7
TOWARDS THE END of July 1554 the Spanish fleet dropped anchor off the Isle of Wight and the Prince of Spain proceeded by barge to Southampton. His arrival had been keenly anticipated. The English fleet had been on patrol in the western approaches since May on the lookout for the great armada – Philip was bringing a personal train of 1,500, as well as 3,000 troops bound for the Low Countries, who were to remain on board discreetly out of sight – and his English household had been languishing in Hampshire for over a month. Always methodical, as ponderous as his great ships, Philip was not one to do anything in a hurry. Nor was he in any great rush to see his bride, the sad, middle-aged woman whom he had hitherto considered his maiden aunt.
It is tempting to ask why Mary was bothering to marry at all, especially given the amount of vociferous opposition to her choice of husband. At the outset of her reign, she had had her subjects’ love; surely, given their detestation of the Spanish match, it would have been wise to reconsider? Perhaps, after all, it would be better to remain single, if only to win back some of that lost popularity. That was to reckon without Mary’s personality, her habit of dependence, and the conventions of the time. It would take a very strong and original woman in the sixteenth century to flout the norm and choose not to marry. Mary was nothing if not conventional. Her whole upbringing had pointed to the need for a husband.
In spite of her undoubted courage and unexpected qualities of leadership in defeating Northumberland and quelling Wyatt’s rebellion, Mary lacked the confidence to rule alone. She could not help comparing herself to her awe-inspiring father. She perceived him as strong, whereas she was weak and in need of a powerful figure to help her rule. For the enormous task of bringing England back to the true Church, no husband, she felt, would be more helpful than Philip; in fact, the reverse was true, as the unpopular marriage delayed the restoration of Catholicism and fixed that religion for ever in the popular mind as something foreign, alien.
The restoration of Catholicism could be secured, Mary felt, only by her founding a new, Catholic dynasty. It seems that she so desperately wanted to believe that she would have a child that she never permitted herself to consider the possibility that she would fail. But the chances of a woman of Mary’s age, with her long history of menstrual disorder and the state of sixteenth-century obstetrics, conceiving and bearing a healthy child were remote. Her health problems were well known. The Venetian ambassador noted that she was
often subject to a very deep melancholy, much greater than that to which she is constitutionally liable, from [menstrual] retention and suffocation of the matrix [infrequent or irregular periods] to which, for many years, she has been often subject, so that the remedy of tears and weeping, to which from childhood she has been accustomed, and still often used by her, is not sufficient; she requires to be blooded either from the foot or elsewhere, which keeps her always pale and emaciated.
The belief was that bleeding a patient would ‘bring down the menses’, the menstrual blood that had failed to flow, causing ill humours to remain in the body.
Perhaps it was in the knowledge that she was unlikely to bear a child that Charles was prepared to allow such favourable terms to the English when negotiating the marriage treaty. The position of king consort was unprecedented in England and unknown to English law. Charles, who negotiated the treaty for his son, was primarily concerned with strengthening Philip’s hand in northern Europe, especially in the Low Countries. The English were deeply mistrustful of the whole business, especially given the Habsburg proclivity for ‘conquest by marriage’.
A woman automatically ceded all her property to her husband on marriage. There was a school of thought that argued that a queen regnant had only a ‘woman’s estate’ in the realm, meaning that the kingdom would pass on her marriage to her husband in full ownership and remain vested in him during his natural life, whether she was alive or dead. The prevailing view, however, was rather more sophisticated. The royal office was unique, so that the laws of real property did not apply. Just as medieval kings and, indeed, Henry VIII, subscribed to the notion of the King’s two bodies – the one mortal with human frailties, the other the embodiment of the kingly office and perpetual – so a queen regnant is two persons politically. She is a wife who is subordinate to her husband in marital affairs, and a magistrate who is superior to him and every one of her subjects in affairs of state.
The marriage treaty of Mary and Philip preserves something of the appearance of the relations of power in a traditional marriage, while actually providing for the Queen’s authority in matters of state. In effect, she metaphorically emasculated her husband. She had the precedent of her grandmother, Isabella of Castile, who had defined her husband Ferdinand as a mere king consort, rather than a king regnant. Indeed, Isabella had gone ahead with her coronation without him. Mary, like Isabella, was careful to maintain an appearance of shared power. She conceded that Philip should take the title of King – he started signing himself Philipus Rex before he was entitled to do so – and allowed his title precedence over hers, for instance on official documents and the coin of the realm. But the treaty explicitly prevented him from exercising any authority in England independent of his wife.
The treaty contained a clear and unequivocal statement that, in the case of there being no children of the marriage, Philip’s interest in the realm would cease with Mary’s death. All offices were to be held by English natives and Philip had no authority to appoint any foreigner to office or benefice. Nor could he disturb the existing laws and customs. He would not be able to take the Queen or her children out of the realm without parliamentary approval, nor the crown jewels, ships or arms.
Charles envisaged that any child of Mary and Philip would inherit England and the Low Countries, while Philip’s son, Don Carlos, would inherit Spain and the Habsburg lands in Italy. In other words, the treaty as good as disinherited Philip’s first-born from a valuable slice of his inheritance. If Don Carlos – an inbred imbecile – did not survive, Philip and Mary’s child would inherit everything.
The publication of the marriage treaty – which tried so hard to assuage English fears – was the only known attempt by Mary’s government to mitigate English hostility to the Spanish match by means of the printing press. But if the English were appeased, Philip was not. When he read the treaty, he was so furious that he drew up a secret protest in the presence of his closest adviser, Ruy Gomez da Silva, and the Duke of Alva, absolving himself and his heirs from observing its terms. As an indication of his future intentions in England, he asked his father if the clause preventing him from involving England in his ongoing war with France could be amended. Charles knew the matter was far too sensitive even to broach with the English.
There was no enthusiasm on Philip’s part for the marriage. It was simply duty. His father had to prompt him to make even the most basic gesture towards Mary. ‘You will send to England a gentleman of position to take a present to be given to the Queen after her betrothal, a ring or some jewel of value, for it will be eagerly looked for,’ he instructed. Mary hesitated to write to Philip, feeling that the man should initiate the correspondence. ‘You have not privately written to me since our alliance has been negotiated,’ she eventually hinted. It was not a hopeful sign.
Philip could hardly have complained about his welcome in England. The foremost noblemen had been sent to Southampton to greet him and they did so with all due courtesy. Lord Arundel presented him with the Order of the Garter and a white jennet harnessed in crimson velvet embroidered with gold, pearls and precious stones from the Queen. The next day the Lord Chancellor, Gardiner, arrived with Mary’s gift of a large diamond, while Arundel in turn carried a diamond from Philip to Mary, ‘but considerably smaller than the first one’.
On 21 July Mary issued a proclamation in London inviting all noblemen, gentlemen and ladies to ‘repayre to the Cittie of Winchester, there to doe attendance at her graces marriage’. The wedding was to take place on St James’s Day, 25 July, at Winchester Cathedral. On the 23rd Philip rode up from Southampton with a magnificent entourage, making his first acquaintance with an English summer. There was torrential rain and his fine clothes were soaked. ‘He went straight to the cathedral, a fine building where there was such a crowd that they all were in danger of stifling, and then proceeded on foot to his quarters, not to the Queen’s. He supped quietly with a small company and then went to visit the Queen.’
They were to marry in two days’ time and this was their first meeting. At ten o’clock that night Philip was brought privately from the deanery through the gardens to the bishop’s palace, where Mary was staying. Accompanied by her ladies and several counsellors, she was waiting at the door of her chamber to greet him. She was ‘dressed in black velvet covered with stones and buttons and adorned with brocade in front’ and many jewels. The couple kissed one another, according to the English custom, and ‘went hand in hand to their chairs’ under a canopy of state. As Philip was no linguist – he had not troubled to learn any English – and Mary understood but did not speak his native Castilian, their conversation, conducted in a mixture of French and Spanish, must have been limited to the general pleasantries. Mary taught Philip to say ‘Good night, my lords all’, which was to be the sum total of his communication with the English nobility in their own tongue. The next day he visited Mary again and ‘they kissed and walked through two or three rooms, and then stood talking a long time.’
Mary was predisposed to love Philip because he came from her mother’s family. The English had never treated her well and her mother’s relatives had often seemed her only lifeline. As they were far away, she was oblivious of their imperfections. She was an idealist and might have imagined that she would receive from Philip something of the unconditional love her mother had given her as a child. After bitter years of loneliness, the once cherished child ached for love; she longed for someone to trust, to ease the strain of governing alone. She would also have found Philip’s appearance reasonably pleasing. Like her, he was short and thin, but he had blue eyes and flaxen hair and the Habsburg jaw was not so marked as it was in his father.
Philip expected little so was unlikely to have been unduly disappointed by his bride. He was careful to mask his true feelings and at all times he treated her with the utmost respect and courtesy. His Spanish attendants, however, did not trouble to conceal the truth in their correspondence.
‘The Queen is a very good creature,’ Ruy Gomez began tactfully in a letter to the Emperor’s Spanish secretary, Francisco de Eraso, ‘though rather older than we had been told. But His Highness is so tactful and attentive to her that I am sure they will be very happy.’ On further reflection, he could not resist adding: ‘To speak frankly with you, it will take a great God to drink this cup … the best of it is that the King fully realized that the marriage was concluded for no fleshly consideration, but in order to remedy the disorders of the kingdom and to preserve the Low Countries.’
Another of Philip’s gentlemen wrote: ‘The Queen, however, is not at all beautiful: small, and rather flabby than fat, she is of white complexion and fair, and has no eyebrows. She is a perfect saint, and dresses badly.’ Gomez was of the opinion that ‘if she dressed in our fashions she would not look so old and flabby’. Nor was he impressed by her abilities, commenting witheringly: ‘The Queen is a good soul, but not as able as we were led to suppose – I mean as a stateswoman.’
She was already lavishing presents on her bridegroom. The day after their meeting she sent ‘her tailor with two suits, one of rich brocade adorned with gold thread, pearls and diamond buttons, the other of crimson brocade’. Mary was never overly generous, however, and it is significant that she gave her husband no lands in England, as a king always did his consort. Philip therefore had no personal patrimony in the country and no English income. Perhaps Mary thought that he was sufficiently rich without the need for English estates; on the other hand, she might not have wanted him to establish an affinity – a following derived from landed property – as she had had when she was a magnate in East Anglia during her brother’s reign. Certainly, Philip’s interests in England could only be served by protecting his wife’s interests.
Whether it was an oversight or a calculated omission on Mary’s part, it meant that Philip had to finance the very considerable outlay of pensions, rewards and bribes – to establish his influence and keep the English nobility onside – from his Spanish revenues. As Ruy Gomez ruefully remarked: ‘Interest is a powerful motive in all countries, but nowhere as powerful as it is here, where nothing is well done unless it brings money, a commodity of which we have so little that, if the English find out how hard up we are, I doubt whether we shall escape with our lives.’ As Philip was to find, the English happily took his money, but would do little to repay him when he looked for their support.
Like a queen consort, Philip was provided with a household, which was paid for by Mary as an augmentation of the royal household. There was some ill feeling because Philip had brought his own complete household and ended up paying for his own and subsidizing the second. He used Spaniards almost exclusively in his Privy Chamber, and the English for the outer chamber and below stairs. An English secretary was provided to act as interpreter, but seems to have been largely ignored. Philip’s Spanish attendants were affronted when they saw Englishmen standing behind Philip’s chair when he dined in state. As Mary was already installed in the king’s side, Philip was to be lodged in the queen consort’s side at each of the royal palaces.
On his wedding day, Philip ‘went forth with a brave following of grandees and gentlemen of his court, so magnificently attired that neither his Majesty’s nor his Highness’s court ever saw the like’, one of them reported to the Emperor’s secretary, ‘such was the display of rich garments and chains, each one finer than the last’. Philip was wearing a doublet and hose of white leather embroidered with silver and a French mantle, of ‘drawn and fluted gold, very richly bestrewn with precious stones and pearls and a very rich sword of gold, black velvet cap with white feathers and a necklace [which] was sent him by the Emperor’. Mary had provided Philip’s mantle and wore a gown of matching material in the French style with a very long train, the sleeves elaborately worked with gold and enriched with pearls and diamonds, and a kirtle of white satin enriched with silver. A Spaniard noted approvingly that ‘she had her hair dressed after our fashion with its chaperon of black velvet bestrewn with pearls which looked very pretty’, while on her breast she wore the big table diamond that Philip sent at the time of their betrothal.
Just as her mother had done when she married Prince Arthur in 1501, Mary walked the whole distance from the cathedral’s west door to the steps of the sanctuary on an elevated walkway. Perhaps now she would cement the alliance between England and Spain that her grandparents had so desired at that time. Symbolically, she was given away ‘in the name of the whole realm’ by the Marquis of Winchester and the Earls of Derby, Bedford and Pembroke. Although she was ablaze with jewels, she chose as her wedding ring a simple gold band, since ‘her desire was to be married as maidens were married in the old time.’ She would also promise ‘to be bonny and buxom [willing], in bed and at board’.
Mary’s Lord Chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, the chief of the five bishops present, confirmed that Philip had ratified the marriage treaty in Spain and held it up without reading it. The previous evening news had arrived that the Emperor had bestowed on his son the kingdom of Naples, so that Mary found to her delight that she was marrying a king rather than a mere prince. When the moment came for Philip to place the gold coins representing his worldly goods on the Bible, Mary scooped them up with a smile and handed them to her kinswoman Lady Margaret Clifford, who was holding her purse.
After the Mass, the ‘King went up to the altar to receive the kiss of peace, which the Bishop gave him on his cheek, after the English custom, and then went to kiss the Queen, to whom he bowed low’, one of his Spanish attendants observed. ‘All the while, for an hour, she remained with her eyes fixed on the Sacrament. She is a saintly woman.’
The herald proclaimed Philip King of England and read out the couple’s royal style and titles: ‘Philip and Marie, by the grace of God king and queen of England, France, Naples, Jerusalem, and Ireland, defenders of the faith, princes of Spain and Sicily, archdukes of Austria, dukes of Milan, Burgundy and Brabant, counts of Habsburg, Flanders and Tyrol’. Then, ‘to the sound of great rejoicing of the people, the blare of trumpets and other music’, they walked hand in hand to the palace under a canopy of crimson velvet embroidered with gold, accompanied by their entourages. The Earl of Pembroke carried a second Sword of State before Philip as king.
At the wedding feast, the couple shared a table with Bishop Gardiner. It is significant that Mary sat on the right, in a superior chair to Philip’s, and that she ate off gold, while her husband had to make do with silver plate. The ambassadors and grandees shared another table, while the various Spanish and English gentlemen took up several others. The Queen’s ladies had their own table. Afterwards, the company proceeded to another hall, where Philip and Mary danced together ‘after the German fashion’. It was an awkward gathering as the two nations did not know each other’s dances and the Spaniards were not sure what to make of the English ladies. ‘They are neither beautiful nor graceful when dancing, and their dances only consist in strutting or trotting about,’ one complained. Neither understood the other’s language, and only a few of the English ladies spoke Latin. The party was over by nine. Curiously, the bridal couple took supper separately in their own quarters.
Bishop Gardiner blessed the marriage bed and left the couple alone, still in their finery. A discreet veil has been drawn over the rest of the proceedings. ‘What happened that night only they know,’ one of the Spaniards recorded. ‘If they give us a son, our joy will be complete.’ Mary had been brought up to embrace chastity and had continued in that way of life; she was so innocent that she did not know the meaning of the word ‘whore’ or understand a risqué joke. Her apprehension at thirty-eight, having her first sexual experience with a younger man she barely knew, can be imagined.
The next morning when Philip’s Spanish entourage noisily came to the bedchamber to congratulate the couple, they found the way barred by Mary’s shocked ladies, who told them that it was not the custom for queens of England to be seen on the day following their marriage night, but to spend it alone in private. Philip was not there anyway, having risen at seven and been at his desk for hours. He would dine alone in public. ‘This match will have been a fine business if the Queen does not have a child,’ one of Philip’s disgruntled attendants concluded, ‘and I am sure she will not.’
Philip, it seemed, was handling the situation with some sensitivity, as his confidant Ruy Gomez was soon reporting: ‘He treats the Queen very kindly, and well knows how to pass over the fact that she is no good from the point of view of fleshly sensuality. He makes her so happy that the other day when they were alone she almost talked love-talk to him, and he replied in the same vein.’
The couple slowly made their way to London, stopping at various great houses to hunt, until they arrived at Southwark, prior to Philip’s official entry into the capital. The rotting body parts of the victims of Wyatt’s defeat were hastily removed and much care had been taken with the pageantry. Gardiner was furious to see a tableau depicting Henry VIII holding a Bible with the words ‘Verbum Dei’ prominently displayed. He ordered the painter to scratch them out and substitute a pair of gloves. Another tableau emphasized Philip’s Lancastrian ancestry and his double descent from the legitimate offspring of John of Gaunt, son of Edward III. Not only did Philip, with his fair colouring, look reassuringly English, but this tableau sought to impress upon the people that he was almost an English prince.
The first impression Philip made on the English was unexpectedly favourable, thanks to the careful coaching of his father and Renard. He was to make an honest effort to embrace English customs, even to dining in public – more often than Mary did – and drinking beer, which the English did to excess. Under the surface cordiality, however, Philip was almost as unfitted for the task of governing England as his wife. His stiff dignity, notorious linguistic limitations, his distaste for the macho physical sports so dear to the English, and his narrow Spanish patriotism precluded his winning the hearts of the people, just as the same lack of warmth and engagement was alienating him from his subjects in the Low Countries.
Like Mary, Philip had no image of himself. He lacked charisma and a sense of showmanship. The official entry into London was his opportunity to bond with the crowd and he fluffed it. He remained mute and unresponsive; there was no repartee, no friendly badinage, no overt show of appreciation. The type of reciprocal gesture that the English expect of their sovereigns simply was not forthcoming. To make matters worse, English xenophobia was finding a ready target in his entourage. ‘The English hate us Spaniards worse than they hate the Devil and treat us accordingly,’ one of them wrote home. Brawls and robberies were frequent and the Spaniards found themselves given the worst lodgings and ripped off into the bargain.
In mid September, Mary’s joy was complete when her physicians told her that she was pregnant. She had missed her period and was experiencing nausea in the mornings and changes in her breasts. Renard was one of the first to know, reporting to the Emperor: ‘If it is true everything will calm down and go smoothly here … I have already caused a rumour to be started for the purpose of keeping the malcontents within bounds.’ An heir would secure the regime and discourage its opponents. Perhaps Parliament would approve Philip’s coronation and further religious legislation would be carried on a wave of sympathy for a queen who was to become a mother.
It seemed to Mary that God had wrought this miracle as a reward for her fidelity to the Catholic cause. She was not alone in this assumption. As one of Philip’s nobles wrote to Charles’s close adviser, the Bishop of Arras:
The Queen is with child. I have personal reason to believe it, as I have noticed her feeling sick, besides which her doctor has given me positive assurance … The Queen was saved and preserved through many great dangers and raised to the throne almost by a miracle, and for the peace and good of the kingdom it was ardently to be hoped that she might bear children to establish and make safe the success of the undertaking to which she has set her hand, namely the restoration of the Catholic religion and faith.
Right on cue, Cardinal Reginald Pole wrote a long letter to Philip, begging for admittance in order to carry out his mission in England at last: ‘A year has passed since I began to knock at the door of the royal house and none has opened to me … Now, what shall I say of Mary, the Queen? I know she rejoices, but I also know that she fears; for did she not, she would not so long have delayed to open.’
Renard had already warned the Emperor that the time was not ripe for a full restoration of Catholicism. ‘Affairs are not settled here yet, and the King has only been a few days [six weeks] in the realm. The Spaniards are hated, as I have seen in the past and expect to see in the future … disagreeable incidents are of daily occurrence.’ Renard, a native of the Franche-Comté, disliked Spanish hauteur just as much as the English did.
In the first week of November Renard was convinced that Mary’s pregnancy was real. ‘There is no doubt that the Queen is with child, for her stomach clearly shows it and her dresses no longer fit her.’ One of Philip’s nobles reported that ‘she is fatter and has a better colour than when she was married, a sign that she is happier, and indeed she is said to be very happy.’
Weight gain and swelling of the abdomen are signs of a phantom pregnancy, just as much as a real one. Had Mary’s physician had the knowledge or been allowed to examine her properly, he might have noted that the enlargement of her abdomen was not accompanied by the effacement of her umbilicus.
In spite of Renard’s grim prognostications, on 24 November 1554 the aesthetic figure of Cardinal Pole, the papal legate, arrived at Whitehall by boat, dramatically holding the cross before him. He was greeted by Philip at the riverside. Inside, Mary welcomed her long-exiled cousin, kneeling for his blessing. Significantly, he addressed her in the opening words of the Ave Maria: ‘Hail, Mary, thou art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women.’
The suggestion was all it took for Mary to send him a message, after he had retired to Lambeth Palace later in the day, that she had felt the child in her womb quicken. There was an obvious parallel with St Elizabeth when she greeted her pregnant cousin: the child she was carrying, St John the Baptist, had leapt in recognition of the Christ Child in the Virgin Mary’s womb. Mary the Queen’s leapt in anticipation of her country’s restoration to the faith.
It is not untypical for a woman to experience foetal movements during a phantom pregnancy, but of course there are no foetal heart sounds.
Pole took up the analogy four days later when, in the presence of Philip and Mary, he addressed Parliament, inviting it to annul the laws and statutes against the Pope’s and the Church’s authority as being unreasonable and contrary to established truth. The Pope and the apostolic see loved the kingdom of England, he told them, careful to play on the English nationalism so successfully awakened by Henry VIII. The people had been in error, but thanks to Mary and her marriage, all would now be well: ‘And see how miraculously God of his goodness preserved her highness, contrary to the expectation of man, that when numbers conspired against her, and policies were devised to disinherit her, and armed power prepared to destroy her, yet she being a virgin, helpless, naked and unarmed, prevailed.’
In April 1555 a day of thanksgiving for the Queen’s pregnancy was held, with the bells of St Paul’s and London’s forty-four parish churches ringing in celebration. Her confinement was expected in mid June. At Hampton Court she went through the formal ceremony of taking to her chamber, following the guidelines for the delivery of a queen laid down by her great-grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, in 1494:
If it please the Queene to take her chamber, shee shall bee brought thither with the lords and ladies of estate, and brought into the chapel or church there … then to come into the great chamber and take spice and wine under the cloth of estate; then two of the greatest estates to lead her into her chamber where shee shall be delivered; and they then to take their leave of the Queene. Then all the ladies and gentlewomen to goe in with her; and after that noe man to come into the chamber where she shall bee delivered, save women.
While she awaited her confinement a queen would effectively be sealed off from the world, in a darkened chamber. But Mary, the first queen regnant, ignored protocol by appearing at the window on St George’s Day, 23 April, to watch Philip lead the celebrations for the patron saint of the Knights of the Garter. So proud was she of her pregnancy that she positioned herself sideways at the window, so that eyewitnesses could see her swollen belly.
A vast gathering of ladies had converged on Hampton Court to await the birth, so that the palace was full to overflowing. The most important lady of all, however, after the Queen, was Elizabeth. Sure of her triumph over her bastard half-sister, Mary now freed Elizabeth from detention at Woodstock, where she had been sent after the Wyatt rebellion and a spell in the Tower, and brought her to court, to be present as a witness at the birth of the child who would supplant her as heir to the throne. Elizabeth arrived quietly, only being admitted to see her sister and brother-in-law once or twice ‘by private stairs’. It was Philip’s first glimpse of the red-headed Princess and he liked what he saw; she presented such a dazzling contrast to his thin-lipped, ageing wife. The Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Michiel, was already speculating that if Mary died, Philip would marry her sister. Certainly, if Mary died, the possession of Elizabeth’s person would guarantee Philip’s safety until he could leave the country.
On the last day of April, a report was circulated in London that the Queen had been delivered of a son in the early hours. No matter how unpopular the regime was becoming now that persecution of Protestants had begun in earnest, the birth of a male heir to the throne threw the people into a frenzy of rejoicing. In London shops were shut, church bells rung, tables hauled out to the street and spread with wine and meats for all to enjoy, and bonfires lit. By afternoon, people returning from Hampton Court denied the report and the mood swiftly swung to disappointment.
A month later the child had still not arrived. ‘Everything in this kingdom depends on the Queen’s safe deliverance,’ Renard wrote in agitation. Apparently, Mary’s ‘doctors and ladies have proved to be out in their calculations by about two months, and it now appears that she will not be delivered before eight or ten days from now,’ he reported to Charles on 24 June. Philip’s patience was wearing thin. Probably he already suspected that there was no baby. A child would have justified his presence; otherwise he regarded his sojourn in England as a distasteful and fruitless exile. He was so desperate to leave that, according to Michiel, ‘one single hour’s delay in this delivery seems to him a thousand years.’ As ever, Renard imagined conspiracies: ‘It is almost incredible how 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, that a suppositious child is going to be presented as hers, and that if a suitable one had been found this would already have been done.’
And yet Mary continued to show every sign of being pregnant. Her girth had increased, consistent with a pregnancy of nine months, and her breasts were swollen and tender and secreting milk. She refused categorically, with characteristic stubbornness, to consider the possibility that she might not be pregnant or to undertake procedures that might clarify the situation. Pandering to her every whim, the doctors and her ladies baulked at telling her what they now suspected: that she was not pregnant at all. Only Frideswide Strelly, who had been a faithful attendant for many years, had had the courage to tell Mary all along that she was not pregnant, that there must be another explanation for her symptoms. The French ambassador was chortling with glee, because he had heard that Mary was able to drop down on a cushion and sit for hours with her knees pressed up against her chest, as no pregnant woman could do. Elizabeth, meanwhile, watched and waited, torn between pity for her sister and concern at the humiliating position into which the farce of her pregnancy was placing the monarchy.
As late as the third week in July the Venetian ambassador was reporting that the delivery ‘is now unaccountably delayed’. A consultation had been held in which the physicians had cravenly suggested that they had miscalculated by two or three months. A woman who had given birth to live triplets at forty was brought to the palace to assure the Queen that she too could expect a happy delivery.
By now, Hampton Court stank. The unusually long occupancy of the royal household and the additional hangers-on who had taken up residence at the Queen’s expense to be present at the birth, living in crowded conditions with sixteenth-century sanitary arrangements, had had the inevitable result. After one or two episodes of ‘false labour’, Mary’s abdomen, which had had the appearance of full-term pregnancy, began to diminish. The signs of pregnancy disappeared and she was forced to concede that there would be no child after all. The baby’s cradle which had stood in readiness with the rockers and layette were discreetly removed.
On 5 August Michiel reported that Philip and Mary had quietly slipped away from Hampton Court to Oatlands, where she had resumed her regal duties. No official announcement was made. Michiel was speculating that ‘the pregnancy will end in wind rather than anything else’, but in order to keep ‘the populace in hope, and consequently in check’, nothing would be said to disabuse them for the time being.
It was a classic case of pseudocyesis – false, phantom or hysterical pregnancy – the most public in history. The pain, the humiliation and embarrassment can only be imagined. Mary immediately plunged into depression, as was typical in the wake of a phantom pregnancy. Poor Mary, she had ended up in the same dynastic marriage trap as her mother, under intense pressure to bear a son. For all her show of defiance, she had re-enacted her father’s chief obsessions, believing that she was valueless unless she could produce a male heir, and going to frantic lengths to convince herself and her people that she was capable of doing so. She shared her father’s belief that her failure to have a son was a demonstration of deep inadequacy and suffered the same acute anguish. It seemed that God had withdrawn His favour from her, just as her father had imagined that He looked with disfavour on his incestuous marriage to Mary’s mother.
A phantom pregnancy can be rooted in fear of pregnancy, but is more commonly encountered when the desire for pregnancy becomes an obsession. Some psychiatrists believe that it provides compensation for a real or imagined loss, that the condition stems from early unresolved loss of a parent. The sudden separation from a parent in childhood – such as Mary’s from her mother when the latter was banished from court and sent to a place of confinement, and the abrupt termination of her father’s love about the same time – can lead later to separation anxiety from a loved one and a desperate need to secure that source or object of affection. Perhaps Philip, a member of her mother’s family, reawakened in Mary long-suppressed feelings of maternal loss, especially after they were sexually intimate. She probably believed that a child would bring her husband closer to her and, indeed, during her ‘pregnancy’ he had been most attentive.
Philip was all the more furious, therefore, when it proved false. His wife had made a laughing stock of him in front of all Europe. He knew now that there would never be a child by Mary and there was nothing to keep him in England. He left in disgust and irritation, adding to her loss of self-esteem. ‘As may be imagined with regard to a person extraordinarily in love,’ Michiel noted sympathetically, ‘the Queen remains disconsolate, though she conceals it as much as she can, and from what I hear mourns the more when alone and supposing herself invisible to any of her attendants.’
On the day of his departure, the Queen saw Philip to the top of the stairs at Greenwich, where he kissed all her ladies and the Spanish noblemen kissed her hand. She maintained her dignity and gravity while in public, but on returning to her apartments overlooking the river, not thinking herself observed, ‘she gave free vent to her grief by a flood of tears, nor did she once quit the window until she had not only seen the King embark and depart, but remained looking after him as long as he was in sight.’