Mary Tudor (29 page)

Philip’s personal relations with his wife appear to have been excellent, and it was not long before she was speaking rather coyly about being pregnant, but whether he could exploit that relationship so that he would acquire real political authority remained to be seen. Although the situation in the Netherlands had improved from the Spanish point of view, and there was no prospect of Philip being peremptorily summoned to join his father, he continued to be deeply interested in Imperial business, and daily concerned with it. For this purpose he had his own councillors, who were entirely distinct from the English council. He met regularly with the latter (or with some members of it), conferring in Latin, but since it was not the custom in England for the monarch to attend normal council meetings, it is unlikely that he attempted to do so. His ‘Spanish council’ was quite different, because he always attended and the business was conducted in that language. It must have been these meetings to which the Duke of Alba was referring when he declared that ‘all public business is transacted in Castilian’. Alba’s report makes it appear that he was referring to the privy council proper, but that would have been impossible since no English councillor spoke much Spanish.
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Philip’s councillors and remaining courtiers were distressed by this situation, and by the king’s general detachment from English affairs. He had not even been crowned, and the terms of the marriage treaty prevented him from conferring English offices upon any of them. Some of them were even trying to persuade him to withdraw until he could either force or persuade the English to show him more respect. What galled them most was the fact that he had been given no English resources, and this remains something of a puzzle. The consort of a king would have received a substantial estate – equivalent at least to that of a major peer – and all Henry’s queens had been so endowed. But Philip received nothing. Perhaps Mary was persuaded to withhold this favour on the grounds that Philip had plenty of resources already, but the suspicion must remain that it was done deliberately to make sure that he had no independent English patronage. If the king himself felt slighted by this omission, he gave no sign of it. What bothered him, it later transpired, was the absence of an English coronation.

Meanwhile, Philip had two main preoccupations in his new kingdom – to keep Mary happy and to put the Church to rights. At this stage the former appeared to be the more straightforward: for the first, and probably the only, time in her life, during these months Mary was at peace with the world. ‘The king and queen’s majesties be in health and merry’ ran a report from the court on 12 October, ‘they danced together on Sunday night at the court. There was a brave maskery …’ The revels office had been stirred out of the torpor induced by Mary’s indifference by Philip’s arrival.
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Philip knew that a brave show was required, and this is an early example of his impact. The queen was full of gratitude, both to her husband and to his father. ‘This marriage and alliance,’ she wrote to the latter, ‘renders me happier than I can say, as I daily discover in the king my husband and your son, so many virtues and perfections that I constantly pray God to give me grace to please him.’
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Some of this happiness even rubbed off on the queen’s subjects, jaundiced as they were by the sight of Spaniards on the streets of London, with their strange garb and incomprehensible speech. The rumours of Mary’s pregnancy, which were widespread by November, awakened a warm response in many – somewhat paradoxically, as any child born to them would be three-quarters Spanish by blood. Whether this reaction was motivated by human empathy or the prospect of a secure succession, we do not know, but the observant Ruy Gomez noticed it, and took it for a good sign: ‘If it is true,’ he wrote, ‘everything will calm down.’ The loyal ballad mongers were also busy:

Now sing, now spring, our care is exiled,

Our gracious Queen is quickened with child …
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It was a time of hope for everyone, except the beleaguered Protestants, who, with their services outlawed and most of their leaders in prison, now seemed to be deprived of the prospect of any long-term future.

That had, of course, been Mary’s intention from the beginning, but it was only with Philip’s arrival that the Emperor’s opposition was withdrawn and the process of ecclesiastical restoration could begin in earnest. Discussions held during August and September had convinced Philip that it would be a mistake to allow Reginald Pole into the country with the brief that he then possessed. The king knew enough about Cardinal Pole’s view of the English situation to realise that unless he were specifically instructed to do so, he would not make the concessions necessary to satisfy those whom he significantly termed ‘the possessioners’ (i.e. those now in possession of former monastic land). In Pole’s opinion, such people were simply occupying stolen property, to the peril of their immortal souls.
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Philip, however, appreciated that they had paid a fair market price for land to which they believed the king had a perfectly good title. He had himself some experience of extracting land from a reluctant Church, and also wanted the political support of the English aristocracy – so the last thing he needed was Pole’s conscientious inflexibility. If the cardinal was given any discretion in the matter he would not negotiate, and as Philip suspected (with good cause) that Mary was of the same mind, he decided to take the matter in hand himself. He was in an excellent position to do so, because Charles was now willing to allow him to deploy the full weight of Habsburg influence in the curia. On 12 October he wrote to Francisco Eraso, the Emperor’s secretary, saying that he had decided to make direct representations to the pope, and at the same time he sent Simon Renard to the Low Countries to exercise his persuasive skills upon the cardinal.
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This had the double advantage of giving Renard a task well suited to his aptitudes, and getting him out from under the king’s feet. For some time the ambassador’s querulous flow was stemmed while he addressed himself to his new task.

By the end of October Renard had so far succeeded that Pole had agreed to surrender into the king’s hands the discretion allowed him in his existing brief – provided that the pope agreed. Philip was confident enough of his own influence in Rome to accept this as sufficient for the time being. A Parliament had been called for 12 November, and could not be put off without great inconvenience. In this Parliament the issue of ecclesiastical jurisdiction would have to be addressed. Early in November word was received from Rome that a new and more specific brief would be issued to Pole, but there was no chance of it arriving before the Parliament opened. So Philip had to proceed on the basis of what he had already achieved, ‘feeling sure that the Holy Father would ratify and approve my course, and indeed be very glad that I had adopted it’.
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For the first (and only) time Philip accompanied Mary to the state opening, and a prayer for the pope was inserted among the religious formalities.

The cardinal’s presence was now required, but there remained the small matter of an outstanding attainder for high treason against him. Philip, having consulted his advisers and theologians, decided to gamble. On 3 November the privy council invited Pole to return to England, in his formal capacity as papal legate, and as he made his way home with studied and ceremonial deliberation, the repeal of his attainder was rushed through all its stages. The process was completed by 22 November, when the king and queen took the most unusual step of going to the Parliament in person and in mid-session to give the royal assent.
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Two days later the cardinal arrived by river at Westminster (thus ducking the issue of passing through London) and greeted the queen with the words of the ‘Hail Mary’. It was an emotional moment, and she claimed, quite mistakenly, that the child in her womb had quickened in response. Pole took up residence at Lambeth Palace, untenanted since the imprisonment of Cranmer over a year before, and prepared to address himself to the arduous task of reconciliation. On the 28th he addressed both Houses of Parliament, his eloquence giving no hint of the reservations that he must have felt: ‘My commission,’ he declared, ‘is not of prejudice to any person. I come not to destroy but to build. I come to reconcile, not to condemn. I come not to compel but to call again.’
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The past, he went on, would be ‘cast into the sea of forgetfulness’. He praised Mary, Philip and the Emperor in fulsome terms, likening the latter to David, who had been unable to build the Temple at Jerusalem but had been constrained to leave the task to his son Solomon. Two days later, on 30 November, Parliament presented a petition, in the name of both Houses, to the king and queen ‘as persons unspotted by heresy or schism’ to intercede with the papal legate for absolution and reconciliation. Pole pronounced his blessing, and the assembled company ‘cried with one voice, Amen’.
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Tears of joy, we are told, flowed copiously. But of course in legal terms the process had only just begun, and on 4 December a committee was established to draft a bill that would have the effect of repealing all those acts by which the royal supremacy had been established. The committee was also briefed to safeguard the rights of the property holders. All this had been very much Philip’s doing. Apart from taking her place in all the proper formalities, Mary hardly appears in these negotiations at all, and when she wrote to the Emperor on 7 December, informing him of the joy and enthusiasm with which her subjects had embraced the True Church, she rightly attributed this success ‘largely … to the wise guidance of my said Lord’.
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Philip soon became aware, however, that he could not yet sit back and enjoy his triumph. Hard questions remained to be answered. It was all very well to talk about ‘seas of forgetfulness’, but if the acts dissolving the small monasteries and conferring the property of surrendered large houses upon the crown were repealed with the rest, wherein did the property holders’ title lie? A papal dispensation was fine up to a point, but the pope (like Parliament) was a sovereign legislator and could not bind his successors. If the next pope changed his mind and withdrew the dispensation, then the immunity of the new property owners from prosecution disappeared. Even the present dispensation was open to interpretation. It did away with earthly penalties, but suppose Pole claimed (as he probably would) that the actual sin of unlawful possession remained? A sermon by John Feckenham, the Dean of St Paul’s, who was known to be close to Pole, on 25 November had promised no less.
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This prospect of spiritual blackmail was both uncomfortable and unwelcome. What the Parliament needed was a new basis for title. Neither Mary nor Pole would see this – but Philip could, and did.

Philip therefore supported a plan, devised by anonymous lawyers, to include the full text of the dispensation in the statute of repeal. By so doing, it would become enshrined in English law, irrespective of future papal policy, unless or until the statute was itself repealed. This was hardly a perfect solution, but it met the immediate requirement. Pole was utterly opposed to the idea. In the first place he refused to acknowledge that any valid title to the property in question could be created by any positive law, and secondly it was contrary to the papal prerogative to attempt to constrain the freedom of future popes in this way. He had only reluctantly conceded the need for any statute of repeal, and to attempt to use it in this way was quite unacceptable. Mary, we are told, supported him, and between them they could have sabotaged the whole bargain. Detailed discussions took place, recorded (somewhat imprecisely) by Ludovico Priuli, Pole’s secretary.
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Both Pole and Gardiner lectured the lay nobility on the sinfulness of their ways, and called on classical antiquity to counteract modern precedent.

However, at some point between 22 and 27 December, Philip talked his wife round. He must have had magical powers of persuasion, because the issue touched her conscience, but she probably realised that it was a logical extension of the idea of a parliamentary settlement, which she had accepted as early as the previous August. The lawyers made some concessions, but without Mary’s support the clerical position became increasingly untenable. The revised bill, having passed the Lords, was read in the Commons on 27 December and finally passed on 3 January 1555.
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As Gardiner observed (not without a hint of irony), ‘mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other’. To make the point more firmly, the fifteenth-century heresy laws, abandoned by Edward VI, were re-enacted. It became again a capital offence to deny any aspect of Catholic orthodoxy, and Mary and Pole, now armed with the latter’s authority as papal legate, could begin the congenial task of exterminating Protestants.

THE RECONCILIATION WITH ROME, 21 December 1554

Sire. As I have heard that the King has sent to your Majesty the Act passed by the parliament of England on obedience to the Pope and the Apostolic See,
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I have taken no steps to obtain and send a copy. Since that event, on the Sunday following, the King attended mass at St Paul’s, in presence of Cardinal Pole. After mass the Chancellor preached in the pulpit outside the church and was listened to by a multitude of people that overflowed both the church and churchyard, as well as by the King and Cardinal. He explained to the people what parliament had done, and publicly confessed the error into which fear of the late King Henry had led him when he went to Rome and gave his consent to the rejection of the Papal authority, as he set forth in his book on true obedience.
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No overt sign of displeasure was observed on his listeners’ faces, but rather joy and satisfaction at seeing the King and the Cardinal, and hearing about the reconciliation. When the sermon was over the King and Cardinal returned to Westminster, accompanied by the English nobility and the king’s guard, a fine sight to see. Since then parliament has been discussing several bills, among them one confirming the titles of holders of church property, which the English lawyers asserted to be unnecessary because since the earliest times the kings of England have held absolute and immediate jurisdiction over church lands. The holders, however, desired to be reassured, which caused a difficulty in that parliament wished the dispensation to be included in the statute on obedience to the Pope, and the Cardinal would not have this, lest it should seem that the realm’s obedience had been bought, though he was willing to agree that the dispensation should be included in two other acts or statutes. This difficulty proved so serious that the Cardinal declared that he would go back to Rome without having accomplished that for which he came rather than make a concession so prejudicial to the rights of the holy see. Whereupon the King approached the Privy Council and certain private individuals with a view to persuading them to accept the concession of two statutes on some other controversial point. No decision has yet been reached, but it is hoped that parliament will arrange matters. Moreover several members of the Lower House who possess no church property, influenced by envy of the holders, political passion or conscientious scruples, have moved that no dispensation be granted, the question thus being left to the holders’ consciences. But they will not prevail, because of the promise which the King and Queen have given to obtain the dispensation.