Bloody Mary Read online

  BLOODY MARY

  ALSO BY CAROLLY ERICKSON

  The Records of Medieval Europe

  Civilization and Society in the West

  The Medieval Vision

  Mistress Anne

  Great Harry

  The First Elizabeth

  Our Tempestuous Day

  Bonnie Prince Charlie

  To the Scaffold: The Life of Marie Antoinette

  Her Little Majesty

  Great Catherine

  BLOODY MARY

  CAROLLY ERICKSON

  St. Martin’s Griffin New York

  BLOODY MARY. Copyright © 1978 by Carolly Erickson. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quot ations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Erickson, Carolly.

  Bloody Mary / Carolly Erickson

  p. cm.

  Originally published: Garden City, N.Y. :

  Doubleday, 1978.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0-312-18706-8

  1. Mary I, Queen of England, 1516-1558. 2. Great Britain—History—Mary I, Queen of England, 1553-1558. 3. Queens—Great Britain—Biography. I. Title.

  [DA347.E74 1998]

  942.05'4'092'dc21

  [b]

  98-16069

  CIP

  First published in the United States by Doubleday & Company, Inc.

  10 9 8 7 6 5

  To Peter

  1. The Princess Mary at twenty-eight, in 1544, by Master John (Johannes Corvus).

  NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON.

  Preface to the Second Edition

  WHEN I learned, in the spring of 1995, that St. Martin’s Press wanted to reissue my four Tudor biographies I was delighted, and grateful to the editor, Charles Spicer, for sponsoring the project—and at the same time a bit dismayed. For I was told there would have to be a new preface to the four books, and the thought of writing such a preface seemed daunting.

  My first thought was that I would need to reacquaint myself with all the significant books and articles that had been written on Mary Tudor, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and Anne Boleyn over the past dozen years or so and hold my earlier work up to the scrutiny of more recent research. But in fact I have been reading, and reviewing, these books (I have not read all the articles) as they came out and am familiar with the state of Tudor scholarship, and by and large, there have been no upheavals in interpretive viewpoint, no exciting documentary finds of wide import, no fundamental shifts in historical understanding—apart from the lamentable influence of political correctness that continues to corrode academic investigation—that make my biographies obsolete.

  Bloody Mary, Great Harry, Fair Eliza (published as First Elizabeth), and Mistress Anne were written, in that order, between the fall of 1975 and the fall of 1983. Each was contracted for separately; had I known, when I began Bloody Mary, that I would be writing biographies of the other three historical figures I would have designed my research quite differently. I knew that I would be writing for what is called a “popular audience”—a catchall term that includes readers of widely differing educational backgrounds and tastes, united by a thirst for reexperiencing the past through the pages of a readable story. My emphasis was on storytelling, but storytelling deeply anchored in the historical sources and faithful to those sources not only in detail and tone but in emphasis; I did not want to take what was familiar or coherent to twentieth-century readers and leave the rest—often the heart of any given text—in obscurity.

  Bloody Mary found its audience, and the biographical philosophy I developed while writing that book has governed my approach to historical biography ever since. Simply stated, that philosophy is as follows: I pay as much or more attention to the inner life (drives, motivations, emotions, attitudes, character) as to the outer. I try to preserve the natural arc of the life as my subject lived it, allotting as much or more space to the earlier years (whether or not they were the years of fame or Historically Significant Incident) as to the later ones. I never invent dialogue; every word attributed to a historical character in my biographies is a direct quote from a contemporary source—although, as anyone who has done historical research knows, contemporary sources are far from being exact reflections of truth and contain their own distortions. (When I attribute an emotion or attitude to a character, that too is based on hints or explicit statements in contemporary sources, not on speculation.) I try to tell the story as if the outcome were unknown, as if many alternate futures were possible—as they were, in the thinking of my subjects, while they were living out their lives.

  Most important, I try to discover and stress those elements in the story that point to differences between past and present. The sixteenth century was a profoundly different time than our own era, with different prevailing assumptions about reality, human nature, and the place of men and women in the great hierarchy that was thought to link all life to the divine. Life was believed, accurately, to be short and beset with dangers. Clues to its course were provided on all sides by the supernatural world, hence the eager curiosity (and dread) of Tudor folk for all manner of signs and wonders—comets, freaks of nature, prophecies, messages (however spurious) from the beyond.

  Thus when a “marvelous fish” ninety feet long was found beached on the English coast in 1532, crowds gathered to wonder at it and were in no doubt that it was a dark portent; Henry VIII and Anne Boleynwere then making the crossing to France, and the fish was believed to be a warning that no good would come of their journey.

  Because the subjects of my biographies bear famous names, they evoke in the minds of readers conventional images, images heavily colored by cinematic or other fictional melodrama. The Henry VIII I write about in Great Harry is far different from the coarse and bloated lecher of dramatic cliche; he is a brilliant, athletic, heroic figure bursting with vigor who, when he encountered unconscionable dynastic obstacles, shrugged off the restraints by which he felt himself unjustly bound and muscled his way to an ill-fated independence. Late in life, he became monstrous, inwardly and outwardly, but his ugly metamorphosis was a long time coming. Similarly, the Anne Boleyn described in Mistress Anne is not the sympathetic heroine victimized by a ferocious and brutal husband, but a prideful young woman exploited by those around her, a somewhat enigmatic figure at the heart of a dark fairy tale, ultimately pulled down into the quicksand of court politics, her pride broken.

  My Tudor biographies were written at a time when the insights of feminism were beginning to leaven the writing of history. Before the 1970s, biographies of female historical figures had more often than not been distorted by antifeminist stereotypes; now a new generation of writers was attempting to set aside these stereotypes and see actual lives, following unique paths.

  As I searched through the documentary evidence about Mary Tudor, for example, I found not a hardened bigot responsible for the cruel burnings of Protestants, but an anguished, deeply disappointed and heartbroken woman, buffeted emotionally yet always full of courage. In researching Elizabeth, I discovered, behind the Virgin Queen of legend, a woman of stinging eccentricity who smelt of vinegar and was so eaten up with bitterness that she slapped and stabbed her waiting women and demanded that they tell her she was beautiful. The sources offered many images, many facets; Mary was as pathetic as she was courageous, and Elizabeth was as capable of tenderness as she was of swearing “round oaths” and swinging an old rusty sword.

  Rereading the biographies recently, a few details snagged my mind and
memory. Most important, although controversy still surrounds the date of Anne Boleyn’s birth, she is now generally believed to have been born earlier than 1507, and was probably in her early twenties, not her mid- to late teens, when she came to Henry VIII’s court Were I to write her story again, I would take this altered view into account. Another issue concerns the titles of the four biographies. I originally wanted all four books to bear names by which their subjects were familiarly known in their time: Bloody Mary, Great Harry, Fair Eliza, and Mistress Anne. An uncompromising publisher changed Fair Eliza to The First Elizabeth. I wanted no subtitles, but added them at the insistence of publicity departments and editors. Dear reader, disregard them.

  And to the many dear readers who sent me letters over the years, I thank you for the kind words and heartening encouragement with which you have showered me. I have been particularly touched and honored by those letters which began, “I have never before written to an author, but . . .” What follows these words is inevitably a letter to treasure. For whatever inconsistencies, misprints, or minor inaccuracies that remain in these volumes, I ask your indulgence.

  Twenty years ago this month I completed Bloody Mary and sent it off to Doubleday. Then [ lived in Berkeley, committed to art and austere cerebration, with a peacock outside my window that came to be fed every afternoon at three; now I live in Hawaii, beside an aquamarine ocean and a white-sand beach, the beach where I sit as I write this, with palm trees and a hammock nearby, and a huge mango tree that, this year, produced a very large and juicy crop of my favorite food, I am still committed, though only a few hours a week, to art; cerebration I leave behind more and more with each passing year. It is a direction I enthusiastically recommend.

  Carolly Erickson

  Lanikai Beach

  Kailua, Hawaii

  October 24,1996

  Preface

  Mary Tudor has no monument in England. In her will she had asked that a memorial be raised to herself and her mother, “for a decent memory of us,” but her request was ignored. The day of her death, November 17—the day of Elizabeth’s accession—was a national holiday for two hundred years, and before the generation that remembered Mary as queen had died out the contrast between her “poor, short and despised” reign and the “glory, length and prosperity” of her sister’s was becoming a historical commonplace. Succeeding generations called her Bloody Mary, and saw her reign through the pictures in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs—pictures of Protestant prisoners fettered with leg irons, being beaten by their Catholic tormentors, praying as they awaited execution, their faces already touched with the ecstatic vision of heaven.

  The memory of the martyrs still looms large in any appraisal of Mary’s reign, but there were other themes in her story. Mary was a survivor. She outlasted an agonizing adolescence, illness, her mother’s slow martyrdom and her father’s whimsical tormenting. She lived through worse dangers in Edward’s reign, and went on to win the throne when the odds were overwhelmingly against her. Contemporaries saw Mary’s triumphant accession as nothing short of miraculous, and she herself had long since come to believe that she had a divinely appointed destiny to return England to Catholicism. As queen she endured mounting conflicts between her political status and her sexual status, enforced subordination to an indifferent husband, and the shattering disappointment of a false pregnancy.

  Mary Tudor bore an extraordinary burden, yet she ruled with a full measure of the Tudor majesty, and met the challenges of severe economic crises, rebellion and religious upheaval capably and with courage. Her resiliency impressed itself on the men around her. In describing her character several of them hit on the same metaphor. She was a single candle, they wrote, which shone on even when battered about by great winds, and seemed to burn more resplendently in the midst of the storm.

  In writing this account of Mary’s life I have had help and support from Peter Dreyer, who stood by in friendship as the manuscript took shape, from Dennis Halac, who read the completed draft, and from Hal Erickson and Roberta Phillips, whose interest encouraged me as I went along. I want to thank Michael Ossias of Doubleday for his enthusiastic sponsorship and my research assistant, Martha Moore, for her cheerful and competent work over many months. And to Ron Erickson, who read each chapter as it was written and typed most of the manuscript, I owe a heartfelt debt.

  Berkeley, California

  February 2,1977

  Contents

  Preface to the Second Edition

  Preface

  List of Illustrations

  PART ONE: The Princess

  PART TWO: The King’s Troubled Daughter

  PART THREE: “The Unhappiest Lady in Christendom!’’

  PART FOUR: Queen Alone

  PART FIVE: The Kings Wife

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  1. Mary at twenty-eight.

  2. Phillip II, King of Spain.

  3a. The young Henry VIII.

  3b. Katherine of Aragon.

  4. Anne Boleyn.

  5. Henry VIII.

  6. Catherine Parr.

  7. Elizabeth Tudor.

  8a. Elizabeth I, coronation portrait.

  8b. Elizabeth I.

  9. Mary Queen of Scots.

  10a. Jane Seymour.

  10b. Henry VIII.

  Illustration Acknowledgements:

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reproduce the illustrations specified:

  National Portrait Gallery, London: 1, 2, 3b, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8a, 8b, 9,10b.

  Metropolitan Museum of Art: 3a

  By gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen: 8a

  2. Phillip II, King of Spain, ca. 1580. Artist unknown.

  NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON.

  BLOODY MARY

  PART ONE

  The Princess

  I

  Owre Royall Rose now reignyng, rede and whyte,

  Sure grafted is on ground of nobylnes

  In Harry the viij owr joye and our delyte

  Subdewer of wronges mayntenar of rightwysnes

  Foiantayne of honor exsampler of larges.

  Our clypsyd [eclipsed’] son now cleryd is from the darke

  By Harry owr Kyng, the flowr of natewr’s warke.

  On a bright winter day in February of 1511 servants crowded the tiltyard of Henry VIII’s palace at Westminster, readying the lists, carrying body armor and horse barbs, and covering the walls of the wooden spectators’ pavilion with tapestries and hangings of cloth of gold. A solemn joust had been proclaimed, to celebrate the recent birth of Henry’s heir, the infant Prince Henry, duke of Richmond and Somerset and chief hope of the Tudor dynasty.

  Inside the pavilion the queen, Katherine of Aragon, took her place of honor under the small golden cloth of estate, concealing her plumpness in a dark gown with sleeves of gold and black, At her throat she wore her emblem, the pomegranate of Spain, suspended from a chain, and pomegranates had been painted on the wooden trim of the pavilion. Surrounded by her sumptuously dressed ladies, and by the nobles and court officials in their velvets and heavy gold chains of office, Katherine was the center of attention as a crowd of Londoners gathered to watch the spectacle. This was her first public appearance since her churching, and her usually pale face, smiling as always, flushed with pride. She had finally done what she was sent from Spain to do ten years earlier. She had produced an heir to the English throne.

  The trumpeting of mounted heralds bearing the arms of England announced the opening of the jousts. At one end of the tiltyard—a long, narrow stretch of ground divided along its length by a solid wooden barrier—the line of grooms and liveried guardsmen parted as a huge decorated pageant car rolled slowly into view. Nearly as wide as the tiltyard itself, and so tall it towered over the pavilion, it was like a large stage set mounted on wheels, complete with scenery, actors and props. A forest landscape with grass-covered hills, rocks and a variety of tre
es and flowers had been fashioned from green damask and colored silks and satins. In the foreground amid the trees were six foresters in Lincoln green velvet, bringing the wooden lances for the joust, and at the center of the forest stood a golden castle. Before the castle gate a handsomely dressed gentleman sat in the silken ferns weaving a garland of roses for the infant prince. This elaborate scene appeared to be drawn by two great beasts, a lion of damask gold and an antelope of silver, with golden horns and tusks, chained to the pageant car with huge gilded chains. Troops of green-clad wild woodsmen walked before the structure, leading the lion and antelope, and two beautiful women rode on the backs of the beasts.

  When it reached the queen and her ladies the forest halted, the foresters blew their horns, and from four openings in the artificial hills four “Knights of the Savage Forest” rode out of the pageant and down onto the tilting ground. Each of the four was in full armor, with a plumed helmet and a lance in his hand. Though their visors obscured their faces the crowd knew well enough by his height that one of the disguised knights was the handsome nineteen-year-old king. On the trappings that blanketed their horses were the chivalric names of the four defenders: Sir Loyal Heart, Sir Valiant Desire, Sir Good Valour, Sir Joyous Thought. At the sight of the defenders the crowd roared its welcome and to the sound of trumpets and drums the noble challengers, their horses trapped in crimson satin embroidered with golden pomegranates, rode onto the field from the opposite side and the jousting began.

  Sir Loyal Heart—as the king called himself that day—was easily the most skillful jouster at the tourney, shattering more lances than any of the other combatants and, assuming his performance that day was true to form, wearing out four or five mounts. From all accounts Henry did not, as one would expect, triumph over his opponents merely because he was the king; he genuinely surpassed them in size, strength and skill. He was by sixteenth-century standards a very tall man. His standing armor, preserved in the Tower of London, accommodates a man of about six feet two, and the size of his jousting armor suggests that he may have been even taller.1 Like Richard Lionheart and his maternal grandfather Edward IV, Henry towered over his courtiers and guardsmen, and when he walked in a crowd he was easy to distinguish. He was not only tall but powerfully built, with broad shoulders and muscular arms and legs, and with no trace of the repulsive girth he acquired at the very end of his life. “He is well made, tall and stout,” an observer wrote of the king at twenty-one, “and when he moves the ground shakes under him.”2