Bloody Mary (53 page)

Once in Flanders Philip wrote to Mary “in his own hand” informing her that he had made the crossing safely in less than three hours. In an effort to deceive the French he had not waited for the Flemish fleet but had gone on ahead with only four vessels. It was a good thing too, he wrote to Mary, for if he had waited another day at Canterbury he would have run into a terrible storm at sea. After giving Mary this news, however, Philip turned all his attention to the situation in his newly acquired kingdom, and sent few letters to England. Mary wrote him long letters every day, in French, but his replies became fewer and fewer. When Michiel saw her on September I 3 she confided in him “very passionately with the tears in her eyes” that she had not heard from her husband for seven days.
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Mary was prepared to endure separation from Philip as a favor to her cousin Charles V, and for reasons of state, provided his stay in Flanders was brief. Not long before Philip left she had written to his father that although “there is nothing in this world that I set so much store by as the king’s presence,” still she had “more concern for your majesties’ welfare than for my own desires,” and would not oppose his journey.
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But her devotion to him was so great that she was in some anguish without him, and the strain of maintaining a cheerful exterior while inwardly worrying about his feelings for her and about when he would return strained her nerves and threatened her health.

One of Courtenay’s correspondents in England,wrote to him in September to tell him that “the queen is well and merry” despite Philip’s absence, but those closer to Mary saw that she was suffering. Michiel’s informant told him how, when she was alone and “supposing herself invisible to any of her attendants,” Mary mourned as if griefstricken, “as may be imagined with regard to a person extraordinarily in love.”
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Now more than ever Mary found comfort and sustenance in the presence of Reginald Pole. He moved into lodgings in the palace shortly after Philip left, and took on the duty of providing solace to the queen as part of his general task of serving as regent for Philip in all but name. Pole represented everything Mary treasured. He reminded her of their joint survival of the dark days of Henry VIII. He stood for the church mili
tant, fighting back against the advance of heresy and wickedness. And he was the symbol of England’s reunion with Rome. The very sight of Pole made her spirits rise, and though he had more pity than respect for her she was grateful for his grave and consoling presence.

Something else that gave her comfort and absorbed her attention during Philip’s absence was the Franciscan monastery at Greenwich. It had been her mother’s special favorite, and Mary herself had been christened there. She meant to make the Greenwich convent a seedbed for the restoration of monasticism in England, and to this end she took the house into her care, spending a great deal of time among the monks and “delighting marvelously” to watch them chant the hours and celebrate mass in the chapel near the palace. Mary installed twenty-five Observant friars at Greenwich, among them Friar William Peto, “an aged man of most holy life” and like Pole a survivor of the Henrician era. Peto had recently been nominated for a cardinalate, but what endeared him to Mary was a childhood memory of being brought, probably by her mother, to say her confession to Friar Peto when she was seven years old.
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In his letters to Philip Pole described how Mary spent her days as she waited for his return. She “passes the forenoon in prayer,” he wrote, “after the manner of Mary, and in the afternoon admirably personates Martha, by transacting business.” Pole indulgently recorded how the queen “so urged her councilors as to keep them all incessantly occupied,” imagining that she was moved to work with them because she “saw Philip present in their persons.” Though he completely misjudged her motives, Pole found Mary’s diligence in governing impressive. She worked so hard at state business “as to require energy in this matter to be checked rather than stimulated.” After a long day of discussions with her councilors, audiences with petitioners and foreign dignitaries and supervision of the drafting of documents and letters, she liked nothing better than to spend “the greater part of the night” writing to Philip. Pole feared that, combined with the strain of her husband’s absence, these labors might make her sick, especially as it was the time of the year when her chronic illness often appeared. His return would of course cure all, Pole told Philip, and Mary reinforced this message with every letter she sent. When Philip had been gone about five weeks she sent one of her gentlemen to him at Brussels. He brought the king a ring from his wife, and the message that she wished him “health, long life, and speedy return.”
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Worse than Philip’s absence itself was the fact that Mary had no idea when he would come back. He could not commit himself to a definite time, as he had no idea what conditions he might find in Flanders, Then too there were the abdication ceremonies, which promised to be intricate and prolonged. Philip would be called upon to take part in ceremonial transfers of power in every capital and principal town of the Nether
lands, and to spend enough time in each to establish his reputation and authority. Soon after his arrival he began trying to learn to speak Walloon, the only language his Flemish subjects understood and the tongue in which he would have to make himself agreeable, if not loved. His linguistic efforts argued for a long rather than a short stay, since during his year in England Philip had never made any attempt to learn English.

What fed Mary’s worries most was the slow exodus of Spanish persons and goods that went on for months after Philip’s departure. At first he had left the greater part of his household behind in England—his German and Spanish soldiers, his Burgundian cavalry, his physicians and chapel clergy, most of his horses and grooms and even the pages of his chamber. But as the weeks passed the members of his household left, one after another, “with a mind,” Michiel noted, “so far as they themselves are concerned, not to revisit this country for a very long while.”
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Ships carrying the king’s personal effects and those of his chief companions left English ports every day, and worse yet, by mid-September Philip had made arrangements to pay off his creditors. Ten armed caravels arrived from Spain on September I 6, bringing some sixty thousand ducats to be distributed among the English merchants who had supplied his household and the English servants who had helped to staff it. When the Spanish fleet left, though, it carried a far greater sum to Flanders, and it was becoming more and more clear that Philip was making himself very much at home in his new lands.

Now when Philip wrote to Mary his letters were curt and businesslike. She should revive the peace talks. She should provide ships to escort the emperor to Spain after his abdication. She should look into the prospect of having him crowned. Without being too specific Philip gave Mary “fair hope of soon seeing her,” and when she suggested coming “to some place at the sea side to see him” he offered to journey from Brussels to Bruges to be nearer to her in case she decided to come.
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But he dismissed the ship that had been kept waiting in the harbor, ready to take him to England at any time, and finally on October 19 he sent word to Mary that all his remaining noblemen, soldiers, pages, equerries and horses should be loaded onto ships and sent to him at once. This left only his confessor, two Dominican friars and his chapel clergy in England, and though he explained that he needed the others to replace the emperor’s servants who were embarking for Spain Mary was angry and hurt.
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She began fitting out a fleet to send to Flanders to bring him back, but before it could be victualed and manned word came that the emperor’s formal renunciation of his lands had been postponed, and Philip could not hope to leave Brussels before November.
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Mary felt thwarted at every turn. She had expected to have Philip back with her for the opening of Parliament, but that looked increasingly unlikely. And just when she had need of all her allies, the most stalwart of
them lay near death. Bishop Gardiner had not been well since his return from Calais and the peace conference. By October he was gravely ill, and though his physicians persisted in hoping for a recovery and Mary showed him every care, they all admitted that, “being the dead time of the year,” he could not be expected to live. He died on November 12. On his deathbed Gardiner was reconciled to Paget, now severely out of favor with Mary for having disputed the validity of her pregnancy when ordered to defend it. At Mary’s suggestion the chancellor made her his beneficiary, thus returning to the crown the fifty thousand ducats in property, household furniture, silver vessels and coins Mary had given him since his restoration to his bishopric. In this he acted, Michiel believed, “as became a good and grateful servant,” and indeed Mary would find it hard to replace Gardiner. Michiel pronounced him unmatched as a royal servant, and though he had left a good deal to be desired as a leader he had more than made up for this deficiency by his honesty and loyalty.
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The Protestants in England and abroad, though, were to preserve a darker memory of the chancellor. In their view he was responsible for the hated burnings that continued to blemish Mary’s reign. They envisioned him as a monstrous beast, his disfigured limbs an outward sign of the evil in his heart and conscience. He was of a “swart color,” they wrote, with “frowning brows, eyes an inch within the head, a nose hooked like a buzzard, wide nostrils like a horse, ever snuffing into the wind, a sparrow mouth, great paws like the devil, talons on his feet like a gryphon two inches longer than the natural toes, and so tied to with sinews that he could not abide to be touched, nor scarce suffer them to touch the stones.”
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In the end the Protestant calumnies were to outlive both Mary’s solicitude and MicbiePs praise.

With Gardiner gone Mary and Pole were left to manage the unruly Parliament alone. Mary continued to hope that somehow her husband would find a way to rejoin her for at least part of the session, but she was slowly becoming reconciled to a long separation. To remind him of England she ordered her chefs to bake some of his favorite meat pies and shipped them off to him along with letters explaining that his coronation was at best a remote possibility. The pies pleased him but his wife’s uncompliant response did not. For the first time since their marriage began, Philip threatened Mary. He wanted to please her by coming back to England, he said, but only if he were allowed to “share the government with her.” In Spain and the Low Countries he was absolute ruler; to accept a lesser position in England would be “unbecoming his dignity, which requires him to take part in the affairs of the realm.”
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He would return, but only if Mary would make him king of England.

Complain my lute, complain on him

That stays so long away;

He promised to be here ere this,

But still unkind doth stay.

But now the proverb true I find,

Once out of sight then out of mind.

As the fall wore on Philip found more and more to enjoy in the lands he had dreaded ruling. He was entertained at hunts and banquets, and he was guest of honor at the weddings of prominent citizens in Brussels and Antwerp. He attended the weddings masked, and danced afterward with the aristocratic beauties of Flanders until the early hours of the morning. By December the envoys at the imperial court were noting that Philip went out masked to balls or banquets nearly every night, and when one gathering ended he went on to another, exhausting himself and his companions in drinking and merrymaking. After a year of strained reserve and forced joviality in England, the festive atmosphere of the Netherlands was a welcome relief, and Philip let himself be drawn into the carefree enjoyment without regard to his rank or reputation. His taciturn gravity fell away completely under the liberating influence of strong Flemish beer, and he took to presenting himself at the gates of noblemen’s houses at all hours of the night, demanding to be entertained. One evening he danced at a wedding until two in the morning, then went to the house of the duke of Savoy, gave orders that the duke be awakened, and spent the rest: of the night laughing and joking with his sleepy host.
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Before long Philip’s nocturnal adventures became notorious. It was said at court that he “took delight in frequent masqueings, rather more than becomes the present troublous times,” and his intimate servants were
blamed for encouraging him in these and “similar pleasures.”
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He seemed to have forgotten that he was a married man, and it was noticed that he had developed an indiscreet attachment to one Madame d’Aler, “who is considered very handsome, and of whom he seems much enamored.”
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When Mary sent an envoy to her husband in mid-December Philip made no effort to conceal his scandalous pastimes from him, though the Englishman took it upon himself not to reveal what he had seen to Mary, “lest the queen, who is easily agitated, might take it too much to heart.”
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Philip had not forgotten about England entirely. In the first week of December he wrote to his wife in his own hand, telling her to appoint whomever she liked as chancellor (though he recommended either Paget or Wotton) and assuring her that he would be ready to leave Flanders as soon as he completed business which compelled him to go to Antwerp. In the same week, though, he ordered his armory, his wardrobe, and all his German and Spanish halbardiers sent to him in Flanders, and well-informed courtiers in Brussels were saying he showed little inclination to return to England for the time being.

Delays and complications in the transfer of the imperial lands were prolonging Philip’s stay. It took time for the emperor to divest himself of his sizable portion of the world, and each component of his sovereignty had to be passed on separately. He had formally invested Philip with the Netherlands in October, but had not yet passed on to him his Spanish inheritance; currently the emperor was occupied with drawing up the documents relating to his Sicilian and Aragonese lands. Charles’ physical incapacity and the jealousies between his ministers and Philip’s were creating an administrative confusion that made the task all the more difficult. There were thousands of edicts and other documents to be signed, including the acts of renunciation themselves. The emperor’s gout so crippled him that he could not sign these papers, yet when Philip was approached to sign them on his father’s behalf his ministers would not allow it. He must wait, they advised, until he was in possession of full sovereignty before taking over any public business. Meanwhile the clerks continued to copy out the letters notifying the emperor’s principal subjects and minor officials of the transfer of sovereignty—some two thousand of them for Spain and Sicily alone—and the messengers who were to carry them to their recipients waited for news that the emperor had recovered the use of his gnarled hand.

Charles’ sister Mary presented another complication. Far from showing herself eager to retire from public life, she was still attending meetings of her Council daily, and snowing up the councilors by being the first to arrive every morning. There were rumors that she might resume her regency, and she still addressed the Council members and even the governor in the forceful, imperious tone of a ruler.
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Clearly Philip would find it difficult to take power from his aunt when the time came.

He was finding it harder than he had expected to take power in England as well. If he thought that his threats would induce Mary to arrange his coronation he was mistaken. His threats wounded her, but they did not impair her political sense. She equivocated until Parliament met; then, sensing the extreme dissatisfaction in this most unruly of her Parliaments, she told Philip flatly that no proposal for his coronation had any chance of passage. He countered by hinting that she should bypass Parliament and crown him by her own authority, but his hints produced no effect. A year earlier a bill had been proposed which would have made Philip king on Mary’s death—a suggestion that represented the highwater mark of his popularity in England. But in recent months anti-Spanish sentiment had been growing, fostered in part by the libels of English refugees on the continent. Pamphlets such as “The Lamentation of Naples” and “The Mourning of Milan” described in horrifying detail what suffering imperial rule had brought to those states, making the English more and more reluctant to come under the Hapsburg yoke.

But if Philip could not be crowned, he could at least make certain that his sometime rival Edward Courtenay was permanently removed from the succession. Courtenay, whose Plantagenet blood gave him a far better claim to the throne than Philip had as the queen’s husband, was living out an uncomfortable exile on the continent, having recently made himself more dangerous than ever by becoming a Protestant. He had gone first to Brussels, where he and his attendants were repeatedly singled out for attack by Spaniards he had insulted when they were living in England. After the fourth assault he moved with his wounded retainers to Venice, but here too he was in danger of his life. Philip’s friend Ruy Gomez tried to arrange Courtenay’s assassination through a Dalmatian soldier with connections to the Uskoks, outlaws living in the Venetian countryside and eager to be of service in matters of this kind. Gomez offered the Dalmatian a thousand crowns to kill the man “who expects to be King of England,” and assured him he would have Philip’s favor as well, but instead of accepting the offer the soldier told the story to the Venetian Council, and Courtenay was spared. A year later he died mysteriously at Padua, perhaps of poison or perhaps, according to another account, of a fever he caught while hawking.
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While Philip was amusing himself in Flanders Mary faced the opposition of a hostile Parliament. The Venetian ambassador Michiel described the Commons of November 1555 as “more daring and licentious than former houses,” full of gentry and nobility impatient to oppose the queen’s proposals and unwilling to show her the respect former Commons had given her. Noailles had been busy organizing the opposition, and had been assured by some members that they would block any bill granting a subsidy to the government. Gardiner’s experience was sorely missed. (He died some three weeks after Parliament opened.) Accord
ing to Michiel, he alone knew how to control resistance of this kind, sensing “the moment and the means for humoring and caressing, threatening and punishing” the rebellious Commons.
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After Gardiner died Mary took on much of his workload in addition to her own, and she now took on his function as conciliator of the Commons as well. Calling together sixty of the Commons members plus a majority of the Lords, she spoke to them “with her usual gravity and dignity,” explaining that the bills she hoped to see enacted were in keeping with the good of the crown and the restored church, and represented a fulfillment of her predestined role as queen.
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Several of the disputed bills eventually went through, but the session ended in coercion and recrimination. A crown bill recalling the political exiles in France and threatening them with forfeiture of their lands met with forceful opposition. A member from Gloucestershire, Sir Anthony Kingston, locked the doors of the house and kept them locked until the bill was defeated. Kingston was imprisoned for his “contemptuous behavior and great disorder,” and Parliament dissolved in a mood of bitterness on December 9.

Over the next several months a wave of popular feeling against the government swept through southern England. Rumors that Philip would soon be crowned king triggered panic in the country people who had never ceased to fear the Spaniards they had never seen, and even in the Londoners who had cheered Philip on his departure only a few months earlier. A blacksmith described how he met a man at midnight near Fins-bury Fields who told him for certain that the earl of Pembroke would soon obtain the crown for Philip. Other stories imagined that the Spaniard would not hesitate to seize the crown by force. When a truce between France and the empire was finally signed early in February, it was assumed that Philip would give his idle soldiers the task of conquering England. Noailles received intelligence from a continental source that ten companies of German and Flemish soldiers were being outfitted as an invasion force. Privately he doubted the report, but he spread it as widely as he could, and even managed to see that it reached the ears of Cardinal Pole.
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And as if rumors of one king were not disturbing enough, Londoners suddenly found they had a second king on their hands. In January a Greenwich man was arrested for handing out leaflets informing the people that Edward VI was alive and well in France, and was only waiting for a popular rising on his behalf to return to lead his subjects against the queen. In February a man claiming to be the dead king made himself known in London. He was caught and hanged, but not before “many persons, both men and women, were troubled by him.”
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Other disorders worried Mary and her councilors during January and February. There was rebellion in Ireland, and in England, printers were issuing a stream of
“false fond books, ballets, rhymes and other lewd treatises” ridiculing the queen and king. The pipers and minstrels who wandered through the countryside were often asked to sing a favorite song called “Sacke full of Newes,” a lampoon against the court, and in the “north parts” a company of players calling themselves “Sir Francis Leek’s Men” were drawing large crowds to see a play “containing very naughty and seditious matter touching the king and queen’s majesties, and the state of the realm.”
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The ballads that did most damage to the queen’s repute were those that glorified the Protestant martyrs. Ballad-makers wove the names of the seventy-five men and women burned as heretics during 1555 into songs glorifying their heroism and blackening the clergy who burned them. The “Ballad of John Careless” was sung wherever Protestants gathered, and in many places where the Spaniards were feared and the queen’s policies despised. Another song told the story of a woman condemned to the stake who gave birth to a child as she suffered in the flames; the blameless child was thrown into the fire to die with its mother.
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The recent double burning of Ridley and Latimer helped to shape the burgeoning popular image of martyrdom. Both men died with the resolute piety that had come to be the hallmark of those the Catholic clergy called heretics. Ridley died slowly and horribly, his agony prolonged by a badly built fire. Latimer appeared to die all but painlessly, seeming miraculously to embrace the fire and bathe his hands and face in it. Many people in the large crowd that came to witness the executions wept and shook their heads at the sight, and carried away the memory of Latimer’s prophecy that the meaning of these sufferings would become clear in time. “Be of good comfort, Master Ridley,” he was heard to say, “and play the man, we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”

It was in this atmosphere of turbulence and sinister excitement that the most widespread of the plots to overthrow Queen Mary took shape. Tales of plotting came to the attention of the Council regularly, but in the first months of 1556 the accounts began to sound more ominous than usual. First the English ambassador in France sent word of a conspiracy of long standing whose object was to “deprive Mary of her estate” and to use her “as she used Queen Jane.” According to the ambassador’s informant the chief conspirators were “strong and many,” and “such as had never offended the queen before.”
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In March the outlines of a much more dangerous plot began to come to light when one of the lesser figures in the scheme went to Cardinal Pole voluntarily and told everything he knew. This man, Thomas White, had been assigned to take part in robbing the royal Exchequer of fifty thousand pounds in silver. Through the wife of the Exchequer’s teller the conspirators were able to