XLVI

Complain my lute, complain on him

That stays so long away;

He promised to be here ere this,

But still unkind doth stay.

But now the proverb true I find,

Once out of sight then out of mind.

As the fall wore on Philip found more and more to enjoy in the lands he had dreaded ruling. He was entertained at hunts and banquets, and he was guest of honor at the weddings of prominent citizens in Brussels and Antwerp. He attended the weddings masked, and danced afterward with the aristocratic beauties of Flanders until the early hours of the morning. By December the envoys at the imperial court were noting that Philip went out masked to balls or banquets nearly every night, and when one gathering ended he went on to another, exhausting himself and his companions in drinking and merrymaking. After a year of strained reserve and forced joviality in England, the festive atmosphere of the Netherlands was a welcome relief, and Philip let himself be drawn into the carefree enjoyment without regard to his rank or reputation. His taciturn gravity fell away completely under the liberating influence of strong Flemish beer, and he took to presenting himself at the gates of noblemen’s houses at all hours of the night, demanding to be entertained. One evening he danced at a wedding until two in the morning, then went to the house of the duke of Savoy, gave orders that the duke be awakened, and spent the rest: of the night laughing and joking with his sleepy host.¹

Before long Philip’s nocturnal adventures became notorious. It was said at court that he “took delight in frequent masqueings, rather more than becomes the present troublous times,” and his intimate servants wereblamed for encouraging him in these and “similar pleasures.”² He seemed to have forgotten that he was a married man, and it was noticed that he had developed an indiscreet attachment to one Madame d’Aler, “who is considered very handsome, and of whom he seems much enamored.”³When Mary sent an envoy to her husband in mid-December Philip made no effort to conceal his scandalous pastimes from him, though the Englishman took it upon himself not to reveal what he had seen to Mary, “lest the queen, who is easily agitated, might take it too much to heart.”⁴

Philip had not forgotten about England entirely. In the first week of December he wrote to his wife in his own hand, telling her to appoint whomever she liked as chancellor (though he recommended either Paget or Wotton) and assuring her that he would be ready to leave Flanders as soon as he completed business which compelled him to go to Antwerp. In the same week, though, he ordered his armory, his wardrobe, and all his German and Spanish halbardiers sent to him in Flanders, and well-informed courtiers in Brussels were saying he showed little inclination to return to England for the time being.

Delays and complications in the transfer of the imperial lands were prolonging Philip’s stay. It took time for the emperor to divest himself of his sizable portion of the world, and each component of his sovereignty had to be passed on separately. He had formally invested Philip with the Netherlands in October, but had not yet passed on to him his Spanish inheritance; currently the emperor was occupied with drawing up the documents relating to his Sicilian and Aragonese lands. Charles’ physical incapacity and the jealousies between his ministers and Philip’s were creating an administrative confusion that made the task all the more difficult. There were thousands of edicts and other documents to be signed, including the acts of renunciation themselves. The emperor’s gout so crippled him that he could not sign these papers, yet when Philip was approached to sign them on his father’s behalf his ministers would not allow it. He must wait, they advised, until he was in possession of full sovereignty before taking over any public business. Meanwhile the clerks continued to copy out the letters notifying the emperor’s principal subjects and minor officials of the transfer of sovereignty—some two thousand of them for Spain and Sicily alone—and the messengers who were to carry them to their recipients waited for news that the emperor had recovered the use of his gnarled hand.

Charles’ sister Mary presented another complication. Far from showing herself eager to retire from public life, she was still attending meetings of her Council daily, and snowing up the councilors by being the first to arrive every morning. There were rumors that she might resume her regency, and she still addressed the Council members and even the governor in the forceful, imperious tone of a ruler.⁵ Clearly Philip would find it difficult to take power from his aunt when the time came.

He was finding it harder than he had expected to take power in England as well. If he thought that his threats would induce Mary to arrange his coronation he was mistaken. His threats wounded her, but they did not impair her political sense. She equivocated until Parliament met; then, sensing the extreme dissatisfaction in this most unruly of her Parliaments, she told Philip flatly that no proposal for his coronation had any chance of passage. He countered by hinting that she should bypass Parliament and crown him by her own authority, but his hints produced no effect. A year earlier a bill had been proposed which would have made Philip king on Mary’s death—a suggestion that represented the highwater mark of his popularity in England. But in recent months anti-Spanish sentiment had been growing, fostered in part by the libels of English refugees on the continent. Pamphlets such as “The Lamentation of Naples” and “The Mourning of Milan” described in horrifying detail what suffering imperial rule had brought to those states, making the English more and more reluctant to come under the Hapsburg yoke.

But if Philip could not be crowned, he could at least make certain that his sometime rival Edward Courtenay was permanently removed from the succession. Courtenay, whose Plantagenet blood gave him a far better claim to the throne than Philip had as the queen’s husband, was living out an uncomfortable exile on the continent, having recently made himself more dangerous than ever by becoming a Protestant. He had gone first to Brussels, where he and his attendants were repeatedly singled out for attack by Spaniards he had insulted when they were living in England. After the fourth assault he moved with his wounded retainers to Venice, but here too he was in danger of his life. Philip’s friend Ruy Gomez tried to arrange Courtenay’s assassination through a Dalmatian soldier with connections to the Uskoks, outlaws living in the Venetian countryside and eager to be of service in matters of this kind. Gomez offered the Dalmatian a thousand crowns to kill the man “who expects to be King of England,” and assured him he would have Philip’s favor as well, but instead of accepting the offer the soldier told the story to the Venetian Council, and Courtenay was spared. A year later he died mysteriously at Padua, perhaps of poison or perhaps, according to another account, of a fever he caught while hawking.⁶

While Philip was amusing himself in Flanders Mary faced the opposition of a hostile Parliament. The Venetian ambassador Michiel described the Commons of November 1555 as “more daring and licentious than former houses,” full of gentry and nobility impatient to oppose the queen’s proposals and unwilling to show her the respect former Commons had given her. Noailles had been busy organizing the opposition, and had been assured by some members that they would block any bill granting a subsidy to the government. Gardiner’s experience was sorely missed. (He died some three weeks after Parliament opened.) According to Michiel, he alone knew how to control resistance of this kind, sensing “the moment and the means for humoring and caressing, threatening and punishing” the rebellious Commons.⁷

After Gardiner died Mary took on much of his workload in addition to her own, and she now took on his function as conciliator of the Commons as well. Calling together sixty of the Commons members plus a majority of the Lords, she spoke to them “with her usual gravity and dignity,” explaining that the bills she hoped to see enacted were in keeping with the good of the crown and the restored church, and represented a fulfillment of her predestined role as queen.⁸ Several of the disputed bills eventually went through, but the session ended in coercion and recrimination. A crown bill recalling the political exiles in France and threatening them with forfeiture of their lands met with forceful opposition. A member from Gloucestershire, Sir Anthony Kingston, locked the doors of the house and kept them locked until the bill was defeated. Kingston was imprisoned for his “contemptuous behavior and great disorder,” and Parliament dissolved in a mood of bitterness on December 9.

Over the next several months a wave of popular feeling against the government swept through southern England. Rumors that Philip would soon be crowned king triggered panic in the country people who had never ceased to fear the Spaniards they had never seen, and even in the Londoners who had cheered Philip on his departure only a few months earlier. A blacksmith described how he met a man at midnight near Fins-bury Fields who told him for certain that the earl of Pembroke would soon obtain the crown for Philip. Other stories imagined that the Spaniard would not hesitate to seize the crown by force. When a truce between France and the empire was finally signed early in February, it was assumed that Philip would give his idle soldiers the task of conquering England. Noailles received intelligence from a continental source that ten companies of German and Flemish soldiers were being outfitted as an invasion force. Privately he doubted the report, but he spread it as widely as he could, and even managed to see that it reached the ears of Cardinal Pole.⁹

And as if rumors of one king were not disturbing enough, Londoners suddenly found they had a second king on their hands. In January a Greenwich man was arrested for handing out leaflets informing the people that Edward VI was alive and well in France, and was only waiting for a popular rising on his behalf to return to lead his subjects against the queen. In February a man claiming to be the dead king made himself known in London. He was caught and hanged, but not before “many persons, both men and women, were troubled by him.”¹⁰ Other disorders worried Mary and her councilors during January and February. There was rebellion in Ireland, and in England, printers were issuing a stream of“false fond books, ballets, rhymes and other lewd treatises” ridiculing the queen and king. The pipers and minstrels who wandered through the countryside were often asked to sing a favorite song called “Sacke full of Newes,” a lampoon against the court, and in the “north parts” a company of players calling themselves “Sir Francis Leek’s Men” were drawing large crowds to see a play “containing very naughty and seditious matter touching the king and queen’s majesties, and the state of the realm.”¹¹

The ballads that did most damage to the queen’s repute were those that glorified the Protestant martyrs. Ballad-makers wove the names of the seventy-five men and women burned as heretics during 1555 into songs glorifying their heroism and blackening the clergy who burned them. The “Ballad of John Careless” was sung wherever Protestants gathered, and in many places where the Spaniards were feared and the queen’s policies despised. Another song told the story of a woman condemned to the stake who gave birth to a child as she suffered in the flames; the blameless child was thrown into the fire to die with its mother.¹²

The recent double burning of Ridley and Latimer helped to shape the burgeoning popular image of martyrdom. Both men died with the resolute piety that had come to be the hallmark of those the Catholic clergy called heretics. Ridley died slowly and horribly, his agony prolonged by a badly built fire. Latimer appeared to die all but painlessly, seeming miraculously to embrace the fire and bathe his hands and face in it. Many people in the large crowd that came to witness the executions wept and shook their heads at the sight, and carried away the memory of Latimer’s prophecy that the meaning of these sufferings would become clear in time. “Be of good comfort, Master Ridley,” he was heard to say, “and play the man, we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”

It was in this atmosphere of turbulence and sinister excitement that the most widespread of the plots to overthrow Queen Mary took shape. Tales of plotting came to the attention of the Council regularly, but in the first months of 1556 the accounts began to sound more ominous than usual. First the English ambassador in France sent word of a conspiracy of long standing whose object was to “deprive Mary of her estate” and to use her “as she used Queen Jane.” According to the ambassador’s informant the chief conspirators were “strong and many,” and “such as had never offended the queen before.”¹⁸ In March the outlines of a much more dangerous plot began to come to light when one of the lesser figures in the scheme went to Cardinal Pole voluntarily and told everything he knew. This man, Thomas White, had been assigned to take part in robbing the royal Exchequer of fifty thousand pounds in silver. Through the wife of the Exchequer’s teller the conspirators were able to<make an impression of the teller’s keys, and they counted on the cooperation of the Keeper of the Star Chamber and the customs official at Gravesend who agreed to let the boat loaded with the stolen stiver pass the harbor unmolested. It soon became clear that the robbery was merely a preliminary to a more far-reaching plan. The political rebels living in France, their numbers augmented by mercenaries paid with the Exchequer silver, were to cross the Channel and land on the south coast. The leader of the invasion, Sir Henry Dudley, was confident that once he and his thousand soldiers landed, “he would quickly have twenty thousand men, and the best.”

White’s betrayal of his fellow-conspirators meant that the invasion plan did not mature, but as more and more of the men involved were seized and interrogated it became evident that there were nearly as many would-be rebels in England as there were in France, Dozens of public officials, landholders along the southern coast, and gentry in many parts of the kingdom were deeply implicated, and there was evidence from many quarters that some members of Mary’s Council gave at least tacit encouragement to the conspirators.¹⁴ To observers at foreign courts Dudley’s conspiracy exposed the grave weakness of the English government. In the absence of her spouse the queen’s authority appeared to be melting away.

In fact it might have been argued that the defusing of the plot before any harm was done confirmed the strength of the government rather than its weakness, and that Dudley’s menace loomed larger in the imaginations of the queen’s commissioners than it would have proved in fact. But Mary took no comfort from this view of her situation. From the time the first arrests were made she did not appear in public, and Michiel noted that she was “greatly troubled” by recent events. Everywhere she looked she saw traitors. Gentlemen among her courtiers were found to be in league with the principal conspirators. Lord Bray, the nimble-footed gallant who had danced so skillfully on her wedding day, was now in close custody in the Tower. Captain William Staunton, who had steadfastly defended Mary against Wyatt’s forces two years earlier, was also arrested for complicity.¹⁵ The skilled politicians in the Council were so tainted themselves that they could not be entrusted with the task of bringing the traitors to justice; only Mary’s loyal former household officials—Rochester, Englefield, and Walgrave, along with the stalwart Jerningham and Hastings—were appointed to the commission charged with uncovering the truth of the plot. According to Noailles, one of Mary’s chaplains had recently tried to kill her, and she was in dread of even her personal attendants.

In the last days of 1555 Mary wrote to Philip that “she was encompassed with enemies and could not move without endangering her

crown.” Her apprehension grew stronger as the alarming extent of Dudley’s plot became clear, and it made her reluctant to part with the few men at court whose loyalty she counted on. Chief among these was Cardinal Pole, whose continual presence in the palace helped Mary through the difficult winter months. In March she appointed Pole archbishop of Canterbury, with mixed feelings: much as it pleased her to place Pole at the head of the English church she knew he would have to leave her to go to Canterbury to take possession of his see. In preparation for his departure, she provided him with a greatly enlarged household, and episcopal robes and ornaments worth ten thousand ducats, but she dreaded his going, and in the end insisted that he delay until after Easter.¹⁶

Noailles, who was active in Dudley’s conspiracy and took the greatest pleasure in filling his letters and dispatches with news of the queen’s discomfiture, painted a very dismal picture of Mary’s torment during these months. In a letter to a lady of the French court the ambassador wrote how Mary was “in that depth of melancholy, that nothing seems to remain for her but to imitate the example of Dido.” “But that she will not do,” he hastened to add, lest his correspondent at the French court spread the rumor that the English queen was considering suicide. To Henri II Noailles described how Mary “lets no one see her but four women of her chamber, and a fifth who sleeps with her.” She fretted the hours away in crying and writing long letters to Philip, and in bewailing the faithlessness of her subjects. Her tears were futile, the ambassador remarked, as it was now plain to everyone that Philip “never meant to reside for any length of time in England,” and had withdrawn all of his servants and possessions except for his confessor. Mary herself admitted that her separation from Philip was likely to be permanent. According to one of Noailles’ informants, the queen “told her ladies, that as she had done all possible to induce her husband to return, and as she found he would not, she meant to withdraw utterly from men, and live quietly, as she had done the chief part of her life before she married.”

Noailles’ description was an exaggeration, indeed a caricature. But there is no doubt Mary found life wearying in Philip’s absence and that she was under great strain. When Noailles’ wife saw the queen at court in May she hardly recognized her, and told her husband that Mary looked ten years older than when she had seen her last.

Mary turned forty in February, and she was feeling her age. Philip was not yet thirty, and to all accounts he was making the most of what was left of his youth in the banquet halls of Flanders. Mary was painfully aware how little attraction she had for her husband, especially after the embarrassment of her false pregnancy. There was no conclusive proof that she could not bear children, but Philip was understandably reluctantto wait out another questionable pregnancy when the risk of error was great.

Perhaps in token of the approach of her fortieth birthday one of Mary’s subjects gave her on New Year’s Day a supply of Dr. Stevens’ Imperial or Sovereign Water, a tonic guaranteed to lengthen life far beyond the normal span. The medicinal water contained a dozen or more spices ground into Gascoigne wine, and both the inventor himself and a notable prelate were able to vouch for its death-defying properties. Dr. Stevens survived to “such extreme age, that he could neither go nor ride,” and he continued to live on, though bedridden, for a number of years after he had lost the strength to walk. The prelate clung to life until he was so old he could no longer drink from a cup, and had to suck his daily draught of Sovereign Water “through a hollow pipe of silver.”¹⁷ Such examples of longevity were not unheard of. Only a few weeks after Mary’s birthday news of a man of truly prodigious age came out of Rome. He claimed to be 116, and the Venetian ambassador, who saw him, confirmed that his age seemed indeed to be “very great.”¹⁸ If a man born during the Hundred Years’ War could survive into the reign of Queen Mary, then the queen herself had every reason to hope for a generous span of years.

Philip too had a gift for Mary. He had just completed the last of the ceremonies through which he took possession of his father’s Spanish lands, and he sent one of his gentlemen to his wife “with congratulations on her being able for the future to style herself the queen of many and great crowns, and on her being no less their mistress than of her own crown of England.” He had to go to Antwerp for festivities celebrating the emperor’s renunciation, Philip’s envoy explained, but as soon as these were over the king would return to Mary’s side.¹⁹

The rejoicings in Antwerp proved to be lengthy. There were pageants, bonfires, free-flowing wine barrels and booming cannon. The English merchants had erected a pageant of “a goodly castle, of the antique sort, fair painted and trimmed with banners, arms, and writings,” and Philip declared himself very pleased with their efforts. The celebrations were marred by a serious accident, however. The servants charged with looking after the torches in another pageant were careless, and the whole structure caught fire. A dozen people were killed instantly, and a horse and rider were felled when one of the structure’s iron supports broke and came crashing down on top of them.²⁰

Word now came to Mary that Philip would soon leave Antwerp for Louvain, where he would “spend as little time as he can” and then depart for a Channel port. But ten days later he was still in Antwerp, taking part in jousts and living extravagantly on borrowed money. The English ambassador Mason wrote to Petre that Philip was spending thirty-five pounds a week, and fending off the bankers from whom he borrowed itby saying he would pay them on his return to England. But the weeks went on and he showed no sign of returning, Mason added, and “in the meantime, time runneth and charges withal, and he remains tied to the stake.”²¹

In March Philip was still as earnestly engaged in his familiar pastimes as ever. He was currently preoccupied with planning an elaborate joust with Ruy Gomez and others, to be held after Easter. A rival of his in the lists, Count Schwartzburg, was preparing a tournament “in honor of his sweethearts,” and Philip, not to be outdone, was taking as the theme of his tournament “that the women of Brussels are handsomer than those of Mechlin.”²² To Mary he sent the soberer explanation that he was detained in Flanders because of the expected visit of the king and queen of Bohemia. She countered with the suggestion that he bring his royal visitors with him to England, but Philip did nothing about it.²³ By now he was saying openly that England was nothing to him but an expensive nuisance, and it looked as though his marriage was no more than a matter of form. At the French court the king was predicting a worse event to come.²⁴ “I am of opinion,” he told the Venetian ambassador in private, “that ere long the king of England will endeavor to dissolve his marriage with the queen.”