Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [151]
WITHIN HOURS of Mary’s death, the preparation of her body began. Her heart and bowels were removed, her belly opened and filled with preservative herbs and spices. She was placed in a lead coffin and then a wooden chest. For the next three weeks, her corpse lay in state in the Privy Chamber of St. James’s Palace, which had been hung with black cloth and adorned with the royal arms. The coffin stood upon trestles, covered with a pall of rich cloth of gold. Every day her gentlewomen prayed about the coffin and heard Masses, and through the night her hearse was illuminated with burning candles.
In life Mary had received visitors in her Privy Chamber under the cloth of estate; now, in death, mourners looked upon her body and paid their respects. Though dead, Mary would remain in possession of sovereignty until her burial some weeks later. As was customary during the weeks of transition, a lifelike, life-size wooden effigy dressed in the coronation robes and bearing the orb and scepter acted in place of the dead monarch. A fifteenth-century guide, “What Shall Be Done on the Demise of a King Anointed,” gave instructions to “make an image like him clothed in a surcoat, with a mantel of estate, the laces goodly lying on his belly, his sceptre in his hand, and a crown on his head, and so carry him in a chair open, with lights and banners, accompanied with lords and estates as the council can best devise.”6 Around it the routines of court life continued. As Feria noted, “the house is served exactly as it was before.” Food was placed on the royal table; gentleman ushers officiated with their white wands; guards stood at doors of the chamber within which sat the five-foot-five wooden figure.7
The marquess of Winchester, the most senior of Mary’s surviving councillors, was put in charge of the funeral arrangements. The ceremony, conducted according to “King Henry VIII’s funeral book,” was to be traditional, Catholic, and expensive.8 Preparations continued for nearly a month as the dead queen remained in state at St. James’s. Finally, on December 10, with the arrangements made and mourning clothes and funeral accoutrements prepared, a solemn procession of black-robed heralds, lords, ladies, and household officers entered the privy apartments. Mary’s coffin was held aloft and carried to the Chapel Royal, where the high altar had been trimmed with purple velvet. At three in the afternoon lords and ladies assembled in the Presence Chamber and Great Chamber along with the officers of the household. The bishops went into the Presence Chamber, censed the coffin, and said prayers. The coffin, borne under a canopy of purple velvet, was then taken up by eight gentlemen and in ordered procession made its way to the chapel.
Three days later, the funeral cortege made its final journey to Westminster Abbey. Banners of the English royal arms led the king and queen’s household officers, who, dressed in black, marched two by two in rank order. Behind them five heralds bore the masculine regalia of sovereignty—the banner of English royal arms embroidered with gold, the royal helmet, the royal shield, the royal sword, and the coat of armor, as if a king were being buried. A wheeled chariot bearing Mary’s coffin followed, accompanied by the painted effigy “adorned with crimson velvet and her crown on her head, her sceptre in her hand and many goodly rings on her fingers.”9 At each corner of the funeral chariot a herald on horseback bore a banner of the four English royal saints. After the chariot followed the chief mourner, Margaret Douglas, countess of Lennox, and Mary’s ladies-in-waiting, all in black robes, attending her in death as they had in life.10
The procession halted at the great door of the abbey, where it was met by four bishops and an abbot, who censed the coffin before it and the effigy were taken inside. There Mary’s body laid overnight in the hearse that had been specially built to receive it, watched over by a hundred gentlemen in mourning clothes and the queen’s guard, each holding burning