XLIX

Farewell my pleasures past,

Welcum my present payne,

I fele my torments so increse

That lyfe cannot remayne.

Cease now the passing bell,

Rong is my doleful knell,

For the sound my deth doth tell;

Deth doth draw nye,

Sound my end dolefully,

For now I dye.

In the spring of 1558 Mary’s sworn enemy John Knox shook his dour head over his Bible and muttered to himself about the sorry state of Protestantism in Europe. Apart from the few Lutheran principalities in the empire, Calvin’s Geneva, and a handful of other towns, there were no Protestant bastions left. In France, Scotland, England, and the Netherlands—everywhere the doctrines of Luther and Calvin had won large followings—Protestant populations were being crushed by cruel rulers determined to root them out by fire and flail: Catherine de Médicis in France, Mary of Lorraine (mother of Mary Stuart, the future Mary Queen of Scots) in Scotland, Mary Tudor in England and, until recently, Charles V’s sister Mary in the Netherlands. The more Knox pondered this situation from his refuge in Geneva, the more he became convinced that it was no accident that the sorry fortunes of Protestantism should coincide with an unprecedented concentration of power in the hands of women. That so many women were ruling over men, a condition condemned as unnatural in the Old and New Testaments and highly exceptional in recent European history, seemed a sure sign that the times wereout of joint. It was up to godfearing men everywhere to denounce the plague of females before they utterly destroyed God’s church.

Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women was published anonymously in the late spring or early summer. It was the most thorough, the most uncompromising and the most venomous assault on female rulership yet published. “To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature, contumely to God, a thing most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice,” Knox wrote. The incapacity of women was self-evident; they were, according to Knox’s catalogue of imperfections, “weak, frail, impatient, feeble, foolish, inconstant, variable, cruel and lacking the spirit of counsel and regiment.” If the stern patriarchs of antiquity were to be brought face to face with the female monarchs of the 1550s they would be so astonished “that they should judge the whole world to be transformed into Amazons,” and would conclude that human society in its familiar order was coming to a disastrous end.

“For who can deny but it repugneth to nature, that the blind shall be appointed to lead and conduct such as do see?” Knox asked. “That the weak, the sick and impotent persons shall nourish and keep the whole and strong, and finally, that the foolish, mad and frenetic shall govern the discreet? “ Whatever minimal competence women possess, compared to men “their sight is but blindness, their strength weakness, their counsel, foolishness, and judgment, frenzy.”¹ The prevailing arrangement was clearly a political monstrosity; his treatise was intended to bring “this mon-striferous empire of women” to an immediate end.

In his wholesale condemnation Knox did not discriminate among the women whose authority he deplored. He went out of his way, however, to denounce the two monarchs who had thwarted him personally. When the crown of Scotland was placed on the head of his nemesis Mary of Lorraine, he said, it was “as seemly a sight as to put a saddle upon the back of an unruly cow.” Mary Tudor was even worse. To the Scotsman she was another Jezebel, Ahab’s wicked wife who tried to annihilate the preachers of God’s word and ended her life wretchedly, her corpse mutilated by dogs. Mary was England’s “wicked Jezebel, who for our sins, contrary to nature and the manifest word of God, is suffered to reign over us in God’s fury.” Her accession to power was doubly objectionable in that she was a bastard and a vicious tyrant, “unworthy by reason of her bloody tyranny of the name of a woman.” Mary surpassed even the worst vices of her sex; her crimes were so unutterable that even the base name of woman was too good for her.

Knox’s attack was nothing short of treason, since he urged his readers to overthrow the women he condemned. In England the First Blast of the Trumpet was officially prohibited by royal proclamation. Copies of the treatise were to be burned on sight, and anyone failing to carry out this directive was subject to the death penalty. But despite the prohibition Knox’s diatribe was read and reread by English men and women, and his indictment of Mary’s “bloody tyranny” permanently affected public sentiment about the queen. And Knox was, in any case, only one of many writers vilifying Mary. In 1558 their pamphlets and treatises were reaching England in greater numbers than ever before, creating a new vocabulary of slander and robbing Mary of what peace of mind remained to her. They called her “a raging and mad woman,” and nicknamed her “Traitorous Marie” and “Mischevious Marie.” They ridiculed her authority and mocked her false pregnancy. They caricatured her piety as bigotry, her courage as ferocity, her devotion to her husband as a combination of slavery and uncontrollable lust. Crudest of all, they jeered at her tragic marriage. Philip was gone for good, they wrote; his mistresses would keep him company from now on. He had nothing but contempt for his aging wife, and his subjects made her a laughing stock. Spaniards everywhere were wondering why he had married her in the first place, since she was clearly old enough to be his mother. “What shall the king do,” they asked, “with such an old bitch?”²

Late in May a solicitous letter from Philip arrived at Greenwich. He was sorry he had not been able to join the queen as he had hoped, but he was glad to hear that she took the news “bravely.” Philip thanked Pole for keeping his wife company and “cheering her loneliness,” and referred him to Count Feria for further instructions.³ The letter made no mention of Mary’s pregnancy. It was now clear that her belly bore the distended outline of a fatal dropsy, and Philip’s mind had already moved on to thoughts of her successor. He ordered Feria to visit Elizabeth on his behalf, to present his compliments, and to ingratiate himself with the men around her.⁴

Neither the queen nor Pole was in any condition to read Philip’s letter. The archbishop was lost in the fitful dreams of a tertian fever, the queen “suffering from intermittent fever” and wayward mental states. Severe melancholia drove her to her rooms, where she lay as if in a deathlike stupor. In her hours of near-normal consciousness she bemoaned Philip’s absence, the hatred she felt from her fickle subjects, and the loss of Calais. Charles V had once said of the Francophile Pope Paul III that, if his body were opened, three fleurs-de-lis would be found on his heart. Mary adapted the remark to herself. According to Foxe, who got the story at one remove from one of Mary’s most intimate servants, the queen told this man and Susan Clarencieux during her last months of a secret sorrow, “the greatest wound that pierced her oppressed mind.”The two servants thought she meant Philip’s infidelity, and told her “they feared she took thought for King Philip’s departing from her.”

“Not that only,” Mary answered, “but when I am dead and opened, you shall find Calais lying in my heart.”

In August Mary’s fever was so grave that she was moved from Hampton Court to St. James. Her physicians and attendants were worried, because she was not ordinarily susceptible to fever, but to satisfy the Council the doctors tried to find some advantage in Mary’s state. “Through this malady,” they declared solemnly, “she will obtain relief from her habitual indisposition,” meaning the complex of symptoms she suffered nearly every autumn. Mary did everything the physicians ordered, and took “the greatest care of herself,” but even though her physical health fluctuated, sinking for a few days and then reviving in what had by now become a chronic pattern, waves of depression came over the queen with greater and greater frequency, and made her illness worse. “The truth is,” one ambassador wrote, “that her malady is evidently incurable, and will end her life sooner or later, according to the increase or decrease of her mental anxieties, which harass her more than the disease, however dangerous it may be.”

In October Mary was harassed by fresh griefs. Pole was dying, and news came that the two people who had been dearest to her since her mother’s death, Charles V and his sister Mary, were dead. The queen had a relapse. Her doctors, headed by one “Mr. Cesar, Doctor in Physic,” had to use all their skill to bring her back to lucidity. In her gratitude she ordered Dr. Cesar to be paid a hundred pounds, “by way of the queen’s majesty’s reward,” but it was obvious even to Mary herself that she would not live much longer.⁵ She wrote out a codicil to her will, adding the sad acknowledgment that there would be no “fruit of her body” to whom she could leave her crown and lands. At the same time she assured Susan Clarencieux’s future by further gifts, and gave thought to the welfare of her servants and waiting women.⁸ Her favorite Jane Dormer falling sick, Mary sent her one of her doctors and took great “care and regard” for her, “more like a mother or sister than her queen and mistress.”⁷ Jane’s forthcoming wedding was a source of pleasure to Mary in her last weeks. After turning down many other suitors—Mary claimed that Jane “deserved a very good husband,” and “knew not the man that was worthy of her”—she had finally found a man both she and the queen admired. He was none other than Philip’s sometime envoy to England, the count of Feria, a “most perfect gentleman” who was said to be in “great favor” with the queen.⁸ Mary insisted on giving the couple gifts and endowments worthy of her esteem, but she was too poor to provide them. At first she asked Jane to delay the marriage until Philip came back to England, and then, when she knew she was dying, she lamented that she would not live to see the ceremony.

Philip kept himself informed about the state of his wife’s health through his envoys and informers and, at least until late September, through the letters Mary wrote him from time to time. When Mary’s letters stopped, Philip worried. “She has not written to me for some days past,” the king wrote on one occasion, “and I cannot help being anxious.”⁹ What worried him most, aside from the succession question, was that given her present vagueness of mind Mary might become the victim of swindlers. When a request came to his court from England asking his permission to export eight thousand corselets and an equal number of arquebuses and pikes, he worried about the purpose and destination of the arms. The request was made “in the queen’s name,” but there was no confirming letter from Mary herself, and it was rumored that the entire enterprise was set afoot by “private individuals who intend to make money by selling these arms.” Eventually the request was found to be a genuine order from the queen, and the arms were sent, but Philip remained on his guard “in order that there may be no fraud.”¹⁰

When Philip received news of the queen’s relapse in October he sent Feria back to England to represent him during her last days. Feria took with him a Portuguese physician, Lodovicus Nonnius, a man of wide reputation in imperial circles. Though Mary still enjoyed periods of rationality they were becoming fewer each day; many Londoners believed she was already dead. On November 4 she was still capable of advising her Council about what matters should be brought before Parliament, and urging her councilors to treat with Philip’s peace commissioners—for he was negotiating a truce with the French—about the possible English recovery of Calais. But she was “both sick and very weak,” and could not talk to them for very long. They prayed daily now for God to spare the queen, and gave orders that any subject who said she was dead should be set in the pillory.

Feria’s mission involved far more than attendance at the bedside of the dying queen. Now that the accession of Mary’s successor was only a few days or, at most, a few weeks away, the vexed problem of what to do about Elizabeth could no longer be left unsolved. Elizabeth had lived as a Catholic for the past five years, but those who judged her temperament accurately believed that once she was queen she would return England to some form of Protestantism. The changes she made in religion were likely to be paralleled by shifts in England’s diplomatic alignment, as she was known to favor the French over the Spaniards. The only hopeful thing about Elizabeth Tudor, from the imperial point of view, was that she was unmarried; this meant that, if she could be given to a Spanish or Flemish husband, England need not be lost to Hapsburg interests on Mary’s death. If Elizabeth could be married, say, to the duke of Savoy, he could be counted on to countermand her political preferences and to work closely with Philip in the conduct of European affairs.

Feria left Brussels with instructions “to try and dispose the queen to consent to Lady Elizabeth being married as her sister, and with the hope of succeeding to the crown.”¹¹ It was not an easy assignment, for since her accession Mary had clung stubbornly to the belief that Elizabeth was not her sister, and could not bring herself to admit that the daughter of Anne Boleyn would soon be wearing her crown. The Council had already paved the way for Feria’s persuasions, however. They had convinced Mary that she must either relent and acknowledge Elizabeth or leave the realm to the chaos of civil war. In the end Mary weakly agreed, and two of the Council members were dispatched to Hatfield to inform Elizabeth that she would soon be queen. At the same time Mary sent Jane Dormer to Hatfield to give Elizabeth her “rich and precious” jewels, and to ask her to promise three things: that she would uphold the Catholic faith, take care of Mary’s servants, and pay her debts.

Philip’s envoy made no headway with the hoped-for negotiations for Elizabeth’s hand. Mary was in no condition to consider the merits of a Hapsburg match for her successor, and Elizabeth herself was scornful of the suggestion that she marry the duke of Savoy, telling Feria that she would be foolish to follow Mary’s example and marry a foreigner. The more outlandish suggestion that, if she agreed to remain a Catholic, Philip himself might wish to marry her once he became a widower Elizabeth rejected out of hand. In Brussels, though, it was looked on as a certainty that when Mary died Philip would marry Elizabeth, and both the Flemish and the English courtiers were already transferring their attention to the red-haired princess who would soon be queen. The English were buying hundreds of yards of Antwerp silk in which to dress themselves for the coronation, and the Flemings talked of nothing but the king’s forthcoming marriage.¹²

As the nobles, officials and household officers deserted St. James for Hatfield the queen grew weaker and weaker. She could no longer read the letter Feria had brought her from Philip; she could only ask that the count take him a ring as a sign of her undying love. She knew nothing of his proposal to Elizabeth, of course, but from her “much sighing,” those around her believed she was dying of “thought and sorrow” more than from any physical disease. Once when she saw them grieving she tried to comfort them by describing the visions of heavenly joy that filled her dreams. “She told them what good dreams she had, seeing many little children like angels playing before her, singing pleasing notes, giving her more than earthly comfort.” She went on to encourage them “ever to have the holy fear of God before their eyes,” and to keep ever in mind that all human affairs were ordered by a single divine purpose. Whatever happened, she told the faithful servants gathered around her bedside, they should “have confidence that He would in mercy turn all to the best.” As she composed her own thoughts Mary recalled the prayershe had written, “to be read at the hour of death.” “O Lord Jesu! which art the health of all men living, and the everlasting life of them which die in faith,” she prayed, “I, wretched sinner give and submit myself wholly unto thy most blessed will.” “Willingly now I leave this frail and wicked flesh, in hope of the resurrection.” She prayed for forgiveness, for mercy, and for the grace to endure the approach of her last hour with dignity, “that the weakness of my flesh be not overcome by the fear of death. Grant me, merciful Father,” she concluded, “that when Death has shut up the eyes of my body, yet that the eyes of my soul may still behold and look upon thee; that when death hath taken away the use of my tongue and speech, yet that my heart may cry and say unto Thee In manus tuas Domine, commendo spiritum meum; that is, 0 Lord, into thy hands I give and commit my soul.”¹³

More than forty years later, when Jane Dormer, duchess of Feria, was an old woman living in Spain, she wept as she told her biographer how Queen Mary died. “Being at the last point” and sick to death, Jane said, Mary nonetheless asked that mass be said in her chamber before dawn on the morning of November 17. Despite her extremity “she heard it with so good attention, zeal, and devotion, as she answered in every part with him that served the priest.” The ceremony seemed to call forth what awareness remained to Mary, and her low, resonant voice was heard distinctly making the responses. “Miserere nobis, miserere nobis. Dona nobis pacem” She lapsed then, Jane said, into what appeared to be a private meditation, from which she awoke to adore the host. Then, at the climax of the mass, she “closed her eyes and rendered her blessed soul to God.” The last her mistress saw, Jane recounted, was “her Saviour and Redeemer,” “no doubt to behold Him presently after in His glorious Body in heaven.”¹⁴

Jane’s description had all the pious drama of a saint’s life, but according to other accounts there was nothing extraordinary about the queen’s death. She gave up her life so peacefully that everyone but the attending doctor “thought her better, and that she would fain sleep.” He alone realized that she had “made her passage,” and that he had witnessed the fleeting transition between the reigns of Queen Maty and Queen Elizabeth.¹⁵

Across the river at Lambeth Pole received the news of Mary’s death as he too prepared to die. This “final catastrophe” brought on his last paroxysms, and by seven o’clock that evening he too was dead.

Whatever sorrow Mary’s subjects felt at her passing was soon overshadowed by their joyful welcoming of the new queen. Mary died between four and five in the morning; by midafternoon “all the churches in London did ring, and at night did make bonfires and set tables in the street, and did eat and drink and made merry for the new QueenElizabeth, Queen Mary’s sister.”¹⁶ Elizabeth herself heard the news of Mary’s death calmly, then fell on her knees and cried out, “This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.”

Philip, writing to his sister in Spain (where, Knox would have heard with much headshaking, she was regent for her brother), seemed shaken by the deaths of his father, aunt and wife in so short a space of weeks. “You may imagine what a state I am in,” he wrote. “It seems to me that everything is being taken from me at once.” Of Mary he added “May God have received her in His glory! I felt a reasonable regret for her death. I shall miss her, even on this account.” These few hasty sentences were doubtless sincere, but they were inserted in the middle of a long paragraph giving a detailed survey of the peace negotiations.¹⁷ Even in dying Mary disturbed Philip’s concentration on affairs of state only briefly, and without any lasting effect.

The corpse of the late queen lay in state at St. James’ for more than three weeks while the mourning clothes and funeral accouterments were prepared. On December 12, when all was ready, her funeral cortege formed in the courtyard of the palace for the solemn procession to Westminster. A great company of mourners came first, under the standard of the falcon and the hart. Next in order were the hundreds of household servants in black gowns, walking two by two, the heralds riding up and down beside them to keep them in line. Then came the gentlemen mourners, under the banners of the white greyhound and falcon and of the arms of England, embroidered in gold. Immediately preceding the corpse were heralds bearing Mary’s knightly ornaments—her helm, crest and mantle, her sword and coat armor. The coffin in its chariot was draped with a lifelike painted effigy. It showed Mary, dressed in her favorite color of crimson velvet, wearing her crown and carrying her scepter, her hands adorned with “many goodly rings on her fingers.” The chief mourner, Mary’s cousin Margaret Douglas, countess of Lennox, followed the chariot, and with her rode the gentlewomen of the court all in black robes that trailed over their horses’ legs to the ground. The clerks of the royal chapel, the monks and the bishops brought up the rear.

The procession halted at the great door of Westminster Abbey, and the queen’s coffin was carried inside. A hundred poor men in black gowns kept watch over her body all that night, holding long torches in their hands, and around them the soldiers of the royal guard stood with their staff torches. The next day the requiem mass was sung. The bishop of Winchester, conscious that he risked the severe disapproval of the woman who now ruled England, eulogized Mary in the warmest terms. He had been present at her death, he told his audience, and found her godliness and devotion so inspiring that he could not restrain his praise. “If angels were mortal, I would rather liken this her departure to thedeath of an angel, than of a mortal creature,” he said, adding a list of the late queen’s virtues and charitable deeds. “She was never unmindful or uncareful of her promise to her realm. She used singular mercy towards offenders. She used much pity and compassion towards the poor and oppressed. She used clemency among her nobles. She restored more noble houses decayed than ever did prince of this realm, or I pray God ever shall have the like occasion to do hereafter.” The bishop said little about Mary’s religious policies, but was eloquent in defense of her sincere faith. “I verily believe,” he said, “the poorest creature in all this city feared not God more than she did.”

When the eulogy was over the coffin was carried to Henry VII’s chapel in the abbey, and placed in a grave on the north side. Her heart, “being severally inclosed in a coffin covered with velvet bound with silver,” was separately interred. The household officers broke their staves and threw them into the grave, and as they did so the trumpets sounded to signal the beginning of the funeral banquet.

The chief mourners all went in to dinner, leaving the funeral trappings unguarded. In a few minutes the servants and hired mourners and the Londoners who had come to see the queen laid in her grave had torn down the banners and standards, the arms displayed around the altar and the hangings fastened to the walls. They scrambled and fought one another for scraps of cloth, “every man a piece that could catch it,” until the embroidered cloths were in shreds and the queen’s effigy pulled into a hundred pieces. The next day the bishop of Winchester was informed that, “for such offenses as he committed in his sermon at the funeral of the late queen,” he was ordered to keep himself a prisoner in his own house during Queen Elizabeth’s pleasure.