The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (34 page)

With the accession of a queen came a transformation in the nature of politics. At court, access to the monarch, in her private apartments, was allowed only to her ladies, whose influence with her was great. The queen’s intimates, like Gertrude, Marchioness of Exeter and Susan Clarencius, had been trusted by her since the dark days of the 1530s. Men seeking influence with the queen, and information, now tried to ‘fall a-talking’ to them. And women, too, besought them: ‘remember me’, ‘forget me not’. The Duchess of Northumberland made a desperate appeal to Lady Paget that she intercede with her husband and with Mistress Clarencius and the Marchioness ‘in speaking for my husband’s life’. Nothing could save Northumberland, who went to the block on 22 August, but they did their best for her sons. In the most secret conferences with Mary, Susan Clarencius was present, and Simon Renard wondered whether ‘she knew the meaning of all this’. Renard, the Imperial ambassador, Mary trusted as ‘her second father confessor’. She now looked for counsel where she had always looked before, to her cousin, Emperor Charles V, and would not act without his advice. From Cardinal Pole came uncompromising admonitions. Mary’s first wish was to restore the Catholic religion of her childhood, to dismantle the Supremacy with which she was so unwillingly burdened, and to restore England to Rome. Each of her advisers offered different advice about when and how this should be achieved. But above all Mary sought divine guidance. She looked always towards the Holy Sacrament reserved in her chamber, and ‘invoked it as her protector, guide and counsellor and still prayed with all her heart that it would come to her help’.

The Queen needed an heir, a Catholic heir, so she must marry. For herself, she said, she had embraced chastity, ‘had never felt that which was called love’, but she knew her duty. Whom to choose? Some urged an English husband, and chose Edward Courtenay, a victim of Henry VIII’s rage against the Marquess of Exeter and his family, freed at last from the Tower but personally unstable. Yet how, asked Mary, could a queen marry a subject, and why should she be forced to marry a man because Gardiner had been his friend in prison? She listened now to Charles V. Since the first days of her reign, and before, he had planned
for her to marry Prince Philip, his son. This would be Habsburg conquest of England by marriage.

No foreigner had been king of England since William the Conqueror, and ‘the very name of stranger was odious’, so the opponents of the Spanish marriage insisted. Marriage to a ‘stranger’ would outrage the people. England would by this marriage be ‘marrying everlasting strife and danger from the French’, who were already intriguing with the Scots and Irish. Since Philip was Mary’s kinsman a papal dispensation was necessary: a prospect so objectionable that it must be kept secret, and secrecy brought its own dangers. Philip might promise to adapt to English ways, but no one would believe him, and the Spanish would be as hated in England as they were in Flanders. But Mary was adamant: she would die if she married Courtenay. She now loved Philip, she confessed, before ever she met him. To Gardiner’s objection: ‘And what will the people say?’ she replied that it was not for him to prefer the people’s will to hers. When the Speaker led a deputation from Parliament on 16 November to rehearse arguments against the Spanish marriage ‘learnt in the school of the Bishop of Winchester [Gardiner]’, she roundly rejected their petition. Gardiner’s objections may have represented less a narrow patriotism than a politic way of securing the best terms for the marriage treaty; terms so favourable to England that Philip forswore them three times before witnesses, even while he swore them. The fears that ‘heretics’ would use the marriage as proof that the restoration of the old religion meant foreign domination, that papal tyranny and Spanish tyranny were all one, would not go away.

Conspirators, assassins and rebels were plotting against the Queen, so Renard warned. At the end of November in a nobleman’s house in London, a
salon des refusés
of men once advanced by Edward but now out of favour, plans were laid for spring risings from four quarters of England. The Council got wind of the conspiracy. On 21 January Gardiner confronted Courtenay, whom the conspirators intended to play a part in their schemes, and he told all. The rumours which reached London that day that there was rebellion in Devon were false. Two days later a gentleman of Kent, waiting while his horse was shod, told the farrier that ‘the Spaniards were coming into the realm with harness and hand-guns, and would make us Englishmen worse than enemies and viler’. And he urged him: ‘If thou beest a good fellow, stir… all thy neighbours to rise against these strangers.’ Only Kent rose. Under Sir Thomas Wyatt, the son of the late poet, and a coterie of Kentish gentry,
rebel forces 3,000 strong marched upon London which, they believed, ‘longed sore for their coming’. At Rochester Bridge a band of London Whitecoats sent to attack the rebels defected to their cause, and Wyatt’s rebels entered Southwark peaceably. The Queen and the capital were beleaguered, threatened by rebels over the river but even more by the fear of an unknown number of rebel supporters within. Such was the terror that on 31 January Wyatt’s partisans in the City were given free passage to join him before London Bridge was cut down. While the Queen’s commanders played a waiting game, no one knew whether Wyatt would be resisted. ‘By God’s mother,’ said Sir John Bridges to the Tower watch, ‘I fear that there is some traitor abroad that they be suffered all this while.’ Mary, showing a bravery and resolution lacking in her advisers, rallied the citizens at the Guildhall. The City’s gates remained locked against Wyatt, his rising failed, and the quartered bodies of the rebels were hung from London’s walls.

The conspirators had, so it seemed, intended no less than to assassinate Mary, enthrone the Lady Elizabeth, whom they would marry to Courtenay, and restore the evangelical religion. Conspiracies are by nature secret, but none more so than this one, for the rank and file of the rebels never knew the deeper schemes of the leaders. ‘You may not so much as name religion,’ said Wyatt; ‘that will withdraw from us the hearts of many.’ Had not Mary been enthroned six months before by a rising which had been, in part, in defence of the old faith? The rebels’ declared purpose was to withstand the Spaniards. And yet, Wyatt allegedly admitted, ‘we mind only the restitution of God’s word’. Mary’s judgement that the rebels’ quarrel against strangers was ‘but a Spanish cloak to cover their pretended purpose against our religion’ was partly true. The conspirators were men who were excluded from influence, and thwarted, but they were excluded because they were evangelicals. Rebel actions reveal rebel motives. Wyatt offered freedom to all those who were imprisoned for religion. The prisoners chose to wait upon Providence, as did many others of the new faith who remained loyal to Mary while hating her religion, but later events would suggest that there were some who regretted not joining Wyatt when the chance was offered.

The revolt left an ominous legacy. This was a rebellion with an assassination plot at its heart; tyrannicide in the name of religion. No longer would ‘evil counsellors’ bear all the blame for a monarch’s actions. Mary forgot the loyalty of her evangelical subjects, and concluded that all heresy was sedition; that all sedition came from heretics.
By thinking that all of the new faith were her opponents, she risked making them so. An effusion of rebel blood followed. First to die were Lady Jane Grey and her husband, Lord Guildford Dudley on 12 February; Lady Jane penitent for her unwilling treachery but resolute in her faith. The Queen never lost her suspicions of Elizabeth, whose complicity in the plots was hard to deny but harder to prove. Elizabeth was imprisoned first, ominously, in the Tower, and then kept under house arrest at Woodstock, where she scratched in a window with a diamond:

In Winchester on 25 July 1554 Gardiner celebrated the marriage of Mary to Philip, which he had been unable to prevent. He now presented himself as Philip’s principal English counsellor, but it was Paget, Gardiner’s rival, whom Philip most trusted. Where the Spaniards’ presence was felt they were as unpopular as had been expected. Not a day passed without some ‘knife work’ at court between the English and Philip’s Spanish entourage. The worst fears of the Spanish coming – that it augured the Inquisition – seemed to be realized that September when Bishop Bonner of London began a quest for heresy through his diocese. The attacks upon the Spanish, opposition to Philip’s coronation, and continuing support for Elizabeth were the more bitter for Mary while she hoped against hope for a child. At the end of November 1554 came news of her pregnancy. ‘How goeth my daughter’s belly forward?’ asked the anxious Emperor. But by March 1555 rumours were spreading that the baby was a phantom. As months passed, Mary bore no child, nor ever would. Mary’s childlessness was a disaster not just for her, but for the Catholic future.

The Mass lay at the heart of the Catholic religion, Mary’s religion. Forced for so long to hear Mass in secret herself, her first purpose as queen was to restore it. She wanted freedom for others to attend, not to force anyone: so she said, at first. The purpose of the papal legate, Cardinal Pole, was ‘not to compel’ but to ‘call again’: so he said, at first. But the world had changed. Now the Mass, instead of binding Christian society, threatened to divide it. For the gospellers, Christ spoke through His Word, not through a painted image or a white wafer; for them the
Mass was ‘the idol of the altar’, the papist ‘god of bread’. In that spirit they had cast down the altars, the idols had fallen. Each religious side saw the other as sacrilegious, and the dogmatism of each drove the other to obduracy. Peace seemed impossible. The Queen ‘felt so strongly on this matter of religion’, she said, that ‘she was hardly to be moved’.

To strengthen her conviction, there was the popular rejoicing at the restoration of the old faith. London women had rushed to kiss their newly-freed bishop in August 1553 and placed their treasured images in their windows as the Queen first passed through her capital. Out of hiding came all the sequestered votive relics of saints, the nails which had pierced Christ, splinters of the Holy Cross. Processions began again. ‘To see it is to be in a new world.’ The Latin Mass was sung in many places; not by royal command but spontaneously, ‘of the people’s devotion’. Not by royal command because the restoration of the Mass awaited the sanction of Parliament, for what Parliament had made only Parliament could unmake. Robert Parkyn, in Yorkshire, reported with approval the restoration of Catholic sacraments and ceremonies in the North in September, but noted the irregularity, and remembered that those of heretical opinions ‘spake evil’ of it. The legal form of service for the first months of Mary’s reign remained the Edwardian Prayer Book. The bravest of the evangelical clergy and their parishioners continued to celebrate according to the new rite, while the conservatives watched and waited.

The Edwardian laws were repealed in October 1553, during the first session of Mary’s first Parliament. Nearly a quarter of the Lower House voted against the change: a comfortingly small minority for pessimists expecting worse, but still alarming. The English Church now stood officially as it had in 1547: Catholic but schismatic. The Queen was shackled with the Supremacy of a schismatic Church. Could the English Church be reconciled to the universal Church? The Pope’s appointment of Cardinal Pole as his legate in August 1553 signalled his commitment to absolve the errant nation, ‘fled forth of Peter’s ship’. Pole yearned to return home after twenty years of exile, and could forgive no equivocation or delay. Yet England was not as he had left it. The great lands and treasures of the Church which had been alienated to the laity stood in the way of papal absolution, for this was sacrilege. Pole warned of the divine judgement against Belshazzar, who had profaned the holy vessels of the Temple, but few listened. The despoliation had gone so far: the lands had been sold and sold again, the chalices turned into
drinking cups, the vestments into worldly finery, and the new owners (mainly Catholics themselves) were markedly reluctant to cede them. The more politic – including Mary and the Pope – saw that there could be no restoration of papal authority without a dispensation to the possessors; without a bargain. The Pope conceded, to Pole’s dismay. On 30 November 1554, amidst tears of joy, Pole solemnly absolved the realm. Finally, after many obstructions and delays, the Royal Supremacy was repealed on 3 January 1555. England was restored to Catholic Christendom.