Edward VI. had been dead three days, and precautions had been taken in London when Lady Jane Grey, who had retired to Chelsea during the last weeks of the life of the king, was recalled to Sion House, the palace of her family. She was there alone on the 10th of July, 1553, occupied, it is said, in reading Plato in Greek—for Lady Jane was as learned as she was gentle and modest—when the arrival of the Duke of Northumberland, her father-in-law, accompanied by several lords of the council, was announced. Indifferent subjects were talked about; but the young woman was troubled by the watchful looks and respectful tone of her visitors, when her mother-in-law entered with the Duchess of Suffolk. "The king, your cousin and our sovereign lord, has given up his soul to God," said Northumberland; "but before his death, and in order to preserve the kingdom from the infection of Popery, he resolved to set aside his sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, declared illegitimate by an act of Parliament, and he commanded us to proclaim your Grace as queen and sovereign to succeed him." At the same moment, the lords of the council prostrated themselves before Lady Jane, vowing fidelity to her; she started back a pace, uttered a loud cry, and fell to the floor. She was young, timid, in delicate health, fond of retirement, and addicted to serious studies; she protested, asserting that she did not feel herself capable of governing. "But if the right is mine," she said at length, raising her head with humble reliance, "I hope that God will give me strength to bear the sceptre for the glory and happiness of the people of England." She was immediately conducted to the Tower, the usual residence of sovereigns before their coronation; at the same time, the death of King Edward VI. and the accession of Lady Jane Grey were proclaimed in the streets and market-places, while the reason of the exclusion of the princesses was explained. The crowd listened in silence, without any tokens of satisfaction, and the name of Mary was whispered among them. This infringement of the ordinary rules of succession was evidently viewed with no favour by the people of London.
In the country the movement was more vigorous. Mary had written to the council, haughtily claiming her rights in a tone befitting the sovereign power, and the lords had not yet replied to this appeal, when a certain number of noblemen and gentlemen hastened to join, their legitimate queen. The Catholics were not alone, for Mary promised to change nothing in the laws and the religion established by King Edward; she had a small army under her orders, when the Duke of Northumberland, who had hesitated to leave London, and the conspirators whom he held in some degree captive decided at length to march against Mary, leaving the Duke of Suffolk with his daughter to govern in her name. He had scarcely issued forth from the capital, when the members of the council crept out of the Tower under different pretexts, and met at Castle Baynard, the residence of the Earl of Pembroke. The Earl of Arundel was the first to announce his resolution of passing over to Queen Mary. "If reasons do not suffice," exclaimed Lord Pembroke, "this sword shall make Mary queen, or I will die in her cause!" All the nobles responded with acclamation, and the Duke of Suffolk, who had rejoined his colleagues, united his voice to theirs, thus basely abandoning his daughter. Mary was proclaimed in the streets of London, in the open places where a week before the name of Lady Jane had resounded; at Paul's Cross, where Bishop Ridley had preached on the preceding Sunday in favour of the Protestant succession. This time the people applauded, and the Catholics triumphed; the Protestants had not learnt to connect religious principles with political freedom, or did not foresee the evils which they were about to suffer. On leaving London with his troops, Northumberland himself had augured ill from the coldness of the populace. "They come to see us pass," he said, "but nobody cries God bless you!" He was at Cambridge when he learned of Mary's proclamation in London, the defection of the members of the council, and that of the forces which he had raised in the north and who had rallied round Mary. Tears flowed down his cheeks when he repaired to the public square of the city, and throwing his cap in the air, was the first to proclaim Queen Mary. On the morrow he was arrested and taken to the Tower, which Lady Jane had quitted to return to Sion House as soon as Mary had been recognized by the council, but the little queen of ten days had been arrested, as well as her husband; the gloomy fortress began to be peopled by all the actors in the drama of which this poor girl was to be the victim. Mary advanced by short stages towards London, where she entered on the 3rd of August amidst the joyful acclamations of the populace; her sister, Elizabeth, came to meet her with a thousand noblemen and gentlemen. The conduct of Elizabeth had been as skillful as it was prudent, and worthy of the wise policy which she was to practise upon the throne, and she was already indebted for this to the counsels of the Secretary of State, Cecil.
When Northumberland had caused the accession of Lady Jane to be announced to her, proposing land and riches in exchange for her rights to the throne, Elizabeth replied that she had no rights to renounce, since her older sister, the Princess Mary, was alive. Then declaring herself ill, she awaited the event, knowing how to forecast it to the exact extent in order to arrive before her sister in London, muster her friends, and salute the new sovereign upon her entry into the capital. During the five years of the reign of her sister all the prudence of Cecil was required for the service of the mistress whom he had chosen.
The first care of the queen was to repair to the Tower; the prisoners awaited her, not those whom she had caused to be detained there, but the old Duke of Norfolk, a captive for so many years, the Duchess of Somerset, and Bishop Gardiner, who delivered in the name of all a brief speech of welcome to the sovereign whose accession restored them to liberty. Mary was moved to tears. "You are my prisoners," she said, embracing them. The Bishops Bonner and Tunstall were also delivered from their long captivity; the latter was admitted into the council as well as Gardiner, who soon became chancellor and prime minister. The corpse of King Edward had scarcely been interred, and the public obsequies celebrated according to the English rites, when already the sermons at Paul's Cross changed their character. Bourn, canon of St. Paul's, soon afterwards Bishop of Bath and Wells, rose against the innovations introduced into the Church under King Edward, declaring against those who had kept Bonner, the legitimate bishop of that diocese, for four years in prison. The people were not accustomed to such tirades; the canon was upon the point of being beaten to death; two reformed preachers, who were shortly to seal their testimony with their lives, Bradford and Rogers, had great difficulty in conducting him back to his residence in safety.
Queen Mary had been a fortnight in London, but six weeks only had elapsed since the death of Edward VI., when the Duke of Northumberland, his eldest son, the Earl of Warwick, and the Marquis of Northampton appeared before the council as prisoners charged with high treason. The crime was manifest, but the judges assembled to condemn the guilty men were implicated in it like themselves. Northumberland tried to shelter himself behind the members of the council, who had all signed the edict emanating from the personal will of the deceased king; the councillors maintained that they had obeyed under the penalty of their own lives; the Duke of Norfolk, who had but just escaped from the Tower, presided over the court; Cranmer and the Duke of Suffolk signed the sentence. All the base acts of Northumberland could not save his head; in vain did he ask to confer with the doctors sent by the Queen in order to enlighten his conscience; the only favor granted him was that of being simply beheaded. The Earl of Warwick behaved with more self-respect; four secondary accomplices were condemned with the three great noblemen; but Northumberland, Sir John Gates, and Sir Thomas Palmer alone suffered their sentence. They died on Tower Hill on the 22nd of August; the duke was interred in the chapel of the Tower, beside the Duke of Somerset, his former victim; on his right and left reposed the remains of Anne Boleyn and Catharine Howard. The queen was urged to rid herself also of Lady Jane Grey and her husband; but she called to mind the youth of the poor little usurper, saying that she had been but a tool in the hands of her father-in-law. Mary contented herself by detaining her at the Tower.
The Catholic party was triumphant; the Emperor Charles V. recommended prudence, advising that some few dangerous enemies be struck down, but that the new religion should not be touched, trusting to time the care of modifying errors, and taking care not to plunge the people into despair by too much severity. This wise policy agreed neither with the fervent convictions of Mary nor with the firmness of her character, embittered by long misfortunes, by reiterated acts of injustice and by shattered health. "God has protected me in all my misfortunes," she said, "it is in Him that I confide. I will not testify my gratitude slowly, in secret, but at once and openly." The public declaration promised to molest none of her subjects for religion; but mass had already been re-established in the principal churches in London, Cranmer and Latimer were sent to the Tower, and the Princess Elizabeth, prudently bowing her head before the storm, had renounced the practice of the Protestant worship to return to the Catholic faith, of which she always preserved some remains at the bottom of her heart; she accompanied her sister to mass, had a chapel established in her residence, and devoted a portion of her time to the embroidering of church ornaments. Mary was crowned on the first of October at Westminister, by the hands of Gardiner. Five days afterwards Parliament assembled; a month had scarcely elapsed when the edifice raised with so much care by Cranmer and the English Protestants was falling in its entirety; matters had returned to the point at which Henry VIII. had left them: the prayer-book was set aside, the service in the vernacular tongue abolished, the marriage of priests and communion of the two kinds prohibited; the Bishops who were married, or were in favor of the reformed doctrines were deprived of their sees, while the marriage of Henry VIII. and Catharine was alone declared valid. The queen did not, however, renounce the title of chief of the Church; she did not wish to alarm the Protestants by placing them at the outset, under the yoke of Rome, and above all she avoided touching upon the question of the restitution of the property of the clergy, which would have raised all the House of Lords against the new form of government. The queen contented herself by setting the example by taking measures to restore to the Church all the estates annexed to the crown. Being reassured by this indulgence. Parliament voted all that was demanded, and destroyed all that it had formerly established; the convocation of the clergy returned in a mass to the old practices; the priests who had sincerely embraced the Protestant faith and who refused to repeat mass were replaced without difficulty by the monks who were everywhere issuing forth from their hiding-places. The prisons were soon filled by the refractory; those who were not prisoners were able to go about begging along the high roads with their wives and children; a certain number fled abroad. Violent persecution had not yet commenced; Cranmer was acquitted upon the count of treason, but he was sent back to the Tower as a heretic. The sentence of death pronounced against Lady Jane Gray and her husband was not put into execution; the captives even enjoyed a kind of liberty in their prison. Queen Mary was occupied in a more important matter; although now thirty-seven years of age, moved by the solicitations of her councillors, she thought of marriage.
Many illustrious alliances for the Princess Mary had been contracted and broken off in succession; when she was yet in her cradle, the Emperor, the King of France, and the dauphin had each in turn aspired to her hand; but it was whispered at the court that the queen experienced some liking for Lord Edward Courtenay, son of the Marquis of Exeter, executed in 1538; scarcely had she released that handsome young man from the Tower, when she conferred on him the title of Earl of Devonshire, with all the confiscated estates of his father, and it was asserted that her favours did not stop there. Edward Courtenay did not know how to take advantage of fortune; he was thoughtless and a debauchee; his convictions did not incline to the side of Roman Catholicism, and he preferred, it was said, the society of the Princess Elizabeth to that of her royal sister. The queen manifested much coldness towards the princess, who retired to her residence at Ashridge in Buckinghamshire, closely watched by two agents of the court. A union with Cardinal Pole, a cousin of the queen, and who was not in orders, was also spoken of; but he was fifty-three years of age, he was living in retirement by the Lake of Garda; and, although there was a project at that time at Rome for sending him as a legate to England, the Emperor increased the obstacles to his departure, in order to have time to accomplish an undertaking which he had greatly at heart and which the presence of Pole might have hindered.
Queen Mary had learnt during her misfortunes to depend upon Charles V., who had never failed her: since she had been upon the throne she had taken his advice in all her affairs; the Emperor took advantage of this circumstance to ask her for her hand in favor of his son, the Arch-duke Philip, soon afterwards Philip II., who had recently lost his wife, Isabella of Portugal. The foreign powers, and especially France, seconded by the ambassadors of Venice, dreaded this union, which was calculated to cause the balance in Europe to incline against them; their opposition was favored by a powerful party in the very bosom of the council; Gardiner was at its head. He vigorously represented to the queen the aversion which the English had always experienced towards foreign sovereigns, the discontent which the haughtiness of Philip had aroused among his own subjects, the continual hostilities with France which must result from this marriage, the anger and uneasiness of the reformed party. The Commons even presented an address praying the queen to choose her husband from among the distinguished men of her kingdom.