It is highly probable that the wearing of the rosaries was Mary’s idea, for she saw the coming meeting with Edward as a climactic event in a great struggle. In her mind her conflict with the king and Council was more than a matter of politics, more than a tactical device to demonstrate the supremacy of the men in power: it was a supernatural conflict as well. The rosaries dramatized this dimension of the coming confrontation, surrounding it with an atmosphere of solemnity and portent. Onlookers caught up in this otherworldly atmosphere believed they saw in the sky visions like those the medieval crusaders saw as they marched against the Saracens in the Holy Land. Armored horsemen were glimpsed amid the clouds, and extra suns, so bright they outshone the true sun and filled the crowds with wonder. The earth seemed to shake underfoot, and the sky to glow with its three suns in an unearthly way, until the procession took on the character of a holy pilgrimage.12
What brought Mary to London in a state of such determined piety was the deterioration of what remained of her relations with the king and Council. Not long after the inconclusive meeting between brother and sister in December Mary received a letter, composed by the Council but including a paragraph in the king’s own hand, demanding once and for all that she conform to the Anglican liturgy. Whatever leniency might have been shown her in the past was now withdrawn; only her “wayward misunderstanding” kept her from recognizing that no promise of exemption from the king’s laws concerning religion had ever been allowed her. “It is a scandalous thing that so high a personage should deny our sovereignty,” the letter read, and the point was a reasonable one. “That our sister should be less to us than any of our other subjects is an unnatural example.”18 No further disobedience would be tolerated in future, on pain of the customary penalties for heretics. A passage in Edward’s personal postscript left no doubt of the firmness of his intent. “Truly, sister, I will not say more and worse things,” he wrote, “because my duty would compel me to use harsher and angrier words. But this I will say with certain intention, that I will see my laws strictly obeyed, and those who break them shall be watched and denounced.”14
Edward’s letter had referred to Mary as “our nearest sister,” the one who should be to him “our greatest comfort in our tender years,” but more and more Mary was taking second place to the sister who obeyed the religious laws, the seventeen-year-old Elizabeth. As Edward’s letter to Mary was being composed, Elizabeth rode into the capital “with a great suite of ladies and gentlemen,” and enjoying the privilege of a royal escort of a hundred horsemen. The councilors went out of their way to receive her with honor, “in order to show the people how much glory belongs to her who has embraced the new religion and is become a very great lady.”15 Mary was not ignorant of the preferential treatment given her sister, and her pain was reflected in her reply to Edward’s letter. His accusations “caused her more suffering than any illness even unto death,” she said. She affirmed that she had done him no harm, and had no intention of bringing any injury to the king or his kingdom in future. But she could not do otherwise than to follow God and her conscience. “Rather than offend him and my conscience, I would lose all I have left in the world,” her letter read, “and my life too.”16 Scheyfve protested to the Council in February, but in vain, and it was then, with full realization of the danger she faced, that Mary determined to go to court again and defend her mass in a last battle.
The streets were so crowded as Mary and her supporters made their way to Westminster that the horsemen who accompanied her could hardly move through the throng. It was the greatest demonstration of loyalty in recent memory, and its meaning was not lost on Dudley and his colleagues. They took care to make Mary’s official reception as perfunctory as possible. No one from the court met her; instead the controller of the royal household escorted her to a gallery where Edward and the full Council were waiting. After a minimum of ceremony Edward took Mary into a still smaller room to face the Council alone.
Two hours of argument and counterargument followed. The Council harangued Mary on the outlawing of the mass, the king’s insistence thatshe obey his laws, and a new accusation: that in defying the Council she was disobeying her father’s will. She answered in language as blunt as that of her letters. She would not back down from her claim to the promises made to Van der Delft. No one was more humble than she, or more obedient, though she did hope that Edward would “show her enough respect” to realize how hard it would be for her at her age to change the faith in which she had been bred. Time and again she tripped up her accusers, turning their arguments against them, cutting through their assertions and, in the end, goading them to anger by her relent-lessness in debate. When Edward claimed to be ignorant of any agreement made with Van der Delft, because “he had only taken a share in affairs during the last year,” Mary retorted that “in that case, he had not drawn up the ordinances on the new religion,” and therefore she was not bound to obey them. As to the councilors’ insistence that Henry’s will obliged Mary to “submit to the Council’s instructions,” she answered that she had read the will, and found that it obligated her to the Council only where her marriage was concerned, and on this point she had given no offense. If anyone had betrayed Henry’s will, she added, it was the executors—most of whom were in the room—in neglecting the late king’s orders that two masses be said for him daily, and four obsequies annually, according to the rite he left in force at his death.
Whenever her father’s name entered the discussion Mary invariably grew heated, as if in recalling him she took on more of his character. Remembering Henry’s fearsome yet dedicated rule she could not help insulting the self-seeking, unprincipled men who stood before her now. Her father, she said, had “cared more for the good of the kingdom than all the members of the Council put together.” Here Dudley interrupted her. He had as usual been staying in the background of the argument, hoping to make it appear as though Edward were in command. He was pushing Edward more and more into the forefront of policymaking, both to disguise his own actual control of the government and to give the king the illusion of leadership. But Mary was clearly getting the best of the situation, and now she had gone too far.
“How now, my lady?” he broke in. “It seems that your grace is trying to show us in a hateful light to the king our master, without any cause whatever.”
Mary replied that this was not her intention in coming, but that since they pressed her so hard about the will she had no choice but to tell the whole truth as she saw it. At the end of two hours of fruitless debate the parties stood where they had been at the outset. It was left to Mary to make a final statement. She addressed Edward, hoping she could touch him by phrasing her earnest plea for leniency in terms he was accustomed to hearing from other sources. “In the last resort,” she told him, “therewere only two things: soul and body. Her soul she offered to God, and her body to his majesty’s service, and might it please him to take away her life rather than the old religion, in which she desired to live and die.”
It was a moving appeal. Edward quickly assured her he had no wish to ask for any such sacrifice, and gave her permission to return home. She was not well—“My health is more unstable than that of any creature” she had written in January—and the strain of this meeting was bound to affect her. Asking her brother “to give no credit to any person who might desire to make him believe evil of her,” and repeating again that she “would remain his majesty’s humble, obedient and unworthy sister,” she took her leave.17
The next day Scheyfve delivered a formal message from the emperor. If Mary were to be denied the mass, he would declare war on England.
XXVIII
When Wyt with Will and Diligent
Applie themselves, and match as mates,
There can no want of resident
From force defend the castell gates.
Scheyfve felt certain that it was only Charles V’s threatened declaration of war that saved Mary. He knew “from a good source” that without the emperor’s timely interve
ntion “they intended to use her very roughly, keeping her here in this town if she refused to conform with the new religion, and taking away her servants, especially those whom she trusted, in whose place they would have set others of their way of thinking.”1 Mary agreed completely. She was not deluded about her pow-erlessness. She fought the Council not because she believed she could win but for the sake of her honor. Mary knew perfectly well that, “had the Council only had to deal with her, they would long ago have deprived her of the mass and the old religion, and attempted to force her into the new.”2 Doubtless Mary saw her cousin’s threat as providential, for it led to an immediate mellowing of the councilors’ tone and attitude. She was allowed to leave the court without hindrance, and to resume her customary way of life, carrying with her assurances of “the most cordial affection” from the king and Council, delivered by Secretary Petre the day after the emperor’s message arrived. Though Petre found Mary sick in bed at her London residence of St. John’s, he did not hesitate to reiterate the arguments impelling her to abandon the old faith. Lifting herself up out of the pillows, she asked him to excuse the brevity of her reply and said simply that her soul was God’s, her body Edward’s to command. With the king’s permission she left a few days later for Beaulieu.
Despite Petre’s reference to the mass the Council had in fact drawn back from the issue, ostensibly to allow time for a new English envoy,Nicholas Wotton, to go to the imperial court and confer with the emperor. Edward’s own notes of the discussion among the Council members describe something closer to capitulation than to a mere postponement of the religious issue. The king was dismayed to find his three principal bishops—Cranmer, Ridley and Ponet—now persuading him to tolerate Mary’s mass at least for a time, arguing that while it would be wrong to actually give her permission to use the Catholic liturgy it was not sinful to simply look the other way.
Behind this blatant rationalization were grave fears that any further irritation of the emperor might touch off a whole chain of explosions, not merely an Anglo-imperial war. The ruinous debasement of the coinage, which at first had increased the demands of the Flemish wool merchants for English cloth, had finally led to a glut of English wool in Flanders; the cloth industry was a shambles, and in the north thousands of workers were starving. Londoners rioted against the presence of foreign workers and merchants in the city, exaggerating their numbers and blaming them for the high prices. “Ruffians and servingmen” and other “evilly disposed persons” gathered in large numbers to advocate the slaughter of all foreign residents, until in May the Council issued an order warning “the lower sort of people” against becoming “like those sick madmen” who “have presumptuously taken upon them the office of his majesty,” and were “attempting redress of things after their own fantasies.”3
War between England and the empire would certainly worsen the crisis in the cloth industry, and there were other risks as well. In the spring of 1551 the English government was amassing armaments and military equipment in Flanders. If war broke out the entire valuable stockpile—including seventy-five tons of gunpowder, quantities of armor and other goods—would fall into enemy hands.4 A recent diplomatic embarrassment had also to be considered. The English ambassador in Brussels, Richard Morison, had dared to lecture Charles on theology with such vehemence that the emperor lost his temper and ordered him out of the room. The incident was smoothed over, with Charles apologizing for his sour temper and blaming it on his gout and advancing age, but it contributed to the smoldering enmity between the two antagonists, and made it all the more necessary that the Council adopt a conciliatory attitude toward the emperor (and Mary) in the coming months.
Mary was left in relative peace until late summer. The discovery and imprisonment of her chaplain Francis Mallet in April led to a sharp exchange of letters between Mary and the Council, but the chaplain remained in the Tower nonetheless. By this time, though, the business of government was taking second place to the more urgent business of survival. The sweating sickness returned in the late spring and summer of 1551 with a virulence unknown since the early years of the century. Asalways it carried off the most robust men in their prime; the weakest in the population were spared. Before the infection died down fifty thousand victims had been carried off, though official accounts minimized the mortality of the disease. With a threat of imminent war it was unwise to let the other side know how badly the fighting men had been devastated; beyond this there were always troublemakers eager to seize on any destructive plague as a sign of divine wrath at the religious policies of the king and his ministers.5
But there was no disguising the seriousness of the disease to Londoners, who spent the summer either trying to outrun infection by traveling from one village or manor to another or by staying in the city and applying the exotic remedies sold on every street. Persons of every trade—“carpenters, pewterers, brasiers, painters”—became dispensing apothecaries overnight, posing as healers from Constantinople or India or Egypt and “promising help of all diseases, yea incurable.” Their medicines, which a contemporary doctor found to be “so filthy, that I am ashamed to name them,” were of various kinds, but all priced as high “as though they were made of the sun, moon or stars.” There were draughts of many kinds, and other cures ranging from the spiritual to the practical—“blessings, Blowings, Hypocritical prayings, and foolish smoking of shifts, smocks, and kerchieves.”6
The sweat attacked several men in Mary’s household, driving her from Beaulieu to a smaller house. It was there, in mid-August, that she received a letter summoning her controller, Rochester, and two of her gentlemen, Edward Walgrave and Francis Englefield, to appear before the Council. When all three finally appeared at court—Rochester could not at first be spared—they found they were to be the agents of the Council’s will. If Mary would not obey the king’s laws, and if any attempt to coerce her would mean scandal, then the enforcement would have to come from within the household, from men who could be threatened with imprisonment, as Mary could not. Rochester, Walgrave and Englefield were surprised to hear themselves described as “the chief instruments and cause that kept the princess in the old religion.” Without their instigation, she would have accepted the Protestant orthodoxy long before. The three household officers, startled by the sweeping error of this accusation, assured the councilors that “as for her religion and conscience” Mary “asked nobody’s advice and, what was more, not one of her ministers dared broach the matter in her presence.”7 But it was no use. The three were to return to where Mary was staying, at Copt Hall in Essex, and forbid the chaplains to say mass any longer.
They failed, of course. As they knew she would, Mary responded angrily to the Council’s strategy, saying “she found it very strange and unreasonable that her ministers and servants should wield such authorityin her house.” She flatly forbade the three officials to carry out their orders, and sent them back to Hampton Court to face the fury of Dudley and his colleagues. They were ordered again to stop the celebration of mass at Copt Hall; they pointed first to the futility of the effort, and then refused. On August 23 all three were committed to the Tower.
The attempt to coerce Mary through intimidating her servants had failed. The Council would have to enforce its own laws, or else tolerate Mary’s persistent breaking of them. But whether they sensed it or not, there had been another change. The emperor’s once uncompromising stand on his cousin’s mass had grown more flexible. His public utterances were as stern and angry as ever, of course. In June he burst out to Wot-ton “I will not suffer her to be evil handled by them,” meaning the Council, and appeared to stand firmly behind his earlier threat of war. But later he added the morbid sentiment that “if death were to overtake her for this cause, she would be the first martyr of royal blood to die for our holy faith, and would for this earn glory in the better life.”8 And in dispatches to Scheyfve he was urging Mary not to provoke the Council too far, and assuring her that even if her chaplains were forbidden to say mass, as long as sh
e did not adopt the Protestant liturgy she would be guilty of no sin. The regent agreed that as a “victim of force” Mary would be “blameless in God’s sight.”9
So matters stood when at the end of August Rich, Petre and Wingfield came to Copt Hall determined to root out all vestiges of Catholicism. The chancellor handed Mary a letter from Edward, which she knew contained another demand for full conformity in religion. She received it on her knees, “saying that she would kiss the letter because the king had signed it, and not for the matter contained therein, which was merely the doings of the Council.”10 She then read it over to herself, exclaiming under her breath—but loud enough for the councilors to hear—“Ah! good Mr. Cecil took much pains here.” Cecil was Dudley’s secretary, and there was no mistaking the meaning of her remark. When she had finished reading the letter she urged the visitors to be brief, speaking in an irritable, almost offhand tone. When they offered to point out to her all the names of those opposed to her use of the mass she cut them short.
“I care not,” she said, “for the rehearsal of their names, for I know they are all of one mind therein. And rather than use any other service than that ordained during the life of my father, I will lay my head on the block,” she added. Whatever happened she knew Edward was not to be held responsible for what the three councilors were about to do, for “though his majesty, good sweet king, have more knowledge than any other of his years, yet it is not possible for him, at present, to be a judge of all things.” As for the silencing of her priests, she implied that shewould endure it with resignation, though she would under no circumstances tolerate the introduction of the Anglican liturgy into her house.
Bloody Mary Page 38
