The Reign of Mary Tudor

by James Anthony Froude

"The people have only in their heads," the council added, "the defence of the realm by land and sea." The hated connection with Spain had produced all the evils which the opponents of the marriage had foretold, and no good was expected from any enterprise pursued in common with Philip. Prone as the English were to explain events by supernatural causes, they saw, like the queen, in the misfortunes which had haunted her, an evidence that Heaven was not on her side, and they despaired of success in anything until it could be undertaken under better auspices. They would take care of themselves at home, and they would do no more. In reducing the subsidy, the Commons promised to defend the country "with the residue of their goods and life," to "provide every man armour and weapons according to his ability," and to insist by a special law that it should be done.[638]

Every peer, knight, or gentleman, with an income above £1000 a-year, was called on to furnish sixteen horses, with steel harness, forty corslets, coats of mail, and morions, thirty longbows, with sheaves of arrows, and as many steelcaps, halberds, blackbills, and haquebuts. All English subjects, in a descending scale, were required to arm others or arm themselves according to their property.[639]

In the levies of the past summer, men had shrunk from service, and muster-masters, after the fashion of Falstaff, had taken bribes to excuse them. On the present occasion no excuse was to be taken, and every able-bodied man, of any rank, from sixteen to sixty, was to be ready to take arms when called upon, and join his officers, under pain of death.[640] With these essential orders, the business of the legislature ended, and parliament was prorogued on the 7th of March till the following November.

The chief immediate difficulty was to find money for present necessities. The loan was gone. The subsidy would not come in for six months. Englefield, Waldegrave, Petre, Baker, and Sir Walter Mildmay, were formed into a permanent committee of ways and means, with instructions to sit daily "till some device had been arrived at."[641] Sir Thomas Gresham was sent again to Antwerp to borrow £200,000, if possible, at fourteen per cent.[642] The queen applied in person for a loan to the citizens of London. For security, she offered to bind the crown lands, "so assuredly as they themselves could cause to be devised;"[643] and she promised, further, that, if she could legally do it, she would dispense in their favour with the statute for the limitation of usury.

To this last appeal the corporation responded with a loan of £20,000, at twelve per cent.; the Merchant Adventurers contributed £18,000 more; and Gresham sent from Flanders from time to time whatever he could obtain. In this way dockyards and armouries were set in activity, and the castles on the coast were repaired.

Yet with the masses the work of arming went forward languidly. The nation was heavy at heart, and it was in vain that the noblemen and gentlemen endeavoured to raise men's spirits; the black incubus of the priesthood sat upon them like a nightmare. The burnings had been suspended while parliament was in session. On the 28th of March the work began again, and Cuthbert Simson, the minister of a protestant congregation, was put to death in Smithfield, having been first racked to extort from him the names of his supporters;[644] on the same day Reginald Pole, to clear himself of the charge of heresy, sent a fresh commission to Harpsfeld, to purge the diocese of Canterbury;[645] and the people, sick to their very souls at the abominable spectacles which were thrust before them, sank into a sullen despondency.

The musters for Derbyshire were set down at fifteen hundred. Lord Shrewsbury raised four hundred from among his own dependents on his estates. The magistrates declared that, owing to dearth, want, and waste of means in the war of the last year, the "poor little county" could provide but one hundred more.

The musters in Devonshire broke up and went to their homes. The musters in Lincolnshire mutinied. The ringleaders in both counties were immediately hanged;[646] yet the loyalty was none the greater. The exiled divines in Germany, believing that the people were at last ripe for insurrection, called on them to rise and put down the tyranny which was crushing them. Goodman published a tract on the obedience of subjects, and John Knox blew his "First Blast against the Monstrous Regimen of Women." The queen, as if the ordinary laws of the country had no existence, sent out a proclamation that any one who was found to have these books in his or her possession, or who, finding such books, did not instantly burn them, should be executed as a rebel by martial law.[647] "Affectionate as I be to my country and countrymen," said Sir Thomas Smith, "I was ashamed of both; they went about their matters as men amazed, that wist not where to begin or end. And what marvel was it? Here was nothing but firing, heading, hanging, quartering and burning, taxing and levying. A few priests in white rochets ruled all, who with setting up of six-foot roods and rebuilding of roodlofts, thought to make all sure."

With the summer, fever and ague set in like a pestilence, "God did so punish the realm," said Sir Thomas Smith again, "with quartan agues, and with such other long and new sicknesses, that in the last two years of the reign of Queen Mary, so many of her subjects was made away, what with the execution of sword and fire, what by sicknesses, that the third part of the men of England were consumed."[648] In the spring, the queen, misled by the same symptoms which had deceived her before, had again fancied herself enceinte. She made her will in the avowed expectation that she was about to undergo the perils of childbearing. She wrote for her husband to come to her. She sent the fleet into the Channel, and laid relays of horses along the roads to London from Dover and from Harwich, that he might choose at which port to land.

Philip so far humoured the fancy, which he must have known to be delusive, that he sent the Count de Feria to congratulate her. Her letter, he said, contained the best news which he had heard since the loss of Calais. But the bubble broke soon. Mary had parted from her husband on the 5th of the preceding July, and her suspense, therefore, was not long protracted. It is scarcely necessary to say in what direction her second disappointment vented itself.