Carolyn Meyer - Mary, Bloody Mary

I needed to learn more about this Anne Boleyn.

Y ou have nothing to worry about for the present,” Salisbury assured me as we commenced our journey back to Ludlow on a glowing May morning. Dew sparkled on the hedgerows, and the air was sweet with the smell of blossoms. “Before he sailed for France, King Francis complained to your father that “the princess is so small and frail that no marriage is possible for three years, until she is at least fourteen.’”

“‘Small and frail’ — is that what he said?” I cried. “So I do not please him after all! Why did he not say this before we pledged our troth?”

“You please him well, madam. He simply worries that you may not be robust enough to bear children. But this need not concern you. My prayers are answered: you will have plenty of time to grow to womanhood. And who knows what may happen?”

“I shall never marry!” I moaned. “I hate the men my father chooses for me! And if I do not satisfy a pompous old windbag like Francis, then whom can I satisfy?”

This was my third betrothal.

The first had been to the dauphin, the eldest son of this same King Francis, and took place when I was barely two years old and still lived with both my parents at Greenwich Palace. Naturally I could remember almost nothing of that event, but Salisbury had often described the occasion for me.

All I could recall was a jowly hugeness in scarlet satin looming over me — Cardinal Wolsey, that bloated friend of my father’s, who placed a ring with a sparkling stone as big as a wren’s egg on my finger. Wolsey, with his long, yellow teeth and cold, grey eyes, had always frightened me.

I could also remember gazing up at my father and smiling at him, and my father smiling back. How I adored him! How I loved being carried proudly on the king’s shoulder around the Great Hall of the palace as he showed me off or fed me dainty bits from his own plate while my mother frowned in disapproval.

Then, four years later when I was nearly six, my father decided that marrying me to the dauphin would not be in England’s best interests — or in his own. The betrothal was broken.

My mother explained, and Salisbury explained, that from the time of my birth — I was my parents’ only living child — my father had pondered the choice of a husband for me. Not a husband, even, but the promise of a husband. Many promises might be made and broken before there was a real wedding.

“A daughter is not as highly prized as a son would be,” Salisbury said, “but a princess is still precious. She is a valuable tool for forging alliances between kings and kingdoms. You must not concern yourself with it, Mary, because you have no say in any of it. Your mother, the queen, had no say when her own father, King Ferdinand of Spain, betrothed her to Prince Henry. These are the affairs of men, and especially of father’s, and most particularly of kings.”

I loudly protested this idea. My father adored me! Surely my happiness would be most important to him!

“Your happiness has nothing to do with it, madam,” Salisbury said in her infuriatingly calm way.

To my sorrow I learned that Salisbury was right: my happiness did not matter — ever.

After the dauphin, King Henry had next decided on my Spanish cousin, Charles, the son of my mother’s sister. I was just six, and Charles was a man of twenty-two with the title of Holy Roman emperor.

When I was betrothed to Charles, a magnificent procession made its way from London to Dover, on the coast. My mother and I rode in our royal litter, and crowds of people lined the route, cheering and tossing their caps in the air. At Dover we met Charles.

Charles had sailed from Spain with a fleet of one hundred and eighty ships and arrived in Dover accompanied by two thousand courtiers and servants. When I finally saw Charles, his appearance surprised and pleased me. He was clothed in a peculiar manner, so different from my father’s crimson velvet outfit trimmed in fur. Charles wore black velvet with no ornament but a chain of gold around his neck. He had kind, intelligent eyes. And he praised me when I played a little song for him upon my virginals. I liked him, although he was sixteen years older than I was.

King Henry owned numerous palaces and manor houses, and he had prepared Bridewell, one of the most beautiful, for the emperor’s visit. During his stay of several months, Charles began to teach me to play chess.

Then the visit was over. On the day before he sailed away, Charles kissed my hand and promised to return to claim me as his wife when I reached the marriageable age of twelve.

But one day, more than a year after Charles’s departure, a page dressed in the king’s green and white satin livery came to my chambers with a message. I broke the wax seal and read it: the king wished to see me at once. He had signed it, as he always did, Henricus Rex — Henry the King.