Mary Tudor (23 page)

In normal circumstances a disciplined force of this size would have been sufficient – but the circumstances were not normal. By 15 July the Earl of Sussex, the Earl of Bath and Lord Thomas Wentworth had joined Mary’s camp, and five royal warships that had been sent to the Essex coast to prevent any possible escape by the princess had defected to her cause. According to Wingfield one of Mary’s agents had worked on the seamen and they had mutinied against their officers to bring this about.
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It may have been otherwise, and the ships themselves were of no great significance, but their crews and guns were, and this may have been the turning point. At the same time, events in London were moving in the same direction. On 12 July Lord Cobham and Sir John Mason had waited upon the Imperial ambassadors to point out that their commission had expired. They clearly suspected Renard and his colleagues of being behind Mary’s unexpected defiance. Renard was pained, pointing out (truthfully) that they had no such instructions. On the other hand (he said) he was able to demonstrate that French support for Jane was a sham; they wanted Mary excluded in order to make way for their own candidate – Mary Stuart. According to the ambassador the councillors were impressed. They withdrew their ultimatum and arranged for a further meeting with a larger group the following day.
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Neither Cobham nor Mason was close to Northumberland, and the duke – who was still in London – was not informed. Even before he left the capital that unity upon which so much depended was beginning to crack.

Events moved fast. On the 14th, when Northumberland left London, it was believed that Lord Clinton and the Earl of Oxford would reinforce him as he moved north, but on the 15th Oxford joined Mary, and Clinton did not move. At this point Mary was still expecting to have to fight, and moved her headquarters from Kenninghall to Framlingham Castle, which was more defensible. There she was joined by more men of substance – Lord Windsor, Sir Edward Hastings, Sir John Williams – and convened her first council meeting.
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As late as the 16th, after an inconclusive meeting with a number of councillors, Renard still believed that Jane would survive, and he consequently ignored an appeal from Mary for his assistance. In so doing he probably served her cause better than he knew, because the weak spot in the princess’s position was her probable dependence upon foreigners, and if that could have been demonstrated at this critical stage it might have done her untold harm. However, nothing happened and the appeal remained unknown.

By the 18th Mary was reported to have 30,000 men behind her banner, and the confidence of the council in London disintegrated. The initiative was seized by Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, no friend to the Duke of Northumberland, who had readmitted him to the council only as a last-minute gamble.
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Arundel had been thought to favour Mary, but had sworn to Jane with the rest. Now, on 18 July he convened a meeting of those councillors who were clearly wavering, including the Earl of Pembroke. Apparently he denounced Northumberland as a tyrant, and urged the recognition of Mary. Those present agreed with him, and the council divided at that point. The following day the majority group proclaimed Mary queen in London, amid scenes of overwhelming relief and joy.
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Without Northumberland’s resolute leadership, the remainder simply gave up, and the Duke of Suffolk himself informed his daughter that she was no longer queen. Then, with a fatalism that strikes the modern eye as extraordinary, they simply waited to see what would happen. The French ambassador, Noailles, wrote: ‘I have witnessed the most sudden change believable in men, and I believe that God alone has worked it.’

A similar thought probably crossed Northumberland’s mind when news reached him of what had happened in London. He was at Cambridge, and although he still had several hundred loyal men with him, many had deserted, and he now had no cause to fight for. He could have sought to escape, but there was nowhere to go, and defiance does not seem to have crossed his mind. He proclaimed Mary himself and, like his allies, simply waited. The new queen did not at first realise that her enemies had simply evaporated. The news was brought to her at Framlingham on the 21st by Lord Paget and the Earl of Arundel himself, bearing from their colleagues a letter of unparalleled obsequiousness:

… we your most humble, faithful and obedient subjects, having always (God we take to witness) remained your highness’s true and humble subjects in our hearts ever since the death of our late sovereign lord and master your highness’s brother, whose soul God pardon, and seeing hitherto no possibility to utter our determination therein … have this day proclaimed in your City of London your Majesty to be our true natural sovereign liege lady and Queen …
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The writers then went on to ask for pardon – what else could they have done? The resolute Protestants whom Northumberland (and Renard) had expected to rally to Jane had done no such thing. Even the duke’s favourite bishop, John Hooper of Worcester and Gloucester, had immediately recognised Mary, and even sent a contingent of men to her support.

What might have happened if Mary had been opposed by a competent man with some sort of a claim instead of a hapless girl, or if the Duke of Northumberland had not been so universally unpopular, it is probably pointless to speculate. By 21 July the issue was decided. Mary was queen, and no blood had been shed. This has been described as ‘the only successful rebellion against a Tudor government’, but it succeeded precisely because it was not against a Tudor government; it was on behalf of a Tudor against a Grey/Dudley government. A few may have backed the princess out of personal loyalty, or because they recognised her as Henry’s only legitimate child. Some probably looked to her to restore ‘true religion’, but the great majority supported her because she was the heir by what everyone acknowledged to be the law – a statute.
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Her success was momentous, not because it upheld inviolable hereditary succession, but because it represented the triumph of statute law over the undoubted wishes of an incumbent monarch. Had Northumberland succeeded, the whole authority of Parliament to resolve issues such as the succession would have been brought into doubt, and the legislative authority of that institution undermined. Of course if Edward had lived a little longer, and if Parliament had endorsed his ‘Device’, that issue would not have arisen, and Mary’s success would have had a quite different significance. As it was she began her reign with a ringing endorsement of what would later be called a ‘constitutional’ succession, and that was to be very significant for the way in which she conducted her government.

Meanwhile, Mary was in the position of the leader of a hopeless opposition party who suddenly finds herself prime minister. Her council, the core of her government, presented the most urgent problem. Unlike a modern cabinet, it had no collective responsibility because all decisions of importance were made by the monarch personally, but its composition was nevertheless critical both to her image and to her capacity to govern. As soon as she had proclaimed herself queen, she needed a body that could be recognised as a privy council – and for that reason there came into being the so-called ‘Framlingham council’, which consisted of her existing household officers (such as Robert Rochester) and her very first adherents (Sir Henry Bedingfield and the Earl of Bath). This body was strong on loyalty, but woefully short of political experience.
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Then the councillors in London submitted, and she had to decide what to do about them. They were all contaminated by association with the previous regime, but some more than others, and without their assistance the processes of government would have been virtually impossible. So over the next fortnight, while she moved from Framlingham to London, most of them were pardoned and reinstated. Paget and Arundel were the first, and they were followed by the earls of Pembroke, Sussex, Derby and Bedford, the Marquis of Winchester (lord treasurer), Lord Rich, Sir William Petre (principal secretary) and a number of others. When she reached London, there awaited her various ‘prisoners of conscience’ – the Duke of Norfolk, Edward Courtenay, and the ex-bishops of Durham, Winchester and London – all of whom she released ‘with loving words’. Norfolk, Durham and Winchester were immediately sworn into the council, and Winchester was appointed lord chancellor.
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This gave her a council of over forty members, about 25 per cent larger than Edward’s, and very variously made up. The members ranged in age from twenty-six to eighty and in experience from Rochester (nil) to Norfolk (vast and over more than forty years). There was no expectation that they would be unanimous about anything (saving their allegiance), but Mary, because of her own inexperience, wanted consensual advice – and this she hardly ever got. The first and most obvious division was between the ‘Framlingham council’ and the rest. The former regarded the latter as mere time servers, and quasiheretics because they had accepted Edward’s religious settlement. The latter regarded the former as mere bumpkins with no knowledge beyond household management.
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Both groups, up to a point, were right, and their quarrels bedevilled the political functioning of the council throughout the reign.

The other immediate issue was what to do about those who had been caught in the open by the collapse of Jane’s party. This included not only the Duke of Northumberland, his brother Andrew and all his five sons, but also the Marquis of Northampton, the Duke of Suffolk, the Earl of Huntingdon and about a dozen knights and senior ecclesiastics – as well, of course, as Jane herself. They were rounded up without resistance between 23 and 26 July, and interrogated by members of the new council, including some who had moved fast enough to avoid the drop. Mary seems to have decided very early that Northumberland was responsible for the whole plot. This explanation had the great advantage both of exonerating her brother and of focusing the blame on a man who was already unpopular. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, the queen persisted in believing that Edward had simply been led astray by the duke and Archbishop Cranmer in respect of his religion, and by the duke alone in respect of the succession.
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Although she allowed her brother to be interred with the rites that he had professed, she insisted, in spite of all advice, in celebrating a requiem mass for him in the privacy of the Chapel Royal.

About a dozen men and one woman (Jane) were tried for treason as a result of the succession dispute, but only three – Northumberland himself and two relatively minor adherents, Sir John Gates and Sir Thomas Palmer – were eventually executed on 22 August. Northampton and the Dudley sons were also convicted, but they were eventually pardoned. Jane’s father, the Duke of Suffolk, very surprisingly, was pardoned without trial. Guildford and Jane were convicted and held in the Tower. They might also have been released in due course if it had not been for the events that would follow in January.
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The Emperor’s advice, conveyed to Mary by Renard early in August, was to strike hard at the ringleaders and to be lenient with the rank and file, but whether she was following his guidance, the advice of her council or her own instinct is not clear.

MARY ENTERS LONDON, 1553

Now indeed her retinue reached its greatest size. On her arrival the queen was received by all ranks of society, lords and commons alike, with remarkable honour and unutterable love. First, nothing was left or neglected which might possibly be contrived to decorate the gates, roads and all places on the queen’s route to wish her joy for her victory. Every crowd met her accompanied by children, and caused celebrations everywhere, so that the joy of that most wished-for and happy triumphal procession might easily be observed, such were the magnificent preparations made by the wealthier sort and such was the anxiety among the ordinary folk to show their good will to their sovereign. Thus came the Queen, so welcome to everyone, with her sister Elizabeth, and with the leading men of the realm, the lord mayor and aldermen going before her, she was followed by her gentlewomen. On 10 August she arrived with magnificent pomp at the Tower of London, the strongest castle in the kingdom. The queen dismounted and was passing through into her private apartments when she came upon a number of prisoners strategically positioned to beg mercy from her; in her incomparable goodness she not only gave them liberty, but also restored their original honours and positions. This most appropriately prompts me to list their names.

Most important among them was Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk, a scion of the renowned houses of Mowbray and Bigod, but an old man with one foot in the grave; the duchess of Somerset;
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Edward Courtenay, the only son of the marquis of Exeter and grandson to one of the daughters and heirs of King Edward IV.
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The deprived bishops were as follows: Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of Durham, a man of illustrious origin and notable for his exceptional scholarship and purity of life; Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, a man of great intellect and astonishing learning, first imprisoned by Somerset and then deprived of his see and offices by Northumberland, but appointed Lord Chancellor by the queen because of his unusual wisdom; Bishop Day of Chichester, a retiring and highly learned man; Heath of Worcester, an unassuming man of great intellectual gifts; Bonner of London, skilled in civil and canon law.