The Tudor Throne

He left me alone, surrounded by heretics, traitors, and enemies, to fend for myself, and live in fear for my life and crown, hardly daring to eat lest someone slip poison into my food or cup, and afraid to sleep. For when I did sleep, an incubus in Philip’s form would come to visit and ravish me in lewd dreams that made my body gasp and groan and sigh and go through all the motions of passion, making my heart beat fast as if I had climbed to a great height and then leapt blindly, not knowing whether I would land on a soft feather bed or be impaled upon the sharp rocks below sticking up like phalluses to taunt me. I always awoke with a start to find my nightgown pulled up to my chin, my legs spread wide and wet between, and my fingers wet from touching myself. Some of my ladies always slept on pallets in my bedchamber when I was alone, and they saw and heard these wanton displays the Devil tricked and coaxed out of me, and ran giggling to tattle, and soon word spread throughout the court and whenever I appeared before their knowing eyes I felt as if I were being burned on a pyre of shame.

He was not with me on my birthday. He was not there to smile and drink a loving cup with me when Susan and Jane presented me with a goodly supply of Dr. Stevens’s Sovereign Water, a potion made of exotic and mysterious spices mixed into Gascony wine, promising “death-defying longevity well past the normal span allotted to mankind.”

He was not at my side on Easter Sunday when upon my knees in a linen apron I humbly washed the feet of forty-one poor women, one for each year of my life, and kissed with ecstatic devotion the sores of one-and-forty more suffering from scrofula.

He was never there when I was ill with “menstruous retention” and “strangulation of the womb” to hold my hand when the doctors had to bleed me from the sole of my foot to bring on my courses and bring me relief. He was never there when I suffered toothaches, heart palpitations, and megrims.

When he bothered to answer my letters at all, there were no words of love or tenderness, only clipped and curt businesslike phrases. They said he did not welcome my letters and each day when yet another one arrived was wont to exclaim, “The Queen of England is nothing but a nuisance!”

They said he was busy dancing in Antwerp, and getting drunk on Flemish beer, that he had cast off his rigid sense of decorum like a winter coat when the weather warms and given himself over to debauchery and pleasure. They said he had developed a passion for masked balls and was likely to attend, whether invited or not, any wedding celebration he could find. They said he was likely to hammer at any hour on any door of any Flemish nobleman and demand beer and to be entertained and to exercise his droit du seigneur to bed any woman he desired, even the wives and daughters of his hosts or just a pretty maidservant.

I wept and howled and screamed like a madwoman and took a knife to his portrait. “God often sends bad husbands to good women!” I raged as I slashed it to ribbons. Then I sat on the floor for hours, weeping with remorse, as I tried to piece it back together again. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away!” I sobbed.

Ceaselessly, relentlessly, my enemies tormented me with crude drawings, pamphlets, broadsheets, and doggerel verses about Philip’s antics and excesses in the Low Countries. They pictured me as a wrinkled old hag suckling my young Spanish husband at my sagging breasts and labeled me “Mary, the Ruin of England. She robs England’s coffers to send money to her faithless husband.”

They said marriage had aged me ten years; they feared that sorrow would drive me to take my own life. Some even prayed that I would. They said that after I was dead Philip would marry Elizabeth, claiming that he had already secretly petitioned the Pope and been granted a dispensation.

He said he would come back to me if I would finance his war with France, if I would overrule my Council’s adamant “No!” We had no quarrel with France, they said when I begged and pleaded with them, and England had no reason or responsibility to pay for Philip’s warmongering. Furthermore, it would bankrupt the nation. But the only way I could get him back was to provide him with money and men. If I did, then he would come back to me and be my loving husband and share my bed again. Why couldn’t they understand?

And I, in my desperate love and need for him, was willing to bleed England dry as Philip’s faithlessness had bled my heart, if only he would come back to me. To feel his touch again I was willing to do anything. I sent him £150,000 and after eighteen months of waiting, hoping, begging, pleading, and yearning, he, at last, came back to me.