Mary Tudor (49 page)

A series of letters announcing the baby’s safe arrival was prepared and signed by Mary herself, ready to be sent to the pope, the emperor, the king of France, the doge of Venice, and the queen regent of Flanders. In most, the sex of the child and date of delivery were left blank to be filled in by clerks at the last minute, but the letter to the pope specifically informed “his Holiness” of the “happy delivery of a prince.”
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Because of the dangers of childbirth, provision was made in the event of Mary’s death for Philip to be made guardian of the realm during the minority of the expected child. He would still be confined within the limits of the marriage treaty and could not call Parliament, declare war, or arrange for a marriage of his heir without the consent of a council of eighteen peers.
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The final bill of regency justified the need to avoid the “dolorous experience of the inconstant government during the time of the reign of the late King Edward the sixth.” For this and other reasons, the king was to have charge of “the rule, order, education and government” of any children and the “rule, order and government (under such issue or issues)” of the realm during the minority of the heir.
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Finally, at the beginning of April, the king and queen moved to Hampton Court in advance of Mary’s confinement. Mary preferred Windsor, but it was considered too far from London for her to be secure. At Hampton Court she would have the protection of her full guard and have closer access to the troops from the city and the arsenal at the Tower.

Two weeks later, Mary underwent the usual ceremonies in advance of “the lying-in” and withdrew to her chamber with her ladies and gentlewomen. On Saint George’s Day, April 23, she showed herself at a window of the palace as she watched Philip lead the celebrations of the Garter, in which the king, Gardiner, the lord chancellor, knights and lords, and numerous clerks and priests, dressed in copes of cloth of gold, processed with three crosses, singing “Salve Festa Dies.” As Mary looked out from her chamber she turned side-on to show off her great belly—“that a hundred did see her grace.”
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While Mary prepared for the birth, Elizabeth was summoned to court from Woodstock.
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She arrived in late April and repaired to the prince of Wales’s lodging, which had been built for her brother,
Edward. It was more than two years since the sisters had seen each other, but after arriving at court Elizabeth was kept waiting three weeks before Mary agreed to see her. Then, at ten at night, Elizabeth received her summons. With guards bearing torches, she was escorted through the garden to the privy lodging and, accompanied by Susan Clarencius, Mary’s favorite woman, was ushered into the queen’s presence.

Elizabeth knelt while Mary spoke over her, chiding her for her refusal to acknowledge her offense in Wyatt’s rebellion. “You will not confess your offence, but it stands stoutly in your truth. I pray God it may so fall out,” she told her. “If it doth not,” Elizabeth answered resolutely, “I request neither favour nor pardon at your Majesty’s hands…. I humbly beseech your Majesty to have a good opinion of me, and to think me to be your true subject, not only from the beginning hitherto, but for ever, as long as life lasteth.”
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As Mary and Elizabeth were finally reconciled, the country held its breath for the birth of its heir.

AT DAYBREAK ON
Tuesday, April 30, bells rang out the news that Mary had safely delivered. Henry Machyn wrote in his diary, “the Queen’s grace was delivered of a prince, and so there was great ringing through London and divers places, Te Deum laudamus sung.”
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Soon after midnight, “with little pain and no danger,” she had given birth to a son.

The news was received with unadulterated joy. Shops were shut as people rushed to church. Bonfires were lit and tables of food and wine set up as spontaneous street parties erupted all over London.
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“How fair, how beautiful and great a prince it was as the like had not been seen,” as one preacher noted.
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Reports quickly spread to courts across Europe. Thomas Gresham, the English ambassador to the Netherlands, reported how news had reached Antwerp that “the Queen was brought to bed of a young Prince on 30th April,” and the city’s great bell was rung in celebration. The English merchants fired their guns across the water, and the regent sent the English mariners 100 crowns with which to celebrate the news.
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By the evening of May 2, the imperial court was “rejoicing out of measure” to hear of the prince’s birth.

T
HE 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:

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.”
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Renard 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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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: