Bloody Mary (11 page)

Of her accomplishments there was certainly no doubt. Her tutor John Featherstone had taken good advantage of her intelligence and aptitude for languages, and had greatly improved her fluency in Latin, French, Italian and Spanish. At barely nine years old she was able to speak Latin “with as much assurance and facility as if she were twelve years old,” and years later a humanist at her court recalled in a dedication to Mary that at eleven “your grace not only could perfectly read, write and construe Latin, but furthermore translate any hard thing of the Latin in to our English tongue.”
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The French envoys found her learning impressive: according to Turenne, she was “very handsome and admirable by reason of her great and uncommon mental endowments.” Sometime during their stay in England Mary acted in a comedy of Terence staged, in Latin, at Wolsey’s gorgeous palace at Hampton Court.

But no display of erudition, however rare, could compare to the long-awaited banquet and masquing held on the day following the signing of the treaties. The banqueting hall was the scene of a gorgeous array of massive gold plate and serving dishes of silver gilt. Course after course of meat and fish was carried through the gilded arch, while from a balcony above it came the music of viols and sackbuts. Mary did not sit with Henry and Katherine, but at a long table of her own, with the French envoys and “great ladies” of the court. The banquet lasted several hours, and at its conclusion the entire company was assembled in order of rank and ushered into the disguising house, where they quietly took their places in the tiers of seats. The Venetian secretary Spinelli, who was there, noted in his dispatch to the Signory that all this was done “without the least noise or confusion, and precisely as pre-arranged.” The “order, regularity and silence” of public entertainments in England was a thing which amazed him, and he told in detail how the right-hand tiers of seats were reserved for the men, the ambassadors in front, the princes behind them, and the remaining guests at the back. On the left were the women, also in order of rank, “whose beauty,” Spinelli wrote, “enhanced by the
brilliancy of the lights, caused me to think I was contemplating the choir of angels.”
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The performance began without delay. The children of the king’s chapel sang and recited a dialogue among Mercury, Cupid, and Plutus in which Henry was asked to judge which was of greater value, love or riches. This introduced a mock combat between six men at arms in white armor, fighting at a barrier so furiously that they broke their naked swords. The combat being ended, an old man in a silver beard pronounced the conflict settled; princes, he said, had need of both love and riches—the former to gain the obedience and service of their subjects, and the latter to give as rewards to lovers and friends.

A painted curtain was now dropped at the other end of the theater and a new group of performers appeared. Eight gentlemen in gold doublets and tall plumed helmets lit with their torches a scene meant to represent a mountain, walled with gilt towers and “set full of crystal corals and rich rocks of ruby.” On a rock were seated eight damsels dressed in cloth of gold, their hair gathered into nets garlanded with jewels, and the long hanging sleeves of their surcoats trailing in deep folds to their feet. Mary was among these maidens, and as she rose to her feet to the sound of trumpets “her beauty in this array produced such an effect on everybody that all the other marvellous sights previously witnessed were forgotten, and they gave themselves up solely to contemplation of so fair an angel.” She shone with jewels, and as she and the others began their dance, Spinelli reported, she “dazzled the sight in such wise as to make one believe that she was decked with all the gems of the eighth sphere.” The eight damsels performed an unusually complex series of steps, executing a dance unique in its variety and intricacy; then the gentlemen danced by themselves, and finally the eight couples danced a lively
coranto.
After this came another group of masqued dancers, dressed in Icelandic costumes, who “danced lustily about the place,” and at the end of their performance Henry and Turenne and eight other noblemen appeared, all masked and wearing black satin gowns and hoods. For the last several days, ever since he injured his foot playing tennis, Henry had been wearing a black velvet slipper; to prevent him from being recognized, all the maskers now wore slippers like the king’s. The injury, it seems, did not impair Henry’s dancing, for he and the others chose partners from the audience to perform a lavish finale.

The entertainment was at an end, but Henry had one last trick to play. Mary and the other young girls came up to him as the dancing ended, and, drawing her over to where the French ambassadors were seated, he loosened the net and jeweled bands from her hair, letting her heavy gold curls fall over her shoulders, “forming a most agreeable
sight.” This was the image the French took back with them, of a delicate girl nearly out of childhood, dressed in golden robes, her smiling face encircled by masses of golden hair. Turenne had concluded earlier that because the princess was “thin, spare and small” she could not be married for another three years at least. Now he was convinced she would be worth waiting for.

As Henry and his court were dancing and feasting in celebration of the Anglo-French treaties an atrocity of the greatest magnitude was unfolding at the other end of Europe. The German army of Charles V, joined by Spanish troops under the duke of Bourbon, was fighting in central Italy against the combined forces of the Venetians, the French and the pope. Finding Florence and Siena too well defended to attack, the imperial forces turned southward toward Rome, their food supplies exhausted. The soldiers were mutinous; they had not been paid, there were no spoils to be had, and they were now forced to steal from the Umbrian peasants to survive. Only their loyalty to Bourbon prevented mass desertion, and it was to Bourbon that the officers now turned, urging him to march the army to Rome, besiege the city and force the pope to ransom himself for enough money to pay the troops. The imperial forces camped outside Rome on the fifth of May, and their commander sent a message to the Medici pope Clement VII explaining that he could forestall bloodshed by paying what the besiegers demanded. Bourbon’s message may not have reached Clement, because there was no reply. That evening, as the condition of the hungry men became more and more desperate, they were given scaling ladders. The following morning thousands of them went over the walls, the Spaniards shouting “
Sangre, sangre, carne, carne”—
“Blood, blood, flesh, flesh”—and, in the name of Bourbon, they began to kill every Roman they could find.

The sack of Rome might have been less devastating had the duke lived to control his men, but he was killed in the first assault, and the prince of Orange, who tried to take over leadership of the armies, lacked the authority to restrain the two-week orgy of murder and desecration that followed. On the day of the assault a dark fog lay over the Eternal City, making it hard for the attackers and the few defenders to see one another’s faces. What defense there was collapsed in the first two hours, leaving the way open for the imperial troops to enter the Borgo San Sepolcro by the thousands. By noon the mass slaughter had begun. At first the Germans and Spaniards spared only those they could hope to hold for ransom—the wealthiest churchmen and merchants. The terrified Romans, who had been assured until the last moment that the city would be saved by a relieving army, fled to the churches and convents or tried to take refuge in the fortified castles. The pope, who had done nothing to
secure either himself or his city, now retired with thirteen of his cardinals to the Castel Sant’Angelo across the Tiber, weeping and offering to capitulate on whatever terms the imperialists asked. But the floodtide of destruction, once loosed, could not be halted. Rome, the most venerated city in Christendom, great storehouse of pagan and Christian tradition and bastion of the medieval church, was thoroughly and massively despoiled.

The readiest booty was to be found in the churches. Companies of soldiers swarmed into Rome’s hundreds of holy places, stripping the altars of their ornaments and throwing to the ground relics of the saints and the bread of the mass. Catholic Spaniards and Lutheran Germans alike dressed themselves in the rich vestments of the murdered clergy and officiated at the ruined altars, bawling out tavern songs and befouling consecrated sanctuaries with excrement. The church of St. Peter and the papal palace were turned into stables, and processions of drunken soldiers and whores wound through their courtyards in imitation of holy processions. At San Silvestro the head of St. John the Baptist was ripped out of its silver reliquary and hurled to the pavement, where an old nun found it later and carried it to safety.

It was as if all the anticlerical hatred of centuries was released in a single furious burst. Friars were dragged from their convents and beheaded; nuns were beaten and raped. Abbots and cardinals were hung up by their arms or suspended head downward in wells and tortured until they revealed where their wealth was hidden. Others were branded like animals or horribly mutilated, or their mouths were forced open and filled with molten lead. The cardinal of Ara Coeli was seized and carried through the streets on a funeral bier while his captors sang the office for the dead. Fearing for his life, he was made to serve his best wine to his tormentors in the golden chalices reserved for the mass. Clergy and lay men and women alike huddled in Rome’s medieval castles hoping to escape the slaughter. Five hundred nuns were found in one large room of the palace of Pompey Colonna when it was plundered, and hundreds of women were carried off whenever a great house fell to the invaders. Even the palace of the Portuguese ambassador, said to be the best fortified stronghold in the city, could not hold out. All the merchants, nobles and moneylenders who had taken refuge there were brought out and imprisoned, and their goods, which totaled some half a million ducats in value, were divided among the imperial troops.

As the days passed the soldiers, leaderless and crazed by their crimes, alternated between dazed stupor and unreasoning frenzy. They picked up fortunes in the burning remains of palaces only to lose them in a single throw of the dice. Loyalties to countrymen or coreligionists meant nothing; the houses of Spaniards and Germans in Rome were looted as mer
cilessly as those of the Italians. And after they had plundered the wealthy, the imperial soldiers plundered the poor, stripping even the hovels of the street sweepers and water carriers. Hearing that the pope had finally paid the wages of the Germans, the enraged Spaniards attacked their allies and demanded their share. The longer the sack continued the more the city’s food supply dwindled, and as the surviving Romans and their invaders sank deeper into disorder the final nemesis of plague and panic set in. In their thoroughness the soldiers had looted the shops of the apothecaries, and there were now no medicines left to fight disease. Famine and pestilence overtook the entire population, and what began as a human tragedy was ended by broader forces of destruction no human agency could control.

“Everyone considers it has taken place by the just judgment of God,” one imperial official in Rome wrote to the emperor, “because the court of Rome was so ill-ruled.”
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This view of the meaning of the Roman nightmare was not widely shared. As news of events in Rome traveled northward it was received with profound shock and horror. The sack of the papal city was seen as more than the barbarous act of a brutalized army. It was an assault on faith itself. With the desecration of the Eternal City Christian spirituality lost its anchor. The immense power and authority of Rome had been breached as surely as its walls. Christendom had been deeply wounded, not by any external enemy but from within, and would not be the same again.

And wylt thow leve me thus?

That bathe louyd the so long,

In welthe and woo among?

And ys thy hart so strong

As for to leve me thus?

Say nay, say nay!

News of the sack of Rome reached the court of Henry VIII on June I. Letters sent to the king and Wolsey told in bloody detail how the soldiers of Charles V had defiled the venerable city and threatened the pope, who was still a captive of the imperial forces. Wolsey, who saw in Clement VII’s misfortune an opportunity to take over leadership of the church himself, made plans to convene the cardinals at Avignon in France and to preside over a papal court in exile. Henry cursed his nephew Charles as an enemy of the faith, and lamented that “our most holy lord, the true and only vicar of Christ on earth,” had been taken from his flock. Without him the church would surely collapse, the king insisted, and he sped Wolsey on his way.

Henry’s concern about the condition of the papacy was sincere, but his motives were selfish and, for the time being, secret. Unknown to anyone save Wolsey and a few trusted ecclesiastics, he had made the most fateful decision of his reign. He had decided to divorce his wife.

Barely two weeks after the celebration of Mary’s betrothal a church court had been called together by Wolsey to consider the validity of the royal marriage; the next step was to persuade the pope to declare it annulled. Henry was preparing to approach Clement about this when he learned of the fate of Rome. His anger at Charles V was both public and personal. The emperor had at once assaulted Christianity and thwarted Henry’s urgent divorce project, and there was no telling when either of these two wrongs would be righted.

Just when and why Henry made up his mind to put Katherine aside are very unclear, but the legal issues involved were, in Henry’s mind at least, quite simple. Katherine had been the widow of Henry’s brother Arthur. In marrying her he had sinned twice over: once by committing incest and again by disobeying the injunction in the book of Leviticus against “uncovering the nakedness of thy brother’s wife.” Once he realized the enormity of his situation, Henry claimed, the burden on his conscience became intolerable. He had to free himself from the marriage as swiftly as possible—not only to ease his spiritual pain but for the sake of England’s future. For if the marriage to Katherine was invalid, then Mary was a bastard, and unfit to rule. Henry’s new-found scruples deprived him not only of his wife but of his sole legitimate heir, and he owed it to his subjects to remarry and beget a son to secure the succession.

In the mountains of legal opinions which soon arose to contradict the king’s position several points stood out clearly. First, why had it taken eighteen years for the issues of consanguinity and the biblical prohibition to trouble Henry? Neither issue was obscure, particularly to a man of the king’s vaunted theological knowledge. How could they have escaped his attention all those years? Second, whatever obstacles to the marriage of Henry and Katherine might have existed in 1509 had been removed by the granting of a papal dispensation. The pope’s plenary authority gave him the power to legitimize any union, no matter how unconventional, and only the Lutheran heretics disputed the powers of the pope. Third, Henry’s critics pointed out, if some passages in the Bible outlawed the marriage of a man with his brother’s widow others positively encouraged it, and in any case these were matters best left to the discretion of the experts who advised the pope in Rome.

In the beginning Henry may have deluded himself in thinking that the divorce would be a simple matter, swiftly accomplished, to be arranged between himself, Wolsey and the pope. After all, European rulers had been ridding themselves of unwanted spouses for centuries by alleging the stain of consanguinity. The procedure was a time-honored one, and Henry had the best possible excuse—the lack of a male heir—to initiate it. The pope had allowed Henry IV of Castile, married to a childless queen, to divorce her and marry another woman, although he did have to agree to take back his first wife if he had no children by the second. Only a month before Henry began his formal inquiry into the validity of his own marriage he received word that his sister Margaret, whom he had severely criticized as a shameless adulteress, had been granted papal permission to marry the already-married man she had been living with for years.

Even more influential was the experience of Charles Brandon, the broad-shouldered, bluff courtier who was the king’s lifelong intimate. Be
fore he married Henry’s sister Mary, Brandon had been involved in a bizarre matrimonial situation. He had given a binding pledge of marriage-betrothal “by present consent”—to a woman named Ann Brown, but obtained a papal dispensation to marry one Margaret Mortimer before he had honored his pledge to Ann. Tiring of Margaret, he applied for a second bull of dispensation, claiming that he and his wife were related within the prohibited degrees and that his conscience would not permit him to continue the marriage. That he had been married a long time, he said, only made his torment greater; like Henry, he begged for an immediate divorce. His request was granted, whereupon he married his original fiancee Ann Brown.

Many years later, at the time rumors of Henry’s impending divorce were circulating, Brandon was completing a new legal action to ensure that the children of his subsequent marriage to his third wife Mary Tudor were not deprived of their inheritance. At this time Margaret Mortimer was still living, and Brandon seems to have been afraid that she might interfere in the rights of his heirs. Wolsey was largely responsible for resolving Brandon’s tangled commitments to the pope’s satisfaction at this time, and there is reason to believe he extricated the duke from further embarrassments in his domestic affairs that have never fully come to light. Henry conceived his plan to divorce Katherine, then, just at the time his best friend was clearing himself of all obligations to
his
first wife with the capable aid of his chief adviser. Given the king’s dissatisfaction with his marriage and his recently discovered theological objections to it, he could not have had a more; attractive inducement to undertake a divorce suit himself.

There were, as always, diplomatic inducements as well. When Charles V’s victory at Pavia in 1525 made him master of the continent, Henry believed the moment had come for English and imperial armies to carry out his lifelong dream, his “Great Enterprise” against France. The emperor, whose wars had exhausted his treasury, was not caught up in Henry’s romantic ambitions, and his lack of enthusiasm for the conquest of France, combined with his abrupt decision to marry the Portuguese princess Isabella instead of Mary, led to a breach between the two sovereigns. Katherine was a victim of that breach. Her position at Henry’s court had been changing for some time, but with the dissolving of the imperial alliance it grew more awkward than ever. She had long since lost her usefulness to him, and was now little more than a relic of the early years of his reign. Henry had improved with age, and was still robust and youthful; Katherine had become stout and massive, with the fleshy jowls and sagging cheeks of an ill-favored Spanish matron. At twenty, her look of demure innocence had made her plainness appealing; at forty, the deep sadness and resignation in her bloated face made her grotesque. Sympa
thetic courtiers and visitors who searched the queen’s features saw there an unmistakable nobility of expression; casual observers said she was ugly, and made jokes about the young king and his old wife.

For years Katherine had been Henry’s wife in name only, and with the opening of the divorce procedures Henry’s representatives became guardedly candid about her sexual inadequacies. It is impossible to be precise about these complaints. As a young woman Katherine had been troubled by some ailment whose symptoms, including irregular menstrual periods, misled her into believing that she was pregnant when she was not. Repeated real pregnancies may well have brought new disorders, or made the old one worse; by the time she reached her early forties Wolsey was hinting that there were “secret reasons” why Katherine was no longer a fit wife. “There are certain diseases in the queen defying all remedy,” he wrote, “for which and other causes the king will never live with her.”
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Whatever disappointment this may have caused her was sharpened by Henry’s habitual flirtations and brief seductions, and by his long-term liaison with Mary Carey. Katherine was forced to look past these indignities without complaint, keeping her inward torment from her daughter and confiding in her few remaining Spanish gentlewomen and priests. Her only close relative was her nephew Charles V, and as she grew older and more unhappy she maintained the affectionate bond that had grown up between them on his successive visits to England.

It was precisely this bond that now made her an irritant. For if Katherine was indecorous and superfluous, she was also, in Wolsey’s eyes at least, potentially traitorous as well. She had never said or done anything to arouse suspicion, but her sympathies were all on the imperial side, and as Wolsey maneuvered toward a reopening of the alliance with France he became more and more fearful about the queen’s loyalties. He kept himself informed about whom she saw and wrote to, and saw to it that she did not communicate with the emperor’s ambassador in England. He paid spies to live in her household and report all that they saw and heard, and even bribed her trusted servants. One serving woman, torn between Wolsey’s pressure and her love for Katherine, left the court entirely rather than betray her mistress.
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Beyond all the talk of biblical law, diplomatic necessity and the need for a male heir lay a more disruptive motive for the divorce: Henry’s celebrated passion for Anne Boleyn. Cynics then and since have claimed that if he had never met Anne Henry would have remained complacently married, content with his pattern of routine infidelities and untroubled by scruples of conscience. Or, they have speculated, if the king had wanted Anne a little less and she had yielded a little more, his ardor would have burned itself out in time and Anne would have gone the way of Bessie Blount and Anne’s sister Mary Carey. But as it happened,
Henry’s attraction to Anne was unaccountably strong, and her sense of her power over him unusually acute. For seven years she kept herself in the center of his attention, yet just out of reach, until in the end he discarded and persecuted his wife and daughter, cast off England’s immemorial allegiance to the pope and raised himself to new heights of power verging on tyranny, all in the attempt to make Anne queen.

Anne Boleyn was a black-eyed brunette of about fifteen when she came to Henry’s court in 1522. She was then a thin and somewhat gawky adolescent with a neck too long for her heart-shaped face, but over the next four years she blossomed under the attentions of her cousin, the poet Thomas Wyatt, and Henry Percy, son of the earl of Northumberland, who pined after her and wanted to marry her. Four years at the French court had made her more sophisticated than most English girls, and four more spent observing the king’s relationship with her sister gave her a jaundiced view of the way powerful men treated the women they used for pleasure. Mary Carey was a willing, uncomplaining plaything who submitted to a one-sided bargain in which she gave Henry everything he wanted and got nothing in return. By the time she was nineteen, Anne was determined to make a better bargain than her sister, and it may have been that rivalry with her predecessor which helped her to keep her resolution in the face of Henry’s years of wheedling, coy reproaches and clumsy wooing.

She was helped, too, by the relatives and friends who promoted her romance with the king in order to further their own fortunes and political interests. In 1527 nearly all of Henry’s close companions were linked to Anne. Charles Brandon and William Compton were her close friends, Francis Bryan was her cousin, Henry Norris her near relative and admirer. Her brother George was prominent at court, and her father, Thomas Boleyn, had recently been made Viscount Rochford. Beyond these immediate advantages she had aristocratic connections and royal ancestry. Her grandfather was the second duke of Norfolk, the powerful third duke of Norfolk was her uncle, and both her parents could claim Plantagenet descent.
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Henry, who was too shrewd not to take all these things into consideration, pushed them to the back of his mind and indulged his lovesick preoccupation to the hilt. From the summer of 1527 he shut Katherine out of his consciousness, gave little thought to Mary, and put Wolsey in charge of arranging his divorce. He composed inarticulate love letters to his sweetheart and showered her with gifts, and in the evenings he put on his diamonds and brocades, drank as much wine as he could hold, and danced until daybreak.

Katherine found out about her husband’s plan to divorce her several weeks before he had the courage to tell her himself. She heard about
Wolsey’s secret court of inquiry, and informed the imperial ambassador Mendoza. Before long the entire matter was an open secret.