Bloody Mary (19 page)

When Mary was well enough to write again her letter to Chapuys had none of the optimism she had shown during the summer. She wanted now to write to the emperor directly, but didn’t dare to, “fearing,” as she told Chapuys, “lest those who are constantly watching me should get hold of the letter.” Instead she wrote to the ambassador, urging him this time to send a personal envoy to Brussels to lay her case before Charles. Perhaps Chapuys’ dispatches were too dispassionate; what she and her mother needed was an eloquent advocate whose description of their plight would soften the emperor’s heart. Surely, she wrote, he could be made to see that saving his wretched kinswomen would be a work “highly acceptable in the eyes of God,” and no less glorious than his current conquest of Tunis. Even the conquest of all of Africa could bring him no greater honor, she added grandiloquently.
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Mary could not have known as she wrote this that within weeks her plea for imperial aid would be taken seriously. What in fact roused the emperor to action at last was not his cousin’s pitiful message but distressing news from London about the king’s altered state of mind. The news came via an interesting source. Gertrude Blount, marchioness of Exeter and longtime ally of Katherine and her daughter, heard through highly-placed courtiers that early in November Henry had gathered his most valued advisers together and told them bluntly that Katherine and Mary had to be dispatched. He would no longer endure the “trouble, fear and suspense” they caused him, he said, and he wanted them judged once and for all at the next session of Parliament. He was not only firm but angry, the marchioness wrote to Chapuys, and he “swore most obstinately that he would wait no longer.” From his tone and manner the councilors he spoke to understood the seriousness of his purpose, and they linked his meaning to a remark he had made earlier in the month about Mary. Then, in response to some reference to her lack of company, the king snapped that soon he would see to it “that she would not want any company, and that she would be an example to show that no one ought to disobey the laws.” The time had come, he raged, for him to fulfill what
had been foretold of him “that at the beginning of his reign he would be gentle as a lamb, and at the end worse than a lion.”

When these dark fulminations continued for three weeks the marchioness went to Chapuys in person to underscore the urgency of her earlier messages. She came in disguise, he told the emperor, and would without question have been in danger of her life had she been discovered at his residence. She brought fresh evidence of Henry’s determination to carry out his purpose. Talking openly about how he meant to be rid of his stubborn ex-wife and daughter, the king noticed that some of those who heard him were so upset they started to cry. This made him even angrier. “Tears and wry faces would not move him,” he had said loudly, “because even if he lost his crown he would not change his intention.”
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These were things “too monstrous to be believed,” Chapuys told the emperor after seeing the marchioness, yet he was certain his informant was trustworthy and that this time the king was in earnest. Henry had clearly become so exasperated by the stumbling block Katherine and Mary represented that he was prepared to go to war over the issue of their execution. He had shown the same impatient severity before the killings in the spring and summer, and those who cared most about Katherine and Mary’s safety had been saying for months that as a result of those executions the king had become too calloused and “inured to cruelty” to shrink from ordering his former wife and daughter to their deaths. Besides, another matter nagged at him. Anne was pregnant, and if her child proved to be a boy his way would be made much smoother by the elimination of his potential rival and her obstinate mother. And it is just possible that, in the back of his mind, Henry recalled the dire prophecy of Anne’s visionary and vowed he would take no chances with the survival of this child.

Whatever his motives, Henry succeeded in convincing his advisers, Chapuys, and finally the emperor himself that if Katherine and Mary were to be rescued it would have to be done immediately. In December the emperor took the first step toward giving the rebel English lords the support they had been seeking, and then, believing that the success of the venture would hinge on Mary’s role, he laid plans for her abduction. Charles seems to have had a far different plan in mind than simply freeing Mary from captivity and probable attainder. As he saw it, the coming revolt would be carried out in her name. She would be more than an aggrieved victim of Henry’s reckless policies; she would be a pretender to his throne. Once the rebels had seized power Mary would rule, her mother at her side, along with a carefully chosen husband and under the constant supervision and advice of her imperial cousin. England would be brought securely within the orbit of Hapsburg influence, and Henry’s recent break with the pope and alterations in religion would be reversed.

With this bold plan in mind the emperor told the count de Roeulx, his captain general in the Netherlands, to send the best man he could find to England to make arrangements for bringing Mary to a temporary refuge in Flanders. She would wait there, in constant contact with Charles, while the northern lords were armed and prepared. As soon as the fighting began she would make ready to return to claim the throne. If she expressed any doubts about the justice of the undertaking she would be reassured by the recent publication of a papal sentence of excommunication against Henry, depriving him of his kingdom and declaring him to be outside the community of Christian souls. To take an excommu-nicant’s throne was a worthy act in the eyes of the church, and if Mary did not seize it some foreign prince undoubtedly would.

In the first days of the new year 1536, the imperial agent arrived in England. He learned all he could from Chapuys, and then drew up his plans. Mary would be taken to Flanders in February; the rebellion would take place in March or April. By the first of May England would be in new hands.

Though she knew nothing of the impending revolt Katherine too felt the urgency of the political climate in late 1535. She wrote to the pope, entreating him to remember Henry and Mary, and describing England as a land of “ruined souls and martyred saints.” If only the pope would intervene and protect the wayward people, who were straying “like sheep without a shepherd,” she wrote, then the godless tyranny might be brought to an end. “We await a remedy from God and from Your Holiness,” Katherine concluded. “It must come speedily or the time will be past!”

Part of her continued to struggle against the enduring injustice of which she was a victim, but she was gradually giving in to the mental burdens that oppressed her. Living in a single small room with a dreary view of the ruined moat and unkempt hunting park of Kimbolton, Katherine saw only her three maids of honor, her half dozen chamber women and the faithful Spaniards who looked after her material and spiritual well being: her physician, apothecary, confessor and chamberlain. The other members of the household she viewed, quite correctly, as her jailers, and by staying in her tiny apartment she avoided seeing or encountering them. The men Henry put in charge at Kimbolton, Sir Edmund Bedingfield and Sir Edward Chamberlain, were kept at a distance by Katherine’s self-imposed isolation, and most of the guardsmen who watched the gates and grounds never saw their royal prisoner.

These highly restrictive living conditions helped Katherine to preserve a measure of dignity, but they were hardly conducive to either mental or physical health, and as the year 1535 drew to a close she entered
what would be her final illness. What oppressed her most was the terrible thought that in some way she was responsible for all that had befallen England over the last eight years. In maintaining her cause, in refusing to acknowledge that she was now or ever had been anything but queen, Katherine had been true to her conscience and her faith. But what if, fallible as she was, she had misperceived the greater truth that by persisting in her claims she had forced Henry to cut England off from the Roman church and court the Protestant heresy? What if, in doing right, she had done a great wrong? The issue became more poignant still when she recalled the deaths of her beloved supporters Fisher and More, and of the blameless monks who had shared her scruples about the succession. Perhaps by giving in to the king’s demand that she abandon her queenly pretensions and enter a convent she would have done a greater good, both for herself and for the others who had suffered and would suffer in future.

Other griefs crowded in on Katherine’s mind during the long months of her isolation. One she had carried on her conscience for more than thirty years. When her marriage to Prince Arthur was being negotiated, her father had objected to the fact that Arthur’s inheritance seemed insecure. The Tudor dynasty was not yet two decades old, and there was a Plantagenet claimant (Edward, earl of Warwick, son of Edward IV’s brother George) whose pedigree was strong enough to make him a threat to Henry VII’s successor. Ferdinand of Aragon’s objection to the earl’s continued existence prompted Henry to have him executed, and the marriage negotiations proceeded to a successful conclusion. Probably the English king would have had the unfortunate Warwick killed eventually even without Ferdinand’s prompting, but Katherine believed to the end of her life that, through her father, the earl’s blood was on her hands, and she told the other surviving representatives of the Plantagenet line-chiefly the countess of Salisbury and her son Reginald Pole—that her troubles were God’s punishment for her father’s sin.
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Along with the old wound of the divorce and the ever fresh pain of her five-year separation from Mary, Katherine wrestled with these guilts until she became convinced that from the start her life had been fated for tragedy. Her state of mind was shown in the way she occasionally signed her letters: “KA-TARINA SIN VENTURA REGINA”-“Katherine, the unhappy queen.”

On December 30 Chapuys left the court to go to Kimbolton. Katherine had been ill for nearly a month, and Henry had given permission for her to move to a less pestilential house. The ambassador carried this good news, and was in the best of spirits himself. The coming months were to be filled with intrigue and excitement, and he was to be at the center of it all. He could not tell Katherine any of the details, but
the encouragement he gave her during his stay was fed by his own unfeigned enthusiasm. Of course, some of what they said to one another had been arranged beforehand, and was said solely for the benefit of the officials who were present. Bedingfield and Chamberlain, whom Kath-erine had not seen for more than a year, were allowed to be in the room during Chapuys’ first meeting with Katherine, and a “friend of Cromwell’s”—a spy, sent to record all the ambassador did and said during his visit—was also present.

But when the obligatory statements about Katherine’s high status, powerful relatives and vital significance for “the union and peace of Christendom” had been made, their talk became more personal. Chapuys stayed at Kimbolton for four days, and each day he sat for several hours by her bedside, answering all her questions about Henry’s health, his standing with other rulers, Mary’s health and situation and the new house Katherine would live in as soon as she was well enough to be moved. They spoke too of how no one had yet come forward to defend her cause, and of the heresies that had taken root in England because of Henry’s break with Rome over the divorce. On both these troublesome issues Chapuys felt he was able to console Katherine. He pointed out that even as they spoke the pope was preparing to enforce his sentence of deprivation, and was pressuring the French to abandon their lukewarm alliance with England. As for the spread of Protestant doctrines, the ambassador reminded Katherine that God always uses such weapons to prove the faithful and confuse the wicked, and that she was in no way responsible for the delusions of the few who were taken in by them.

Chapuys’ presence and the sound of his voice were as much comfort to the bedridden woman as his words. It was the Christmas season, and there was a little gaiety and a few gifts. One of the ambassador’s men loved to tell jokes, and on the night before Chapuys and his party left Kimbolton he made Katherine laugh again and again. She seemed to be much improved, and her physician told Chapuys there was no reason for him to stay. If her condition worsened, he said, he would send word immediately. But as it happened there was no time to summon him back. On January 7, the day after the Feast of the Three Kings, Katherine knew she was dying. She heard mass and spent the morning in prayer, pausing only to dictate a brief will and to write to Henry. She left the small sum of money she had to her servants, begging the king to supplement her small legacy to each with a year’s wages. She asked that someone make a pilgrimage to Walsingham on her behalf, giving money to the poor along the way. She wanted masses said for her soul, beyond the daily prayers being offered in every parish church in Spain, and she left to her daughter her furs and a gold collar that had been part of her trousseau when she came as a bride from Granada.

Her last message to Henry was full of love. There was no longer any need to remind him of her true title, or of the long conflict that had estranged them. She forgave him everything; she hoped he would look to the good of his soul; she urged him to be a good father to Mary. “Lastly,” the letter ended, “I make this vow, that my eyes desire you above all things.” She prayed for him, and for Mary, until in midafter-noon she died.
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Even before Katherine’s death there had been strong suspicion of poison. The doctor ruled out the possibility that she had been given “simple and pure poison,” whose sudden and dramatic effect would have made it unmistakable. But he thought a “slow and subtle poison” might have been put into some Welsh beer she drank just before her final relapse, and an elaborate rumor of a poison plot quickly took shape. The poison came from Italy, it was said, and was smuggled into England by a brother of the papal protonotary. It was an inescapably lethal toxin, and its effects were evident in what the chandler of Kimbolton found when he opened Katherine’s corpse. The heart, he reported, was completely black and hideous; it would not come clean in any of the three “waters” he washed it in. Inside it was a cancerous growth, also black in color, which seemed to the doctor who heard the chandler’s account clear evidence of slow poison. None of Katherine’s partisans were willing to be cheated of their revenge by admitting that the old woman they had loved for so long had simply died of grief.