The morning on which Lambert suffered he was taken to Cromwell’s house, where he breakfasted simply in the hall; and afterwards he died at Smithfield, crying with his last breath, “None but Christ—none but Christ.”[415] Foxe relates, as a rumour, that Cromwell, before Lambert suffered, begged his forgiveness. A more accurate account of Cromwell’s feelings is furnished by himself in a letter written a few days later to Sir Thomas Wyatt:—
Nov. 28. Cromwell’s opinion of the sentence.
“The sixteenth of this present month, the King’s Majesty, for the reverence of the holy sacrament of the altar, did sit openly in his hall, and there presided at the disputation, process, and judgment of a miserable heretic sacramentary, who was burnt the twentieth of the same month. It was a wonder to see how princely, with how excellent gravity, and inestimable majesty, his Majesty exercised the very office of a superior head of his Church of England; how benignly his Grace essayed to convert the miserable man; how strong and manifest reason his Highness alleged against him. I wished the princes of Christendom to have seen it; undoubtedly they should have much marvelled at his Majesty’s most high wisdom and judgment, and reputed him none otherwise after the same than in manner the mirrour and light of all other kings and princes in Christendom. The same was done openly, with great solemnity.”[416]
Intentions of the Emperor against England.
The circumstances which accompanied Pole’s mission into Spain, and those which occasioned the catastrophe of the marriage treaties, can now be understood. The whole secret of the Emperor’s intentions it is not easy, perhaps it is not necessary, to comprehend; but, as it was not till late in the spring that the threatening symptoms finally cleared, so it is impossible to doubt that an enterprise against England was seriously meditated, and was relinquished only when the paralysis of the domestic factions who were to have risen in its support could no longer be mistaken.
Sir Thomas Wyatt protests against the reception of Reginald Pole in Spain; but the Emperor will not refuse to see him.
The French ambassador as well as the Spanish leaves England.
The official language of the Spanish court through the winter “had waxed from colder to coldest.”[417] On Pole’s arrival in the Peninsula, Sir Thomas Wyatt, by the king’s instructions, protested against his reception. The Emperor, who in 1537 had forbidden his entrance into his dominions when on a similar errand, replied now that, “if he was his own traitor, he could not refuse him audience, coming as a legate from the Holy Father.” The next step was the arrest of the English ships in Flanders, and the recall of the Spanish ambassador; and meanwhile a mysterious fleet was collected at Antwerp and in other ports, every one asking with what object, and no one being able to answer, unless it were for a descent on Ireland or England.[418] Mendoza’s departure from London was followed immediately after by the withdrawal of M. de Chatillon, the ambassador of France. “It is in every man’s mouth,” reported Wriothesley, “that we shall have war. It has been told me that the commission that was sent hither for our matters[419] was dispatched only to keep us in hopes, and to the intent that we might be taken tardy and without provision.”[420]
Wriothesley demands an explanation of the arrest of the ships.