Mary herself was less satisfied on this point. Happy as she would be to find herself out of personal danger, she feared her father might still persist in his heresies, and bring more souls to perdition; “she would, therefore, prefer infinitely,” she said, “the general and total remedy so necessary for God’s service.” She wished Chapuys to send another messenger to the Emperor, to stir him up to activity. But Chapuys, desperate of rousing Charles by mere entreaties, encouraged her flight out of the country as the surest means of bringing Henry to a reckoning. The difficulty would not be very great; the King had shown an inclination to be more gentle with her; Mrs. Shelton had orders to admit her mother’s physician to her at any time that he pleased; and others of the household at Kimbolton were to be transferred to her service; these relaxations would make the enterprise much easier, and Chapuys was disposed to let it be tried. The Emperor’s consent, however, was of course a preliminary condition, and his latest instructions had been unfavourable. The Ambassador, therefore, referred the matter once more to Charles’s judgment, adding only, with a view to his own safety, that, should the escape be carried out, his own share in it would immediately be suspected; and the King, who had no fear of anyone in the world, would undoubtedly kill him. He could be of no use in the execution of the plot, and would, therefore, make an excuse to cross to Flanders before the attempt was made.[379]
Chapuys’s precipitancy had been disappointed before, and was to be disappointed again; he had worked hard to persuade Charles that Catherine had been murdered; Charles, by the manner in which he received the intelligence, showed that his Minister’s representations had not convinced him. In sending word to the Empress that the Queen was dead, the Emperor said that accounts differed as to her last illness: some saying that it was caused by an affection of the stomach, which had lasted for some days; others that she had drunk something suspected to have contained poison. He did not himself say that he believed her to have been poisoned, nor did he wish it to be repeated as coming from him. The Princess, he heard, was inconsolable; he hoped God would have pity on her. He had gone into mourning, and had ordered the Spanish Court to do the same.[380]
In Spain there was an obvious consciousness that nothing had been done of which notice could be taken. Had there been a belief that a Spanish princess had been made away with in England, as the consummation of a protracted persecution, so proud a people would indisputably have demanded satisfaction. The effect was exactly the opposite. Articles had been drawn by the Spanish Council for a treaty with France as a settlement of the dispute about Milan. One of the conditions was the stipulation to which Cromwell had referred in a conversation with Chapuys, that France was to undertake the execution of the Papal sentence and the reduction of England to the Church. The Queen being dead, the Emperor’s Council recommended that this article should now be withdrawn, and the recovery of the King be left to negotiation.[381] Instead of seeing in Catherine’s death an occasion for violence, they found in it a fresh motive for a peaceful arrangement.
It was assumed that if the Princess escaped, and if Henry did not then submit, war would be the immediate consequence. The Emperor, always disinclined towards the “remedy” which his Ambassador had so long urged upon him, acted as Cromwell expected. The adventurous flight to Gravesend had to be abandoned, and he decided that Mary must remain quiet. In protecting Catherine while alive he had so far behaved like a gentleman and a man of honour. He was her nearest relation, and it was impossible for him to allow her to be pushed aside without an effort to prevent it. But as a statesman he had felt throughout that a wrong to his relation, or even a wrong to the Holy See, in the degraded condition of the Papacy, was no sufficient cause for adding to the confusions of Christendom. He had rather approved than condemned the internal reforms in the Church of England: and, after taking time to reflect and perhaps inquire more particularly into the circumstances of Catherine’s end, he behaved precisely as he would have done if he was satisfied that her death was natural: he gave Chapuys to understand, in a letter from Naples,[382] that, if a fresh opening presented itself, he must take up again the abandoned treaty; and the secret interviews recommenced between the Ambassador and the English Chief Secretary.
These instructions must have arrived a week after the plans had been completed for Mary’s escape, and Chapuys had to swallow his disappointment and obey with such heart as he could command. The first approaches were wary on both sides. Cromwell said that he had no commission to treat directly; and that, as the previous negotiations had been allowed to drop, the first overtures must now come from the Emperor; the Queen being gone, however, the ground of difference was removed, and the restoration of the old alliance was of high importance to Christendom; the King and the Emperor united could dictate peace to the world; France was on the eve of invading Italy, and had invited the King to make a simultaneous attack upon Flanders; a party in the Council wished him to consent; the King, however, preferred the friendship of the Emperor, and, Catherine being no longer alive, there was nothing to keep them asunder.
Chapuys, who never liked the proposal of a treaty at all, listened coldly; he said he had heard language of that kind before, and wished for something more precise; Cromwell replied that he had been speaking merely his own opinion; he had no authority and, therefore, could not enter into details; if there was to be a reconciliation, he repeated that the Emperor must make the advances.
The Emperor, Chapuys rejoined, would probably make four conditions: the King must be reconciled to the Church as well as to himself; the Princess must be restored to her rank and be declared legitimate; the King must assist in the war with the Turks, and the league must be offensive as well as defensive.
Cromwell’s answer was more encouraging than Chapuys perhaps desired. The fourth article, he said, would be accepted at once, and on the third the King would do what he could; no great objection would be made to the second; the door was open. Reconciliation with Rome would be difficult, but even that was not impossible. If the Emperor would write under his own hand to the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, and to the Duke of Richmond, who in mind and body singularly resembled his father, much might be done.
A confidential Minister would not have ventured so far without knowing Henry’s private views, and such large concessions were a measure of the decline of Anne Boleyn’s influence. As regarded the Princess Mary, Chapuys had found that there was a real disposition to be more kind to her, for the King had sent her a crucifix which had belonged to her mother, containing a piece of the true cross, which Catherine had desired that she should have,[383] and had otherwise showed signs of a father’s affection.
The Emperor himself now appears upon the scene, and the eagerness which he displayed for a reconciliation showed how little he had really seen to blame in Henry’s conduct. So long as Catherine lived he was bound in honour to insist on her acknowledgment as queen; but she was gone, and he was willing to say no more about her. He saw that the intellect and energy of England were running upon the German lines. Chapuys, and perhaps other correspondents more trustworthy, had assured him that, if things went on as they were going, the hold of the Catholic Church on the English people would soon be lost. The King himself, if he wished it, might not be able to check the torrent, and the opinion of his vassals and his own imperious disposition might carry him to the extreme lengths of Luther. The Emperor was eager to rescue Henry before it was too late from the influences under which his quarrel with the Pope had plunged him. He praised Chapuys’s dexterity; he was pleased with what Cromwell had said, and proceeded himself to take up the points of the proposals.