These assurances, combined with the queen's secret promises about Elizabeth, were held sufficient; and on the 6th of March, at three o'clock in the afternoon, the ambassadors were conducted by Pembroke into the presence chamber. The queen, kneeling before the sacrament, called it to witness that, in consenting to the alliance with the Prince of Spain, she was moved by no carnal concupiscence, but only by her zeal for the welfare of her realm and subjects; and then, rising up, with the bystanders all in tears, she gave her hand to Egmont as Philip's representative. The blessing was pronounced by Gardiner, and the proxy marriage was completed.[271] The prince was to be sent for without delay, and Southampton was chosen as the port at which he should disembark, "being in the country of the Bishop of Winchester," where the people were, for the most part, good Catholics.
Parliament was expected to give its sanction without further difficulty; the opposition of the country having been neutralised by the same causes which had influenced the council. The queen, indeed, in going through the ceremony before consulting parliament, though she had broken the promise which she made in the Guildhall, had placed it beyond their power to raise difficulties; but other questions were likely to rise which would not be settled so easily. She herself was longing to show her gratitude to Providence by restoring the authority of the pope; and the pope intended, if possible, to recover his first-fruits and Peter's pence, and to maintain the law of the church which forbade the alienation of church property.[272] The English laity were resolute on their side to keep hold of what they had got; and to set the subject at rest, and to prevent unpleasant discussions on points of theology, Paget, with his friends, desired that the session should last but a few days, and that two measures only should be brought forward; the first for the confirmation of the treaty of marriage, the second to reassert the validity of the titles under which the church estates were held by their present owners. If the queen consented to the last, her title of Head of the Church might be dropped informally, and allowed to fall into abeyance.[273]
Gardiner, however, saw in the failure of the insurrection an opportunity of emancipating the church, and of extinguishing heresy with fire and sword.[274] He was preparing a bill to restore the ancient rigorous tyranny of the ecclesiastical courts; and by his own authority he directed that, in the writs for the parliament, the summons should be to meet at Oxford,[275] where the conservatism of the country would be released from the dread of the London citizens. The spirit which, thirteen years before, had passed the Six Articles Bill by acclamation, continued to smoulder in the slow minds of the country gentlemen, and was blazing freely among the lately persecuted priests. The Bishop of Winchester had arranged in his imagination a splendid melodrama. The session was to begin on the 2nd of April; and the ecclesiastical bill was to be the first to be passed. On the 8th of March, Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer were sent down to the University to be tried before a committee of Convocation which had already decided on its verdict; and the Fathers of the Reformation were either to recant or to suffer the flaming penalties of heresy in the presence of the legislature, as the first-fruits of a renovated church discipline.
Vainly Renard protested. In the fiery obstinacy of his determination, Gardiner was the incarnate expression of the fury of the ecclesiastical faction, smarting, as they were, under their long degradation, and under the irritating consciousness of those false oaths of submission which they had sworn to a power which they loathed. Once before, in the first reaction against Protestant excesses, the Bishop of Winchester had seen the Six Articles Bill carried—but his prey had then been snatched from his grasp. Now, embittered by fresh oppression, he saw his party once more in a position to revenge their wrongs when there was no Henry any longer to stand between them and their enemies. He would take the tide at the flood, forge a weapon keener than the last, and establish the Inquisition.[276] Paget swore it should not be.[277] Charles V. himself, dreading a fresh interruption to the marriage, insisted that this extravagant fervour should be checked;[278] and the Bishop of Arras, the scourge of the Netherlands, interceded for moderation in England. But Gardiner and the clergy were not to be turned from the hope of their hearts by the private alarms of the Imperialists; and in the heart of the queen religious orthodoxy was Philip's solitary rival. Renard urged her to be prudent in religion and cruel to the political prisoners. Gardiner, though eager as Renard to kill Elizabeth, would buy the privilege of working his will upon the Protestants by sparing Courtenay and Courtenay's friends. Mary listened to the worst counsels of each, and her distempered humour settled into a confused ferocity. So unwholesome appeared the aspect of things in the middle of March that, notwithstanding the formal contract, Renard almost advised the emperor to relinquish the thought of committing his son among so wild a people.[279]
As opposition to extreme measures was anticipated in the House of Lords, as well as among the Commons, it was important to strengthen the bench of bishops. The pope had granted permission without difficulty to fill the vacant sees; and on the 1st of April six new prelates were consecrated at St. Mary Overies, while Sir John Brydges and Sir John Williams of Thame were raised to the peerage.
The Protestants, it must be admitted, had exerted themselves to make Gardiner's work easy to him. On the 14th of March the wall of a house in Aldgate became suddenly vocal, and seventeen thousand persons were collected to hear a message from Heaven pronounced by an angel. When the people said "God save Queen Mary," the wall was silent; when they said "God save Queen Elizabeth," the wall said "Amen!" When they asked, "What is the mass?" the wall said, "It is idolatry." As the nation was holding its peace, the stones, it seemed, were crying out against the reaction. But the angel, on examination, turned out to be a girl concealed behind the plaster. Shortly after, the inhabitants of Cheapside, on opening their shop windows in the morning, beheld on a gallows, among the bodies of the hanged insurgents, a cat in priestly robes, with crown shaven, the fore-paws tied over her head, and a piece of paper clipped round between them, representing the wafer.
More serious were the doings of a part of the late conspirators who had escaped to France. Peter Carew, when he left Weymouth, promised soon to return, and he was received at Paris with a cordiality that answered his warmest hopes. Determined, if possible, to prevent Philip from reaching England, the French had equipped every vessel which they possessed available for sea, and Carew was sent again to the coast of the Channel to tempt across into the French service all those who, like himself, were compromised in the conspiracy, or whose blood was hotter than their fathers'. Every day the queen was chafed with the news of desertions to their dangerous rendezvous. Young men of honourable families, Pickerings, Strangways's, Killegrews, Staffords, Stauntons, Tremaynes, Courtenays, slipped over the water, carrying with them hardy sailors from the western harbours. The French supplied them with arms, ships, and money; and fast-sailing, heavily-armed privateers, officered by these young adventurers in the cause of freedom, were cruising on their own account, plundering Flemish and Spanish ships, and swearing that the Prince of Spain should set no foot on English shores.[280]
The queen indignantly demanded explanations of Noailles, and, through her ambassador at Paris, she required the French government to seize "her traitors," and deliver them to her. Noailles, alarmed, perhaps, for his own security, suggested that it might be well to conceal Carew, and to affect to make an attempt to arrest him. But Henry, at once more sagacious and more bold, replied to the ambassador that "he was not the queen's hangman:" "these men that you require," he said, "deny that they have conspired anything against the queen; marry, they say they will not be oppressed by mine enemy, and that is no just cause why I should owe them ill-will."[281] He desired Noailles, with quiet irony, to tell her majesty "that there was nothing in the existing treaties to forbid his accepting the services of English volunteers in the war with the emperor: her majesty might remember that he had invited her to make a new treaty, and that she had refused:" "he would act by the just letter of his obligations."[282]
Would her subjects have permitted, the queen would have replied by a declaration of war. As it was, she could only relieve herself with indignant words.[283] But Carew and his friends might depend on support so long as they would make themselves useful to France. Possessed of ships and arms, they were a constant menace to the Channel, and a constant temptation to the disaffected; and, growing bitter at last, and believing that Elizabeth's life was on the point of being sacrificed, they were prepared to support Henry in a second attempt to seize the Isle of Wight, and to accept the French competitor for the English crown in the person of the Queen of Scots.[284] Thus fatally the friends of the Reformation played into the hands of its enemies. By the solid mass of Englishmen the armed interference of France was more dreaded than even a Spanish sovereign; and the heresy became doubly odious which was tampering with the hereditary enemies of the realm. In London only the revolutionary spirit continued vigorous, and broke out perpetually in unexpected forms. At the beginning of March three hundred schoolboys met in a meadow outside the city walls: half were for Wyatt and for France, half for the Prince of Spain; and, not all in play (for evidently they chose their sides by their sympathies), they joined battle, and fought with the fierceness of grown men. The combat ended in the capture of the representative of Philip, who was dragged to a gallows, and would have been hanged upon it, had not the spectators interfered.[285] The boys were laid hands upon. The youngest were whipped, the elder imprisoned. It was said that the queen thought of gibbeting one of these innocents in real fact, for an example; or, as Noailles put it, as an expiation for the sins of the people.[286]
Over Elizabeth, in the meantime, the fatal net appeared to be closing; Lord Russell had received a letter for her from Wyatt, which, though the princess declared that it had never been in her hands, he said that he had forwarded; and Wyatt himself was flattered with hopes of life if he would extend his confession. Renard carried his ingenuity farther; he called in the assistance of Lady Wyatt, and promised her that her husband should be spared; he even urged the queen to gain over, by judicious leniency, a man whose apostasy would be a fresh disgrace to his cause, and who might be as useful as a servant as he had been dangerous as a foe.[287] Wyatt, being a man without solidity of heart, showed signs of yielding to what was required of him; but his revelations came out slowly, and to quicken his confession he was brought to his trial on the 15th of March. He pleaded guilty to the indictment, and he then said that Courtenay had been the instigator of the conspiracy; he had written to Elizabeth, he said, to advise her to remove as far as possible from London, and Elizabeth had returned him a verbal message of thanks. This being not enough, he was sentenced to death; but he was made to feel that he might still earn his pardon if he would implicate Elizabeth more deeply; and though he said nothing definite, he allowed himself to drop vague hints that he could tell more if he pleased.[288]