VII

Ravished I was, that well was me,

O Lord! to me so fain,

To see that sight that 1 did see

I long full sore again.

I saw a king and a princess

Dancing before my face,

Most like a god and a goddess,

I pray Christ save their grace!

When Mary returned to her father’s court early in 1527 she found it dominated as never before by the masterful, ebullient king. Henry was now thirty-six, but he seemed ten years younger. After seeing him a foreign visitor wrote home that “never in his days did he see any man handsomer, more elegant, and better proportioned than this king, who is pink and white, fair, tall, agile, well formed and graceful in all his movements and gestures.” He had ruled England for nearly twenty years, yet he preserved a boyish freshness of manner and appearance that made him seem eternally youthful. Barring accidents, his would be an unusually long reign, and the two chief advantages of a long reign—stability and momentum—were already beginning to be apparent in England.

More and more the diffused powers of government were gathering around the person of the king and his omnipotent chief minister Wolsey, and Henry’s personal magnificence kept pace with the growth of royal authority. Supplicants, diplomats and other dignitaries vied with one another in finding phrases to describe his grandeur, calling him “most famous lantern of grace” and comparing him to the sun and stars.¹ One royal servant, Clement Urmeston, employed to design the torchlit chandeliers and “dancing lights” for Henry’s banquets, became convinced thatthe king possessed occult powers by virtue of his exalted office and believed that these powers were concentrated in his seal. The visual impact of the seal, properly directed, could influence the course of public affairs, Urmeston believed, but no one at court took his speculations seriously.² Soon after Mary’s return Henry himself acknowledged his increased celebrity by assuming the style of “majesty” instead of the traditional referent “your grace.”³

Every European court knew of his uncommon abilities; cordial wishes and gifts arrived from many of these courts in a steady stream. The marquis of Mantua sent splendid horses for Henry’s stables; Francis I sent a shipload of wild swine to be bred for his table. The chancellor of Poland, Christopher Schidlowijecz, sent him a rare great gerfalcon and four falcon chicks from Danzig, and from another ruler came a tame leopard.⁴ Christian II, king of Denmark, sent his councilor George Menckevitz, an adventurer and man of arms who hoped to enter Henry’s service when he went to war again.⁵

In fact Henry could no longer afford to go to war, and his last efforts to raise money by asking his nobles and clergy for an exorbitant “Amicable Grant” had led to rioting and resentment. He continued to stage the elaborate mock wars performed on his tilting ground, however, and he was still the chief performer, fighting both on foot and on horseback. He continued to order armor made according to designs of his own, and one afternoon he and his company tilted in new armor, “of a strange fashion that has not been seen,” against the men of the marquis of Exeter until nearly three hundred spears had been broken.⁶

No matter what he did, Henry was the star attraction of the court. Whether he was exercising or riding or just walking in his gardens, invariably the palace would be deserted and a crowd of courtiers and sightseers would collect to dog his feet and applaud his every move.⁷ During the day he shone at sports and outdoor pastimes; at night it was dancing. Henry was not only a graceful but a virtually indefatigable dancer, and he loved to lead his courtiers in the intricate steps of the galliard late into the night. Mary was now old enough to join in the dancing, and now and then, to the delight of the entire court, Henry would take Mary as his partner. Her steps were as nimble, if not as long, as her father’s, and with their similarity of coloring and pleasing features they made a handsome pair. Vives’ treatises had warned Mary against the madness of dancing, which both the sober ancients and the church Fathers had condemned. “What meaneth that shaking unto midnight, and never weary?” he asked disapprovingly.⁸ But the princess evidently thought little of the warning, and Katherine, now very much a background figure at most entertainments, forgot to worry about her own worsening hold on the king’s affections and was happy when she saw Henry and Mary together.

There would be dancing enough when the French ambassadors arrived for the final stage of the marriage negotiations. Mary’s betrothal to Charles V had been broken off shortly before she left for Wales, and for nearly two years Wolsey had been attempting to arrange a French match once again. Francis I needed a wife, but had promised to marry Charles V’s favorite sister Eleanor, the thirty-year-old widow of the king of Portugal. Francis had expressed a preference for Mary, acknowledging her beauty and virtue and admitting to Wolsey’s representative that “he had as great a mind to her as ever he had to any woman.”⁹ Compared to Eleanor, Mary “weighed down the balance by a great number of ounces,” but she was still a child; though he was pleased with the portrait of the princess Henry sent him (together with a portrait of Henry himself), Francis was in no hurry to commit himself irrevocably to either Mary or Eleanor.¹⁰ He wrote Mary a gracious letter, calling her “high and powerful princess” and assuring her of his loyalty as her “good brother, cousin and ally,” but in truth he was far from being an enthusiastic suitor.¹¹ He had been thoroughly humiliated by the emperor, and for the time being his fate was not his own. He was, he said, willing to marry anything, even Charles V’s mule, if it meant regaining his dignity.

Francis’ dismay was the result of another shuffling of interests and alliances among the European powers that occurred while Mary was in Wales. The realignment was triggered by events in Italy, where an invading French army was routed at Pavia in 1525 by the forces of Charles V and Francis himself was taken prisoner. Charles lost no time in exploiting Francis’ awkward position. The French king was imprisoned in Madrid and forced to buy his freedom; he agreed to give Charles the duchy of Burgundy and sovereignty over the French territories of Flanders and Artois. Charles’ other demand was harsh indeed. Francis’ two sons, the dauphin and the duke of Orleans, became the emperor’s hostages, guaranteeing their father’s good faith.

Once he was back in France, Francis immediately renounced his oath to Charles, claiming that because it was taken under duress it was not binding. But though the pope santioned the breach of faith he could not force Charles to return the two hostages, and Francis was badly in need of help from any quarter. He turned to England, where the betrothal of Mary and Charles had just been officially ended. The imperial emissaries had been instructed to tell Henry that “he could have with much thank the lady princess [back] in his hand, which is a pearl worth the keeping.”¹² Immediately Henry and Wolsey approached the French king, and though it seemed more and more certain that Francis himself would be forced to marry Eleanora in order to placate the emperor and free his sons, he was open to the betrothal of the duke of Orleans and the princess.

It was in this diplomatic atmosphere of coercion and fear that four French envoys arrived at Dover six days after Mary’s eleventh birthday. They were the bishop of Tarbes, president of the parlement of Toulouse, the vicomte of Turenne, and La Viste, president of the parlement of Paris. Two months of hard bargaining followed. The English had the advantage: Francis reportedly feared more for his sons’ safety than for his own, and badly needed English men and money to make war on Charles. He faced a tortuous dilemma. If he married Eleanor, he would be bound to the emperor by ties of kinship; their children would have a claim to both France and Hapsburg lands. As yet, Charles had no successor, and his pregnant wife was sickly. If on the other hand Francis did not marry Eleanor, he had reason to fear for the lives of his hostage sons. As Wol-sey continually reminded the French negotiators, “there is no malice like the malice of a woman,” and the jilted widow might take a cruel revenge. Francis sent his envoys several sets of instructions. In one set he told them to oppose all the anticipated English demands and objections and to insist that Mary be delivered to him in France as quickly as possible. In secret dispatches, however, he authorized them to agree to anything that would hasten the progress of the talks and lead to a quick agreement.

Wolsey and Henry worked as a smooth team. Wolsey, who held talks with the ambassadors nearly every day, alternated between openness and warmth and icy displeasure. He claimed to favor France, and made it clear that he had worked to restrain Henry from invading the country when Francis had been a helpless captive. Yet at the slightest opposition from the French negotiators he became hostile and adamant. At this point they would apply for an audience with Henry, who would proceed to disconcert them by his affability. Taking Turenne by the shoulders, the king would dismiss the difficulties with a wave of his hand and expand on his affection for Francis. If only they were ordinary gentlemen and not kings, he mused, he would be constantly in Francis’ company. On other occasions Henry would turn cold, sending the French scurrying back to Wolsey’s palace at Hampton Court in hopes of finding a compromise with the cardinal.

A primary issue was the English insistence on an annual pension of 50,000 French crowns. At first the French refused this outright, but later made a counteroffer of 15,000 crowns. Wolsey took no more account of this counteroffer “than if they had given him a pair of gloves,” and Henry dismissed it with the remark that he had lost more than that in a single night of cards. When a stalemate arose Wolsey for the first time suggested that instead of taking Mary for himself Francis might marry her to his second son, adding that as a further inducement the duke of Richmond could be betrothed to Francis’ daughter. As it became apparent that Mary would not be allowed to go to France for several years,this alternative seemed more and more desirable, and eventually, when the interlocking treaties of perpetual peace, the military alliance and the marriage contract had all been drafted and redrafted several times, Henry signed them on May 5.

There had never been any real doubt in the king’s mind that the negotiators would eventually agree. Six weeks before the French arrived he had ordered work begun on a banqueting hall and disguising theater on one side of the tiltyard at Greenwich. These would be the scene of a magnificent feast and entertainments to celebrate the signing of the treaties. Two teams of artisans and laborers were employed to complete the structures before the diplomats completed their negotiations. The basic carpentry went quickly, but the ornamentation of the interiors was another matter. Four Italian painters and gilders, with their assistants, were brought in to work around the clock decorating the moldings of the high windows in the banqueting hall with carved crests and “savage work.” The antique candlesticks, “polished like amber,” that fitted into the moldings had to be painted and gilded, as did the five hundred “little antique leaves” that adorned the beams which held the chandeliers.

A huge triumphal arch connected the banqueting hall and the disguising house, ornamented with gargoyles, serpents, and armorial designs. Henry’s motto “Dieu et Mon Droit” was carved into the arch, along with other mottoes and “antiques and devices.” Six busts of Roman emperors were ranged along its sides, and in all the gilt, coloring materials, and wages to the color grinders and painters who worked on this monument came to well over three hundred pounds. On the back of the arch was a painting of the siege of Thérouanne—a reminder of Henry’s victory over the French fourteen years earlier—executed by Hans Holbein. Holbein also worked on the revels house, a theater with tiers of seats around the sides for spectators. Carpets of silk embroidered with gold lilies covered the floor of the theater, and the ceiling, designed by Henry’s astronomer Nicholas Kratzer, showed a map of the earth, the planets and the signs of the zodiac. Pillars painted azure blue with gold stars and fleurs-de-lis divided the rows of seats, and each pillar held a great silver basin of branching wax candles that lit up the room. The disguising house had a high ornamented arch like that in the banqueting hall, and two more paintings by Holbein were hung along its walls. Even when the talks between Wolsey and the French temporarily broke down, work on the magnificent hall and theater progressed, so that by the time Wolsey’s clerks were copying out the treaties for the final time the foreign artisans were putting the finishing touches on their gilded handiwork.

For Mary the months of deliberations were a time of great excitement crowded with hours of preparation. For the first time she was to be a principal performer in the revels, and dances designed to show off herskill and grace were choreographed by Henry’s dancing master and taught, step after step, to the princess and those who would dance with her. She was to be dressed in costumes of cloth of gold and red tinsel, and in jewels more brilliant than any she had ever worn; there were endless fittings of these garments, and of the headgear, hose and slippers to be worn with them. As the bride to be of a prince and the object of a hard-won diplomatic struggle, Henry wanted his daughter to be the center of attention during the celebrations. There must be no doubt that in agreeing to Mary’s betrothal he was giving Francis his most valued possession, his “pearl of the world.” She must be made to seem the most charming and accomplished heiress of her day.

Of her accomplishments there was certainly no doubt. Her tutor John Featherstone had taken good advantage of her intelligence and aptitude for languages, and had greatly improved her fluency in Latin, French, Italian and Spanish. At barely nine years old she was able to speak Latin “with as much assurance and facility as if she were twelve years old,” and years later a humanist at her court recalled in a dedication to Mary that at eleven “your grace not only could perfectly read, write and construe Latin, but furthermore translate any hard thing of the Latin in to our English tongue.”¹³ The French envoys found her learning impressive: according to Turenne, she was “very handsome and admirable by reason of her great and uncommon mental endowments.” Sometime during their stay in England Mary acted in a comedy of Terence staged, in Latin, at Wolsey’s gorgeous palace at Hampton Court.

But no display of erudition, however rare, could compare to the long-awaited banquet and masquing held on the day following the signing of the treaties. The banqueting hall was the scene of a gorgeous array of massive gold plate and serving dishes of silver gilt. Course after course of meat and fish was carried through the gilded arch, while from a balcony above it came the music of viols and sackbuts. Mary did not sit with Henry and Katherine, but at a long table of her own, with the French envoys and “great ladies” of the court. The banquet lasted several hours, and at its conclusion the entire company was assembled in order of rank and ushered into the disguising house, where they quietly took their places in the tiers of seats. The Venetian secretary Spinelli, who was there, noted in his dispatch to the Signory that all this was done “without the least noise or confusion, and precisely as pre-arranged.” The “order, regularity and silence” of public entertainments in England was a thing which amazed him, and he told in detail how the right-hand tiers of seats were reserved for the men, the ambassadors in front, the princes behind them, and the remaining guests at the back. On the left were the women, also in order of rank, “whose beauty,” Spinelli wrote, “enhanced by thebrilliancy of the lights, caused me to think I was contemplating the choir of angels.”¹⁴

The performance began without delay. The children of the king’s chapel sang and recited a dialogue among Mercury, Cupid, and Plutus in which Henry was asked to judge which was of greater value, love or riches. This introduced a mock combat between six men at arms in white armor, fighting at a barrier so furiously that they broke their naked swords. The combat being ended, an old man in a silver beard pronounced the conflict settled; princes, he said, had need of both love and riches—the former to gain the obedience and service of their subjects, and the latter to give as rewards to lovers and friends.

A painted curtain was now dropped at the other end of the theater and a new group of performers appeared. Eight gentlemen in gold doublets and tall plumed helmets lit with their torches a scene meant to represent a mountain, walled with gilt towers and “set full of crystal corals and rich rocks of ruby.” On a rock were seated eight damsels dressed in cloth of gold, their hair gathered into nets garlanded with jewels, and the long hanging sleeves of their surcoats trailing in deep folds to their feet. Mary was among these maidens, and as she rose to her feet to the sound of trumpets “her beauty in this array produced such an effect on everybody that all the other marvellous sights previously witnessed were forgotten, and they gave themselves up solely to contemplation of so fair an angel.” She shone with jewels, and as she and the others began their dance, Spinelli reported, she “dazzled the sight in such wise as to make one believe that she was decked with all the gems of the eighth sphere.” The eight damsels performed an unusually complex series of steps, executing a dance unique in its variety and intricacy; then the gentlemen danced by themselves, and finally the eight couples danced a lively coranto. After this came another group of masqued dancers, dressed in Icelandic costumes, who “danced lustily about the place,” and at the end of their performance Henry and Turenne and eight other noblemen appeared, all masked and wearing black satin gowns and hoods. For the last several days, ever since he injured his foot playing tennis, Henry had been wearing a black velvet slipper; to prevent him from being recognized, all the maskers now wore slippers like the king’s. The injury, it seems, did not impair Henry’s dancing, for he and the others chose partners from the audience to perform a lavish finale.

The entertainment was at an end, but Henry had one last trick to play. Mary and the other young girls came up to him as the dancing ended, and, drawing her over to where the French ambassadors were seated, he loosened the net and jeweled bands from her hair, letting her heavy gold curls fall over her shoulders, “forming a most agreeablesight.” This was the image the French took back with them, of a delicate girl nearly out of childhood, dressed in golden robes, her smiling face encircled by masses of golden hair. Turenne had concluded earlier that because the princess was “thin, spare and small” she could not be married for another three years at least. Now he was convinced she would be worth waiting for.

As Henry and his court were dancing and feasting in celebration of the Anglo-French treaties an atrocity of the greatest magnitude was unfolding at the other end of Europe. The German army of Charles V, joined by Spanish troops under the duke of Bourbon, was fighting in central Italy against the combined forces of the Venetians, the French and the pope. Finding Florence and Siena too well defended to attack, the imperial forces turned southward toward Rome, their food supplies exhausted. The soldiers were mutinous; they had not been paid, there were no spoils to be had, and they were now forced to steal from the Umbrian peasants to survive. Only their loyalty to Bourbon prevented mass desertion, and it was to Bourbon that the officers now turned, urging him to march the army to Rome, besiege the city and force the pope to ransom himself for enough money to pay the troops. The imperial forces camped outside Rome on the fifth of May, and their commander sent a message to the Medici pope Clement VII explaining that he could forestall bloodshed by paying what the besiegers demanded. Bourbon’s message may not have reached Clement, because there was no reply. That evening, as the condition of the hungry men became more and more desperate, they were given scaling ladders. The following morning thousands of them went over the walls, the Spaniards shouting “Sangre, sangre, carne, carne”—“Blood, blood, flesh, flesh”—and, in the name of Bourbon, they began to kill every Roman they could find.

The sack of Rome might have been less devastating had the duke lived to control his men, but he was killed in the first assault, and the prince of Orange, who tried to take over leadership of the armies, lacked the authority to restrain the two-week orgy of murder and desecration that followed. On the day of the assault a dark fog lay over the Eternal City, making it hard for the attackers and the few defenders to see one another’s faces. What defense there was collapsed in the first two hours, leaving the way open for the imperial troops to enter the Borgo San Sepolcro by the thousands. By noon the mass slaughter had begun. At first the Germans and Spaniards spared only those they could hope to hold for ransom—the wealthiest churchmen and merchants. The terrified Romans, who had been assured until the last moment that the city would be saved by a relieving army, fled to the churches and convents or tried to take refuge in the fortified castles. The pope, who had done nothing tosecure either himself or his city, now retired with thirteen of his cardinals to the Castel Sant’Angelo across the Tiber, weeping and offering to capitulate on whatever terms the imperialists asked. But the floodtide of destruction, once loosed, could not be halted. Rome, the most venerated city in Christendom, great storehouse of pagan and Christian tradition and bastion of the medieval church, was thoroughly and massively despoiled.

The readiest booty was to be found in the churches. Companies of soldiers swarmed into Rome’s hundreds of holy places, stripping the altars of their ornaments and throwing to the ground relics of the saints and the bread of the mass. Catholic Spaniards and Lutheran Germans alike dressed themselves in the rich vestments of the murdered clergy and officiated at the ruined altars, bawling out tavern songs and befouling consecrated sanctuaries with excrement. The church of St. Peter and the papal palace were turned into stables, and processions of drunken soldiers and whores wound through their courtyards in imitation of holy processions. At San Silvestro the head of St. John the Baptist was ripped out of its silver reliquary and hurled to the pavement, where an old nun found it later and carried it to safety.

It was as if all the anticlerical hatred of centuries was released in a single furious burst. Friars were dragged from their convents and beheaded; nuns were beaten and raped. Abbots and cardinals were hung up by their arms or suspended head downward in wells and tortured until they revealed where their wealth was hidden. Others were branded like animals or horribly mutilated, or their mouths were forced open and filled with molten lead. The cardinal of Ara Coeli was seized and carried through the streets on a funeral bier while his captors sang the office for the dead. Fearing for his life, he was made to serve his best wine to his tormentors in the golden chalices reserved for the mass. Clergy and lay men and women alike huddled in Rome’s medieval castles hoping to escape the slaughter. Five hundred nuns were found in one large room of the palace of Pompey Colonna when it was plundered, and hundreds of women were carried off whenever a great house fell to the invaders. Even the palace of the Portuguese ambassador, said to be the best fortified stronghold in the city, could not hold out. All the merchants, nobles and moneylenders who had taken refuge there were brought out and imprisoned, and their goods, which totaled some half a million ducats in value, were divided among the imperial troops.

As the days passed the soldiers, leaderless and crazed by their crimes, alternated between dazed stupor and unreasoning frenzy. They picked up fortunes in the burning remains of palaces only to lose them in a single throw of the dice. Loyalties to countrymen or coreligionists meant nothing; the houses of Spaniards and Germans in Rome were looted as mercilessly as those of the Italians. And after they had plundered the wealthy, the imperial soldiers plundered the poor, stripping even the hovels of the street sweepers and water carriers. Hearing that the pope had finally paid the wages of the Germans, the enraged Spaniards attacked their allies and demanded their share. The longer the sack continued the more the city’s food supply dwindled, and as the surviving Romans and their invaders sank deeper into disorder the final nemesis of plague and panic set in. In their thoroughness the soldiers had looted the shops of the apothecaries, and there were now no medicines left to fight disease. Famine and pestilence overtook the entire population, and what began as a human tragedy was ended by broader forces of destruction no human agency could control.

“Everyone considers it has taken place by the just judgment of God,” one imperial official in Rome wrote to the emperor, “because the court of Rome was so ill-ruled.”¹⁵ This view of the meaning of the Roman nightmare was not widely shared. As news of events in Rome traveled northward it was received with profound shock and horror. The sack of the papal city was seen as more than the barbarous act of a brutalized army. It was an assault on faith itself. With the desecration of the Eternal City Christian spirituality lost its anchor. The immense power and authority of Rome had been breached as surely as its walls. Christendom had been deeply wounded, not by any external enemy but from within, and would not be the same again.