CHAPTER 64
IN 1557, GIOVANNI MICHIELI, THE VENETIAN AMBASSADOR, LEFT England. In his final report, the relacione, he gave a detailed account of the character and concerns of the then-forty-one-year-old queen.
Above all, he praised Mary’s devotion and piety. “Besides her noble descent,” he wrote, she was “a very great and rare example of virtue and magnanimity, a real portrait of patience and humility, and of the true fear of God.” Indeed, few women in the world were known to be more “assiduous at their prayers than she is,” always keeping to the canonical hours and observing Communions and fast days. She had lived a life “little short of martyrdom, by reason of the persecution she endured.”
In her youth, he reflected, Mary “was considered not merely tolerably handsome, but of beauty exceeding mediocrity.” However, the queen’s aspect was now “very grave,” with “wrinkles, caused more by anxieties than by age, which make her appear some years older.” Though “like other women,” she could be “sudden and passionate, and close and miserly,” she maintained a “wonderful grandeur and dignity.”
Despite being “valiant” and “brave,” Mary was prone to “deep melancholy”—a product, Michieli surmised, of “monstrous retention” and “suffocation of the matrix [womb],” a disease thought to be caused by the retention of menstrual fluids and a condition from which she had suffered for many years. But “the remedy of tears and weeping, to which from childhood she has been accustomed, and still often used by her” was no longer sufficient and now she required to be “blooded either from the foot or elsewhere, which keeps her always pale and emaciated.”
Principal among Mary’s distresses were those that arose from her love for Philip and her resentment of her sister, Elizabeth. Philip’s constant traveling left Mary bereft, “not only of that company, for the sake of which (besides the hope of lineage) marriages are formed,” but the separation “which to any person who loves another heartily, would be irksome and grievous” is felt particularly by a woman so “naturally tender.” Her “fear and violent love” for Philip left her constantly in a state of anxiety. If to this were added jealousy, the ambassador continued, “she would be truly miserable,” as to be parted from the king was one of the “anxieties that especially distresses her.”
Added to this was her “evil disposition,” as Michieli described it, “towards her sister Elizabeth”; although the queen pretended otherwise, “it cannot be denied the scorn and ill will she bears her.” When faced with Elizabeth, “it was as if she were in the presence of the affronts and ignominious treatment to which she was subjected to on account of her mother,” Anne Boleyn. Worse still, Mary saw “the eyes and hearts” of the nation already fixed on Elizabeth as her successor, given Mary’s lack of an heir. Much to Mary’s dismay, she perceived that no one believed “in the possibility of her having progeny,” so that “day by day” she saw her authority and the respect induced by it diminish. Besides this, “the Queen’s hatred is increased by knowing her to be averse to the present religion … for although externally she showed, and by living Catholically shows, that she has recanted, she is nevertheless supposed to dissemble and to hold to it more than ever internally.”
Mary had, the Venetian reflected, become a queen of regrets. She had been “greatly grieved” by many insurrections, conspiracies, and plots that continually formed against her at home and abroad, and she mourned the decline of the “affection” universally evinced toward her at the beginning of her reign, which had been “so extraordinary that never was greater shown in that kingdom towards any sovereign.” The country was, Michieli said, “showing a greater inclination and readiness for change” than ever before. The “fruitlessness” of Mary’s marriage was a source of profound regret, and the lack of an heir threatened the restoration of Catholicism and the obedience of the English Church to Rome, which was now sustained by her “authority and presence.” But, Michieli added, “nor is it to be told how much hurt that vain pregnancy did her.”
If the queen predeceased Philip, he would be deprived of the kingdom; but more important was the fear that the king’s “enemies” would seek to occupy England “or cause the realm to fall into their hands.” Michieli ended his relatione with a list of possible claimants for the English throne: first, Elizabeth, whose right was based on the will of Henry VIII and the Act of Succession; then Mary, queen of Scots, who claimed an absolute hereditary right; and the two sisters of the late Lady Jane Grey, who claimed precedence over Elizabeth on account of the will of Edward VI. Yet, as Michieli concluded, even if Mary were to be “undeceived,” which “as yet she is not,” about the possibility of having children, she wished to avoid naming a successor and “will rather leave it to time to act, referring the matter after her death to those whom it concerns either by right or by force.”1