Tudors (History of England Vol 2)

by Ackroyd, Peter

  On 10 July the heralds-at arms announced the accession of Queen Jane in Cheapside, Paul’s Cross and Fleet. There is no evidence of rejoicing, or even of general acceptance. The crowds responded with silence, if not with open discontent, their faces ‘sorrowful and averted’. One chronicler reports that a vintner’s boy, Gilbert Potter, cried out that ‘the Lady Mary has the better title’; he was seized and led away. His ears were severed at the root on the following morning.

  It might have been thought that Northumberland was in a pre-eminent position. He had control of the fleet as well as the treasury; he commanded the fortresses and garrisons of the land. Mary had as yet no army at her disposal; she had only the members of her household. But all Northumberland’s power was not enough in the face of her determined opposition and the evident fury of her supporters. The lawful succession to the throne of England could not be compromised by double-dealing. The crisis, of Northumberland’s own making, had broken over them all. Some of the councillors secretly doubted him. Others were confused and uncertain. William Cecil armed himself and made plans to flee the realm.

  Northumberland had decided to detain Mary, by force, and bring her to London. If he had acted sooner, even before Edward’s death, he might have succeeded in destroying her. It was first believed that the armed party against her would be led by Jane Grey’s father, the duke of Suffolk, but the new queen’s protestations prevented the move. Instead Northumberland himself would march from London, by way of Shoreditch, with a retinue of 600 armed men. The citizens watched them leave. ‘The people press to see us,’ he remarked, ‘but not one sayeth God speed us.’ He had asked his colleagues to remain faithful to him, but he could not be entirely sure of their loyalty.

  Mary stood her ground. She was resolute and defiant on the model of her father; she had a stern Tudor sense of majesty, allied with an awareness of her religious mission to save England from heresy. It had been thought that she might flee to the emperor in Brussels, but why should a queen abandon her realm? Supporters flocked to her, with the earl of Sussex and the earl of Bath among the first of them. The people from the towns and villages of the region took up their weapons. It seemed that the whole of East Anglia had risen for her. The city of Norwich proclaimed her as rightful sovereign. A small navy of six ships, sent out by Northumberland to guard the seaways off the Norfolk coast, defected to Mary’s camp. When she went out to review her new troops the cry went up ‘Long live our good Queen Mary!’ She removed from Kenninghall to Framlingham Castle, in Suffolk, where she might repel any armed force. Yet she was still in the utmost danger. If she had been defeated and come to trial, she would have been declared guilty of treason. The fate of the nation, and of her religion, was now at stake.

  Northumberland had taken his men to Cambridgeshire, where Newmarket had been chosen as the rendezvous for the army made up of tenants from various noble estates. But when the report of the navy’s defection to Mary reached that place, the men began to mutiny; they declared that they refused to serve their lords against Queen Mary. Northumberland sent an express message to the council demanding reinforcements and was given ‘but a slender answer’. The members of the council, in the absence of their presiding genius, began to entertain doubts about the wisdom of the entire enterprise. As a contemporary chronicler put it, ‘each man then begun to pluck in his horns’.

  As the radical preachers continued their pulpit campaign against Mary, William Cecil and others began to organize a coup d’état. They had been gathered in the Tower, close to Queen Jane herself, where they remained under the observation of a garrison loyal to Northumberland. On Wednesday 19 July, with Northumberland’s forces in open rebellion, the councillors managed to leave the Tower and gather at Baynard’s Castle on the north shore of the Thames about three-quarters of a mile above London Bridge.

  They were joined here by the Lord Mayor, the aldermen and other prominent citizens. The earl of Arundel spoke first. If they continued to support the claims of Lady Jane Grey, civil war was unavoidable, with the distinct possibility that foreign powers would also intervene. No fate would be more unhappy for England and its people. The earl of Pembroke then rose and, taking his sword out of his scabbard, announced that ‘this blade shall make Mary queen, or I will lose my life’. Not one voice was heard on behalf of Northumberland or of Jane. A body of 150 men were then marched to the gates of the Tower, where the keys were demanded in the name of Queen Mary. Lady Jane’s father realized that the end had come; he rushed to his daughter’s chamber and tore down the canopy of state under which she sat. Her reign had lasted for just nine days.

  The lords of the council then proceeded to the cross at Cheapside, where in due state they declared Mary to be the queen of England. The crowd of spectators cried out ‘God save the queen’, and Pembroke tossed his purse and embroidered cap into the throng. The bells of St Paul’s rang out, to be joined by all the other bells in the city. The lords then went in procession to the cathedral where, for the first time in almost seven years, the hymn of praise known as the Te Deum was sung by the choir. The apprentices gathered wood to light bonfires at the major crossroads. That evening the council wrote to Northumberland, asking him to lay down his arms.

  The duke himself, now all but trapped in Cambridge, hurried to the market cross. He informed the crowds of angry spectators that he had followed the council’s orders in proclaiming Jane and proceeding against Mary; now that the council had changed its opinion, he would also change his. He threw up his cap and called out ‘God save Queen Mary’. He told a colleague that Mary was a merciful woman and would declare a general pardon. To which came the reply that ‘you can hope nothing from those that now rule’.

  Arundel came to Cambridge with orders to arrest him. ‘I obey, my lord,’ Northumberland said, ‘yet show me mercy, knowing the case as it is.’

  ‘My lord, you should have sought for mercy sooner. I must do according to my commandment.’

  At seven in the evening of 3 August Queen Mary entered her capital in triumph accompanied by a retinue of 500 attendants; her horse was trapped with cloth of gold, and her gown of purple velvet was embroidered with gold. She wore a chain of gold, and jewels, about her neck and her headdress was similarly covered in precious stones. She was greeted by the civic dignitaries at Aldgate and then through cheering crowds rode in procession to the Tower of London. Here, the prisoners of the old regime were waiting to greet her, among them the duke of Norfolk and the conservative bishops. She raised them from their knees, and kissed each one upon the cheek. ‘You are my prisoners!’ she exclaimed before returning to them their liberty. The cannons sounded ‘like great thunder, so that it had been like to an earthquake’.

  Less than three weeks later Northumberland was led to the scaffold at Tower Hill. He confessed to the crowds around him that he had ‘been an evil liver and have done wickedly all the days of my life’. Then, perhaps to the surprise of those who watched him, he denounced radical preachers for turning him away from the true religion. ‘I beseech you all,’ he declared, ‘to believe that I die in the Catholic faith.’ The day before he had heard Mass in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower. It was said that he had made his conversion in a desperate attempt to avert death or, perhaps, to save his family from further punishment. Yet his return to Catholicism may have been entirely genuine.

  As the end came he recited a prayer and the psalm De Profundis. The executioner, according to custom, now begged his pardon; the man wore a white apron, like a butcher. ‘I have deserved a thousand deaths,’ Northumberland told him. He made the sign of the cross in the sawdust around him and laid his head upon the block. One stroke of the axe was enough. Some little children mopped up the blood that had fallen through the slits of the scaffold.

  22

  In the ascendant

  The imperial ambassador declared that Mary’s triumphant reclamation of the crown had been a miracle of God and a token of the divine will. The new queen herself saw her accession as part of a sa
cred dispensation. It was her destiny, and duty, to bring her country back to the old faith. On the secular level it could also be said that a popular rebellion had overthrown an established regime. She had, in addition, gained the throne largely as a result of the loyalty of the Catholic nobility; no overtly Protestant lord had supported her. As soon as she heard that she had been proclaimed queen in London, she ordered that the crucifix be once more set up in her chapel at Framlingham.

  When Mary first rode into the capital, after her triumph, many households placed images of the Virgin and of the saints in their windows as a token of the change. News of her accession reached the congregation gathered in Exeter Cathedral to hear a sermon by the reformer Miles Coverdale; the report was whispered around the assembly and, one by one, the people stood up and walked out. Only a few of the ‘godly’ remained. All over the country the Mass was once more chanted in Latin. Without any statutes or proclamations, the images and altars of the old faith were quickly restored. The crucifixes were set up, and the statues of the Virgin and the saints were put in their familiar places. When a justice tried to prosecute some priests in Kent for saying Mass, he himself was imprisoned. Six or seven Masses were, in any case, now being sung every day in the royal chapel at Whitehall. It had once again become the centrepiece of true faith.

  On the matter of her brother’s funeral Mary was hesitant. She did not want to use the reformed burial service. ‘She could not’, she said, ‘have her brother committed to the ground like a dog.’ She was advised that it were best for a heretic king to have a heretic funeral, thus avoiding public controversy. So she compromised. Reluctantly she agreed that he could be buried according to the rite that he had favoured during his reign, but she tried to safeguard his soul and her principles by having a Latin Mass for the dead sung the night before his funeral and a solemn requiem a few days later.

  On 18 August 1553 Mary issued a Proclamation Concerning Religion in which she forbade the use of opprobrious terms such as ‘papist’; she also commanded that no one ‘shall henceforth under pretext of sermons or lessons either in Church, publicly or privately, interpret the Scriptures, or teach anything pertaining to religion, except it be in the Schools of the university’. She had, in other words, banned all radical or reformed preachers. She had asserted that she had no thought of religious compulsion, but with the ominous proviso ‘until such time as further order by common consent may be taken’.

  Yet, in certain quarters, resistance to the reintroduction of the old faith could be fierce. Some preachers, righteous in their generation, proclaimed the true doctrine of King Edward’s reign. London was as ever the centre of religious radicalism. When one Catholic chaplain preached at Paul’s Cross, a large crowd cried out ‘Thou liest!’ and ‘Pull him out! Pull him out!’ A dagger was thrown at the pulpit, and he had to be hurried away through the schoolhouse close by. Nevertheless, the European reformers, who had made the capital their home, now quickly made their way back to Zurich or Geneva or Strasburg. The colony of Walloon weavers, settled in Glastonbury, was happy to go home.

  Other incidents of insurrection took place. A church in Suffolk was set on fire as Mass was being said. One radical, Thomas Flower, pulled out a wooden knife from his belt at the time of communion and repeatedly stabbed at the officiating priest. The reformers were soon obliged to meet in secret; they went into fields, or ships moored on the Thames, under cover of darkness. The bishop of London, Edmund Bonner, was determined to root out the heretics. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said to one of them, ‘there is a brotherhood of you, but I will break it, I warrant you.’ He had been condemned to perpetual imprisonment in the Marshalsea by Northumberland’s council; soon enough he became known as ‘Bloody Bonner’ for his determined persecution of reformers.

  Another restored bishop, Stephen Gardiner, was fresh from the Tower when he confronted another heretic. ‘My lord,’ the man said, ‘I am none heretic, for that way that you count heresy, so worship we the living God.’

  ‘God’s Passion!’ bellowed the bishop. ‘Did I not tell you, my lord deputy, how you should know an heretic? He is up with the “living God” as though there were a dead God. They have nothing in their mouths, these heretics, but “the Lord liveth, the living God ruleth, the Lord Lord” and nothing but “the Lord” ’. At this point he took off his cap, and rubbed to and fro, and up and down, ‘the fore part of his head, where a lock of hair was always standing up’. His final words were ‘Away with him! It is the stubbornest knave that ever I talked with.’ He dispatched another radical preacher with the words ‘carry away this frenzy-fool to prison’. His archdeacon at Westminster was equally vehement; when disputing with a disciple of Arianism, whereby the Son of God is inferior to God the Father, he spat in the man’s face. Just as ‘Catholic’ now became used as a term of triumph, so ‘Protestant’ entered the language in the course of this reign as a mark of opprobrium.

  To gauge the true faith of the English is impossible. It is clear enough that only a minority of the people were committed to the new faith, and that a slightly larger number now espoused full Catholicism. The changes in direction of religious policy, the attack upon the rituals of the old faith, the stripping of the churches, must have had devastating consequences for the piety of the people. The bonds of the sacred had been loosened. It is possible, then, that there was no drift from Catholicism to Protestantism (or vice versa) but rather a movement from the fervent or instinctive piety of the medieval period to bland conformism and even indifference. This would be entirely consistent with a reformation that was less about the assertion of faith and principle than about the redistribution of power and wealth. Habit and custom, rather than faith or piety, were the determinants of English religion.

  Mary was the first woman, apart from the ill-starred Jane Grey, to be proclaimed queen regnant of England. Her one possible predecessor, Matilda, had never been crowned and was known only as domina, or lady. But Mary had one precedent; her grandmother, Isabella, had ruled as queen of Castile and had maintained all the panoply of a royal court. No doubt Katherine of Aragon had discoursed with her daughter on the rituals and splendours of a reigning queen. Mary’s great-grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, had been the power behind the throne of her son Henry VII. And her cousin, Margaret, had been ruling as queen-regent of Flanders for the last twenty years. As a child she had been brought up to be a queen; no subject could kiss her, except on the hand, and in formal rituals those about her knelt. There was a tradition of female power upon which she could draw.

  She employed the members of her own household as her first advisers, but she could not wholly dispense with the councillors of the previous reign; only they had the knowledge, and skill, to maintain the system of government. Two days before her coronation she had summoned them; when they assembled she sank to her knees before them and spoke to them of the duties that, as a sovereign, God had imposed upon her. ‘I have entrusted my affairs and person to you, and wish to adjure you to do your duty as you are bound to your oaths.’ According to the Spanish ambassador, who became her principal confidant, they were deeply moved and did not know how to reply. But hers was a politic move. She knew that many of them had been hostile to her in the past, having signed the device barring her from the succession, and she distrusted them. She declared to the ambassador that ‘she would use their dissimulation for a great end, and would make their consent prevent them from plotting against her’.

  It was a large and in some ways unwieldy council, composed of some fifty members. Mary herself was infuriated by the divisions among them; they were continually ‘chopping and changing’, blaming one another and exculpating themselves. Some had always been loyal to her, while others had been disloyal to the last possible minute; some were conservative bishops, newly released from prison, while others were great magnates who had done well out of the confiscation of monastic lands. She said, on a later occasion, that she spent most of her time shouting at them. Yet from this council a small inner circle of six or seven men was so
on formed. Most notable among them was the old bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner; the bishop, previously confined to the Tower, was appointed to be lord chancellor. Most of the others were professional administrators who had served under the old regime.

  Mary set about the business of governing with a will. She rose at dawn, when she prayed and heard a private Mass; she then went to her desk where she stayed until one or two in the afternoon. She took a light meal and then returned to her desk where she worked until midnight. She wrote letters; she granted audiences to her subjects; she conferred with her council. Yet it was still commonly believed that she needed a husband. A female monarch was considered to be unnatural, an aberration that could be countered only by a male figure of authority at her side.

  When parliament assembled on 5 October, in the first year of her reign, the question of her marriage was a pressing issue. The vast majority, of both Lords and Commons, wished her to take an Englishman as her consort. At her formal coronation, four days before, she had worn her hair loose as a symbol that she was a virgin.

  Matters of a more general purport were also debated. Parliament passed a bill affirming the validity of Henry VIII’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon, legitimizing Mary’s claim to the throne. An Act was also passed to enforce the religious settlement as it had stood in the last year of Henry VIII, thus abolishing all the Edwardian innovations; the matter caused protracted deliberation, over a period of four days, and was eventually agreed by 270 over 80 votes. A significant minority, therefore, still supported the Edwardian reforms. The members of parliament, however, let it be known that there were two topics on which they were united. There was to be no restitution of Church property, and no restoration of papal authority.