Mary Tudor (34 page)

Finally, at eight in the evening, she arrived. Her standard was unfurled and displayed over the gate tower. It was a defiant gesture on the eve of what looked to be imminent conflict. Northumberland was said to have had 3,000 men and the whole of the royal armory to draw on. Mary’s forces and supplies were thin in comparison. Again she sent a desperate appeal to the imperial ambassadors: “She saw destruction hanging over her” unless she received help. But the emperor believed Mary’s chances of coming to the throne to be “very slight,” and he sent nothing.
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For a number of days Mary’s fate hung in the balance. In many towns it was a confused picture of shifting and changing allegiances. In Ipswich, Sir Thomas Cornwallis, the sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, together with Thomas, Lord Wentworth, and other prominent Suffolk men, initially declared for Jane, on July 11. But then one of Mary’s servants, Thomas Poley, arrived in the town’s marketplace and proclaimed Mary “hereditary Queen of England.” It was only then that Cornwallis saw where the sympathies of the people lay and declared for Mary. As Wingfield described it, the public outcry against Jane was so great that Cornwallis actually stood “in grave peril of his life.” Although a lifelong religious conservative, Cornwallis, like many other East Anglian gentry, had bet against Mary, given Jane’s access to superior military resources. Yet they too had underestimated the popular support for Mary. At Framlingham, Cornwallis humbly prostrated himself before her and begged her pardon. For Cornwallis, as
for many others, factors other than faith or principle led him to declare for Mary.

In Norwich, where the town authorities had on July 11 refused to open the gates to Mary’s messengers, saying that they did not yet know for certain that the king was dead, they not only proclaimed her the following day but also sent men and arms. Gradually events began to swing in Mary’s favor. A squadron of five ships of the late king, laden with soldiers and weaponry, had been forced into the safety of Orwell harbor by bad weather. The crews mutinied against their officers for disowning Mary and put themselves under the command of Mary’s ardent supporter Sir Henry Jerningham. Many others flocked to Mary’s side. Henry Radcliffe arrived at Framlingham with a cohort of horsemen and foot soldiers. He was followed by John Bourchier, earl of Bath, another noble figure, who also arrived with a large band of soldiers including Sir John Sulyard, knight of Wetherden, and Sir William Drury, knight of the shire for Suffolk. All leading figures in East Anglia, they, together with Sir Thomas Cornwallis, were important gains that would prove crucial to Mary’s success. Yet one figure eluded her. To secure her position in eastern Suffolk, Mary needed to win the support of Thomas, Lord Wentworth, a prominent and respected nobleman. She sent two of her servants, John Tyrell and Edward Glenham, to Nettlestead to negotiate with him. She warned that forsaking her cause would lead to the perpetual dishonor of his house. He paused and reflected. Finally he declared for Mary. It was a great coup. Wentworth arrived at Framlingham on the fifteenth, clad in splendid armor and with a large military force of gentlemen and tenants.

It was just in time. Northumberland was en route to Bury St. Edmunds, just twenty-four miles from Framlingham. Five hundred men were appointed to guard Mary within the walls of Framlingham Castle. Mary was focused and resolute. She summoned her household council, ordered her field commanders to prepare her forces for battle, and issued a proclamation asserting her authority, making clear her defiance:

Now, as her army mustered, Mary declared that she was “nobly and strongly furnished of an army royal under Lord Henry, Earl of Sussex, her Lieutenant General, accompanied by the Earl of Bath, the Lord Wentworth, and a multitude of other gentlemen.” She condemned Northumberland, that he “most traitorously by long-continued treason sought, and seeketh, the destruction of her royal person, the nobility and common weal of this realm,” and finished with a rallying cry:

Within days an unskilled and disorganized mob had been turned into a disciplined army, obedient to order and eager to meet the enemy. On the twentieth, Mary rode down from the castle to review her troops. Standards were unfurled and her forces drawn up in battle order; helmets were thrown high in the air as shouts of “Long live our good Queen Mary!” and “Death to the traitors!” rang out across the Suffolk countryside. Mary dismounted and for the next three hours inspected her troops on foot.

SINCE NORTHUMBERLAND’S
departure from London, the privy councillors had begun to waver in their support for Jane as queen, “being deeply rooted in their minds, in spite of these seditions, a kind of remorse, knowing her [Mary] to be, after all the daughter of their King Henry VIII.”
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By the eighteenth, their resolve had crumbled. Ships’ crews off Yarmouth had deserted, and rumors had spread that Sir Edmund Peckham, treasurer of the Mint and keeper of the king’s
privy purse, had fled with the monies to Framlingham. Now a proclamation was drawn up offering a reward for the arrest of Northumberland: £1,000 in land to any noble, £500 to any knight, and £100 to any yeoman bold enough to lay his hand on the duke’s shoulder and demand his surrender.
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The following day, a dozen or so privy councillors, including the earls of Bedford, Pembroke, Arundel, Shrewsbury, and Worcester, and Lords Paget, Darcy, and Cobham, broke out of the Tower, which had been locked, and rendezvoused at Pembroke’s house, Baynard’s Castle. There they took the final step. In a speech before the Council, Arundel declared:

At five or six in the evening of the twentieth, as Arundel and Paget set out to pledge their fidelity to Mary at Framlingham and petition for pardon on behalf of the whole Council, two heralds and three trumpeters rode from Baynard’s Castle to the Cross at Cheapside. With the streets full of Londoners, the heralds announced that Mary was queen.
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“There was such shout of the people with casting up of caps and crying, ‘God save Queen Mary,’ that the style of the proclamation could not be heard, the people were so joyful, both man, woman and child.”
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For two days all the bells in London, “which it had been decided to convert into artillery,” rang; money was “cast a-way,” and there were banquets and bonfires in the streets.
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“It would be impossible
to imagine greater rejoicing than this,” the imperial ambassadors reported.
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Upon hearing the news, Northumberland, then at Cambridge, was forced to admit defeat. He threw his cap into the air and acknowledged Mary as queen. The coup attempt was over. That evening the earl of Arundel arrived to arrest Northumberland in the queen’s name.
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D
AYS BEFORE SHE WAS TO BE CROWNED AT WESTMINSTER ABBEY
, Mary called together her Council for an impromptu and improvised ceremony. Ensconced in the Tower of London, she had been preparing for the coronation to come, rehearsing the oaths and changes of clothes and regalia and pondering the responsibilities of office. Kneeling before her councillors, Mary spoke of how she had come to the throne and what she considered to be her duties as queen. It was her solemn intention to carry out the task God had given her “to His greater glory and service, to the public good and all her subjects’ benefit.” She had entrusted “her affairs and person” to her councillors and urged them to be faithful to the oaths they had sworn and to be loyal to her as their queen. Mary remained on her knees throughout. So “deeply moved” were her councillors that “not a single one refrained from tears. No one knew how to answer, amazed as they all were by this humble and lowly discourse unlike anything ever heard before in England, and by the Queen’s great goodness and integrity.”
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It was an astonishing sight, yet these were extraordinary times: a woman was now to wear England’s crown.

THE FIRST QUEEN
to rule England was a small, slightly built woman of thirty-seven. With her large, bright eyes, round face, reddish hair, and love of fine clothes, she cut a striking figure, though one marked by age and ill health.
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She suffered bouts of illness, heart palpitations, and headaches, was exceedingly shortsighted, and was prone to melancholy. Although for most of her adult life she had known neither
security nor happiness, she was regarded as “great-hearted, proud and magnanimous.” Highly educated and intelligent, well versed in languages, and quick of wit and understanding, her frequent acclamation was “In thee, O lord, is my trust, let me never be confounded. If God be for us, who can be against us?”
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Mary had secured the throne against the odds. It was a victory, Wingfield wrote, “one of Herculean rather than womanly daring.”
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A female accession had been a prospect her father had gone to great lengths to avoid, but on Edward’s death all the plausible candidates for the English throne were female. In default of male heirs, Edward had had to accept Lady Jane Grey as his Protestant successor. Yet Mary had managed to win support across the religious spectrum as the rightful Tudor heir. Notably it was a victory won without direct foreign aid; the English people had put Mary on the throne. The anonymous author of “The Legend of Sir Nicholas Throgmorton” put into the mouth of his hero the sentiments of many: