XLV

But why am 1 so abusyd?

Syth worde and dede is take in vayne,

And my service all-way refusyd,

Yet moreovyr a gretter payne,

I wote nott where I may complayn;

For where I shulde, they be mery_t

When that they knowe I am sory.

On Holy Thursday of Easter week, a large hall was prepared in the palace at Greenwich for the queen to wash the feet of the poor. At one end of the hall were the bishop of Ely, dean of the chapel, and the chaplains and royal choristers. At the other end were Mary’s chief ladies and gentlewomen, wearing long linen aprons reaching to the ground and with long towels around their necks. In their hands they carried silver ewers full of water, and bunches of April flowers. Ranged down both sides of the hall were forty-one poor women, one for every year of the queen’s life. (Mary had now entered her forty-first year.) They sat on benches, their right feet bare and elevated on stools. In preparation for Mary’s act of piety the poor women’s right feet had already been washed three times—first by a servant, then by the Under Almoner, and then again by the Grand Almoner, the bishop of Chichester. When the bishop had finished Mary came into the hall, flanked by Cardinal Pole and the members of her Council. She wore a linen apron like those of her ladies, and as she knelt down before the first of the poor women she beckoned to one of these ladies to assist her. One by one the queen washed the feet of each of the paupers in turn, drying them thoroughly with the towel which hung from her neck. As she finished drying each foot she made the sign of the cross over it and kissed it, “so fervently that it seemed as if she were embracing something very precious,” and then moved on down the row of benches, remaining on her knees the whole time.

When she had finished Mary went around the room six more times in all, serving the poor women with platters of salted fish and bread and bowls of hippocras, and then giving them shoes and stockings and cloth for new clothes, leather purses full of forty-one pennies, and finally the aprons and towels which she and her ladies had worn. Then, looking carefully for the poorest and oldest of the paupers, she gave her the dress she had been wearing under her apron—a gown of the finest purple cloth trimmed with martens’ fur, with sleeves so long they trailed to the ground. The Venetian ambassador Michiel was present at the ceremony, and was moved by Mary’s devout seriousness throughout. “In all her movements and gestures,” he wrote, “she seemed to act thus not merely out of ceremony, but from great feeling and devotion.”

Mary was in fact becoming as well known for her piety toward humble people and the poor as she was for her reputed cruelty to the Protestants. She liked to appear at the door of needy households, dressed as a gentlewoman and not as queen, and offer whatever help or advice was needed. When the keeper of Enfield Chase and Marylebone Forest died, Mary went to see his widow, and finding her in tears, “took her by the hand, and lifted her up—for she kneeled—and bade her be of good cheer, for her children should be well provided for.” Mary sent the woman’s two oldest sons to school, and paid their tuition until they were nearly grown.¹ She liked nothing more than to go with a few of her women to visit families living near her palaces, or on Pole’s estate at Croydon. The carters and farmers and carpenters and their wives rarely realized who she was; she spoke with such “plainness and affability” that they took her to be one of “the queen’s maids, for there seemed no difference.” Jane Dormer recorded how, if Mary found children in the house, she always gave the parents money for the children’s sake, “advising them to live thriftily and in the fear of God,” and if the families were very large she would turn to Jane and tell her to write down their names so that afterward she could make arrangements for some to be apprenticed in London.²

Jane Dormer had now become Mary’s most intimate companion, “particularly favored by her and affected.” Jane was with Mary during most of her waking hours, and often slept with her at night. They read the offices of the church together, and the queen gave into Jane’s care “her usual wearing jewels” and other valuable ornaments. When she ate it was Jane who cut her meat, and even though there were many suitors for Jane’s hand Mary insisted that none of them was good enough for her, and would not let her marry.³

On Mary’s charitable outings it was Jane who kept a record of what complaints were made about the bailiffs on the royal estates or about local officials. Mary made a particular point of asking the villagers how they lived and whether they were getting by on what they earned.And always she pressed them to tell her “if the officers of the court did deal with them,” and whether their carts had been requisitioned for the queen’s use or their grain or chickens purloined for her table. If she found any evidence of mistreatment or dishonesty she dealt with it as soon as she returned to the court. Once at a collier’s house she sat and spoke with the collier and his wife as they were eating supper, and the man told her that, though his cart had been taken by men from the court in London, they had never paid him. Mary asked whether he had come to ask for his money, and he assured her he had, “but they gave him neither his money nor good answer.” The queen looked the collier in the eye. “Friend,” she asked one last time, “is this true, that you tell me?” He swore it was, and asked Mary to intercede with the royal controller for himself and other poor men who were abused in the same way. Mary told the collier to come again and ask for what was due him the next morning, and left.

As soon as she got back to the palace the queen summoned the controller “and gave him such a reproof for not satisfying poor men, as the ladies who were with her, when they heard it, much grieved.” Mary told Rochester in her loud, low voice that the men who served him were surly thieves who took advantage of the country people, and that she wanted their wrongdoing stopped. “Hereafter he should see it amended,” Mary told her controller, “for if she understood it again, he should hear it to his displeasure.” And every penny owed must be paid the very next morning. Rochester had had long experience of the queen’s uncompromising authority, of course, but what puzzled him was how she came to hear of his officers’ behavior. Then Jane and the other women explained to him about the interview with the collier, and in future he took care to see that his men paid their debts and kept their word.⁴

By 1556 word of Mary’s charity had reached even the destitute Benedictine nuns of Siena. The city had been devastated by war—“Siena is wasted like a candle,” one diplomatic dispatch began—and in the destruction the nuns’ convent had been leveled. Since then the hundred members of the religious community had been living in a small and unhealthy house and subsisting on charity. They had no money to rebuild their convent, and in their desperation they wrote to Mary. Her generosity was well known, the letter said; would she help them build another dormitory and church?⁵

On Good Friday Mary carried out the other ceremonies traditionally performed by English sovereigns at Easter—creeping to the cross, blessing the cramp-rings and touching for the “king’s evil,” scrofula. She approached the cross on her knees, stopped to pray, and then kissed it, “performing this act with such devotion as greatly to edify all those who were present.” Then, kneeling within a low enclosure to the right of thehigh altar, she began the blessing of the rings. There were two large basins of gold and silver rings, one filled with rings Mary had ordered made for this purpose, the other with rings given by their owners to be blessed by the queen, and marked with their owners’ names. Reciting prayers and psalms in a low tone, Mary now began to pass her hands over the basins and to reach in and touch each of the rings in turn, shifting them from one hand to the other and intoning “Bless, O Lord, these rings.” Cramp-rings were valued as healing talismans possessing the power inherent in the touch of an anointed monarch. Mary’s rings were much sought after, not only in England but in foreign courts as well.

When the rings had been distributed the queen went into a private gallery to bless the scrofulous. There were four of them, one man and three women, all afflicted with the skin disorder- monarchs of England and France had been healing for centuries by the touch of their hands. An altar had been raised in the room, and Mary knelt before it, reciting the confession, after which Pole blessed her and gave her absolution. Then, having cleansed herself spiritually in preparation for the act of healing she was about to perform, Mary had the first of the sufferers brought before her. As a priest repeated again and again the verse from Mark’s gospel, “he laid his hands upon a few sick folk, and healed them,” the queen knelt down and put her hands on the woman’s sores. With her hands in the form of a cross, she pressed the raw places several times, “with such compassion and devotion as to be a marvel,” and then called forward the next victim. When all four had received the healing touch they approached Mary a second time. She now touched their sores with four gold coins, and gave them the coins to wear on ribbons around their necks, making each of them promise never to part with the hallowed object except in extreme need.⁸

Throughout all these fatiguing ceremonies it was evident to observers that Mary acted out of deep piety and profound devotion. They sensed in her a quality difficult to name except by the bland and vague term “goodness.” The Spaniards who came to England with Philip had seen in her that same quality, and had admired her for it. Michiel, no facile flatterer, was impressed enough to write in a dispatch to the Signory that “I dare assert that there never was a queen in Christendom of greater goodness than this one.”

Beyond this, though, in the Easter ceremonies of 1556 and on similar occasions Mary displayed the same indefinable quality of majesty that had marked her father and his predecessors as beings set apart from ordinary mortals. Through her coronation Mary had become an anointed queen—the first anointed queen of England—a sacred personage with semi-divine status. Nothing in her public manner betrayed that status. Even her detractors remarked on her regal demeanor, grave yet magnanimous, and on the great dignity of her speech and bearing. As thoroughly as any king she fulfilled the image of majesty.

Yet since her marriage Mary had been working to fulfill a contrary image. When she became a wife she took on a traditional burden of subjection that conflicted with her regal status at every point. In her letters she addressed Philip “in as humble wise as it is possible,” declaring herself to be “your very loyal and very obedient wife, which to be I confess myself justly obliged to be, and in my opinion more than any other woman, having such a husband as your highness is.” Mary believed she owed Philip the deference any woman owed her husband, and more besides; his exalted position as king of several kingdoms and heir to much of the Hapsburg empire meant that he deserved a greater measure of subservience from his wife, even though she was herself a queen.

But the quality of Mary’s subordination was broader than this. Following a commonplace of sixteenth-century teachings on marriage every wife was told to see in her husband an earthly representative of Christ. Vives, the Spanish humanist who wrote Mary’s childhood schoolbooks, wrote in his treatise On the Duty of Husbands that “If the husband be the woman’s head, the mind, the father, the Christ, he ought to execute the office to such a man belonging, and to teach the woman: for Christ is not only a saviour and a restorer of his church, but also a master.” Mary was as far below Philip, then, as all sinners were below Christ. Mary had somehow to resolve the bewildering paradox that, as queen, she herself carried out healing and sanctifying functions that gave her a cast of divinity, yet at the same time she had to look to her husband as a Christlike figure, remote and awesome, appointed to teach and guide her.

Cardinal Pole put this special form of wifely piety into words. In the prayers he wrote for Mary to repeat Philip is referred to as “a man who, more than all other, in his own acts and guidance of mine reproduces Thy image, Thy image whom Thou didst send into the world in holiness and justice.”⁷ The identification of Philip and Christ had a powerful effect on the emotions of a woman of strong faith. Christ and his church were at the center of Mary’s life; Philip was now bonded to that core of her identity and purpose.

Yet it was becoming harder and harder for Mary to see as Christlike a man who had to all appearances deserted her. By the time Philip had been gone seven months or so she felt abandoned, and wrote to her father-in-law “imploring him most humbly” to permit him to return. “I beg your Majesty to forgive my boldness,” she wrote, “and to remember the unspeakable sadness I experience because of the absence of the king.” She knew he was occupied with important matters, but she feared that unless he simply tore himself away he would never find an opportunity to return, for “the end of one negotiation is the beginning of another.”⁸

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.⁹

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.¹⁰ 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 theking’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.¹¹

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.”¹² 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.¹³

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.¹⁴ 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 business 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.¹⁵ He called himself a “great prince,” and kept a princely table, washing down course after course of delicacies with black Neapolitan wine.¹⁶

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.”¹⁷

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 ofher councilors.¹⁸ 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.¹⁹

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.”²⁰ 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.”²¹ 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.”²²

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.” Aconspirator who claimed to be Courtenay was caught and eventually executed, and twelve others were committed to the Tower.²³ 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.²⁴ 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.