituted for the deliberations of a committee of equals bitter squabbling between the supporters and opponents of the increasingly offensive Protector, and it opened the way to an orgy of opportunism, corruption and ineptitude in government.

None of this was yet apparent, however, when Edward made his ceremonial progress through London on the day before his coronation. He was dressed in cloth of silver embroidered in gold, and his belt and cap sparkled with rubies, diamonds and pearls. His horse was trapped in crimson satin, and as he rode through the freshly swept streets he was greeted as a “young king Solomon” who would continue his father’s noble work of restoring “ancient Truth” and suppressing “heathen rites and detestable idolatry.” These pointed references to Edward’s Protestantism were set in elaborate pageants in which children representing Faith, Justice, Grace, Nature, Fortune and Charity spoke to the king and Edward the Confessor and an armored St. George on horseback re
minded him of his lineage and patriotic duty. One scene recalled his parentage: a phoenix, representing Jane Seymour, came out of an artificial heaven of “Sun, Stars and Cloudes” to where a crowned golden lion—King Henry—greeted her lovingly. A young lion, their offspring, then appeared, and after two angels crowned him the phoenix and the old lion vanished, leaving him to rule on his own.

The solemnity of these representations was relieved by a death-defying spectacle played out in the air above St. Paul’s churchyard. A rope was stretched taut from the steeple of the church to a “great anchor” in the yard below. As Edward rode up before the church an Aragonese acrobat, who had been waiting on the roof, lay down on the rope at its highest point and, spreading out his arms and legs, “ran on his breast on the said rope from the said battlements to the ground,” like an arrow out of a bow. Edward paused, delighted, while the Aragonese saluted him and kissed his foot before climbing back up the rope to begin more tricks. When he got halfway up he began to “play certain mysteries” on it, tumbling and hopping from one leg to another, and finally hanging by a second rope tied around his ankle. Edward and his attendants “laughed right heartily” at this entertainment and stayed a long time watching it before going on to Westminster to complete the progress. On the following day, February 20, the young king was crowned, and on successive days the coronation was celebrated by tournaments at which the dashing Thomas Seymour, the Protector’s brother and now Lord Admiral, won the prizes.

Edward began his reign in a climate of unclouded approbation. His councilors, officials and subjects welcomed him as David, Samuel, and “the Young Josias.” His beauty, wit and amiability were exalted; he was praised as the “gentlest thing of all the world.” His gravity far exceeded his age. “It should seem he were already a father,” said a court observer, “yet passeth not the age of ten years.” Few in the crowd of admirers perceived that Edward would prove to be little more than a symbol of the continuity of Tudor rule, vulnerable to the manipulative ambitions of the men around him and “opportune to treacheries.”

Mary had always stood next to Henry in Edward’s affections. In his early childhood she never failed to send him gifts—an embroidered coat of crimson satin, a gold brooch with an image of St. John the Baptist set with a ruby—and he sent her in return baskets of vegetables and, when he learned to write, brief, precise letters in elegantly turned Latin. The letters were more schoolroom exercises than outpourings of brotherly feeling, but Edward’s sincere love for Mary was not entirely stifled by the rhetoric. In one letter he worked out the sentiment that, although he did not write to her often, still he loved her most; he wore his best clothes less often than the others yet he loved them more.
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He wrote so
licitous notes to Mary when she was sick, and sent greetings to her women. And once, when he was only eight, he felt the need to remind her that “the only real love is the love of God,” and that her inordinate enjoyment of dancing and entertainments imperiled her respectability. He urged her from then on to avoid “foreign dances and merriments which do not become a most Christian princess.”
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According to Mary’s gentlewoman Jane Dormer, who spent a good deal of time in Edward’s company as a child and whose autobiographical memoir contains valuable accounts of his reign and Mary’s, the young king “took special content” in Mary’s company. He treated her with the respect and reverence of a mother, asking her advice and promising to keep secret anything she confided to him.

Edward’s accession put a barrier of ritual deference between the boy king and his sisters. When they ate with him they had to sit on low benches, not chairs, and etiquette required that they be placed far down the table, so that the cloth of estate which hung above the king did not cover them. Even when talking to him in private in his apartments they did not dare to sit in armchairs but on benches or cushions, and when entering his presence they were required to kneel several times. The barriers of precedence, though, were slight compared to those erected by the Protector and Council. To these politicians Mary represented a diplomatic and confessional liability, and a potential focus of discontent and even of rebellion. As such she had not only to be kept away from the king but from the court as well.

The authors of this policy toward Mary were committed to a political and religious program far removed from Mary’s beliefs and remote too from the ideals of that large group in the population which was devoted to her. Encouraged by the Protector, Parliament was sweeping away many of the characteristic laws and policies of the last reign. Many of the changes were beneficial. The treason laws, the foundations of Henry’s authoritarian power, were being struck down, making it much more difficult for the sovereign to obtain a treason conviction from the courts. New social legislation aimed at tapping the wealth of the booming cloth industry and restoring the old patterns of farming disrupted by the enclosure of lands for sheep raising was being formulated, and old legislation enforced, with the full approval of the Protector and Council. But where religious legislation was concerned, the changes were alarming to Mary and others like her. The Henrician religious settlement was being swiftly and radically overturned, to prepare the way for thoroughgoing Protestantism.

For a decade and more English religious life had been prey to royal and governmental assault. The pope had been vilified and his power in England destroyed; the monastic establishment had been uprooted and
plundered. The sacraments were reduced to three, and the adoration and invocation of saints condemned. Theology, the exact definition and redefinition of what was to be believed about the mass, the clergy and the process of salvation, was left in confusion. And since many of those who tried to clarify that confusion were burned as heretics, little clarification was attempted.

The result was a harvest of anticlericalism. Time-honored hatreds of clerical wealth and privilege were unleashed with a vengeance. Everything once held sacred was profaned. The clergy were ridiculed. The “nodding, becking, and mowing” of priests performing mass was compared to the posturing of apes. The saints were insulted, the virgin Mary reviled. The pope was condemned as “the misty angel of Satan” or worse; the Protector claimed that, among ordinary folk, “the name of the pope is as odious as the name of the devil himself.” Penance and Lenten fasting were dismissed as unnecessary practices; purgatory was denounced as a fantastic invention of priests. Christening, it was said, was a superfluous gesture which could be performed just as well by immersing the child in a tub of water at home or in a ditch by the roadside. As for holy water, it made a good sauce for mutton if a little onion was added to it; failing that it was good medicine “for a horse with a galled back.” Praying to the saints for help was like “hurling a stone against the wind,” for saints can do no more to help a man than wives to help their husbands. And priests, the authors and perperuators of all these delusions, were little better than agents of the devil; their tonsures were “the whore’s marks of Babylon.”
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In Edward’s reign violent insults soon gave way to violence itself. Churches and ruined monasteries were plundered until every holy image they contained was destroyed. Altars were smashed, tombs laid in ruins, stained-glass windows shattered into heaps of colored glass. The hostility spilled over into the streets and public houses. Men were shot at as they went to church, and clerics were assaulted. Innkeepers changed the names of their establishments to avoid attracting the consequences of religious prejudice: the sign of the Salutation of the Angel became the Soldier and Citizen; the St. Katherine’s Wheel became the Cat and Wheel. Even King Edward, eager to purge his institutions of all taint of popery, objected to the association of St. George with the Order of the Garter.

In a purely negative sense the explosion of anticlericalism laid the foundation for doctrinal change. The condemnation of good works as useless to salvation prepared the way for the Protestant teaching of justification by faith alone. Ridiculing the mass wafer as a “round Robin” or a “jack in the box” and deriding the “roaring, howling, whistling, murmuring, tomring and juggling” of the mass and offices set the stage for the introduction of the simpler English communion service. The
sweeping condemnation of the externals of the old faith—“hallowed candles, hallowed water, hallowed bread, hallowed ashes”—made way for the Protestant emphasis on internal conversion and the devotion of the heart. And by adding to the general bewilderment about belief this furor of invective made at least some in the population doubly eager for the new orthodoxy when it came at last.