XXXI

Haile Quene of England, of most worthy fame

For vertve, for wisdome, for mercy and grace;

Most firme in the fa[i]th, Defence of the same,

Christ save her and keepe her in every place.

A week before Mary made her ceremonial entry into London Dudley and some ten of his captains and accomplices rode into the city under strict and heavy guard. At the head of the armed cortege four standard-bearers carried the royal ensign, then came a large company of mounted men, and behind them an array of archers and men at arms. More guardsmen lined the streets, to prevent the townspeople from breaking through the column of horsemen and attacking the duke. During the journey south from Cambridge he had been wearing a scarlet cloak; at the city gate he was made to take it off to make him less conspicuous among the small group of prisoners, but the crowd knew him well enough. He held his cap in his hand, as if begging for mercy, but the people, “greatly excited,” cried out insults as he passed, and cursed him as a traitor to the crown. “A dreadful sight it was, and a strange mutation,” the imperial ambassadors recorded, for only a few weeks earlier the duke had ridden through these same streets in state, magnificently dressed, escorting Jane Grey to the royal apartments in the Tower. Now he was being taken there to die.¹

Dudley’s trial was brief. The court was assembled at Westminster, where the old duke of Norfolk, as Earl Marshal, sat representing the queen as president of the court. Mary had recently released him from his seven years’ imprisonment in the Tower, and acknowledged his primacy among the peers. Norfolk was among those Mary might well have wanted to punish once she came to power, for the wrongs he had done her in the past. Given his shameless promotion of Anne Boleyn, and hisrepeated cruelties to Mary and her mother during her father’s reign, Mary would have been amply justified in reducing him to penniless obscurity, but she showed no hint of vindictiveness. Instead the duke was given the privilege of overseeing the condemnation of his old enemy Dudley, in a setting which did him much honor.

He was seated atop a high scaffolding many feet above the floor in a chair bearing the dossal, pall and mantle of majesty. The chief officers of Mary’s government sat at his side—Paulet, Arundel, Paget and even the former chancellor Rich. Four aldermen, and an equal number of lawyers in their scarlet robes and white wigs, completed the personnel of the court. Dudley had made a full confession of his guilt in writing before the trial began; he reiterated it now, falling on his knees and begging the absent queen for mercy, saying that he had acted with the advice and consent of the Council in all he had done. When he had made his appeal Norfolk pronounced the sentence of the court: Dudley was to be hanged, “his heart to be drawn from his body and flung against his face,” and his body quartered. Custom demanded that the traditional barbarous punishment for traitors be invoked; later Mary commuted it to simple beheading.

During his weeks in the Tower Dudley had undergone an amazing transformation. He was assailed by remorse for all of his sins, political and religious. To ease his conscience he wrote his confession and then, asking that Somerset’s two sons be brought before him, he admitted that he had had their father wrongly condemned, and begged their forgiveness. He asked pardon of others as well, and returned all the money he had amassed from the royal treasury during his years in the government. But what was more astonishing was that, having professed the most radical Protestantism for the last four years, he suddenly recanted and returned to the old faith. He confessed his sins, heard mass with every sign of heartfelt fervor and gave himself up to prayers and devotions. He even went so far as to link his crimes to his abandonment of Catholicism, telling those who came to see him die that “since he had forsaken God and the church to follow the new religion he had done no good.” His final message from the scaffold was to urge his hearers to obey the “good and virtuous” queen, who had “attained the throne miraculously” through the “hand of God.” Then the executioner, a lame swordsman wearing “a white apron like a butcher,” made ready to perform his office, and the duke, with a last prayer, put his head on the block.²

Some Protestants suspected that Dudley’s change of heart was part of a government plot to discredit the established church, which Mary was eager to replace with her own, but to many Londoners his remarkable conversion was just one more sign that the circumstances surrounding Mary’s accession were nothing short of miraculous. Catholics werepredicting that God would soon “take pity on his people and church in England, through the instrument of a virgin called Mary, whom he has raised to the throne.”³ Protestant pamphleteers tried to refute the argument, widespread among the “common sort,” that Mary’s victory over Dudley confirmed that hers was the only true religion. “This is of God which our queen and old bishops have professed,” they were saying. “For how has God prospered and kept them! What a notable victory has God given them!”⁴ Ballads told how the duke “went forth full glad” to meet Mary, yet “came a traitor in full sad,” because God subdued all her enemies. New songs welcoming her to the throne were registered at stationers’ hall every few days, some of them addressing her by the old fond nickname of “Marigold.”

The most eloquent statement of Mary’s providential accession came from Reginald Pole, who in a letter to the new queen marveled at how, “without the aid of any other forces or resistance save that which the spirit of God roused in the hearts of men,” her throne was secured. Her reign was proof that the hand of God ruled human affairs, Pole told Mary, and like the virgin Mary she should rejoice that “her soul did magnify the Lord.” The queen had “more cause than any one” to sing the virgin’s song of praise, “He hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden; he hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.”⁵

It was not the first time Mary’s life had been compared to that of Jesus’ mother. After an earlier crisis, in 1536, after signing her formal Submission to her father, Mary had been given a ring signifying her obedience in the words of the virgin’s song, the Magnificat. Now Pole was encouraging Mary again to see her life as a channel for the divine purpose, just as the virgin Mary’s life had been used by God to fulfill his plan for mankind. The parallel could hardly have been more flattering, but the queen was already convinced. For seventeen years she had been living with the certainty that hers was to be a destiny beyond the ordinary. Now that destiny had been made clear. She was to bring England back to the true faith.

Mary’s initial statements on religion showed considerable tolerance and flexibility. She “wished to force no one to go to mass,” she told the imperial ambassador Renard at their first meeting late in July, but she “meant to see that those who wished to go should be free to do so.”⁶ She told her councilors it was not: her intention “to compel or constrain other men’s consciences,” merely to provide them the opportunity to hear the truth through “godly, virtuous learned preachers.”⁷ She was aware that both Protestants and Catholics were waiting to see how resolute she was. In her view the funeral that had yet to be held for Edward provided the first test of her fidelity to the Catholic ritual. A Protestant funeral wouldmake the Lutherans “more audacious,” she told Renard. They would be sure to “proclaim that she had not dared to do her own will.” When she ordered a Catholic funeral her Council would not object, though some members “would only consent out of dissimulation and fear.” She meant to go ahead despite this, relying on her troops to prevent any serious incidents and hoping to use her councilors’ dissimulation “for a great end” later.

Renard advised Mary to be cautious in making any religious demonstrations for the time being; the emperor, who imagined that she might try to alter the religious settlement overnight, had ordered his envoys to urge caution. There was no need for alarm. Mary was moving slowly though unmistakably toward her ultimate goal, at a pace designed to prevent organized opposition from her Protestant subjects. Her first official announcement on August 12 made it plain that she meant to leave her subjects free to worship as they chose until Parliament could cooperate in bringing about orderly change. “She had so far found no better expedient than to leave each one free as to the religion he would follow,” the announcement read. “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.”⁸ As if to confirm this policy Mary decided to authorize two separate funeral observances for Edward—a Protestant service in Westminster Abbey and a requiem mass in the old chapel of the White Tower. But if she saw the virtue of deferring the re-establishment of Catholicism there was no doubt she meant to complete it in time. She told Renard “she felt so strongly on this matter of religion that she was hardly to be moved,” glancing as she said this toward the altar in her chamber.⁹

The court set a pious example of adherence to the traditional faith, and one that was followed in many places throughout the kingdom. Six or seven masses were being sung every day in Mary’s chapel, with all the Council members in attendance. (It was noted, though, that neither Elizabeth nor Anne of Cleves had yet attended.) In the major churches of London the altars were being restored, and the crucifixes replaced. Matins and vespers had been recited in St. Paul’s for weeks, and on St. Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, the first Latin mass was sung there.¹⁰Elsewhere the Catholic ritual had been restored even earlier. At Oxford a visiting Protestant watched Catholics “dig out as it were from their graves their vestments, chalices and portasses, and begin mass with all speed” as soon as Mary was proclaimed queen. In their exuberance they “had a public festival, and threatened flames, hanging, the gallows and drowning” to all Protestants.¹¹ In some places, of course, secret masses had been performed throughout Edward’s reign, either by daring English priests or by foreign clerics from Normandy or Brittany, many of whom could not speak English.¹²

Demonstrations against the restoration of the old faith began on the day the councilors announced Mary’s accession. Shortly after she was proclaimed a man was set in the pillory “for speaking against the good Queen Mary,” and before long the slander took written form. Less than a month after Mary came to the throne she published an edict against “books, ballads, rhymes and treatises” injurious to the peace of the realm which printers and stationers, “of an evil zeal for lucre,” were selling.¹³Few preachers managed to get through their sermons without interruption from roving bands of troublemakers, and apprentices and servants went about from street to street insulting priests, singing anti-papal songs and disrupting religious services. Protestant preachers, including some Flemings and Frenchmen, who “interspersed seditious words” in their sermons were silenced, but not before some violence had broken out. In the week after Mary entered London in triumph an old priest said mass in St. Bartholomew’s church. The sight attracted an angry mob, who “would have pulled him in pieces.”¹⁴ A few days later a “defamatory leaflet” was found scattered in the streets which exhorted Protestants to take up arms against Mary’s government. In it all “nobles and gentlemen favoring the word of God” were urged to overthrow the “detestable papists” who supported “our virtuous Lady, Queen Mary,” especially “the great devil,” Gardiner, bishop of Winchester. Gardiner had to be “exorcised and exterminated” before he could “poison the people and wax strong in his religion,” the pamphleteer claimed; otherwise the cause of the gospel would be lost.

The first really serious incident took place on Sunday, August 13, when Mary’s chaplain Gilbert Bourne preached at Paul’s Cross. In his sermon Bourne lashed out at the former bishop of London, Ridley, and praised the newly established Catholic bishop Bonner. The assembled crowd was so infuriated with his remarks that they broke into “great uproar and shouting, like mad people,” and were on the point of rioting. A dagger was thrown at Bourne, and narrowly missed him, sticking fast in one of the sideposts of the pulpit. The preacher was hurriedly led to safety in the cathedral school nearby, and a reforming preacher in the crowd, one Master Bradford, eventually managed to quiet the crowd. Mary and the Council were outraged, ordering the people to obey the Lord Mayor and keep the peace or she would “set other rulers over them.”

It was thought that the presence of the Mayor and of Edward Cour-tenay in the crowd had helped to prevent more harm from being done, and the following Sunday the worshipers arrived at Paul’s Cross to find not only the Mayor but all the crafts in their liveries, the Council, Bishop Bonner, the captain of the guard and upwards of two hundred guardsmen flanking the preacher Mary sent to address them. The guardsmen “strode about the pulpit with their halberds,” as if daring another attack, while the preacher expanded on the less inflammatory subject of “rebuilding the old temple again.”¹⁵ The incident was not repeated, but it led Mary to increase her personal guard. Beyond her ordinary mounted escort, she ordered eight cannon brought to Richmond “for her greater safety, and to make a show of her strength and authority for the intimidation of the seditious and those who have evil intentions.” In addition, she was said to be arming seven or eight hundred more mounted guardsmen and two hundred footsoldiers.¹⁶

In these first unsettled weeks of her reign Mary was forced to come to terms not only with unruly Protestants and would-be rebels, but with the volatile, divisive men of her Council as well. There were more than forty of them, drawn from among Mary’s faithful household officers, men imprisoned or out of favor during the preceding reign and, to the surprise of many, the members of Edward’s Council—the men who had assented to removing Mary from the succession and giving her crown to Jane Grey. From her household came Rochester, Walgrave, Englefield, and her chaplain Bourne, supplemented by men such as Sir Henry Jer-ningham, now captain of her guard, who with the old earl of Sussex had come to her defense at Framlingham, Sir John Gage, her aging Lord Chamberlain, and Sir Thomas Cheyne. These men were utterly trustworthy, reliable, staunch in their loyalty to Mary and the Catholic church, but lacking any experience of statecraft.

Equally loyal and far more experienced were the political outcasts, mostly churchmen, who had suffered for their views and allegiances in the regencies of Somerset and Dudley. The duke of Norfolk, Thomas Thirlby, bishop of Norwich, Cuthbert Tunstal, the octogenarian bishop of Durham and the able, outspoken and choleric bishop of Winchester Stephen Gardiner had all managed to serve, and survive, two rulers. Gardiner had been a principal adviser to Henry VIII in the matter of his divorce—something Mary chose to look past now—but had redeemed himself in her eyes by becoming more and more conservative in religion as the years passed, and by developing an inveterate hatred of Dudley. This antipathy flattered the bishop, who was honest where the duke was devious and deceitful, and who like Mary stood by his convictions to the end.

More ominous for the future of Mary’s government was that Gardiner was at odds with the leader of the third group in her Council. This third group, consisting of the now-repentant councilors who had lent their authority to Dudley’s plot, were led by William Paget, a wary, circumspect man whose outstanding characteristic was his ability to adapt himself to every political climate. Paget had advised Henry VIII in his last years, befriended the Protector yet survived his fall, made himselfuseful to Dudley and was now becoming invaluable tc Mary. The men Paget spoke for—Pembroke, Petre, Arundel, Derby, Shrewsbury and the others—were in an extremely awkward position. They were all embarrassed by their association with the traitor Dudley, yet each of them tried to lay the blame for the Council’s acquiescence on the others. Some, like Derby, had deserted Dudley early in the contest to bring thousands of soldiers to Mary’s camp, while others had remained inconspicuous throughout the struggle for the throne. The former expected to be rewarded with offices and special favors, while the latter hoped their cowardice had not been noticed. All of them were continually on edge in the early part of Mary’s reign, sometimes explosively so. Yet she would have found it hard to rule without them, for despite their disadvantages they were the only men in the government with recent experience of affairs. Besides, given the deterioration of government over the last six years there were few men in public life whose integrity was above reproach. As the imperial ambassador wrote to Charles V in August, Mary “found matters in such a condition when she came to the throne that she cannot possibly put everything straight, or punish all who have been guilty of something; otherwise she would be left without any vassals at all.”¹⁷

Mary had gotten a foretaste of the squabbling indecisiveness of her Council in the first weeks of her reign. Between the time her camp at Framlingham was broken up and the day she made her formal entry into London Mary met with her Council several times. She was naturally curious to hear from them what had really happened in the last days of Edward’s reign—whether the Device had been his own or Dudley’s idea, whether or not the duke had planned to imprison or kill her, how and why she had been allowed to get away. Instead of answers her questions unleashed a barrage of mutual accusations and recriminations among the councilors, and she soon realized that she would never learn the truth about the conspiracy from these men. To her astonishment, they could not even come to a decision about whether she should hasten or delay her journey to the capital, “some saying she had better tarry a while because of the heat, bad air and danger of the plague . . . others urging her to press on as fast as possible to set her affairs in order and establish herself in the government of the country.” In her first conversation with Renard Mary confessed to him that “she could not help being amazed by the divisions in the Council,” whose members spent all their time trying to get the better of one another, changing their views as often as necessary to protect their reputations.¹⁸

What was worse, many of them were becoming enmeshed in a net of backbiting, influence peddling and petty intrigue. Some of the more obscure gentlemen who had “stood by the queen in the days of her advershy and trouble” now felt “cast off and neglected” because they had not been appointed to office or given lands or titles. Instead of approaching Mary directly, though, they took their complaints to more powerful lords who in turn spread tales of dissatisfaction to anyone who cared to listen. These lesser men let it be known that they “might easily change sides if they perceived that they received no notice,” and devoted far less energy to the work of government than to the task of finding an influential patron or outmaneuvering rivals for bureaucratic posts.

Others thought they could advance their careers in the queen’s service by ingratiating themselves with her women. Renard noticed in August that “the ladies about the queen’s person are able to obtain from her more than she ought to grant them,” and Mary was frequently approached by female friends and relatives asking favors on behalf of courtiers. In one complex negotiation the earl of Pembroke approached Courtenay to ask if he would persuade his mother to speak to the queen on the earl’s behalf. Courtenay’s mother was Gertrude Blount, marchioness of Exeter, one of Mary’s oldest friends, and Pembroke knew that Mary would be favorably inclined to anything the marchioness proposed. To ensure Courtenay’s cooperation Pembroke gave him valuable gifts—a sword and poniard, a basin and ewer, and several horses—worth in all more than three thousand pounds. The marchioness “made his peace with the queen,” and Pembroke found himself named to the Council as he had hoped. At another time the duchess of Suffolk, mother of Jane Grey and wife of the conspirator Henry Grey, now a prisoner in the Tower, came to Mary’s bedchamber at two o’clock in the morning to tell her that her husband had been poisoned and to beg for his release.

Even the leading figures in the Council, Gardiner and Paget, were caught up in the web of intrigue. Each resented the other’s power and influence, and their enmity was becoming public knowledge and interfering with the business of government. After observing the operations for a time Renard was inclined to agree with Mary that “the Council does not seem to us ... to be composed of experienced men endowed with the necessary qualities to conduct the administration and government of the kingdom.”¹⁹

The shortcomings of the men around Mary were all the more crucial in that, as her reign opened, England stood lower in the estimation of the European states than at any time since the Wars of the Roses. Henry VIII had been able to create an illusion of power and majesty so convincing it made his kingdom seem powerful—or at least substantial—as well. With Edward on the throne the illusion vanished, and when Dudley became the actual ruler in 1549 England’s influence in European diplomacy melted away. Paradoxically, England’s very weakness gave it a new importance in the 1550s. Astute observers on the continent were convinced that, sooner or later, the country would become a client state of France or the empire, and the competition between them came to center on England as it once had on Italy earlier in the century. With Mary on the throne, Hapsburg domination seemed likely, probably in the form of a marriage between Mary and Dom Luiz or the emperor’s widowed son Philip. But the French would be certain to keep their influence alive in England as well, and there was always the chance that the bold young French king might mount an invasion, as he clearly thought of doing when Dudley appealed to him for help in July.

Even if the French did not invade England proper there was no doubt that Henri II was eager to regain the English-held territories of Calais and Guines, and Mary’s first concern as queen was to ensure the defense of these two possessions. The issue was urgent, for in his desperate need for military aid Northumberland had authorized his envoy to Henri II’s court to discuss transferring the English strongholds to the French, and had recalled the English commander of Guines, Lord Grey. Mary quickly sent Grey back, with orders to hold the town at all costs and to inform the French that Dudley had been seized as a traitor. To emphasize her determination to hold the towns Mary ordered a muster to be held in London, specifically to enroll men to defend Calais and Guines; the muster, along with the presence of an imperial garrison in the vicinity, dissuaded the French from attacking.

The defense of the English-held territories was more than a military problem; it was also a fiscal one. At the end of July Renard wrote that Mary could “find no money for current expenses,” and was struggling with the problem of paying the dissatisfied English soldiers defending Guines and Calais. The government had not been solvent for years, and beyond the huge deficits Dudley had left there were hundreds of smaller obligations of a more personal kind that had been gathering dust in the royal exchequer for decades. The government was in debt to “many an old servitor, minister, officer, merchant, banker, captain, pensioner and soldier,” Mary found. She considered it a point of honor that they be paid, and announced in September that she would pay every obligation left from the two preceding reigns, no matter how long it took.²⁰ Even more important, she made a significant beginning in solving the longstanding crisis of the currency. New coins were issued, with higher proportions of gold and silver, set according to a fixed standard. There would be no further debasements, she announced, and although it was evident her government would have to go heavily into debt to remain solvent, the worst of the economic plagues, unprofitable foreign exchange and inflation, were already coming under control. English money beganto hold its value against foreign coins once again in the money markets of Antwerp and Brussels, and in England, prices of food and other goods fell by as much as one third in 1553.

Despite the fears about her incapacity and inexperience, Mary was clearly beginning to take command. With all evidence of rebellion crushed and religious and economic problems more or less in hand, she was ready to play her role in the great political drama of her coronation.