Mary Tudor (36 page)

THE ACCESSION OF
a queen regnant necessitated changes in the monarch’s private apartments. The male servants of Edward’s entourage were replaced by female attendants, many of them long-serving servants from her princely household, such as Jane Dormer, Mary Finch, Frances Waldegrave, Frances Jerningham, and Susan Clarencius, who became chief lady of the Privy Chamber. Their positions close to the queen gave these women a measure of influence, especially in the early months of the reign, a fact that was of concern to the emperor. “If you have an opportunity of speaking to her without her taking it in bad part,” he instructed Renard, “you might give her to understand that people are said to murmur because some of her ladies take advantage of their position to obtain certain concessions for their own private interest and profit.”
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But it was Simon Renard, building on Mary’s familial ties and attachment to the emperor, who would enjoy an unprecedented role as secret counselor and confidant. From the start, Mary had expressed her
uncertainty as to how to “make herself safe and arrange her affairs,” and, as the ambassadors reported, “still less did she dare to speak of them to anyone except ourselves. She could not trust her Council too much, well knowing the particular character of its members.”
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Just a few hours after the imperial ambassadors’ first public audience, on July 29, and within days of her accession, the queen sent all three ambassadors word that one or two of their number might go to her privately in her oratory, “entering [by] the back door to avoid suspicion.”
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The task was delegated to Renard, who from then on acted as a secret counselor, advising and admonishing Mary as to decisions to be made and actions taken. He quickly won the queen’s trust and confidence and was frequently consulted by her in secret, when none of her English advisers was present. On religion Renard told her:

Huddled under a cloak, Renard would slip quietly in through the back door of the queen’s privy apartments. She would encourage him to come in disguise and under cover of darkness.

To consult an ambassador as though he were a secret counselor upon the domestic affairs of the kingdom was a highly unusual step for a monarch to take. But from her earliest days Mary had pledged herself to the emperor. On July 28, when the imperial ambassadors had journeyed to meet Mary at Beaulieu, she had declared that “after God, she desired to obey none but” her cousin Charles, “whom she regarded as
a father.”
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After her accession, she wrote thanking him for his congratulations, adding, “May it please your Majesty to continue in your goodwill towards me, and I will correspond in every way which it may please your Majesty to command, thus fulfilling my duty as your good and obedient cousin.”
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It was a sign of things to come.

A
WEEK BEFORE MARY’S CEREMONIAL ENTRY INTO LONDON, JOHN
Dudley, the duke of Northumberland, and his accomplices, Sir John Gates and Sir Thomas Palmer, were brought back to London under heavy guard.
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Despite a proclamation ordering citizens to allow the prisoners to pass by peacefully, the mounted men at arms struggled to hold back the large crowds.
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As they made their way to the Tower from Shoreditch, Londoners filled the streets to watch, throwing stones and calling out “Death to the traitors!” and “Long live the true queen!” Pausing at Bishopsgate, the earl of Arundel made Northumberland take off his hat and scarlet cloak to make him less conspicuous among the group of prisoners. For the rest of the journey to the Tower, he rode bareheaded through the streets, his cap in his hand.
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Two weeks later the duke was tried and condemned to death. During his time in the Tower he was assailed by remorse for his sins, begging to be pardoned and professing his adherence to Catholicism: “I do faithfully believe this is the very right and true way, out of which true religion you and I have been seduced this xvj years past, by the false and erroneous preaching of the new preachers.”
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His apostasy did not save him. He went to the block with Gates and Palmer in front of a huge crowd on August 22.
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None of the other July rebels was executed, and both Lady Jane Grey and her husband, Guildford Dudley, remained in the Tower in honorable imprisonment. The emperor urged Mary to act against them, but she “could not be induced to consent that she should die.”
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Jane had written a long confession explaining that she had known
nothing of the plan to declare her queen until three days before she was taken to the Tower and had never given any consent to the duke’s intrigues and plots. Upon the proclamation of Mary’s accession, she had, she claimed, gladly given up the royal dignity as she knew the right belonged to Mary.
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Mary acknowledged her submission and showed a spirit of temperance toward her. Her mother, the duchess of Suffolk, was a long-standing acquaintance and had spent Christmas with Mary the previous year. “My conscience,” Mary declared to the ambassador, “will not permit me to have her put to death.”
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On July 31, upon the petition of his wife, Frances, Mary released the duke of Suffolk from the Tower, even though he had been strongly implicated in Northumberland’s coup to place Jane on the throne. As Renard reported, “many who judge her actions impartially, praise her clemency and moderation in tempering the rigour of justice against those who plotted her death and disinheritance, in staying their punishment, and, moreover, in forgiving their misdeeds and extending her grace and mercy to them.”
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FIVE DAYS AFTER
Mary had taken possession of the Tower and a month after the king’s death, the coffin of the late Edward VI was carried from Whitehall to Westminster Abbey. Mary had initially expressed her intention to have him buried “for her own peace of conscience” according to the “ancient ceremonies and prayers” of the Catholic Church, fearing that if she “appeared to be afraid” it would make her subjects, particularly the Lutherans, “become more audacious” and “proclaim that she had not dared to do her own will.”
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But in a confidential memorandum, Renard advised caution: if Mary inaugurated her reign in this fashion, she would “render herself odious and suspect.” Burying Edward, who had lived and died a Protestant, with Catholic rites might “cause her Majesty’s subjects to waver in their loyal affection.”
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Mary agreed to compromise. On August 9, while Mary and her ladies heard a Requiem Mass for the repose of his soul in a private chapel in the Tower, Edward was buried in the abbey in a Protestant service conducted by Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury.
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Outside the Tower, there was evidence that religious change had
already begun. Even before Mary had reached London, altars and crucifixes had started to reappear in the city’s churches, and Matins and Evensong were being recited “not by commandment but by the devotion of the people.” As the chronicler Wriothesley described, at St. Paul’s “the work that was broken down of stone, where the high altar stood, was begun to be made up again with brick.” And on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, a Latin Mass was said there.
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But amid such demonstrations of enthusiasm for the old religion, violent disturbances erupted across London. On Sunday, August 13, during a sermon at St. Paul’s Cross, Gilbert Bourne, chaplain to the bishop of London, was “pulled out of the pulpit by vagabonds” and “one threw his dagger at him.”
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The following Sunday, crowds there were met by the captain of the Guard and more than two hundred guardsmen to protect the preacher. Defamatory pamphlets exhorting Protestants to take up arms against Mary’s government littered the streets. “Nobles and gentlemen favoring the word of God” were asked to overthrow the “detestable papists,” especially “the great devil” Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester.
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A number of leading Protestant figures, including John Bradford, the prebendary of St. Paul’s, and John Rogers, the canon of St. Paul’s, were arrested, and leading reformist bishops such as John Hooper, bishop of Worcester and Gloucester, and Hugh Latimer, bishop of Worcester, were imprisoned some weeks later. In September, Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, was imprisoned for treason for his role in Lady Jane’s attempted coup.

In mid-August, as violence and alarm spread, Mary issued her first proclamation, intended to avoid “the great inconvenience and dangers” that had arisen in times past through the “diversity of opinions in questions of religion”:

Mary called on her subjects “to live in quiet sort and Christian charity” and told them that further religious change would be settled by “common consent,” by act of Parliament.
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In the midst of popular unrest and fear of change, Mary had responded with moderation and pragmatism.