41
Mary
W
hen my child didn’t come in May, the doctors patted my hands and said I had muddled my dates, as women often did, especially with a first baby, and said I should most likely be delivered near the end of June. When that month also passed I began to despair that something was well and truly wrong. I knew then that I must put myself wholly in God’s hands.
“A miracle
will
come to pass!” I insisted as I put on one of my fine pleated Holland cloth birthing smocks with the wrists, neck, and hem edged with gold braid, and tucked my hair up in a matching cap. Then I wound my precious ivory rosary around my hand and fastened round my neck the cross my mother had given me containing a splinter from the True Cross. Having these dear, precious things made me feel like my mother and grandmother were right there in the birthing chamber with me. I clasped an ivory and gold inlaid crucifix to my breast and lay back on my bed with my legs wide and my knees bent and waited for my pains to begin. I had the midwives bring their instruments and stand poised in readiness at the foot of my bed, and issued orders for the swaddling bands to be brought out of the chest where they were kept, and for the wet-nurse and cradle rockers to be ready to assume their duties; I was about to give birth. At my command, all my ladies and a number of nuns from an abbey I had recently restored arranged themselves in neat rows and knelt in prayer around my bed. Whilst outside in the courtyard I could hear a procession of monks in rough dung-brown robes walking round and round in circles, the soles of their leather sandals slapping against the flagstones, as, with their tonsured heads bowed, they chanted:
O Almighty Father, which didst sanctify the Blessed Virgin and Mother Mary in her conception, and in the birth of Christ Our Savior thine only Son; also, by thine omnipotent power, didst safely deliver the Prophet Jonas out of the whale’s belly: defend, O Lord, we beseech Thee, thy servant Mary, our queen, with child conceived; and so visit her in and with Thy godly gift of health, that not only the child Thy creature, within her contained, may joyfully come from her into this world, and receive the blessed sacraments of baptism and confirmation, enjoying therewith daily increase of all princely and gracious gifts both of body and soul; but that also she, through Thy special grace and mercy, may in time of her travail avoid all excessive dolor and pain, and abide perfect and sure from all peril and danger of death, with long and prosperous life, through Christ our Lord. Amen.
I closed my eyes tight and prayed with all my might, harder than I ever had in my life, beseeching Our Lady to show mercy and bring on my good hour.
Truly, you are blessed among women.
For you have changed Eve’s curse into a blessing;
and Adam, who hitherto lay under a curse,
has been blessed because of you.
Truly, you are blessed among women.
Through you the Father’s blessing has
shone forth on mankind,
setting them free of their ancient curse.
Truly, you are blessed among women,
because through you
your forebears have found salvation.
For you were to give birth to the Savior
who was to win them salvation.
Truly, you are blessed among women,
for without seed you have borne, as your fruit,
him who bestows blessings on the whole world
and redeems it from that curse
that made it sprout thorns.
Truly, you are blessed among women,
because, though a woman by nature,
you will become, in reality, God’s mother.
If he whom you are to bear is truly God made flesh,
then rightly do we call you God’s mother.
For you have truly given birth to God.
For hours I lay thus waiting for my pains to begin, repeating my prayer, feeling the wooden edges of the crucifix I clutched bite into my hands. It comforted me to know that I was surrounded on all sides by prayers—the monks outside chanting in the courtyard, walking round and round, wearing out their soles, and inside the palace, at my command, when I lay down and opened my legs and drew up my knees, everyone had stopped whatever they were doing and knelt where they were, and prayed for me and my safe delivery.
My voice grew weary and hoarse and in the heat of the late afternoon I fell into a torpor. I drifted as the voices droned and I know not how many more hours had passed before a heavenly light so bright it hurt my eyes appeared beside my bed. Within it I saw a bright angel gowned in blue with flowing gold hair.
Though her eyes were kind, her lips were downturned in sorrow. She told me that God was not pleased with me. Heresy still flourished in my realm. I had failed to uproot the weeds from my garden—though some had been plucked and others had perished, many more still remained to breed and multiply and spread their blasphemy like a Black Plague of the soul—so He must withhold my miracle. My child could not be born until every heretic in England had been burned or converted to the true faith.
Heretics were the worst kind of criminals, worse than any ordinary murderer or thief, and much more dangerous, for their crimes were not only against man but God as well. They were the worst kind of thieves, for they stole the souls of the innocent and ignorant and cheated them of salvation, condemning them to damnation and denying them the kingdom of Heaven.
I opened my eyes then and sat up. God, through His angel, had spoken to me, and I knew
exactly
what I must do.
42
Elizabeth
M
ary had been pregnant nearly ten months with no sign that the birth was imminent. Many believed that it was a physical delusion wrought by the mind of a brainsick woman because she wanted a child so very much, or else a tumor of the womb that caused her stomach to swell in a grim parody of pregnancy. But her women, her doctors, and even the midwives who were the wisest of the lot, were quick to defend Mary and insist that she had shown every sign of being with child. Her courses had stopped, her breasts were tender and swollen and milk had even flowed from them, and her stomach had expanded with the passing months exactly as it should during the course of a normal pregnancy.
A crudely printed but much circulated drawing predicted that Mary’s pregnancy would end in a great wind and nothing else and showed Philip on a ship being blown out to sea, back to Spain, by the force of a massive fart issuing from Mary as she lay in an attitude of birthing, whilst on the deck of the ship Philip fastidiously held his nose. And there was a rumor that a woman named Isabel Malt, who had just been delivered of a son, had been visited discreetly after dark by men in the Queen’s service who had tried to buy her child so that it might be passed off as the Queen’s.
The burnings had taken on a whole new intensity. From the bed where she still lay, praying and waiting to give birth, Mary spent her days, and sat up far into the nights, signing death warrants. Mary signed them without weighing the merits of each case. There was no time to fully investigate them; the merest hint of suspicion was enough to send the accused to the stake.
Untold horrors reached my ears of people dying in choking agony upon piles of damp, green fagots, and of bags of gunpowder tied about their necks to give them a quick death either failing to explode or doing so but failing to kill and instead maiming horribly so that they died in even greater agony as they waited for the smoke and flames to consume them. One woman went pregnant to the stake—How could Mary do it? Did she even know? Did she miss that crucial fact in her haste to sign and send another alleged heretic to Hell?—and in her agony her womb disgorged the child right into the grasping hands of the flames, thus claiming two lives, one entirely innocent, and the other guilty only of being a poor uneducated woman with a muddled understanding of Catholic dogma, unable to name or number the Sacraments correctly. If any tried to help or intervene or spoke out in protest, they were also subject to arrest and punishment in the stocks or pillory, or even the stake itself if they too were suspected of harboring heretical beliefs.
Lists of those who had died at the stake were sold in the streets of London as “Names of The Martyrs.” Their ashes and belongings were preserved and displayed as holy relics. And verses and prayers for “The Ascension of Elizabeth” were printed on broadsheets on secret presses that changed locations regularly and operated only in the dead of night, the printers knowing full well that if they were caught it was jail or death, or even both. One of the most popular went:
When raging reign of tyrants stout,
Causeless did cruelly conspire
To rend and root the simple out,
With furious force of sword and fire;
When man and wife were put to death:
We wished for our Queen Elizabeth.
There was also an even shorter and more direct verse that was upon many of the common people’s lips.
When these with violence were put to death,
We prayed to God for our Elizabeth.
To them, I was the living embodiment of Hope; I was the virgin queen whose coming to the throne would put out the flames. That, more than anything else, kept me alive. When I grew weary of struggling to stay alive, of flirting with Philip, of battling with Mary and trying to combat and disprove her suspicions, it was their hope and belief in me that sustained me and kept me going to live and fight to preserve my life for one more day. Because I knew that my day would come, and that my people had need of me.
Another month came and went. And it was apparent to all except Mary herself that there would be no child. A rumor arose that the Queen was dead and to prove it false she made a point of showing herself each afternoon at her window overlooking the courtyard, where monks, intent on their prayers, walked round and round even in the deluge of rain that was rotting the crops in the fields and bringing famine upon the country. Some persisted in believing that it wasn’t truly Mary at all but a wax figure held up by Philip.
Mary refused to believe that she was not carrying a child and insisted that every day a long winding procession of clergy trudge through the streets of London praying that England be delivered from heresy and that God send the Queen a goodly hour soon. And the doctors and midwives, too fearful to tell her the truth, continued to reassure her and murmur about miscalculations and such.
Instead of warmth and abundance, the summer of 1555 was a summer of cold and want. Incessant rains drummed down upon the fields and turned the soil to a muddy, mushy mire in which nothing could thrive. The crops were pelted and pounded mercilessly, and when the rains stopped, they lay broken and rotting in the feeble sun. None had seen the like of it in human memory. The people lived in fear of famine and the burnings that continued unabated. And with no grain to be had, prices soared, and people went in want of bread and beer. There was no grass and oats to feed the cattle, sheep, and horses, and many sickened and died, and before summer’s end the price of one scrawny sheep could, in better times, have bought a small house.
In August, everyone, except Mary, admitted that if she were delivered of a child it would indeed be a miracle, for she had by then been pregnant an entire year.
Finally, with the air of Hampton Court grown unbearably foul and ripe, with the rushes in dire need of changing, and the courtiers surly, ill-tempered, and bored from want of fresh air and outdoor exercise, and the gardens a rotting, muddy mess, pounded into a pulp by the pouring rain, and fear of the plague running rampant, Mary emerged from seclusion with her belly deflated and her face defeated.
She made no mention of her pregnancy, and no explanation was ever given out either publicly or privately. She simply declined to discuss the matter; she merely announced that they would be leaving for Oatlands Palace so that Hampton Court could be cleansed.
I was not invited to accompany them, but told to go back to Hatfield or Hell or wherever I would. “You are at liberty to go where you will,” Mary said to me when we parted. “All I know is that I will never trust you again.”
So I took myself back to the peace and quiet of Hatfield and left Mary to play beggarmaid-queen, weeping, whining, and groveling for scraps of affection from her coldhearted husband’s table.
43
Mary
T
he August morning I awoke to find blood on my nightgown my heart broke. I knew it was God’s judgment upon me. I had failed to deliver England from the vipers injecting my people with the venom of heresy, so He had failed to deliver me of a son. It was a hard but fair bargain, and I knew I
must
do better—it was the
only
way I would ever hold my miracle in my arms—and it must be soon, for the hourglass that holds the sands of a woman’s fertile years was, for me, fast running out.
Crossing the threshold of the room that was to have been my birthing chamber to confront the curious faces of my court was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do, but I held my head up high as I regally sailed past them in black velvet and diamonds, offering no explanation.
And as I rode to Oatlands in my litter, with my resumed monthly blood seeping into the cloths between my thighs, and the great cramps that seized and wrung my womb making me gasp and bite my lip not to cry out, I watched Philip through a gap in the velvet curtains riding straight-backed in the saddle of his white horse and knew that very soon he would leave me. He didn’t have to speak to show me his displeasure; his silence was my punishment.
Other men might have shown compassion, they might have held and kissed and comforted a wife who had lost a baby, but not Philip; such was not his way. When I held out my arms and begged him to hold me, he turned his face away and said coldly, “It is not when you need me to hold you, Mary, it is when I want to hold you.” So I was left alone to bear my personal cross—the knowledge that I had failed my husband, my Christ on earth, just as I had failed God.
And then he left me, after we moved to Greenwich. I knew that he would. At the top of the stairs he bowed formally over my hand, his lips barely brushing my feverish flesh that trembled and yearned for his touch, before he turned his back and walked away from me, leaving me wringing my hands and helpless as the tears poured down my face. He never once looked back even though my eyes followed him, like a drunkard, never able to drink their fill. Each tap of his boot heels on the stairs was like a nail being driven into my heart.
The moment the palace doors closed behind him, I burst into tears, loud keening sobs that startled even me, and caused my court to start and stare horror-stricken and appalled at me. They were too callous to care that my heart was breaking, and I knew more caricatures and jests would soon follow and be left for me to find.
Wailing like a wounded animal, I sought solace in my private chapel and the compassionate face of the Holy Virgin, who understood so well the hearts and sorrows of women. I threw myself on my knees before the candlelit altar and prayed that my husband would come back to me soon and safe.
I cried until my eyes were as red and dry as autumn leaves. Then, staggering blindly, I made my way down to the kitchens and gave orders that a batch of my beloved’s favorite meat pies be prepared at once, then taken, by the fastest ship in our fleet, to Calais, the first stop on his journey, and presented to him with my love and most heartfelt wishes for his “health, long life, and speedy return.” Then I staggered back upstairs to my bedchamber and sat down at my desk to pour out my heart to him in a letter. I vowed I would write to him every day until he returned to me, and I am proud to say that I kept that vow; I never gave cause for anyone to ever doubt my devotion.