Bloody Mary (6 page)

That the best fed, wealthiest and most privileged members of society should be most victimized by the epidemic offended the prevailing faith in the order of things. It raised the unnerving possibility that order had only a tenuous advantage over anarchy, and that the future might hold the unexpected along with the predictable. It touched the most deep-seated phobia of the age—the fear that the entire social order might collapse. This fear gnawed at the English throughout the second season of the sweating sickness, until in the winter of 1518 the sweat receded with the cold weather and, to their unbounded relief, did not return in the spring.

It was in this time of panic and sudden changes of residence that the Princess Mary spent the early months of her life. She was at first put into the care of a wet-nurse—Katherine Pole, daughter-in-law of the countess of Salisbury. Later Lady Margaret Bryan replaced Katherine Pole with the title “lady mistress.” Lady Bryan was responsible for the small group of servants that made up Mary’s immediate household: her four rockers, Margery Parker, Anne Bright, Ellen Hutton and Margery Cousine, her launderer Avys Woode, and her chaplain and clerk of the closet, Sir Henry Rowte.
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The princess had a state household as well, headed by the countess of Salisbury and including a chamberlain, treasurer and gentlewoman of the bedchamber. The attendants in this state household all wore liveries in Mary’s colors of blue and green. When the sickness threatened the palace, however, the formalities of the official household were forgotten and the king simply packed up his family and a few intimates and moved as far from the infection as he could get. His London residences—the apartments in the Tower, the spacious Baynard’s Castle in Thames Street—were out of the question. His favorite residence, the red brick palace by the Thames at Greenwich with its sprawling lawns and flowering gardens, was too near the heart of the city for safety during the epidemic. The turreted royal apartments at Richmond in Surrey offered refuge for a time, but before long word would
reach Henry that a nearby village had been wiped out by the sweat and in a matter of hours he would be on his way again. The magnificent medieval castle at Windsor he disliked intensely, finding it claustrophobic and austere. What Henry liked were parks and gardens, the open country and, if possible, the river at his doorstep. At Greenwich he could walk down to the dock and inspect his ships and talk with the gunners and sailors. At Windsor he was surrounded by paved courtyards and, in the chapel of the Garter, the tombs and monuments of the Garter knights and military relics of the Plantagenet kings. Farther into the countryside the royal residences were small and in some cases dilapidated. Eltham in Kent could accommodate a severely reduced household, but the manor of Woodstock in Oxfordshire, built to house the king while he hunted in the summer and dating back to Norman times, was both cramped and shabby, and was not fit to be occupied for long.

By the fall of 1518, when Mary was two and a half years old, the court had begun to settle back to its accustomed routine. There were still periodic “removals” from one palace to another, of course. Royalty lived semi-nomadic lives, and rarely spent more than a few weeks in any one palace. But in normal times changes of residence were planned, and followed an established order, and it was to this order that Henry’s court now returned.

For Mary the readjustment marked her first opportunity to play an important role in affairs of state. Rivalry between France and England was as strong as ever, and Henry now saw a way to put his daughter to use as a diplomatic tool. The new French king, Francis I, was anxious to prove his strength and that of France, and only a war or a flattering gesture of brotherliness from Henry would satisfy him. Francis had a son, Henry a daughter. A marriage alliance between them was the obvious alternative to war.

In September of 1518 the negotiations were concluded. A treaty of universal peace was to bind England and France, sealed by the proxy marriage of the dauphin and the English princess which would be consummated when the dauphin turned fourteen. Among the provisions relating to her dowry rights was the highly significant stipulation that if Henry died without a male heir, Mary would succeed him—the earliest statement of her right to the throne.
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To the negotiators of the treaty the point was a minor one. There was still a good deal of hope that Henry would have a son—Katherine was pregnant again, and near her term—and in any case no woman had ever been crowned queen of England in her own right. But as evidence of a real if remote possibility the statement was revealing, and prophetic.

In mid-September ambassadors from the French court arrived in England to sign the treaty and solemnize the marriage. The French made an
impressive showing as they rode through London in their silk doublets, surrounded by the Scotsmen of the French king’s guard and a welcoming escort of English nobles and guardsmen, fourteen hundred horsemen in all. At each of the ceremonies and banquets in the following days the French appeared in fresh robes of slashed silk, to the astonishment of the English courtiers. The seemingly inexhaustible wardrobes of the ambassadors were matched by their purses. They gambled heavily, and no state banquet was complete without the card games and dicing the king loved. At a lavish feast given by Wolsey—now a cardinal of the church and papal legate, and rapidly becoming the most powerful man in England next to the king himself—to celebrate the treaty of universal peace, golden bowls of ducats and dice were set out after dinner for the guests to play at mumchance. After midnight, when all the others had left, Henry “remained to play high with some Frenchmen.”

The treaty arrangements were sworn to by both parties before the high altar of St. Paul’s, and then came the wedding ceremony. At eight o’clock in the morning of October 5 the betrothal parties and their retinues assembled in a hall at Greenwich. Henry stood in front of his throne, with Katherine, his sister Mary, Wolsey and another papal legate, Cardinal Campeggio, at his side. During the bishop of Durham’s long oration in praise of the marriage—at least the third such declamation to which the French visitors had been subjected since their arrival—Mary’s nurse stood at Katherine’s side holding the princess in her arms. Mary was dressed in cloth of gold, wearing over her golden curls a black velvet cap that was studded with jewels. She was small for her age, and delicate, with her father’s fair skin and light eyes. Her coloring and even features made her a very pretty child, and she remained smiling and poised throughout the long ceremony, true to Henry’s proud boast that “his daughter never cried.” When the bishop had finished the ambassadors asked for Henry and Katherine to consent to the marriage, the French admiral Bonnivet consenting on behalf of the dauphin, and Wolsey slid a tiny ring onto Mary’s fourth finger. In it was a very large diamond—his wedding gift to the princess. The admiral, acting for the absent bridegroom, passed it over her second joint in a final solemnity, and then the entire company adjourned to the gorgeously decorated chapel for a celebratory mass. Yet another banquet closed out the festivities, and the dancing that followed it lasted until three in the morning, long after the bride had been put to bed.
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The visit of the French ambassadors to England was only half of the process of peacemaking and matchmaking; to complete it English ambassadors had to travel to Paris to sign the treaty and stand in place of the princess at a repeat of the proxy wedding. Early in December the English party arrived in Paris, and a few days later the king gave them a public
audience. He received them in a large hall whose high ceiling was decorated with the lilies of France. Tapestries covered the walls. Half the room was taken up by an elevated stage several feet higher than the floor. A second platform rising from this stage, at the extreme end of the room, held the throne—a chair covered with cloth of gold under a trailing canopy of gold brocade. King Francis was seated on his throne, wearing a sumptuous silver robe embroidered in flowers and lined entirely in Spanish heron feathers. His feet rested on a cushion of cloth of gold; the dais was carpeted in violet-colored velvet ornamented in lilies. On the stage below the king stood several ranks of great nobles and churchmen, the papal nuncio, and the foreign ambassadors resident at the French court. Far to the king’s left on a lower platform, hidden from the company in the hall by screens, were Queen Claude and the king’s mother, Louise of Savoy, and other gentlewomen.

The English ambassadors, who had put on their richest doublets, gold chains and jeweled girdles for this reception, were preceded into the audience hall by a guard of two hundred gentlemen carrying battle axes, who brought them up the steps of the raised stage to stand below the king. Francis, who up to this point had maintained his kingly pose un-moving, responded to their deep bows with the warmest courtesy, getting up from his throne and descending to greet them each by name. Their credentials were presented and accepted, speeches of welcome and cordiality were exchanged, and finally Francis came down from his throne once more to embrace each of the English representatives in turn, exactly as Henry had embraced the French ambassadors at their audience two months earlier.

A few days after this formal reception the two parties swore to uphold the treaty at a high mass in Notre Dame, and afterward Francis and Claude on behalf of their son espoused the Princess Mary, represented by the earl of Worcester. Throughout these proceedings Francis did his utmost to appear magnificent yet approachable—to fulfill the exalted image of sovereignty while being affable and companionable to his English guests. He took them bear hunting and stag hunting; he jousted with them and for them, and he provided food and entertainment on a scale to match and, he hoped, to surpass the ostentatious banquets at Henry’s court. In the open courtyard within the Bastille a wooden floor was built, with a huge space for dining tables and three galleries for spectators around the sides. The entire area was covered with a ceiling of blue canvas to form a pavilion, and hangings in the king’s colors of white and tawny formed the walls. Here Francis gave a splendid feast, sitting under his golden canopy and surrounded by his relatives and courtiers in order of pre-eminence. The English sent detailed accounts of the evening to Henry, describing the wonderful effect of the huge chandeliers, each
blazing with sixteen torches, throwing their light across the starry blue ceiling painted in gold with the signs of the zodiac and the planets. The food was served on plates of solid gold and silver, and some of the courses “emitted fire and flames,” to the wonder of the diners. Each dish was presented with a degree of pomp usually reserved for visiting dignitaries. A flourish of trumpets announced its approach, with guardsmen and six attendants following the trumpeters. Five heralds then proclaimed the arrival of the eight seneschals of the king’s household, who ushered in the Lord Steward; his staff of twenty-four pages of honor and two hundred guardsmen carried in the meat or fish or game.

Six companies of masquers danced in turn after the dining tables were cleared away: boys in white satin, men in long black satin mantles and white wigs and beards, and a group in “long gowns with tall stockings and short bolstered breeches.” In the midst of the masquers Francis appeared, in a costume which perfectly evoked his magical and sacramental character as king. He wore a long, close-fitting white satin gown made in the shape of a cross like the white robe of Jesus in a religious painting. His youth and dark hair and beard heightened his resemblance to the familiar image of the savior, and his handsome face and solemn bearing created a profound and disturbing effect. Fastened to the white gown were “compasses and dials”—occult symbols—whose meaning eluded the onlookers and added to his air of mystery. The appearance of a group of girls dressed in low-cut bodices in “the Italian fashion” handing around wine and sugared confections broke the spell, and the evening ended with dancing and drinking. Fortunately, the ambassadors wrote, the canvas ceiling had been well waxed so that only a few drops of the heavy rain falling on the pavilion dropped on the heads of the guests. Francis’ immense investment in the banquet, which they estimated at 450,000 crowns, was protected.

Midway in these ambassadorial exchanges occurred the last of Kath-erine’s great disappointments. Her child had been much hoped for. “God grant she may give birth to a son,” Giustinian wrote home to Venice in the last month of her pregnancy, “so that having an heir male, the king if necessary may not be hindered embarking on any great undertaking soever.” A son would make certain that the crown would not pass to Mary and, through her, to her future husband the dauphin. A son would anchor the dynasty, reassure the king and satisfy his subjects.

In her eighth month Katherine gave birth to a stillborn daughter. Giustinian pronounced the misfortune “vexatious.” “Never had this entire kingdom ever so anxiously desired anything as it did a prince,” he declared, “it appearing to everyone that the state would be safe should his Majesty leave an heir male, whereas, without a prince, they are of a contrary
opinion.”
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Katherine was heartbroken, Henry temporarily glum. The betrothal of the princess was a calculated risk. Henry was gambling that long before the dauphin reached marriageable age his claim on the English throne in right of his wife would be invalidated by Henry’s son or sons. For the time being, he had lost his wager. Giustinian expressed his private belief that if the outcome of Katherine’s pregnancy had been known before the treaty was signed and the marriage promises exchanged, the entire diplomatic venture would have been abandoned. It is “the sole fear of this kingdom,” he observed, “that it may pass through this marriage into the power of the French.”

And I
war a maydyn,

As many one ys,

For all the golde in England

I wold not do amysse.

Katherine’s stillbirth meant that Mary would not, as her father hoped, fade into the background, eclipsed by a brother. Instead she remained an important focus of political attention—so important that her health was the subject of the most assiduous attention at the French court. Through her betrothal to the dauphin Mary had become the living embodiment of peace between England and France; as such it was important that she stay healthy. Queen Claude took to asking the English ambassador Thomas Boleyn how the princess was every time they met, and diplomats and courtiers began to exchange oblique inquiries about “whether the princess had been sick lately” as a matter of course.
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A few months after her espousals a rumor circulated in Paris that she was dead, causing a few days of confused alarm, but before long Boleyn was able to quiet the disconcerted courtiers with the assurance that Mary was in perfect health.

The size and expense of her household now reflected her diplomatic importance. Before she was three years old the cost of maintaining her establishment had risen to fourteen hundred pounds, and an inventory of her household goods included enough hangings, bedding and other furnishings for a sizable apartment in the palace. Listed in the inventory along with the tapestries, rugs, featherbeds, linen, brassware and pewter basins were the necessary fixtures of a household constantly on the move: five thousand hooks and two thousand crochets for hanging and rehang-ing the tapestries, hammers for driving the hooks into the walls and nailing shut the lids of chests and coffers, dozens of yards of canvas for
covering loaded carts and rope for securing bundles and tying the canvas in place.
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Included too was a miniature throne—a little chair upholstered in cloth of gold and velvet—with a golden cloth of estate to be suspended over it and small gold cushions to go under the princess’ feet.

By age three Mary had made herself the darling of her relatives and Henry’s courtiers. At New Year’s in 1519 she was showered with gifts—a gold spoon from Katherine’s close friend Lady Devonshire, a gold pomander from her aunt Mary, two smocks from Lady Mountjoy, wife of Katherine’s chamberlain, and from Wolsey a handsome gold cup. She was beginning to take part in the life of the court now, and was dressed up and shown around the room at banquets and other state occasions. She joined in family ceremonies of all kinds, and when her cousin Frances Brandon was born in the summer, Mary was called upon to be her godmother.
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That the king kept a close watch on his daughter at this time is evident from a letter his secretary Richard Pace wrote to Wolsey in July of 1518. Henry and Katherine were staying at Wolsey’s estate of the More, and spending the long summer days hunting. Sometimes they rode together, sometimes the queen rode alone the four miles to the little hunting park on Sir John Pechy’s estate that was her favorite. Neither of them returned until late in the evening, and it was after dark on the night of July 17 that Henry heard the news that one of Mary’s servants was sick with “a hot ague.” Mary had not come to the More with her parents, but was only two days’ ride away, and Henry and Katherine received frequent messages from her household. Reports of small-scale outbreaks of both plague and the sweating sickness had been reaching the court all summer, and Henry was doubtless worried that the “hot ague” might be the sweat. He quickly told his secretary to write to Mary’s servant Richard Sydnour ordering him to bring her to the More by way of Bisharn Abbey, skirting the known infected areas. At the same time he told Pace to write Wolsey, who was in charge of all household affairs, asking him to work out safe itineraries for both Henry and Mary for the rest of the summer, and giving suggested routes.

Though he saw his daughter from time to time Henry’s concern for Mary was usually expressed at a distance. Intimacy between the princess and her royal parents was not built up through daily contact as in less exalted families, but through occasional visits, exchanges of gifts and of money, letters and messages carried back and forth by household servants. In her earliest years Mary spent the greater part of her time surrounded by her gentlewomen and by Margaret Pole, countess of Salisbury, a long-faced, plain featured woman who in time became as dear to Mary as a grandmother.

Her parents moved through her life with the impermanence of
pleasant dreams, Katherine in her ash-colored court dress or her hunting skirts, her face always bright with laughter, Henry looming tali and strong in his velvets and jeweled caps. Mary was with them longest at holidays and in the seasons of panic during her second and third summers, but even then she saw them when they sent for her and not when she needed them. And she saw them often from the far end of the banquet hall, or looking out a window at the tiltyard. She may have been allowed to watch the pageant celebrating the French peace treaty in October of 1518, at which knights dressed as Turks and Christians fought an apocalyptic mock combat in front of a mountainous artificial “rock of peace” representing harmony among the European states. But there is no record that she was there. More likely on that evening Henry sent word ordering the princess dressed in her most splendid clothes and jewels, hugged her and carried her once around the room in his arms, and then gave her to an attendant gentlewoman to be put to bed.

Henry certainly admired and cherished his daughter—when he thought about her—and he was capable of a sentimental affection for her that reappeared at intervals throughout his life. But his idea of fatherly behavior was to be boisterous and demonstrative with his daughter for a few moments and then leave her in other hands. He saw to it that they were capable hands, but that was all. He made certain she was well cared for, but made no effort to get to know her or to involve himself in her life as she grew older. There would be no confidential intimacy between Henry and Mary. For that he needed not a daughter but a son.

Elizabeth Blount first came to Henry’s court as a young girl sometime after the birth of the New Year’s boy. A niece of Lord Mountjoy, she was blonde and very beautiful, and became one of the queen’s maids of honor during the period when Katherine was vainly trying each year to produce a son. Elizabeth soon became “Bessie” to the king and his gentlemen, and was an especial favorite of Charles Brandon. Her beauty was put to use to adorn the pageants and revels, and at a court where graceful dancers and clear singing voices were at a premium Bessie Blount danced and sang extraordinarily well.

Bessie was still in her teens when she became Henry’s mistress. She was not the first, of course. Beyond the king’s indiscretion with the duke of Buckingham’s sister there had been rumors of a Flemish mistress during the 1513 campaign, and dozens of the hrief or lasting courtly flirtations which were a little more than an extension of good manners. But Bessie was different. She was certainly the most beautiful girl, if not the most intelligent or fascinating, at Henry’s court. His association with her lasted for several years, not merely a few days or weeks. And most important, she bore him a son.

The boy was born sometime in 1519, when Mary was three years old.
Bessie left Katherine’s service when the signs of her pregnancy became an outrage to the queen—for like everyone else she knew very well who the child’s father was—and went to a monastery in the country for her delivery, Her child was christened Henry, with the honorific surname Fitzroy. Bessie herself was henceforth known at court by the unofficial title “mother of the king’s son,” and out of gratitude Henry arranged for her to marry a substantial gentleman, Sir Gilbert Talboys. The king’s liaison with Bessie did not continue after the young Henry’s birth, but Henry and Bessie remained linked through their son, and to Katherine’s immense displeasure both Lady Talboys and her child were revered almost as if they had become part of the royal line. Certainly many observers assumed that, if katherine had no son of her own, the king’s bastard would rule in place of his legitimate daughter. And to keep this possibility open, Henry gave his infant son a princely household and a succession of titles that gave him every appearance of being heir to the throne,

In Mary’s young childhood Henry VIII was at the apex of his popularity, He had taken the ideal of chivalric monarchy to heights undreamed of by his medieval predecessors. He had led an army to victory in France; he ruled a turbulent but adoring people; he had proven himself to be among the wealthiest and most generous of European rulers. Whether they glimpsed him in his red-plumed helmet and golden armor covered with little golden bells, laughing and throwing the bells to Maximilian’s soldiers at the siege of Thérouanne, or riding to the hunt with the entire court at his heels, Henry captured and held the admiring attention of his contemporaries as no earlier king had done. His reign was unfolding as a vast drama in which he played the starring role. His love of costumes and of surprise changes of character, his taste for theatrical spectacles, his constant effort to be unpredictable, to do the unexpected both in his court and in affairs of state, fascinated all who came near him. Henry forced himself on the consciousness of his age and held his central place there until the very end of his life. In a remarkable feat of sustained image-building, he was re-creating the English monarchy in his own likeness.

Mary’s childhood was spent in Henry’s giant shadow. There was a total identification, in the popular mind, between father and daughter, but Mary was seen as the king’s adored plaything, another ornament like his huge jewel-studded admiral’s whistle or his collar of enormous diamonds. His nickname for her denoted a precious adornment to his court: he called her his pearl, “the greatest pearl in the kingdom.” The name aptly conveyed her worth in Henry’s eyes. She was a treasure to be protected, hoarded, and, when the time came, spent to procure a lasting
diplomatic advantage. That she might some day succeed her father was no more than an alarming improbability. And so throughout her childhood she was groomed, conditioned and taught not how to rule England, but how to make a successful transition from daughter to wife—to move from ornamenting her father’s court to adorning that of her future husband. Central to this conditioning was Mary’s formal education, which taught her to see herself as a weak and inferior being who could redeem her inherent sinfulness only by an attitude of subservience and vigilant self-denial. The contrast between her gloriously successful father and her admired yet repressed self pervaded Mary’s childhood, especially during her formative years.

This contrast was heightened by the fact that she saw her father, as a rule, only on favored occasions. From about the age of three Mary saw her parents only at Easter and Christmas; during the long months in between she rode in her litter from Windsor to Hanworth to Richmond to Greenwich—to wherever, at Wolsey’s order, fresh rushes had been laid and the rooms “sweetened” for the princess.
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Christmas became the high point of her year, for then she not only visited her father and mother but celebrated the holiday with twelve days of feasting, dancing and masques climaxed by the arrival of New Year’s gifts. At her fourth Christmas a company of children performed a play for Mary, under the direction of the royal dramatist John Heywood. In the following year she was allowed her own Lord of Misrule—one of her household valets, John Thurgood—who planned and presented entertainments with morris dancers, carillons and hobbyhorses. For Mary’s sixth Christmas Thurgood outdid himself. Mary’s Christmas this year at Ditton was a miniature version of Henry’s great festivities at nearby Windsor. Her Christmas feast, like his, featured a gilded and painted boar’s head; her mummers appeared in visors and armor, rabbit skins and tails. Her nine morris dancers wore ten dozen tinkling bells, and one of her “disguisings” required “straw to cover twelve men.” Another entertainment was a gory mock battle whose props included twelve crossbows, gunpowder, four gunners, two dozen morris pikes and “a man to kill a calf behind a cloth.” Her New Year’s gifts were becoming more costly each year: a gold cross from the countess of Devonshire, twelve pairs of shoes from Richard Weston, a tall gold salt cellar set with pearls from Wolsey, and from Henry a standing cup of silver gilt overflowing with coins.
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And from “a poor woman of Greenwich” a rosemary bush (one of the Tudor symbols) hung with gold spangles.

We know very little about the dim world of Tudor childhood. For Mary it meant the loud noises and crowded halls of the great palaces, the long silences and green vistas of the smaller manors, candlelight, torchlight, black darkness. It meant journeys through the countryside at all
seasons, barge rides from Richmond to Greenwich and back again, animals, sudden rain showers and the sweet scent of cherries and strawberries from the gardens of Hanworth and Windsor, It was prayers, priests, music, her jewels, her little throne. It was not a world of indulgent parents or nurses. Visitors to England in the late fifteenth century were struck by the terror children showed in the presence of their parents. Even as adults English men and women stood in nervous silence when their parents entered a room, and did not speak until they were spoken to. Children were governed through fear as a matter of course, and if they failed to obey they were slapped and beaten until they did. Thomas More, who wrote proudly that if he flogged his children at all it was with the tail of a peacock, was famous for his gentleness, but the attitude of his friend Richard Whytford was more typical of his time. Whytford composed a little prayer for children to repeat to their mothers every morning: