Mary Tudor (37 page)

YET WHILE MARY
publicly temporized, she made secret steps toward restoring Catholicism. In August, she addressed a private letter to Pope Julius III, petitioning him to remit all the ecclesiastical censures against England that had been imposed when Henry broke with Rome. As she wrote to Henry Penning, the pope’s chamberlain, she had “always been most obedient and most affectionate towards the Apostolic See and his Holiness had no more loving daughter than herself.” She declared that within a few days she “hoped to be able to show it openly to the whole world” and would first need to “repeal and annul by Act of Parliament many perverse laws made by those who ruled before her.”
¹⁷

On learning of Mary’s accession, the pope had appointed as cardinal and papal legate Reginald Pole, the son of Mary’s former governess Margaret Pole, in order to arrange the reconciliation of England to the Catholic Church. Pole began petitioning for an immediate and unconditional return to Roman obedience, for “The Queen, or at least England, was assuredly [ship]wrecked when she threw herself overboard … into the sea of this century.” As he had “drawn a picture of the danger; her Majesty will judge whether it is time to deliberate, or rather to act as ordained and prescribed by divine and human counsel.”
¹⁸
With Parliament summoned for the beginning of October, Pole demanded that the issue of papal supremacy and monastic property be quickly resolved and on August 10 launched a series of exhortations to the queen, begging her to end the schism without delay.

Yet Mary had come to realize the scale of her task. On September 11, she wrote to the cardinal of Imola, informing him that no legatine mission should be sent until the time was more propitious. She was aware of the dangers of introducing religious changes before they could be sanctioned by Parliament. For now she dissembled, maintaining that she did not want to coerce people into going to Mass. As Mary declared to Renard, “she had so far found no better expedient than to leave each free as to the religion he would follow…. If some held to the old, and others to the new, they should not be interfered with or constrained to follow any other course until the coming Parliament should decide by law.”
¹⁹
There was, however, one notable exception.

WITHIN TWO WEEKS
of Mary’s entry into London, Renard reported that he had raised with the queen the presence at court of the Lady Elizabeth, who might, out of “ambition or being persuaded thereunto, conceive some dangerous design and put it to execution, by means which it would be difficult to prevent, as she was clever and sly.”
²⁰
Writing to Mary in late August, the imperial ambassadors, M. de Courrières, M. de Thoulouse, and Renard, advised her “not to be too ready to trust the Lady Elizabeth” and urged her

Aware of such suspicions against her and “perceiving that the Queen did not show her as kindly a countenance as she could wish,” Elizabeth asked Mary for a private audience. They met at the beginning of September at Richmond, in one of the galleries of the palace; Mary was accompanied by one of her ladies, Elizabeth by one of her maids. Falling on her knees before the queen, Elizabeth wept,
saying she knew the queen was “not well disposed towards her, and she knew no other cause except religion.” She begged for understanding. She acted out of ignorance, not obstinacy: she had never been taught the doctrine of the ancient religion. She asked for books so that “having read them she might know if her conscience would allow her to be persuaded; or that a learned man might be sent to her, to instruct her in the truth.”

Glad to see such “good resolves,” Mary granted her request.
²²
Meanwhile, as she had promised, Elizabeth attended Mass in the Chapel Royal on September 8, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin. It was clearly under duress. She had tried to excuse herself on grounds of ill health and had complained loudly of a stomachache all the way to church.
²³
It was a rerun of the earlier clashes between Mary and Edward, when he had implored her to submit to his authority and accept the Protestant changes. But unlike Mary, Elizabeth had no desire to be a martyr.

No one, least of all Mary, was fooled by Elizabeth’s display of compliance. Within days the imperial ambassadors were reporting that “last Sunday the Lady Elizabeth did not go to mass,” adding “the Queen has sent us word that she has half-turned already from the good road upon which she had begun to travel.”
²⁴
Mary continued to press Elizabeth as to the purity of her motives, questioning whether she really believed, as Catholics did, “concerning the holy sacrament,” or whether she “went to mass in order to dissimulate, out of fear or hypocrisy.” Elizabeth replied that she was contemplating making a public declaration “that she went to mass and did as she did because her conscience prompted and moved her to it, that she went of her own free will and without fear, hypocrisy or dissimulation.”
²⁵

Although she continued to doubt Elizabeth’s sincerity, Mary allowed her sister to remain at court and to attend her coronation. But underlying tensions remained. Within weeks Renard reported that Mary was considering barring her from the succession on account of her “heretical opinions and illegitimacy, and characteristics in which she resembled her mother.” As Anne Boleyn “had caused great trouble in the kingdom,” she feared her daughter might do the same “and particularly that she might imitate her mother in being a French partisan.” She told Renard that it “would burden her conscience too heavily to
allow a bastard to succeed.”
²⁶
Mary increasingly suspected that Elizabeth went to Mass only “out of hypocrisy; she had not a single servant or maid of honour who was not a heretic, she talked every day with heretics and lent an ear to all their evil designs.”
²⁷

Finally, in early December, Elizabeth asked for permission to leave court. The sisters parted on affectionate terms. Mary gave her a coif of rich sables, and en route to Hatfield, Elizabeth stopped to write to Mary asking her for copes, chasubles, chalices, and other ornaments for her chapel. The queen ordered all these things to be sent to her, “as it was for God’s service and Elizabeth wished to bear witness to the religion she had declared she meant to follow.”
²⁸

F
ROM THE EARLIEST WEEKS OF HER REIGN, PLANS WERE PUT
into place for Mary’s coronation.
²
Fabrics and cloth were purchased and delivered, clothing was made ready, the nobility was summoned, and triumphal pageants were composed. By mid-September, the citizens of London had begun decorating the city; arches, scaffolds, and scenery for the pageants were erected and painted, and wooden rails were installed along the coronation procession route to hold back the crowds.
³
At Westminster Abbey a great stage had been constructed for the crowning, and banners hung all around. It was as it had been for countless coronations before.

Yet amid the following of “old customs” there existed unease.
⁴
Though everyone had resolved to make the ceremonies “very splendid and glorious,” the manner and form of the ceremony were uncertain. There were no precedents for the crowning of a queen regnant, let alone a Catholic bastard.
⁵
The fourteenth-century guide
Liber Regalis
and the “Little Device,” first used for the coronation of Richard III, outlined only the procession and ceremony of a queen consort. And after weeks of religious unrest and plotting in the capital, there were fears of further violence.

As Renard reported, “arquebusers, arrows and other weapons were
being collected in various houses,” giving rise to fears that during the coronation procession “some attempt might be made against [the Queen’s] person.”
⁶
A number of former Edwardian councillors called for unprecedented change, arguing that the coronation should be postponed until after Parliament had met and confirmed Mary’s legitimacy.
⁷
The imperial ambassadors believed that such “novelty” was intended to “cast doubts upon and put in question the Queen’s right to the throne, to render her more dependant on [her] council and Parliament than she should be [and] bridle her so that she cannot marry a foreigner.” It was a proposal born of the fears raised by accession of the country’s first female sovereign, and one that Mary rejected outright.
⁸

The coronation had been set for October 1, a Sunday, according to tradition. Although the 1552 Act of Uniformity remained in force and Mary was to be crowned supreme head of the Church, the coronation ceremony was to proceed as a full Catholic Mass. Recognizing the potential illegitimacy of the ceremony, Mary requested that Pole, the papal legate, absolve her and her bishops on the day of the coronation so that they might be able to say Mass and administer the sacraments without sin.
⁹
Moreover, concerned that the oils to be used in the anointing, which had been consecrated by an Edwardian minister, “may not be such as they ought,” she asked the imperial ambassadors to write to the bishop of Arras, Charles’s chief minister in Brussels, to secretly prepare specially consecrated oil for her anointing.
¹⁰
The conservative Bishop Gardiner, recently freed from the Tower, was chosen to perform the rite in place of Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, who remained imprisoned. With the amendments made, all was ready for the pageantry to begin.

ON THURSDAY
, September 28, Mary departed St. James’s Palace for Whitehall, accompanied by her sister, Elizabeth, now heir apparent, and their former stepmother Anne of Cleves. At Westminster, Mary boarded her barge and was escorted down the Thames to the Tower by the lord mayor, the aldermen of London, and the companies, their boats festooned with banners and flying streamers.
¹¹
As the flotilla approached the Tower, a salute was fired. At the Watergate, Mary
thanked the city officials, and then, amid a cacophony of trumpets, musicians, singers, and the pounding of cannon, she entered the Tower.
¹²

On Saturday, the eve of the coronation, a symbolic chivalric ritual dating back to the fourteenth century was performed. Fifteen young nobles were created knights of the bath. A ceremony of naked bathing, shaving, and prayer marked their coming of age as warriors.
¹³
It was a male rite of passage, an exercise in chivalric kingship, and a means of rewarding loyalty and service to the Crown. Many of those given the honor were those of Mary’s servants who had acted in her defense in the succession crisis, men such as Sir Henry Jerningham and Robert Rochester. Not for the last time, Mary’s gender necessitated the redefining of ritual as the lord steward, the earl of Arundel, deputized in Mary’s place. On Saturday morning the chosen gentlemen plunged naked into a wooden bath in the chapel of the Tower before reemerging to kiss Arundel’s shoulder.