Seven Will Out: A Renaissance Revel (33 page)

“Yes, and the part about poor impulse control fits Father to a T, as well,” said Mary. “Remember him going off to meet Anne of Cleves before their wedding? He acted like a schoolboy, against all royal protocol!”

“Well, we might chalk that up to romantic notions,” Elizabeth said. “But the exception he took to the woman immediately afterward was inexplicable. She wasn’t at all unpleasant, unreasonable, or unattractive,” Elizabeth said. “And yet he divorced her on a whim.”

“Speaking of whims, there was the changeability of Father’s feelings about you and me, Elizabeth, as he made his way through his four marriages after our mothers’ deaths. One or the other of us, in favor, out of favor, in favor, out of favor—like some kind of insane emotional morris dance.”

“And Katherine Parr, bless her, could attest to the man’s temper,” Margaret pointed out. “The things he threw around the sick room when the woman was trying to play nurse for him. Unspeakable! Poor Katherine had to dodge more than one loaded chamber pot, I can tell you!”

“So you are telling us, Dolly,” Mary said, voice strained and hands shaking, “that these behaviors on Father’s part were because of his injury and were not simply because of his personal choices?”

“You’re telling us,” said Elizabeth, likewise trembling, “that the man wasn’t gratuitously cruel and unfeelingly changeable? That he was, well—sick?”

“Quite possibly sick, if you buy into the traumatic brain injury theory we’ve been discussing. And on top of that, given the abysmal state of medicine in the early Renaissance era, he was probably being medically managed, or rather mismanaged, by men who had no idea what they were dealing with. Your father could quite possibly have been ‘more sinn’d against than sinning,’ one might say,” I told them, venturing to quote from
Lear
. “The theory opens up an intriguing line of thought, if nothing else.”

Mary and Elizabeth clearly found it all more than just intriguing. The two hugged, shedding tears of joy. I was reminded of their mutual tomb back on earth and its inscription: “Consorts in realm and tomb, here we sleep, Elizabeth and Mary, sisters in hope of resurrection.”

“Dolly,” Elizabeth said, turning to me after embracing her sister, “Do you realize that, in a way, you have given me my father back? Had he not had that accident, he may never have executed my mother!”

Mary turned to me next.

“Well, Mary, we can’t use the traumatic brain injury theory to exculpate Henry VIII from his treatment of
your
mother,” I said. “That was a done deal well before the accident.”

“Yes, Dolly, that is true. Father is not off the hook in any way for all that happened before that accident. But you see, when I was living the nightmare of Father’s Great Matter, I always felt that if only Ann Boleyn were out of the picture, things might get better between my father and me. Once he had her executed and she
was
out of the picture, however, things did not improve very much at all.”

“In favor, out of favor, in favor, out of favor,” I repeated.

“And now I find out that it was all because of this medical condition of Father’s,” Mary said.

“I don’t know about the word ‘all,’” I said. “The traumatic brain injury theory is, of course, only a theory. And even if the theory is correct, there was still a lot of other context around Henry VIII’s actions,” I pointed out.

“Still, Dolly,” Mary said, looking at Elizabeth, who nodded her head in agreement, “it is as though, in a way, you have given us a gift. There are now many grievances, small and large, against
our father that we can let go of, based on the fact that he may not have been in his right mind when the events occurred.”

“It must feel good to let go of that,” Catherine Grey said.

“And since so much of Henry VIII’s behavior set the two of you at odds, it must feel good to be able to let go, at least to a degree, of some of your sisterly rivalry,” said little Mary Grey, hugging her sisters Catherine and Jane in an extension of sibling joy.

“This letting go
does
feel good,” Mary confessed.

I was glad to have relieved both Mary and Elizabeth, at least to some degree, of some of their bad feelings about their father and maybe even each other.

“Well, Mary,” I said, “we’ve discussed your finding ways to come to grips with your painful feelings about four of the pivotal people in your life: your father, your mother, your sister, and Ann Boleyn. It occurs to me, though, that there might be one more unsatisfactory relationship in your life that we have left uncovered.”

“Actually, two more,” Mary answered.

Chapter Eighty-Seven

Literary Notions and Going through the Motions

“Well, I think I can guess who one of those remaining unsatisfactory relationships of yours was with, Mary.”

I hesitated about going too deeply into the details of Mary’s marriage; in fact, I hated to even mention it. I worried that to do so would be painful for her. She married, as her mother would have wished, Phillip II, then Prince Phillip of Spain. This Catholic marriage was, to say the least, not popular in the increasingly Reformist England and even led to the Wyatt Rebellion. As a husband, Phillip was reportedly dutiful if not devoted, at least when he was actually present in England, which was a far cry from all the time. His final words about Mary—‘I felt a reasonable regret for her death’—seemed to pretty much sum up the marriage, at least from Phillip’s side.

Mary, on the other hand, was described as being almost besotted with the man who so failed to appreciate her. Presumably, at least in earthly life, she was spared the knowledge that very shortly after her death, her widower would be considering his options with her sister, Elizabeth. Word on the street was that Phillip was attracted to the girl even before Mary’s death; hopefully, in life she’d been spared that knowledge as well.

Mary, it seems, read my mind as the thoughts were formulating themselves. “You know, I am sure, the story of my marriage, Dolly. My husband was away from me so very much of the time!”

Phillip’s being one of the inbred and unprepossessing Renaissance-era Hapsburgs, and by all reports something of a
prig, may have made this a plus rather than a minus for some women. Clearly, though, this was not the case for Mary.

Mary walked over to a portrait of herself and Phillip, and I followed her to it. I was familiar with the work by Hans Eworth and made note of its details once again as Mary spoke.

“I put a good face on it, but I knew that my husband was just going through the motions when it came to our marriage and to our, shall I say, intimate relations.”

I looked at the Phillip in the portrait, all freakishly large head, short little arms, impossibly skinny legs, and big feet. The thought of him going through the marital motions with Mary or anyone else did not make for the prettiest of pictures.

I chose my words carefully, going for the ever-popular open-ended questions. “Tell me about the emotions your relationship with Phillip inspired and which of them you committed to paper,” I suggested.

“To be entirely correct, it was not so much emotions as the situation we both found ourselves in,” Mary said. “For me, it was being the chooser in our relationship and unhesitatingly selecting him, all starry-eyed and anticipating reciprocal affection. For him, it was having no personal voice whatsoever in a political marriage and having to pretend an affection that he did not feel. I put a good face on it, of course; I was my mother’s daughter, after all. But I knew in my heart that with every bit of emotion I showed to Phillip, I simply made him more and more uncomfortable.”

“That can’t have been easy for either of you.”

“And of course, the pressure on both of us to produce a pregnancy only made it all worse, especially as my health became so unpredictable.”

Mary’s false pregnancy symptoms are of course part of the stuff of Tudor legend. Amenorrhea, abdominal girth, and nausea convinced everyone at first that the perimenopausal Mary had defied all the odds and had indeed become pregnant by Phillip. The only thing missing was the baby—none appeared after months if not years of pregnancy symptoms.

“It was early on in what I thought to be my pregnancy that I wrote my play about the problem of Phillip and me,” Mary said. “As I wrote, I harbored a slim hope that the baby I thought I was carrying would solve the whole relationship problem in one fell swoop.”

“You wouldn’t be the first to put all your hopes on the baby solution to a problematic marriage,” I said.

“She certainly would not have!” said Elizabeth. “There was my mother, for one; she certainly had reason to believe that a baby, or at least a male one, would solve her marital problem.”

At all these mentions of the word “problem,” I thought about Shakespeare and the plays that, being neither comedies nor dramas, fell under the rubric of problem plays.

“You certainly did have a problem there, Mary. And if I am correct in my guess about which play you wrote about it, I can safely say that literary history agrees. ‘If ever truth were pregnant by circumstance’—” I said, feeling confident that Mary’s marital play and Shakespeare’s most cynical problem play were one and the same.

“Your choosing your husband, and your husband being, shall we say, less enthusiastic than you’d have liked about being chosen—the template for the dilemma of Helena and Bertram, was it not?” I asked.

“Yes, Dolly, it was. I got the idea for the play from one of the tales in Bocaccio’s
Decameron
.”

“Helena earns the right to marry Bertram; Bertram is not happy about this. He says he will not marry the girl until she can get both a ring and a baby from him, things he is certain will never take place. Helena contrives to make both of these things happen, though, making use of the rather unfeminist principle that one woman is pretty much like another in the dark. And so, Helena and Bertram are united in a—what should I call it? ‘Happy ending’ doesn’t quite seem to fit the bill,” I said.

“That’s why I called it
All
’
s Well That Ends Well
,” Mary said.

I was sobered by just how little Mary seemed willing to satisfy herself with in terms of a romantically satisfying conclusion. I was about to be even more sobered when I learned which was the last of Mary’s plays.

Chapter Eighty-Eight

The Riled and the Exiled

“Enough about my husband and me though,” Mary said. I have to admit I was glad to move on from an awkward subject. Unfortunately, the next subject at hand was even more awkward still.

“We are now left with the last of the relationships that I felt the need to process in a fictional work,” Mary said.

“Well, we’ve covered mother, father, sister, and husband; who is left?” I asked, flummoxed.

“My kingdom remains, Dolly; my subjects, courtiers and commoners both. My relationship with them is the subject of my remaining play.”

Given that Mary Tudor had come down through the ages as Bloody Mary, the least popular of English monarchs, I figured another problem play was in with a chance, a tragedy was an even better bet, and a comedy was pretty much out of the question.

“I started my reign with such high hopes, Dolly! I wanted to bring the people of England back to the old religion, Catholicism. I considered it a gift I could give to them. And they did not want what I had to offer.”

“Not unlike your relationship with Phillip, was it?” I said.

“Rejection by those I valued was certainly a theme in my adult life,” Mary admitted. “It seemed to me that the influential and reasonably well-off were the first to abandon me after I began my reign; so many of them chose exile from the country over converting to my faith. Catherine Willoughby,” Mary added meaningfully, “was one of them.”

“She had a lot of company,” I said. “There were said to have been over eight hundred Marian exiles, as they came to be called.”

“And I considered each departure a slap in the face, and a failure on my part. So I stepped up my game.”

“To the tune of two hundred and eighty-three,” I remarked. There was a moment of silence as we all recalled those lost in the Marian executions for political or religious intransigence.

“A bit of me died with each and every one of them,” Mary admitted.

“And yet, you went on,” I said, merely ruminating on the fact. Jane of all people stepped up, not to Mary’s defense exactly, but to remind me of some of the context of the Marian executions.

“Please do remember, Dolly; in Mary’s father’s reign there were wholesale religious executions as well.”

“Yes, of course; easily two hundred during the Pilgrimage of Grace alone, with some estimates going into the thousands.”

“And there was the Prayer Book Rebellion during the reign of her brother, Edward VI,” Jane pointed out.

“Well over five thousand down over that one, they say,” I recalled.

“And my cousin Elizabeth’s reign; so many executions during the Northern Rebellion alone.”

“Up to eight hundred, according to Elton.”

“Make that eight hundred and one, if you think about it,” said Mary, Queen of Scots.

“All right, ladies. Point taken about the context of the executions of Bloody Mary; ‘everything is relative,’ as the Bard says.”

“I think you will find that was Leon Trotsky, Dolly,” Jane said.

“How in the world did you get the skinny on Leon Trotsky?” I asked. Surely the early twentieth-century Russian communist had not sojourned here.

“We had one of the members of the Romanov dynasty—Alexandra—here for a consult. As empress of Russia, she was going down a very bad road with a cleric named Rasputin. Unfortunately, there was no talking her out of it. We heard that that ended badly.”

“It’s surprising the things you have and haven’t heard here, over the years,” I commented.

“We’ve learned a lot, of course, from our guests over the centuries; sometimes, it is blanks filled in about things that happened relevant to our legacy after we died. But mostly, it is about how very much things have changed over the centuries. Hence, we understand why someone from the twenty-first century may not fully understand the dynamics of executions in our day,” Elizabeth said.