Bloody Mary (52 page)

In actuality the soldiers were being kept in readiness so that “in case the queen of England die in childbed” they could be sent immediately to England to protect Philip, but the French feared an attack on their border. This danger, coupled with Pole’s ineffectual leadership and Gardiner’s choleric tendencies, prevented progress toward a settlement. Finally, when Noailles’ dispatches arrived with the intelligence that Mary was not pregnant, the English lost what diplomatic leverage they had possessed and on June 7 the conference came to an abrupt end.

At its start there had been much talk of how Mary, who had miraculously brought England back to reunion with Rome, should be able to bring about a similar miracle at the peace table. When the meeting ended in a stalemate it was noted that, for the first time since her good fortune began years earlier, Mary had presided over a failure.

The summer of 1555 was bleak and sunless. The air was cold even at midday, and the rain never seemed to stop. The fields were turned to mud, and the grain grew in stunted clumps, bent under the weight of the constant rain. The weather was so bad that “the like is not remembered in the memory of man for the last fifty years,” Michiel wrote. “No sort of grain or corn ripens, and still less can it be reaped, a prognostic of scarcity yet greater than that of last year.”
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The peace conference had failed, the crops were failing, and at Hampton Court the queen’s unyielding hope was slowly losing ground to despair.

In the first week of June the clergy began to lead daily processions for Mary’s safe delivery. Her courtiers and Council members joined in, and at her request they marched around the palace court below her apartments. She sat at a small window and watched the procession every morning, bowing “with extraordinary cheerfulness and graciousness” to the dignitaries and councilors who doffed their caps to her as they passed.
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There was more color in her cheeks now than in May, and some said she had never been in better health, though she still felt “no movement indicating parturition.”
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The Spanish courtiers were especially anxious for any hopeful sign of the approaching birth, as they looked forward to leaving England as soon after the christening as possible. “The queen’s deliverance keeps us all greatly exercised in our minds,” Ruy Gomez wrote, “although our doctors always said that the nine months are not up until 6 June.” When she thought she felt some pains on May 3 I and again in mid-June they became excited, but when Mary did not take to her bed they grew glum.
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Ruy Gomez dutifully sent word of each change in the doctors’ official prognostications, but he was becoming cynical, and in his private letters he made jokes about the queen’s vanished girth. “All this makes me doubt whether she is with child at all,” he confided to a correspondent, “greatly as I desire to see the thing happily over.”
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The king was even more eager than his courtiers to see the conclusion of the queen’s pregnancy. He had been expected in Flanders since May—on June 6 the emperor was still postponing Queen Joanna’s interment in hopes that his son would arrive at any time—and he was prepared to embark as soon as he knew that the child was born and Mary was out of danger. He had already given some of the lesser members of his retinue permission to leave, and the soldiers in his personal guard were due to begin crossing to Flanders in the second week of June. With the failure of the peace conference a fresh outbreak of war seemed likely, and Philip was determined to be a part of it. He was tired of being thought of as unfit and disinclined toward war; he badly wanted a military reputation.
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“From what I hear,” Michiel wrote in a dispatch, “one single hour’s delay in this delivery seems to him a thousand years.”
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He was still living like a wealthy guest in England, dependent on the hospitality of the court yet paying all his expenses and those of his household. It was known he had not touched a penny of the revenues of the English crown. In fact he had loaned Mary a good deal of money, and it was partly as a result of this that his treasurers were at work in Antwerp early in June trying to secure a loan. Money was scarce, and it took them some weeks to complete their negotiations. In the meantime none of the Spaniards had any coins in their pockets, and when they tried to live on credit the English landlords and merchants either complained loudly or denied them lodging and food. “In truth these poor courtiers have a very bad time of it,” Michiel said of Philip’s retainers, “both by reason of the intolerable scarcity of everything, which has doubled in price owing to them, as also because there is no one who, either with money or credit, will succor and assist them in their need.” The dreary weather and the certain prospect of a poor harvest made the English more reluctant than ever to accommodate the Spaniards, and when Philip’s agents finally sent word they had negotiated a loan of 300,000 ducats they were overjoyed, even though the bankers demanded more than twenty-five per cent interest. Philip too was relieved, but apprehensive for the future, for in order to arrange the loan he had been forced to pledge all his revenues for the next two years.
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Crowning his worries, though, was the embarrassment of being held up to ridicule in foreign courts. English diplomats abroad could only make excuses for Mary for so long, referring to the miscalculations of the doctors and the “common error of women in reckoning their time.”
Mason wrote from Brussels asking that Mary appear occasionally at mass or in some public place in order to put an end to the scurrilous rumors at the imperial court. The Council sent him back an official response telling him to counteract whatever rumors he heard, but individual Council members forewarned him later in private letters that they doubted the genuineness of the pregnancy.
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The Venetian ambassador in Brussels had received trustworthy information that “the queen has given manifest signs of not being pregnant” before the end of May, although he confined his knowledge to secret dispatches and maintained the opposite in his public statements.
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The French king was willing to put down the delay to “women’s ways,” but one of his ambassadors, who was staying at Padua for his health, busily spread the story of her freak delivery of a “mole or lump of flesh,” now embroidered to include the fabrication that he had seen letters confirming the queen’s death.
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Meanwhile Mary busied herself with ordering her secretaries to prepare letters announcing her safe delivery to be sent to the pope, the emperor, the kings of France, Hungary, and Bohemia, the doge of Venice, the queen regent of Flanders and the queen dowager of France. The date of the birth was left blank, as was the sex of the child; these important details would be filled in by clerks at the last minute. Mary signed the letters herself, and also the passports for the envoys who were deputed to carry the good news to the imperial and Portuguese and French courts.
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She prepared a brief letter to Pole at the same time, informing him how it had “late pleased God of his infinite goodness” to add to the benefits he had conferred on her “the happy delivery of a prince.”

And as if to match these premature announcements an ambassador from Poland arrived at Hampton Court to convey his sovereign’s compliments to the queen. The false report of Mary’s delivery that had so rejoiced Londoners on April 30 had reached Poland some weeks later. There no one contradicted it, and the king immediately sent an envoy to England in consequence. The Polish diplomat knew no English, but had prepared a “premeditated Latin oration” artfully combining condolence on the death of Queen Joanna with congratulations on the birth of Mary’s son. Apparently he was unable to disentangle his sentiments, for he delivered both the sorrowful and joyful portions of his address before Philip and his courtiers, “to the laughter and amusement of many persons who were present.”
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As the summer dragged on popular unrest was so great the earl of Pembroke and his forces had to be brought in to keep order in London. A planned rising for the last week in June was discovered by the Council in time to forestall it, and pageants scheduled for the feasts of Sts. Peter and John were canceled. Efforts were made to break up any crowd that gathered in the city, but Pembroke and his men could not be everywhere.
On Corpus Christi Day all the principal Spaniards went to worship in a certain church, intending to follow the host in procession. A huge crowd gathered at the door of the church, the English outside outnumbering the Spaniards within by two to one. The Spaniards prudently stayed inside and some of the English, “less daring and indiscreet than the rest,” succeeded in dispersing the mob, but the confrontation could easily have ended in the worst bloodshed yet seen.
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Both sovereigns did what they could to prevent the violence, issuing order after order threatening severe penalties for assaults of any kind, but Mary’s distress at the mistreatment of the Spaniards only angered her subjects further. They said she was “a Spaniard at heart,” and that she cared nothing for the true Englishmen who supported her. Worse still, they said that her Spanish husband was betraying her with other women. Protestant pamphleteers alleged that the king kept company with whores and commoners’ daughters while Mary was confined to her rooms. “The baker’s daughter in her russet gown,” they rhymed, was “Better than Queen Mary without her crown.”

Other ballads spread even more quickly in the summer of 1555, songs about the heroism of the Protestants burned by the queen’s bishops and about the malice of the queen herself. The burnings were creating a fresh undercurrent of opposition stronger than any political rebellion. It came to the attention of the Council that two Protestants, John Barnard and John Walsh, were going about the countryside carrying the bones of William Pigot, a man burned for heresy at Braintree in March. Barnard and Walsh were showing the bones to the people as if they were relics, and exhorting them to hold firmly to the doctrines they had learned under Henry VIII and Edward as the martyr Pigot had done.
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In the first two weeks of June there were eight more burnings, and the “sudden severity” they indicated was odious to many. There were riots in Warwickshire in July, and fears of more disturbances in Devonshire and Cornwall, and Pembroke was again summoned to put a stop to the unrest before it reached a critical stage.
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The English Protestants on the continent affirmed that there was a direct connection between the burnings and the queen’s frustrated hope for motherhood. Gardiner had persuaded Mary that the Protestants had bewitched her, they said, and in her fear of them she had given the bishop a free hand in his cruel slaughter of the true believers. Even in London it was being said that Mary had declared her child could not be born until every heretic then in prison was burned.
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In July the doctors and midwives ceased their calculations altogether. By some reckonings the queen was now eleven months pregnant, and if she succeeded now in giving birth to a healthy child it would in truth be a miracle. A miracle, it seems, was just what everyone near her expected. “The universal persuasion and belief” was, according to Michiel, that a
miracle would “come to pass in this, as in all her majesty’s other circumstances, which the more they were despaired of according to human reasoning and discourse, the better and more auspicious did their result then show itself.” Mary’s child would prove to the world once and for all that her affairs “were regulated exclusively by divine providence.”
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As the queen waited for the miracle, she wept and prayed. Her prayer book survives, its pages worn and stained. The queen’s tears appear to have fallen most often on a page bearing a prayer for the safe delivery of a woman with child.
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I know wher is a gay castle

Is build of lime and stone,

Within is a gay ladie

Her lord is ryd from home.

By the first of August Hampton Court stank as badly as a London street. The kitchens and courtyards reeked of refuse, and indoors the air in the chambers and galleries was foul and stale. The constant rains had spoiled the palace gardens, and made hunting or riding impossible. The courtiers had no choice but to keep to their tiny, overcrowded rooms, going outside only to join the religious processions that still petitioned God to deliver the queen. They were bored and impatient. There were no celebrations or entertainments to occupy them and their fine clothes hung useless in their wardrobes, rotting in the dampness.

To their immense relief it was announced that the court was moving to Oatlands so that Hampton Court could be cleansed. It was a tacit acknowledgment that Mary’s confinement was over, for the manor of Oatlands was a modest rural house barely large enough to accommodate a reduced royal household. Philip’s attendants had been leaving for Flanders for weeks, and now even Ruy Gomez took his departure. The noblewomen who had been shut up with Mary for nearly four months ordered their servants to pack their trunks and returned to their own summer houses. There was no formal announcement that the queen and her physicians had given up hoping for a child. Instead both Mary and Philip’s most intimate advisers continued to insist that she was in her sixth or seventh month, but everyone knew it was only said “for the sake of keeping the populace in hope, and consequently in check.” But the people could only be fooled for so long, and they knew as clearly as the ambassadors did that “the pregnancy will end in wind rather than anything else.”
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Perhaps they cared less than Renard and the other imperialists thought. The incipient rebellions that had been reported turned out to be far less serious than Renard’s dispatches made them appear. The Warwickshire rising was in fact an angry crowd at a local market protesting the unscrupulous profiteering of some grain speculators—a serious enough matter, but no danger to the queen. The unrest in Devon and Cornwall was no more than a ripple of dissatisfaction produced by a story that the queen was dead. The only evidence that she was still alive, her daily appearance at the palace window, was said to be a fraud; it was not the queen’s own face at the window but a wax replica. Another supposed rebellion was nothing more than a dispute between a landlord and his tenants.

Disturbed though the country people were by the unaccountable course of the queen’s fruitless pregnancy their immediate concern was for the price of grain and beer. In the drenched fields the harvest had putrefied. There was no fresh grain to be had, either for bread or for brewing. There was no grass for the cattle, no hay or oats for the horses. In some areas the “greater part” of the sheep had sickened and died, and those that were left were being sold for the price of a small farm.
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In normal times August was a month of abundance, but this year there was only want, and fear of famine in the months to come. As the king and queen rode eastward out of London toward Oatlands on August 3 they saw little but barren farmlands and lean cattle, and the faces of the peasants who called out to wish them godspeed were very thin indeed.

Who it was that gave the order to remove to Oatlands is unclear. Mary herself may have struggled toward a conscious accommodation with the truth, or a compassionate waiting woman may have helped her to make the difficult decision. According to one account there was at least one among the women of her suite who refused to go along with the delusion of pregnancy. Mistress Frideswide Strelley, “a good honorable woman of hers,” never echoed the comforting words of Susan Claren-cieux and the midwives, and when Mary could no longer endure the strain of her false hopes she sent for Mistress Strelley and thanked her for her constancy. “I see they be all flatterers,” the queen told her, “and none true to me but thou.”
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Once installed at Oatlands Mary returned to her accustomed routine. The household officials took up their posts again, and the queen resumed her governmental tasks and audiences. She had never entirely stopped seeing ambassadors and other dignitaries, even during the time court observers reported her to be most reclusive. One of these interviews concerned the abortive peace conference. The papal prothonotary Noailles, brother of the French ambassador, spoke with Mary at Hampton Court in July. He found her to be fully informed about the course the talks had taken, and thoroughly disillusioned with the obstinacy of the French. She
told him “half angrily” that in view of her obligations to her husband and father-in-law she could hardly be expected to remain neutral much longer, adding that if the conference had failed it was not the fault of the English mediators. “She would not lay the blame,” she said, “on anything but our own sins and demerits, and on the evil nature of the times, God’s wrath not having as yet sufficiently vented itself on us.”
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If Mary had this view of diplomatic affairs it is possible she applied the same logic to her own situation. Her confidence in God’s guiding hand had been badly shaken, but she may have found some justification for her disappointment in the view that the wickedness of the age demanded punishment. If God could use her to drive out tyranny and restore the church, then he could use her barrenness to chastise his people for their sins. Armed with this dark consolation Mary took up her accustomed life once again, showing herself and conversing with her courtiers as usual and finally admitting “with her own lips” that she was not pregnant after all.
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Philip went to Oatlands disappointed of a son but endowed with a kingdom. Charles V had at last determined to pass on his lands to his heirs, and the choicest of these lands, the kingdom of the Netherlands, was to be Philip’s inheritance. The emperor’s gout and troubled mental state made it impossible for him to go on ruling any longer. He needed rest and sun and quiet, when at Brussels he found only toil and foul weather and the imminent threat of war. His ailments were so severe in the summer of 1555 that he had to treat them with waters from the baths of Liege. Mules were posted at intervals along the road between Liége and Brussels to carry skins of water in relays to the imperial court.
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The emperor’s doctors had prescribed that he bathe in the healing waters at least once every twenty-four hours, and as he could not leave his desk to go to the spa the spa had to come to him.

Charles’ sister Mary was preparing to lay aside her authority at the same time he did, to make way for Philip’s personal rule. To judge from her later behavior she was by no means anxious to relinquish her power, but did so in deference to her brother. She wrote Charles an official letter informing him of her decision in August, filled with self-apology and polite formulas of subservience. “Having long been burdened with a sense of her inadequacy,” she began, she had decided to follow his example and give up her throne, realizing that if Charles in his wisdom felt the need to retire it was only fitting that she feel the same need “given her inferiority to him in every respect, and the fact that she is a woman.” Her ability, compared to a man’s, was “as black compared with white,” she confessed, and no woman, however gifted, could effectively govern the Low Countries in time of war. As for her future, Mary of Flanders had modest expectations. She would rather “earn her living as best she
might” than go on ruling, she claimed. She had always planned to tend her mother in her old age, but now that Joanna was dead Mary would like nothing better than to live in Spain with her widowed sister Eleanor, queen dowager of France.
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Philip was as reluctant to take power in the Netherlands as his aunt was to give it up. He was eager to leave England, but not in order to rule over the Flemings, who detested him. What he wanted most, he informed his father through Ruy Gomez, was to go back to Spain as soon after the abdication as possible, and he begged earnestly to be spared a repetition of his tense year in England. But with Charles himself planning to retire to Spain it was more imperative than ever that his son remain in Flanders, especially now that war with France was imminent. All that Philip had gained in England might be lost if he put himself at such a distance from London, while at Brussels he was only four or five days away from his island kingdom. What he had accomplished in England was well worth preserving. In the eyes of the foreign ambassadors he was so obviously the locus of political power there that both the Portuguese and Venetian envoys to the English court offered to follow him to Brussels in order to stay close to the heart of English affairs.
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Before his leavetaking Philip acted very much like a ruling king. He startled Cardinal Pole by appearing at his door, “very privately in person,” to tell the cardinal he wanted him to assume charge of the government in his absence, and the following day he repeated this request to the entire Council, ordering the Council members “to defer to him [Pole] in everything.” “All public and important business” was to be decided according to the “opinion and advice” of the cardinal, while “private and ordinary matters” were to be handled by the Council alone.
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This left nothing whatever for the queen to do, and indeed Philip did not mention her in his final speech.

Mary may have had this significant oversight in mind as she prepared to accompany Philip to Greenwich, where he was to take ship for Gravesend and then travel by land to Canterbury and eventually to Dover to embark for the Flemish coast. Philip was to ride through London to Tower Wharf, where he would join Mary in her barge and travel downriver to Greenwich with her. But at the last minute Mary decided not to go by water to the wharf but to ride beside her husband in an open litter, with Pole at her side and the Lord Mayor and aldermen bearing the royal insignia before her. Her instincts were sound, for many Londoners still believed she was dead, and the sight of her created a joyful commotion. The city was full of country folk crowding in for Bartholomew Fair, and the roadway along which the royal procession passed was choked with spectators. When they heard the queen was coming, the people “all ran from one place to another, as to an unexpected
sight, and one which was well-nigh new, as if they were crazy, to ascertain thoroughly if it was her, and on recognizing and seeing her in better plight than ever, they by shouts and salutations, and every other demonstration, then gave yet greater signs of their joy.”
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By her mere appearance Mary had upstaged Philip, though both were applauded heartily all along the length of their route.

On August 29 Philip embarked from Greenwich. He and Mary said their goodbyes in private, but afterward she insisted on walking with him to the head of the stairs where his gentlemen all kissed her hand. Michiel, who was present, noted that Mary “expressed very well the sorrow becoming a wife” as well as the dignity becoming a queen. She was evidently “deeply grieved internally,” but she took care not to show it, “constraining herself the whole way to avoid, in sight of such a crowd, any demonstration unbecoming her gravity.”

Once the king had gone, however, and she was safely back in her apartments, she sat down in front of a window which looked out on the river and began to cry. No one but her women—among them Michiel’s informant—could see her there, and she was free to express her feelings. Her beloved Philip, her dear husband and helpmeet, was going with the next tide. She sat by the window for hours, watching as his trunks and chests and horses were loaded onto the barge, then watching his personal servants, his companions, and finally Philip himself step aboard and go below. She saw the sailors cast off and the ship move off downriver, and to her delight Philip came up on the deck one last time, “mounted aloft on the barge in the open air, in order to be better seen when the barge approached in sight of the window,” and waved his hat in Mary’s direction, “demonstrating great affection.”
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She continued to watch the river until the ship was out of sight.

Philip and his retinue stayed at Canterbury for several days, waiting for good weather and an escort fleet of Flemish ships. There were many French ships and privateers in the Channel; only a month or so earlier seventeen French vessels had burned and sunk a Flemish fleet in a bloody day-long battle. While he waited Philip read the messages Mary sent him and sent her replies of his own. Gentlemen-in-waiting were on the road between Canterbury and Greenwich nearly every hour, and messengers hung about the courtyard of the palace night and day, “booted and spurred ready for a start.”

When he was not attending to this correspondence Philip talked with great interest to his traveling companion Francisco de Ribera. Ribera, an adventurer living in Peru, had come back to Europe to strike a bargain with the emperor. He and his fellow landowners wanted to buy the right to their lands in perpetuity in return for enormous sums in Peruvian sil
ver. Ribera came to Philip first, hoping to gain his support for the plan before approaching his father. The more Philip heard of the wealth to be gained the more he was inclined to give his approval. On his journey from the New World, Ribera said, he had lost some fifty thousand ducats in bullion when his ship foundered, but the loss meant nothing since the natives would replace the silver twice over as soon as he returned. Philip needed no more convincing. By the time he and Ribera set sail for Calais they were on the best of terms, and Philip spent the brief voyage calculating his profits—“so considerable a sum that the mere mention of it is alarming.”
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