The Reign of Mary Tudor

by James Anthony Froude

On the 3rd of August, the king and queen removed for a few days from Hampton Court to Oatlands; on the way Mary received consolation from a poor man who met her on crutches, and was cured of his lameness by looking on her.[485]

On the 26th, the royal party came down the river in their barge, attended by the legate; they dined at Westminster on their way to Greenwich, and as rumour had said that Mary was dead, she was carried through the city in an open litter, with the king and the cardinal at her side. To please Philip, or to please the people, Elizabeth was invited to the court before the king's departure; but she was sent by water to prevent a demonstration, while the archers of the guard who attended on the queen, were in corslet and morion.[486]

On the 28th, Philip went. Parliament was to sit again in October. It would then be seen whether anything more could be done about the succession. On the consent or refusal of the legislature his future measures would depend. To the queen he left particular instructions, which he afterwards repeated in writing, to show favour to Elizabeth; and doubting how far he could rely upon Mary, he gave a similar charge to such of his own suite as he left behind him.[487] Could he obtain it, he would take the princess's crown for himself; should he fail, he might marry her; or should this too be impossible, he would win her gratitude, and support her title against the dangerous competition of the Queen of Scots and Dauphiness of France.

On these terms the pair who had been brought together with so much difficulty separated after a little more than a year. The cardinal composed a passionate prayer for the queen's use during her husband's absence.[488] It is to be hoped that she was spared the sight of a packet of letters soon after intercepted by the French, in which her husband and her husband's countrymen expressed their opinions of the marriage and its consequences.[489] The truth, however, became known in England, although in a form under which the queen could turn from it as a calumny.

Before the meeting of parliament, a letter was published, addressed to the Lords of the Council, by a certain John Bradford.[490] The writer accounted for his knowledge of the secrets which he had to tell, by saying that he had lived in the household of one of the Spanish noblemen who were in attendance on Philip; that he had learnt the language unknown to his master, and had thus overheard unguarded conversations. He had read letters addressed to Philip, and letters written by him and by his confidential friends; and he was able to say, as a thing heard with his own ears, and seen with his own eyes, that the "Spaniards minded nothing less than the subversion of the English commonwealth." In fact, he repeated the rumours of the summer, only more circumstantially, and with fuller details. Under pretence of improving the fortifications, Philip intended to obtain command of the principal harbours and ports; he would lay cannon on the land side, and gradually bring in Spanish troops, the queen playing into his hands; and as soon as peace could be made with France, he would have the command of the fleet and the sea, and could do what he pleased.[491]

"I saw," the writer continued, "letters sent from the emperor, wherein was contained these privities,—that the king should make his excuse to the queen that he would go to see his father in Flanders, and that immediately he would return—seeing the good simple queen is so jealous over my son. (I term it," said Bradford, "as the letter doth.") "We," said the emperor, "shall make her agree unto all our requests before his return, or else keep him exercised in our affairs till we may prevail with the council, who, doubtless, will be won with fair promises and great gifts, politicly placed in time." "In other letters I have read the cause disputed, that the queen is bound by the laws of God to endue her husband in all her goods and possessions, so far as in her lieth; and they think she will do it indeed to the uttermost of her power. No man can think evil of the queen, though she be somewhat moved when such things are beaten into her head with gentlemen; but whether the crown belongs to the queen or the realm, the Spaniards know not, nor care not, though the queen, to her damnation, disherit the right heir apparent, or break her father's entail, made by the whole consent of the realm, which neither she nor the realm can justly alter."[492]

Struggle as the queen might against such a representation of her husband's feelings towards her, it was true that he had left her with a promise to return; and the weeks went, and he did not come, and no longer spoke of coming. The abdication of the emperor would keep him from her, at least, till the end of the winter. And news came soon which was harder still to bear; news, that he, whom she had been taught to regard as made in the image of our Saviour,[493] was unfaithful to his marriage vows,[494] Bradford had spoken generally of the king's vulgar amours; other accounts convinced her too surely that he was consoling himself for his long purgatory in England, by miscellaneous licentiousness. Philip was gross alike in all his appetites; bacon fat was the favourite food with which he gorged himself to illness;[495] his intrigues were on the same level of indelicacy, and his unhappy wife was forced to know that he preferred the society of abandoned women of the lowest class to hers.

The French ambassador describes her as distracted with wretchedness, speaking to no one except the legate. The legate was her only comfort; the legate and the thing which she called religion.

Deep in the hearts of both queen and cardinal lay the conviction that if she would please God, she must avoid the sin of Saul. Saul had spared the Amalekites, and God had turned his face from him. God had greater enemies in England than the Amalekites. Historians have affected to exonerate Pole from the crime of the Marian persecution; although, without the legate's sanction, not a bishop in England could have raised a finger, not a bishop's court could have been opened to try a single heretic. If not with Pole, with whom did the guilt rest? Gardiner was jointly responsible for the commencement, but after the first executions, Gardiner interfered no further; he died, and the bloody scenes continued. Philip's confessor protested; Philip himself left the country; Renard and Charles were never weary of advising moderation, except towards those who were politically dangerous. Bonner was an instrument whose zeal more than once required the goad; and Mary herself, when she came to the throne, was so little cruel, that she would have spared even Northumberland himself. When the persecution assumed its ferocious aspect, she was exclusively under the direction of the dreamer who believed that he was born for England's regeneration. All evidence concurs to show that, after Philip's departure, Cardinal Pole was the single adviser on whom Mary relied. Is it to be supposed that, in the horrible crusade which thenceforward was the business of her life, the papal legate, the sovereign director of the ecclesiastical administration of the realm, was not consulted, or, if consulted, that he refused his sanction? But it is not a question of conjecture or probability. From the legate came the first edict for the episcopal inquisition; under the legate every bishop held his judicial commission; while, if Smithfield is excepted, the most frightful scenes in the entire frightful period were witnessed under the shadow of his own metropolitan cathedral. His apologists have thrown the blame on his archdeacon and his suffragan: the guilt is not with the instrument, but with the hand which holds it. An admiring biographer[496] has asserted that the cruelties at Canterbury preceded the cardinal's consecration as archbishop, and the biographer has been copied by Dr. Lingard. The historian and his authority have exceeded the limits of permitted theological misrepresentation. The administration of the see belonged to Pole as much before his consecration as after it; but it will be seen that eighteen men and women perished at the stake in the town of Canterbury alone,—besides those who were put to death in other parts of the diocese—and five were starved to death in the gaol there—after the legate's installation. He was not cruel; but he believed that, in the catalogue of human iniquities, there were none greater than the denial of the Roman Catholic Faith, or the rejection of the Roman bishop's supremacy; and that he himself was chosen by Providence for the re-establishment of both. Mary was driven to madness by the disappointment of the grotesque imaginations with which he had inflated her; and where two such persons were invested by the circumstances of the time with irresponsible power, there is no occasion to look further for the explanation of the dreadful events of the three ensuing years.

The victims of the summer were chiefly undistinguished persons: Cardmaker and Bradford alone were in any way celebrated; and the greater prisoners, the three bishops at Oxford, the court had paused upon—not from mercy—their deaths had been long determined on; but Philip, perhaps, was tender of his person; their execution might occasion disturbances; and he and his suite might be the first objects on which the popular indignation might expend itself. Philip, however, had placed the sea between himself and danger, and if this was the cause of the hesitation, the work could now go forward.