Bloody Mary (18 page)

To be sure, Henry’s altered attitude toward Lutheranism was rooted in political expediency. He was seeking allies among the enemies of the empire; many of those enemies were Lutheran. In the summer of 1534 he welcomed embassies from the Lutheran free cities of Hamburg and Lübeck with great pomp, and as they rode upriver in the royal barge Londoners remarked on the bright red liveries of the Ltibeckers, with their motto of indomitability, “If God be for us, who can be against us?” In breaking with the pope and casting his lot with the continental Protestants Henry was putting English trade and commerce in jeopardy, and even risking the possibility of food shortages among his subjects. The commercial repercussions of English diplomacy were widespread. English merchants in Flanders, Spain and France found their markets so hostile they had no choice but to sell their wares and come home. Those who stayed were abused, boycotted or robbed, and their rights under the law of nations governing international trade were ignored. Even the English fleets that fished off Iceland and Newfoundland were liable to be attacked or sent home by agents of the Danish king.

There were those who argued that until the conflict between England and the pope was ended the English people forfeited their place in Christendom. This highly abstract view had little direct impact on the practical lives of the English, but it did lend support to continental debtors who withheld payments from their English creditors, and to foreign merchants, who engaged in reprisals—legalized piracy—against English ships. Most damaging of all was the policy of the Hanseatic merchants, who now refused to supply England with grain. In a year of poor harvests, this put the country at the severe disadvantage of having to turn to grain suppliers in the unfriendly territories of France and the Low Countries.

The harvest of 1535 was among the worst within living memory. The rain began falling, so the people said, on the day the Carthusians were hanged, and it showed no sign of stopping. God was taking vengeance on his faithful for the wickedness of their ruler. The king ordered the preachers to say that God was merely testing his chosen people, but they knew better. It was Henry, they said, who was testing the Lord, and he had finally gone too far. When the fields were harvested the barns were less than half full. There would not be enough corn to last the winter.
Everywhere the king was blamed and reviled, and bitter songs about his impiety, his tyranny and his despised wife were sung at every bride-ale and wake.

The constant rain irked Henry as much as it did his unloving subjects. It spoiled the summer’s hunting, and kept him cooped up with his reproachful, neurotic wife. It spoiled his temper as well. When his favorite fool, Will Somers, chose the wrong moment to joke about the king’s “ribald and bastard”—meaning Anne and Elizabeth—Henry struck him so hard he nearly killed him, and the terrified Somers had to take refuge in a nobleman’s house until the incident blew over.
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Henry had a great deal on his mind that summer. His legs were bothering him, he was starting to put on weight, and he had recently ordered nine men of conscience to their deaths. One of them, Thomas More, had been among his few genuine friends in earlier years, a man whose wit had amused him and whose unfailing good sense he had relied on completely. And there was Anne, now grown querulous and vengeful, and still barren of sons. He was thinking of ridding himself of her, except that he might then have to take back [Catherine and face the ridicule of every petty priest and royal servant in the Christian world. Meanwhile the new pope, Paul III, was showing himself to be a much more vigorous enemy than Clement had been. The execution of Cardinal Fisher had spurred him to launch a fresh assault on Henry’s power. The pope wrote to the European rulers announcing his intention to deprive Henry of his kingdom and asking their aid. His only weapon was the loyalty of the Catholic sovereigns, but that loyalty could be counted on to injure England in a hundred ways short of war. And as the rainy summer dragged on Henry felt more and more disinclined to bestir himself to retaliate.

It was while these troublesome thoughts were plaguing him that Henry slipped away one night on a whim. He heard that a play mocking the clergy was to be presented in a village far from the censorious eye of the London clergy, and taking nothing but a swift horse and a two-handed sword he set out for the place on his own. He rode the first twenty miles but had to walk the last ten, trying to forget the ulcers on his legs and the weight of the sword against his thigh. He walked most of the night, until he finally came to the house where the play was in progress. He was in disguise, of course, but once he saw himself represented on the stage he could hardly keep silent. He was so delighted when the actor who represented him “cut off the heads of the clergy” that “in order to laugh at his ease, and encourage the people,” he made his identity known.
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To most of Europe he might be a monster, but to the handful of Protestant sympathizers who had gathered on that summer night to revile the church, he was their hero once again.

By me al women may beware,

That se my wofull smart:

To seke true love let them not spare,

Before they set their hart,

Or els they may become as I,

Which for my truth am like to dye.

The executions of 1535 made Mary desperate to escape. In the week the Carthusians suffered, Lady Shelton was “continually telling her to take warning by their fate,” and reminding her for the hundredth time that she was a superfluous nuisance who had long ago been marked for death herself. A servant of the imperial ambassador Chapuys who visited Mary during that week reported to his master that escape was on her mind day and night, and “she thinks of nothing else than how it may be done, her desire for it increasing every day.”
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The idea of escape was not new. Chapuys had brought it up from time to time, and every plan for political revolt brought to him over the last year had included the kidnapping of Mary and Katherine, who were to be taken to a safe hiding place to await the outcome of the rising. When Mary fell sick in February the ambassador was in the process of designing another escape plan, and each time the tension mounted around her he recalculated the distances, the obstacles and the means necessary to carry Mary to freedom in Flanders. So far each crisis had eased before the escape plans matured, but that was no guarantee she would not have to escape in the future. In the spring of 1535 Mary felt her danger to be greater than ever. She sent word to Chapuys “begging him most urgently to think over the matter [of her escape], otherwise she considered herself lost, knowing that they wanted only to kill her.”
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She was at Eltham when she sent the ambassador this message, and was still troubled by illness. She
suffered another relapse in mid-April, but remained so intent on escape that she talked long and urgently to Chapuys’ man about it from her sickbed, and what she said was very affecting. “If I were to tell you the messages she sent me,” the ambassador wrote to Charles V’s chief minister Granvelle, “you could not refrain from tears, begging me to have pity on her, and advise her as I thought best, and she would obey.”

On first consideration the ambassador thought Eltham might be the ideal site for Mary’s escape. In the Kentish countryside about five miles south of the Thames at the nearest point, it was far enough from London to be inaccessible by the king’s guard yet near enough to the river to provide swift access to the Channel ports. Mary felt certain it would be impossible for her to get out beyond the walls at night, but flight might be possible during the daytime. It seems she was now permitted, probably for health reasons, to walk in the grounds and perhaps even to go hawking, for Chapuys suggested that she could be carried off while “going out to sport” at some little distance from Eltham. There she could be seized, put on horseback, and escorted to the river somewhere below Grave-send, where a rowboat would be waiting to take her to a Spanish or Flemish ship. A gunboat would provide what protection would be needed, and within hours Mary would be within sight of the Flemish coast. They would need a favorable wind, of course. But if the wind drove them back against the coast the armed escort vessel could hold off any pursuing English ships, while any wind that might favor the pursuers would also drive Mary’s ship all the faster toward Flanders.
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And once ashore there she would be taken to Brussels, to become a celebrated guest at the court of her imperial cousin, honored in her exile as Princess Mary, sole heir to the throne of England.

The easiest part of the plan, Chapuys thought, was the Channel crossing. There were Spanish and Flemish merchant ships in the Thames at all times, and imperial warships hovered just off the coast. Even as he wrote a great galleon lay only a short distance downriver, and he knew of “several Spanish ships” which were in a position to take Mary aboard at a moment’s notice.
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He did not worry about those who might try to follow Mary and her abductors. Once she was past the household guard she would encounter only friendly faces between Eltham and the coast. The country people were all on her side, and even those sent in pursuit would, he felt certain, “shut their eyes and bless her saviors,” and would “make no hurry” to catch up with her.
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Apart from her recurrent illnesses Mary herself presented no problem; her passionate desire to escape, combined with her proven “great prudence and courage” convinced Chapuys she would play her part well. “It is very hazardous,” he concluded about the escape plan, “but it would be a great triumph and very meritorious.”
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The most significant thing about Mary’s desire for flight was that in making up her mind to leave she was for the first time departing from Katherine’s model. Katherine had sworn never to tarnish her honor as queen, never to disobey her husband, and never to leave England. Until this year of 1535 Mary had repeatedly stated her intention to follow Katherine’s example in every way, and the few letters she received from her mother urged her to continue in that resolve. But now, without telling Katherine, she decided to save herself by running away. (That Katherine knew nothing of the plan seems beyond doubt. In a letter to Henry written just at this time Katherine offered to pledge her own life as a guarantee against Mary’s flight if the king would allow their daughter to come to Kimbolton.)

It would be easy to say that Mary’s decision was nothing more than a simple survival reflex—an overwhelming urge to get away once and for all from an intolerable situation. She was, after all, a semi-prisoner in the hands of pitiless and hostile strangers; her health was breaking under the continual strain and she was in dread of a relapse; she had good reason to believe Anne was trying to poison her; and her father, the murderer of innocent monks, had recently announced that she was his worst enemy. Under such pressures as these anyone might break and run.

But Mary’s new-found determination did not come from blind panic. It was a well-considered, deliberate choice. And it was a choice which marked a break with many of the strongest influences in her upbringing. It went against her education, which taught her to be helpless, to distrust her judgment, to fear to leave home and above all to obey her father. It went against the object lessons of prayer, patience and martyrdom offered by the saints of the church. It departed from her mother’s lifelong example of heroic masochism. And it was of course a decision which, if carried out, would have represented an act of political defiance of the greatest consequence.

Mary would never abandon the premises impressed on her in childhood and continually reinforced by her environment. But from now on there would be another force at work, a force impelling her to act decisively and with courage in the face of crises, to arrive at her own opinions, and to be true to a sense of her own destiny that was slowly taking shape in her mind.

As it turned out, there was to be no escape for the time being. Much as Mary tried to bring it about, the indispensable elements in the scheme—the ships, sailors and armed men on horseback—were beyond her control. And Chapuys, who probably had the means to engineer the adventure, was really not the best man for the job. He was far more at home in
the private recesses of the king’s Council chamber than galloping along the highroads of Kent, and in any case the emperor had not yet ordered him to act.

Meanwhile the climate of tension increased. Cromwell was openly lamenting the fact that by their very existence Katherine and Mary were preventing good relations between England and the empire. He reminded the emperor’s ambassador that, after all, the two women were only mortal. Katherine was ill and aging, and would probably not live long; if Mary were to die her death would do far less harm than good, since the most immediate result would be a treaty of mutual good will between Henry and Charles.
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It was not hard for Chapuys to see what Cromwell was hinting at, and he tried his best to impress on the chief minister that if Mary were harmed the emperor would be less rather than more disposed to come to an accommodation with her father. But by summer Cromwell’s hints had turned to curses. He now blamed Katherine and Mary for all the king’s troubles in recent years. If only God had “taken them to himself” no one would have questioned Henry’s marriage to Anne or the right of their daughter to succeed him. The entire dispute would have long since been forgotten, and the possibility of internal revolt and war with the emperor would never have arisen.
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Chapuys hoped that Cromwell’s casuistry was a substitute for more violent assaults on Katherine and Mary, though he could not be sure. He was fairly confident that Cromwell felt no personal malice toward them; they were merely added complications in the difficult diplomatic balance sheet he was trying to maintain. To have them permanently out of the way would have made his job easier, and in his professional capacity Cromwell could not afford to let pity interfere with statesmanship. But if Cromwell would have found the deaths of Katherine and Mary a diplomatic convenience, Anne saw it as a dynastic necessity. When Henry ordered Fisher and More to the scaffold she talked loudly of the injustice of allowing the two royal women to live, calling them worse rebels and traitors than the others. She accused Mary in particular of “waging war” against the king and, in an odd reversal of the truth, of conspiring Anne’s death. “She will be the cause of my death unless I get rid of her first,” Anne insisted. “But I will so manage that if I die before her, she shall not laugh at me.”
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In her mind Anne magnified the conflict over the succession to a final apocalyptic struggle from which only one of them would emerge alive. It was said that to quiet Anne down Henry had promised her that as long as he lived he would not allow Mary to take a husband. Without a husband to help raise a revolt she was less dangerous to Elizabeth and to the son Anne was longing for.

Anne’s most ingenious stratagem against Katherine and Mary turned
on this most sensitive of all issues: the need for a male heir. Ever since the affair of the nun of Kent the air had been full of revelations and occult messages, and the nun’s accusation that Henry’s second marriage was cursed still rang in Henry’s ears. Now Anne claimed to have discovered a visionary whose messages supported her interests. She paid a man to swear that he had received a revelation about the royal succession. He was clearly shown in a dream, the man said, that Anne would be unable to conceive again as long as Katherine and Mary were still alive. The suborned prophet was sent to Cromwell first and then to the king, and though there is no evidence that Henry took the prophecy to heart it was the sort of thing that bothered him and added to his irritation.
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He was uneasy throughout 1535 about Mary’s security. He knew perfectly well that an attempt might be made to kidnap her, whether with her consent or against her will. He seems to have believed that her kidnappers would most likely be French and not Spanish or Flemish, however. He was counting on Charles’ studied policy of belligerent noninterference to continue for the time being, but the French might see in Mary a tempting hostage. Everywhere but in England Mary was considered heir to the English throne, and possession of her person might well provide the diplomatic leverage France needed to restore her tarnished influence in Italy and elsewhere. Mary was no longer a minor, and could be married to a prince of the royal house; equipped with an invading army, her husband could then undertake the conquest of England in his wife’s name, confident of the support of the rebellious lords and disaffected courtiers who had been hoping for just such an eventuality for several years.

In an effort to prevent this alarming possibility Henry saw to it that an armed watch was kept around every house where Mary stayed, and ordered that no one but trusted household servants and known visitors like Chapuys’ men were to be allowed anywhere near her. Every seaport within a day’s ride of her residence had its armed guardsmen, alerted to look out for a girl taking ship with an escort of foreigners. When Chapuys told Cromwell he might have to go to Flanders on personal business the secretary turned pale, thinking the ambassador’s business might concern the abduction of the king’s bastard.
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There must have been some reason for optimism now, for despite Henry’s precautions Mary was writing to her cousin Mary, regent of the Netherlands, that she had recently heard “an efficient remedy would be found for these troubles.” The reference was very vague, but the letter had an unmistakably hopeful tone in spite of its ominous close. Above her name Mary signed “written in haste and fear, the 12th of August.”
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The regent must have sent some good news in her own earlier letter, and
Mary knew from the ambassador that continuous prayers were being said in all the churches of Spain for the safety and health of herself and her mother.
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In the fall, though, Mary’s hopes fell as her cycle of illness began again. The doctors were called in September to treat a “rheum” in her head, and recommended that she be moved at once to “some place where she may get recreation and pleasure.” Because of her fear of poison she now “detested all sorts of medicine,” and became a difficult patient,
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and when she fell sick again the following month Lady Shelton kept it a secret even from the physicians for twelve awful days,
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probably hoping that this time Mary would not have the resiliency to survive.