XLI

When raging reign of tyrants stout,

Causeless, did cruelly conspire

To rend and root the Simple out,

With furious force of sword and fire;

When man and wife were put to death:

We wished for our Queen Elizabeth.

Hooper was one of several men burned for heresy in February 1555. Their sufferings are often taken to be a watershed in the story of Mary’s reign, but at the time their deaths were seen not as the beginning of a bloody campaign against the Protestants but as merited punishments long overdue. Bishop Gardiner, who tried Hooper and his companions in his episcopal court late in January, had been accused of being “too mild and too gentle” toward those guilty of the “great atrocity and consummate contumely” of heresy. For heretics were uncommon criminals, not to be classed with ordinary arsonists or murderers or traitors; their crime was not merely against man, but against God as well. By maintaining lies about the nature of God and his sacraments they made themselves as loathsome to the community of true believers as lepers or victims of the sweat. They were carriers of the plague of error, a plague that brought spiritual death and denial of eternal life.

Gardiner fully shared this view of the almost inhuman evil of heresy but he realized the political danger of moving too harshly against an opposing group. “I take heresies in the church to be like boils in a man’s body, which oversoon lanced wax sorer and in time putrefy their matter,” he said, and though Paget and his friends in the Council repeatedly spoke of the chancellor as a “man of blood” his restraint belies the label.¹

In fact there was no one, at Mary’s court or outside it, who did notfavor the burning of heretics. Mary’s Council had been discussing the question since the summer of 1554, and the treasurer, Paulet, was said to be a persistent advocate of the extreme penalty for Protestants who would not recant. Pole, a man whose thoughts ran easily to martyrdoms, had for twenty years and more been closely associated with reforming cardinals determined to fight heresy with every weapon at the church’s command. Among his intimates was Cardinal Caraffa, who as head of the Theatine Order showed no mercy to Protestants and as the future pope Paul IV was to oversee personally the torture and pitiless repression carried out by the papal Inquisition. Pole had been at the forefront of the militant Catholic Reformation on the continent, and he carried that militant philosophy with him into England.

According to Renard, who had unmatched respect for the Protestants’ strength and threat to the throne, the bishops were eager to bring heretics to justice at the stake, and if left unrestrained would go far beyond their authority in ordering executions. Articles published by Bonner, bishop of London, in the fall of 1554 created alarm because they contained the term “inquisition,” and in justifying their publication without approval from the king or queen or the Council Bonner remarked that “in religious matters it was meet to proceed firmly and without fear.” Like Renard, Bonner recognized the danger of a Protestant rising out of reaction to the burnings, but he saw no reason to stop them; instead he recommended carrying them out in secret.²

Though he feared the rash zeal of the bishops Renard believed that Philip could control them if he chose to. That the king did not use his authority in this way was in keeping with his deep personal revulsion for even the smallest taint of heresy. To be sure, Philip ordered his chaplain to preach a sermon opposing the burnings soon after they began, in order to dissociate himself and the other Spaniards from a practice that might lead to rebellion. But he had lived most of his life in the land of the Spanish Inquisition, where the extermination of religious error had been looked on as a pious duty for centuries. His great-grandmother (and Mary’s grandmother) Queen Isabella had brought the great inquisitorial machine into being and inspired its divine work. Philip’s principal mentor in statecraft, his father Charles V, had by one estimate burned or beheaded or buried alive at least thirty thousand Lutherans and Anabaptists in his Flemish domains, and was in this year of 1555 ordering executions for heresy at the rate of seventy to eighty every month. Philip’s chaplain in England, Alfonso y Castro, was famous as a determined persecutor of heretics whose treatise on the subject was dedicated to the Spanish prince.³

Philip was careful to keep his own feelings to himself, but in a revealing letter he wrote four months after he came to England heremarked that, as for the English appointed to be his personal servants in his bedchamber, “I am not satisfied that they are good enough Catholics to be constantly about my person.”⁴ Philip’s fastidious orthodoxy showed itself not long afterward when, as king of Spain, he put new vigor into the Inquisition and presided in person over a vast auto da fé in the public square of Valladolid. Asked by one of the gasping victims why he had to undergo such a horrible death, the king is traditionally said to have answered, “Had I a son as obstinate as you I would eagerly carry faggots to burn him.”

The records are oddly silent about Mary’s attitude toward the deaths of Hooper and the others in February. In discussing the hazards of the venture Renard put the emphasis on Philip rather than Mary. He stressed Philip’s pre-eminence in general, of course, but if Mary had been among the most outspoken supporters of the burnings his dispatches would surely have reflected this. Like all those around her Mary believed that heretics deserved the ultimate punishment, and that the combating of false beliefs was part of the preordained purpose of her reign. Yet the one statement she wrote “with her own hand” about the policy makes it clear that she saw it as a temporary measure only, to be carried out neither vindictively nor hesitantly but judiciously.

To prevent any one official from going about his work with a heavy hand she ordered that a Council member be present to supervise each burning in London. Throughout the statement her attention was less on the dying heretics than on the effect of their example on the living witnesses to their deaths. For if Philip found heretics physically offensive Mary found them despicable for misleading others too ignorant to understand the truth and robbing them of their salvation. “Touching the punishment of heretics,” she wrote, “I believe it would be well to inflict punishment at this beginning, without much cruelty or passion, but without however omitting to do such justice on those who choose by their false doctrines to deceive simple persons, that the people may clearly comprehend that they have not been condemned without just cause, whereby others will be brought to know the truth, and will beware of letting themselves be induced to relapse into such new and false opinions. And above all, I should wish that no one be burned in London, save in the presence of some member of the Council; and that during such executions, both here and elsewhere, some good and pious sermons be preached.”⁵

No groups espoused burning for the crime of religious error with greater vehemence than the congregations of Protestants. Here they differed from the Catholics only in their judgments of truth and error. John Knox was if anything more eager to see Gardiner, Tunstal and Bonner burned than any of those Catholics were to burn him. “It is notonly lawful to punish to the death such as labor to subvert the true religion,” he wrote, “but the magistrates and people are bound so to do.” Here he echoed John Calvin, who argued that anyone who thought it unjust to execute heretics was as guilty as the heretics themselves. In Edward’s reign Calvin had given Somerset advice on how to carry forward the work of religion. “Of all things, let there be no moderation,” he counseled the duke. “It is the bane of genuine improvement.” Nearly every Protestant leader on the continent shared this view—Melanchthon, Beza, Farel and Luther, whose followers in Germany refused to allow the Marian exiles to enter their lands because the latter denied the physical presence of Jesus in the sacrament. In England, John Philpot denounced one group of his fellow Protestants as “flaming firebrands of hell” whom the devil “shat out in these days to defile the gospel.” Such wretches, he wrote, deserved to be burned without mercy.

If the burning of the first Protestants in February of 1555 caused no moral outrage it did intensify the angry opposition of their coreligionists to the queen and her government. The numbers of men and women set in the pillory for speaking “horrible lies and seditious words against the queen’s majesty and her Council” rose, and the ballad-makers who had written songs in praise of the new reign now put out ballads against the queen’s “misproceedings” and the brutality of the bishops. A minstrel’s apprentice from Colchester went to the village of Rough Hedge to sing at a country wedding. He sang the old anti-popish songs of Henry’s reign and Edward’s, and a new ballad, “News out of London.” The latter ridiculed the mass and the queen, and the next day the parson of Rough Hedge denounced him to the local officials, who punished him.

In Henry’s reign the forces of popular mysticism had gathered against him in the utterances of visionaries and in folk prophecies. Now these occult weapons were turned against Mary.

When boughs and branches begin to bud

Two Marys shall go out of the Tower

And make sacrifice with their own blood

ran one of these vague prognostications; others foretold Mary’s death un-equivocably, and predicted Elizabeth’s accession. There were persistent rumors that Edward was not really dead, and would come to the throne again, and so great was the power of the folk imagination that this hope was sustained for many years. Mary tried to stop these tales from spreading, sending letters to her justices of the peace ordering them to “use all the best means and ways ye can, in the diligent examining and searching out, from Man to Man, the Authors and Publishers of these vain Prophesies, and untrue Bruits, the very foundation of all Rebellions,” but the stories persisted.⁸

As Mary went into the final months of her pregnancy another kind of rumor was put about. It was said that the queen was conspiring to pass off another child as her own. Alice Perwick, wife of a London merchant tailor, was indicted for saying “The queen’s grace is not with child, and another lady should be with child and that lady’s child when she is brought in bed should be named the queen’s child.”⁷ French agents helped to make this report better known, and rebels in Hampshire planned to use it to persuade the country people to rise against the queen and put Elizabeth and Courtenay on the throne.⁸

At court the Christmas festivities brought Spaniards and English together with predictable results. There were banquets and plays, displays of magnanimity and of short temper on both sides. There were masques of Venetian senators and galley slaves, and of “Venuses or amorous ladies” and cupids. The Venuses wore buskins “cut out of old garments” for economy’s sake, but their headpieces were tall, costly helmetlike structures fitted out with hair and spangles and netting, and decorated with colored silk flowers. The cupids wore shirts of white sarcenet and carried bows strung with “twisted lace of silk,” and had wings specially made by a London feathermaker.⁹

In the afternoons Philip’s men took on the English nobles in tournaments, no longer the tame cane play of the Spaniards but rough tilting on foot with spears and swords. On several occasions the king and his company held the barriers against English opponents, proving they could withstand the force of the larger Englishmen’s strength, but the tilting easily led to grudges and quarrels. One Spaniard was branded on the forehead and lost an ear for wounding another man in a church, and later, at the court gate at Westminster, another of Philip’s household ran an Englishman through with a rapier while two Spaniards held him by the arms. The murderer was hanged at Charing Cross, but Mary pardoned his two accomplices.¹⁰ And in the vicinity of the court a bear-baiting ended badly when the “great blind bear,” maddened by the dogs that were tormenting him, broke loose from his chains and ran headlong into the crowd. He caught a servingman by the calf of the leg and bit away a huge chunk of his flesh down to the anklebone, and the man died three days later of his infected wound. The chronicler did not record the recapture of the bear.¹¹

The tournaments continued throughout the winter, and by the first week of March it was evident that Philip had decided to postpone his departure for the continent until after the birth of Mary’s child. By now he had acquired a taste for English-style tilting, and the tournament held on Lady Day of 1555 was the most elaborate yet seen. The challengers, one Spaniard and one Englishman, were all in white, while the king and his retinue wore blue jerkins trimmed in yellow, with great plumes of blueand yellow feathers in their helmets. Their whifflers and footmen and armorers were turned out in satin gowns and caps, and another company, dressed like Turks, were all in red, with falchions in their hands and carrying great targets. As the queen and court looked on the challengers and defenders rode course after course, tiring many mounts and not stopping until more than a hundred staves had been broken.¹²

Mary took pleasure in these displays and in her husband’s performance at the tilt, but the Venetian ambassador noticed that they made her nervous. She was relieved that Philip would be staying in England yet she could not help but be afraid for his safety as she watched him riding vigorously against all comers and exchanging blows with a punctilious dispatch he had never shown in the jousts his father had organized for him. At the Lady Day tournament “she could not conceal her fear and disquietude” for the king, and sent him a message “to pray him not to encounter further risk” after he had run many courses. As soon as he received it he left the lists.¹³

In Easter Week the king and queen went to Hampton Court and there, in the presence of her principal courtiers, Mary underwent the ceremonies that signified the beginning of her confinement. In a month, or within six weeks at the most, she would experience the “happy hour” of her delivery. Mary would have preferred to retire to Windsor, but it was too far from the capital. At Hampton Court she would have the protection of her full guard, troops from the city, and the arsenal of the Tower close at hand.

Just before she retired to keep her chamber Mary witnessed the beginnings of another part of her religious restoration. Since the dissolution of the monasteries many Franciscan and Dominican monks had been living in poverty in Flanders, waiting until their lands and properties could be restored. Now Mary summoned them back to England, returning to them the few religious properties possessed by the crown that had not been alienated into private hands. The friars made themselves at home in London, and were “well received and kindly treated.” The Benedictines were beginning to revive their order in England too. Sixteen former monks who had been living as secular men since the 1530s put on their habits again, renounced all their goods and requested a monastery to live in. They asked for an audience with the queen, and came before her as a group, in their robes and tonsures. Mary had not seen so many religious together in one place since she was a young girl, and as soon as they entered the presence chamber she wept for joy.

She carried the happy sight of the monks with her as she entered the last days of her pregnancy. Surrounded by her waiting women she rested, dreaming of the baby, and then woke to watch for the signs the doctors said would indicate the approach of birth. According to Renard, thechild was expected on or before May 9, and final preparations of the delivery room and nursery were already under way.¹⁴ The waiting women spent their time sewing the majestic counterpoint of estate and matching headpiece that went to adorn the queen’s bed. Coverings and wrapping cloths had to be embroidered, and baptismal cloths for the day of the christening. For the queen there were smocks of the softest Holland cloth with delicate trimmings of silver thread and silk at the neck and wrists, and breast cloths and blankets. The physicians assembled their instruments, and oversaw the furnishing of the delivery room with tables and benches and bowls, and casting bottles to hold the perfumed water that would help to purify the odors in the room.

They were not looking forward to assisting at this delivery. Mary had turned thirty-nine in February, and though her health had appeared to improve as her pregnancy advanced she had not been entirely free of melancholy and the illness that accompanied it. They did not confide their apprehensions to the queen, of course. Instead she was given every encouragement. Shortly after her confinement began a peasant woman and her three newborn babies were brought up to Mary’s apartments at Hampton Court. The woman was “of low stature and great age like the queen,” yet only a few days earlier she had given birth to the triplets, all of whom were sturdy and comely. The mother was already out of bed, “strong and out of all danger,” and Mary was much heartened to see them all.¹⁵

On Easter Sunday a Protestant surgeon, Thomas Flower, committed an act of outrageous sacrilege in the parish church of St. Margaret in Westminster. Flower, a former priest himself and a monk at Ely, clearly went to hear mass in the church intending to do mischief of some kind, for he disguised himself as a servingman and carried a woodknife. As he watched the priest in his canonicals standing before the altar, holding the chalice full of consecrated wafers, he was seized by rage. Running toward the altar he roared out accusations at the priest, shouting that he was committing idolatry and deceiving the people. As he spoke he lunged at his victim with his knife, striking him on the head and hand so that the blood from his wounds gushed out over his vestments and into the chalice. The priest sank down as if dead, and the crowd inside the church dispersed in an uproar. The shrieking of the horrified worshipers attracted a second crowd outside, and some of these men, their weapons drawn, dashed into the church to seize Flower. At first it was said that the murder of the priest of St. Margaret’s was meant to be the signal for a general rising against all the foreigners in Westminster, putting the entire population of that quarter into the greatest alarm. But it was soon obvious that Flower had acted alone, and almost as soon as he was imprisoned in Newgate he was condemning what he had done as “evil and naught.”¹⁶

Flower’s crime appeared to be a response to a second series of burnings that took place in Essex and in the Welsh Marches as well as in the London suburbs. In the week that Mary rejoiced to see the Benedictines at court a second victim was burned at Smithfield (the first, John Rogers, had died there on February 4), and in the following week five men were sent to the stake in as many Essex towns, one a barber from Maldon. At one of these execution sites a “slight insurrection” occurred. As Lord Dacre and his men escorted their prisoners to the appointed place “so great a concourse of persons assembled at this spectacle, that it was incredible.” The condemned men spoke to the crowd, urging them to continue in their faith and “to endure, as they themselves did, any persecution or any torment.” The onlookers were so stirred that the officials feared for their lives, for “very strong language” had been used against those who ordered the execution. The magistrates ordered the fires to be built and lighted, but as the flames rose there were loud affirmations from the crowd that the victims were “the holiest of martyrs.” Their words were written down and copies of them passed from hand to hand, and after they died the ashes were combed for their remains.¹⁷

In response to Flower’s assault and lesser incidents of the same sort the king and queen sent for more “true and faithful great men of the realm” to stay at Hampton Court with their armed retainers. More troops were raised and quartered in the immediate neighborhood of the palace, and they brought artillery with them. Similar precautions were taken in London, for fear that the “idle rogues” who infested the city might try to take advantage of any “misfortune” at the time of the queen’s delivery to sack the houses of the wealthy. The number of guards at the city gates was increased, and watchmen patrolled the streets at all hours of the night.¹⁸ The nobles were said to be gathering at the palace to be present at the birth, and every effort was made to underplay the gathering of the soldiers. Philip made a great show of attending the wedding of the earl of Arundel’s son, Lord Maltravers, arriving at the earl’s house with all his chief courtiers and giving the bride a beautiful jeweled necklace worth a thousand ducats. Another wedding was held at the court. The earl of Sussex’s son Lord Fitzwalter married the earl of Southampton’s daughter with great pomp, and afterward, to do even greater honor to the bride and groom, Philip joined the other wedding guests in a tournament.¹⁹

On Tuesday morning, April 30, just at daybreak the news came that a little after midnight the queen had given birth to a prince. She had had little pain and was well out of danger, and the boy was fair and without blemish. Royal officials confirmed the account of the birth, and by mid-morning there were bonfires in the streets and all the bells in the city were ringing. No shops opened, and tables spread with meat and winewere set up in the squares and in the courtyards of the merchants’ companies. The clergy marched in procession round their churches singing Te Deums “for the birth of our prince,” and the sailors who left that day from the Channel ports carried the joyful news with them to the continent.

By the evening of May 2 the imperial court was “rejoicing out of measure” to hear of the prince’s birth, and at four o’clock on the morning of the third the emperor sent for the English ambassador to hear an official announcement from his lips. Mason said that he too had heard the news from London, but had not yet heard anything from the court. Charles, though, was “loath to bring the thing to any doubt,” and his sister, at Antwerp, “caused the great bell to ring to give all men to understand that the news was true.” The English merchant ships in the harbor shot off all their guns, and their captains met to plan “some worthy triumph upon the water,” but before they could complete their plans fresh reports came from Brussels that their joy was premature. The duke of Alva sent word to the emperor from Hampton Court that the rumor in London was false. There was no child; the queen had not yet begun her labor. The imperial court returned to its accustomed “hope and expectation,” but Londoners were disappointed and resentful.²⁰ “It is hardly to be told,” wrote the Venetian ambassador Michiel, “how much this dispirited everybody.”