Authors: Anna Whitelock
Mary Tudor (30 page)
As the plan was agreed, word came that the bailiffs of Maldon wished to impound Dubois’s boat on suspicion that it was associated with the warship at Stansgate. According to Dubois, Mary started to panic, asking “What shall we do? What shall become of me?” She feared “how the Emperor would take it if it turned out impossible to go now, after I have so often importuned his Majesty on the subject.” Dubois urged that they should take Mary immediately, but Rochester declared that it would be impossible: the watch was going to be doubled that night and men would be posted on the church tower. At this point Mary became hysterical, repeatedly shrieking “But what is to become of me?” It was decided that Rochester would contact her again within ten or twelve days with an exact date when they would be ready to put the plan into action. But no further attempt was made. Dubois suspected “that the Comptroller had made out the situation at Maldon to be more dangerous than it was in reality.”
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To have fled would have been to gamble. If Edward died when Mary was abroad, she would have no hope of succeeding. If she
stayed, she might be deprived of her household and be left to face dangers alone. There was both “peril in going and peril in staying.” Having set the plan into motion, Mary procrastinated, then changed her mind. She accepted that to win her rightful throne and restore Catholicism, she needed to be in England. She resolved to stay and fight.
AN UNNATURAL EXAMPLE
The Lady Mary sent one of her servants to me today to tell me that a publication was recently made in that part of the country where she lives, forbidding, as she hears, chaplains or others to say mass or officiate at all in her house according to the rites of the ancient religion, under certain heavy penalties both civil and criminal. She requested therefore that I should remonstrate with the Council on the first opportunity and declare that she demanded and would persist in her demand to live according to the ancient religion, in virtue of what had passed in this matter. She requested me also to inform your Majesty and the Queen [Dowager of Hungary].
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—A
MBASSADOR
J
EHAN
S
CHEYFVE TO THE EMPEROR
, J
ULY
26, 1550
W
ITH THE ESCAPE PLAN ABORTED, MARY PREPARED TO LEAVE
Woodham Walter and sent her chaplain, Francis Mallet, ahead to Beaulieu to arrange Mass for her arrival. When Mary was delayed, Mallet performed the service anyway with many of her household servants in attendance. The incident gave the Council the pretext it had been looking for. Orders were dispatched for Mallet’s arrest, and Mary was summoned to court. Again she refused to attend, claiming ill health—“being the fall of the leaf”—and petitioned the Council to rethink the enforcement of the statutes.
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The Council responded that the dispensation regarding Mary’s freedom of worship had been made to the imperial ambassador
for his sake and for your own also, that it should be suffered and winked at, if you had the private mass used in your own closet for a season, until you might be better informed, whereof there was some hope, having only with you a few of your Chamber, so that for all the rest of your household the service of the realm should be used, and none other. Further than this the promise exceeded not.
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Mary made a fresh appeal to the emperor, who instructed Scheyfve to secure unconditional assurances. As he added in his dispatch, “You will persist in your request at all costs. Give them plainly to understand that if they decide otherwise, we will not take it in good part, or suffer it to be done.”
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BY CHRISTMAS, MARY
had run out of excuses to avoid attending court and all three Tudor siblings gathered for the reunion, postponed from the previous year. Edward, now twelve, rebuked Mary for hearing Mass in the chapel. She continued to argue that he was not yet old enough to make up his own mind about religion. He demanded her obedience, she resisted, and both were reduced to tears. Writing later to the Privy Council, she blamed its members for turning her brother against her:
When I perceived how the King, whom I love and honour above all things, as by nature and duty bound, had counselled against me, I could not contain myself and exhibited my interior grief…. I would rather refuse the friendship of all the world (whereunto I trust I shall never be driven), than forsake any point of my faith.
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But though Edward protested that he thought “no harm of her,” he remained determined that she submit. He would “inquire and know all things.” On January 17, 1551, Mary received letters from the Privy Council ordering that Mass must no longer be heard in her household. While claiming her “general health and the attack of catarrh in the head” did not permit her to answer their points “in detail, sentence by
sentence,” she vehemently disputed the assertion that no promise had been made to Charles V as to the practice of the Mass:
God knows the contrary to be true: and you in your own consciences (I say to those who were then present) know it also … you accuse me of breaking the laws and disobeying them by keeping to my own religion; but I reply that my faith and my religion are those held by the whole of Christendom, formerly confessed by this kingdom under the late King, my father, until you altered them with your laws. To the King’s majesty, my brother, I wish prosperity and honour such as no King ever enjoyed … but to you, my lords, I owe nothing beyond amity and goodwill…. Take this as my final answer to any letters you might write to me on matters of religion.
Once again she emphasized her poor health in an attempt to bring the confrontation with the king to an end: “were you to know what pain I suffer in bending down my head to write,” she said, he would “not wish to give me occasion to do it. My health is more unstable than that of any creature and I have all the greater need to rejoice in the testimony of pure conscience.”
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A week later Edward wrote, advising Mary that he would see that his laws were obeyed:
Dear and well-beloved sister
,
We have seen the letters recently sent to you by our Council, together with your answer thereto, concerning the matter of certain chaplains of your household, who have committed a breach of our laws by singing mass. We have heard their good and suitable admonitions, and your fruitless and wayward misunderstanding of the same. We are moved to write to you these presents, that where the good counsel of our Councillors have failed to persuade, the same advice given by us may haply produce some effect. After giving all due consideration to the matter, it appears to us to stand as follows: that you, our nearest sister, in whom by nature we should place reliance and our highest esteem, wish to break our laws and set them aside deliberately and of your
own free will; and moreover sustain and encourage others to commit a like offence…
.
… it appears by your letters that you have persuaded yourself that you may continue in your erring ways in virtue of a promise which you claim to have received, though we truly know that the said promise was not given with the intention you Lend to it. My sister, you must learn that your courses were tolerated when our laws were first promulgated, not indeed as a permission to break the same, but so that you might be inclined to obey them, seeing the love and indulgence we displayed towards you. We made a difference between you and our subjects, not that all should follow our ordinances, and you alone disregard them, but in order that you should do out of love for us what the rest do out of duty. The error in which you persist is twofold, and each part of it so great that for the love we bear to God we cannot suffer it, but you must strive to remedy it; nor can we do otherwise than desire you to amend your ways, for the affection we bear you … knowledge was offered to you, and you refused it
.
Mary would be permitted to “speak frankly” and would be listened to, provided she agreed to abide by Edward’s response. As for the second part of her offense—“the transgression of our laws”—Edward made it clear that he would not tolerate the abuse of his office as king:
We have suffered it until now, with the hope that some improvement might be forthcoming, but none has been shown, how can we suffer it longer to continue? … Your near relationship to us, your exalted rank, the condition of the times, all magnify your offence. It is a scandalous thing that so high a personage should deny our sovereignty; that our sister should be less to us than any of our other subjects is an unnatural example; andfinally, in a troubled republic, it lends colour to faction among the people
.
He summed up his position in a postscript written in his own hand: “Sister, consider that an exception has been made in your favour this long time past, to incline you to obey and not to harden you in your resistance.” He could not “say more and worse things because my duty would compel me to use harsher and angrier words. But this I will say
with certain intention, that I will see my laws strictly obeyed, and those who break them shall be watched and denounced.”
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Mary was stunned. Replying two days later, she declared that his words, accusing her of being “a breaker of your laws” and “inciting others to do the same,” had caused her “more suffering than any illness even unto death.” She had been promised free expression of her faith and implored him to command his ambassador in Brussels to learn from the emperor “the truth concerning the said promise” so that he could see that she was guilty of no offense. She beseeched him “for the love of God to suffer me to live as in the past” and reiterated that rather than offend him and her conscience she would “lose all that I have left in the world, and my life too.”
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The same day Mary sent another hastily written letter to Francesco Moronelli, a former servant of van der Delft, who had traveled in secret to meet her at Beaulieu months before. At the time she had made him promise that if she were ever in trouble he would travel to Flanders to tell the emperor’s ministers that help was urgently needed. That moment had now arrived.
Francisco, you must make great haste concerning the message, for since your departure I have received worse and more dangerous letters than ever before from the King himself, written in haste the 3rd of February
.
[Postscript]: I request and command you to burn this note directly after you have read it.
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Charles again made representations to the Privy Council through Scheyfve, but Edward remained firm. In March, to affirm his determination, he summoned Mary to court. No further disobedience would be tolerated.
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NAUGHTY OPINION
O
N MARCH 15, 1551, MARY ARRIVED IN LONDON, RIDING TO HER
house at St. John’s, Clerkenwell. Fifty knights and gentlemen in velvet coats and chains of gold rode before her; some four hundred gentlemen and ladies followed behind. As Henry Machyn the London diarist recorded, each carried a “pair of beads of black”—a rosary. It was a dramatic display of Catholic defiance and the scale of Mary’s power and support.
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By the time she reached the gates of the city, there were more than four hundred people in her train. It was, in Machyn’s assessment, the greatest demonstration of loyalty in living memory: “The people ran five or six miles out of town and were marvellously overjoyed to see her, showing clearly how much they love her.”
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