Bloody Mary by Carolly Erickson Read Free Book Online Page A

choosing. It was well known that her choice would fall on Charles Brandon, Henry’s intimate companion, and when soon after the wedding Louis died, it was Brandon who was sent to France to console the widow. While he was there he and Mary were secretly married. Henry was furious, but was too fond of both Mary and Brandon not to let them return to court. His revenge was to seize Mary’s plate and jewels, and to force her to repay the cost of her expensive French wedding; she was still paying off the debt at the enormous rate of a thousand pounds a year when she died.
    Princess Mary’s English and Spanish ancestry was rich in enterprising, combative, courageous and independent men and women. She too would carry those traits, and though raised as an Englishwoman she was also taught to honor her Spanish blood and acknowledge it proudly. She was after all cared for by a mother whose English was never really fluent, and who continued to pray in Spanish all her life. In personality and spirit Mary would most resemble her grandmother Isabella. She would show Isabella’s tenacity, her bravery, her taste for long working hours, her tendency to melancholy. Mary shared something of Isabella’s desire to purify religious belief as well, but in circumstances so different from those of fifteenth-century Spain as to defy comparison. Had she lived amid the archaic honor, piety and religious idealism of medieval Spain Mary might have been a heroine as splendid as her grandmother; amid the crisis-ridden climate of treachery, doubt and religious revolution of Tudor England she was to find obstacles even Isabella could not have conquered.

III
    I
pray daily ther paynys to asswage
    And sone to sende where they faynest wolde be,
    Withoute disease or adversyte.
    In the winter of 1517 a great frost struck London in the middle of January. The streets were slick with ice, and the Thames froze solid. Men with business at the courts had to travel from London to Westminster on foot instead of by boat, and when the river showed no signs of a thaw the townspeople cleared a “common way,” or high road, in the ice. The weather was no better in February. Giustinian, who had to go to Greenwich to see the king, complained that going by boat was still impossible and that the “frozen and dangerous roads” made travel of any kind hazardous. The frost came in the midst of a great drought. No rain fell in southeastern England from September to the following May. The lush green pastures turned brown, small streams dried up and farmers had to drive their cattle three or four miles to water. 1 And soon after the first long-awaited rains fell, the sweating sickness broke out all over London.
    The sweat, now thought to have been influenza with pulmonary complications, struck its victims “with a great sweating and stinking, with redness of the face and of all the body, and a continual thirst, with a great heat and headache.” A pimply rash appeared on the head or body, sometimes accompanied by pricks of blood, and almost before treatment could be applied the sufferer was dead. It was the pitiless suddenness of death from the sweat that horrified survivors. People fell ill on the street, at their work, at mass; they rushed home to collapse and die. A doctor who studied the disease closely wrote that it killed “some in opening their windows, some in playing with children in their street doors; some in one hour, many in two, it destroyed; . . . some in sleep, some in wake, somein mirth, some in care, some fasting and some full, some busy and some idle; and in one house sometime three, sometime five, sometime more, sometime all.” 2 Often there was no time to make a will, or to send for the priest, and those who died either intestate or without the last rites were denied burial in consecrated ground.
    All who could fled the city at once, but most had to stay—to bury their dead, to guard their goods, to earn their livings. And before long there was nowhere to