CHAPTER 54
THE BELLS WERE SOON SILENCED AND THE BONFIRES EXTINGUISHED. The rumors were false. The queen had not gone into labor, and fresh calculations had to be made. As the Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Michieli, reported in late May:
Everything is in suspense, and dependant on the result of this delivery, which, according to the opinion of the physicians, unless it takes place at this new phase of the moon two days hence, may be protracted beyond the full [moon] and [its] occultation, on the 4th or 5th of next month; her Majesty’s belly having greatly declined, which is said yet more to indicate the approaching term.1
Days passed, but the labor pains did not begin. Speculation continued to fill letters and ambassadorial dispatches. Ruy Gómez observed on May 22 that he had seen the queen walking in her garden with such a light step that “it seems to me that there is no hope at all for this month.”2Renard wrote, “Everything in this kingdom depends on the Queen’s safe deliverance.” If she did not bear a child, he foresaw “trouble on so great a scale that the pen can hardly set it down … the delay in the Queen’s deliverance encourages the heretics to slander and put about false rumours; some say that she is not with child at all.”3 Philip had already expressed his doubts. Writing in April to his brother-in law Maximilian of Austria, he declared, “The Queen’s pregnancy turns out not to have been as certain as we thought. Your highness and my sister manage better than the Queen and I do.”4
The summer turned increasingly bleak; the weather was so bad “that the like is not remembered in the memory of man for the last fifty years.”5 Mary grew more and more reclusive, sitting in one place for hours at a time, wrestling with depression and anxiety, neither leaving her chamber nor giving audience to anyone.6 To those who saw her she looked pale and ill, weeping and praying that her labor pains begin. Her prayer book survives, the pages worn and stained around a page bearing a prayer for the safe delivery of a woman with child.7
As the weeks passed, the mood became one of despair. Some said the queen was dead; seditious talk was everywhere. Every few days new libels against her were thrown into the streets, stirring up fears and encouraging rebellion. By June, the earl of Pembroke and a number of troops had to be brought in to keep order in London. Protestant pamphleteers alleged that the king kept company with whores and commoners’ daughters while Mary was confined to her rooms. Rumors circulated that Mary had never been pregnant at all “but that a suppositious child is going to be presented as hers”; or that the fetus had been a pet monkey or a lapdog; or that the Queen had delivered “a mole or lump of flesh and was in great peril of death.”8 Posters were nailed to the palace door and abusive papers thrown into the queen’s own chamber. Others said the queen had been deceived by a tympany or some other disease to believe herself to be pregnant but was not. Some thought that she had miscarried, others that she was bewitched.9
The French ambassador, Noailles, scoffed at the solemn prayers and anxious anticipation, believing the queen’s pregnancy to be an elaborate farce. He had been informed by two of Mary’s intimate female attendants, Susan Clarencius and one of the midwives, “that the Queen’s state was by no means of the hopeful kind generally supposed, but rather some woeful malady, for several times a day she spent long hours sitting on her floor with her knees drawn up to her chin,” a position that no pregnant woman could have assumed without considerable pain. The midwife, “one of the best midwives in the town,” believed the queen, “though pale and peaked,” was not pregnant. “The said midwife, more to comfort her with words than anything, tells her from day to day that she has miscalculated her pregnancy by two months, the royal physicians either too ignorant or fearful to tell the Queen” the truth and so would refer only to a “miscalculation” in the time of her delivery.10
In a letter to Eraso, Ruy Gómez wrote, “All this makes me wonder whether she is with child at all, greatly as I desire the thing to be happily over.”11 Philip shared Gómez’s sentiments and grew restless. “From what I hear,” Michieli wrote in a dispatch, “one single hour’s delay in this delivery seems to him a thousand years.”12 He had been expected in Flanders since May, and on June 6 the emperor was still postponing the interment of Queen Joanna, Philip’s grandmother, in the hope that his grandson would arrive at any time. Philip had made preparations to leave as soon as the child was born and Mary was out of danger. According to Michieli, the hope of childbirth “has so diminished that but little reliance can now be any longer placed on it”; he concluded that “the pregnancy will end in wind rather than anything else.”
By the end of June, the doctors had given up trying to predict when the queen would be delivered. On the twenty-sixth, Michieli wrote, “There is no one, either of the physicians or the women, or others, all having been deceived, who at present dare any longer form any opinion about it, all persons resigning themselves to such hour and time as shall best please our Lord God.”13
The delay was interpreted in different ways. In mid-June two gentlemen “of no ordinary repute” were imprisoned in the Tower, charged with “having spoken about this delivery licentiously, in a tone unbecoming their grade.”14 People closest to Mary believed that a miracle would come to pass “in this as in all her Majesty’s other circumstances, which the more they were despaired of according to human reason and discourse, the better and more auspicious did their result then show itself.” The queen’s child would prove to the world once and for all that her affairs “were regulated excessively by Divine Providence.”15
AT THE END of July, daily processions and prayers for the royal baby’s delivery were halted. On August 3, with no public announcement and on the pretext that Hampton Court needed to be cleaned, the court moved to the far smaller residence of Oatlands, allowing for the large retinue of gentlewomen, rockers, and nursery staff to be dismissed. As the Venetian ambassador wrote:
Although no one dares to proclaim it … the fact is that the move has been made in order no longer to keep the people of England in suspense about this delivery, by the constant and public processions which were made, and by the Queen’s remaining so many days in retirement … to the prejudice of her subjects; as not only did she transact no business, but would scarcely allow herself to be seen by any of her ladies who, in expectation of childbirth, especially the gentlewomen and the chief female nobility [who] had flocked to court from all parts of the kingdom in such very great number, all living at the cost of her Majesty.16
There had been no baby. Like her mother forty years before, Mary had been deluded into believing that she was pregnant. Wise after the event, Michieli described how “from her youth” she had suffered from the “retention of menstrual fluids” and the “strangulation of her womb.” Her body swelled, and her breasts enlarged and sent out milk. “It was this which had led to the empty rumour of her pregnancy.”17
THE OUTCOME OF the pregnancy had been of central importance to the peace negotiations between the French king and emperor, held under English auspices at La Marque in May. The latest round of hostilities, which had erupted in 1551, had reached a stalemate. The birth of an heir to the English throne would have given the emperor immense benefit, but if the queen and child died, the advantage would be with the French.
For the English, a great deal was at stake: the revival of England’s prestige in continental politics, an improvement of relations with France, and, of greatest importance, the prevention of a new war in which Spain might try to involve England. But as the negotiations continued, it became clear that neither the Habsburgs nor the Valois were willing to give much ground. As the talks reached an impasse, news came at the beginning of June of Mary’s failed pregnancy and of the election of Giovanni Pietro Carafa, a seventy-nine-year-old Neapolitan and great enemy of the Habsburgs, as pope. The conference came to an abrupt end: the French had lost their fear.
Now, with no immediate prospect of an heir, Philip prepared to depart England for the Low Countries. Nervous of informing Mary of his intentions, he rehearsed how he would tell her in a draft letter, sent probably to Ruy Gómez: “Let me know what line I am to take with the Queen about leaving her and about religion. I see I must say something, but God help me!”18 Philip decided to leave most of his household in the hope of convincing the queen that he would return quickly. Yet, as the Venetian ambassador reported, “it is said more than ever, that he will go to Spain, and remove thence his household and all the others by degrees.”19
Philip would be leaving England with the Catholic restoration achieved and the enforcement of Catholic obedience under way. Six months before, the medieval treason laws, repealed by Edward VI, had been restored. The secular authorities were empowered once more to deal ruthlessly with religious opponents: seditious words and activities would be punished. With the rising threat of disorder and rebellion, the restoration of Catholicism was to take on a ferocious edge: heretics would be burned alive.