A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [110]
This extraordinary cataract of events, precipitated by a king’s yearning for a male heir, led, ironically, to two royal heiresses, each of whom reigned memorably. Catherine’s daughter, Mary, survived her mother’s humiliation and briefly visited a terrible retribution upon those she held responsible for it. The fears of Charles V were at first realized; after the divorce Mary was declared illegitimate. Later, however, after the birth of a male heir to Henry—the future Edward VI, his son by Jane Seymour—Parliament relented, passing a complex act which, among other things, restored Catherine’s daughter to the royal line of succession and permitted her to occupy the throne for five years, beginning in 1553, as Queen Mary I.
Mary was not a beloved sovereign, nor did she mean to be. Popularity was not among her priorities. Juan Luis Vives had done his work well; she had never renounced her Roman Catholicism, nor—understandably—had she forgiven the zealous new Protestants who had refused to let her visit her mother, even when Catherine had lain on her deathbed. As sovereign she swore to turn back the clock, wiping out the Reformation. It was impossible, but she tried very hard. As her chief adviser she appointed Reginald Cardinal Pole, an English cardinal who had remained loyal to Rome, and whom the pope designated as Mary’s papal legate. Pole shared her bitterness. He had quarreled with Henry over the divorce and predicted, in the king’s presence, that he would be consigned to hell.
That had been lèse majesté with a vengeance, and it had been swiftly punished. The angry sovereign had set a price on Pole’s head; the cardinal had fled for his life, eluding capture but suffering nevertheless, for during his fugitive years both his mother and brother were beheaded. Now, at his urging, Mary made her attempt to restore papal supremacy over England. The penal laws against heresy were revived. On her orders, Archbishop Cranmer was burned at the stake—other famous martyrs were Bishops Ridley and Latimer—and Pole was then consecrated in Canterbury as Cranmer’s successor. Over three hundred Englishmen, whose only crime had been following Mary’s father out of the Roman Church, were also executed. Perhaps her most significant achievement, which she shared with Henry, was her demonstration that England could be just as barbaric as the rest of sixteenth-century Europe. Even today she is remembered as Bloody Mary.
THE IMMORTAL Maid of Orleans still dominated memories of the prior century. But now the sixteenth was more than half gone and it had produced no woman to match her; indeed, no heroines at all. Then, late in its sixth decade, irony intervened to produce a woman who would rank with the greatest sovereigns in English history, giving her name to a new age which would redeem the squalor of the old. She was the daughter of the disgraced Anne Boleyn, who had lain in Anne’s womb, awaiting birth, during the coronation Sir Thomas More had ignored. On the day of her birth, she had been declared illegitimate by the Vatican. In the wake of her mother’s execution the archbishop of Canterbury—after ruling that Anne had, in fact, been married to Percy at the time of her royal wedding and had thus been bigamous as well as adulterous and incestuous—had concurred with Rome, pronouncing the child a bastard.
Anne having been formally declared a common slut—thus placing her far beneath Catherine, whose status as a divorcée was relatively respectable—the royal solicitors concluded that Henry’s second marriage had had no legal status whatever. Since it had never occurred, the three-year-old waif who had been its only issue had no legal existence. Like her half-sister, however, and indeed because of her, Anne