Mary Tudor (39 page)
Rather surprisingly amid this story of gathering gloom, the Parliament that met from 20 January to 7 March was the least contentious of the whole reign, and it was the only one to be prorogued rather than dissolved.
[376]
This may have been partly because minds were focused by the reality of war, and by recent setbacks at the hands of the old enemy, France; it may have been because everyone was desperate to get out of London before they were caught by the influenza. The first business, inevitably, was a subsidy for the war. Negotiations ensued. It was pointed out that a substantial loan had only just been raised, and if there were to be an invasion in the summer, everyone would be put to great expense for armour and weapons. Eventually the Commons agreed to one subsidy for 10 June 1558, and a tax of ‘one fifteenth’ on land for October. For 1559 they would not commit themselves, and Mary had perforce to accept what was offered.
[377]
More positively, both Houses were keen to provide for defence in more direct ways, and a number of measures concerning the musters and the possession of weapons passed backwards and forwards between the two Houses, emerging eventually as two statutes (on the Parliament roll, 4 & 5 Philip and Mary, caps 2 and 3). The first of these specified in detail what horses, armour and weapons each citizen was required to produce, in strict accordance with his position in the social hierarchy. The second set out penalties for non-attendance at the musters, by those who had been duly summoned; it also penalised corrupt muster masters, and made desertion (once mustered) a felony. Although these were later claimed to have been sectarian measures, designed to maintain the Catholic ascendancy, there appears to have been no justification for such a view. How effectively the Acts were enforced during the musters of the summer, it is not easy to say, but they remained the basis of the Elizabethan domestic military system for nearly twenty years.
[378]
An attempt was also made to recover debts owed to the crown through the sequestration of real estate, but this ran into great difficulties and was eventually abandoned on the queen’s orders just a few days before the session ended.
There was no reason why the loss of Calais should have made any difference to the Church, except in so far as it contributed to a growing sense of malaise. ‘I am told,’ Feria wrote in February, ‘that since the fall of Calais, not one third as many Englishmen go to mass as went before …’
[379]
This need not be taken too seriously because Feria, as we have seen, believed that Pole’s whole strategy was mistaken and ineffectual, but it was indicative of the struggle that the regime was having to maintain its credibility at a time when misfortune was naturally interpreted as evidence of divine disapproval. Meanwhile, the heretics were continuing to make their way to Smithfield.
The xxii day of December [1557] was burned in Smithfield one Sir John Ruff, a friar and a Scot, and a woman, for heresy ...
[380]
The financial demands of war also pressed hard on the Church. Pole was well aware of the extent to which various dioceses, and indeed the Church as an institution, had benefited from Mary’s generosity, and he was insistent that clerical taxation should be voted by convocation, and paid in full. But it was a struggle, and rumours that Pole had made a personal fortune of £100,000 out of his position were very wide of the mark. He did have an income of about £3,000 a year, but to maintain his status as archbishop, even when he had ceased to be papal legate, that was by no means too much – and would not have been considered such. However, he seems to have been careless about distinguishing between his private money, the money attached to his various offices, and the funds of the Church as a whole – such as the dues of ‘first fruits and tenths’. After his death this left his secretary, Priuli, with a great deal of disentangling to do, and although there is no reason to doubt the cardinal’s financial integrity, he certainly gave hostages to fortune.
[381]
In some ways the Church (the burnings excepted) was still doing well in the last nine months of Mary’s reign, a period that saw the publication of Thomas Watson’s
Wholesome and Catholic Doctrine
, one of the most effective pastoral works of the reign. There is still some evidence of a recovering piety among ordinary people, not least in bequests to parish churches and refounded religious houses. But the shadow of papal disfavour continued to hang over the whole enterprise.
[382]
When Philip left England for the second and last time in July 1557, Mary was left pretty much to her own devices. Charles V had retreated to San Yuste, the pope was hostile, and her old and faithful servant Robert Rochester died in November. Her great personal props and supports in this isolation were Susan Clarencius, another old and faithful servant, and her cousin Reginald Pole.
Susan Clarencius is not very visible after Mary’s marriage, except in so far as she received a number of small but lucrative rewards in the form of lands, wardships and rectories (allowing her to draw the tithes from certain parishes). She inveigled a coach and horses out of the Venetian ambassador, in return no doubt for the favour of access,
[383]
and can be glimpsed taking money off Sir William Petre while she entertained him at cards as he waited in the privy chamber to be received. She exchanged New Year gifts with Mary in 1557, but that list was governed by the strictest protocol and tells us nothing of Mary’s degree of intimacy with her servants. More revealing perhaps is the fact that she was able to write to the Countess of Bedford with news of her husband’s ‘valiantness’ on campaign with the king before any official despatch had mentioned him. On 25 July 1558, St James’ Day (and the anniversary of the royal marriage), she even took delivery of a consignment of flags and other images intended for a court celebration of the saint.
[384]
These may well have been displayed in a public procession of some kind, but the relevant pages of Henry Machyn’s diary are missing and no other chronicler mentions it. As evidence of a close relationship, this does not amount to much, but we have John Foxe’s testimony to the fact that she was ‘most familiar’ with the queen, and was one of those who attended her on her deathbed.
In a sense Pole is much more visible because of his ecclesiastical authority, but the evidence of his personal relations with Mary is virtually all oblique or circumstantial. Philip thought highly of Pole’s influence over his wife, but was never explicit about how that influence was exercised. There are occasional references to his good offices as a councillor, usually in a clerical context, but he appears to have played almost no part in the secular government, which was the queen’s main preoccupation.
[385]
Pole lived at Lambeth Palace, just over the river from Whitehall, so it is not surprising that his comings and goings to the court attracted little attention. On 15 July 1557 Henry Machyn noted that ‘the Queen’s grace dined at Lambeth with my lord cardinal Pole’ on the eve of one of her regular moves to Richmond, which suggests that visits in that direction were not common.
[386]
On St Andrew’s Day in the same year he accompanied Mary from St James’ to Whitehall, where after mass Sir Thomas Tresham was created master of the Order of St John in England, ‘and iiii knights of Rodes made’. It was on this occasion, after dinner, that Pole notably preached in the presence of ‘all [the] juges and bysshopes’.
[387]
However, this was all in the way of ecclesiastical duty, and does not tell us much about their personal relationship. When Mary made her will on 30 March 1558, she named Pole as the chief executor (leaving him £1,000 for his pains), a role that should probably be seen as that of a trusted friend rather than an
ex officio
function of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
[388]
When Pole made his own will on 4 October, he requested his executors ‘to inform the Queen concerning this will, and to entreat her to show me the same favour when I am dead as she did in all my affairs while I was alive’, which is correct but hardly effusive.
[389]
Neither left any ‘memorial’ to the other, as Mary very conspicuously did to Philip, and this suggests a close professional association rather than warm personal friendship. Whether the cardinal ever acted as the queen’s confessor we do not know.
When Mary returned to London after Philip’s departure, she seems to have retreated into her shell. Apart from the state opening of Parliament on 20 January 1558, and the relevant high mass, there are almost no mentions of her appearance, and the revels accounts tell a similar story. They show no sign of activity at all between June and December 1557, and the total Christmas expenditure amounted to £36 4
s
0
d
.
[390]
Nothing at all seems to have been spent on props or new costumes, which suggests a very low level of activity, and no originality whatsoever. ‘Masks, plays and other pastimes’ are mentioned, but nothing is specified, and there is no reference to anything being created for the occasion. For Candlemas in the same year the costs were even more modest: £18 2
s
0
d
. In fact the last entertainment of the reign for which any description survives was a ‘great mask’ of Almains (i.e. Germans), pilgrims and Irishmen, which took place at Whitehall on 25 April 1557; in other words, while Philip was still in England. This seems to have accounted for a large part of the £151 17
s
7
d
spent in that financial year.
[391]
Mary seems to have lacked all enthusiasm for such capers, although the fact that she again believed herself to be pregnant early in 1558 may offer a partial explanation. When the king was away, no one else was in a position to act as cheer leader for the regime, and the royal magnificence was veiled. On New Year’s Eve 1558 ‘there came a lord of misrule from Westminster’ into London with a suitable retinue, but there is no certainty that this had any connection with the court.
[392]
When Giacomo Soranzo, the Venetian ambassador, left England for another posting in May 1557, he wrote (as was customary) a full description of England for the benefit of his successor, and this contained a detailed description of Mary herself.
[393]
This offers as much evidence as we are likely to obtain about her appearance and main characteristics, but of course Soranzo had no access to her private person, and did not apparently know anyone who had. ‘She is of low rather than middling stature,’ he commenced, but clean limbed and with ‘no part of her body deformed’. Her frame was spare and delicate, unlike either her father or her mother who (apparently) had run to fat in middle age. Where young Mary had been considered a beauty, her present wrinkles were caused more by anxiety than by age, although the effect was to make her look older than her real years (forty-one at this point). ‘Her aspect,’ he continued, ‘is very grave’ (
nel resto molto grave
), with eyes so piercing that they inspired fear in anyone who was scrutinised by them. He admitted that this was slightly deceptive, as she was very short-sighted and had to hold any book or document close to her face in order to be able to read it. Her ‘piercing eyes’ may therefore have been rather less perceptive than Soranzo was willing to admit. Indeed it is unlikely that she could see anything very clearly at a distance of more than a few feet. Spectacles were not unknown as a remedy for such a deficiency by this time, but either her physicians did not wish to advise them, or the queen herself was averse to the idea – a touch of vanity perhaps. Her voice, with which he must have been very familiar, was rough and loud, ‘almost like a man’s’, and audible at a considerable distance. She was, he concluded, a ‘seemly woman, never to be loathed for ugliness’, which, given the courtly world within which he was operating, was rather less than enthusiastic.
Her mind, he went on, was quick. She was able to comprehend ‘whatever is intelligible to others’. In case this should also seem to be faint praise, he makes clear that the ‘others’ referred to were male, and that this constituted ‘a marvellous gift for a woman’. She understood five languages, he wrote (somewhat optimistically), and spoke English, Latin, French and Spanish. Italian she understood but did not speak. Mary’s competence in Spanish is somewhat controversial, because other contemporary opinions do not agree with the Venetian in this respect, and it is unclear what she got from her mother and what from Philip.
[394]
It is also probable that he got it by hearsay as he did not speak Spanish himself, and his conversations with the queen were conducted in Latin. The fact that her intelligent responses ‘surprised everyone’ is more a comment on the times than on the queen, because there is plenty of evidence that Mary was (and always had been) an intelligent and highly educated woman.