PRINCESS MARY, AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-EIGHT.
It was to Hunsdon that, in the month of September, Ridley came to pay his respects to the King’s sister, cherishing, it may be, a secret hope that where King and Council had failed, he might succeed; and his courteous reception by the officers of her household was calculated to encourage his sanguine anticipations. Mary too, when, at eleven o’clock, he was admitted to her presence, conversed with her guest right pleasantly for a quarter of an hour, telling him that she remembered the time when he had acted as chaplain to her father, and inviting him to stay to dinner. It was not until after the meal was ended that the Bishop unfolded the true object of his visit. It was not one of simple courtesy; he had come, he said, to do his duty by her as her diocesan, and to preach before her on the following Sunday.
If Mary prepared for battle, she answered at first with quiet dignity. It was observed that she flushed; her response, however, was merely to bid him “make the answer to that himself.” When, refusing to take the hint, the Bishop continued to urge his point, she spoke more plainly.
“I pray you, make the answer (as I have said) to this matter yourself,” she repeated, “for you know the answer well enough. But if there be no remedy but I must make you answer, this shall be your answer: the door of the parish church adjoining shall be open for you if you come, and you may preach if you list; but neither I nor any of mine shall hear you.”
To preach to an empty church, or to a handful of country yokels, would not have answered the episcopal purpose; and Ridley was plainly losing his temper.
He hoped, he said, she would not refuse to hear God’s word. The Princess answered with a scoff. She did not know what they now called God’s word; she was sure it was not the same as in her father’s time—to whom, it will be remembered, the Bishop had been chaplain.
The dispute was becoming heated. God’s word, Ridley retorted, was the same at all times, but had been better understood and practised in some ages than in others. To this Mary replied by a personal thrust. He durst not, she told him, for his ears, have avowed his present faith in King Henry’s time; then—asking a question to which she must have known the answer—was he of the Council? she demanded. The inquiry was probably intended as a reminder that his rights did not extend to interference with the King’s sister, as well as to elicit, as it did, the confession that he held no such post.
“You might well enough, as the Council goeth nowadays,” observed Mary carelessly; proceeding, at parting, to thank the Bishop for his gentleness in coming to see her, “but for your offering to preach before me I thank you never a whit.”
In the presence of his hostess the discomfited guest appears to have kept his temper under control, but, having duly drunk of the stirrup cup presented to him by her steward, Sir Thomas Wharton, he gave free expression to his sentiments.
“Surely I have done amiss,” he said, looking “very sadly,” and explaining, in answer to Wharton’s interrogation, that he had erred in having drunk under a roof where God’s word was rejected. He should rather have shaken the dust off his feet for a testimony against the house and departed instantly, he told the listeners assembled to speed him on his way—whose hair, says Heylyn, in relating this story, stood on end with his denunciations.[133]