In London disillusionment over the false announcement of April 30 led to mounting agitation. New libels against Mary were thrown into the streets every few days, stirring up fears and encouraging rebellion. Some said the queen was dead, and printed versions of a “grace to be said at the accession of Elizabeth” appeared. Seditious talk was everywhere—in taverns, in the streets, anywhere gentlemen met to eat and gamble. Philip was so worried he wrote to his father for advice, asking what he should do about the libels, the slanderers, and the rash of impostors claiming to be King Edward. One such pretender was brought before the Council on May Io, but no sooner was he taken than another youth of eighteen was seized in Kent for proclaiming himself the rightful ruler and “raising a tumult amongst the populace.” He was brought to London, whipped and mutilated by the cropping of his ears. A fool’s coat was put on his back, and signs indicating his crime were fastened on his head and hung over his breast. It was announced that he was only a serving boy doing what others told him, but not before he had persuaded many of the country folk that he really was the late king.15
Violence at court had become so alarming that Philip enjoined secrecy on all those who knew the details of the most recent incidents. Three English thieves who robbed a Spaniard of a huge store of gold and jewels were hanged, but there was little that could be done to punish thehundreds of English assailants who appeared just outside the court gates, their swords at the ready, to take on every Spaniard in sight. What started as a brawl between a few men on both sides escalated rapidly until by one estimate there were five hundred of the English involved. Before the battle was over five or six men were dead, and nearly three dozen seriously wounded. Despite the king’s stern warning the affair could not be kept secret, and the English were so elated to find that no large-scale punishment resulted that they immediately laid plans for an even bloodier assault to be attempted early in July.18
The continued postponements in the queen’s delivery had as great an importance in international affairs as within her realm. Since the start of her reign Mary had been looked on as a natural mediator between France and the empire, and now in the spring of 1555 a peace conference was arranged under English auspices. There was a good deal at stake: the revival of England’s prestige in continental politics, the improvement of relations between England and France and, of greater immediate importance, the prevention of new warfare in which Philip might try to involve England on the Hapsburg side.
There was another significant factor in the conference as well. It was planned, executed and paid for by Mary and her agents alone. Because of his obvious bias Philip had no authority or involvement in this diplomatic enterprise, and it was one of the few autonomous undertakings for which Mary could claim credit. The delegates met, under Pole’s presidency, on Engiish-held territory in the Calais pale. Five wooden buildings were constructed by the English to house the participants. The imperial, French and English delegates each had separate temporary residences, a fourth was for Pole, and a fifth provided a neutral setting for the meetings.17
From the start the French seemed to have the upper hand. The French delegates arrived accompanied by five hundred mounted guardsmen each, plus companies of noblemen and prelates and great crowds of servants. In their “pompous attire” they had the air of knights riding to a tournament, while the imperial negotiators, wearing mourning for Queen Joanna, were drab and funereal by contrast.18 There was an appearance of amity as the discussions began, with the English taking the imperialists by the hand and all but forcing them to embrace the Frenchmen, but these courtesies could not take the place of meaningful concessions of territory and privileges. The French refused to return any of the lands they had seized from the empire in the recent war, and wanted still more. The emperor’s negotiators insisted that all conquered territories be returned and would not offer anything of value in exchange. Bishop Gardiner did not help the situation any by urging the emperor to take compassion on “the infirmity of the French” following St. Paul’s dictum thatthe man should pity “the infirmity of the woman.” The French took umbrage at being called women, and at the massing of troops in the region of the conference.
In actuality the soldiers were being kept in readiness so that “in case the queen of England die in childbed” they could be sent immediately to England to protect Philip, but the French feared an attack on their border. This danger, coupled with Pole’s ineffectual leadership and Gardiner’s choleric tendencies, prevented progress toward a settlement. Finally, when Noailles’ dispatches arrived with the intelligence that Mary was not pregnant, the English lost what diplomatic leverage they had possessed and on June 7 the conference came to an abrupt end.
At its start there had been much talk of how Mary, who had miraculously brought England back to reunion with Rome, should be able to bring about a similar miracle at the peace table. When the meeting ended in a stalemate it was noted that, for the first time since her good fortune began years earlier, Mary had presided over a failure.
The summer of 1555 was bleak and sunless. The air was cold even at midday, and the rain never seemed to stop. The fields were turned to mud, and the grain grew in stunted clumps, bent under the weight of the constant rain. The weather was so bad that “the like is not remembered in the memory of man for the last fifty years,” Michiel wrote. “No sort of grain or corn ripens, and still less can it be reaped, a prognostic of scarcity yet greater than that of last year.”19 The peace conference had failed, the crops were failing, and at Hampton Court the queen’s unyielding hope was slowly losing ground to despair.
In the first week of June the clergy began to lead daily processions for Mary’s safe delivery. Her courtiers and Council members joined in, and at her request they marched around the palace court below her apartments. She sat at a small window and watched the procession every morning, bowing “with extraordinary cheerfulness and graciousness” to the dignitaries and councilors who doffed their caps to her as they passed.20 There was more color in her cheeks now than in May, and some said she had never been in better health, though she still felt “no movement indicating parturition.”21
The Spanish courtiers were especially anxious for any hopeful sign of the approaching birth, as they looked forward to leaving England as soon after the christening as possible. “The queen’s deliverance keeps us all greatly exercised in our minds,” Ruy Gomez wrote, “although our doctors always said that the nine months are not up until 6 June.” When she thought she felt some pains on May 3 I and again in mid-June they became excited, but when Mary did not take to her bed they grew glum.22Ruy Gomez dutifully sent word of each change in the doctors’ official prognostications, but he was becoming cynical, and in his private letters he made jokes about the queen’s vanished girth. “All this makes me doubt whether she is with child at all,” he confided to a correspondent, “greatly as I desire to see the thing happily over.”23
The king was even more eager than his courtiers to see the conclusion of the queen’s pregnancy. He had been expected in Flanders since May—on June 6 the emperor was still postponing Queen Joanna’s interment in hopes that his son would arrive at any time—and he was prepared to embark as soon as he knew that the child was born and Mary was out of danger. He had already given some of the lesser members of his retinue permission to leave, and the soldiers in his personal guard were due to begin crossing to Flanders in the second week of June. With the failure of the peace conference a fresh outbreak of war seemed likely, and Philip was determined to be a part of it. He was tired of being thought of as unfit and disinclined toward war; he badly wanted a military reputation.24 “From what I hear,” Michiel wrote in a dispatch, “one single hour’s delay in this delivery seems to him a thousand years.”25
He was still living like a wealthy guest in England, dependent on the hospitality of the court yet paying all his expenses and those of his household. It was known he had not touched a penny of the revenues of the English crown. In fact he had loaned Mary a good deal of money
, and it was partly as a result of this that his treasurers were at work in Antwerp early in June trying to secure a loan. Money was scarce, and it took them some weeks to complete their negotiations. In the meantime none of the Spaniards had any coins in their pockets, and when they tried to live on credit the English landlords and merchants either complained loudly or denied them lodging and food. “In truth these poor courtiers have a very bad time of it,” Michiel said of Philip’s retainers, “both by reason of the intolerable scarcity of everything, which has doubled in price owing to them, as also because there is no one who, either with money or credit, will succor and assist them in their need.” The dreary weather and the certain prospect of a poor harvest made the English more reluctant than ever to accommodate the Spaniards, and when Philip’s agents finally sent word they had negotiated a loan of 300,000 ducats they were overjoyed, even though the bankers demanded more than twenty-five per cent interest. Philip too was relieved, but apprehensive for the future, for in order to arrange the loan he had been forced to pledge all his revenues for the next two years.26
Crowning his worries, though, was the embarrassment of being held up to ridicule in foreign courts. English diplomats abroad could only make excuses for Mary for so long, referring to the miscalculations of the doctors and the “common error of women in reckoning their time.”Mason wrote from Brussels asking that Mary appear occasionally at mass or in some public place in order to put an end to the scurrilous rumors at the imperial court. The Council sent him back an official response telling him to counteract whatever rumors he heard, but individual Council members forewarned him later in private letters that they doubted the genuineness of the pregnancy.27 The Venetian ambassador in Brussels had received trustworthy information that “the queen has given manifest signs of not being pregnant” before the end of May, although he confined his knowledge to secret dispatches and maintained the opposite in his public statements.28 The French king was willing to put down the delay to “women’s ways,” but one of his ambassadors, who was staying at Padua for his health, busily spread the story of her freak delivery of a “mole or lump of flesh,” now embroidered to include the fabrication that he had seen letters confirming the queen’s death.20
Meanwhile Mary busied herself with ordering her secretaries to prepare letters announcing her safe delivery to be sent to the pope, the emperor, the kings of France, Hungary, and Bohemia, the doge of Venice, the queen regent of Flanders and the queen dowager of France. The date of the birth was left blank, as was the sex of the child; these important details would be filled in by clerks at the last minute. Mary signed the letters herself, and also the passports for the envoys who were deputed to carry the good news to the imperial and Portuguese and French courts.30 She prepared a brief letter to Pole at the same time, informing him how it had “late pleased God of his infinite goodness” to add to the benefits he had conferred on her “the happy delivery of a prince.”
And as if to match these premature announcements an ambassador from Poland arrived at Hampton Court to convey his sovereign’s compliments to the queen. The false report of Mary’s delivery that had so rejoiced Londoners on April 30 had reached Poland some weeks later. There no one contradicted it, and the king immediately sent an envoy to England in consequence. The Polish diplomat knew no English, but had prepared a “premeditated Latin oration” artfully combining condolence on the death of Queen Joanna with congratulations on the birth of Mary’s son. Apparently he was unable to disentangle his sentiments, for he delivered both the sorrowful and joyful portions of his address before Philip and his courtiers, “to the laughter and amusement of many persons who were present.”31
As the summer dragged on popular unrest was so great the earl of Pembroke and his forces had to be brought in to keep order in London. A planned rising for the last week in June was discovered by the Council in time to forestall it, and pageants scheduled for the feasts of Sts. Peter and John were canceled. Efforts were made to break up any crowd that gathered in the city, but Pembroke and his men could not be everywhere.On Corpus Christi Day all the principal Spaniards went to worship in a certain church, intending to follow the host in procession. A huge crowd gathered at the door of the church, the English outside outnumbering the Spaniards within by two to one. The Spaniards prudently stayed inside and some of the English, “less daring and indiscreet than the rest,” succeeded in dispersing the mob, but the confrontation could easily have ended in the worst bloodshed yet seen.82 Both sovereigns did what they could to prevent the violence, issuing order after order threatening severe penalties for assaults of any kind, but Mary’s distress at the mistreatment of the Spaniards only angered her subjects further. They said she was “a Spaniard at heart,” and that she cared nothing for the true Englishmen who supported her. Worse still, they said that her Spanish husband was betraying her with other women. Protestant pamphleteers alleged that the king kept company with whores and commoners’ daughters while Mary was confined to her rooms. “The baker’s daughter in her russet gown,” they rhymed, was “Better than Queen Mary without her crown.”
Other ballads spread even more quickly in the summer of 1555, songs about the heroism of the Protestants burned by the queen’s bishops and about the malice of the queen herself. The burnings were creating a fresh undercurrent of opposition stronger than any political rebellion. It came to the attention of the Council that two Protestants, John Barnard and John Walsh, were going about the countryside carrying the bones of William Pigot, a man burned for heresy at Braintree in March. Barnard and Walsh were showing the bones to the people as if they were relics, and exhorting them to hold firmly to the doctrines they had learned under Henry VIII and Edward as the martyr Pigot had done.33
In the first two weeks of June there were eight more burnings, and the “sudden severity” they indicated was odious to many. There were riots in Warwickshire in July, and fears of more disturbances in Devonshire and Cornwall, and Pembroke was again summoned to put a stop to the unrest before it reached a critical stage.34 The English Protestants on the continent affirmed that there was a direct connection between the burnings and the queen’s frustrated hope for motherhood. Gardiner had persuaded Mary that the Protestants had bewitched her, they said, and in her fear of them she had given the bishop a free hand in his cruel slaughter of the true believers. Even in London it was being said that Mary had declared her child could not be born until every heretic then in prison was burned.35
In July the doctors and midwives ceased their calculations altogether. By some reckonings the queen was now eleven months pregnant, and if she succeeded now in giving birth to a healthy child it would in truth be a miracle. A miracle, it seems, was just what everyone near her expected. “The universal persuasion and belief” was, according to Michiel, that amiracle would “come to pass in this, as in all her majesty’s other circumstances, which the more they were despaired of according to human reasoning and discourse, the better and more auspicious did their result then show itself.” Mary’s child would prove to the world once and for all that her affairs “were regulated exclusively by divine providence.”38
As the queen waited for the miracle, she wept and prayed. Her prayer book survives, its pages worn and stained. The queen’s tears appear to have fallen most often on a page bearing a prayer for the safe delivery of a woman with child.37
XLIII
I know wher is a gay castle
Is build of lime and stone,
Within is a gay ladie
Her lord is ryd from home.
By the first of August Hampton Court stank as badly as a London street. The kitchens and courtyards reeked of refuse, and indoors the air in the chambers and galleries was foul and stale. The constant rains had spoiled the palace gardens, and made hunting or riding impossible. The courtiers had no choice but to keep to their tiny, overcrowded rooms, going outside only to join the religious processions that still petitioned God to deliver the queen. They were bored and impatient. There were no celebrations or e
ntertainments to occupy them and their fine clothes hung useless in their wardrobes, rotting in the dampness.
To their immense relief it was announced that the court was moving to Oatlands so that Hampton Court could be cleansed. It was a tacit acknowledgment that Mary’s confinement was over, for the manor of Oatlands was a modest rural house barely large enough to accommodate a reduced royal household. Philip’s attendants had been leaving for Flanders for weeks, and now even Ruy Gomez took his departure. The noblewomen who had been shut up with Mary for nearly four months ordered their servants to pack their trunks and returned to their own summer houses. There was no formal announcement that the queen and her physicians had given up hoping for a child. Instead both Mary and Philip’s most intimate advisers continued to insist that she was in her sixth or seventh month, but everyone knew it was only said “for the sake of keeping the populace in hope, and consequently in check.” But the people could only be fooled for so long, and they knew as clearly as the ambassadors did that “the pregnancy will end in wind rather than anything else.”1
Perhaps they cared less than Renard and the other imperialists thought. The incipient rebellions that had been reported turned out to be far less serious than Renard’s dispatches made them appear. The Warwickshire rising was in fact an angry crowd at a local market protesting the unscrupulous profiteering of some grain speculators—a serious enough matter, but no danger to the queen. The unrest in Devon and Cornwall was no more than a ripple of dissatisfaction produced by a story that the queen was dead. The only evidence that she was still alive, her daily appearance at the palace window, was said to be a fraud; it was not the queen’s own face at the window but a wax replica. Another supposed rebellion was nothing more than a dispute between a landlord and his tenants.
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