Ridley said the sentence would but send them the sooner to the place where else they hoped to go.
Latimer said, "I thank God that my life has been prolonged that I may glorify God by this kind of death."
Hooper, Ferrars, Coverdale, Taylor, Philpot, and Sandars, who were in the London prisons, were to have been simultaneously tried and sentenced at Cambridge. These six, however, drew and signed a joint refusal to discuss their faith in a court before which they were to be brought as prisoners; and for some reason the proceedings against them were suspended; but whether they refused or consented was of little moment to the Bishop of Winchester; they were in his hands—he could try them when he pleased. A holocaust of heresiarchs was waiting to be offered up, and before a faggot could be lighted, the necessary powers had to be obtained from parliament.
The bishop, therefore, was determined, if possible, to obtain those powers. He had the entire bench of prelates on his side; and Lord Howard, the Earl of Bedford, and others of the lay lords who would have been on the side of humanity, were absent. The opposition had to be conducted under the greatest difficulties. Paget, however, fought the battle, and fought it on broad grounds: the bishops' bill was read twice; on the third reading, on the 1st of May, he succeeded in throwing it out: the Lollards' bill came on the day after, and here his difficulty was far greater; for toleration was imperfectly understood by Catholic or Protestant, and many among the peers, who hated the bishops, equally hated heresy. Paget, however, spoke out his convictions, and protested against the iniquity of putting men to death for their opinions.[319] The bill was read a first time on the day on which it was introduced; on the 4th of May it was read again,[320] but it went no further. The next day parliament was dissolved. The peers assured the queen that they had no desire to throw a shield over heresy; the common law existed independent of statute, and the common law prescribed punishments which could still be inflicted.[321] But, so long as heresy was undefined, Anabaptists, Socinians, or professors of the more advanced forms of opinion, could alone fall within the scope of punishments merely traditional.
The tempers of men were never worse than at that moment, Renard wrote. In the heat of the debate, on the 28th of April, Lord Thomas Grey was executed as a defiance to the liberal party. Gardiner persuaded the queen, perhaps not without reason, that he was himself in danger of being arrested by Paget and Pembroke;[322] and an order was sent to the Lieutenant of the Tower that if the chancellor was brought thither under warrant of the council only, he was not to be received.[323]
On the other hand, twelve noblemen and gentlemen undertook to stand by Mary if she would arrest Paget and Pembroke. The chancellor, Sir Robert Rochester, and the Marquis of Winchester discussed the feasibility of seizing them; but Lord Howard and the Channel fleet were thought to present too formidable an obstacle. With the queen's sanction, however, they armed in secret. It was agreed that, on one pretence or another, Derby, Shrewsbury, Sussex, and Huntingdon should be sent out of London to their counties. Elizabeth, if it could be managed, should be sent to Pomfret, as Gardiner had before proposed; Lord Howard should be kept at sea; and, if opportunity offered, Arundel and Paget might, at least, be secured.[324]
But Pomfret was impossible, and vexation thickened on vexation. Lord Howard was becoming a bugbear at the court. Report now said that two of the Staffords, whom he had named to command in the fleet, had joined the exiles in France; and for Lord Howard himself the queen could feel no security, if he was provoked too far. She was haunted by a misgiving that, while the prince was under his convoy, he might declare against her, and carry him prisoner to France; or if Howard could himself be trusted, his fleet could not. On the eve of sailing for the coast of Spain, a mutiny broke out at Plymouth. The sailors swore that if they were forced on a service which they detested, both the admiral and the prince should rue it. Lord Howard, in reporting to the queen the men's misconduct, said that his own life was at her majesty's disposal, but he advised her to reconsider the prudence of placing the prince in their power. Howard's own conduct, too, was far from reassuring. A few small vessels had been sent from Antwerp to join the English fleet, under the Flemish admiral Chappelle. Chappelle complained that Howard treated him with indifference, and insulted his ships by "calling them cockle-shells." If the crews of the two fleets were on land anywhere together, the English lost no opportunity of making a quarrel, "hustling and pushing" the Flemish sailors;[325] and, as if finally to complete the queen's vexation, Lord Bedford wrote that the prince declined the protection of her subjects on his voyage, and that his departure was postponed for a few weeks longer.
The fleet had to remain in the Channel; it could not be trusted elsewhere; and the necessity of releasing Elizabeth from the Tower was another annoyance to the queen. A confinement at Woodstock was the furthest stretch of severity that the country would, for the present, permit. On the 19th of May, Elizabeth was taken up the river. The princess believed herself that she was being carried off tanquam ovis, as she said—as a sheep for the slaughter. But the world thought that she was set at liberty, and as her barge passed under the bridge Mary heard, with indignation, from the palace windows, three salvoes of artillery fired from the Steelyard, as a sign of the joy of the people.[326] A letter from Philip would have been a consolation to her in the midst of the troubles which she had encountered for his sake; but the languid lover had never written a line to her; or, if he had written, not a line had reached her hand; only a ship which contained despatches from him for Renard had been taken, in the beginning of May, by a French cruiser, and the thought that precious words of affection had, perhaps, been on their way to her and were lost, was hard to bear.
In vain she attempted to cheer her spirits with the revived ceremonials of Whitsuntide. She marched day after day, in procession, with canopies and banners, and bishops in gilt slippers, round St. James's, round St. Martin's, round Westminster.[327] Sermons and masses alternated now with religious feasts, now with Diriges for her father's soul. But all was to no purpose; she could not cast off her anxieties, or escape from the shadow of her subjects' hatred, which clung to her steps. Insolent pamphlets were dropped in her path and in the offices of Whitehall; she trod upon them in the passages of the palace; they were placed by mysterious hands in the sanctuary of her bedroom. At length, chafed with a thousand irritations, and craving for a husband who showed so small anxiety to come to her, she fled from London, at the beginning of June, to Richmond.
The trials of the last six months had begun to tell upon Mary's understanding: she was ill with hysterical longings; ill with the passions which Gardiner had kindled and Paget disappointed. A lady who slept in her room told Noailles that she could speak to no one without impatience, and that she believed the whole world was in league to keep her husband from her. She found fault with every one—even with the prince himself. Why had he not written? she asked again and again. Why had she never received one courteous word from him? If she heard of merchants or sailors arriving from Spain, she would send for them and question them; and some would tell her that the prince was said to have little heart for his business in England; others terrified her with tales of fearful fights upon the seas; and others brought her news of the French squadrons that were on the watch in the Channel.[328] She would start out of her sleep at night, picturing a thousand terrors, and among them one to which all else were insignificant, that her prince, who had taken such wild possession of her imagination, had no answering feeling for herself—that, with her growing years and wasted figure, she could never win him to love her.[329]