Bloody Mary (55 page)

Mary appealed to the emperor as a bereft woman, but to Philip she was showing herself more and more as an injured queen. In mid-March she sent Mason to Philip in Brussels with orders “to pray the king her consort to be pleased to say frankly in how many days he purposed returning.” Mason was to tell the king that his wife was tired of the expense and inconvenience of keeping a fleet ready to escort him back to England. The ships would leave their moorings at the Thames docks, drop down to the sea, and anchor just off the coast waiting for instructions to sail to Flanders. Then, when their water became foul and their food supplies ran low, they would return upriver to take on fresh provisions and wait for the queen’s order to sail out to sea again. The cycle had been repeated again and again throughout the fall and winter, and as spring approached Mary wanted to know precisely when to send her fleet in order to prevent further futile missions.

Mason did his best. He urged Philip “to comfort the queen, as also the peers of the realm, by his presence,” and reminded him “that there was no reason yet to despair of his having heirs” by Mary. But all Philip would say was that he intended to come as soon as he could, though his Flemish affairs were demanding more and more of his time. Philip’s advisers were more categorical. The king would have to tour all the Netherlands provinces in the coming months, they said, and they reminded Mason of the bad treatment and enormous cost Philip had endured during his earlier sojourn in England. His wife had shown him “little conjugal affection” while he was there, and the English had treated the Spaniards with shameless contempt and violence. For all these reasons Philip would be ill advised to return to England soon, Ruy Gomez told Mason, but there was another cause for delay. Philip’s astrologer had predicted that a conspiracy would take shape against the king in England sometime in 1556, and he would be foolish to return while this threat persisted.
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When she found that Mason had failed in his mission Mary was “beyond measure exasperated.” Philip was treating her with disrespect bordering on contempt, and the sovereign in her was angered. She determined to use her most effective envoy, Paget, to try to learn the truth about her husband’s intentions. Paget, whose rehabilitation to royal favor had been crowned by his appointment in January as Lord Privy Seal, was the ideal mediator between Mary and Philip. Because of his new standing at court he was eager to please the queen, and he had always been the foremost advocate of imperial interests on the Council. He was “dear to the king,” and “very subtle” besides; he could be counted on to discover the true reason behind Philip’s long absence.
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Paget came no closer than Mason to discovering the hidden motive behind Philip’s behavior, but he did at least bring back from the imperial court a definite date for the
king’s return. If he did not return to Mary by June 30, Philip had said, then “she was not to consider him a trustworthy king” any longer.
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What Paget did not tell Mary was that, now as always, Philip was acting not out of private inclination but political expediency. Mary, and England, were two counters on Philip’s vast diplomatic gameboard. He knew perfectly well that, as the regent of Milan told the Venetian ambassador during Paget’s visit, it was not to his advantage “that the queen’s angry remonstrances should be converted into hatred.”
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But he also knew that in the long run Mary’s affection might have to be sacrificed for the sake of attaining some more important advantage in the Netherlands. Philip was in any case in close touch with the English Council throughout his absence. Minutes of the Council meetings were forwarded to him regularly, and he returned them with marginal comments in his own hand. Sometimes his comments were no more than a brief sentence of approval—“this seems to be well done”—but sometimes they were more lengthy than the minutes themselves, and there is no doubt Philip kept himself well informed about English affairs and believed he retained a measure of control over them. He asked, for example, that “nothing should be proposed in Parliament without its having been first communicated to his majesty,” and continued to expect that eventually he would receive word that his coronation had been approved.
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But even this issue had lost some of its importance in the light of recent events. When Philip married Mary in 1554 England was in the forefront of European affairs; now in 1556 it had become a diplomatic backwater. The Hapsburgs and the French were still battling for supremacy on the continent, but England had ceased to be the focus of their rivalry. A new force had arisen to challenge the power of the Hapsburgs: the fiery Neapolitan Pope Paul IV.

Cardinal Caraffa had become Pope Paul IV in May of 1555, and was devoting his pontificate to the twin goals of annihilating heretics and fighting Philip II with every weapon at his command. He was eighty years old, but he had the vigor of a man of forty. “He is all nerve,” one diplomat wrote of the pope, “and when he walks, it is with a free, elastic step, as if he hardly touched the ground.” Caraffa came from hardy stock. His mother, Vittoria Camponesca, was a bold and dashing horsewoman who liked to ride at a breakneck pace over the mountain passes of southern Italy. Hagiographers recorded that, shortly before her son was born, Vittoria raced past a hermit who called out to her to stop, then urged her to travel at a gentler pace, as the child in her womb was destined to become pope.
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His hot temper, his eccentricity, and his unpredictability made Paul IV a fearsome figure. He was sometimes eloquent and businesslike, sometimes foulmouthed and tyrannical. He shouted at his chamberlains not to dare to disturb him with church busi
ness after sunset, “even were it to announce the resurrection of his own father,” and drove out cardinals who troubled him at the wrong time with a torrent of abuse and a raised fist.
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He called himself a “great prince,” and kept a princely table, washing down course after course of delicacies with black Neapolitan wine.
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As he dined he talked loudly to the cardinals who gathered each evening to watch him, and his conversation was invariably dominated by his hatred of Hapsburg power. The pope had been a young man when the armies of Ferdinand of Aragon swept through Naples, replacing French rule with that of the overbearing Spaniards. In middle age he had watched the forces of Charles V take Milan, and then sack Rome. Italy had become forfeit to the greedy foreigners from the north; it was time to expel these barbarians, and the pope was the natural leader of any such campaign. Furthermore, Paul IV had a deep personal grudge against Philip II. The king had had the audacity to attempt to prevent Caraffa’s election as pope. His maneuverings had been secret, but after the election was over the truth came out, leaving the newly elected pope violently angry. His anger was only increased by rumors that his election had not been canonical, and he knew that Philip had asked his Spanish lawyers to look into the possibility of deposing him on these grounds. Soon after he assumed the tiara Paul IV began intriguing against Philip, hoping to assemble a coalition strong enough to drive the Spaniards out of Naples. He negotiated a short-lived treaty with the French, and in the summer of 1556 was attempting to revive the French alliance again. In Brussels Philip nervously watched the machinations of the feisty, energetic old man with alarm, and told Mary’s envoys he could not leave Flanders as long as the pope’s menace continued.

It had not rained in England since early in February. The fields that had been flooded in the previous summer now lay parched under the hot sun. Seeds sown in the spring lay dormant or died for lack of water, and as the summer wore on there were fears of famine and, worse still, of the sweating sickness. Drought had brought the sweat in the past, and might well bring it again. In July Mary ordered daily processions to begin, to intercede with a wrathful God, but though the clergy dutifully processed and anxious Londoners fell in behind them the skies remained cloudless and the heat seemed to grow more intense every day. To escape the oppressive weather Mary joined Pole at Canterbury, comforted, as usual, by his presence and his advice, and “intent on enduring her troubles as patiently as she can.”
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Her frustration with Philip now showed itself in bursts of anger. A portrait of Philip that hung in the Council chamber, as if representing the king’s authority in his absence, had begun to irritate Mary. She ordered it removed; her enemies said she kicked it out of the room in plain sight of
her councilors.
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She was heard to remark pointedly that “God sent oft times to good women evil husbands,” and though she was speaking of Lady Bray her meaning was clear enough. Yet when Philip fell sick late in June she showed great concern for him, sending messengers to bring news of his condition every few days and insisting that his seventy-year-old physician, still in England, dispatch himself to Flanders at once despite his gout and infirmity.
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Neither Mary’s anger nor her concern had any effect on Philip or his father. Her pleasure in Philip’s company and her hope for a Catholic heir were, it seemed, to be denied her in future. Yet the diplomatic entanglements resulting from the marriage remained as firm as ever. War between Philip and the French had been temporarily forestalled by the truce signed in February, but either side could disavow that agreement given adequate provocation. And should war break out, England would almost certainly be drawn in on the Hapsburg side. All these things were on Mary’s mind as she sat down to write to her cousin Charles V in July. She sent her regards to the king and queen of Bohemia (who sent her in return a jeweled fan with a crystal mirror on one side and a watch on the other, “richly wrought, highly artistic and of beautiful design”), and then stated frankly her disillusionment with the promises made to her about Philip’s return. “It would be pleasanter for me to be able to thank your majesty for sending me back the king, my lord and good husband,” she wrote, “than to dispatch an emissary to Flanders. . . . However, as your majesty has been pleased to break your promise in this connection, a promise you made to me regarding the return of the king, my husband, I must perforce be satisfied, although to my unspeakable regret.”
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It was as forthright a letter as Mary had ever written to her lifelong protector Charles, yet her hand trembled as she wrote it, and she knew very well it would do no good.

To those around her it was apparent that Mary’s health was breaking under the strain. “For many months the queen has passed from one sorrow to another,” Michiel noted, adding that “her face has lost flesh greatly since I was last with her.”
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By August she was finding it hard to sleep at night, and appearing at court with a drawn face and dark circles under her eyes. Combined with “the great heat, the like of which no one remembers,” her inner anguish made her ill. She spent the latter part of August in seclusion and, significantly, “was seen no more at Council.”
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At Yaxley in Huntingdonshire it was being said that the queen was dead. A Protestant schoolmaster and a dozen of his fellow villagers, including the parish priest, imagined that they could stir the surrounding communities to rebellion by a bold imposture. In the parish church the priest announced that Mary had died and that “the Lady Elizabeth is queen, and her beloved bed-fellow, Lord Edmund Courtenay, king.” A
conspirator who claimed to be Courtenay was caught and eventually executed, and twelve others were committed to the Tower.
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But a troublemaker closely associated with the Yaxley plotters become something of a Protestant hero over the next few months.

This unnamed figure, thought to be “a captain from the other side of the Channel, an arch-heretic well acquainted with Germany,” lived in the northern forests where the queen’s officials were few and her laws ignored. He hid himself for a time, then appeared “with great audacity” in a town, seeking out the Protestants and “preaching to them and encouraging them to remain firm and constant, as they shall soon hear and see great and powerful personages, who will come to replace them in their religion and free them from slavery.” Sometimes he was disguised as a peasant, sometimes as a wayfarer, sometimes as a merchant. After he had eluded the local officials for months a massive effort was made to catch him. Spies were sent into the forests, and the keepers and others tramped through the woods with bloodhounds “as is done to wild beasts and beasts of chase.” But the mysterious woodsman remained out of sight, and finally disappeared altogether, perhaps returning to one of the emigrant colonies abroad.
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His agitation troubled the queen and her councilors in the last weeks of summer, as the sun beat down on the withered crops and on the fires lit daily under the feet of the Protestant heretics.

Of sectes and of schysmes a riddaunce to make,

Of horrible errours and heresies all;

She carckes and cares and great travell dooth take,

That vertue may flourish and vice have a fall.

When Mary sent Paget to Brussels in April of 1556 it was only partly to discover the true cause of Philip’s delay in Flanders. Paget also had instructions to talk to the Emperor Charles about the vexed problem of the burning of heretics.

It had been fourteen months since the first burnings began, and in that time hundreds of suspected heretics had been examined and imprisoned, and many of these had been condemned to the stake. The executions had become commonplace, but not mundane; those who watched the Protestant men, women and children die the slow death by fire found it difficult to forget what they had seen. The spectacle of a man dying in the flames, singing a psalm “until that his lips were burnt away,” was a haunting image, as was the sight of a sixty-year-old widow bound to the stake, or a young blind woman, a ropemaker’s daughter, sentenced to burn by a bishop she could not see.

The executioners made these grim proceedings even more memorable by their ineptness. All too often the wood for the fire was green, or the rushes were too soggy to burn quickly. The bags of gunpowder tied to the victims to shorten their agony failed to ignite, or else maimed them without killing them. No one thought to gag the sufferers, and their screams and prayers were audible often until the very moment of death. It mattered little that most of them were originally singled out for punishment by their neighbors, the jurymen of their localities, who gave their names to the justices or commissioners who passed them on to the bishops. Or that many of the victims were Anabaptists whom not only Catholics but most Protestants saw as arch-heretics to be destroyed out of
’hand, and whom the Protestant King Edward, had he lived, would almost certainly have burned. Or that they were brought to the stake in an age habituated to violence and frequent executions, when men and women were hanged for most petty crimes and all two hundred of the felonies recognized under English law.

What mattered was that day after day new victims, most of them ordinary villagers, were dying amid a climate of legend and martyrdom. Stories of their heroism and joyous deaths had now become as commonplace as the burnings themselves. It was told again and again how John Rogers went to his death promising to pray for his executioner and how, “as one feeling no smart,” he “washed his hands in the flame, as though it had been in cold water” until the fire had consumed him. The story of Laurence Saunders was equally well known. Saunders, it was said, went “with a merry courage” toward the fire, barefoot and dressed in an old gown and shirt, and when he came to the stake he took it in his arms and kissed it, saying “Welcome the cross of Christ! welcome everlasting life!” As his body burned he seemed to “sleep sweetly” in the fire.
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The burning of Cranmer had done much to foster this atmosphere of dauntless piety. Already condemned by the doctors of the university, he was excommunicated by the pope in November of 1555 and deprived of his archbishopric the following month. In February he was delivered to the queen’s officers as a degraded cleric sentenced to be burned for heresy, yet his execution was postponed for nearly a month. In that time the former archbishop wrote three humble recantations of his Protestant views, disavowing all that he had written and taught about the sacraments and the pope’s authority during a clerical career spanning three decades. He blamed himself for much of the harm done to the faith in England, and submitted himself utterly to the queen’s mercy as a contrite sinner. Mary doubted the sincerity of his penitential writings, believing “that he had feigned recantation thinking thus to save his life, and not that he had received any good inspiration.” He was not worthy of pardon, she said, and ordered the execution to proceed.

Once he knew he must die Cranmer took back everything he had said and written and, to dramatize his true belief, threw his recantation into the flames. He asked the crowd to forgive him for having tried to save himself; he had only done it, he said, so that he might be of use to them all at some future time. Then, thrusting his right arm and hand into the fire, he said “This, which has sinned, having signed the writing, must be the first to suffer punishment.”
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Cranmer’s recantation was published by the government, but instead of strengthening Catholicism it put Mary and her Council in a bad light. Londoners remembered only Cranmer’s final gesture, not his forced surrender to royal coercion; they denounced the published recantation as a hoax, and condemned the queen and the bishop who had subscribed his name to the book as liars.
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The bishop, Edmund Bonner, was already thoroughly hated. Himself imprisoned in the Marshalsea during Edward’s reign, and then in the Tower, Bonner had become the leading public symbol of the Marian persecution. At the start of Mary’s reign her Catholic subjects had knelt to receive Bonner’s blessing when he was released from prison. Now the children sang out “Bloody Bonner” as he passed, and their parents vilified him as a “beastly belly-god and damnable dunghill” whose “butcherly, bloody proceedings” made him no better than a murderer. He was so bigoted, it was said, that he would have condemned even St, Paul to the flames, and so bloodthirsty that his “great fat cheeks” were glutted with the flesh of the martyrs.
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Bonner was in fact a gross, corpulent man who liked vulgar jokes and carried out his grisly duty toward the condemned heretics of the London diocese with inhuman relish. But the stories told of his sadism—stories that in all probability went far beyond the truth—made him a monster. He liked to flog his prisoners, it was said, and to see them tortured. He tormented a blind man, and held the hand of another sufferer in a candle flame until the skin cracked open, Bonner represented all that was odious in the government’s religious policy with none of the sincere faith that made that policy tragically plausible. He was a figure of ridicule and contempt, and in an odd way he provided the Protestants with the dark comfort of a villain they could dismiss as a savage fool,

As great a tragedy as the burnings themselves was the fact that so many innocuous villagers were condemned to the flames for holding such relatively harmless beliefs. To be sure, a sizable number of the victims in Kent and Essex were stout sectaries who preached their heretical doctrines openly and lured ignorant country people away from the church. At Colchester priests were “hemmed in at the open streets, and called knaves,” and seditious talk was as common as heresy in every alehouse and tavern.
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But in many other places the men and women singled out for destruction were only unlettered peasants or craftspeople, confused by twenty years of shifting orthodoxy and by the conflicting voices of clergymen who had changed their doctrines at least once in every reign. Young people who had grown to maturity hearing only evil of the pope were now punished for reviling him; villagers who had heard their own priests denounce the mass and the Catholic sacraments were now ordered to the stake for holding imprecise opinions on the nature of the Eucharist. Four of the women burned at Essex “could not tell what a sacrament is.” One of these women, “a young maid unskilled,” thought she had heard tell of one sacrament, but could not name it.

And it was almost invariably the ordinary working people, the artisans and the laboring poor, who came to the attention of the commissioners. Apart from the Protestant bishops there were few gentlemen among the
victims, and only one gentlewoman. The rest were weavers, fullers, tailors, hosiers, brewers, tanners, bricklayers and their wives. There were serving men and serving women, day laborers and workers in the fields, widows and farm wives.
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It was obvious to the officials operating the search for heretics that their procedures were entrapping those who least deserved to suffer. “I do see by experience,” one of Bonner’s assistants wrote, “that the sworn inquest for heresies do, most commonly, indict the simple, ignorant and wretched.” The populace at large was greatly disturbed, he added, “when they see the simple wretches (not knowing what heresy is) to burn.”
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It was as obvious to the queen as it was to her servants that the rigorous campaign to root out heresy was failing of its object. Instead of instilling devotion and a love of good doctrine the executions were creating impiety and resentment. The most notorious of the Protestants who had not fled to the continent were still at large, and error flourished in areas remote from royal control. Worse still, many good Catholics were refusing to believe that the holy work of preserving the true faith could take the unholy form of roasting human flesh. The burnings were “the evil church’s persecution of the good church,” some were saying. And others, who said little, simply turned from religion altogether in their disgust. One Protestant woman wrote to Bonner warning him that he had “lost the hearts of twenty thousand that were rank papists these twelve months,” and she may not have been far wrong.
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The dawning realization that in her zeal to defend the faith she might be harming it irretrievably weighed on Mary and made her wretched. She was doing her best to rebuild the church, restoring monastic communities, renewing the clergy, giving her support to the reforming efforts of Cardinal Pole. Yet her subjects were not settling back into the familiar Catholicism of her childhood. She had believed for so long that she was destined to preside over a people happily restored to their ancestral belief. Why was that restoration so long in coming?

If Mary hoped for insight from her cousin in Flanders, her hope was vain. What Charles V told her envoy Paget in the spring of 1556 was not recorded, but the religious situation in the Netherlands was no less tense than in England. Here too the official policy of persecution was failing to discourage the spread of Protestantism. Only a short time before Paget arrived in Brussels a house full of Anabaptists was raided; three men and a woman were taken into custody, along with the woman’s son, a boy of fourteen. The boy was spared, after receiving a public christening in the town square, but the four others were tortured until they revealed the names of many of their coreligionists, and then burned. Such incidents were common, yet the number of Protestants in the population was growing. The president of the Council in Brussels had begun to question
the wisdom of the mass burnings, hangings and drownings of heretics. Over thirteen hundred such executions had bloodied the Netherlands provinces in the last eighteen months, he was saying, with little positive result. “For the avoidance of greater cruelty,” he now suggested, “the execrable intentions of these sectarians must be tolerated as much as possible, they being in too great number.”
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The problem of heresy had been driven into the background of the emperor’s thoughts by an event of cosmic magnitude. For seven days and nights a huge comet was visible in the skies over northern Europe, arching its way across the heavens and “shooting out fire to great wonder and marvel to the people.” The comet was half the size of the moon, and much brighter, with beams like bursts of flame from a torch. The “blazing star” amazed the emperor, who took it as an omen of his approaching death. “These signs speak to me of my fate,” he was heard to say, and he told his servants to hurry their preparations for his departure for Spain.
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He had given up all his powers now, but had not lost either his fascination with statecraft or his instinctive hatred of the French. He liked to mutter to ambassadors about how the French had “ever sought to dominate not a part, but the whole of the world,” punctuating his remarks with graphic gestures and repeating himself for emphasis. The French king’s current warlike demands, he told the Venetian ambassador, were like “stamping on his throat,” and as he said it he “placed his right hand on his neck, and with great vehemence explained this conceit, and repeated it twice.” But Charles was clearly near his end. The incessant pains from his gout had become so severe that at times he “gnawed his hand and longed for death,”
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and he did not want to die in Brussels. Finally on September 16 he left for Spain, taking with him his sister Mary, his household and the accumulations of a long and turbulent reign.

Just after he left a letter arrived from his daughter-in-law in England. He never saw it—his ship had already embarked when the messenger reached the imperial court—but he could have guessed its contents. Mary was writing yet again to plead with her father-in-law to send Philip back to her. “I wish to beg your majesty’s pardon for my boldness in writing to you at this time,” she began, “and humbly to implore you, as you have always been pleased to act as a true father to me and my kingdom, to consider the miserable plight into which this country has now fallen.” Philip’s “firm hand” was needed to stop the mounting unrest and criticism of the government that seemed to reach its climax as the scanty harvest was gathered in. “Unless he comes to remedy matters,” Mary wrote, “not I only but also wiser persons than I fear that great danger will ensue.”
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