When Guise had first approached Calais, Philip instructed his favourite Count de Feria to hasten to England and insist upon reinforcements being sent. Before his departure Calais fell, and on arriving at Dunkirk to embark he learnt of the loss of Guisnes; whereupon he delayed his departure for a day, in order not to be the bearer of the last bad news. The tidings of the English defeats had fallen like a thunderbolt upon Mary and her advisers; but there was no repining yet, so far as the Queen was concerned, for God might yet, she hoped, send her a son, and then all would be well. She would, she said, have the head of any councillor of hers who dared to talk about making peace without the restitution of the captured fortresses; and church and laymen alike opened coffers wide to provide funds for avenging English honour and protecting English soil.
Feria arrived in London on the 26th January, though the primary reason of his mission had disappeared when Calais fell. He saw Mary immediately, and found her stout of heart and hopeful, desirous of all things to please her husband, though doubtful about the goodwill of her Council. Two days afterwards Feria met the Council in Pole’s room, and presented his master’s demands. Mary had told the ambassador that both they, and the people at large, were murmuring that the war was of Philip’s making, and she thought that it would be well boldly to face and refute that point before it was advanced by the councillors. The Council listened politely to the King’s message, and recognising that they had before them the ideas not only of King Philip, but of their own Queen as well, took time to reply. A day or two afterwards the Council visited Feria, and Archbishop Heath, the chancellor, delivered their answer. It was couched in submissive language towards Philip, and told a sorry story. Far from being able to send any troops across the sea, they badly wanted troops for their own defence. The coast and the Isle of Wight were at the mercy of the French, and an invasion was threatened over the Scottish Border. But if King Philip would send them 3000 German mercenaries, for which they would pay, they would quarter them in Newcastle to protect the north country, and they would then arm a hundred ships in the Channel with a considerable force of men, some of whom might be used, at need, for Philip’s service. Feria reported that the 5000 Englishmen he had seen at Dover, intended for embarkation, were disorderly rascals, useless as soldiers, and he and his master agreed that nothing could now be expected from England in the form of a military contingent for foreign service.
The country, says Feria, is in such a condition that if a hundred enemies were to land on the coast they could do as they liked.[[161]] Confusion was spreading throughout all classes in England, owing to the dislike of the war for the sake of Spain, and to the disquieting news of the Queen’s health. Not a third of the usual congregation go to church since the fall of Calais, reported Feria; and when, in a conversation with the Queen, the ambassador explained to her how the Spanish nobility were bound to contribute so many mounted men each, in case of war, Mary sadly shook her head at the idea of applying any such rule to England. ‘Not all the nobility of England together,’ she said, ‘would furnish her with a hundred horse.’ Parliament was sitting, and at the demand of money tongues began to wag that it was to send across the sea to the Queen’s Spanish husband, whose proud envoy could only sneer and scoff at the clumsy English way of raising funds for their sovereign, and tell everybody that he would be only too glad if he could prevail upon them to raise the necessary money for their own defence, for his master wanted none of it from them.
Philip did not go so far as that, for he was very hard pressed indeed, and urged upon Mary some other way of collecting funds besides the parliamentary vote. In vain Gresham tried to borrow £10,000 in Antwerp on the Queen’s credit; attempts to cajole more money from the church and the nobles were made with but small result. The money from the parliamentary grant and other sources that could be got together was sent to Flanders to pay for the raising of German levies for the English service; and at once the murmurs in London grew to angry shouts, that English money was being sent out for King Philip. The fitting out of the English fleet, ostensibly for coast defence, was hurried forward, for the distracted English councillors were deluded into the idea that a great combined movement would be made to recover Calais: they were frightened by a false rumour that there was a strong French fleet at Dieppe, that the Hanse Towns and Denmark would descend on the east coast; anything to get them to push forward a strong fleet, really, though not ostensibly, for Philip’s purpose. But Philip took care when the fleet was ready that Clinton should use it as he desired;[[162]] and the much talked of 3000 German mercenaries never came to England, but in due time were incorporated in Philip’s army. It is curious to see how cleverly Feria and his master worked off the Queen against her councillors, and vice versa. With regard to these mercenaries, for instance, though the King was constantly sending letters and messages to his wife, he purposely refrained from mentioning his desire to make use of the Germans, for whom she had paid. ‘I am writing nothing of this to the Queen,’ he wrote; ‘I would rather that you (Feria) should prudently work with the councillors to induce them to ask us to relieve them of these troops.’[[163]]
Mary’s hopes of progeny were once more seen to be delusive; and she, in deep despondency now, was seen to be rapidly failing. Pole also was a dying man, said Feria; and all the other councillors, though constantly clamouring for Spanish bribes, were drifting away from the present regime. ‘Those whom your Majesty has rewarded most are the men who serve the least: Pembroke, Arundel, Paget, Petre, Heath, the Bishop of Ely and the Controller.’ Even Philip himself was ready now to turn to the rising sun, and away from his waning wife. ‘What you write (he replied to Feria) about visiting Madam Elizabeth before you leave England, for the reasons you mention, seems very wise; and I am writing to the Queen that I have ordered you to go and see the Princess, and I beg the Queen also to order you to do so.’[[164]] When Feria had frightened the Queen and Council out of all that was possible, he went to Hatfield to see Elizabeth, with all manner of kind messages and significant hints from Philip; and sailed from England in July, leaving as his successor a Flemish lawyer named D’assonleville.
Mary had lost all hope. She knew now, at last, that she would never be a mother: the persecutions for religion, and above all the war for the sake of Philip, had made her personally unpopular, as she never had been before; she had not a single, honest capable statesman near her, Pole being now moribund, but a set of greedy scamps who looked to their own interests alone; and the doomed Queen saw that not for her was to be the glory of making England permanently Catholic, and ensuring uniformity of faith in Christendom. As the autumn went on the Queen’s condition became more grave, and constant fever weakened her sadly. In the last week of October D’assonleville wrote to Philip that the Queen’s life was despaired of, and Feria was instructed to make rapidly ready to cross, and stay in England during the period of transition that would supervene on her death. On the 7th November D’assonleville wrote again, urging that, as Parliament had been summoned to consider the question of the succession, it would be well that Philip himself should if possible be present. This was true; but Philip had his hands full, and, even for so important an errand as this, he could not absent himself from Flanders; for the peace commissioners from England, France, and Spain were in full negotiation, and peace to him now was a matter of vital importance.
Feria arrived in London on the 9th November, and found Mary lying in her palace of Saint James’s only intermittently conscious. She smiled sadly as the ambassador handed her Philip’s letter, and greeted her in his name; but she was too weak to read the lines he had written, though she indicated that a favourite ring of hers should be sent to him as a pledge of her love. Her faithful Clarentius and beloved Jane Dormer, already betrothed to Feria, whom she afterwards married, tended her day and night: but most of the others who had surrounded her in the day of her glory were wending their way to Hatfield, to court the fair-faced young woman with the thin lips and cold eyes who was waiting composedly for her coming crown. Feria himself took care to announce loudly his master’s approval of Elizabeth’s accession when her sister should die; and did his best to second the Queen’s efforts to obtain some assurance from the Princess that the Catholic faith and worship should be maintained in England. Elizabeth was cool and diplomatic. She knew well that she must succeed in any case, and was already fully agreed with her friends as to the course she should take, careful not to pledge herself too far for the future; and when Feria, leaving the Queen’s deathbed, travelled to Hatfield to see the Princess, she was courteous enough, but firmly rejected every suggestion that she should owe anything to the patronage of the King of Spain.
Mary in her intervals of consciousness was devout and resigned, comforting the few friends who were left to sorrow around her bed, and exhorting them to faith and fortitude. It was the 17th November, and the light was struggling through the murky morning across the mist upon the marshes between Saint James’s and the Thames, when the daily mass in Mary’s dying chamber was being celebrated. The Queen was sick to death now, but the sacrament she ordered for the last time riveted her wandering brain, and the clouds that had obscured her intelligence passed away, giving place to almost preternatural clearness. She repeated the responses distinctly and firmly; and when the celebrant chanted ‘Agnus Dei qui tollis peccatur mundi,’ she exclaimed with almost startling plainness, ‘Miserere nobis! Miserere nobis! Dona nobis pacem‘; then, as the Host was elevated, she bowed in worship, with closed eyes that opened no more upon the world that for her had been so troubled.
And so, with a prayer for mercy and peace upon her lips, and her last gaze on earth resting upon the holy mystery of her faith, Mary Tudor went to her account.[[165]] Her life was but a passing episode in the English Reformation; for she was handicapped from the first by her unpopular marriage, and the unstatesmanlike religious policy of her ecclesiastical advisers. Like her mother, and her grandmother Isabel, she would deign to no compromise with what she considered evil. ‘Rather would I lose ten crowns if I had them,’ she exclaimed once, ‘than palter with my conscience’; and, though to a less exalted degree, this was Philip’s attitude of mind also. Fate cast them both in an age when rigidity of belief was breaking down before the revival of ancient learning, and the widened outlook of life growing from the renaissance. They were pitted against rivals whose convictions were as wax, but who were determined not only to win but to appear right in this world, at any sacrifice of principle; and the fight was an unequal one. Mary could not change—only once under dire compulsion did she even pretend to give way in the matter of religion—Elizabeth changed as often and as completely as suited her purpose: Philip had only one invariable set of convictions and methods, his rivals had none, but invented them and abandoned them as occasion served.
And so Mary Tudor failed; pitiably, because she was naturally a good woman, who did her best according to her conscience. But the defects of her descent were too strong for her: she was a Tudor, and consequently domineering and obstinate; she was a grand-daughter of Isabel the Catholic, and as a natural result mystically devout and exalted, caring nothing for human suffering in the pursuit of her saintly aims; she was an English Queen, proud of her island realm; a Spanish princess, almost equally proud of the land of the Catholic kings; and, to crown all, she was the consort of Philip II., pledged to the cause for which he lived, the unification of the Christian faith and the destruction of the power of France. Within a year of her death England was a Protestant country, and Philip was married to a French princess.