Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [128]
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.10
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.”11 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.”12 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.”13
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.”14 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.”15
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:
Although no one dares to proclaim it … the fact is that the move has been made in order no longer to keep the people of England in suspense about this delivery, by the constant and public processions which were made, and by the Queen’s remaining so many days in retirement … to the prejudice of her subjects; as not only did she transact no business, but would scarcely allow herself to be seen by any of her ladies who, in expectation of childbirth, especially the gentlewomen and the chief female nobility [who] had flocked to court from all parts of the kingdom in such very great number, all living at the cost of her Majesty.16
There had been no baby. Like her mother forty years before, Mary had been deluded into believing that she was pregnant. Wise after the event, Michieli described how “from her youth” she had suffered from the “retention of menstrual fluids” and