Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [127]
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.17 “How fair, how beautiful and great a prince it was as the like had not been seen,” as one preacher noted.18 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.19 By the evening of May 2, the imperial court was “rejoicing out of measure” to hear of the prince’s birth.
CHAPTER 54
HER MAJESTY’S BELLY
THE 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:
Everything is in suspense, and dependant on the result of this delivery, which, according to the opinion of the physicians, unless it takes place at this new phase of the moon two days hence, may be protracted beyond the full [moon] and [its] occultation, on the 4th or 5th of next month; her Majesty’s belly having greatly declined, which is said yet more to indicate the approaching term.1
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.”2 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.”3 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.”4
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.”5 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.6 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.7
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.”8 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,