Mary Tudor (53 page)

The government immediately set about limiting the damage. The following day, Passion Sunday, Dr. Cole preached a denunciation of Cranmer in the church where he had spoken the day before. Within days John Cawood printed
All the Submissions and Recantations of Thomas Cranmer
, which ended with Cranmer’s final expected recantation, rather than the one he had actually delivered. As the Venetian ambassador observed:

A
T THREE ON THE AFTERNOON OF MAUNDY THURSDAY, APRIL
3, 1556, Mary, accompanied by Cardinal Pole, her Council, and her chaplains, entered the Great Hall at Greenwich Palace. Gathered at the entrance were Mary’s chief ladies and gentlewomen in long linen aprons and towels around their necks. Each carried a silver ewer full of water and bunches of flowers. Mary wore a gown of purple velvet, its sleeves touching the ground. On either side of the hall were forty-one poor women, one for every year of the queen’s life, seated on benches, their feet on stools. The women’s right feet had been washed in preparation for the ceremony, first by a servant, then by the under almoner, and then by the grand almoner, the bishop of Chichester.

Kneeling before the first of the poor women, Mary took the woman’s right foot in her hand, washed it and dried it, and, having signed it with the cross, kissed the foot with “reverence and solemnity.” To each of the women she did the same, moving one by one along each side of the hall, always on her knees, accompanied by one of the noblewomen attending her with basin and towel.

Rising to her feet, Mary went again to each of the poor women, this time with a large wooden platter filled with pieces of salted fish and two large loaves of bread. Having distributed the alms she returned with a wooden bowl filled with either wine or hippocras and then gave each of the women a piece of rich cloth and a leather purse containing forty-one pennies. Finally she presented to the women the apron and towel that each of the noblewomen had worn. She then left the hall to remove her purple gown. Half an hour later she returned, preceded by a servant
carrying the gown. As the choristers sang, she went around the room, twice examining the women one by one; returning for the third time, she gave the gown to the woman she had deemed the poorest and oldest of them.

THE FOLLOWING DAY
, Good Friday, the queen came down from her oratory for the Adoration of the Cross. Kneeling at a short distance from the cross, she moved toward it on her knees as she prayed and kissed it “with such devotion as greatly to edify all those who were present.” Then, reciting prayers and psalms, Mary began the ceremony of the benediction of the cramp rings and the touching for the “king’s evil,” a healing ritual for sufferers of scrofula. An enclosure had been formed to the right of the high altar with four benches placed in a square. Mary stood in the center and knelt down before two large, covered basins, each filled with gold and silver rings. One basin contained Mary’s own rings, the other those of private individuals, each labeled with its owner’s name.

After the basins were uncovered, Mary began reciting prayers and psalms, and then, taking the rings in her hand, she passed them from one hand to the other. She then withdrew to an altar in a private gallery. There she knelt, made her confession to and received absolution from Cardinal Pole, and then proceeded to bless the four scrofulous women who had gathered before her. The first sufferer was brought before her, and, still on her knees, Mary pressed her hands in the form of a cross on one of the woman’s sores “with such compassion and devotion as to be a marvel.” When all four sufferers had received the royal touch, Mary made the sign of the cross with a gold coin and placed it on a ribbon around their necks. After washing her hands, Mary returned to her oratory. As Marc Antonio Faitta, the secretary to Pole, concluded,

By exercising her “healing power,” Mary had demonstrated once again that a female monarch could conduct the ceremonies previously prescribed only to a “divinely appointed” king.

O
N MARCH 5, 1556, A BLAZING COMET APPEARED IN THE SKY OVER
London. Night after night for a week it shone, and Londoners looked up at it with “great wonder and astonishment.”
²
These were fearful and uncertain times; “the stout and devilish hearts of the people of England” were once again ready “to work treason and make insurrections.”
³
Yet what was initially thought to be civil unrest in London would reveal itself to be much more: a plot to overthrow Mary.

Born of political disaffection and Protestant intrigue, the conspiracy sought to exploit the popular discontent that had been growing since the previous summer. “The greatest rain and floods that ever was seen in England … [in which] both men and cattle drowned” had led to poor harvests and famine across England.
⁴
Mary’s pregnancy had been unsuccessful, the peace conference at La Marque had failed, and the religious persecution continued with the burnings of Bishops Ridley, Latimer, and Cranmer. Renard warned that “unless steps are taken to remedy this state of affairs, it is impossible that trouble will
not ensue … all the executions have hardened many hearts, for it has been seen how constant, or rather stubborn, these heretics prove at the stake.” He had, the ambassador concluded, “never seen the people in such an ugly mood as they are at present.”
⁵
Rumors of sedition and incipient rebellion became commonplace amid growing fears that Philip was to be crowned. When Parliament met in October 1555, rumors circulated that the demand of a subsidy was for the king’s coronation.
⁶

A few days into the parliamentary session, the Privy Council, fearing insurrection, closed all houses of public dancing and gambling in London on the grounds that they provided opportunities for seditious assemblies.
⁷
At the same time, three Suffolk men were imprisoned in the Tower, one of them having declared on the day Parliament opened that “to free the kingdom from oppression it would be well to kill the Queen.”
⁸
Seditious pamphlets, written by English exiles and filled with accounts of Habsburg tyranny in Naples and Milan, circulated on the streets of London.
⁹
By the end of October, the queen had abandoned all hope of persuading Parliament to consider Philip’s coronation. She remained determined, however, to pass bills allowing crown lands and revenues to be returned to the Church and for the estates of Protestant exiles who had fled abroad to be confiscated.

The death on the night of November 12 of the lord chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, made Mary’s task even more difficult. His health had been failing since the spring, and he had struggled to speak at the opening of Parliament. Without her primary supporter, Mary was left to face the Commons alone. Her determination to restore the crown lands was matched by the Commons’ reluctance to let them go for fear that they would have to give up their own gains.
¹⁰
Though Mary succeeded in passing this bill, the other great measure, the exiles bill, was defeated after Sir Anthony Kingston, a member of the Commons, locked the doors of the chamber, forcing a division. Three days later, Parliament was dissolved and Kingston was imprisoned in the Tower.

By the new year, discontentment had deepened. In January, as the pace of religious persecution quickened, the Council decreed that the queen’s pardon should no longer be offered to heretics at the stake because of the contempt with which the offer was habitually treated. Moreover, it ordered that those in the crowds at the burnings who were
understood to be “comforting, aiding or praising the offenders, or otherwise use themselves to the ill example of others” would be imprisoned.
¹¹
On January 27, seven people—five men and two women—were burned at Smithfield and a few days later five more at Canterbury. In February, the Treaty of Vaucelles, by which hostilities between France and Spain were to be suspended for five years, left England marginalized, as it had been excluded from the negotiations. Philip, in his first act as king of Spain, was blamed for the blow to national prestige. As the comet appeared in the sky in March, Philip’s astrologers advised that a major rising was to be expected in England.
¹²
It was in these circumstances that the plot to depose Mary, hatched on both sides of the Channel, began to take shape.

LED BY SIR HENRY DUDLEY
, a cousin of the late duke of Northumberland, and with the complicity of the French ambassador, Antoine de Noailles, the conspiracy sought to break the Spanish alliance and replace Mary with Elizabeth.
¹³
After setting fire to several areas of the city to disguise their purpose, the plotters—among whom were Sir Anthony Kingston, released from the Tower after two weeks’ imprisonment, and Christopher Ashton, Dudley’s father-in-law—planned to rob the Exchequer of £50,000 in silver bullion and flee to the Isle of Wight in two of the queen’s ships, already commandeered. There they would raise forces and effect a national rebellion while Dudley sailed from France with a number of other exiles. But before the plan could be executed, Thomas White, an Exchequer official, leaked the plot to Cardinal Pole.
¹⁴
At first the Council waited, giving the conspirators time to begin executing the plot, while secretly moving bullion out of the Exchequer. Finally, on March 18, the government acted. The chief conspirators were arrested and sent to the Tower.
¹⁵
The Venetian ambassador reported on the twenty-fourth: