Mary Tudor (35 page)
Philip’s second visit to England began auspiciously. Not only was Mary delighted to see him, but his whole arrival had been carefully choreographed. He landed symbolically by barge at Greenwich, having ridden overland from Dover and taken to the water again just a few miles downstream. It was five o’clock on the afternoon of 20 March, and he was greeted with a 32-gun salute, and cries of ‘God save the King and Queen’.
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Every mile of his passage from Calais had been assisted and smoothed by the queen’s ships and the queen’s servants, and the whole court was mustered to receive him. The following day all the bells of London rang out, and a
Te Deum
was sung in every church – by order of the bishop. On the 23rd the ceremonies continued with a
joyeuse entree
, comprising a ride through the City from Tower Wharf to Whitehall with the sceptre borne before him and all the livery companies in their finery lining the route. All this was for public consumption, not least in Habsburg Europe, where Philip’s position in England was regarded as dishonourable.
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Behind the scenes, difficulties continued. At one level, Englishmen did not love Spaniards any better in 1557 than they had in 1555. As Henry Machyn noted, three shiploads of them arrived with the tide before the sound of rejoicing had died away. These were no doubt the retinues of the courtiers and officials who had accompanied the king, and they seem to have behaved with more discretion than two years before – but they were not welcome.
Although he was extremely active politically, Philip seems to have appeared very little in public on his second visit, after his initial ‘shewing’ in London. On 23 April – St George’s Day – ‘the King’s grace whent a presessyon at Whytehalle’, which was a public appearance of a sort; but Machyn was much more impressed by the ‘duke of Muscovy’, who turned up on the same occasion with a gorgeously attired (and exotic) retinue.
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On 10 June the royal couple paid a visit to Hampton Court ‘for to hunt and to kyll a grett hartt’, but they stayed only a few days and the household remained at Whitehall. On Corpus Christi Day (17 June) they were back at base, and made another procession through the hall and great court, which was open to the public, but hardly ostentatious. Finally, on 30 June, just four days before he would depart England, the king went hunting on his own ‘in-to the forest’, and wherever that may have been it was certainly not at Whitehall.
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This time he seems to have succeeded in his mission to kill a stag, although he was reduced to using a gun for the purpose, which was clearly thought to be not quite gentlemanly.
In the political arena, the privy council continued to be deeply divided over the war with France. Paget was in favour, and he was backed by Pembroke, and possibly Shrewsbury, but Pole, Heath and Rochester were vehemently opposed, and they appear to have been supported by Arundel and Winchester. Petre had resigned by this time (possibly over the war issue) and the attitude of his replacement, John Boxall, is not known. On 1 April Mary summoned this council and, in the presence of the king, set out the arguments for war. Two days later they responded with another memorandum. England could not, and should not, become involved in the hostilities.
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The council did not, of course, make such decisions; but it looks at this stage as though Philip was preparing to make the best of a bad job. The Count of Feria, who was close to the king, informed the new Venetian envoy, Michiel Surian, that although the king could do what he liked with the English nobility because they were so venal, he would probably settle for money and the use of the fleet, rather than insisting upon a formal declaration of war.
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Money was what he desperately needed, because he was effectively bankrupt, and credit, whether in Antwerp or Genoa, was costing him 54 per cent. England, however, did not have money – at least not in the quantities that were required. On 12 April Philip confided to the Bishop of Arras that the going was proving tougher than he had expected. Arras pressed him to settle for nothing less than a complete break. As long as there was a French ambassador in England he would continue to stir up trouble and to be a focus for disaffection.
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Paradoxically one of the king’s most effective allies in this conflict was his enemy Pope Paul IV. Because Philip, as King of Spain, was at war with the pope, the conscientious Pole refused to have any direct dealings with him, or to attend council meetings, which deprived the ‘peace party’ of their most effective and influential spokesman. In early April Paul was contemplating the drastic move of declaring Philip deposed from all his dominions as a rebel against the Holy Church. His own advisers dissuaded him from this, probably on the grounds that he could not make such a sentence effective, and might well make a fool of himself. On 10 April he did, however, revoke all his legates from Philip’s lands, including Pole specifically and by name. The cardinal appealed the decision, and his servants effectively ignored it, so it made little difference to his attitude as long as Philip remained in England.
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Meanwhile Mary’s persuasiveness was proving effective. She summoned the members of the privy council one by one and worked on them. It is not clear that anyone specifically changed his mind, but their opposition was much reduced.
What broke this deadlock was a strange raid on the Yorkshire coast by one Thomas Stafford. Stafford was an adventurer with pretensions. His maternal grandmother had been the Countess of Salisbury, and he therefore had a touch of the Plantagenet royal blood. His paternal grandfather had been Edward, Duke of Buckingham, who had died on the scaffold in 1521. He was therefore, in his own eyes, rightful Duke of Buckingham and a claimant to the crown of England. At the beginning of 1557 he was one of those political exiles who besieged the French court, looking for some kind of service or better still, reward.
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Henry at this time was seriously worried about adding England to his list of declared enemies, and was torn between a desire to make life difficult for Mary and a desire not to do anything that would precipitate a complete break. On 13 January Nicholas Wotton, the English ambassador in France, speculated that the French king might be contemplating using Stafford for some kind of ‘great enterprise’, but nothing happened and the rumours died down. Then in early April they began again. Talk of war was incessant, and there was a plot of some kind against the town of Guisnes in the Calais Pale. More importantly, an agent of Wotton’s had extracted from one of Stafford’s servants the information that his master was planning to seize a castle on the English coast. The agent even managed to secure a map of the place, which Wotton sent on to the council with the comment that it looked like Scarborough. ‘It is thought,’ the ambassador wrote, that ‘the French King will not interfere.’
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On 14 April Wotton reported again that Stafford had left the court, and was gathering arms and men at Rouen. On 23 April he appeared off Scarborough with two ships and somewhere between thirty and a hundred men, ‘some French, some English rebels’.
The castle was half ruined, and the small garrison completely surprised. Stafford seized it and issued a lengthy prepared statement to the effect that because she was handing the realm over to foreigners, Mary was no true queen. He proclaimed himself Duke of Buckingham and protector of the realm.
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No one was interested. In that fairly remote corner of northern England the Spaniards were hardly an issue. By what appears to have been mere chance the Earl of Westmorland was not far off with a force of the local levies that he was on the point of leading to Newcastle for the defence of the border. By the morning of the 24th he knew of the incursion, and by the 28th the intruders had been overpowered and were in custody. The whole farce had lasted just five days, and had posed no threat to anyone.
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By the 27th the council had been informed, and had issued instructions to the city of Newcastle to fit out four or five ships to go in pursuit of those that had transported Stafford and his men. By the time that they had complied, their quarry had long since disappeared. By the 29th it was known in London that the crisis was over, but even before that Bernardino de Mendoza had decided that the incident would inevitably mean war: ‘As for the breach of the truce, the French have spared us the trouble.’
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He was right: within a week the council had agreed that this was a provocation too far, and acceded to Philip and Mary’s demand. Norroy the herald did not bear the queen’s defiance to Henry II, the French king, until 1 June, but by then everyone who needed to know was preparing for the conflict.
There are a number of suspicious circumstances about the whole Stafford affair, which proved to be so convenient for the royal desires. Given that it is 200 miles from Scarborough to London, government reaction was incredibly rapid and decisive. It looks almost as though news was being released before it was received. The contrast with the official hesitancy that had initially greeted both Wyatt and Dudley makes this even more remarkable. Even more suspicious is the fact that Jean Ribault, who commanded the French ships, had worked in England in Edward’s reign and had been in the service of Lord Paget.
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Once he had set Stafford ashore, Ribault and his ships simply evaporated. When he discovered what had happened, Henry expressed astonishment and denied involvement of any kind. In the circumstances, he would have been bound to say that but it may well have been true. It is possible (though unprovable) that the money to put this rather pathetic adventure together came not from the French king, but from Philip and Mary, via Paget and Ribault. Stafford, in short, was a dupe, so blinded by his own self-importance and the febrile propaganda of the English exiles that he was quite unable to sense the trap into which he was walking. The council had been warned some time before that Scarborough was the likely target of an attempt, but nobody had told the men on the spot, because it was necessary that the raiders should come ashore in order to declare their treasonable intentions – which they did, right on cue. From the speed of his reaction, however, it looks as though the Earl of Westmorland was expecting the call that came on 24 April. Whether foolishly optimistic or victim in a trap, Stafford, along with John Bradford and a few others, died a traitor’s death on 28 May.
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So Philip got his war, and some of the military men in England were pleased enough by the prospect of legitimate employment. However, London, which provided most ambassadors with what they could learn of public opinion, was not pleased. As Surian reported in two despatches on 7 and 8 June, they were saying that:
… besides the suppression of their trade, on which the kingdom may be said to subsist, they will have to pay constant subsidies for the maintenance of the war. And what weighs more with them than anything else, is to see that all this is being done for the benefit of aliens whom they detest, and most especially the Spaniards.
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The reasons officially given for the break – the hostile record of France in relation to the present government, capped by this latest example of bad faith – were regarded as thin and stale. Philip’s honour was satisfied, but only at a price. This is not apparent from any of the surviving documents, but at some point in his final battles with the council he must have agreed to foot the bill for England’s war effort. Mary would provide for the defence of her kingdom, including the border against Scotland, and would put her fleet to sea, but if Philip wanted any troops to join his army in the Low Countries, he would have to pay for them himself. Considering how dire Philip’s financial straits were in the summer of 1557, he must have set a high value on his honour. London may have been disgruntled, but the military peerage was not the only group to see profit in the war. As we have seen, during his first stay in England, Philip had endeavoured to attract into his service captains and other gentlemansoldiers, many of whom had dubious records of loyalty to the regime. That was even more pronounced now. The three surviving sons of the Duke of Northumberland – Ambrose, Henry and Robert Dudley – together with Lord Braye, Peter Killigrew, Sir Peter Carew, Sir James Croftes, William Winter, and a number of others who had seen the inside of prisons for their opposition to Mary, were all recruited into the king’s service.
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Mary had no control over those whom her husband might recruit for his army, and none of these men enjoyed her favour – or even indulgence.
ENGLAND AT WAR WITH FRANCE, early June (possibly 9th) 1557 AN ACCOUNT OF WHAT THE HERALD FROM ENGLAND DID IN FRANCE AND THE KING OF FRANCE’S REPLY AT RHEIMS, BY BAGUENOIS, PRINTER TO THE CARDINAL OF LORRAINE, 1557.
