Mary Tudor (21 page)

After this we opened the kinges majesties pleasure for oone to attende upon her grace for the supply of Rochester’s place during his absence, & as in thinstruccions. To this her aunswer was that she would appointe her own officers, and that she had yeres suffcyent for that purpose; and if we lefte any suche man there she would go out of her gates, for they two would not dwell in one howse. And (quoth she) I am sickly, and yet I will not dye willingly, but will do the best I can to preserve my life; but if I shall chaunce to dye I will protest openly that you of the Councell be the causes of my death. You gyve me fayre wordes, but your dedes be always ill towards me …

Fynally, when we had sayd and done as ys aforesaid and were goone out of the howse, tarrying there for one of her chaplaynes who was not with the rest when we gave the charge aforesaid unto them, the Ladye Maryes Grace sent to us to speake with her one worde at a wyndowe. When we were comme into the courte, notwithstanding that we offred to come upp to her chamber, she would nedes speake out of the wyndowe, and prayed us to speake to the Lordes of the Councell that her Comptroller might shortly returne; for, sayd she, sythens his departing I take thaccoumpte myself of my expenses and learne how many loves of brede be made of a bushel of whete, and ywys
*
my father and my mother never brought me up with baking and bruyng, and to be playne with you, I am wery with myne office … And I pray God to send you to do well in your sowles and bodies to, for somme of you have but weake bodyes …’

[
Acts of the Privy Council
, III, pp. 348-52. Original TNA PC2.]

*
ywys = I think.

Mary’s officers remained in prison until the spring of the following year, so presumably she learned to count loaves – and other things. But in a sense her performance achieved its objective. The ban on her household mass was never lifted – but neither was it enforced. Scheyfve made his ritual protest on 4 September and was told that the king insisted upon obedience, and would in no wise change his mind. However, having learned some discretion, in practice Mary went on having mass celebrated in her closet and in the presence of a few of her ladies, and this pragmatic stalemate lasted for the remainder of the reign – a matter of nearly two years.

By the autumn of 1551 the council had probably decided that, short of imprisoning her, there was nothing more that they could do about this obstinate woman, and that it was better to tolerate a low-profile nonconformity than to stir up further international trouble. However, by failing to enforce a full submission they had left her credibility intact, and paradoxically that spelt a new danger when Franco-Imperial hostilities were renewed in October. Charles had always been reluctant to go beyond words in using Mary against her brother’s government, but the Emperor’s health was now poor and control of policy was coming increasingly to rest with Mary of Hungary and with his chief minister, Antoine Perrenot, Bishop of Arras. Mary of Hungary took English support for France in the new conflict for granted, but was absolutely contemptuous of England’s military capability, and planned to use her namesake as a means of taking England out altogether. There is no reason to suppose that the princess was in any way a party to these plans, and we have no means of knowing what her attitude might have been. Writing to the bishop on 5 October, Mary of Hungary pointed out what an immense advantage it would be to have one or more English harbours at their disposal, and went on:

Many people are of the opinion that the kingdom of England would not be impossible to conquer, especially now that it is a prey to discord and poverty. It seems that there are three persons who might try their fortune, conquer the country and marry our cousin …
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A pretext for intervention would be easy to find. ‘Taking the king out of the hands of his pernicious governors … [or] of avenging him, or some other excuse easily to be devised …’ The three gallants in question were the Archduke Ferdinand (Charles’ nephew), Dom Luis of Portugal (brother of the king), and the Duke of Holstein (brother of the King of Denmark). Mary was both a bait and a pretext – in fact no more than a pawn. Mary of Hungary had no particular sympathy with her predicament. If she were finally deprived of her mass altogether ‘she will be obliged to put up with it. She has no means to resist, and would be a victim of force, so that she would be blameless in God’s sight …’
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Charles, although he had never done anything very tangible to help, had at least taken Mary’s conscientious scruples seriously – as they deserved. This extremely cynical plan was never implemented, perhaps because England’s capacity to resist was reappraised, or perhaps because the Emperor vetoed it. But it does serve to emphasise what a dangerous person Mary had become, in spite of the fact that she made no move to destabilise the government, nor offered any encouragement to those who did.

The Earl of Warwick had in any case no intention of supporting France in the new war. His policy was one of disengagement. He had given up the English position in Scotland, and surrendered Boulogne, specifically to be able to concentrate on the difficult tasks of domestic government and retrenchment. Apart from his dealings with Mary, he was reasonably successful. The crown’s debts were reduced, and in spite of continuing tensions there were no repetitions of the rebellious outbreaks of 1549. At the end of October Mary was invited to court to meet Mary of Guise, the Queen Dowager of Scotland, who was returning overland from France. She declined, on the grounds of her ‘constant ill health, which at present is worse than usual’, but admitted privately that the real reason was that she would not be able to hear mass if she was at court. Interestingly, when he heard of this the Emperor admonished her that it would be better to attend when invited, and she replied that she would go after Christmas as usual, but would refrain from contaminating herself with the rites of the Chapel Royal.
^[155]
Mary continued to allege that her chaplains were being harassed, and in January both she and Scheyfve made ritual protests, but the impression given is that of force of habit rather than of any new or specific grievance.

In November 1551 the Earl of Warwick had himself created Duke of Northumberland, and the timing of this may have been significant. Edward had turned fourteen on 12 October, and this represented in some contexts a coming of age.
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The king would not achieve his actual majority until he was eighteen, but Warwick was anxious to bring him into the political process as soon and as fully as possible. Apart from anything else, Edward was being very carefully educated for his future responsibilities, and only he stood any chance of prevailing over his sister. Warwick was carefully preparing himself for the day when he would step aside as regent and become instead the trusted first minister of an adult king. The enhancement of rank has to be seen in that context.

At almost exactly the same time Northumberland destroyed the Duke of Somerset. The ex-protector was accused of all sorts of plottings and treasonable intentions, most of which were fictitious, as Northumberland later admitted.
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He had, however, threatened to divide the council at a time when any lack of unity could have been disastrous. Plotting with Mary’s supporters was probably just another fiction, but in any case he was not convicted of treason. He was convicted of felony for assembling an armed band at his house in contravention of statute law – and of that he was guilty as charged. It was of course a pretext, but he was the king’s uncle and a man of great political experience. Edward might have turned to him rather than to Northumberland as he approached his majority – if Somerset had still been around. If Edward’s reaction to his uncle’s death is anything to go by (a succinct, emotionless note in his journal), it was probably a misplaced fear, and in any case the circumstances did not arise.

What Somerset’s execution in January 1552 demonstrated to Mary was that she was dealing with a man who was capable of being completely ruthless, especially if he sensed that the king was alienated from his victim, even temporarily. Her officers returned to duty in mid-April 1552, and there seems to have been a noticeable relaxation of tension. Edward was genuinely fond of his sister, infuriating as he found her, and it was important to keep him in that frame of mind. Although nothing fundamentally changed, by the summer of 1552 Mary was refraining from provocative actions or abrasive words, and when she visited the court in June she was honourably received – and the subject of religion does not seem to have been mentioned.
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A new Act of Uniformity reached the statute book in April 1552, imposing a liturgy far more explicitly Protestant than that of 1549, but this made little difference as far as Mary was concerned. For those who had struggled to convince themselves (as Stephen Gardiner did for a while) that the first Prayer Book was capable of a Catholic interpretation, this was a blow; but Mary had never suffered from any such delusion.
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The English Prayer Book was heretical in whatever guise it came; and cocooned in her closet with her sympathetic priests, she did not have to endure it. What the second Act of Uniformity did make abundantly clear, however, was that the royal supremacy as a bulwark of traditional belief was a dead concept. If the supremacy was to be accepted, then it must also be accepted that the king (and the king’s government) had the right to impose beliefs and practices that were traditionally regarded as heretical. We have no specific evidence, but it may well have been at this point that Mary – like Gardiner – came to the conclusion that the defence of the Henrician settlement was a pointless strategy. Only the Universal Church could protect true doctrine from sacrilegious hands. What we know is that as late as August 1551 she was arguing that her father’s Church had represented the true faith, while by August 1553 she was privately arguing for the restoration of the papal jurisdiction.

At what point Edward’s health began to give grounds for serious anxiety we do not know. He had a bad cold at Christmas 1552, but he had thrown off such infections before without great difficulty. Contrary to what is sometimes said, he had never been a sickly child, and although he had shown no great aptitude for them, his enthusiasm for war games and other physical recreations was immense. At some time early in 1553 he drew up the document called his ‘Device for the succession’, but this was a school exercise, not an attempt to address a pressing issue. It did indeed envisage the possibility of his dying without heirs (that was its whole point), but it did so with a long and indefinite time span. For example, the ‘heirs male’ of his cousin Jane Grey were included, although Jane, who was sixteen, was as yet not married.
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What is significant about it is that it ignored Henry’s Act of Succession of 1544, which had laid down quite clearly that if Edward were to die without heirs, he should be succeeded by Mary. Now this may have been in response to a tutorial instruction – ‘suppose that act had never been passed, what then?’ In other words it was a hypothetical exercise. Or it may have been that there was already an understanding between the king and his tutors that the statute would be disregarded. We do not know. What is clear is that the matter was being thought about some time before there was any urgent need for an answer. Northumberland was certainly not spoiling for a fight, in fact he was going out of his way to make conciliatory gestures to Mary, although admittedly these related to payments of money and exchanges of lands, not religious matters.

In February Mary visited the court in some state, and if she made any provocative religious gestures no one commented upon them. Edward was sufficiently unwell by then to postpone seeing her for a few days, but if her visit demonstrates anything it is that most of the court still thought of her at that stage as the heir to the throne.
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In March, according to Scheyfve, she asked him to press the Emperor to secure a relaxation of the tight restrictions upon her worship, but that was in the context of making sure that her lines of communication were still intact and (probably) that Charles was still sufficiently
compos mentis
to be appealed to if necessary.

Parliament met from 1 to 31 March, and the king was not well enough to perform the usual opening ceremony, but the succession was not discussed, and the ‘Device’ was never mentioned. It seems unlikely that anyone except the king, and possibly the Duke of Northumberland, knew of its existence. During March Edward’s health improved. He closed Parliament in the usual way, and on 11 April was able to ‘take the air’. At this stage only Scheyfve seems to have thought that his life was in any danger, and that may tell us more about the ambassador than it does about the king. His sources of information were good, but not special, let alone unique. More significantly, he coupled these pessimistic messages with the news that Northumberland was keeping Mary carefully informed of every change in the king’s condition. He was poorly again at the end of April, but by the middle of May all the talk was of a complete recovery.
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On the list of that month a marriage took place that was to loom large in the conspiracy theories of the forthcoming crisis, but no one seems to have seen it in that light at the time. Guildford Dudley, Northumberland’s fourth (and only unmarried) son wedded Jane, the eldest daughter of Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk. This was later represented as a crafty plot to hijack the crown, but at the time even Scheyfve merely commented that Jane was ‘the king’s kinswoman’.
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She was not even Northumberland’s first choice for his son, but the Earl of Cumberland had rejected his approaches in respect of his daughter Margaret. At the same time Guildford’s sister, Catherine, married Henry Hastings, heir to the Earl of Huntingdon, and Jane’s sister (also Catherine) married Henry Herbert, heir to the Earl of Pembroke. In other words this was a routine dynastic ‘wedding circus’ of the kind that was common between aristocratic families, and had no significance beyond that. The king was not present, but gave his full approval to the ceremonies. Unfortunately, Jane had had no desire to marry Guildford, who was her inferior in both character and intellect, and this was not to be without its relevance in due course.