Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (38 page)

Yet, in certain quarters, resistance to the reintroduction of the old faith could be fierce. Some preachers, righteous in their generation, proclaimed the true doctrine of King Edward’s reign. London was as ever the centre of religious radicalism. When one Catholic chaplain preached at Paul’s Cross, a large crowd cried out ‘Thou liest!’ and ‘Pull him out! Pull him out!’ A dagger was thrown at the pulpit, and he had to be hurried away through the schoolhouse close by. Nevertheless, the European reformers, who had made the capital their home, now quickly made their way back to Zurich or Geneva or Strasburg. The colony of Walloon weavers, settled in Glastonbury, was happy to go home.

Other incidents of insurrection took place. A church in Suffolk was set on fire as Mass was being said. One radical, Thomas Flower, pulled out a wooden knife from his belt at the time of
communion and repeatedly stabbed at the officiating priest. The reformers were soon obliged to meet in secret; they went into fields, or ships moored on the Thames, under cover of darkness. The bishop of London, Edmund Bonner, was determined to root out the heretics. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said to one of them, ‘there is a brotherhood of you, but I will break it, I warrant you.’ He had been condemned to perpetual imprisonment in the Marshalsea by Northumberland’s council; soon enough he became known as ‘Bloody Bonner’ for his determined persecution of reformers.

Another restored bishop, Stephen Gardiner, was fresh from the Tower when he confronted another heretic. ‘My lord,’ the man said, ‘I am none heretic, for that way that you count heresy, so worship we the living God.’

‘God’s Passion!’ bellowed the bishop. ‘Did I not tell you, my lord deputy, how you should know an heretic? He is up with the “living God” as though there were a dead God. They have nothing in their mouths, these heretics, but “the Lord liveth, the living God ruleth, the Lord Lord” and nothing but “the Lord” ’. At this point he took off his cap, and rubbed to and fro, and up and down, ‘the fore part of his head, where a lock of hair was always standing up’. His final words were ‘Away with him! It is the stubbornest knave that ever I talked with.’ He dispatched another radical preacher with the words ‘carry away this frenzy-fool to prison’. His archdeacon at Westminster was equally vehement; when disputing with a disciple of Arianism, whereby the Son of God is inferior to God the Father, he spat in the man’s face. Just as ‘Catholic’ now became used as a term of triumph, so ‘Protestant’ entered the language in the course of this reign as a mark of opprobrium.

To gauge the true faith of the English is impossible. It is clear enough that only a minority of the people were committed to the new faith, and that a slightly larger number now espoused full Catholicism. The changes in direction of religious policy, the attack upon the rituals of the old faith, the stripping of the churches, must have had devastating consequences for the piety of the people. The bonds of the sacred had been loosened. It is possible, then, that there was no drift from Catholicism to Protestantism (or vice versa) but rather a movement from the fervent or instinctive piety of the medieval period to bland conformism and even indifference. This
would be entirely consistent with a reformation that was less about the assertion of faith and principle than about the redistribution of power and wealth. Habit and custom, rather than faith or piety, were the determinants of English religion.

Mary was the first woman, apart from the ill-starred Jane Grey, to be proclaimed queen regnant of England. Her one possible predecessor, Matilda, had never been crowned and was known only as
domina
, or lady. But Mary had one precedent; her grandmother, Isabella, had ruled as queen of Castile and had maintained all the panoply of a royal court. No doubt Katherine of Aragon had discoursed with her daughter on the rituals and splendours of a reigning queen. Mary’s great-grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, had been the power behind the throne of her son Henry VII. And her cousin, Margaret, had been ruling as queen-regent of Flanders for the last twenty years. As a child she had been brought up to be a queen; no subject could kiss her, except on the hand, and in formal rituals those about her knelt. There was a tradition of female power upon which she could draw.

She employed the members of her own household as her first advisers, but she could not wholly dispense with the councillors of the previous reign; only they had the knowledge, and skill, to maintain the system of government. Two days before her coronation she had summoned them; when they assembled she sank to her knees before them and spoke to them of the duties that, as a sovereign, God had imposed upon her. ‘I have entrusted my affairs and person to you, and wish to adjure you to do your duty as you are bound to your oaths.’ According to the Spanish ambassador, who became her principal confidant, they were deeply moved and did not know how to reply. But hers was a politic move. She knew that many of them had been hostile to her in the past, having signed the device barring her from the succession, and she distrusted them. She declared to the ambassador that ‘she would use their dissimulation for a great end, and would make their consent prevent them from plotting against her’.

It was a large and in some ways unwieldy council, composed of some fifty members. Mary herself was infuriated by the divisions among them; they were continually ‘chopping and changing’, blaming one another and exculpating themselves. Some had always been
loyal to her, while others had been disloyal to the last possible minute; some were conservative bishops, newly released from prison, while others were great magnates who had done well out of the confiscation of monastic lands. She said, on a later occasion, that she spent most of her time shouting at them. Yet from this council a small inner circle of six or seven men was soon formed. Most notable among them was the old bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner; the bishop, previously confined to the Tower, was appointed to be lord chancellor. Most of the others were professional administrators who had served under the old regime.

Mary set about the business of governing with a will. She rose at dawn, when she prayed and heard a private Mass; she then went to her desk where she stayed until one or two in the afternoon. She took a light meal and then returned to her desk where she worked until midnight. She wrote letters; she granted audiences to her subjects; she conferred with her council. Yet it was still commonly believed that she needed a husband. A female monarch was considered to be unnatural, an aberration that could be countered only by a male figure of authority at her side.

When parliament assembled on 5 October, in the first year of her reign, the question of her marriage was a pressing issue. The vast majority, of both Lords and Commons, wished her to take an Englishman as her consort. At her formal coronation, four days before, she had worn her hair loose as a symbol that she was a virgin.

Matters of a more general purport were also debated. Parliament passed a bill affirming the validity of Henry VIII’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon, legitimizing Mary’s claim to the throne. An Act was also passed to enforce the religious settlement as it had stood in the last year of Henry VIII, thus abolishing all the Edwardian innovations; the matter caused protracted deliberation, over a period of four days, and was eventually agreed by 270 over 80 votes. A significant minority, therefore, still supported the Edwardian reforms. The members of parliament, however, let it be known that there were two topics on which they were united. There was to be no restitution of Church property, and no restoration of papal authority.

In the following month the Speaker of the House of Commons
came before the queen and her council. He presented her with a petition on the question of her marriage and then, in a long and prolix speech, he urged the queen to choose one of her own subjects as her spouse. It would not be fitting to choose someone from abroad, since a foreign prince would have other interests and other priorities. She started to her feet and in the course of a hasty and improvised reply she stated that ‘if you, our Commons, force upon us a husband whom we dislike, it may occasion the inconvenience of our death; if we marry where we do not love, we shall be in our grave in three months . . .’

Yet others were already involved in the matter of marriage. Just nine days after her proclamation as queen the Spanish ambassador raised the question with her. Mary replied that she would willingly follow the advice of her cousin, Charles V, which meant that in practice she would have no hesitation in marrying a member of the Spanish royal family of which she was already a part. She was, indeed, half-Spanish. The most suitable of the male candidates was inevitably Philip, the eldest son of the king. This is what the Lords and Commons feared.

Mary summoned the ambassador to her private chapel in the autumn of 1553, just as parliament was meeting; this was the sanctuary where she kept the Holy Sacrament and where she told the ambassador that ‘she had continually wept and prayed God to inspire her with an answer to the question of marriage’. She went down upon her knees and began to recite ‘Veni Creator’, a hymn from the Gregorian chant. It seems to have been at this point that she resolved to marry Philip. He was, in a sense, the natural choice. How could the queen marry an English subject?

One possible English candidate had emerged. Edward Courtenay, great-grandson of Edward IV and heir to the House of York, had been imprisoned for the last fifteen years on trumped-up charges of treason; his Plantagenet blood was always a threat to the Tudor dynasty. Mary had released him, as a matter of honour, but had no intention of marrying him. ‘I will never, never marry him,’ she had told her council, ‘that I promise you, and I am a woman of my word. What I say, I do.’ He was not to her taste. Long imprisonment had rendered him feeble and supine. She had irrevocably turned to Spain.

One evening the Spanish ambassador was received at court and, as he bowed to her, he whispered in her ear that he had credentials from the emperor to deliver to her. At the same time he passed her a letter that she quickly concealed. On the following evening he was brought in state by barge to the palace, bearing the official proposal for Mary to wed Philip. Some days later, as the queen was being led towards the royal chapel for Vespers, someone in the court shouted out ‘Treason!’ to general alarm. Mary was unperturbed but her younger sister was seized with fear and trembling.

Princess Elizabeth had largely been a spectator in these marital proceedings. She had followed Mary in her sister’s triumphant entry into London, as a way of advertising their accord in rebutting the claims of a rival family, but the two were not united in any other way. Elizabeth was seen tacitly to represent the Protestant influence, and as such she soon came under suspicion. The French ambassador reported that ‘Elizabeth will not hear Mass, nor accompany her sister to the chapel’. She was considered to be of a proud and fiery spirit, like the other members of her family. The imperial ambassador, another conduit of news and rumour, decided that ‘the princess Elizabeth is greatly to be feared; she has a spirit full of incantation’.

But she knew when to bend. On hearing that her refusal to hear Mass was being treated as insurrection, she fell upon her knees before the queen and begged to be given instruction in the Catholic faith. Yet her sincerity was doubted; it was said that she was too ready to consort with heretics. When she attended her first Mass, in the autumn of the year, she complained all the way to the chapel that she was tormented by a stomach ache, ‘wearing a suffering air’. She never wore the gorgeous rosary that her sister had given her. Mary let it be known that she did not want Elizabeth to succeed to the throne, but her only remedy was of course to bear her own children. The queen was now thirty-seven years old, spare and lean, with a thin mouth and commanding gaze; Elizabeth was twenty, with youth and beauty on her side. She might be a threat.

That threat seemed to emerge in a rebellion at the beginning of 1554. When the envoys from Spain had arrived in January to
seal the terms of the marriage treaty with Philip, the Londoners ‘nothing rejoicing, held their heads down sorrowfully’. Schoolboys pelted the Spanish delegation with snowballs. The terms of the treaty were announced on 14 January and, although they restricted Philip’s role in the determination of policy, a chronicler reported that ‘almost each man was abashed, looking daily for worse matters to grow shortly after’. Religious, as well as political, discontent was in the air. By the end of 1553 the Mass and the Latin offices were decreed to be the only legal forms of worship. In December, at the close of parliamentary proceedings, a dead dog was thrown through the window of a royal chamber; it had been shaved with a tonsure like a monk. On another occasion a dead cat was found hanging in Friday Street, wearing Romish vestments; it had between its paws a piece of bread like a ‘singing cake’ or sacramental host.

The leaders of the Protestant cause now began to act in concert; among them was Sir Thomas Wyatt, the son of the poet, and the duke of Suffolk together with his three brothers. Suffolk himself was of course the father of Jane Grey, the queen of nine days. Edward Courtenay, perhaps angry at his rejection by Mary, joined them. They were in league with the French ambassador, whose country was much affronted by the queen’s decision to marry the heir of the Spanish crown. Some insurgents were simply opposed to the Spanish presence, while others were convinced reformers who were dismayed at the return to Catholicism. A party of the rebels had in fact been members of the military establishment under Northumberland and Edward VI. Cornwall and Devonshire were supposed to be the first regions to rise; Wyatt would carry his native county of Kent, and Suffolk would stir the Midlands. All of the armies would then converge upon London, where they hoped for a happy welcome.

The conspirators remained in London for the first two weeks of the year, but in that period Edward Courtenay gave signs of indecision. He professed to believe that the queen was about to marry him, after all, and he lingered in the purlieus of the court; then he ordered a lavish costume of state, and spoke unwisely about what he knew. The chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, interviewed him and discovered much about the plot. Gardiner summoned one of
the insurgents, Sir Peter Carew, to London. Carew fell into a panic and tried to incite his native city of Exeter; Exeter did not rise, and Carew fled to France.