Authors: Anna Whitelock
Mary Tudor (32 page)
With the situation at a deadlock, security around the princess was tightened. Edward recorded in his journal that “pinnaces were prepared to see that there should be no conveyance overseas of the Lady Mary, secretly done.” Meanwhile, the lord chancellor, the lord chamberlain, the vice chamberlain, and Secretary Petre “should see by all means they could whether she used the mass, and if she did that the laws should be executed on her chaplains.”
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IN OCTOBER
1551, Henry II of France declared war on Charles V with the intention of recapturing Italy and securing European supremacy. The renewal of Habsburg-Valois hostilities brought an increased fear of imperial intervention in England. Mary of Hungary,
Charles’s sister, was certain that England would join France in the war and so proposed an invasion of England to gain a strong port from which to defend the Netherlands and to place Mary on the throne.
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With her fortune ever tied to events in Europe, pressure eased on Mary. When Mary of Guise, the dowager queen of Scotland, visited Edward for several days in October, Mary was invited to court “to accompany and entertain” her, while Edward sent his own message, that he would enjoy the pleasure of Mary’s company. Once again Mary pleaded ill health to avoid being put under religious pressure by her brother.
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Over the next few months the conciliatory overtures continued. In March 1552, Rochester, Englefield, and Waldegrave were released from the Tower and returned to Mary’s household. Two months later, Mary rode through London to St. John’s “with a goodly company of gentlemen and gentlewomen” and went by barge to Greenwich to visit her brother.
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In April, Edward had written in his chronicle, “I feel sick of the measles and the smallpox.” He made a quick recovery, but by the winter of 1552 he was seriously ill once more, his body racked by a hacking cough. It was clear that the king was suffering from “consumption”—tuberculosis. The Council made no further overt attempts to suppress Mary’s Masses. With Edward’s health deteriorating, it was prudent to conciliate one who stood so near to the throne.
MY DEVICE FOR THE SUCCESSION
T
HE YEAR 1552 SAW THE CLIMAX OF THE EDWARDIAN REFORMATION
. In the Second Book of Common Prayer and Forty-two Articles, the Real Presence in the Eucharist was rejected outright; altars were stripped from churches throughout the country and replaced by Communion tables; and images were whitewashed.
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The long-term survival of the new Protestantism was, however, under threat. By the terms of Henry VIII’s will, Mary was Edward’s heir, but it was clear that she would halt the process of reformation and restore Catholicism. It was a prospect that Edward would not countenance. He needed to overturn his father’s will and the parliamentary statute of 1544 that had decreed Mary his successor.
On February 10, 1553, Mary rode to court along Fleet Street, accompanied by more than two hundred lords and ladies. She was met on the outskirts of the city by John Dudley and knights and gentlemen, who escorted her to the gates of Whitehall. There she was “more honourably received and entertained with greater magnificence” than ever before, “as if she had been Queen of England.”
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But for several days, Edward could not see her, having contracted a “feverish cold.” Following Mary’s visit, the fifteen-year-old’s health deteriorated further, though his decline was concealed from both his sisters. Mary heard falsely that he was better and sent a letter giving thanks for his recovery and praying “with long continuance in prosperity to reign.”
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It would be her final contact with her brother.
Among the Council there was a growing sense of fear that the king would soon die. His doctors believed he had a “suppurating tumour” of the lung, exacerbated by a hacking cough and a fever. “The sputum
which he brings up is livid, black, fetid and full of carbon; it smells beyond measure; if it is put in a basin of water it sinks to the bottom. His feet are swollen all over. To the doctors all these things portend death, and that within three months, except God of His great mercy spare him.”
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Writing at the end of May, Scheyfve described how Dudley, who had become duke of Northumberland in October, “and his party’s designs to deprive the Lady Mary of the succession to the crown are only too plain. They are evidently resolved to resort to arms against her, with the excuse of religion among others.”
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By mid-June, it was obvious that Edward did not have long to live. Another successor needed to be found.
In early spring, Edward had drawn up in his own hand “My Device for the Succession” by which he sought to direct the succession and, specifically, disinherit his sisters. Mary and Elizabeth were excluded on the grounds that they were both bastards. The line of succession was transferred to the family of Edward’s cousins the Greys—the male heirs of Frances Grey, duchess of Suffolk, the daughter of Henry VIII’s sister Mary, and the male heirs of her eldest daughter, Lady Jane Grey.
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Women were, Edward determined, unfit to rule in their own right and through marriage might subject the realm to foreign domination. Edward was relying on a yet-unborn male heir. It was a last-ditch attempt to avert a female succession.
On May 21, Lady Jane Grey was married to Guildford Dudley, Northumberland’s son. But within days, Edward’s health deteriorated rapidly. There would be no time for Jane to become pregnant. Edward was forced to overcome his misogyny and, in his own hand, to alter his device. Whereas originally he had left the crown to the “Lady Jane’s heirs male” he edited the text and changed it to “Lady Jane and her heirs male.”
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The Protestant Lady Jane was preferred as Edward’s successor to the throne.
Three weeks later, Sir Edward Montagu, the lord chief justice, and other senior lawyers of the King’s Bench were summoned to the king’s bedside at Greenwich. To make the succession legal, they were required to draw up letters patent to give legal effect to the terms of the revised “device.” Montagu refused, declaring he would not be involved with any changes to the succession and asserting that letters
patent could not overturn statute; Parliament needed to meet. There was, he warned, “the danger of treason.” He suggested a compromise: Mary should be allowed to succeed if she pledged to “make no religious change.” Northumberland and Edward were furious. The plan was sharply rejected.
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As Edward explained, neither Mary nor Elizabeth was acceptable as his heir:
I am convinced that my sister Mary would provoke great disturbances after I have left this life, and would leave no stone unturned, as the proverb goes, to gain control of this isle, the fairest in all Europe, my resolve is to disown and disinherit her together with her sister Elizabeth, as though she were a bastard and sprung from an illegitimate bed…. Therefore, to avoid the kingdom being weakened by such shame, it is our resolve, with the agreement of our noblemen, to appoint as our heir our most dear cousin Jane … for if our sister were to possess the kingdom (which Almighty God prevent) it would be all over for the religion whose fair foundation we have laid.
For indeed my sister Mary was the daughter of the King by Katherine the Spaniard, who before she was married to my worthy father had been espoused to Arthur, my father’s elder brother, and was therefore for this reason alone divorced by my father. But it was the fate of Elizabeth, my other sister, to have Anne Boleyn for a mother; this woman was indeed not only cast off by my father because she was more inclined to couple with a number of courtiers rather than reverencing her husband, so mighty a King, but also paid the penalty with her head—a greater proof of guilt. Thus in our judgment they will be undeservedly considered as being numbered among the heirs of the King our beloved father.
Lady Jane, by contrast, would support “the religion whose fair foundation we have laid.”
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Finally, confronted by Edward’s frail figure, the judges relented and agreed to help the king draw up his will.
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The letters patent were countersigned by Edward in six places and then by more than a hundred signatories, including judges, peers, nobles, and other dignitaries.
Edward made his final appearance at the window at Greenwich Palace on Saturday, July 1. It was clear to all that death was little more than hours away. “He was doomed, and that he was only shown because the people were murmuring and saying he was already dead, and in order that his death, when it should occur, might the more easily be concealed.”
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THE FRENCH NOW
urged Northumberland to commit to war against Charles in return for their support for Jane’s accession; the situation in England had turned to their advantage.
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With Edward in poor health in the spring of 1553, both rulers had sent ambassadors to England. Antoine de Noailles represented the French king, and Simon Renard, who would become the resident ambassador, came as part of a three-man embassy from Brussels. The emperor’s mission, as Charles outlined in instructions drawn up on June 23, was to “preserve our cousin’s [Mary’s] person from danger, assist her to obtain possession of the Crown, calm the fears the English may entertain of us, defeat French machinations and further a good understanding between our dominions and the realm of England.”
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Noailles feared that Northumberland had made a deal with Charles V to hand over Mary to be married, possibly to his eldest son, “a thing which is more to be feared than a thousand others which might happen in this affair.”
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In desperation he presented the Council with further “honest and fine offers” from Henry II, pledging his military support. Northumberland thanked him, saying that he hoped for the support of French troops “when the occasion presents itself,” and a letter was sent to the French court, stating, “We shall never forget this great friendship in so difficult times, although we doubt not but that the estate and power of this realm shall, by God’s goodness, prevail against all manner of practices or attempts either by the Emperor or any other, either foreign or outward enemies whatsoever the same be.”
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A year earlier, Henry II had extended the frontiers of France almost to the Rhine by seizing the bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun. His great ambition was to win back the last English territory in France, Calais. An alliance with England would tilt the balance of power decisively
in favor of either Henry or the emperor. For the French, it would provide a base from which to launch an invasion of the Netherlands, while for the emperor it would mean the encirclement of France and security of the sea route between Spain and the Low Countries. England now stood as a potential battleground between the Habsburg and Valois kings.