Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (42 page)

The affairs of the realm were in suspense. The imperial ambassador wrote to his emperor that ‘I foresee convulsions and disturbances such as no pen can describe’. He also repeated the rumours that Mary had never been pregnant or, more damagingly, that a convenient newborn male child would be conveyed to her bed. There were also fears that the queen was in fact barren, and would never produce an heir. It was possible that a cyst or tumour had provoked this phantom pregnancy, in which case her condition might prove fatal.

Elizabeth was summoned to Hampton Court from Woodstock, where much to the displeasure of the queen the courtiers knelt and kissed her hand. She was pressed to ask for pardon from her sister, but she acknowledged no offence. A week later the two women
met for the first time in almost two years. Two chroniclers, Foxe and Holinshed, have left reports of this encounter. ‘You will not confess,’ the queen told her, ‘you stand to your truth. I pray God it may so fall out.’

‘If it does not,’ Elizabeth replied, ‘I desire neither favour nor pardon at your hands.’

The queen asked her if she would spread reports that she had been wrongfully punished by her imprisonment at the Tower and at Woodstock. Elizabeth denied any intention of so doing. ‘I have borne the burden,’ she said, ‘and I must bear it.’

The queen merely muttered, in Spanish, ‘
Dios sabe
’ – ‘God knows’. Her sister then withdrew from her presence. Yet Elizabeth now remained at liberty.

Philip could not endure a longer stay in England; his anxious and disheartened wife was for him a dead failure. No son of his would now ascend to the throne. ‘Let me know,’ he wrote to an adviser, ‘what line I am to take with the queen about leaving her and about religion. I see I must say something, but God help me!’ His departure was made all the more urgent by the decision of his father, Charles V, to abdicate and to seek solace in a monastery. Philip informed his wife that he would leave her for only two or three weeks, but he was dissembling. At the end of August they parted at Greenwich, since the long journey to Dover would trouble the queen’s health.

The Venetian ambassador was, as always, in attendance. The queen was entirely composed as she accompanied her husband through all the halls and chambers of the palace just before his departure; she stood at the head of the staircase clothed ‘in royal state and dignity’ as he went out of the door towards the water. She then retired to her private chambers overlooking the Thames where ‘thinking she was not observed, she gave scope to her grief in floods of tears’. She watched as the barge slowly disappeared from sight, Philip raising his hat in farewell.

The weeks passed. The queen spent her evenings, after the work of government was done, writing long epistles to her absent husband. He tended to reply with short letters on matters of business. She even went to the trouble of writing to the emperor himself, expressing her ‘unspeakable sadness which I experience
because of the absence of the king’. She may also have been receiving news of his dissipations at the imperial court of Brussels; he was feasting and dancing with a joy he had never shown in London. He was also visiting Madame d’Aler, a beautiful woman of whom he was much enamoured. He had other companions. He relished eating lumps of bacon fat, and it was said that his taste in courtesans was not much higher.

In the autumn of 1555 he assumed the leadership of the Spanish territory of the Netherlands and, when Mary wrote asking him to return to her, he replied that he could only come back to England if he were given some role in its governance. It was essentially a polite refusal. England had become for him an expensive distraction. Mary is reported to have told her ladies that she would now revert to the life she had led before her marriage. According to reports she looked ten years older.

The parlous situation of the queen of course encouraged the ambitions of others. Parliament was divided and obstinate, with the queen herself complaining of ‘many violent opposition members’; her advice, in the election of the autumn of 1555, for the return ‘of the wise, grave and Catholic sort’ had not necessarily been followed. No parliamentary parties or groups existed in the modern sense, only a shifting aggregate of discontented individuals. Mary’s administration suffered another blow with the death in November of the chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, from ‘suppression of urine’. The archdeacon of Winchester wrote, from his prison cell, that ‘although the cockatrice be dead, yet his pestilent chickens, with the whore of Babylon, still live’.

An armed conspiracy against the queen was detected at the end of 1555. ‘I am sure you hear,’ Sir Henry Dudley told a friend in confidence, ‘they go about a coronation.’ He was referring to the rumour that Mary was about to crown Philip as king, which would be an intolerable threat to the safety and independence of England. It was enough to stir the ‘western gentlemen’ who now, in secret conspiracy, proposed to march on London and give the crown to Elizabeth; Mary would be sent packing to Brussels and the arms of her husband.

A further refinement came from Sir Henry Dudley himself, who intended to bring in the French. The French king had
promised to supply ships and money, with the crews made up of western privateers. The captain of the Isle of Wight was prepared to surrender his island and Dudley undertook to attack Portsmouth, where he would find the cannon out of action. At a midnight audience the French king, Henry II, handed a large sum of money to Dudley and advised him to reconnoitre the coast of Normandy in preparation for an invasion.

The walls of a royal court have ears and eyes. The English ambassador in Paris had been informed of the interview immediately after it had taken place, and he passed on the information to Mary in the form of a cipher. One of the conspirators, in panic fear, betrayed the names of his colleagues to the council. They were arrested and imprisoned; some of them were tortured.

Yet even after their execution Mary could not rest. The French ambassador, recalled at this time of tension, described her ‘dreading every moment that her life might be attempted by her own attendants’. She was ‘deeply troubled’ and saw conspiracies in every corner. The palaces at Whitehall and Greenwich were filled with armed men. She did not appear in public, and slept no more than three hours each night.

The name of Elizabeth had been invoked by the Dudley conspirators, but there was no clear evidence that she was involved in the rebellion; nevertheless, the suspicion was there. The constable of France had written to the French ambassador ordering him to ‘restrain Madame Elizabeth from stirring at all in the affair of which you have written to me, for that would be to ruin everything’. Five of her household servants were arrested, and one of them was found guilty of treason; he was later pardoned. The princess was now heir apparent, and had to be treated with circumspection. Mary tried to dissemble her real feelings but in private she was said always to talk of Elizabeth with scorn and hatred. The atmosphere was further clouded by the persistent rumours that Philip was about to invade the country with an imperial army.

At the beginning of May 1556, a blazing comet appeared in the London sky; it was half the size of the moon and was ‘shooting out fire to great wonder and marvel to the people’. It could be seen flaring for the next seven days and seven nights, thus signifying
great changes in the affairs in the world. A gang of twelve men went about the streets predicting the end of the world, but the tumult they caused was a screen for their robberies. More generally the rumours of riot and rebellion grew ever more numerous.

In this age of anxiety Mary now relied primarily upon the counsels of Reginald Pole. At his behest the most celebrated burnings of Mary’s reign were performed at Oxford. The three great bishops of reform – Ridley, Latimer and Cranmer – had been stripped of their rank and solemnly degraded. The worst disgrace was reserved for the archbishop of Canterbury. He had been clothed in his full pontifical robes – except that they were made of rough canvas. As each strip of clothing was pulled from him Bishop Bonner made a speech. ‘This is the man’, he said, ‘that despised the pope, and is now judged by him. This is the man that pulled down churches, and is now judged in a church. This is the man that condemned the sacrament, and is now condemned before it.’ One of those presiding pulled Bonner by the sleeve several times, begging him to stop the abuse of this grave old man. Bonner paid no heed. A barber clipped the hair around the old man’s head and then Cranmer was forced to kneel before Bonner, who began to scrape the tips of the archbishop’s fingers to desecrate the hand that had administered extreme unction. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘are you lord no longer.’ Cranmer was then given a threadbare gown and a townsman’s greasy cap before being surrendered to the secular authorities.

The stake was raised in a ditch outside Balliol College. Ridley and Latimer were the first to die. ‘Oh, be ye there?’ Ridley called out on seeing his colleague.

‘Yea, have after as fast as I can follow.’

When they reached the stake they both knelt down and kissed it. To his friends Ridley gave the small gifts in his possession – some pieces of ginger and nutmeg, his watch. Latimer had nothing to give, but stood meekly as he was stripped to the shroud he wore as a mark of his fate. Ridley was given a small bag of gunpowder to tie around his neck. ‘Have you any for my brother?’

‘Yes, sir, that I have.’

‘Then give it unto him betime, lest you come too late.’

They were tied on opposite sides and, when the lighted faggot was placed at Ridley’s feet, Latimer called out to him: ‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’ These words have become perhaps the most celebrated in the entire history of Reformation but they may be the invention of John Foxe in the second edition of
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs
. The truth of the matter cannot be determined.

As the flames leapt up Ridley cried: ‘
In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum
’ – ‘Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit.’ Latimer cried: ‘Oh Father of heaven receive my soul!’ Latimer seemed to embrace the fire and ‘after that he had stroked his face with his hands, and as it were bathed them a little in the fire, he soon died . . .’ Ridley was less fortunate. The fire stalled and proceeded only slowly. In his agony he cried out ‘I cannot burn! I cannot burn! Lord have mercy upon me! Let the fire come unto me! I cannot burn!’ The flames were stoked and as they rose higher the bag of gunpowder around his neck exploded. His time had come.

Thomas Cranmer, quondam archbishop of Canterbury, had witnessed the burning of his colleagues from the tower of Bocardo and was of course much moved by the sight. It is reported that he fell to his knees in tears. Some of the tears may have been for himself. He had always given his allegiance to the established state; for him it represented the divine rule. Should he not now obey the monarch and the supreme head of the Church even if she wished to bring back the jurisdiction of Rome? In his conscience he denied papal supremacy. In his conscience, too, he was obliged to obey his sovereign.

Soon after the burning of his colleagues he was removed from Bocardo to the house of the dean of Christ Church, where he was more at ease. He was visited there by a Spanish friar who tried to persuade him of the merits of the Catholic faith. He did indeed issue a series of recantations; whether out of deference to the arguments of the friar, or from fear of a painful death, was soon to be ascertained. He wrote a declaration in which he acknowledged the pope to be supreme head of the Church in England;
this was his duty to queen and parliament. In another submission he stated that he believed in all the articles of faith promulgated by the Catholic Church; in particular he accepted the power of the sacraments. On 18 March 1556, in a sixth submission, he confessed himself to be an unworthy sinner who had persecuted the holy Church and stripped the realm of true faith. His was the most significant religious statement in the realm. It was said that one salmon was worth a thousand frogs.

These six statements of belief might have been considered enough to earn him a pardon, or at least a respite from the fire. Yet Cranmer had been the father of schism in England, the most energetic promoter of reform. Mary could not forgive him as the master of heresy any more than she could forget his role in the persecution of her mother. On 20 March he was told that he would be tied to the stake on the following day.

On that last morning he was brought to St Mary’s Church, where he stood on a platform as a sermon was directed against him. He looked ‘the very image of sorrow’. He sometimes raised his face to heaven, and sometimes stared at the ground; he was in tears. He was then expected to deliver a short address in which he would repeat his acceptance of the truths of the Catholic Church. He began by declaring himself to be a miserable penitent who had set forth many sinful writings. It was now believed that he would repeat his belief in the sacraments. But instead he proceeded to recant his recantations and deny the six statements he had previously made. The audience murmured and called out. He had written them, he said, ‘for fear of death’. The university church was now in commotion, and Cranmer had to shout to be heard. ‘And as for the pope. I refuse him, as Christ’s enemy, and Antichrist, with all his false doctrine.’

An attendant lord called out to him ‘Remember yourself, and play the Christian.’

But Cranmer could not be restrained: ‘And as for the sacrament, I believe as I have taught in my book against the bishop of Winchester!’ He did not, in other words, accept the Catholic doctrine on transubstantiation.

The officials pulled him down from the platform and, amid the noise and confusion, hustled him into the rain; he was led
towards the stake as the Spanish friar repeated over and over again ‘
Non fecisti?
’ – ‘You didn’t do it? You didn’t do it?’

He knelt before the stake where he prayed; after he was bound the flames came up quickly, and he put his right hand into the middle of them, saying ‘my unworthy right hand’ for composing the recantations. In the heat he wiped his forehead with his unburnt hand. He died quietly enough, praying ‘Lord Jesus receive my spirit’ as the fire rose around him. On that day Cardinal Pole became archbishop of Canterbury.