The House of Tudor (44 page)

All the same, Philip can scarcely be blamed for his dilatoriness. It was not only that his bride was a delicate, middle-aged woman to whom he referred in a letter to his friend Ruy Gomez as ‘our dear and well-beloved aunt’ - that was just the luck of the draw in the lottery of royal marriage. Far more off-putting were the prospects of humiliation in a strange land. By the terms of the marriage treaty he was debarred from taking any independent part in the government; he could appoint no officials, send no English money abroad. He was forbidden to bring any Spanish troops with him - he would in fact be a mere cipher, his wife’s husband and nothing more. This was bad enough, but even more galling to a young man like Philip, who hid his shyness under a stiff public manner, was the anxious, constantly repeated advice from his father, from his father’s ministers and from Simon Renard, to sink his pride and strain every nerve to conciliate the ungrateful, heretical islanders. He must be affable and show himself to the people. He must be lavish with presents as well as smiles. He must bring as few as possible of his own friends and servants and resign himself to being served by clumsy, suspicious strangers - all the harder since he spoke no English. Those Spaniards who did accompany him must on no account bring their wives, for they were more likely to cause trouble even than soldiers. For the sake of the alliance, he and his retinue must be prepared to put up with insult and anything else the English might choose to throw at them. Small wonder then that Philip lingered, finding excuses of ‘business’ to keep him in Spain, until at last the iron sense of duty which drove him throughout his life would let him delay no longer. He sailed from Corunna on 13 July and six days later, on the anniversary of Mary’s accession, his fleet was dropping anchor in Southampton Water.

The prince came ashore on the afternoon of 20 July to be greeted not by insult or hostile crowds but, in far more typically English fashion, by a persistent downpour of fine summer rain. He rested in Southampton over the weekend and on Monday set out on the ten-mile ride to Winchester. The rain which had been falling steadily for three days managed to penetrate even the thick red felt cloak he wore over his black velvet and white satin finery, so that he was obliged to stop at the Hospital of St. Cross to change. The laggard bridegroom was still, it seemed, in no hurry. On arriving at Winchester he went first to the cathedral, where there was such a crowd of sightseers eager to catch a glimpse of him that several people were nearly suffocated in the crush, and it was past ten o’clock before he made his way by torchlight through the gardens to the Bishop’s Palace where the Queen was waiting.

They met in the long gallery, he kissing her on the mouth in ‘English fashion’ and then, she taking him by the hand, they sat together under the cloth of estate talking in a mixture of French and Spanish. That first meeting was short and informal but Philip, who was doing his utmost to ingratiate himself (even to the extent of forcing himself to drink beer), insisted on kissing all the Queen’s ladies ‘so as not to break the custom of the country, which is a good one’. He asked Mary to teach him what he should say to the lords in English at his departing and she told him to say ‘good night my lords all’ - a formula which he carefully repeated before leaving for his lodgings in the Dean’s house. Next day he came to see his fiancée again, with more ceremony this time, although they had another quarter of an hour’s private talk ‘each of them merrily smiling on the other, to the great comfort and rejoicing of the beholders’.

No one was in any doubt as to what the Queen thought of Philip and in general he was making a good impression. His appearance was in his favour, for he was a small, slender man with reassuringly un-foreign blue eyes and fair complexion. Some people thought his yellow hair and beard made him look like a Fleming and the Flemings had always been popular in England. What Philip thought of his bride he kept to himself but in their letters home the other Spaniards were less discreet. The Queen was a dear, good creature but older than they had been led to expect. She was a perfect saint but dressed badly. She was certainly not beautiful and had no eyebrows. Ruy Gomez thought she might look better and less flabby if she adopted Spanish fashions but, he went on, it was just as well Philip understood that the marriage had been arranged for political and not fleshly considerations, for this elderly virgin would obviously give him no satisfaction in bed.

The Queen of England and the Prince of Spain were married in Winchester Cathedral on 25 July with all the solemn ritual, all the pomp and splendour proper to the occasion. The flickering tapers glinted on the gorgeous clothes of the wedding guests and the rich vestments of the officiating clergy - six bishops, coped and mitred - on the sumptuous velvet and satin, on the jewels and the gleaming altar plate; but Mary’s wedding ring was, by her own request, a plain gold band with no stone in it ‘because maidens were so married in old times’. After high mass, during which the Queen remained wrapt and motionless, her eyes never leaving the sacrament, the heralds announced in Latin, French and English, the impressive list of the newly married couple’s styles and titles: Philip and Mane, by the grace of God King and Queen of England, France, Naples, Jerusalem and Ireland, Defenders of the Faith, Princes of Spain and Sicily, Archdukes of Austria, Dukes of Milan, Burgundy and Brabant, Counts of Hapsburg, Flanders and Tyrol. But to Mary only two things mattered - that at last she was married and was already helplessly in love.

The King and Queen walked hand-in-hand under the canopy of state back to the Bishop’s Palace for the wedding feast with its quantities of elaborate food and displays of gold plate, the musicians playing in the background and the heralds crying largesse. There was dancing afterwards and then, when darkness had fallen, the Bishop of Winchester blessed the marriage bed and the newly-weds were left alone. ‘What happened that night only they know’, observed one of the Spaniards sagely, but ‘if they give us a son our joy will be complete.’

The Court stayed at Winchester till the end of the month, the Queen, according to custom, not appearing in public. The Spaniards amused themselves sightseeing and lounging in the antechamber, talking or dancing or playing cards with the Queen’s ladies. None were beautiful by Spanish standards, although some were better than others and at least it helped to pass the time. On the thirty-first the household was on the move towards London, going by way of Basing, Reading and Windsor, where Philip was installed as a Garter knight. ‘Their majesties are the happiest couple in the world’, wrote someone enthusiastically to a friend in Salamanca, ‘and more in love than words can say’. Certainly Philip was unfailingly polite and considerate, riding at Mary’s side, always at hand to help her mount and dismount, attentive, said someone else with perhaps unconscious cruelty, as a son. By 11 August they were at Richmond and a week later the Queen brought her husband to the capital. London had been swept and garnished, the gibbets and blackened heads removed and decorations more suitable to the occasion substituted. The citizens, well primed with free drink, were in a benevolent mood and although there was plenty of jealousy and backbiting at Court and the Spaniards complained they were being charged twenty-five times the proper price tor everything in the shops, on the surface things were going reasonably well.

Philip was determined that they should continue to do so. The whole point of his marriage (and the only reason why he was enduring it) was to enable him to gain control of the government, to bring England permanently within the Imperial Hapsburg orbit, and to achieve this it was essential to avoid serious friction. Mary, lost in her fool’s paradise of love, was only too happy to leave everything in his hands; to trust prudent, pious. Catholic Philip to be wise for both of them.

While Mary was giving herself up to the delights of married life, Elizabeth was still languishing at Woodstock. The Queen had given orders that her sister was to be treated ‘in such good and honourable start as may be agreeable to our honour and her estate and degree’, and Elizabeth had a respectable number of servants to wait on her, was allowed to walk in the gardens and orchard and to have any books, within reason, to help pass the time. But time passed with agonizing slowness and the princess, who was becoming increasingly bored and resentful, did not hesitate to tease her custodian with demands for all sorts of additional concessions and to complain that she was being worse treated than any prisoner in the Tower or, on second thoughts, worse than the worst prisoner in Newgate. The unhappy Henry Bedingfield, acutely conscious of his heavy responsibilities and never quite sure if ‘this great lady’, as he always referred to Elizabeth, was in earnest or not, found himself in a constant state of marvellous perplexity ‘whether to grant her desires or to say her nay’. Like a good civil servant, he took refuge in tenacious adherence to his instructions and insisted on referring every detail to London, although, as he apologetically admitted, he realized this meant that he was having to trouble the Council ‘with more letters than be contentful to mine own opinion’.

This was precisely what Elizabeth intended he should do, for while she undoubtedly got a certain amount of amusement out of baiting Bedingfield, she had another and more serious purpose. The public memory was short and buried in the country she could all too easily be forgotten. Her enemies might then seize the opportunity to have her shipped abroad - the Emperor had a scheme to send her to his sister in Brussels - and once there she might be married off to some obscure Hapsburg dependant or even perhaps more permanently disposed of So she nagged persistently to have her case re-opened and in June had got permission to write to the Queen. But Mary had not deigned to reply, merely sending Bedingfield a curt message that she did not want to be bothered with any more of her sister’s ‘disguised and colourable’ letters. A month later, though, she did agree to allow Elizabeth to ‘write her mind’ to the Council and the princess begged their lordships ‘upon very pity, considering her long imprisonment and restraint of liberty’, to persuade the Queen either to have her charged ‘with special matter to be answered unto and tried, or to grant her liberty to come unto her highness’s presence, which...she would not desire were it not that she knoweth herself to be clear even before God, for her allegiance.’ Elizabeth addressed her appeal specifically to those members of the Council who had been executors ‘of the Will of the King’s majesty her father’ - a shrewd reminder that, outcast and disgraced though she might be, she was still heir presumptive to the throne.

Elizabeth may have hoped that now Mary was married and had presumably got everything she wanted, she would be in a more amenable frame of mind. But Mary made no sign and the Council remained deaf to Elizabeth’s complaints. The Queen, it appeared, was determined to wring some admission of guilt or contrition out of her sister before she would consider setting her free. The winter closed in and the household at Woodstock gloomily resigned itself to waiting out an indefinite contest of Tudor stubbornness.

In London that winter events were taking place which, temporarily at least, had pushed the problem of Elizabeth’s fate into the background. Mary believed herself to be pregnant, and on 12 November she and Philip together opened the third Parliament of the reign - a Parliament which, if all went well, would re-establish Rome’s authority over the church in England. Two weeks later Cardinal Pole, the first papal legate to set foot on English soil since the far-off da vs of the King’s Great Matter, travelled up-river to Westminster bringing with him the Pope’s absolution for his schismatic and excommunicated countrymen. Reginald Pole, an exile for more than twenty years, was the son of Margaret Plantagenet, the butchered Countess of Salisbury, and for Mary Tudor he brought back precious memories of happy childhood days as well as being the living symbol of so many of her future hopes. As she stood waiting to greet this long-lost kinsman and prince of the Church, the Queen felt a joyous conviction that ‘the babe had quickened and leapt in her womb’.

A few days later the reconciliation with Rome had been accomplished. The three estates of the realm knelt together in the Great Chamber of the Court at Westminster to receive the absolution pronounced by the Bishop of Winchester and England was once again a Roman Catholic country. The negotiations leading up to this remarkable moment had been going on throughout the autumn under the personal supervision of Philip of Spain and had been primarily concerned with devising unbreakable safeguards for the property rights of all holders of church lands. Once these had been hammered out to everyone’s satisfaction, the Commons, a body carefully chosen from ‘the wise, grave and Catholic sort’, was ready to complete the work of undoing the Reformation, of repealing all the religious and ecclesiastical legislation passed during the last two reigns, of abrogating the Royal Supremacy and restoring the ancient laws and penalties against heresy.

So far, it seemed, so good. But as the expected date of Mary’s delivery approached, the question of the future in general and of Elizabeth’s future in particular was once more exercising men’s minds. Stephen Gardiner was openly of the opinion that all attempts to eradicate Protestantism in England would amount to no more than stripping the leaves and lopping the branches as long as the root of the evil - the heretical heiress herself- remained untouched. Now if ever was the time, urged the Lord Chancellor, to push a bill through Parliament disinheriting her once and for all. But there was strangely little enthusiasm for this project. Even the Spaniards were lukewarm, reflecting that if Elizabeth was passed over, it would be very difficult to resist the claims of the Catholic but half-French Mary Stuart.

Philip, in consultation with Simon Renard, was now giving the problem his serious attention. He was assured of the regency if Mary died in childbed and her child survived. But supposing, as seemed probable enough, neither mother nor child survived? Suppose even, as was being whispered in some quarters. Mary was not pregnant at all? Philip was a tidy-minded man and he wanted to see the whole matter of the English succession put on a regular basis. Elizabeth would have to be released sooner or later and, according to Bedingfield’s reports, she was conducting herself like a good Catholic these days. It would, therefore, surely be more sensible to try and establish friendly relations with her now. at a time when she was likely to be grateful for her brother-in-law’s support and was still young enough to be influenced. A Catholic husband could then be found for her - that useful Hapsburg pensioner Emmanuel Philibert, Prince of Piedmont, would do as well as any. or there might be a suitable German prince available - and the future of the alliance would be secured. Philip’s reasoning was politically sound but he may also have been motivated by purely human curiosity in his evident desire to make the acquaintance of this enigmatic, dangerous young woman he had heard so much about.