Bloody Mary (38 page)

At the end of May the duke learned that the struggle would be upon him even sooner than he had expected. Edward’s doctors informed him that it was now their opinion that the king could not live through the autumn. There would be no time for Jane to bear a son; if things remained as they were Edward would die without an heir, leaving the way open to confusion and civil war. It was probably at this time that Dudley made a slight alteration in Edward’s Device. Inserting two extra words he changed the order of succession to read “the Lady Jane and her heirs male.” Now the document identified a successor, Jane Grey. She was to take precedence over the nonexistent male heirs Edward had hoped for.

In this revised version the Device was put into legal form in June and signed by the members of the Council and others. Some objected to it, but most were too busy preparing for the immense wave of popular protest they knew would come once Mary’s exclusion was announced. “All the councilors down to the very secretaries are buying up armor and weapons,” Scheyfve reported in June, and in the midst of their hurried preparations the dying king himself was neglected.

During June Edward withered into agonized immobility. He was kept drugged with opiates, and when he did struggle into consciousness it was only to bring up a livid black sputum that gave off an unbearable stench. His digestive system no longer functioned; his hair and nails had dropped out and “all his person was scabby.” When in his final days the doctors gave up on the king a woman offered to try to cure him, “if she could have a free hand.” She dosed him with something vile which made his shrunken body swell like a balloon. His legs puffed out painfully, and all “his vital parts were mortally stuffed.” His pulse began to fail, his skin changed color, and he could hardly breathe or speak. After several days of this new agony, on the sixth of July Edward died, leaving it to God and Dudley to work out the succession to the throne.

When they forth went, lyke men they were, most fearefull to beholde;

Of force and eke of pusaunt power they semed very stronge;

In theyr attemptes, also, they were both fearse and wonders bolde.

If god wolde have ben helper to such as stryveth in the wronge—

But at the last he helped us, though we thought it ryght longe.

The Nobles here proclaymed her queene, in voydyng of all blame;

Wherfore prayse we the lorde above, and magnyfie his name.

On July 4, two days before Edward’s death, both Mary and Elizabeth received messages summoning them to the bedside of their dying brother. Elizabeth did nothing; Mary, who had been staying twenty miles from court at Hunsdon, moved cautiously toward the capital, to give at least the impression that she meant to go to Greenwich as ordered. It is doubtful that she would have gone very much nearer, for she had been warned by a friend the previous day to go farther into the country for her own safety, and had already made plans to travel to Framlingham in Suffolk, where “she had confidence in her friends.”
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Scheyfve had no doubt that if she went to Greenwich she would be playing into Dudley’s hands. “It is to be feared that as soon as the king is dead they will attempt to seize the princess,” he wrote to his master in Brussels. On July 4 Scheyfve had just heard about the official designation of Jane as heir apparent; whether Mary knew of it we don’t know.

Mary reached Hoddesdon on the evening of July 6, the day Edward died, intending to spend the night there. But before the household was asleep a messenger arrived to say that the king was dead, and the summons was a trap.
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Without waiting for dawn, she left Hoddesdon at once, stopping only to send word to the imperial envoys in London that she was on her way to Kenninghall. As Edward lay dying, the emperor had sent three special representatives to England, officially to inquire
about his condition but actually to oversee the transfer of power that he knew could not be long in coming. Two of the envoys, Jacques de Mar-nix and Jean de Montmorency, were to have a marginal role in Mary’s future, but the third, Simon Renard, was to influence the early years of her reign in a decisive way. Mary was relying on them to help her now, as she fled in the night with only two women and six gentlemen to protect her. The anonymous messenger may have told Mary that one of Dudley’s sons, Robert Dudley, was making ready to ride to Hunsdon with an escort of three hundred guardsmen to take her prisoner; perhaps to avoid meeting him on the highway she and her little retinue made their way along the Newmarket road, the route that led directly toward Yarmouth and the sea.

Dudley let it be known right away that instead of coming to see her brother as decency demanded Mary had “gone towards the provinces of Norfolk and Suffolk, being the coast opposite Flanders, with intent to involve the kingdom in troubles and wars, and bring in foreigners to defend her pretensions to the crown.”
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It was rumored that she had escaped to Flanders, and the duke, fearing that this was the obvious preliminary to an invasion by the armies of Charles V, put his navy in readiness. He sent seven heavy warships to lie off the Norfolk coast, to watch for any sign of ships from Flanders and, if the rumor proved to be untrue, to prevent Mary from escaping before she could be captured.

It was an awkward situation, for though Edward had been dead for nearly forty-eight hours no official announcement of his death or of Jane’s accession had yet been made. When the imperial envoys asked to see the king on July 8 they were told he was too ill to receive them, but it was obvious from the heightened pace of military activity in London that Mary’s dash for the seacoast was not the only climactic event of recent days. The emperor’s representatives knew in fact that Edward was already dead—Renard had found out the news the day before—and they watched with great interest as Northumberland and his confederates made their final preparations for war. The Tower was secured, and with it the largest cache of arms and other military supplies in the kingdom. The admiral, Lord Clinton, was put in charge of the Tower and its garrison, and he ordered all the great ordnance there hauled to the top of the White Tower and mounted for immediate use. In the prison itself the three most eminent prisoners—the old duke of Norfolk, Gardiner, former bishop of Winchester and Edward Courtenay, son of the ill-fated marquis of Exeter who had grown to manhood confined in the fortress-were ordered to prepare themselves for death.

On the tenth of July, late in the afternoon, Queen Jane was brought to the Tower and installed there, in accordance with custom, to await her coronation. It was a hollow ritual, with none of the excitement or
pageantry of a state entry. Only a small crowd was present, and the few spectators watched in silence. A little later in the day two heralds and a trumpeter went through the city proclaiming Jane to be queen, and declaring that Mary, “unlawfully begotten,” and a papist, was not fit to rule.
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The announcement met with a melancholy response. “No one present showed any sign of rejoicing,” the emperor’s envoys noted, “and no one cried ‘Long live the queen!’ except the herald who made the proclamation and a few archers who followed him.” There were murmurs of dissatisfaction, and a few shouts of defiance. A young barman, Gilbert Pot, was arrested “for speaking of certain words of Queen Mary, that she had the right title.” The next morning Pot was solemnly set on the pillory and both his ears were cut off.

The girl who was now exalted to the throne was a thin, pale bride of sixteen whose complete surprise at finding herself queen was exceeded only by her dismay in discovering that she was expected to make her husband Guilford Dudley king. “I sent for the earls of Arundel and Pembroke,” she wrote to Mary later, “and said to them, that if the crown belonged to me I should be content to make my husband a duke, but would never consent to make him king.” Jane had an instinct for ruling, but she was treated as a powerless cipher by those around her. When she refused to give her husband a crown of his own his mother was furious, and “persuaded her son not to sleep with me any longer as he was wont to do.” Jane might have made a capable ruler in time, but for the immediate future it was up to Dudley to control the dissatisfied populace, dominate the disgruntled Council and give an illusion of majesty to the makeshift royal household in the Tower. He had expected this, and was gambling on his ability to deal with any emergency as it might arise. But there were two eventualities he had not reckoned on: that Mary might elude capture and gather an army of her own, and that he might have to leave London in order to deal with it.

On the same night that Jane was proclaimed a letter was brought to the councilors from Kenninghall. It was from Mary, and it was a forthright statement of her right to the throne. The letter proved that she had evaded Robert Dudley and his guard, and that she was committed to resist Jane’s usurpation. The councilors were “astonished and troubled” by Mary’s letter, but the next day brought even more disquieting news. Reports reached them from Norfolk that a number of nobles and gentlemen—the earl of Bath, the earl of Sussex, Sir Thomas Wharton, Sir John Mordant, Sir Henry Bedingfield—were either with her at Kenninghall or on their way to her there, and that in addition she had gathered to her banner “innumerable companies of the common people.” A force had to be sent to disperse this rebel host—for since Jane’s accession was hedged about with legal sanctions, Mary’s opposition was nothing less than
rebellion—but who could be spared to command it? Henry Grey, duke of Suffolk, Jane’s father, was an obvious choice, but the queen grew frightened at this suggestion and burst into tears; Suffolk would have to stay beside her in the Tower. The most feared commander in the kingdom was Dudley, and the councilors reminded him that only four years earlier he had won his greatest victory in the very region where Mary was now drawing her support. The battle of Kenninghall could be as glorious a triumph as the bloody field of Dussindale, they told him, and, seeing no alternative, he reluctantly agreed to go.

On the night of July 12 carts loaded with big and small guns, bows, spears, morris pikes, arrows, gunstones and gunpowder rumbled through the streets to the Tower, where Dudley’s army was gathering. There had been a muster that day in Tothill fields, to take in men “for a great army toward Cambridge,” where, it was said, the duke was going to “fetch in the lady Mary ... to destroy her grace.”
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Now all those who had agreed to join the muster for tenpence a day were formed into companies in the courtyard, and prepared to move northward. Two days later the duke marched out of London, having left to Suffolk the difficult task of representing him in the Council and keeping order in the city.

Dudley had with him some three thousand mounted men and footsol-diers, thirty cannon from the Tower, and as many cartloads of ammunition. He controlled the capital, the government, the treasury, and the queen. No commander was superior to him in experience or skill; he seemed to have every advantage. The imperial envoys gave Mary little chance to win against such odds. How could one woman prevail over such a concentration of power, they wrote to Charles V, even if she was the rightful queen?

But what Renard and the others did not take into account was the power of popular feeling. Dudley was hated; Mary was adored. As earl of Warwick, the dark presence behind Edward, and now as duke of Northumberland, father-in-law of the spurious queen they did not accept, John Dudley was “the tyrant,” the “bear of Warwick,” the man many suspected of poisoning the king in order to bring the crown into his own family. “The duke’s difficulty is that he dares trust no one, for he has never given any one reason to love him,” the imperial ambassadors admitted in a dispatch written while Dudley’s army was camped in Cambridge.
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Mary, on the other hand, was now reaping the full measure of popular loyalty. There were some who fought for her because they hated “the ragged bear most rank,” Dudley, but most joined her because, in their minds, she had always been princess of England, and this was the first opportunity they had been given to fight in defense of her rights.

At about the time Dudley left London Mary rallied her forces at Framlingham in Suffolk, a large, strong castle that had belonged to the
old duke of Norfolk but had recently come into Mary’s possession. Its forty-foot walls were eight feet thick, and crowned with thirteen square towers; the highest watchtower provided a good view of the sea. Here dozens of gentlemen brought their horsemen and their retainers and mounted knights, in numbers that grew astonishingly from day to day. With the thousands of peasants from Norfolk and Suffolk that swelled the ranks Mary had an army of nearly twenty thousand by July 19, plus an abundance of ordnance and provisions. Those who could not fight for her sent her money, or mercenaries, or carts full of bread, beer and freshly slaughtered meat. And one by one the towns of the southeast proclaimed Mary to be queen, and not Jane; the biggest of them, Norwich, declared for Mary as early as July 12.

In some places, to be sure, loyalty gave way temporarily to expediency. Armed bands from Framlingham would ride into a town, proclaim Mary to a delighted crowd, and then ride on; “as soon as they were departed the inhabitants, for fear of the Council, proclaimed Jane anew, and all were in arms in the greatest confusion in the world.”
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But there was no wavering at Framlingham itself, where, “to encourage her people,” Mary rode into the camp to give orders for the expected battle with Dudley’s forces. Her appearance was greeted by “shouts and acclamations,” and her troops threw their helmets into the air and shot off their guns wildly, crying out “Long live our good Queen Mary!” “Death to traitors!” The noise and excitement made Mary’s horse unmanageable; she dismounted, and walked the entire length of the mile-long camp on foot, followed by her nobles and ladies, “thanking the soldiers for their good will.”
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If Mary spread confidence and encouragement among her troops she felt little herself. She was in communication with the emperor’s envoys, and looked to them to provide support for her cause by whatever means they could manage. “Destruction was hanging over her head,” she told them, unless they or the emperor helped her. If she had known of the disarray in Dudley’s camp, though, Mary would surely have taken heart. The duke had stopped at Cambridge, unable to go on because of the threat of a rising in London if he moved farther north. He mistrusted his troops, his captains, and the people who every day “muttered against him” and prepared to declare for Mary as soon as he had moved on. There were quarrels between prominent men over which candidate was the true queen, and the duke himself got into a violent argument with Lord Grey that came to blows. Grey left Dudley’s camp and joined Mary, and a good many others did the same. With his military effectiveness drastically reduced—he could only fortify Cambridge and send out small bands to levy peasants and burn the houses of those who supported Mary—the duke took the desperate step of calling in French aid. He sent
a relative, Sir Henry Dudley, to offer Henri II the precious English territories of Calais and Guines in return for a force of picked troops. There was no sign of the reinforcements the Council had promised to send him, but Mary’s camp was said to be growing larger and stronger every day. Three thousand French soldiers from Boulogne would tip the balance in Dudley’s favor.