The Baker's Daughter Volume 2

by Bonny G Smith

  Dudley had expected as much, and if it had been left at that, his point would have been made and little harm done. But also present was Nicholas Wotton, Dean of Canterbury, and he used the opportunity to harangue the regent and the emperor about their religious beliefs, seeking to show them the error of their ways. Charles angrily dismissed both men. They had exceeded their mandate; England was now under threat of war from the Empire.

  When Mary entered the palace the next day, she was escorted not to a great hall or crowded presence chamber, but to the small room where the Privy Council did their business. So, she thought, the demonstration of the day before had not been lost on them! They would risk no wider showing this time.

  Mary raised her eyes to Edward’s and this time she saw no uncertain boy; this was a king who meant to be obeyed. What happened since they had met and clung together at Christmastide? Poor child; but a child no more, she feared. She knew that he had been taking on more and more work of the government; Scheyfve had told her so. But Edward was still far from exercising any real power or control over affairs. He blustered and strutted and sought to imitate his royal father, but all in vain. He knew that he lacked the royal charisma; he knew that he was being exploited by the power-seeking men around him, and that any authority he exercised was carefully controlled by them. He was well aware of his shortcomings; he could not stand on his own and he knew it, and knowing, resented any resistance to the illusion of power that he did try to wield.

  And now who stood before him but his equally helpless sister, whose Achilles Heel was the now outlawed Catholic faith?

  What is to become of me? thought Mary. Edward regarded her with a look that was not hostile, but disconcertingly bland. She remained silent and waited for him to speak. He was, after all, the king.

  “Sister,” he said. “Please seat yourself.” He waved a hand and indicated a chair opposite his own at the other end of the council table. The men of the Council were ranged on either side, all with grim countenances. Once she was seated he said, “You have been repeatedly admonished to cease allowing your chaplains to hold Mass in your household, and yet you continue to blatantly defy my will.” When she would have spoken, Edward held up his hand. “I expect, dearest sister, that you would have obeyed this stricture not only because it is the law, but out of love for myself, who is your king and brother. You ought to do out of love what others do out of duty.”

  Mary noticed that in the intervening months since she had seen him that his voice no longer wavered between childhood and manhood; his voice was deep and strong. Very well, she would meet like with like. She lifted her chin and replied. “Forgive me, Your Grace, but you are young and have a lot to learn.”

  This time Edward did not search out the eyes of any of his advisors; he was quick with his reply. “I am glad that I am young,” he retorted, “because I have not been tainted by the old ways. You also have a lot to learn, sister, and one is never too old for that!” He sat up and pounded a small white fist on the table, in imitation of what he must have seen their father do so many times. “I will be obeyed, sister! I believe that all of this is a misunderstanding on your part, a misunderstanding which can easily be remedied. If you knew, if you understood the new ways, there would be no cause for all this animosity. I shall instruct you myself.” His gray eyes searched hers.

  It was all Mary could do not to shake her head in disbelief. How pathetic, she thought, that he was such a child as to believe that a few words, fed to him by his councilors and recited parrot-wise to her, would make any difference against beliefs that were over fifteen hundred years old and for which countless men and women had died over the centuries.

  Mary felt a cold, tight knot twist in her stomach, and the coldness radiated out until it reached her very fingertips. There were only two choices; give up or fight. She had come to fight.

  “Sirs,” she said, leaning forward to lend strength to her words, “I remind you once again of the assurances given to me and my cousin that I would not be hindered in the practice of my beliefs.”

  “No!” cried Edward. The delicate white fist hitting the table did not do so with even enough force to make the wine cups tremble. “No such promises were given.”

  “They were,” returned Mary, in her firm, clear voice. There would be no tears this time, from either of them. “I have it on the strength of the testimony of three Imperial ambassadors, if the word of the emperor is not sufficient.”

  Dudley waved a dismissive hand. “Van der Delft is dead,” he said coldly.

  Mary rounded on him firmly. “Yes, and I do not wonder, considering the haranguing we have taken from all of you since my father’s death! Having to deal with that is enough to drive any man…or woman,” she eyed each of the men in turn, “to the grave. And Chapuys is still alive.” Mary began to wish very much that she had the elusive paper with the words of the disputed promise written on it. Charles had demanded such a writing many times, and the Council had always demurred. She herself had never been convinced of the worth of such a thing; now she knew better. Very well, then; if she had not the words written on a paper to show, she would convince them another way.

  No one stirred or spoke a word.

  “And may I remind all of you,” Mary said very quietly, “that Chaplain Mallet was arrested at New Hall this July past, for the saying of the Mass for my household without my presence, I having been delayed in my journey from Kenninghall.”

  Sir William Petre crossed his arms on his chest. “Yes, and well he should have been!”

  Mary’s blue eyes glinted. “You miss the point, Secretary, she said. “This presupposes that had I been present, then no such infraction would have occasioned.”

  Dudley’s face reddened dangerously, and the other men coughed and shifted in their chairs.

  Edward simply looked puzzled. Then suddenly he said, as if he had solved a problem set to him by his teachers, “Do you mean to imply that if the arrest was founded on your absence, and not on the law, sister, that the corollary is that your presence would have nullified the infraction?”

  Mary said nothing. Edward regarded his ministers. She had made her point, and it was a good one.

  “A pox on promises and precedents!” exclaimed Edward. “We can no longer suffer you to break our laws. Doing so encourages others to follow suit, as your bold demonstration yesterday proved.”

  Mary shrugged. “I did naught but ride into town.”

  “With a great rosary hanging about your neck, and the necks of an hundred more! Leave was never given for such blatant display!” Edward flushed in his anger.

  Mary leaned back in her chair, clasped her hands before her on the table, placed her tongue firmly in her cheek and said, “So, Your Grace, leave was given for the saying of Mass, but not for the public wearing of rosaries. I do beg your pardon, then.”

  Dudley looked at Edward in exasperation, and the king seemed to wilt under that gimlet eye. Mary had scored another point at their expense.

  While admitting nothing, Edward said, “I have only acquiesced to your imbecility in the past in the hopes that you should be persuaded to right thinking, not to harden your resistance to reason!”

  Mary had often thought of her spontaneous tears at their Yuletide meeting; she knew now why it had happened. The thought that Edward was unlikely to change upon attaining his majority had moved her, but what had really lain at the core of that outburst was the certainty that she had lost him. He had backed down then; he would not do so now. She could only imagine the admonitions that her brother had suffered at the hands of these men for his display of kindness to her.

  “Promises were made, Your Grace,” said Mary. “And they are now being broken.”

  Edward bristled. “I am ignorant of any such promises, sister!”

  Bishop Ridley addressed Mary and the Council in his best pulpit voice. “The king,” he said, “has only recently taken a hand in affairs; that being the case, he need not honor promises that were made on his behalf if he di
sagrees with them.”

  “Ah!” Mary replied with a smile. “That is as well, then. For if such be the case, then nor shall I be bounden to obey any laws made to alter the religion of England, since these occurred long before any promises to the emperor need ever have been made!”

  This time Dudley turned as purple as an eggplant. Mary struggled to hide her glee at scoring yet another point.

  Why stop now? Mary drew a deep breath and said, “It must also be considered that the very recent unpleasantness at the Imperial court was founded upon the argument that the ambassador and I are granted the privilege of hearing the Mass, and therefore so should the English ambassador be suffered to hear his heretic service there. Quod Erat Demonstradum, I should say. Do you not agree?”

  This time, Dudley seemed on the verge of apoplexy, but he hid his ire most skillfully.

  Archbishop Cranmer cleared his throat, and all eyes turned to him. “There is another matter,” he said softly.

  Mary had always thought of Cranmer as a timid man, a leaf blowing in whatever direction the wind took him. He was weak. She would have no difficulty refuting any point the Archbishop of Canterbury cared to make.

  Cranmer raised a grim countenance and said, “You have broken not only the king’s laws, madam, but you have broken the commandment “Honor thy father”, most grievously. You have defied your father’s will.”

  Mary could contain herself no longer; at this she laughed out loud. “And that, sir, is an excellent example of the pot calling the kettle black! If anyone has abused my father’s will, it is all of you; it would take me from now until sunset to list the many ways you have done so. But allow me to name two such instances that would have been, I am certain, at the forefront of my father’s concerns, were he with us. The first is his request to have daily masses said for his soul and the second is the obsequies he requested be recited four times a year.”

  Cranmer ignored her and went on, “You were to have submitted your will to the Council,” he said in his melodic voice.

  Mary leaned forward and her eyes danced. Against all odds, she was actually enjoying herself. “I have read my father’s will, sir,” she said. “The only matter upon which I must submit me to the Council is over the matter of my marriage. An issue that has neither form nor substance at the present time, nor likely to!”

  “Enough of this bandying of words!” cried Edward. The room fell silent. “I will see my laws obeyed! By everyone! And those who do not shall be subject to the full penalties of the law!”

  “This is not the king speaking, but Dudley!” Mary shot back.

  Edward’s eyes narrowed. He was a Tudor, after all. When the retiring, patient part of him that was Jane’s was exhausted, the temper that was Henry’s would win through. How far could he be pushed?

  “I would rather die than offend God or my conscience,” said Mary. “I am ready, if it is your will, Your Grace, to die for my beliefs. In the final analysis, brother, there is but one body and one soul. My body is Your Grace’s to do with as you will, but my soul is God’s. If it please you to take away my life then you must.”

  Suddenly Edward’s face seemed to crumple in on itself; every eye in the room was on him, but he could not help himself. His voice had lost its demanding quality. “No such sacrifice shall be required, sister,” he said softly.

  Enough was enough; she had beaten them all.

  “Methinks,” said Dudley, “that Your Grace seeks to turn the king against us.”

  Mary eyed him haughtily. “And is such not what you and all these men here present have been doing to me these past years?”

  It was the last word, and she had gotten it. But it was a hollow victory. For she had the example of her mother to show her that one could win every battle and still lose the war.

  Durham House, London, August 1551

  There had been plague in the city all summer long. Dudley had refused to leave his residence for fear of it; if the business of government was to be done, the Council must come to him. Edward had long since been packed off to Windsor with his tutors. A quiet, uncertain pall lay over London, a miasma consisting of fog and the smoke from the fires burning the dead; if the aldermen’s reports were to be believed, the death toll for this latest and most virulent outbreak was approaching fifty thousand. Too many for burial; the grave diggers could not keep up, even with the use of mass graves. An eerie silence rested on the city like a low cloud.

  Dudley lay back on his pillows, a hot poultice on his chest. He was not ill, he was simply over-tired. But his wife would not listen, she insisted on trying remedy after remedy, which he bore with patience.

  In his hands he held the precious parchment. He was king now in all but name, and if any had doubted it, including himself, this was proof positive that it was true. For what he held in his hands was the ultimate achievement. There were actually two documents, each with its bold black signatures and from which dangled elaborate red wax seals.

  Dudley leaned forward and the poultice slipped off. He picked it up and laid it aside. It was only lukewarm now, and had lost its virtue, anyway. He spread the two documents out on the bed. If one was imaginative, one could still make out the shape of the sheep on whose skins the words were written, the signatures signed. At the top, where the neck had been, was the royal crest of France with its fleur-de-lys; the seals were attached by ribands to the rump. He rubbed his hands across the softness of the vellum, as if to caress the words it contained.

  The document on his left was a treaty of alliance with Henri II, King of France; the document on his right the marriage treaty between King Edward and the Princess Elisabeth of France, Henri’s daughter. It was an astounding achievement for one not born to royalty.

  It had aided his cause that he had known the king of France when he was still the dauphin; despite the fifteen years’ difference in their ages, they had become as friendly as an Englishman and a Frenchman were ever likely to be. This understanding between the Lord President of the Council and the King of France, along with Dudley’s efforts to end the costly French and Scottish wars, had helped immensely in the crafting of a peace treaty and a marriage alliance between Edward and the French king’s daughter.

  The princess was only six years old, and such marriage treaties were usually little more than political posturing; plenty of time to deal with the issue of the princess’s Catholic religion if and when the betrothal ever came to fruition. Between Edward’s obvious frailty and the princess’s tender age, that was not likely to be a concern for many years to come, if ever.

  But for now, these precious treaties were exactly the big stick he needed to be able to thumb his nose at the emperor. And the corollary to that was that it gave him the confidence he needed to insist once again that the Princess Mary cease her devotion to the Catholic Mass and begin to obey the laws of England in regard to her religion.

  The scenes with Mary earlier in the year had resulted in the emperor’s threats of war on her behalf; the Council had been given little choice but to back down. Dudley knew that Charles could afford war no more than could England; His Grace had his hands more than full with Germany and the religious rebellions there. But there was still the damage to trade to be considered. All in all, it was best to give way…for a little while. Edward had been appalled when his three principal bishops, Cranmer, Ridley and Ponet had, at Dudley’s urging, advised the king to wink at Mary’s Mass and her religious sedition for the meantime. Mary had been right when she said that the king was young and had a lot to learn; he still viewed matters as either black or white. He had not yet learned the value of gray when it came to policy.

  Dudley heaved a heavy sigh. He wished, not for the first time, that he had simply turned a blind eye when Mary had wished to escape to the court of her cousin. Let her go and be someone else’s problem! Oh, for that opportunity again! It was possible that the princess would never have been any more than a political exile with no hope of ever gaining the throne of England. But alas, the threat that sh
e represented abroad and out of his control was too great; a Catholic husband willing to invade England in Mary’s name, with the backing of her cousin, the emperor, was too great a risk.

  So Mary had not been allowed to escape, but in England she represented the Catholic faith and stirred those faithful to it to break the law. Dudley eyed the precious parchments. Now was the time to subdue the Princess Mary…once and for all.

  Copt Hall, August 1551

  Sir William Petre, Lord Richard Rich and Sir Anthony Wingfield stood before the Princess Mary in silence. She had not invited them to sit, nor would she.

  Mary eyed the men closely. What was Dudley about, sending these three to her? If she had not backed down before the king and the entire council, what made him think that she would acquiesce to the Chancellor, the Controller and the Secretary? There was more here than met the eye; she must be on her guard.

  She and the Council had been playing a game of cat and mouse since early in the year when she had been called to account for keeping her faith and for staging her demonstration with the rosaries. There was little doubt in her mind as to who was the cat and who the mouse; she did not do battle with the Council because she thought she could win, but for the sake of her honor. And yet over and over again she had tripped them up and used their arguments against them. So far, against all odds, she had walked away from each confrontation with the upper hand. But how much longer could she expect to do so?