Orderly government in England appeared to be breaking down at an appalling rate, and imperial interests there were being damaged. Charles was therefore all the more predisposed to do what he could for Mary when she wrote to him in April, shortly after Van der Delft’s visit to her. She wrote of the plight of all English Catholics in “these miserable times” and stressed that “after God, your Majesty is our only refuge.” “We have never been in so great a necessity,” she went on, and alluded to the recent enactments making the English service the only tolerated form of worship. Mary urged Charles to do his utmost to ensure that she could “continue to live in the ancient faith, and in peace with her conscience.” “In life and death I will not forsake the Catholic religion of the church our mother,” she swore, even if compelled by “threats or violence.”12
Late in May, just before the violence of the summer months broke out, Charles began to put pressure on the Protector and Council to exempt Mary from obedience to the recent laws governing religion. Van der Delft asked Edward Seymour to give Mary “letters of assurance” guaranteeing that she would not be compelled to give up her faith and embrace the new orthodoxy. Seymour refused, saying he had no authority to act against parliamentary law, and that even if he did he could not bring himself to grant something so dangerous to the kingdom. Given the character of the nation, he said, “if the king and his sister, to whom the whole kingdom was attached as heiress to the crown in the event of the king’s death, were to differ in matters of religion, dissension would certainly spring up.” Mary could continue to worship as she liked, at least for the time being, but the Protector could offer no assurances for the future. The emperor was indignant, and told the ambassador to persist in his efforts, always “making use of all his cleverness so that the Protector may not interpret our words as threats of any kind, or imagine that we might resort to violence.” Van der Delft was to walk a tightrope between perseverance and intimidation; he was a far less skillful diplomat than Chapuys had been, and he found it hard going.
On the day that the new service was to become official, two commissioners from the Council, Secretary Petre and Chancellor Rich, came to Mary’s residence and informed her that she and all in her household were subject to the Act of Uniformity in religion. She stood firm and gave them a curt refusal, but they had not been sent to enforce the law, merely to state it unequivocally, and the confrontation was relatively mild. Not long afterward, however, Mary received a second message insisting on her compliance and peremptorily ordering two of her household officers, her controller Sir Robert Rochester and her chaplain Dr. Hopton, to appear before the Council.
Both the order and the summons angered Mary. She replied in a letter that her controller could not be spared and her chaplain was sick. As for her mass, she had broken no law in maintaining her manner of worship, she told the councilors, “unless it be a late law of your own making,” which could not be held as binding on her conscience. And she went on to lecture them about how they had broken the oath they took “upon a book” to keep King Henry’s religious settlement intact. The evil results of their changes were apparent “to every indifferent person,” she wrote—and even as she composed her letter revolts were spreading in Devon and Norfolk. They had brought displeasure to God and disquiet to the realm, and she would not lend support to their innovations lest Edward should later hold her accountable for them when he grew to manhood.
Mary’s protest was disregarded entirely. Rochester, Hopton and a third man in her household, Sir Francis Englefield, were summoned again and this time Mary let them go. The Protector’s tactic was two-edged. He hoped to frighten Mary, and to make her anxious about her servants; at the same time he seems to have believed that, if told by her own trusted men to alter her religion, she might obey. Rochester refused utterly to try to command his mistress, or even to convey a message to her from the Council. Hopton, slightly more flexible, agreed after being closely questioned by the Protector about his theological views to carry back “instructions” about the changes Mary was expected to make.
By this time the rebels were in control of large sections of the country, and no effective counterforce had yet been mustered. Exeter was in the hands of the insurrectionists, and Norwich soon would be. Van der Delft was worried because rebel ground lay between London and the country house where Mary was staying; he could not be sure of sending or receiving messages from her. Though he was preoccupied with meeting the growing threat to his government Somerset agreed to see the ambassador in mid-July. He was remarkably cool and reasonable, under the circumstances. Mary could continue as she was, he said, provided she no longer made a spectacle of her worship. “We have not forbidden the Lady Mary to hear mass privately in her own apartment,” he reiterated. “But whereas she used to have two masses said before, she has three said now since the prohibitions, and with greater show.” He added the frightening insinuation that through one of her chaplains Mary was implicated in the risings in the west. The Protector had heard that “the head of the Cornish rebels was her chaplain once,” he said, but made no further reference to the matter. (At the same time the Council wrote to Mary complaining that her receiver, one Pooley, was “a leader of the worst sort ofthe rebels in Suffolk.” According to Mary both accusations were groundless. )13
As the summer wore on the bloody course of the rebellions held the attention of the Protector and Council. Van der Delft and Somerset met once again in mid-August, but it was not until September, after the conclusive battles were won, that Paget and another councilor, Paulet, were deputed to state the Council’s position to the ambassador. They spoke of Mary with a surprising degree of deference and respect. They were sorry, they said, that such a “wise and prudent lady, the second person in the kingdom,” was so fixed in her views that she could not conform to the new service without doing violence to her conscience. They could not give Van der Delft the written letters of assurance the emperor asked for, but they were prepared to make a verbal promise “that she should freely and without hindrance or interference continue divine service as she had been accustomed to have it celebrated in her house, and that her priests and the members of her household should incur no risk.”14
Van der Delft was not satisfied with this solution, but Mary was. Written guarantees were in reality no more binding than verbal ones, and in any case Chapuys had trained her long ago to be wary of anything put in writing. Letters of assurance, she told the ambassador, might imply an acknowledgment of the laws against the mass which she had no wish to give. “These innovations were not laws,” she insisted, “for they were not duly given, but contrary to God, to her father’s will and the welfare of the realm.”15
Mary had come safely through the dangerous summer of 1549, but there were already signs of political upheavals to come. Somerset would soon come under attack, and Mary was under pressure to become part of the coup. She knew that her only safety lay in remaining aloof from political involvements until Edward came of age, yet her mounting concern for the state of the country tempted her to take action. There were some in the Council, notably Dudley, who would like nothing better than to accuse her of treason, and if the Protector were ousted Dudley would become the most powerful man in the Council.
In her dilemma Mary read and reread her old letters from the emperor and regent, prayed daily that God would have mercy on the councilors and “that matters might be restored as they were when the king her father left them,” and composed meditations to lift her thoughts above the vexed conditions of politics and the faith. She tried to remind herself that for the true Christian this world is only a temporary resting place on the soul’s journey to its home country. Beyond the pains of mundane life stretch the joys of eternity, when all that was once obscure shall be made clear in the light of God’s wisdom.
“This natural life of ours is but a pilgrimage from this wanderingworld, and exile from our own country,” she wrote in a “Meditation Touching Adversity” in 1549.
And lest the pleasantness
and commodity of this life should withdraw us from the going to the right and speedy way to thee, thou dost stir and provoke us forward, and as yet ward prick us with thorns, to the intent we should covet a quiet rest, and end of our journey. Therefore sickness, weepings, sorrow, mourning, and in conclusion all adversities be unto us as spurs; with the which we being dull horses, or rather very asses, are forced not to remain long in this transitory way. Wherefore Lord, give us grace to forget this wayfaring journey, and to remember our proper and true country. And if thou do add a weight of adversity, add thereunto strength, that we shall not be overcome with that burden: but having our minds continually erected and lift up to thee, we may be able strongly to bear it. Lord! all things be thine; therefore do with all things without any exception as shall seem convenient to thine unsearchable wisdom. And give us grace never to will but as thou wilt. So be it.
XXV
But Styll as one all desperate,
To lead my life in misery,
Sith feare from hope hath lockt the gate
Where pity should graunt remedy;
Despair this lot assigns me ever
To live in pain, joy shall I never.
The rebellions of 1549 put an end to the Protector’s authority. His ability to maintain order had been discredited. His reputation, largely undeserved, as “the good duke” who had tried to correct the evils of enclosure had helped to incite the rebels. His popularity in the countryside was more than offset by the hatred of his colleagues at court, who saw him as incompetent, arrogant and dangerously near to forgetting that he was only the overseer of Edward’s government and taking the royal powers into his own hands. By the time the risings had run their course Somerset had made himself so odious that under Dudley’s leadership the Council moved as one to depose him.
During his time as Protector Somerset had one overriding preoccupation: to bring the Scots to heel and to establish a lasting peace between the two lands. He defeated the Scots at Pinkie Cleugh in September of 1547 in a battle more fearful in its carnage than that of Flodden three decades earlier, but his hoped-for goal of marrying Edward to the five-year-old Mary Queen of Scots was thwarted. The engagement was broken off and the heiress sent to safety in France, and Somerset now combined revenge and apocalyptic militarism in hoping for a war “to make an end to all wars.” His drawn-out enterprise against the Scots so obsessed him that he neglected more urgent threats from the empire and France. Charles V, irritated by the licensed piracy against Flemish merchants in English waters, was antagonized by Somerset’s Protestant innovations; beyond his concern that Mary be allowed to keep her Latin mass, he opposed the spread of Protestantism anywhere in Europe and considered it his duty to support its overthrow.
By 1549 England and the empire were at odds, leaving the English without a continental ally against the French. The new French king, Francis I’s successor Henri II, lost no time in profiting from Somerset’s preoccupation with the Scots. France and Scotland were traditional allies, and any war on the northern border had in fact to be waged on two fronts. But the Protector did little or nothing to fend off war with France. By ignoring the defenses of the English holdings at Calais and Boulogne he invited Henri to attack them, and in August of 1549, when Somerset had his hands full suppressing revolts at home, Henri took the outer fortresses of Boulogne. England and France were once again at war.
Somerset’s presumption, greed and hotheaded disposition made even more enemies than his myopic foreign policy. He was no more eager to enrich himself than many others in the Council, but his prominence made his peculation more obvious. He flaunted his wealth in ostentatious building projects, ordering two churches razed to the ground to make room for the palatial magnificence of his residence, Somerset House. He was given to inordinate fits of rage, lashing out at everyone around him and indulging what even his friend Paget criticized as his “great choleric fashions.” On one occasion Somerset roared out his anger at Richard Lee, a courtier who had the misfortune to displease him. When the cascade of abuse ended Lee was reduced to tears. He went weeping to Paget’s apartments, where after more tears he grew angry and complained that he had been treated far more harshly than necessary. And, Paget added, he “seemed almost out of his wits, and out of heart.”1
As the months and years of Somerset’s rule passed his habitual look of melancholy deepened. He had not won his war to end all wars; his government was careening toward bankruptcy; he was surrounded by corruption and discontent. He was surrounded, too, by relatives and in-laws impatient to share the advantages of his power. His wife, “a woman of a haughty stomach,” coveted his wealth for their nine children and forced him to disinherit those he had by a previous marriage. His household was a turmoil of squabbling; at court he was hemmed in by petty skirmishes over precedence. Thomas Seymour refused to take off his hat in the presence of the duchess of Somerset; she in turn refused to hold his wife’s train. That Catherine Parr Seymour had once been queen was a circumstance her envious sister-in-law could not forgive, and the Protector was constantly besieged by his wife’s demands that he put Catherine in her place once and for all. These sordid quarrels came to an abrupt end when Catherine died in childbed and Thomas Seymour on the block. It was asobering solution to the problem and, for the Protector, a prophetic one. Seven months after he signed the warrant for his brother’s execution Somerset was himself arrested and imprisoned in the Tower.
An initial benefit of Somerset’s fall was that relations between Mary and the Council temporarily improved. Van der Delft heard a rumor that she might be made regent for Edward, but it was only wishful thinking on the part of her supporters.2 Her support was sought when the Protector was ousted, but in keeping with her practice since Edward became king she took care not to ally herself with any faction or political policy. She had in fact been considering the possibility of escape. Earlier in the year she sent the emperor a ring, which he took to be a sign that she wanted to be rescued and brought to Flanders. He sent instructions to Van der Delft that she was not to be encouraged in this, both because of the logistical problems involved in getting her out of England and—here he was blunt—because he had no wish to pay the cost of maintaining her and the household she would require.
Mary took no comfort from her brief rapprochement with the Council. She was treated with greater deference than before, and there were small signs that the Protector’s restrictive policy toward her had been replaced by a more relaxed attitude. Sir Thomas Arundell, a gentleman “of the old faith” whom Somerset had kept from entering Mary’s service in the past, now made his request again, this time with the approval of the Council. Because Arundell had been an important figure in the plot to depose the Protector Mary did not at first accept him into her household, but she noted the significant reversal of Somerset’s position.3
Still, to Mary the brief months of closer accord with the Council in the fall of 1549 were only an interlude between tyrannies. Somerset was out of the way, but Dudley was pushing himself to the fore; it was only a matter of time before he would impose his own style of control over the Council and the king. Both within the government and outside it she saw only mounting chaos, criminality and unrest, along with calculated destruction of the old faith. The rebellions in the countryside had been subdued, but not entirely suppressed, and the economic conditions that had triggered them were growing worse. As long as the “disorder among nobles and peasants” continued, she told Van der Delft, no improvement in the religious situation could be expected. She had come through the recent upheavals personally unscathed, and her confrontation with the Protector over her use of the Latin mass had not put her in real danger. But she saw herself in the eye of a storm which might at any moment break with fury over her head. “She thinks she is the only person here exempt from scandal and trouble,” the ambassador wrote after a conversation with Mary. She was waiting to see what the Council would do next, he said, “not without apprehensions.”4
Mary was apprehensive on several levels. O
n the political level, she feared the subtle Dudley more than the overbearing Somerset; he was shrewder and even more unprincipled, and lacked Somerset’s pretense of courtesy toward her. Where religion was concerned she had even more to fear. Beyond the issue of her private worship there was the threat of the vague “Marian faction” that some in the Council saw forming around her, and the everpresent reality that she, a Catholic, was heir to the throne. As one member of the Council put it, Mary was “the conduit by which the rats of Rome might creep into their stronghold.”
But Mary was looking beyond the human dimension. In trying to understand events in England she was turning more and more to theological explanations, and to analogies from the Bible. She saw the rebellions in the west and north as signs of divine displeasure, and believed that the worst was still to come. If the men in power continued to destroy the church and persecute the true believers, then God’s punishment was to be feared in the form of a revolt so widespread and so devastating it could not be suppressed. England was like Egypt in Moses’ time, she said. The English Catholics, like the Israelites of that day, were pleading for their freedom, but in vain. “He hath hardened the hearts of the councilors as he did pharaoh’s,” Mary said to Van der Delft in an oracular tone. And she feared he meant to loose plagues on England more harmful than any the Egyptians had endured.5
In December relations between Mary and the Council took a new turn. Elizabeth was brought to court, “received with great pomp and triumph,” and conspicuously entertained in Edward’s presence. Because Elizabeth did not hesitate to conform to the religious decrees—she had never known any faith but that of Henry VIII’s church—she was being favored over Mary, who remained at a house thirty miles from London. There Mary received a letter in the king’s hand inviting her to join her brother and sister at court for Christmas. Mary suspected a trap. There could be only one reason for the invitation, she told the ambassador: to force her to celebrate the holiday according to the Protestant observances. “They wished me to be at court so that I could not get the mass celebrated for me,” she explained, “and that the king might take me with him to hear their sermons and masses. I would not find myself in such a place for anything in the world,” she added. She excused herself on grounds of ill health, and made plans to visit the palace after the holidays, when she would be free to stay in her own London house and hear her chaplains say mass without hindrance. But she would stay only four or five days even then, to avoid becoming entangled in a theological debate with the king. She had heard that Edward was being encouraged to pose as an authority on religious questions and to be very vocal in his opposition to the Roman faith.6
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