Mary Tudor (41 page)
With the benefit of hindsight there is a fin de siecle air about the year 1557–8, but it may not have seemed that way at the time. In fact Mary managed quite well on her own, because after his second departure Philip was not sufficiently interested to interfere. By the summer of 1558 his English pensions were anything up to two years in arrears, and there are no signs that the reorganisation of household officers that took place at Christmas 1557 owed anything to his influence.
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Mary had made all her big decisions, and had set in place an administrative machine that worked with commendable efficiency. On the other hand, there are some signs that she was losing touch with reality. Her second phantom pregnancy provides some evidence of that, as does her determination to settle the succession only on her own offspring, in which nobody else now believed. It may also be significant that the religious persecution, which she was so instrumental in driving, increasingly turned into mass incinerations of six or seven offenders at a time. The careful examinations and macabre theatre that characterised most of the burnings, down to and including Cranmer’s in March 1556, were increasingly abandoned in favour of these more general executions. Mary had no intention of giving up on this campaign, but it seems to have become more and more mechanical.
On 19 June 1558 Philip sent a special courier to England to inquire about his wife’s health. ‘She has not written to me for some days past,’ he wrote to Feria, ‘and I cannot help being anxious.’ He had been expected in England for several weeks – or at least Mary had been expecting him. Ships had been put on standby to escort him, but he had not come. The excuses were the same as usual, and on the 23rd Feria reported that the queen was bearing her disappointment patiently.
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Her health seemed to be a little better than it had been of late, and he referred somewhat dismissively to ‘her usual ailments’. She had reacted badly to the disappointment over her second phantom pregnancy, and for several weeks was reputed to be weak and sleeping badly, so it was probably this familiar state of depression to which the ambassador was referring. There was, however, a lack of animation about her, and in particular her enthusiasm for the war seemed to have waned. This Feria blamed on the malign influence of certain councillors. He may have had Pole in mind, but he did not name him. With the benefit of hindsight it looks as though Mary had entered into a slow but terminal decline from the early summer, but it did not seem that way to contemporaries. Mary had suffered from menstrual problems, and from fits of lassitude and depression, for as long as anyone could remember. These fits had tended to alternate with periods of intense application, anger and determination. Her physicians manifested no particular alarm, and the general expectation seems to have been that this disorder would pass, as the others had. Philip’s anxiety was probably as much diplomatic as caring, because the royal couple were in the middle of another quarrel over Elizabeth.
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Although no longer in the diplomatic front line, at some point, probably in the spring of 1557, Simon Renard had written to Philip about the English succession. In this undated memorandum he had pointed out that, undesirable as she might be for many reasons, Elizabeth was the best bet if (or when) Mary succumbed to one or other of her illnesses. It was therefore essential to bring her under control, because left to her own devices she would marry an Englishman, restore the heretical Church and align her foreign policy with France.
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Philip did not need this advice, because he had already come to the same conclusion, but his persuasions had failed in 1557. In the spring of 1558, he returned to the charge. Perhaps Mary’s second phantom pregnancy had set the alarm bells ringing, but something prompted him in March or April to revive the project to marry Elizabeth to the Duke of Savoy. Mary became angry and distressed – any mention of Elizabeth seems to have upset her. In April an embassy arrived from Gustavus Vasa of Sweden, seeking the princess for his son and heir, Eric. There was no chance that Mary would have consented to her sister’s marriage with a Lutheran, and in any case the ambassador misbehaved by going straight to Elizabeth’s residence at Ashridge without the queen’s permission. Mary was extremely annoyed, not least, it would seem, because the incident put her halfsister firmly back on the agenda.
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An exchange of letters with Philip seems to have followed. Only one of these now survives, but it gives an indication of the progress of the negotiation. Mary offered to put the whole question of the succession before Parliament. This may have been stalling, because Parliament had recently been prorogued and there were no immediate plans to recall it; however, it was a perfectly proper suggestion. There were good precedents for a legislative answer to English succession problems, but what she may have had in mind was the repeal of the 1544 Act, under which Elizabeth was the heir. The condition that had been attached to that status was that she should marry with the consent of the council. Whether Mary had it in mind to impose some other condition, or to change the order altogether, we do not know. The suggestion apparently angered Philip, who replied that if Parliament altered the succession he would hold her to blame. In the one surviving letter, Mary responded:
I beseech you in all humility to put off the business until your return … For otherwise your highness will be angry against me, and that will be worse than death to me, for I have already begun to taste your anger all too often, to my great sorrow.
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She had, she continued, already discussed her conscience in this matter with Friar Alphonus (one of the king’s confessors), who had left her more confused than before. She had believed for twenty-four years that Elizabeth was a bastard, and she was not going to change now. Only if Philip and Savoy both came to England could she see any hope of resolving the matter – although how their presence would achieve that, she did not explain.
Meanwhile Feria was visiting Elizabeth at Ashridge. As the king’s confidential agent he did not need permission to do this, and how often he went before he returned to the Continent in July we do not know. Such visits are referred to occasionally in his reports, but he never committed to writing the substance of their discussions – merely saying that they were ‘satisfactory’.
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Elizabeth was expressing a total unwillingness to marry at all, so it is unlikely that he elicited any signs of a change of mind. Probably his satisfaction derived from the fact that the princess was showing a proper gratitude for Philip’s support, and a willingness to continue good relations if (or when) she should become queen. There is no sign of a thaw in relations between the sisters. In February Elizabeth visited her London residence at Somerset House ‘with a great company of lords and noble men and noble women’. She stayed just over a week, paying a brief and chilly visit to the court, but then returned to the country with a similar retinue.
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The point can hardly have been missed. Between Philip’s recognition and her own domestic support, the princess was now very much the second person in the kingdom, and too strong to be touched, even if Mary had had the will to do so.
The war ground on. The Duke of Guise inflicted a sharp defeat on Philip’s forces at Thionville in June, but the king redeemed the position by taking Gravelines at the beginning of July. Philip had ordered the English fleet to support this operation, only to find that it had been deployed for the defence of Alderney on the queen’s orders. His reaction is not recorded, and may have been muted by the fact that a squadron under vice admiral John Malen did turn up while the battle was in progress and successfully bombarded the French positions.
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At the end of July, Lord Clinton landed 7,000 men near the port of Brest, but was unable to take it and withdrew after a few days, his stores having run out and his Flemish allies having departed. It was unsuccessful, but hardly a disaster, and the English fleet maintained control of the English Channel in an unheralded but effective way throughout the summer, at the same time maintaining a squadron off the Firth of Forth. They got little enough thanks from Philip, who measured everything by battles in the Low Countries, but they effectively prevented French troop movements by sea in a manner that no one else could have done. There is little sign of strategic coordination, but the French fleet offered no effective challenge. With both sides approaching financial exhaustion, there was talk of peace as early as May 1558, but the sparring continued throughout the summer as each side hoped for a tactical advantage. Only in September was Henry finally manoeuvred into requesting formal negotiations, which then commenced at Cercamp.
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The English participated, but had almost no leverage, because Mary was by that time extremely sick, and Philip had no intention of putting himself out for allies with whom he remained extremely dissatisfied.
About the middle of August, Mary developed a fever. This was unusual for her, and may indicate that she had contracted a mild version of the influenza that was still raging among her subjects. However, Pole reported to Philip that she was taking good care of herself, and by the following month the symptoms had disappeared. Optimism, however, was premature. By the end of September the queen was ill again, with what was described as a ‘dropsy’, and this time her condition soon began to give rise to serious anxiety. Her attendants were saying that only a visit from Philip would restore her to health, but unfortunately the king could not come. His own father, the Emperor, died at San Yuste on 21 September, and although he had long since handed over all his responsibilities, Charles remained in theory Holy Roman Emperor, and his funeral rites would be elaborate and prolonged.
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Philip could hardly absent himself at such a time. Moreover the peace negotiations had finally opened on 8 October and required close attention, particularly as one of the main sticking points was Calais. There was probably also another consideration in the king’s mind. If he should be in England when the queen died, his honour would require him to claim a continued role especially as he had (albeit secretly) repudiated the limitations of the marriage treaty that forbade him to do any such thing. However, he had no desire to do so, having decided that he would accept Elizabeth and cut his losses in England.
Philip therefore resolved to send back the Count of Feria, who was well known to Mary, ostensibly to commiserate with her on her illness, but in fact to keep a watching brief and, if Mary should die, to ensure that Elizabeth succeeded without any impediment. On 28 October the queen added a codicil to her will, finally acknowledging that there was unlikely to be any ‘fruit of her body’, and confirming that the succession was to go to the next heir by law. She carefully avoided naming Elizabeth, although her meaning was clear enough.
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A few days later she sent a message to her half-sister, acknowledging Elizabeth’s right, and requesting only that her debts be paid and that the Church be maintained. As far as we know Elizabeth did not respond, and the two did not meet, but Mary had done the one thing necessary to ensure a peaceful succession.
On 9 November, Feria reached the English court. The queen, he reported, was glad to see him, and particularly to receive news of her husband, but too weak to read the letters that he had brought with him. ‘There is … no hope of her life,’ he wrote, ‘but on the contrary each hour I think that they will come to inform me of her death, so rapidly does her condition deteriorate from one day to the next.’
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He wrote these words on 14 November, and by the time that Philip received them, Feria’s prediction had been fulfilled. As she grew weaker, Mary seems not to have wanted to talk about Philip, but confided to those about her that she had had a vision of angels ‘like little children’, and is alleged to have said that ‘Calais’ would be found written on her heart. During her final illness she received the sacrament more than once, and each time an improvement in her condition was imaginatively attributed to its efficacy. Finally, on 17 November, she received the ‘viaticum,’ the holy communion for the dying, made the responses, and then slipped into a coma. The exact moment of her passing was not even noticed by those present – a peaceful end, they said, as a reward for a noble and virtuous life.
John Foxe, who claimed to have his information from Rees Mansell, a gentleman of Mary’s privy chamber, who was present, took a rather more detached view.
MARY’S DEATH, 1558
Touching the manner of whose death, some say she died of a tympany,
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some by her much sighing before her death, supposed she died of thought & sorrow. Whereupon her council seeing her sighing, & desirous to know the cause to the end that they might better minister the more ready consolation unto her, feared, as they said, that she took that thought for the King’s Majesty her husband, which was gone from her. To whom she answering again: Indeed (said she) that might be one cause, but that is not the greatest wound that piercest my oppressed mind: but what that was she would not express to them.