Bloody Mary (56 page)

The danger appeared to be coming closer and closer. Servants in her
household were no longer to be trusted, and her personal guard was doubled. William Harris, one of Mary’s carpenters, was overheard to slander his mistress as he sat at an alehouse. “She hath undone us,” he declared, “and hath undone this realm too, for she loveth another realm better than this.”
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One of the officers of the queen’s pantry, William Cox, had to be committed to the porter’s lodge for receiving a seditious handbill claiming that King Edward was still alive; the matter was serious enough to come to the Council’s attention and Cox was dismissed. Worst of all, while Mary was staying in the apartments Pole kept in readiness for her at Croydon someone with free access to her presence littered her rooms with copies of the ugliest and most insulting libel yet to appear. It caricatured Mary as a wrinkled hag, her shriveled bosom suckling a crowd of greedy Spaniards. Circling the drawing were the words “Maria Ruina Angliae,” and the text of the bill was an expose of how Mary, “England’s Ruin,” was plundering her subjects in order to send money to her faithless husband in Brussels.

Mary might have found this injury easier to bear had Philip been true to his latest promise to return. He had told the English ambassador Mason that he was “setting his stable and a part of his house in order to be sent to England,” and that he would make the journey himself in August. But the summer months found him at a “house of pleasure” outside the capital, seeking refuge from the plague, and when September came and still he had not taken ship for England Mary’s disappointment deepened. By now even Cardinal Pole was “beginning to be incredulous,” as he told the Venetian ambassador, though he tried not to let Mary see his disillusionment.
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If she had known what changes Philip had undergone during his year in Flanders Mary might have been less eager for his return. For if the lighter side of his temperament had found an outlet in masquings and tournaments, his innate seriousness had also deepened. Observers now saw in him “the very image and portrait of the emperor his father,” and noted the resemblance in complexion, features and even in “habits and mode of life.” He was no longer the affable prince whose primary concern was to obey his imperious father; he was now a powerful ruler in his own right, consumed with affairs of state and revealing a rare taste for the tedium of administration. He sat with his councilors for four or five hours at a time, made himself available to petitioners whenever they requested it, and relished combing through every clause of the reports and dispatches of his ministers with the crawling thoroughness of the born functionary.

It was said that Philip was already becoming a very old young man, prey to infirmities and with the mentality of an invalid. His natural languor drained him of vigor and his attacks of indigestion had become more and more frequent.
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Harassed by bowel complaints, his brow fur
rowed by hours of deliberations and paperwork, his dapper figure hunching prematurely into the slouch of middle age, Philip was no longer Mary’s storybook prince. What was more, he had had to mortgage the income from the Netherlands provinces in order to satisfy his creditors and, like Mary, was taxing his subjects so heavily they were on the point of rebellion. And he was being pushed from all sides into war. In November Philip wrote to Mary that he saw no way of coming back to her as long as the pope continued to “injure his affairs” and the French king continued to prepare his armies and increase his arsenal. Belligerent adversaries, not indifference or amorous adventures, were keeping Philip from his wife’s side.
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As Philip wrote to Mary his general, Alva, was leading his cavalry up to the walls of Rome. The pope had insolently imprisoned several imperial ministers in the Castel Sant’Angelo, and Alva and his troops were threatening to besiege the city. Panic-stricken Romans geared themselves to withstand the siege, tearing down churches and convents and bolstering the walls as best they could. Nearly thirty years earlier the armies of Charles V had destroyed the papal city with a vengeance; spurred by the memory of that devastation monks and nuns joined the lay citizens in digging trenches and fortifying the strongest buildings, rooting out every growing thing the hated soldiers might feed on and hoarding food and water. Pope Paul, secure in his renewed alliance with the French, was defiant. He excommunicated Philip, calling him the “son of iniquity” and accusing him of trying to “surpass even his father Charles in infamy.” Philip, who had neither the money nor, below his surface bravado, the stomach for war, was forced to look to England to fill his treasury.

A rapprochement with his wife was now essential. To prepare the way Philip sent his pages, his stable, and his personal armory to England. When Mary heard that they had landed at Dover she was overjoyed, and when, shortly afterward, several Spanish shopkeepers disembarked with their goods she felt sure Philip would soon be on his way at last.
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Two weeks later Michiel reported that the queen was “pacified” about Philip’s absence, and that she was “enduring this delay better than she did.”
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In fact the threat of war was bringing out all Mary’s instinctive loyalty to her husband. The fact that he was in danger made her forget his neglect, his threats and his callousness. Mary was at her best in a crisis, and she responded now by bringing every resource of her government to Philip’s aid.

Messengers began to carry letters back and forth between Mary and Philip far more frequently than ever before. They kept one another informed of everything, with Philip notifying his wife of every move Alva made and Mary passing on war intelligence gathered from English agents abroad. She sent him valuable descriptions of new French war devices
being deployed on the Picardy border—instruments to sap and break down walls, a specially constructed bridge made to span even the widest ditch, and a special file which could cut through the thickest chains without making a sound.
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Philip sent “very copious letters” apologizing for his inability to return, and Mary responded with descriptions of the emergency Council meetings she called to persuade her ministers to support Philip in his time of need. Through forced loans she amassed 150,000 ducats, and sent them to Philip, along with a promise of naval support against the French. Within a few weeks so much freshly coined money was put into circulation that the merchants, remembering the drastic fiscal measures of Henry VIII and Edward, feared a massive depreciation of the coinage. By December there were signs of financial panic in London, with wildly fluctuating exchange rates and debtors scrambling to pay their alarmed creditors before they found that the coins in their pockets were worthless.
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By January of 1557 England was being drawn closer and closer to war. The sheriffs in the counties nearest the capital were summoned to court to report on the numbers of fighting men they could supply, and the royal guard was newly outfitted. Ships were repaired and manned, and the garrison at Calais received fresh troops and was put in a state of alert. After holding off as long as possible the Council agreed to send Philip the six thousand foot and six hundred horse soldiers which England was obligated to provide in the event of a French attack on the Netherlands, and on January 20 a muster of the royal pensioners was held at Greenwich Park before the queen.

The men at arms rode past her three abreast, mounted on great war horses and carrying spears painted in white and green. Every pensioner had three hired soldiers with him, wearing the Tudor colors of green and silver-white, and as Mary stood on a high platform they rode up and down in front of her at the park gate, their trumpeters blowing and their standards waving in the wind. The standards bore a new design, one which combined Philip and Mary’s arms and symbolized the union of the two powers against their common foe. On one side the Castilian colors of red and yellow surrounded the white hart of England; on the other was the black eagle of the Hapsburgs with gilded legs. The pensioners hired a tumbler to perform before Mary, and as they rode by he “played many pretty feats” before her, “so that her grace did laugh heartily.” When the muster ended Mary “thanked them all for their pains” and went back into the palace much heartened.
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She and her loyal guardsmen had no need to fear the French. The combined forces of England and Spain would be more than a match for the pope and his allies.

The new French ambassador in England, François de Noailles, took a far different view of Mary’s preparations for war. Like his brother An
toine, whom he officially replaced as ambassador in November of 1556, he saw the coming war as the ultimate tragedy of Mary’s unwise marriage. Mary’s authority was already strained to the limit; war with France would surely lead to her overthrow. “I do not know,” he wrote, “whether, if she tries to bend the bow still further, the wood and the string may not fly into fragments.” Noailles saw more clearly than Mary herself the mental anguish the war would cause her. “She is on the eve of bankrupting either her own mind or her kingdom,” he insisted. “It is impossible that the crown will not fall from her head and roll so far that someone else may pick it up before she has wept for her sins.”

Ageynst the Frenchmen in the feld to fyght

In the quarell of the church and in the ryght,

With spers and sheldys on goodly horsys lyght,

Bowys and arows to put them all to flyght:

Englond, be glad! Pluk up thy lusty hart!

Help now thi king, thi king, and take his part!

On March 8 Philip left Brussels for Calais, where he would take ship for England. He took with him only two gentlemen of his chamber, six nobles, and half of his household officers, leaving the bulk of his household behind. He traveled by slow stages, stopping at Ghent, Bruges, Oudenbourg, Nieuport, Dunkirk and Gravelines, and did not embark from Calais until March 18. He was in no hurry to return to his island kingdom, and the small size of his retinue argued for a short stay once he arrived. But having weighed all considerations of diplomacy, military strategy and finance that faced him in this spring of 1557, Philip had decided that he needed England as an active ally in his quarrel with the pope and the French king. Mary had been able to give him some money and to promise him a limited number of troops, but he needed much more of both. More important, he needed what the English Council most dreaded to consent to: a formal declaration of war.

A forty days’ truce concluded in November between the captain of Philip’s armies in Italy, Alva, and the pope had spared Rome the indignity of a siege, but when the truce expired at the beginning of the new year mutual hostilities began again. Paul IV ordered all Spaniards to leave the papal city on pain of death, and set up a commission to try both Charles V and his son as rebels against the authority of the Holy See. Meanwhile Henri II, who swore he would come to the pope’s aid even if it cost him his crown, sent an army into Italy under the duke de Guise, and as Philip
made his way toward the Channel the French and papal strategists were meeting in Rome to draw up a joint plan of attack.

That the attack would come in Italy was obvious, and Philip’s most effective counterattack would therefore have to be made in the north. If Philip’s Spanish troops could be massed in force against the Franco-Flemish border—France’s weakest perimeter—then the French army in Italy would have to be reduced in order to strengthen the border defenses and the initiative would pass to the imperial side. What he needed, then, was a large army and a full treasury from which to pay it. But this meant trying to take new loans at a time when he lacked the funds even to pay the installments on his old ones. He was in fact technically bankrupt. In January he had sent orders to the treasury in Seville not to honor any of the payment orders he signed, thus defaulting on every fiscal guarantee he and his ministers had made in recent months.
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His only hope, short of the miraculous appearance of a treasure ship from the New World, was to try to exploit the good repute he had left behind him in England, counting always on the obedience of his wife.

Early in February he sent Ruy Gomez to England to prepare for his arrival. He had instructions to tell Mary the long-awaited news that her husband was returning to her at last, but he was to make it very clear that the price of Philip’s return was a guarantee of an English declaration of war against France. Mary understood only too well, but she eagerly agreed to do all in her power to move the Council. Before he left Gomez had persuaded Mary to part with another
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100,000, and to give her promise to bting England into the war.
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On February 21 she wrote to Philip, begging him “not to be afraid to come” and telling him confidently that his presence would be sufficient to sway the councilors to agree to his demands.

On the evening of March 18 Philip landed at Dover, and the next day he joined Mary at Greenwich. His homecoming was celebrated with a great ringing of bells and the shooting of all the Tower guns, and on March 23 the king and queen rode through London flanked by the great nobles and saluted by the London crafts and the Lord Mayor and aldermen. Outwardly Philip appeared to be resuming his old role as Mary’s deferential husband, but in truth both spouses had changed. Mary was quick to note the transformation her husband had undergone in Flanders, while Philip in turn found her hemmed in by doubts and deep worries, her face deeply lined and drawn.

Michiel described the queen and her sorrows in his report to the doge and Senate written only two months after Philip came to England. In appearance Mary was “very grave,” he noted, and very “seemly,” “never to be loathed for ugliness, even at her present age.” Whenever she spoke she
commanded attention, her rough voice carrying so that “she is always heard a long way off,” but her eyes were her most arresting feature. “Her eyes are so piercing that they inspire, not only respect, but fear, in those on whom she fixes them,” .Michiel wrote, adding that she had become so nearsighted that she had to hold whatever she needed to read very close to her face, Mary’s ‘-Veil-formed” features were marred by wrinkles, “caused more by anxieties than by age,” but whatever shortcomings there were in her physical appearance her mental endowments were vast. The facility and quickness of her understanding were so remarkable that nothing seemed too complex for her to grasp. Her gift for languages was much esteemed, while “the replies she gives in Latin, and her very intelligent remarks made in that tongue,” Suriano remarked, “surprise everybody.”

What stood out most about Mary, in Michiel’s view, was the unmistakable quality of heroism in her life and personality. “Not only is she brave and valiant, unlike other timid and spiritless women, but so courageous and resolute that neither in adversity nor peril did she ever even display or commit any act of cowardice or pusillanimity,” he wrote. She kept “a wonderful grandeur and dignity” in all circumstances, and knew as well as any statesman in her service how to behave in order to maintain “the dignity of a sovereign.” Now, nearly four years after her coronation, Mary still reminded observers of a constant flame burning amid a storm. “It may be said of her,” Michiel claimed, “as Cardinal Pole says with truth, that in the darkness and obscurity of that kingdom she remained precisely like a feeble light buffeted by raging winds for its utter extinction, but always kept burning.”

But if, as Michiel insisted, Mary’s light still shone brightly in the world, it was fast becoming dimmed by her poor health and private griefs. Her old disease troubled her nearly constantly now, leading to depression and long periods of crying. To relieve this condition her doctors bled her frequently, “either from the foot or elsewhere,” and she was always pale and emaciated from lack of blood. Her general health was poor, her teeth ached and she slept badly, though she worked on in spite of these problems and did not allow her sufferings to impair her public presence. Her anguish of mind, though, she could not keep hidden. Portraits of the queen painted toward the end of her reign show a gaunt, controlled woman of middle age, the pomegranate of Spain stitched into her brocaded sleeves, and around her neck her favorite jewel—the great diamond with the pendant pearl. Her face is still handsome, but the set of her lips in her thin cheeks suggests grim determination. She looks out with the frightening stare Michiel found so arresting, and her expression is one of haggard benevolence. Mary’s controlled demeanor
was maintained, these portraits imply, by an immense effort of will; behind her composure was a brittle sanity which might snap under the weight of her mounting sorrows.

Chief among these sorrows, Michiel believed, was her barrenness. It was impossible to overestimate the damage her fruitless pregnancy did her, he wrote. Without a child to succeed her every effort of her reign was futile. Even if she succeeded in rebuilding the churches and restoring the monasteries, and even if her religious policies purified the faith the entire process would be repudiated on her death unless she left behind her a Catholic heir. Yet far from encouraging her in the hope that she might yet bear a child, her courtiers and gentlewomen accepted her childlessness and withdrew their esteem accordingly. “No one believes in the possibility of her having progeny,” Michiel wrote, “so that day by day she sees her authority and the respect induced by it diminish.” And there were many other causes for grief. Plots against her life and against the government were uncovered more frequently now, and the people showed “a greater inclination and readiness for change than ever.” The extraordinary affection her subjects had shown her early in the reign was swiftly being eroded. Her debts were huge, and her attempts to pay them by taxing her people only led to greater unrest. As a sovereign Mary faced the greatest challenge of her reign since the attempt of Dudley to seize the throne for Jane Grey.

Worse even than these adversities, Michiel believed, was Mary’s painful realization that she was likely to live out her days deprived of the company of the man she passionately loved. According to the ambassador, Mary’s feeling for her husband was one of “violent love”; “she may be said never to pass a day without anxiety” on Philip’s account, and in his absence her one fear was that he might become seriously attached to another woman. She knew he had been unfaithful to her, but she believed his flirtations and seductions in Flanders had been no more than passing amusements. “If she does not hold the king chaste,” Michiel wrote, “I at least know that she says she believes him free from love for any other woman.” This at least was some consolation. But the longer Philip stayed away the more likely he was to fall deeply in love, and then she would be “truly miserable.”

The tragedy of Mary’s marriage was now apparent: she had sworn to adore and obey a man whose political responsibilities kept him all but totally separated from her, by whom she would have no children, and whose undivided love she was unlikely to keep for long. In this woeful state she was forced to watch “the eyes and hearts of the nation” turning more and more to the daughter of Anne Boleyn.

At twenty-three Elizabeth was a tall, good-looking young woman whose olive skin set off her lovely eyes and even features. Like Mary be
fore her she was using her wits to survive in the midst of danger; she observed the Catholic rituals and claimed her observance was sincere, though Mary did not believe it. And even if Mary had been able to trust her half-sister’s conversion there would still have been grounds for resentment. Mary had never believed Elizabeth to be legitimate, and was said to doubt whether she was Henry VIII’s daughter at all. The realization that Elizabeth would in all likelihood come next to the throne seemed monstrously unjust, as if from beyond the grave Anne Boleyn was to enjoy an ultimate triumph after all. It was unspeakably odious to Mary, according to Michiel, “to see the illegitimate child of a criminal who was punished as a public strumpet on the point of inheriting the throne with better fortune than herself, whose descent is rightful, legitimate and regal.”
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Philip’s arrival temporarily drove these dark preoccupations from his wife’s mind, though his presence was far from comforting. The “warmed-over honeymoon,” as one diplomat described it, began badly. Mary had a severe cold and toothache, while Philip, who had been indisposed even before he left Brussels, was still recovering during his first days in England.
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Mary had arranged a series of entertainments for her husband and his retinue—banquets, dances, and one “great masque of Al-mains, Pilgrims and Irishmen” to be staged at Whitehall on St. Mark’s Day—but the festivities were marred by rivalries among the women and by the tense atmosphere at court. There was no disguising the true purpose of Philip’s coming, and with very few exceptions the English did not intend to allow their nominal king to force them into his war. In a feeble effort to alleviate their mistrust some of the Spaniards tried to spread the story that Philip was only in England to restore good relations with Mary, and in particular to soothe her worries about his love affairs. No one believed this, however, and within days of Philip’s coming libels appeared in the capital slandering the Spanish marriage. The old claim was revived that Philip’s marriage to Mary was invalid because of his pre-contract with the Portuguese princess, and gossip about his romances was elaborated in every tavern. There were rumors too that Spanish troops would soon be landing on English shores, and when a proclamation appeared limiting the length of rapiers that could be worn in London the queen’s subjects laughed at it and armed themselves to the teeth.

Philip’s romances were indeed a sore point between the royal spouses, but far from trying to set Mary’s mind at rest Philip brought with him to England the current object of his affections, his cousin the duchess of Lorraine. It was said that she was his mistress, and when Mary arranged the housing for Philip’s party she was uneasy about where to put the duchess, finally settling her on the ground floor at Westminster, in an
apartment overlooking the garden. The English sources are silent about the awkward relationship between the queen and the duchess. At the French court, though, stories about how Mary’s jealousy got the better of her at dances and other entertainments, and how after two months of torment she forced the king’s cousin to pack her trunks and leave, delighted Henri II and put the English queen in a pitiable light.
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