Mary Tudor (43 page)

†
Sir John Mason (1503–66). A privy councillor from April 1551, reappointed by Mary in July 1553. Treasurer of the chamber in October 1557, and retained by Elizabeth in that position.

‡
Probably Brockett Hall, the home of Sir John Brockett, who was one of her Hatfield tenants.

§
Nicholas Heath, Archbishop ofYork.

**
Sir William Petre (1505?–72). Principal secretary from 1543 to 1557; Joined Elizabeth’s council on 24 November 1558.

††
Henry Fitzalan (1511?–80). Lord steward to both Mary and Elizabeth. Apparently he took his matrimonial chances seriously, and provided lavish entertainments for Elizabeth during her summer progress in 1559.

‡‡
Thomas Thirlby (1506?–70), Bishop of Ely; Edward, Lord Hastings of Loughborough (1519?–72), lord chamberlain; Sir Thomas Cornwallis (1519– 1604), controller.

Mary had died surrounded by her loyal familiars, and one of her last thoughts was for the young Jane Dormer, who many years later recorded one of the versions of the queen’s death.
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Jane was betrothed to no less a person than Feria himself, and the queen had delayed their nuptials in the hope of being able to attend. Now that would be impossible, and she expressed her sorrow for having stood in their way. By virtue of this relationship, the ambassador seems to have considered himself an honorary Englishman, but no one else shared this view, and in the light of his generally low opinion of his wife’s countrymen, that is hardly surprising. Feria and Jane Dormer were eventually married in December, after Mary had been laid to rest, and they remained in England until the following April, by which time Jane was already pregnant with their first child.
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As Duchess of Feria she long outlived her husband, dying in about 1610, but she never returned to England and her contacts with her English kindred faded away.

The old queen lay in state at St James’ for nearly a month, in accordance with the standard practice, and all the protocols were strictly observed, but Feria found himself distressed by the tone of the comments that he was picking up. In spite of his friendly relations with Elizabeth, he now had only the access of a normal ambassador, and Jane neither had, nor would have wished to have, any place in the new establishment. Nevertheless he understood that the new queen’s councillors were being sharply critical of Mary for having sent large sums of money out of the country (which was not true), and he even found himself accused of having spirited away 200,000 ducats (£70,000), which was even less true.
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Someone close to the new queen was concerned to undermine her predecessor’s reputation, and this came long before there was any question of a religious issue. A memorandum of ways ‘in which the realm has suffered great damage’ survives among the state papers in the hand of Mr Secretary Cecil, and he may well have been the source of these rumours.
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Mary was finally buried on 14 December in King Henry VII’s chapel at Westminster Abbey, attended, as she would have wished, by Abbot John Feckenham and his monks. The full traditional rites were observed, and the funeral sermon was preached by John White, Bishop of Winchester. His text he took from the words of Solomon, ‘
laudavi mortuus magis quam viventes
’ [let us praise the dead rather than the living], to which the privy council took exception, but in truth his sermon had nothing to say of the living, being a pure panegyric in the traditional style:

She was king’s daughter, she was a king’s sister, she was king’s wife; she was a queen and by the same title a king also … What she suffered in each of these degrees before and since she came to the Crown, I will not chronicle; only this I say, howsoever it pleased God to will her patience to be exercised in the world, she had in all estates the fear of God in her heart.
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The ceremonies were not spared. They lasted two days and cost £7,763, approximately the cost of a large warship.

Before the grave was filled, as was customary, Mary’s officers broke their wands of office and cast them on top of the coffin. For most of them, this was no mere symbolic act – it marked the end of their public careers. Of the senior officers of the household only the lord great chamberlain (the Earl of Oxford, who hardly ever appeared), the lord steward (the Earl of Arundel) and the treasurer of the chamber (Sir John Mason) were reappointed. The lord chamberlain (Lord Hastings), the vice chamberlain (Sir Henry Bedingfield), the master of the horse (Sir Henry Jerningham) and the comptroller (Sir Robert Freston) all retired into private life.
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Sir Thomas Cheney, the treasurer of the household, died, and all the ladies of Mary’s privy chamber returned to their families. As Feria had feared, the new privy chamber was a hotbed of Protestantism as the queen sought congenial companions. Kate Ashley, banished for suspected heresy in 1556, was back in her quasi-maternal role as principal gentlewoman, supported by members of the Boleyn, Dudley and Cecil families. Susan Clarencius, Mary’s long-serving mistress of the wardrobe, went with the Ferias to Spain, and died there in about 1564.
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The whole climate of the court was changed, foreshadowing the changes that were to take place in both Church and state. The new court was highly educated and overwhelmingly secular; predominantly, but not entirely, Protestant; and almost exclusively English.

Elizabeth was proclaimed the same morning that her sister died, and the Parliament, which had reconvened on 5 November, was immediately dissolved.

The same day [17 November] between xi and xii afore noon, the Lady Elizabeth was proclaimed Queen Elizabeth, Queen of England, France and Ireland, and defender of the faith, by divers heralds of arms and trumpeters … [and] … at afternoon all the churches in London did ring, and at night [they] did make bonfires, and set tables in the street, and did eat and drink and make merry for the new Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mary’s sister …
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London, which had endured an uneasy relationship with the old queen, and had been even more uneasy with Philip, was looking for better times. In the country at large there was relief that the succession had been unchallenged, and relief to see the back of King Philip, but Mary herself was mourned in many places. Even the Protestant tirade that appears to have been delivered in York on 24 November (the day the news reached that city), and that was published soon after, mourned the passing of ‘a Lady that of her own inclination wished all for the best’. It was not, the author asserted mendaciously, the queen who had been responsible for the wicked persecution, but her ‘spiritual council’ – the Catholic clergy.
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Mary had been weak, easily led – both by her bishops and her husband – and, above all, not really English. This had been a constant theme of alehouse gossip throughout the reign: ‘She loves another realm better than this’; she would let Philip ‘put out Englishmen’ from the government and so on. By no means all these mutterers were Protestants. Many of them, when challenged, claimed to be loyal Catholics.

In contrast Elizabeth was not merely her father’s daughter, but (as she described herself) ‘mere English’. Here was a queen who would not only get rid of pernicious Spanish influences and restore the country’s autonomy, but would also restore its pride and self-respect. She was, declared the York pamphleteer, ‘a prince of no mingled blood, of Spaniard or stranger, but born mere English here amongst us’.
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Even the diarist Henry Machyn, who was cautious and preferred the old ways, caught something of the euphoria of the moment. There was ‘such shooting of guns as never was heard afore’ when the queen processed through the City to the Tower on 28 November.
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Thanks to Philip, and to Mary’s timely, albeit painfully reluctant, surrender in the matter of the succession, there had been so sign of a challenge. The French remained silent, and Margaret Clifford, who had once been Mary’s preferred choice as successor, was confined to the role of chief mourner at her funeral. Elizabeth’s supporters, who had been quietly mobilising their retinues against the possibility of trouble, equally quietly disbanded them. The queen was dead – Long live the queen!

Unlike Mary at a similar stage, Elizabeth preferred to keep the courts of Europe guessing about her intentions on all major issues. What was she going to do about the war? Her marriage? The Church? The signals were mixed, but seemed to indicate continuity rather than the reverse. She renewed the commission of the negotiators at Cercamp, and made it clear that she had no intention of surrendering on the issue of Calais; she reaffirmed her intention not to marry, at least for the time being; she insisted upon maintaining the status quo in public worship. About half of her new privy council had served Mary in the same capacity. Paul IV waited for a dutiful communication from his new daughter. However, those with rather sharper eyes, like Feria, saw the situation rather differently. The only senior officer of state to be reappointed was the lord treasurer, the Marquis of Winchester. Heath did not receive the great seal, nor Paget the privy seal. Instead Nicholas Bacon became lord keeper, and the privy seal remained vacant. Mass continued to be celebrated in the Chapel Royal, and there was no repetition of the iconoclastic enthusiasm of 1547; but those imprisoned for heresy and awaiting trial began to be released, and Protestant sermons were again heard at Paul’s Cross.
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The accommodating George Carew took over as Dean of the Chapel Royal from William Hutchenson, and some of the more optimistic Protestant exiles began to return. Whereas Mary and Gardiner had encouraged Catholics to ignore the ecclesiastical laws that were in place at her accession, and had restored deprived bishops with only the most perfunctory of process, Elizabeth insisted that all existing laws should be obeyed unless (or until) they were changed. At twenty-five she had an advantage of twelve years’ youth over her half-sister at the time of her accession, and could afford to be more procrastinating about marriage. In due course the succession would become an issue – but not yet.

Feria had been about two-thirds right in his predictions. He was wrong about Arundel, who retained his post, and most conspicuously about Paget, who continued to bombard the council with unsolicited advice but never regained a place on it. He was also wrong, although less obviously, about Pembroke, Throgmorton and Carew. He was probably right about Pole, but the latter’s death made that unprovable, and conspicuously right about William Cecil and Robert Dudley. The latter was not immediately the focus for gossip that he later became, but he was promptly appointed to the prestigious position of master of the horse.
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This was not a surprise. Elizabeth had known him for a number of years; at one time he had even loaned her money, and they had shared the disfavour and mistrust of Mary as well as the (slightly clandestine) favour of Philip. He was also safely married to Amy, the daughter of Sir John Robsart of Norfolk. So no one saw anything scandalous about his appointment to a position that carried with it – and required – a great deal of unsupervised access to his mistress.

Sir William Cecil was a quite different proposition. He was an experienced politician, having already served one term as secretary of state during the regency of the Duke of Northumberland (Robert Dudley’s father) between 1550 and 1553. He had lost this position at Mary’s accession, and had maintained a low profile throughout the reign, but he had continued to serve as Elizabeth’s receiver general, a position to which he had first been appointed in about 1549, when he had also been secretary to the then lord protector, the Duke of Somerset. When Elizabeth named him as principal secretary at Hatfield on 20 November 1558, the new queen is alleged to have given him a prophetic charge:

… you shall be of my Privy Council and content yourself to take pains for me and my realm. This judgement I have of you, that you will not be corrupted by any manner of gift, and that you will be faithful to the state, and that without respect of my private judgement, you will give me that counsel that you think best.
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The source of this statement is a copy, and it is not known just when it was written, but its iconic significance is immense. It is the foundation stone of one of the great political partnerships of English history. Mary had no Cecil. Nor, in all probability, would she have known how to use him if she had found such a person, because when it mattered, her own private judgement was too strong to be gainsaid.

Elizabeth was not lacking in conviction, either about her position as queen or about her faith. The prayers and other personal memoranda that she committed to paper make her Protestantism abundantly clear,
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but she also distinguished – in a way that Mary was unable to do – between matters fundamental and
adiaphora
, matters indifferent. On the former she would accept the guidance of her clergy, and on the latter she would please herself. The pope was pointedly omitted from the list of European sovereigns who were formally notified of her accession, and Sir Edward Carne was recalled from Rome. He declined to come, preferring to stay in Italy, but that was not the point; his diplomatic status with the Holy See had come to an end. That in itself was not decisive. Elizabeth might have been intending to send some other representative, and by the time that it was clear that she would not, Parliament had created a new religious settlement in England.