Bloody Mary (51 page)

Mary took pleasure in these displays and in her husband’s performance at the tilt, but the Venetian ambassador noticed that they made her nervous. She was relieved that Philip would be staying in England yet she could not help but be afraid for his safety as she watched him riding vigorously against all comers and exchanging blows with a punctilious dispatch he had never shown in the jousts his father had organized for him. At the Lady Day tournament “she could not conceal her fear and disquietude” for the king, and sent him a message “to pray him not to encounter further risk” after he had run many courses. As soon as he received it he left the lists.
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In Easter Week the king and queen went to Hampton Court and there, in the presence of her principal courtiers, Mary underwent the ceremonies that signified the beginning of her confinement. In a month, or within six weeks at the most, she would experience the “happy hour” of her delivery. Mary would have preferred to retire to Windsor, but it was too far from the capital. At Hampton Court she would have the protection of her full guard, troops from the city, and the arsenal of the Tower close at hand.

Just before she retired to keep her chamber Mary witnessed the beginnings of another part of her religious restoration. Since the dissolution of the monasteries many Franciscan and Dominican monks had been living in poverty in Flanders, waiting until their lands and properties could be restored. Now Mary summoned them back to England, returning to them the few religious properties possessed by the crown that had not been alienated into private hands. The friars made themselves at home in London, and were “well received and kindly treated.” The Benedictines were beginning to revive their order in England too. Sixteen former monks who had been living as secular men since the 1530s put on their habits again, renounced all their goods and requested a monastery to live in. They asked for an audience with the queen, and came before her as a group, in their robes and tonsures. Mary had not seen so many religious together in one place since she was a young girl, and as soon as they entered the presence chamber she wept for joy.

She carried the happy sight of the monks with her as she entered the last days of her pregnancy. Surrounded by her waiting women she rested, dreaming of the baby, and then woke to watch for the signs the doctors said would indicate the approach of birth. According to Renard, the
child was expected on or before May 9, and final preparations of the delivery room and nursery were already under way.
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The waiting women spent their time sewing the majestic counterpoint of estate and matching headpiece that went to adorn the queen’s bed. Coverings and wrapping cloths had to be embroidered, and baptismal cloths for the day of the christening. For the queen there were smocks of the softest Holland cloth with delicate trimmings of silver thread and silk at the neck and wrists, and breast cloths and blankets. The physicians assembled their instruments, and oversaw the furnishing of the delivery room with tables and benches and bowls, and casting bottles to hold the perfumed water that would help to purify the odors in the room.

They were not looking forward to assisting at this delivery. Mary had turned thirty-nine in February, and though her health had appeared to improve as her pregnancy advanced she had not been entirely free of melancholy and the illness that accompanied it. They did not confide their apprehensions to the queen, of course. Instead she was given every encouragement. Shortly after her confinement began a peasant woman and her three newborn babies were brought up to Mary’s apartments at Hampton Court. The woman was “of low stature and great age like the queen,” yet only a few days earlier she had given birth to the triplets, all of whom were sturdy and comely. The mother was already out of bed, “strong and out of all danger,” and Mary was much heartened to see them all.
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On Easter Sunday a Protestant surgeon, Thomas Flower, committed an act of outrageous sacrilege in the parish church of St. Margaret in Westminster. Flower, a former priest himself and a monk at Ely, clearly went to hear mass in the church intending to do mischief of some kind, for he disguised himself as a servingman and carried a woodknife. As he watched the priest in his canonicals standing before the altar, holding the chalice full of consecrated wafers, he was seized by rage. Running toward the altar he roared out accusations at the priest, shouting that he was committing idolatry and deceiving the people. As he spoke he lunged at his victim with his knife, striking him on the head and hand so that the blood from his wounds gushed out over his vestments and into the chalice. The priest sank down as if dead, and the crowd inside the church dispersed in an uproar. The shrieking of the horrified worshipers attracted a second crowd outside, and some of these men, their weapons drawn, dashed into the church to seize Flower. At first it was said that the murder of the priest of St. Margaret’s was meant to be the signal for a general rising against all the foreigners in Westminster, putting the entire population of that quarter into the greatest alarm. But it was soon obvious that Flower had acted alone, and almost as soon as he was imprisoned in Newgate he was condemning what he had done as “evil and naught.”
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Flower’s crime appeared to be a response to a second series of burnings that took place in Essex and in the Welsh Marches as well as in the London suburbs. In the week that Mary rejoiced to see the Benedictines at court a second victim was burned at Smithfield (the first, John Rogers, had died there on February 4), and in the following week five men were sent to the stake in as many Essex towns, one a barber from Maldon. At one of these execution sites a “slight insurrection” occurred. As Lord Dacre and his men escorted their prisoners to the appointed place “so great a concourse of persons assembled at this spectacle, that it was incredible.” The condemned men spoke to the crowd, urging them to continue in their faith and “to endure, as they themselves did, any persecution or any torment.” The onlookers were so stirred that the officials feared for their lives, for “very strong language” had been used against those who ordered the execution. The magistrates ordered the fires to be built and lighted, but as the flames rose there were loud affirmations from the crowd that the victims were “the holiest of martyrs.” Their words were written down and copies of them passed from hand to hand, and after they died the ashes were combed for their remains.
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In response to Flower’s assault and lesser incidents of the same sort the king and queen sent for more “true and faithful great men of the realm” to stay at Hampton Court with their armed retainers. More troops were raised and quartered in the immediate neighborhood of the palace, and they brought artillery with them. Similar precautions were taken in London, for fear that the “idle rogues” who infested the city might try to take advantage of any “misfortune” at the time of the queen’s delivery to sack the houses of the wealthy. The number of guards at the city gates was increased, and watchmen patrolled the streets at all hours of the night.
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The nobles were said to be gathering at the palace to be present at the birth, and every effort was made to underplay the gathering of the soldiers. Philip made a great show of attending the wedding of the earl of Arundel’s son, Lord Maltravers, arriving at the earl’s house with all his chief courtiers and giving the bride a beautiful jeweled necklace worth a thousand ducats. Another wedding was held at the court. The earl of Sussex’s son Lord Fitzwalter married the earl of Southampton’s daughter with great pomp, and afterward, to do even greater honor to the bride and groom, Philip joined the other wedding guests in a tournament.
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On Tuesday morning, April 30, just at daybreak the news came that a little after midnight the queen had given birth to a prince. She had had little pain and was well out of danger, and the boy was fair and without blemish. Royal officials confirmed the account of the birth, and by mid-morning there were bonfires in the streets and all the bells in the city were ringing. No shops opened, and tables spread with meat and wine
were set up in the squares and in the courtyards of the merchants’ companies. The clergy marched in procession round their churches singing Te Deums “for the birth of our prince,” and the sailors who left that day from the Channel ports carried the joyful news with them to the continent.

By the evening of May 2 the imperial court was “rejoicing out of measure” to hear of the prince’s birth, and at four o’clock on the morning of the third the emperor sent for the English ambassador to hear an official announcement from his lips. Mason said that he too had heard the news from London, but had not yet heard anything from the court. Charles, though, was “loath to bring the thing to any doubt,” and his sister, at Antwerp, “caused the great bell to ring to give all men to understand that the news was true.” The English merchant ships in the harbor shot off all their guns, and their captains met to plan “some worthy triumph upon the water,” but before they could complete their plans fresh reports came from Brussels that their joy was premature. The duke of Alva sent word to the emperor from Hampton Court that the rumor in London was false. There was no child; the queen had not yet begun her labor. The imperial court returned to its accustomed “hope and expectation,” but Londoners were disappointed and resentful.
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“It is hardly to be told,” wrote the Venetian ambassador Michiel, “how much this dispirited everybody.”

The baker’s daughter in her russet gown,

Better than Queen Mary without her crown.

Everyone expected Mary’s child to be born late in April. The chief gentlewomen of the kingdom had come to Hampton Court to witness the birth, and somehow room had been found in the palace for all of them. The sewing and embroidering had all been done, the wetnurses brought in, and the rockers engaged. The royal cradle, “very sumptuously and gorgeously trimmed,” sat in the queen’s bedchamber. Inlaid into the wood were verses in Latin and English, celebrating the divine benefit soon to be conferred on England:

The child which thou to Mary, O Lord of might!

hast send,

To England’s joy, in health preserve—keep, and

defend!
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As day after day passed and still the pains did not begin, Mary kept more and more to her room, seeing no one but her women and becoming all but invisible to the court save for an occasional appearance at a window. Outside the queen’s apartments the courtiers were ordered to put on mourning for the death of the king’s grandmother, and the silk kirtles and velvet doublets in gay colors were exchanged for somber black. After years of bizarre behavior and melancholic wretchedness Joanna the Mad was dead, and Philip shut himself in his rooms until a funeral could be held for her. He planned of course to put off his mourning “for the joy of the delivery,” but until then he and everyone around him had to observe his official grief. His one consolation was that Joanna’s income, some twenty-five thousand ducats a year, now came to him.
²

The French ambassador dismissed the proceedings at Hampton Court
as an elaborate farce. He had never had any respect for Mary, and for the past year he had been nursing a personal grudge against her as well. In the aftermath of Wyatt’s rebellion she had been understandably brusque with him, yet he found her anger incomprehensible. He wrote to Henri II that she “lost all feminine sweetness” in her dealings with him, and he could not seem to understand that what infuriated her was the French support given to a group of English rebels who had escaped to France and set up a small colony at Neufchatel. These “tall men and diverse young gentlemen,” less than two hundred strong, were talking of leading an invading French army into England. They were in league with the Channel pirates, and the French king was encouraging them with everything but money and arms. Mary confronted Noailles with this information, accusing King Henri of breaking faith with her and saying “she would not have acted toward him in that way for the gain of three realms.”

With that she walked out of the room, leaving the ambassador gaping disconcertedly after her. In a moment his confusion had turned to rage, and he took it out on the nearest object at hand, which happened to be the chancellor. Noailles accused Gardiner of reading instead of listening during his conversation with the queen, and reminded him of an old promise he had made but not kept to provide him with a barge. Gardiner, who had a hot temper of his own, grew angry in his turn, and the argument might have become even more serious if Noailles hadn’t noticed that they were not alone. At the opposite end of the gallery was one of Renard’s secretaries, pretending to be preoccupied with his own thoughts but in fact registering every word that was said to tell his master. Sputtering fresh accusations Noailles stalked out.
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Now as he moved among the black-robed English and Spanish courtiers at Hampton Court Noailles laughed at their solemn expectations and their prayers for the queen’s child. He knew for a certainty that there would be no child, for there was no pregnancy. One of his informers, a man in the confidence of both Susan Clarencieux and a midwife who was in constant attendance on the queen, told him that both women had admitted this. Mary was “pale and peaked,” but apart from the swelling of her abdomen she had none of the symptoms of pregnancy. The midwife—“one of the best midwives in the town”—believed the royal physicians to be either too ignorant or too fearful to tell the queen the truth, and she herself, “more to comfort her with words than anything,” would only refer tactfully to a “miscalculation” in the time of her delivery.
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It had been rumored for months that the swelling was “only a tumor, as often happens to women,” and to make this diagnosis more plausible one of Mary’s physicians had been overheard to say that she ate so little she could not possibly keep both herself and a child alive.
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All this was more
than enough evidence to convince Noailles that what he called the “seraglio” at Hampton Court was only a ridiculous pretense, and that the queen was either a blatant liar or a pathetic dupe.

The truth, though, was much more complicated than anyone realized. To begin with, in telling Noailles’ informant there were no symptoms of pregnancy the midwife was inexact. To her experienced eye this may have been true, but there were signs enough to convince both the untrained observers at court and Mary herself that she was indeed expecting. Renard, a hard man to deceive, wrote with confidence that “the queen is veritably with child, for she has felt the babe, and there are other likely and customary symptoms, such as the state of the breasts.”
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The Venetian ambassador Michiel, writing several years after the events he described, assured the Signory that “besides all the other manifest signs of pregnancy there was the swelling of the paps and their emission of milk.”
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Looking back on all that he saw and heard during the months in which Mary waited to be delivered he believed “there was neither deceit nor malice in the matter, but mere error, not only on the part of the king and queen, but on that of the councilors of the whole court.”
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According to one twentieth-century medical hypothesis Mary was afflicted with ovarian dropsy, which produced the amenorrhea that troubled her all her life and the abdominal swelling that she mistook for pregnancy. Even if she had conceived, this condition would have prevented her from carrying a child for the full nine months.
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An odd statement by the French ambassador Boisdaulphin referred to a freak abortion. On May 7, he said, “the queen was delivered of a mole or lump of flesh, and was in great peril of death.” The report was unconfirmed and vague, and though it gave rise to a good deal of Protestant ridicule of Mary it sheds little light on her physical state.

What is clear is that Mary was so strongly persuaded of the appropriateness of her apparent pregnancy that even when it began to seem that she was mistaken she chose to believe in the illusion rather than the reality. Her fruitfulness was in keeping with the overarching design of her life; her barrenness was not. Furthermore, everyone around her, initially convinced by the same evidence as she was, continued to reassure her in her delusion even after they began to have doubts themselves. In the end the doctors, the midwives and her chamberwomen all deceived Mary, finding every reason but the true one for her prolonged confinement and searching for corroboration of the probability that her hopes were well founded. Her grandmother Isabella had given birth to her mother at age fifty-two, they told her, and such events were not rare. If she went past her expected delivery date there was simply a flaw in the calculations, not in the diagnosis.

Fresh calculations were made. The cliild would come, the doctors
and midwives announced solemnly, either at the next change of the moon on May 23 or after the full moon, on June 4 or 5.
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With these comforting voices all around her Mary persisted in her expectations, but the longer she waited the more she came under stress. She grew more and more reclusive, sitting in one place for hours at a time and wrestling with depression and anxiety. Such inactivity was far from natural to her, and those who saw her said she looked pale and ill. And they noted that her sitting position was one that no pregnant woman could have assumed without considerable pain. She sat on a cushion on the floor, her knees pulled up to her chin, her abdomen squeezed nearly flat.
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By the twenty-first of May it was reported that “her majesty’s belly [has] greatly declined, which is said yet more to indicate the approaching term.”
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One of her physicians, Dr. Calagila, looked for the onset of labor “any day now,” and declared that she had certainly entered her final month. Yet Ruy Gomez wrote that he had seen her walking in her garden with such a light step that he could not imagine her being brought to bed soon, and no one was willing to hazard a final deadline.
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Meanwhile the life of the court and government all but came to a standstill, and impatient courtiers and irritated dignitaries paced the galleries exchanging rumors and worried looks as they waited for news from the queen’s apartments. “Everything is in suspense,” Michiel wrote, “and dependent on the result of this delivery.”
¹
*

In London disillusionment over the false announcement of April 30 led to mounting agitation. New libels against Mary were thrown into the streets every few days, stirring up fears and encouraging rebellion. Some said the queen was dead, and printed versions of a “grace to be said at the accession of Elizabeth” appeared. Seditious talk was everywhere—in taverns, in the streets, anywhere gentlemen met to eat and gamble. Philip was so worried he wrote to his father for advice, asking what he should do about the libels, the slanderers, and the rash of impostors claiming to be King Edward. One such pretender was brought before the Council on May Io, but no sooner was he taken than another youth of eighteen was seized in Kent for proclaiming himself the rightful ruler and “raising a tumult amongst the populace.” He was brought to London, whipped and mutilated by the cropping of his ears. A fool’s coat was put on his back, and signs indicating his crime were fastened on his head and hung over his breast. It was announced that he was only a serving boy doing what others told him, but not before he had persuaded many of the country folk that he really was the late king.
¹⁵

Violence at court had become so alarming that Philip enjoined secrecy on all those who knew the details of the most recent incidents. Three English thieves who robbed a Spaniard of a huge store of gold and jewels were hanged, but there was little that could be done to punish the
hundreds of English assailants who appeared just outside the court gates, their swords at the ready, to take on every Spaniard in sight. What started as a brawl between a few men on both sides escalated rapidly until by one estimate there were five hundred of the English involved. Before the battle was over five or six men were dead, and nearly three dozen seriously wounded. Despite the king’s stern warning the affair could not be kept secret, and the English were so elated to find that no large-scale punishment resulted that they immediately laid plans for an even bloodier assault to be attempted early in July.
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The continued postponements in the queen’s delivery had as great an importance in international affairs as within her realm. Since the start of her reign Mary had been looked on as a natural mediator between France and the empire, and now in the spring of 1555 a peace conference was arranged under English auspices. There was a good deal at stake: the revival of England’s prestige in continental politics, the improvement of relations between England and France and, of greater immediate importance, the prevention of new warfare in which Philip might try to involve England on the Hapsburg side.

There was another significant factor in the conference as well. It was planned, executed and paid for by Mary and her agents alone. Because of his obvious bias Philip had no authority or involvement in this diplomatic enterprise, and it was one of the few autonomous undertakings for which Mary could claim credit. The delegates met, under Pole’s presidency, on Engiish-held territory in the Calais pale. Five wooden buildings were constructed by the English to house the participants. The imperial, French and English delegates each had separate temporary residences, a fourth was for Pole, and a fifth provided a neutral setting for the meetings.
¹⁷

From the start the French seemed to have the upper hand. The French delegates arrived accompanied by five hundred mounted guardsmen each, plus companies of noblemen and prelates and great crowds of servants. In their “pompous attire” they had the air of knights riding to a tournament, while the imperial negotiators, wearing mourning for Queen Joanna, were drab and funereal by contrast.
¹⁸
There was an appearance of amity as the discussions began, with the English taking the imperialists by the hand and all but forcing them to embrace the Frenchmen, but these courtesies could not take the place of meaningful concessions of territory and privileges. The French refused to return any of the lands they had seized from the empire in the recent war, and wanted still more. The emperor’s negotiators insisted that all conquered territories be returned and would not offer anything of value in exchange. Bishop Gardiner did not help the situation any by urging the emperor to take compassion on “the infirmity of the French” following St. Paul’s dictum that
the man should pity “the infirmity of the woman.” The French took umbrage at being called women, and at the massing of troops in the region of the conference.