by G. J. Meyer
Mary’s perspective was of course entirely different. With Gardiner gone, dissenters were becoming increasingly bold in deploring the Spanish marriage, the reunion with Rome, and Mary’s whole regime. They accused the queen of being more Spanish than English in her loyalties and of scheming to deliver England permanently into the hands of the Hapsburgs even if she and Philip failed to produce a child. In March the authorities uncovered a plot—originally encouraged by Henry of France, though he lost interest when discovery might have jeopardized his treaty with Philip—to overthrow Mary and put Elizabeth on the throne. Though a number of the conspirators were captured and executed, their leaders (including Sir Henry Dudley, a freebooting soldier and distant cousin of John Dudley, the late and unlamented Duke of Northumberland) remained at large in France. Efforts to trace the plot down to its roots ended in frustration. Elizabeth, who may or may not have been a party to it, was extricated from danger when Philip sent orders that she was not to be questioned or investigated. As in the aftermath of Wyatt’s Rebellion, he was acting less as the uncrowned king of England than in the interests of the Spanish Crown. Again his concern was that if Elizabeth perished—and Mary would surely have been satisfied to see her die if she could be proved guilty of treason—the next in line to the throne would be Mary, Queen of Scots.
During the investigation of the so-called Henry Dudley conspiracy, with the court feeling itself under threat both from subversives at home and exiles abroad, Thomas Cranmer was burned for heresy. His execution was the most notorious event of Mary’s reign, one that cast no credit on any of the people involved, Cranmer included. From the time when his compeers Latimer and Ridley went bravely to their deaths, Cranmer had begun denying the evangelical beliefs that he had devoted himself to imposing upon all of England. He repeatedly renounced the idea of royal supremacy and took upon himself responsibility for all the religious troubles that England had undergone since his consecration as archbishop of Canterbury. He went so far as to beg the pope for forgiveness, declaring that he deserved not only death but eternal punishment. In doing so he repudiated his own entire career and gave his enemies a propaganda victory of tremendous potential value. But Mary and her advisers snatched from the jaws of that victory an even greater defeat. Instead of being satisfied with Cranmer’s surrender and allowing him to fade away into obscurity, they pushed ahead with plans for his execution. When the hour of his death arrived, seeing that he no longer had anything to gain or lose, Cranmer declared that all his recantations had been lies told in the hope of saving his life and that in fact he recanted nothing. Famously, when the fire was lit, he is supposed to have held his right hand in the flames—can anyone who has ever scorched a finger with a kitchen match believe this story?—while telling onlookers that it must be punished first because it had written the lies. Be that as it may, the drama of his last moments established Cranmer as chief among those martyred in the English Protestant cause. Others were being burned at this time, but few were known to the public. Many of the evangelical clergy had fled abroad—first to Lutheran Germany, where they were unwelcome because of their departures from Lutheran theology, and then to Switzerland, where they were embraced. Those members of the gentry who could not contain their hatred for Philip and Spain went mainly to France, where they received royal support except during those intervals when Henry II found it advantageous to suspend his hostility to the Hapsburgs and therefore to Mary.
The most recent of those intervals came to its inevitable end in July 1556. Paul IV was still hoping to draw France into his ancestral feud with the Hapsburgs, and now at last he found Henry ready to be drawn. An alliance was agreed under the terms of which, once the Spanish had been expelled from Italy, one of Henry’s sons would become king of Naples (evidently the pope was willing to accept foreign rule of his home city so long as it was not Hapsburg domination) and another would become Duke of Milan. Philip retaliated by ordering his viceroy the Duke of Alba to invade the Papal States. When the pope found himself without the means to defend Rome, he offered, unhappily, to make peace. That might have been the end of the trouble, but then Henry II sent an army under the Duke of Guise into Italy with orders to support the pope, and all the adversaries found themselves at sword’s point yet again. Predictably, the pope was enraged with Philip—so enraged that he excommunicated him, declaring him a “son of iniquity” and ordering the eviction of every Spaniard in Rome and the withdrawal of every papal legate from the territories of the Hapsburgs. Having been installed as archbishop of Canterbury just days after Cranmer’s death (he had finally been ordained), Pole was not required to leave England. This fresh rupture, however, gravely compromised his ability to proceed with reform. His work of rejuvenating the church, the Westminster synod included, came shuddering to a halt.
Mary was caught in the middle. She appears to have had little difficulty deciding that, at least in this matter, her loyalty was owed to her spouse. Her inclinations were reinforced in January 1557 when Henry of France opened a new front in his conflict with Philip by attacking the Flemish city of Douai, a Hapsburg possession. Mary had previously warned the French against an action of this kind, reminding them that Douai had been covered by a 1543 mutual defense treaty between Henry VIII and Charles V and asserting that the treaty remained in effect. The French king, who like his father Francis loved to fish in England’s as well as Spain’s most troubled waters, was predictably unimpressed. As far as he was concerned, Mary’s connection to the Hapsburgs meant that she and her kingdom were France’s enemies. It was the pope’s willingness to challenge Hapsburg rule in Italy that had caused him to rush troops to Italy, and it was because those troops were now stymied that he had turned his attention to Flanders, where he could open a new front against the Hapsburgs.
Philip, his resources stretched thin, desperately needed English help, and as Mary’s consort he thought himself entitled to it. In March he crossed the Channel, received a rapturous welcome from his adoring wife, and set about trying to secure the use of English ships, naval bases, and troops. Mary was fully on his side but prudently looked to her council to make the necessary commitment. This presented Philip with a challenge of the first order: most members of the council wanted nothing to do with his war, largely if not entirely because the treasury was so deplorably short of funds. In opposing Philip, they could point to the part of the marriage treaty stating that England was not to be drawn into Spain’s conflicts. Even Pole, despite the trusting relationship that he had formed with Philip, was opposed to helping him against the pope. All his life Pole had demonstrated, and repeatedly proved his willingness to suffer for, a keen sense of obligation to Rome. He was not prepared to change now, but neither did he wish to be disloyal to Mary or her husband. And so he withdrew from politics, declining to attend council meetings or even to meet with Philip. He received scant thanks. On April 29 the pope issued an order for Pole to return to Rome for unexplained reasons that were universally understood to involve accusations of heresy. The absurd process was now under way by which, in the space of not many months, Pope Paul would make himself the implacable enemy of the very people who had restored the Catholic Church in England.
Philip might never have received English help if not for an act of pure folly. Among the young rakehells and soldiers of fortune who had gone into exile in France after Mary won the crown was her twenty-four-year-old relative Thomas Stafford, who had inherited royal blood through both his father and his mother, regarded himself as entitled to the Dukedom of Buckingham (which had belonged to his family until his grandfather was executed by Henry VIII), and was an ardent Protestant in spite of being a nephew of Cardinal Pole. Lured by fantastic visions of glory, and drawing on mysterious sources of support that probably included Henry of France, Stafford came ashore at Scarborough in the north of England on April 25 at the head of a mixed force of English, French, and Scottish followers who numbered at least thirty but no more than a hundred. Taking possession of a poorly defended and half-ruined castle, he
issued a proclamation calling upon the people of England to join him in deposing Mary and establishing a protectorate. So far as is known, he failed to attract a single recruit. Stafford was in custody within four days of his landing, and before the end of May he was, to little public notice, executed for treason. At court his adventure was interpreted as the latest French outrage. It brought the council around to supporting Philip and the queen.
As preparations got under way for assembling an army and transporting it to the continent, efforts were made to dissuade the pope from recalling Pole. The English ambassador in Rome begged the pope to reconsider, Mary and Philip sent appeals of their own, and at last even the diffident Pole wrote to say that the feeble state of the church in England required the presence of someone authorized to represent Rome. All of it availed nothing or less than nothing. It appears, rather, to have thrown Pope Paul into a fresh rage. He placed one of Pole’s oldest friends and fellow reformers, Cardinal Giovanni Morone, under arrest on a variety of heresy charges of the kind that probably would have been brought against Pole himself had he been in Rome. Like Pole, Morone had lost the trust of the archconservatives with his willingness to deal with the Lutheran reformers on respectful terms and acknowledge that not all blame for the breakup of the church lay on the Protestant side. The pope made malicious use of Pole’s letter by replacing him as legate with Friar William Peto, the same Observant Franciscan who decades before had denounced Henry VIII to his face for seeking to discard Catherine of Aragon. Peto was now back at his old monastery at Greenwich—Mary herself had restored it—and was serving as confessor to the queen. The situation deteriorated into a ridiculous tangle. Pole, loyal as always, would have traveled to Rome as ordered but was forbidden to do so by Mary, who insisted that he was entitled to defend himself in England. Peto, eighty years old and in bad health, protested that he was neither able nor willing to serve. The nuncio bringing official notification of Peto’s appointment was intercepted at Calais and prevented from crossing the Channel, and his mission was soon rendered pointless by Peto’s death. The pope wanted to declare that Philip was no longer legitimately king of anything but was dissuaded by cooler heads. He contented himself with refusing to transact any business with the English church. Mary’s (and Pole’s) nominations for vacant bishoprics were ignored, and the number of vacancies mounted.
After three consecutive crop failures and widespread hunger, a weakened population was being ravaged by an influenza epidemic that would in a few years claim hundreds of thousands of lives. Nevertheless an army of seven thousand men was somehow pulled together, and by July it was on the continent ready to join Philip’s thirty thousand Spanish, German, and Flemish troops in the war with France. Philip, too, was back on the continent, but neither he nor the English army was on the scene when, in September, the main Hapsburg force inflicted a devastating defeat on the French at St. Quentin. Fully half of the French army was killed or taken prisoner, and upon receiving the news, the pope abandoned his hopes for Italy and signaled his willingness to make peace. Henry II then ordered the army that he had sent to the pope’s assistance to return home and asked its commander, the Duke of Guise, to find some way to avenge the shame of St. Quentin. When around the turn of the year Mary announced that she was once again pregnant, no one including her husband paid serious attention. Philip sent congratulations, but they were little more than a formality. It was, after all, nearly six months since he had last seen her.
January 1558 brought the crowning calamity of Mary’s reign: the loss of Calais, the last of England’s once-vast holdings on the European mainland. The Duke of Guise, having received reports of the sorry state of Calais’s defenses from French ambassadors passing through the town after their expulsion from England, knew that no one would expect a midwinter assault. He positioned his army in such a way as to appear to be preparing a move against St. Quentin, wheeled it around for a surprise advance on Calais, and extracted a surrender from its garrison so quickly that neither Philip nor the English had any chance of responding. Though the loss would prove to be of no strategic importance—the English figured out in time that holding Calais had produced no benefits commensurate with the costs—it came as a shock to England’s nascent national pride and a humiliation for Mary. Philip, inevitably but unfairly, was blamed. He had warned the council in advance of Guise’s offensive and offered to provide Spanish troops for the defense—an offer that was rejected because of groundless suspicions that Philip wanted Calais for himself. Afterward, when he offered to match whatever number of troops England made available to retake Calais, he was again rebuffed. A sense of things coming to an end, a miasma of something like death, was beginning to hang over Mary and her court. A Parliament was called but quickly prorogued after showing itself unwilling to help the government with its financial problems, and by May the queen was no longer talking of an expected child.
Mary was ill that month, and again in August, and yet again in October. In September Charles V died, removing whatever small hope Mary might still have had of Philip’s return to England. Finally, knowing that Reginald Pole, too, was seriously ill, resigned to her own impending death and to the certainty that she would be succeeded by her half-sister, she sent a maid of honor to Elizabeth with a letter in which she asked for three things. First, that upon becoming queen she, Elizabeth, would deal generously with the members of Mary’s household. Second, that she would repay the debts that the Crown had incurred under Mary’s Privy Seal. And third, that she would continue to support the church in the form that Mary had reestablished. Elizabeth had only recently repeated her assurances that she was a believing Roman Catholic, politely complaining of the queen’s difficulty in accepting her word on that score. There was no opportunity for her to do so again. On the morning of November 18, Mary quietly expired while hearing mass from her bed. Pole died hours later. The English Counter-Reformation was dead too.
Mary at the end was worn out and thoroughly defeated. She seemed somehow to have lived for a long time, and her reign, too, seemed to have lasted too long and to have grown sterile. It is startling to realize that at the time of her death she was all of forty-two years old, and had ruled for only five years.
22
Yet Another New Beginning
It is an hour or two past midnight on March 24, 1603. In the deepest recesses of Richmond Palace the fireplaces are ablaze, the light from shoals of candles dancing in the drafty air. In the shadows at the rear of the palace’s innermost chamber Queen Elizabeth lies in bed, her face turned to the wall. Her physicians have made it known that she is dying. Everyone with access to the court has come to bear witness to a momentous event.
Despite the hour the atmosphere is electric: the death of the monarch is certain to bring enormous changes—good things for some, disappointment for others. People bundled up in hats and furs whisper together in little clusters, disperse, gather again in new combinations: the grieving and the hopeful, the worried and the merely curious. Among them is Sir Robert Carey, the queen’s cousin, the ambitious grandson of Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary. Like the others he keeps his face stern and his voice low, but he is excited and impatient and struggling not to show it. A fast fresh horse awaits him outside, and he has arranged to have other horses posted all along the four-hundred-mile route from Richmond to Edinburgh. He is determined to give himself a leg up with the next regime by being the first to inform the king of Scotland that Elizabeth is dead at last, and that England is now his.
Tudor medicine being the tangle of butchery and superstition and sterile tradition that it is, not even the doctors have any real idea of why the queen is dying. A bronchial infection that has turned into pneumonia, perhaps. Possibly streptococcus, or the failure of some vital organ. Whatever the root cause, it appears to have been aggravated by depression; one thing even her physicians can see is that Elizabeth has been seriously depressed for months. It is possible that she has been poisoned—that she has, inadvertently, poisoned herself. For forty years, ever s
ince smallpox nearly took her life and ravaged her fine fair skin, she has refused to leave her privy chamber without first having her face, neck, and breast caked with the most prized cosmetic of her day, a mixture of white lead and vinegar known as ceruse or spirits of Saturn. Even painters who use brushes to apply white lead not to their own skin but to walls often fall victim to poisoning. That Elizabeth has remained vigorous to such an age while living under a thick coat of such a toxic concoction is little less than astonishing.
By the standards of the day her age is ripe indeed. Ninety-four years have passed since her father Henry VIII became king, 118 since her grandfather won the crown at Bosworth Field. Elizabeth herself, next to Henry VII the Tudor who overcame the longest odds in coming to the throne, has reigned for four and a half decades. This is nearly twice as long as the first Henry Tudor, nearly a decade longer than the second, nine times as long as either her brother or her sister. Her next birthday would be her seventieth.
