With playwrights saluting her as the savior of her people, courtiers flattering her and diplomats filling their dispatches with news of her government and her marriage plans Mary was at home with her office by the end of 1553. Her public serenity was more apparent than real, but her private joy at the forthcoming marriage grew greater with each piece of news Renard brought her. By mid-November she was declaring that Renard “had made her fall in love with his Highness,” adding jokingly that “his Highness might not be obliged to him for it, though she would do her best to please him in every way.”7
When a full-size portrait of Prince Philip arrived a few weeks later she became even more enamored of him. It was a Titian portrait, painted some three years earlier, and in it Philip wore a blue coat trimmed in white wolfskin. It was a good if flattering likeness, and Mary was no doubt relieved to see that the man represented to her as uncommonly handsome had, at least, shapely limbs and regular features. Everyone who had lived at the court of Henry VIII remembered the king’s greatest mistake—Anne of Cleves—and knew the dangers of misleading portraiture. The regent, who sent Mary the portrait, told her the likeness was not exact, but made it clear that the prince was even better looking than he had been when he posed for Titian, with a more manly body and a fuller beard.8
At this time too Granvelle sent Antonio Moro to England to paintMary’s portrait, but she had little time to spare for sitting idle while he sketched. Matters of diplomacy and administration, large and small, pressed in upon her with greater urgency every month. The French king asked her to mediate his dispute with the emperor. Foreign merchants asked her for licenses to avoid paying customs. Courtiers petitioned for offices, pensions and other favors. A decision had to be made about the title “Supreme Head of the church,” a relic of the two preceding reigns that was part of the royal style but that Mary refused to adopt because it denied papal authority. After consulting with Renard, her councilors and, by letter, with Cardinal Pole, who told her the phrase “misbecame her sex,” Mary got around the problem by putting “et cetera” in place of the actual words of the style.
Criminals of uncommon boldness and notoriety had to be sought out and brought to justice. Thieves robbed Lady Knevet of her plate in the fall of 1553, and because it was assumed they had taken it to Paris to sell, it was up to Mary and the Council to try to find them. The men’s identities were known, and the English ambassador in France, Wotton, sent one of his servants to Paris to ask the French goldsmiths for help in tracking them down. The servant made the rounds of the city, looking “everywhere Englishmen commonly resort there,” but without success.9 Crimes along the Scots border took up more of the Council’s time. On the pretext of fishing in the Tweed, the Scots were grouping under the walls of Norham Castle at night, to the danger of the garrison; the ancient fishing boundaries had to be enforced. The Scots complained that the English were stealing their cattle; the English retorted that the beasts were taken on the English side of the border, and their owners could only get them back on payment of a fine, and the Council concurred. A “lewd Englishman” provoked a quarrel with a Scot, and the Scots claimed it led to murder; the Council believed the report was exaggerated, but in any case the Scots were guilty of so many murders of Englishmen they could not possibly recite them all.10
These and similar matters—grievances of merchants, complaints of piracy and border encroachments—made up only a small part of the day to day work of the queen and her Council. It took time for the lax administrative practices of the preceding reign to be corrected. As late as January of 1554 Mary’s clerks were still occasionally sending out official documents sealed with King Edward’s seal instead of the queen’s, leading to delays and added work for the chancery.11 The most serious issue faced by Mary’s government, however, was a severe financial crisis. The queen admitted to Renard in November that there was no money in the country, and that Dudley’s rule had left the treasury ,©700,000 in debt. Her agent Thomas Gresham was hard at work in Antwerp, trying to raise loans, but here too the dead weight of the previous reign proved to be ahandicap. Gresham had to straighten out the dishonest dealings of his predecessor Christopher Dawntesey while competing with the agents of Charles V and those of the great towns for what little money the bankers had to loan. Once he did negotiate a loan he was faced with the problem of conveying the money safely to England, and finally decided to pack the coins inside suits of armor—a method he had used before with success.
Mary was not unique in her financial difficulties, of course. Late in 1553 the French king was trying desperately to borrow all the money he could, and was taking his nobles’ plate to melt down for coins. The emperor too was borrowing enormous sums from the Flemish bankers, and the regent had had to take a loan of two million florins in 1552. But in the empire finance was a vast drama in which the imperial treasury was repeatedly saved from bankruptcy by the timely arrival of ships heavy with the plundered riches of the New World. As Mary’s agent Gresham was toiling to squeeze sixty thousand florins from the reluctant Antwerp banker Jaspar Schetz, Charles V’s financial clerks were weighing out newly arrived treasure from the Americas worth five million ducats in gold.12
However serious England’s financial problems might be, the men who came to Mary’s first Parliament in October and November were preoccupied with the dismaying probability of the queen’s marriage to a powerful foreigner. They thought in terms of the legal and political hazards of the match, and of the impossibility of binding either party to fulfill their contractual agreements. “In case the bonds should be broken between the husband and wife,” one member asked, “each of them being Princes in their own country, who shall sue the bonds?”13 There was no natural arbiter for marital quarrels when the spouses were both sovereigns in their own right, and if Philip would need no defender in such quarrels, Mary almost certainly would. On November 16 a delegation from the Commons, led by Speaker Pollard and accompanied by some dozen or more of the councilors, met with the queen in an effort to dissuade her from marrying Philip. The delegation was superfluous, as Mary had already given her solemn oath to go ahead with the marriage and most of the Council members had been won over to supporting it. But the Commons knew nothing of this, and the Speaker had taken pains preparing an eloquent discourse for the occasion.
His speech was very solemn and very long, “full of art and rhetoric and illustrated by historical examples.” He told Mary how it would displease the people to have a foreigner as the queen’s consort, and how the foreigners in his retinue would make themselves hateful and “lord it over the English.” If Mary died childless her husband would lose no time in carrying money, artillery, and everything else of value back to his owncountry. He might decide to take her out of the country too, “out of husbandly tyranny,” and if she left him a widower with young children he would probably try to usurp the throne for himself.
Mary listened to this outpouring for a time, but the longer it went on the more exasperated she became. Pollard had unfortunately forgotten his notes, and his extemporaneous ramblings were, she later told Renard, “so confused, so long-winded and prolific of irrelevant arguments” that she found them irritating and offensive. As he spoke Mary was formulating a point-by-point reply, for she had decided to depart from the customary practice of allowing the chancellor to answer on behalf of the sovereign. When Pollard finally finished she rose to address the assembly.
She thanked them dryly for advising her to marry, but as for the rest of the advice “she found it very strange.” It was hardly traditional for Parliament to recommend to the ruler whom she should marry, nor was it “suitable or respectful.” Mary tossed off her arguments with skill, her words judicious but full of anger and occasional sarcasm. History showed that even when the ruler was a minor Parliament had never interfered with the choice of a consort. All the nobles present could vouch for the fact that the behavior of the Commons was unprecedented and thoroughly inappropriate. Furthermore, if she were forced to marry a man who did not pleas
e her she would die within three months, leaving the kingdom worse off than ever and defeating the prime purpose of the marriage—namely the birth of an heir. With this direct and telling threat she closed her rebuttal, assuring the Speaker and his colleagues that she had the good of the kingdom as much in mind as they did, and that in the question of her marriage, as in all her other affairs, she would be guided by the inspiration of God.
The extraordinary sight of the queen answering the Speaker in person made almost as great an impression on her audience as the force of her logic. The nobles present backed her in this, and “said she was right,” while Arundel afterward ridiculed Gardiner, saying that “he had lost his post of Chancellor that day, for the Queen had usurped it,” and the other councilors laughed heartily at his expense. Mary had in fact become contemptuous of what she perceived as Gardiner’s equivocation. It had not taken her long to understand his tricks, she told Renard. One day he would assure her, when it suited his purpose, that the people would obey her, while the next day, “speaking on a matter that touched him personally,” he would try to frighten her with the prospect of rebellion.14 She was beginning to understand why the Protestants called her chancellor “Doctor Doubleface,” and was finding that there was more to the accusation than Gardiner’s embarrassing change of views on the question of Henry VIII’s marriage to Katherine.
Mary suspected Gardiner, in fact, of prompting the Speaker to addressher on the subject of her marriage, and of supplying him with his arguments. Several days after her meeting with Pollard and the Commons she confronted the chancellor and accused him of intrigue with the Speaker, She wanted him to understand, once and for all, that no matter what means he used to persuade her otherwise she would never marry Courte-nay. The Speaker’s “disrespectful words” had nearly made her angry, she said, and she did not intend to listen to any more advice about what husband to choose.
The chancellor broke down completely. He confessed with tears that he had spoken with Pollard and coached him in his speech, and that it was true he had always been fond of Courtenay ever since then-imprisonment together, Mary asked Gardiner disdainfully whether he seriously meant to suggest that she marry a man just because he had befriended him in prison, and then went on to give a cogent summary of the extreme disadvantages of Courtenay as a consort—his “small power and authority,” his intrigues with the French, England’s need for money, and so on. Finally the chancellor gave in entirely, saying that “it would not be right to try to force her in one direction or another,” and swearing to “obey the man she had chosen.”15
Mary emerged unscathed from her encounters with Parliament and the chancellor, and with an added measure of authority. Renard’s fears for her competence were quieted, at least for the moment, and he admired her “steadfastness and courage” in dealing with Gardiner, But the marriage question, important though it was, had little to do with the deeper issues that divided the country. Parliament had begun to come to terms with some of these, revoking the “corrupt and unlawful sentence” of Henry’s divorce from Katherine and, by implication, making Elizabeth a bastard again. Jane and Guilford Dudley were attainted, along with Cranmer, and a further step was taken to rid the country of the archbishop’s Protestant liturgy when a law was passed making it illegal to perform any service but that in use at the time of Henry VlII’s death after December 20 of the present year. All of Edward’s Protestant statutes were repealed, after a week of “marvelous dispute,” but the principle that the sovereign and not the pope ruled the English church remained intact. Mary had got around using the term “Supreme Head” in her title, but she had to sit by and allow Parliament to retain it on her behalf in its laws.
Any further progress toward a complete return to Catholicism would have been impossible, for throughout the parliamentary sessions there were outbreaks of violence over the clergy and the mass. In one village church an arquebus was aimed at the priest who was saying mass, but it misfired. In Norfolk and Kent parishioners rioted and prevented mass from being celebrated, and it was being said that elsewhere two priestshad actually been killed. Mary herself had been living with assassination threats since September, and it was a mark of her courage and flair for rulership that she continued to appear in public ceremonies and court audiences as freely as if no danger existed. Several plots against Gardiner’s life had been uncovered since the reign began, forcing him to move into Mary’s palace in order to be under her protection.16
A week before Parliament dissolved Mary’s courtiers were seriously frightened. As the queen was passing through a gallery on her way to vespers, accompanied by Elizabeth and a number of others, an unseen voice cried out loudly “Treason!” The courtiers scattered, but Mary, unperturbed by the alarm, went on into the chapel to hear the office. It was later found that the accusation was meant for Gardiner, and came from a man the bishop had imprisoned many years earlier for writing a treatise in defense of Katherine of Aragon; but at the time no one doubted that the cry was directed at the queen. Elizabeth was so frightened she turned pale and “could not compose her countenance.” She was amazed, she said, that Mary had not retired to safety after receiving such a warning, given the danger of an attack on her person. Elizabeth herself could not stop trembling, and had to get Susan Clarencieux to rub her stomach until the color came back to her face and she was able to join Mary at the altar.
XXXV
Our life is a warfare, the worlde is the fielde:
Her highnes her army hath alwayes at hande;
For Hope is her helmet, Faith is her shielde,
And Love is her brestplate, her foes to withstand.
In a “Memorial” he sent her two weeks after her coronation Renard outlined to Mary the dangers she faced as queen, as he saw them. “You have four certain and open enemies,” he told her: “the heretics and schismatics, the rebels and adherents of the duke of Northumberland, the king of France and Scotland, and the Lady Elizabeth.” These opponents might appear to be quiescent from time to time, but their menace could never be ignored. “They will watch for a propitious moment for carrying out their plans,” Renard wrote, “and your Majesty must always bear these four adversaries in mind and guard against them.”1
Of the four enemies, Dudley’s adherents had been dealt with most directly, if inconclusively. The duke and two of his captains had been executed, and his sons and daughter-in-law Jane were condemned prisoners in the Tower. Northampton and Suffolk had been imprisoned briefly, then released, while the marquis of Winchester, Pembroke and ten others who had signed the Device disinheriting Mary now sat on her Council. Mary’s decision not only to pardon Dudley’s councilors but to give most of them places in her government was widely criticized; giving Suffolk his freedom soon proved to be especially dangerous.
As for the heretics and schismatics—by which Renard meant Protestants of all kinds—their opposition was growing. Mary was showing wise moderation in moving the country back toward Catholicism very slowly, but the most committed opponents of the old faith were becoming more and more vociferous in defense of their beliefs. Here Cranmer showed the way. Mary had been lenient in her treatment of the archbishop,confining him to his house but stopping short of imprisoning him as a traitor. When it was said that he might submit himself to the queen’s mercy and return to the church of Rome, however, he demonstrated the strength of his faith by writing a bitter attack on the mass; in a very short space of time he joined the former bishop of London, Ridley, and the fiery Protestant preacher Latimer in the Tower. Cranmer’s defiance put heart into his coreligionists, who met Mary’s attempts at conciliation with vehement arguments and symbolic insults. Toward the end of October a theological discussion was arranged, at which four learned Protestants were to debate six Catholic doctors. The meeting coincided with parliamentary debate over alterations in the religious laws, but instead of enlightening the lawmakers the theologians nearly came to blows. Reasoned discussion gave way to “scandalous wrangling,” leaving Parliament and the public disgus
ted.2 On the day Parliament rose anonymous troublemakers took a dead dog, shaved its head in the form of a priest’s tonsure, and heaved it through the windows of the royal presence chamber.
The hopes of the Protestants hinged on the last of Mary’s enemies—her half-sister Elizabeth. Mary and Elizabeth inherited their hatred of one another from their mothers, and though Mary made a sincere effort to be charitable toward her younger sister there was never any neutral ground between them. Mary could never perceive Elizabeth as anything but a bastard, telling Renard sarcastically that she was “the offspring of one of whose good fame he might have heard, and who had received her punishment.”3 According to Jane Dormer, the queen clung firmly to the old slander that Elizabeth was not the daughter of Henry VIII at all but of the musician Mark Smeaton; she had Smeaton’s “face and countenance,” Mary liked to say, and her own morals were no more admirable than her mother’s had been.4 Elizabeth had been guilty of an indiscreet flirtation with Thomas Seymour as a young girl, and she had acquired a reputation for promiscuity. It was hardly to be expected that the daughter of Anne Boleyn would grow into a woman of outstanding virtue, and Mary liked to cite the “characteristics in which she resembled her mother” as an important reason for keeping Elizabeth from coming to the throne.5 Renard found the princess to be like Anne in another respect. She possessed, he wrote, “a bewitching personality,” a power to entrap others and make them do her will. He was certain Elizabeth was using her beguilements on Courtenay, knowing that to marry him would give her access to the queen through Courtenay’s mother.
Mary and Elizabeth were far apart in age—Mary was thirty-seven, Elizabeth twenty—as well as in parentage, temperament and, most important, religion. When Protestant preachers spoke of the future they liked to say that the papists were “having their turn” but that Elizabeth would remedy all in time.8 Nevertheless Mary insisted at the outset of her reignthat Elizabeth observe the Catholic ceremonies, knowing full well that a genuine conversion was a remote possibility. When rumors persisted that Elizabeth’s attendance at mass was mere hypocrisy Mary brought the issue out in the open, asking her sister “whether she firmly believed what the Catholics now believed and had always believed concerning the holy sacrament?” Elizabeth insisted that she went to mass “of her own free will and without fear, hypocrisy or dissimulation,” adding that she had considered making a public declaration to that effect. Mary was relieved to see how timid her sister appeared to be, and how she trembled when she talked to her, but to Renard her behavior indicated that she was lying about the mass, and guilty of plotting against the queen besides.7 When Elizabeth left court in October Mary embraced her and made her a gift of an expensive sable hood and two strings of beautiful pearls, but Paget and Arundel sent her off with a harsh warning against becoming involved in any conspiracy to dethrone the queen.
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