Bloody Mary (45 page)

Londoners were in no mood to tolerate meddling foreigners just then. The January weather was bitterly cold, and both wood and coals were scarce and costly. To relieve the situation the mayor ordered sea coals to be sold at Billingsgate and Queen’s Hithe for fourpence the bushel, “which greatly helped till better provision might be found,” but the public temper remained sour.
¹³
Verbal attacks on the Spaniards mounted. A gentleman was thrown into prison on January 5 for saying “that the upshot of the match would not be as the Council expected,” and in the same week signs were posted at streetcorners announcing that the man the queen hoped to marry was already the husband of the Portuguese infanta.
¹⁴

The climate of criticism was so pervasive it reached Mary herself. News of the slanders in London was brought to her by some of her courtiers; others warned her gentlewomen of the dangers of popular revolt in such graphic terms that they came running to the queen in fear. At times these reports drove Mary to despair. “Melancholy and sadness” made her ill, and she was torn with guilt at the knowledge that her vow to marry Prince Philip caused such unrest among the people who claimed her primary loyalty.
¹⁵

But the danger that arose in the last weeks of January, 1554, came not from the people at large but from a small group of disgruntled gentlemen united—though loosely—by their opposition to the Spanish marriage and by a somewhat cloudy determination to remove Mary from the throne. The conspirators included Sir Peter Carew and Courtenay in the west, Sir James Crofts in Herefordshire, Sir Thomas Wyatt in Kent and in Leicestershire, the duke of Suffolk. Courtenay seems to have provided motivation to the group during their first meetings in November, and many believed that, from first to last, the aim of the plotters was to place Elizabeth and Courtenay jointly on the throne. But the earl was hardly one to mastermind a political coup, and in fact he did little to promote the uprising that was eventually touched off two months later. Elizabeth knew of the plot but did nothing to promote it; Noailles was brought in at the end of December, and did all he could to make it look as though the French were about to come in on the side of the conspirators in force. One bloodthirsty plotter, William Thomas, had concocted a plan to assassinate the queen, but could not persuade his colleagues to back him in this and the proposal “that the queen should have been slain as she did walk” was abandoned almost as soon as it was raised. By the time the imperial ambassadors arrived all that was definite was that there would be
four simultaneous rebellions in Herefordshire, Kent, Devon and Leicestershire, set for Palm Sunday, March 18.

Mary and the Council first learned of the serious disaffection when news came in mid-January that Carew was attempting to frighten the townspeople of Exeter with stories of Spanish rapine and slaughter. Mary immediately issued a warrant for Carew’s arrest, and was sending captains and lieutenants to every county in the south to raise men at arms to prevent trouble. Carew disappeared, and his fellow conspirators, unprepared as they were, nevertheless attempted to set off the risings that had been planned for later in the year. Courtenay, interviewed by Gardiner on January 21, told all he knew, and for better or worse, the rebellion was under way.

The conspiracy might have melted away entirely at this point, but Sir Thomas Wyatt, the Kentish gentleman who later called himself “the third or fourth man” in the plot, went ahead with his sworn agreement to raise the men of Kent against the queen. He gathered his forces first at Rochester, appealing to the broadest possible segment of the population by leaving the precise aims of the revolt unclear. His supporters rode through the villages near Wyatt’s camp shouting that the Spaniards were coming “with arquebusses, morions and matchlight,” and when the invaders failed to appear Wyatt told his men that his true purpose was to improve the advice given to the queen and change her councilors. The rebel force numbered no more than four thousand men at its strongest—some estimates place Wyatt’s total following at only two thousand—but Londoners imagined it to be much larger, and Mary’s advisers, who knew of the prearranged revolts to be staged in the West Country and the Welsh Marches, feared the worst. A French spy had informed Renard that Henri II was hoping to open another front along the Scots border, and had already sent agents into England carrying white badges to be given to the English captains he expected to recruit. The rebels had been told, Renard’s informant said, that there were twenty-four French ships and eighteen infantry companies massed on the Normandy coast, ready to sail for England on a few hours’ notice.
¹⁶

In the first days of the revolt the rebels had the initiative, though there were already signs that Wyatt would never succeed in stirring any but a small minority of the country population to join him. For if the rebel lieutenants were spreading fears of invasion, councilors and local officials loyal to Mary were riding through the same villages behind them, offering the queen’s pardon to all who would reconsider their adherence to Wyatt and return quietly to their homes. On January 27, market day, Sir Robert Southwell addressed the crowd at Mailing in Kent in ringing terms. “They go about to blear you with matters of Strangers,” he said,
referring to the rebel persuasions, yet “he seemeth very blind, and willingly blinded, that will have his sight dimmed with such a fond mist! For if they meant to resist Strangers,” Southwell pointed out, “they would then prepare to go to the seacoasts, and not to the queen’s most royal person, with such a company of arms and weapon.” His logic was impeccable, and his appeal to the patriotism of the citizens of Mailing even more effective. When he concluded his speech with “God save Queen Mary and all her well willers!” the crowd answered with a hearty “God save Queen Mary!” and “with one voice defied Wyatt and his accomplices as arrant traitors.”
¹⁷

But if the people of Malling were willing to swear they would die in defense of the queen, few of them actually joined the bands recruited to oppose Wyatt, and when the elderly duke of Norfolk led a force of men against him five hundred of the Londoners among them actually broke ranks and joined the rebels rather than fight them.

The defection of these “Whitecoats” and the failure of the stalwart old duke marked the low point in the contest with Wyatt and his men. The sight of the remnant of Norfolk’s fighting men straggling into the capital, “their coats torn, all ruined, without arrows or string in their bows,” was “heart-sore and very displeasing” to the queen, and when she turned to her councilors for advice and help she found them quarrelsome and treacherous.
¹⁸
Paget and his associates blamed the chancellor for creating unrest by his intemperate religious policies; Gardiner’s faction in turn blamed Paget, Arundel and the others for backing the marriage with Philip. Renard felt certain that some of the Council members were implicated in the revolt, and the curious inactivity of the body as a whole throughout the crisis lent support to his suspicions. Mary had ordered the Council to provide her with a large bodyguard shortly after the rising began; by January 31 they still had not done so even though she received word that same day that Wyatt meant to march on London. There was virtually no one in her government whom she could trust, Mary confided to Renard; she had no army, and for the first time since the middle ages, rebels would soon be at the gates of the capital.

Watch had been kept at all the gates in London since the twenty-sixth, and when the news came that Wyatt was indeed about to march on the city every possible measure was taken for its defense. Every craft provided double its normal muster of men, all wearing the white coats that identified the forces of the queen. Men in armor stood at every entrance to the city, and great guns were set in place at the drawbridge. Wyatt was proclaimed “a traitor and rebellious,” and whoever took him was promised a landed estate, to be held by himself and his heirs in perpetuity.

With the city in such danger the Council finally began to consider the
safety of the queen, and debated whether she should retire behind the thick walls of the Tower or retreat to Windsor. Some said she ought to disguise herself and go to live among the faithful country people until the coming battle had been decided, while a few—at least one spy among them—argued that she would be safest of all across the Channel at Calais. The four imperial commissioners set her an example by leaving London on February i, fearing that “the fury of the populace” was about to fall on their heads.
¹⁹
They went to take leave of Mary, and found her amazingly composed and resolute in the face of such danger. She “showed a firm spirit,” they wrote, asking as usual to be remembered to the emperor and regent and saying she would write them when she had time. Egmont and the others took the first ship they could find, and the ignominy of their departure was increased by the rudeness of the guardsmen who escorted them to the wharf. As soon as they embarked the guardsmen “behaved disrespectfully towards them, both by word and by firing certain arquebus shots” in their direction. They were seasick all the way home.
²⁰

Those who thought Mary would leave London to its fate gravely misunderstood her. On the day of the commissioners’ departure she went with an escort to the Guildhall, where the citizens were assembled to try to work out a plan to resist Wyatt’s invasion. She entered the great hall and went up into the place of the hustings, where a rich cloth of estate was hung. Standing beneath it, she spoke to the people in a strong, low voice that carried to the back of the hall.

“I am come unto you in mine own person,” she said, “to tell you that which you already see and know; that is, how traitorously and rebel-liously a number of Kentishmen have assembled themselves against us and you.” She explained, in clear and direct language, that Wyatt and his followers were only pretending to oppose her forthcoming marriage, and in fact meant to attack her religion and take the government into their own hands.

“Now, loving subjects,” she went on, “what I am ye right well know. I am your queen, to whom at my coronation, where I was wedded to the realm . . . you promised your allegiance and obedience unto me. And that I am the right and true inheritor of the crown of this realm of England, I take all Christendom to witness. My father, as ye all know, possessed the same regal state, which now rightly is descended unto me.” As to her marriage, Mary assured her subjects that she had been moved to take a husband not out of lust or self-will, but “to leave some fruit of my body behind me, to be your governor.” If she thought for one moment that her marriage would harm any one of her subjects, or any part of the realm, she said, she would remain a virgin for life.

It was a masterful speech, delivered without notes and seemingly
without any preparation but the constant preoccupation of a loving sovereign with her people’s welfare.

“I cannot tell how naturally the mother loveth the child,” Mary told the Londoners, “for I was never the mother of any, but certainly if a prince and governor may as naturally and earnestly love her subjects, as the mother doth love the child, then assure yourselves that I, being your lady and mistress, do as earnestly and tenderly love and favor you.”

At these “so sweet words,” a chronicler wrote, the people took comfort, and many of them were weeping.

“And now, good subjects,” the queen concluded, “pluck up your hearts, and like true men, stand fast against these rebels, both our enemies and yours, and fear them not, for I assure you I fear them nothing at all!”
²¹

Cheers of “God save Queen Mary!” rang through the hall as the queen took her leave, and some were heard to add “and the prince of Spain!” Mary’s councilors were dazzled, and her chancellor openmouthed in admiration. “Oh, how happy are we,” he exclaimed, “to whom God hath given such a wise and learned prince!” Renard, cynical to a fault and grudging in his compliments, stated the simple truth when he wrote that “there never was a more steadfast lady than this queen.”

Remember well, o mortall man, to ‘whom god geveth reason,

How he truly, most ryghtfully, doth alivayes puny she treason.

On the morning of Saturday, February 3, Wyatt and his men entered Southwark. They met no resistance. Some of the soldiers raised to oppose them joined them instead, and the people of the suburb entertained the rebels “most willingly with their best” out of fear. Only the river now lay between the Kentishmen and the heart of London, and in the city proper all was rumor and panic. “Then should you have seen taking in wares off the stalls in a most hasty manner,” wrote one Londoner. “There was running up and down in every place to weapons and harness; aged men were astonished, many women wept for fear; children and maids ran into their houses, shutting the doors for fear.” All the boats in the river were withdrawn to the Westminster side, and in every quarter of the city Mary’s speech was read and reread to the people to give them courage in the difficult hours that lay ahead.

Wyatt set up two cannon against London Bridge, but the citizens had placed four against him, while arquebusiers fired on his men from the White Tower and the Water Gate. The great guns of the Tower were trained on Southwark, but when one of the Tower captains came to Mary to ask whether his gunners should fire on the rebels she refused to give the order. “That were pity,” she said, “for many poor men and householders are like to be undone there and killed.” In the end the threat of bombardment was enough to drive Wyatt to the desperate gamble of marching his men upriver to Kingston, crossing over by night to the opposite bank, and coming into the city from the west at dawn on February 7.

The musters had been ordered for six o’clock, but it was only four when the streets were filled with the “noise and tumult” that Wyatt was
only a few miles off. Mary was at Westminster, very near the rebels’ path; her councilors met in her bedchamber, and begged her to save herself by taking her barge to the Tower. But putting her faith in her captains—Pembroke and Clinton—and in the gentlemen pensioners and guardsmen who surrounded the palace she announced that “she would tarry there to see the uttermost.” Her courage was so great many believed she might take the field against Wyatt herself.
¹

Throughout the day the rebels and the defending bands marched back and forth through the city, with Wyatt gaining Ludgate after encountering only slight resistance from the chamberlain, Sir John Gage, and his men at Charing Cross and from Pembroke at what is now Hyde Park Corner. Sir William Howard held Ludgate against him, however, and he had to turn back, only to find that all the routes out of the city were now blocked off by troops loyal to Mary. To prevent more bloodshed Wyatt surrendered, and by five o’clock he was the queen’s prisoner.

No one in the court knew until the end of the day how the battle for the city was going, and alarming rumors of defections, rebel victories and treasonous behavior from the queen’s captains set the servants of the royal household to pacing the galleries anxiously and arming themselves as best they could. Mary’s women expected the worst, wringing their hands and swearing “We shall all be destroyed this night. What a sight is this, to see the queen’s bedchamber full of armed men!” As the day went on, one of the guardsmen wrote in his diary, there was “such a running and crying of ladies and gentlewomen, shutting of doors, and such a shrieking and noise as it was wonderful to hear.”

Through it all Mary remained serene, assuring everyone around her that her captains would not deceive her, and even if they did, God would not, “in whom she placed her chief trust.”
²
When one of Wyatt’s lieutenants came to the court gate at Whitehall and shot arrows into the court itself, wounding one of the defenders, an attorney of Lincoln’s Inn, in the nose, some of Mary’s soldiers came running to her crying “All is lost! Away! Away! A barge! A barge!” But even then “her Grace never changed her cheer, nor removed one foot out of the house,” and instead asked all of her courtiers to pray for victory. “Fall to prayer!” she told them, “and I warrant you, we shall hear better news anon.”

By this time it was late in the afternoon, and Mary’s guard, fearing an attack on the court in force, asked her to let them open the gate and de-fend it as long as they could. Mary agreed, after the guardsmen promised “not to go forth out of her sight,” as they were “the only defense of her person this day.” The soldiers marched out to take their places, and as they passed under a gallery window the queen leaned out and spoke to them again, requiring them, as “gentlemen in whom she only trusted,” not to go out of her sight. But they had been at their post less than an
hour when the news came that Wyatt had been captured, and the queen and her courtiers breathed easily once again.
³

At Tower Gate a crowd of dazed spectators, bewildered first by the pre-dawn alarm of Wyatt’s onslaught and again only twelve hours later by the news of his sudden surrender, watched as the traitor was led past them in his mail shirt, velvet cassock and lace-trimmed velvet hat. As he passed into the compound a knight who had fought against him seized his collar and addressed him loudly.

“Oh! thou villain and unhappy traitor!” he shouted menacingly, shaking Wyatt as he spoke, “how could you find it in your heart to work such detestable treason to the queen’s majesty?” “If it were not that the law must justly pass upon you, I would strike you through with my dagger.”

The knight’s hand was on his dagger as he finished, but the prisoner made no stir to defend himself. He kept his arms at his side, and, “looking grievously with a grim look” at the other man, said quietly “It is no mastery now,” and passed on into the fortress.
⁴

Wyatt’s confederates were less resigned to their fate. William Thomas, the man who had suggested assassinating the queen, tried unsuccessfully during his imprisonment to kill himself by “thrusting himself under the paps with a knife.” Another of Wyatt’s captains escaped to Hampshire, where he was finally captured disguised as a sailor, “his face disfigured with coals and dirt.” The duke of Suffolk, Jane Grey’s father, was found hiding in a hollow tree where a dog had sniffed him out.
⁵

For months after the rebellion London was a city of corpses. New gallows were built at every city gate and at the principal landmarks, and in Cheapside, Fleet Street, Smithfield, Holborn, on London Bridge and at Tower Hill the bodies of those who had followed Wyatt swung and rotted and stank. The soldiers who had gone over to join the rebels were hanged at the very doors of their houses in the city, and the executions seemed to go on for weeks. “There has never been seen such hanging as has been going on here every day,” Noailles wrote, and those who were pardoned had good reason to thank their luck and cheer the queen. Perhaps as many as a hundred of the rebels were hanged; the rest, bound with cords and wearing nooses around their necks, went in double file to the tiltyard at Westminster, where they knelt in the mud before Mary. There she pardoned them, and their ropes were cut and their nooses thrown off. A diarist who described the scene of the mass pardons wrote how the freed men rushed out into the streets, throwing up their caps and shouting “God save Queen Mary!” while bystanders picked up the nooses as souvenirs, sometimes collecting as many as four or five before going home.
⁶

In the wave of official retribution Jane and Guilford Dudley, who had
taken no part in Wyatt’s revolt but who nonetheless represented a threat to the security of Mary’s government, were condemned and executed on February 12. Wyatt himself was kept alive until April, when he was beheaded on Tower Hill, his “bowels burnt” and his head set on the gallows on Hay-Hill beside Hyde Park. His corpse was taken to Newgate to be parboiled, after which it was quartered and the four quarters displayed in four parts of the capital. Wyatt’s lands were parceled out among the gentlemen of Kent who had helped to suppress his rebellion, but Mary took pity on his widow and five children. At first the queen allowed the woman an annuity, and later permitted her to redeem her husband’s goods and a little of his property.

In the dispatches of the resident ambassadors in England the Kentish rebellion took on the proportions of a monumental uprising. All the rumors of the early days of Wyatt’s threat—of large-scale unrest in Cornwall and Wales, of mass desertions from the queen’s forces and of imminent, country-wide revolt—were reported in detail and sent to the imperial, Venetian and French courts with all haste. Before these exaggerated accounts could be corrected they had given rise to further distortions, until it was being said that Mary was about to be overthrown and “all England” was in turmoil. The French king circulated reports that thousands of rebels in many parts of the kingdom had seized the major fortresses, backed by the majority of the people, who preferred death to subjugation to a foreign prince. To the pope, the Venetian Signory and the rulers of the Italian states he wrote that there were hundreds of Spanish troops fighting against the rebels, and his letter was given such credence in Venice that the English ambassador there, Peter Vannes, had to send out a letter of his own explaining that the current reports went far beyond the truth.
⁷

The colony of English merchants in Antwerp was thoroughly frightened, not least because local creditors would lend no more money to the English government once they got wind of the rebellion. Egmont and his colleagues, who had left London as Wyatt moved into Southwark, substantiated the worst of the rumors by claiming that the rebels were massed against the capital twenty thousand strong. When the news of the queen’s victory over Wyatt finally arrived on February 14 every Englishman in the city joined in a huge celebration, lighting bonfires, providing tuns of wine to all who would drink and setting off a “great peal of guns.”
⁸

Though more accurate reports of the size and menace of the Kentish revolt eventually reached continental sovereigns the episode put both Mary and her government in a bad light. The revolt itself was attributed to the weakness of a woman ruler, yet its suppression was in no way credited to her strength. The royal defeat of Wyatt was in any case a
clouded triumph, for the collapse of his rebellion was to an extent his own doing. In going ahead without the promised support of the other conspirators Wyatt had shown determination but scant judgment. He had not been able to recruit enough followers to guarantee success, nor had he proved competent to lead a swift and decisive attack on London. More worrisome to the queen and her councilors was that many of her subjects, though indifferent to Wyatt’s nebulous program to change Mary’s advisers, were equally unwilling to take up arms against the rebels. In the long run this stubborn lack of concern might prove more dangerous than any rebellion.

The leniency with which Mary treated three of the conspirators—Courtenay, Elizabeth and Noailles—was particularly hard for foreign rulers to comprehend. Courtenay had been in on the plot from the start, but had not carried out the role assigned to him, and had actually fought on Mary’s side—where he was a distinct liability—during the final days of the revolt. He was allowed to go abroad, though he did not leave for some months. Elizabeth, who was strongly suspected of being in communication with Wyatt and the French about the revolt, was imprisoned in the Tower for three months but then released under close guard. And Noailles, though endlessly harassed and annoyed by Renard and his men, received no official punishment.

Noailles was made thoroughly uncomfortable throughout the spring of 1554. He found his spies suborned, his agents threatened, and his dispatches missing. He suspected, with good reason, that Mary and Renard were reading everything he wrote, aided by a cipher key provided by a double agent. When a new house was made available to him in London—Mary’s residence of Bridewell—he found to his chagrin that it was Renard’s old house, and that his predecessor had taken every door, window and lock with him when he left. The only thing Renard did leave behind, in fact, was one of his own informers, who reported everything Noailles said and did and kept all important visitors away from his door.

There were no serious aftershocks to Wyatt’s rebellion, but the drawn-out executions and prominent gallows kept the events of February fresh in the memories of Londoners. Foreigners living in the city became more and more apprehensive about their safety, and some, observing mysterious marks on their houses, believed they had been singled out for assassination and left the country.
⁹
With the first days of warm weather children playing in the open fields at the outskirts of the city carried out a chilling re-enactment of the drama their parents had lived through. Armies of boys and girls, hundreds on each side, played “queen against Wyatt” so roughly that some on both sides were hurt. One boy took the part of the prince of Spain; he was taken prisoner and hanged, and the
simulation was so authentic that he was nearly strangled by the rope. Mary ordered those who had organized the mock combat to be whipped and imprisoned briefly, and no more games of “queen against Wyatt” were reported during her reign.
¹⁰