On November 17, 1558, Queen Mary I died. She was the first woman to hold the throne in her own right in England’s history.
After a golden childhood in which she was the cherished “pearl” of her father’s kingdom, Mary’s life was thrown into misery when Anne Boleyn entered the picture and her father sought an annulment from her mother.
Mary refused to accept her father’s position on the divorce, or as head of the church. She believed denying the authority of the pope was tantamount to denying Catholicism as a whole, and accepting that her parents had never been married was a lie that would damn her soul.
Mary was exiled from court, separated from her beloved mother and refused permission to see her, even as Katharine lay dying. She eventually broke down under her father’s relentless bullying and submitted to him, but their relationship was never the same.
When she came to the throne, Mary saw it as a chance to set everything right again and restore England to the kingdom she remembered from her childhood.
She expected her own marriage to be as happy as she remembered her parents’ union as being before Henry was “lured away” by Anne. Mary was half in love with her husband before she even met him.
Philip of Spain was polite and courteous to his wife, but she was much older, and he wasn’t interested in a romantic relationship with her. He was eager to get back to his kingdom on the Continent as soon as possible.
Not long after her wedding, Mary began experiencing the symptoms of pregnancy. She stopped menstruating, her breasts leaked milk, and her stomach swelled. But in the Tudor era, there was no way of confirming pregnancy until the woman experienced the “quickening” or felt the baby move for the first time. Mary claimed she felt the child leap in her womb when she met with the cleric who’d come to England to cement the country’s return to the church. She entered her chamber to await the birth.
But no baby came. The doctors said the “unworldly” Mary must have mistaken the dates and pushed back the delivery time. And then again. And again. Still no baby came. Mary’s belly deflated slowly. It took a while before she would accept that no child was coming. Her husband, who’d been waiting impatiently for the birth, departed for his own kingdom on the continent. Mary was left to deal with her heartbreak and humiliation on her own.
Some modern physicians believe that Mary was actually suffering from ovarian cancer and a tumor was causing a release of hormones that emulated pregnancy, but it wasn’t until the modern era this was understood. For a long time, Mary’s pregnancy symptoms were said to have been psychosomatic, induced by her intense longing for a child.
Mary seems to have decided that God was displeased with the heresy she had allowed to flourish in her kingdom. She rolled back the religious reforms of her father and brother’s reigns, expecting the English people would be grateful to be taken back into the arms of the Catholic Church. She was doomed to be disappointed.
Rebellion and strife sprang up in its wake, only intensified once the burnings began.
When she was finally able to convince Phillip to return for a time, another false pregnancy ensued. Phillip departed for the Continent, this time to stay. She would never see him again.
Her nation had been plagued by famine because of years of bad harvests, and her military ventures had ended with the loss of the last English territory on the Continent, Calais. Nothing had worked out as Mary had expected.
She never fully recovered from the final “pregnancy.” She had a constant low fever, nausea, headache, blurred vision, and hair loss. Her doctors bled her daily, further weakening her. There was an influenza pandemic in the last months of 1558; she may have also caught it.
As Mary lay in her bed in St. James Palace, the halls echoed with silence. All but the most staunchly loyal members of court had abandoned her, flocking to her sister Elizabeth, who would soon wear the crown. It was something Elizabeth never forgot – how Mary had been abandoned by the fickle court as she lay on her deathbed. It was one of the reasons Elizabeth always resisted naming her heir, delaying unto the last moments of her life.
Mary slept longer and longer hours as her illness sapped her strength, and toward the end, her moments of lucidity were few. But she was able to make her will. In the end, Mary couldn’t quite bring herself to name her sister as heir, saying only that the throne should pass as the law dictated.
Mary’s closest friend, Jane Dormer, wrote an account that says Mary gave her ladies pious exhortations, and had pleasant visions of angelic little children playing around her bed and singing. Reality was likely less inspirational.
Mary was given last rites just before midnight on Wednesday, November 16, 1558 and mass was celebrated in her chamber for the last time at dawn the following morning. Afterwards, Mary fell asleep and died somewhere between five and seven AM. One account says she passed so quietly that no one noticed for a while, which is why we don’t know the exact time of her death.
The few remaining courtiers scattered, everyone hoping to get to Elizabeth first with the news. Sir Nicholas Throckmorton pulled a ring from Mary’s finger (some sources say it was her coronation ring; others say it was her betrothal ring) and took it to Elizabeth as proof of the queen’s death, but was crushed when he arrived and discovered that his news was already rendered “stale” by the arrival of the council.
Mary’s body was left with the handful of loyal household attendants who would prepare her for burial. They didn’t have undertakers in the Tudor era. It was Mary’s own household officers that embalmed her, rendering their final services to their queen. Her mother, Katharine of Aragon was embalmed by her chandler, the household officer in charge of candles and soap.
Mary was disemboweled by her surgeons and her heart, intestines, and lungs were removed. The Clerk of the Spicery and the chandlers packed the body’s cavity with spices and herbs before wrapping it in cerecloth, a wax-coated white cloth used for burial shrouds. (Agnes Strickland cites an early historian, Gregorio Leti, who claimed Mary was buried in the habit of a nun, but considering she was uxorious in the extreme, I think it’s unlikely.)
The cloth-wrapped body was enclosed in sheets of lead by the “serjeant plummer,” and then was placed inside a coffin covered in purple velvet and decorated with lace and gold gilt nails – exactly the kind of coffin that Mary would have wanted.
As was common, the organs that had been removed were buried separately. Mary’s heart was placed in a silver casket lined with velvet and buried in the Chapel Royal of St. James. Her entrails might have gone to Westminster Abbey, because this interesting tidbit is found in the Memoir of Richard Busby.
“About the beginning of the year 1670, the funeral obsequies of General Monk were celebrated previously to which a royal vault was opened in which were two urns; one appropriated to Queen Mary, the other to Queen Elizabeth. I dipped my hand into each. I took out of each a kind of glutinous red substance, somewhat resembling mortar. That of Mary only contained less moisture.”
For over twenty days, Mary lay in state inside St. James, candles flickering around her bier. Elizabeth had ordered the highest respects be paid to her sister, modeling the services on those performed for her father. With one difference, however – Mary’s rites were fully Catholic. Her ladies prayed around the clock beside her coffin, while masses were said for Mary’s soul.
On December 13, the funeral began. Mary’s coffin was placed on a magnificently bedecked hearse and drawn to Westminster Abbey. On top of the coffin lay a wooden effigy, dressed in one of Mary’s own gowns, holding a scepter and wearing a crown. Embalming being as primitive as it was, the wooden or wax effigy would lie in view for the month-long duration of the funeral instead of the actual body, so they felt it was important for it to be as lifelike as possible. The effigy still survives in Westminster.
Some sources say Elizabeth made dark hints about her displeasure if the court didn’t turn out for Mary’s funeral, so it was a parade of the highest nobles in the land.
The services were elaborate and lengthy, as Tudor royal funerals always were. Finally, after all of the ceremonies, Mary was buried in a vault in the chapel built by her grandfather, Henry VII.
All in all, this extravaganza cost over £7,662, which is the equivalent to seven million pounds today. But Elizabeth insisted upon it. Any disrespect shown to a Tudor monarch disrespected her own crown, after all.
Mary’s widowed husband, Philip II of Spain wrote to his aunt about his wife’s passing at the end of a letter describing his peace negotiations with France: “The queen, my wife, is dead. May God have received her in his glory. I felt a reasonable regret for her death. I shall miss her even on this account.”
He instructed his agent in England to represent him at the funeral and make sure to collect an extensive list of jewels he had left behind in England when he last departed. He was given back La Peregrina, the massive pearl he had given to Mary for their wedding. (It may have last been sold to an anonymous buyer at the estate sale of actress Elizabeth Taylor, but there’s a gap in the pearl’s provenance. Another pearl, the Pearl of Kuwait, claims to be the one Mary Tudor wore.)
Mary’s will specified that her mother, Katharine of Aragon, was to be exhumed from her humble tomb in Peterborough Cathedral and brought to lie beside Mary, and an honorable tomb be erected in memory of the two queens.
Despite the honor Mary paid to her mother’s memory, she had made no moves to rectify her mother’s simple burial as a princess dowager during her five-year reign. She left it to the daughter of Anne Boleyn. Did Mary really believe Elizabeth would re-bury Katharine with the honors due a queen when Elizabeth’s legitimacy rested upon the notion that Katharine was not?
The tomb was never built, but too much shouldn’t be read into that. Elizabeth seemed to have an aversion to tomb building in general. She never marked Anne Boleyn’s anonymous grave beneath the floor of St. Peter ad Vincula, nor did she build a tomb for her father, nor for her little brother, Edward VI. She didn’t even build one for herself. That fell to James I, after Elizabeth’s death.
Mary’s grave was unmarked for nearly fifty years after her death. Sources record that rubble from altars broken up during the Reformation were piled up on top of her tomb.
When Elizabeth died, she was temporarily interred with her grandfather, Henry VII until James could finish building her magnificent tomb. When it was finished 1606, James exhumed Mary and buried her within it as well.
Elizabeth’s carved marble effigy is the one that decorates the lid of the tomb, and it is her achievements inscribed in Latin on the sides, but an inscription on the lower portion of the tomb mentions Mary’s presence as well: “Partners in throne and grave, here we sleep, Elizabeth and Mary, sisters, in hope of the Resurrection.”
Perhaps Dean Stanley’s epitaph was better than any inscribed on the marble of the grand edifice in which they lay: “The long war of the English Reformation is closed in those words. The sisters are at one; the daughter of Katherine of Aragon and the daughter of Anne Boleyn rest in peace at last.”
The two coffins were placed into the same vault below the floor, Elizabeth’s coffin placed on top of Mary’s. For one last – and final – time, Mary was placed in a subordinate position to her half-sister.
