Bloody Mary (37 page)

A fourth chaplain could not be found, and Rich, Petre and Wingfield delayed their departure while one last search for him was made. While they waited Mary appeared at an open window and called out to them insolently.

“I pray you,” she said, “ask the lords of the Council that my controller may shortly return; for since his departing I take the accounts myself, and lo! I have learned how many loaves of bread be made of a bushel of wheat! I know my father and mother never brought me up to brewing and baking,” she went on, “and, to be plain with you, I am weary of my office. If my lords will send my officer home again, they shall do me a pleasure; otherwise, if they send him to prison, beshrew me if he go not to it merrily, and with a good will.” In a final burst of impudence she wished them on their way with a wry insult. “And I pray God to send you well in your souls, and in your bodies too, for some of you have but weak ones.”

On this saucy note the long conflict over the mass ended. The prohibition was in force, and there would be no more public masses said in Mary’s house, with the gentry from neighboring houses and farmers from the villages streaming in to join in the worship. But in another sense Mary had come out ahead. She had succeeded in protecting her servants from punishment, and by hiding away one of the chaplains she provided herself with a way of continuing her worship in secret. If discovered the fugitive priest could correctly say he had not personally been forbidden to perform the sacrifice in Mary’s house; technically he was exempt from the order. And so, “unknown to more than three of the most confidential persons at the utmost,” Mary continued to hear mass for the next two years, conscious of the grave danger she would be in if she were found out.
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Her fear of discovery and punishment was not lessened by the fact that under Dudley’s leadership the country was gradually coming to pieces. With his favorites Northampton and Dorset he spent his days dominating the Council, supervising the shaping of the king’s mind and opinions and browbeating peasants accused of disobeying the religious laws. Voices could be heard up and down the galleries outside the Council chamber, shouting loudly and violently at the unfortunates and “handling them roughly.”
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Inflation was a far more serious problem than heresy in Edward’s reign, but all Dudley could think to do for it was to repeat Somerset’s disastrous policy of debasing the coinage. Coming on the heels of uncontrolled inflation in the early years of the reign, the new
debasements created appalling hardships. In 1551 coined money was worth a little over half its value in the closing years of Henry’s reign, while prices had tripled. Ignorant of the fact that when coins are worth less, goods cost more Dudley blamed the inflation on “diverse insatiable and greedy persons” who raised prices simply to enrich themselves, and the cycle of devaluation and higher and higher prices continued.

Widespread unrest continued with it, and rumors of rebellions being plotted at country manors far from London. It was said the earls of Derby and Shrewsbury, who absented themselves from court because of political differences with Dudley, were prepared to raise a rebel army of sixty thousand men on a few days’ notice, and as the months passed more and more of those who had once looked to Dudley as a deliverer secretly hoped he would be overthrown. One of these disillusioned men, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports Sir Thomas Cheyne, confided to Scheyfve that “he would spend all he had to help in restoring matters to a better condition than we see them in now.”
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A conspicuous sign of the decay of the political order was the ceaseless preoccupation with security. The government was as hard hit by the inflation as the king’s angry subjects, and new and inexpensive ways had to be found to maintain an armed force to keep order at home and discourage invasion from abroad. Beyond the five hundred foreign troops now brought in to form an expanded royal bodyguard, Dudley was experimenting with a semi-feudal arrangement under which gentlemen and lords were to provide several armed horsemen each to a national fighting force in return for a nominal sum from the king. In this way it was thought that four thousand horsemen might be kept at the ready at a cost to the royal treasury of only ten thousand pounds.
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In October of 1551 the need for security was emphasized when Somerset, who had continued to sit on the Council ever since his release from the Tower nearly two years earlier, was arrested again and charged with high treason. According to the Council, Somerset had plotted to seize the Tower, use the arms stored there to take over the city, and then stir up the commons to revolt. Accomplices in other parts of the country would seize the strong places and subdue the local population. Then in a bloodthirsty epilogue the duke had planned to invite the Council members to a banquet at which they would all be assassinated.
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The sinister plan was discovered and forestalled just in time, and the duke, who could hope for no leniency this time, was executed the following January.

In the same month that Somerset was charged, Dudley and the principal men about him advanced themselves in rank, taking new titles and greatly enlarging their estates. Dudley, already earl of Warwick, became duke of Northumberland; Grey, marquis of Dorset, was given the
recently extinct title duke of Suffolk. (With the death of Charles Brandon in 1545 the title duke of Suffolk had gone to his brothers, both of whom died of the sweat in 1551; Grey was married to Brandon’s daughter Frances, and so had a claim to the dukedom through his wife.) The treasurer, Paulet, became earl of Wiltshire, while Herbert became marquis of Winchester and earl of Pembroke.

With the frantic efforts to support fighting men, the alarms of the conspiracy, and the flourishing of new titles and styles within the government, Mary and her mass were virtually forgotten. At the end of the year she heard a rumor that an attempt might be made to force her to adopt the Anglican liturgy, but nothing came of it. In the spring of 1552 Rochester, Walgrave and Englefield were quietly released from captivity and allowed to return to her service. From then on Mary came to the attention of the Council only in passing, in connection with routine matters. On one occasion she exchanged four of her manors—St. Osyth, Little Clafton, Great Clafton and Willeigh—for others, a transfer not without significance, as St. Osyth was at the mouth of the Blackwater in Essex, even closer to the sea than Woodham Walter. At other times money was sent to her to repair her houses, or her flooded lands “decayed by the rage of the water.”
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The emperor and regent watched the course of English politics with astonishment. They saw a disorganized tyranny presiding over a disintegrating society. A king who might not live to manhood was at the mercy of a coterie of insecure opportunists that was gradually turning in on itself and devouring its own. The regent wrote to her chief minister about the volatile situation, describing a dark scenario of what might happen in the near future. The men at the head of affairs saw their own shortcomings all too clearly, she wrote. Knowing they could never give a good account of their stewardship to the king at his maturity, they might well kill both Edward and Mary and avoid the day of reckoning. “Stranger things have been seen in England,” she remarked, “and done with less motive.”
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In view of this possibility, “many people are of opinion that the kingdom of England would not be impossible to conquer, especially now that it is prey to discord and poverty.” She suggested three men who might be counted on to lead an expedition to England to “take the king out of the hands of his pernicious governors”: Archduke Ferdinand, Mary’s longtime suitor Dom Luiz of Portugal, and the duke of Holstein. The latter might count on his brother, the king of Denmark, for help, “for the Danes claim England, have often invaded it, and have actually held it for a number of years.”
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The regent had read her history thoroughly, but there was no precedent for the sudden change in fortunes that now overtook England. Edward’s health began to decline. He lost his vitality, his weight dropped, and he fell prey to a series of diseases. He was “thin and weak” in the
summer of 1551, and the following spring he took to his bed with measles and smallpox. His convalescence was very slow, and though he was able to make a summer progress the following July and August “it was observed on all sides how sickly he looked, and general pity was felt for him by the people.” When the Milanese physician and psychic Girolamo Cardano saw Edward in the fall of 1552 he was impressed with his abilities but pessimistic about his future; he bore, Cardano wrote, “an appearance on his face denoting early death.” And he added, “His vital powers will always be weak.”

By the early months of 1553 Edward was showing the symptoms of an advanced case of tuberculosis. He was racked by a “tough, strong, straining cough,” which seemed to get worse every day. At the same time he showed a “weakness and faintness of spirit” which betrayed the decline of his vital parts. When Mary came to court in February she heard rumors that her brother’s sickness was growing “by a slow-working poison.” He was too ill to see her, but after three days of waiting she was finally allowed into his bedchamber. A week later, with the cough and other symptoms growing more severe despite every sort of medical treatment, the doctors all but gave him up. To protect themselves they warned the Council that Edward was in peril of his life, and that if any other “serious malady” supervened he would not be able to survive it.

It now appeared that, unless Edward made a miraculous recovery, Mary would soon be queen of England. Whether Mary herself believed this possible is unclear. At one time she speculated that, if Edward died, she would be killed very quickly, before there was time for a popular rising on her behalf. She may have felt the same fear for her life now, or she may not have been aware that Edward’s illness had reached a critical point. She was away from court during Edward’s last months; she knew he was seriously ill, but she may not have realized until shortly before news of his death reached her that he had been fatally ill.

The thought that Mary might come to the throne had haunted the minds of Dudley and the Council ever since Edward’s increasing debilitation began in the spring of 1552. The prospect was a grim one indeed, for as queen Mary would certainly overturn the Protestant religious settlement, bring England back within the jurisdiction of the pope, and take vengeance on those in the Council who had mistreated her, exploited her brother and illegally enriched themselves. With Mary in line to succeed, Edward’s death would bring in a prolonged day of reckoning that would shake the kingdom to its political foundations, putting most of those who had ruled for the past six years in the Tower.

But even as they contemplated these horrors the councilors did nothing to forestall them until the late spring of 1553, when two distinct forces—Edward’s firm opposition to Catholicism and Northumberland’s desperate ambition—came together to exclude Mary from the succession.

In mid-May, as the king lay wasting away at Greenwich coughing blood, his body covered in ulcers and his mind disturbed by the fever that never left him, he wrote out in his own hand a document altering the succession established by his father’s will. This “Device for the Succession” passed over Mary and Elizabeth and named the heirs to the throne in the following order: first the male heirs of Edward’s cousin Frances Brandon, then the male heirs, in turn, of her three daughters, Jane, Catherine and Mary Grey, and finally the male heirs of Margaret Clifford, like the Greys a granddaughter of Charles Brandon and Mary Tudor.

That Edward should redraw the plans for the succession was not as unorthodox as it might seem. His father had changed the succession several times, until it seemed more a matter of the royal will than the royal blood. And there was the urgent issue of religion. Under Dudley’s tutelage Edward had become so staunchly opposed to the old faith that he could not tolerate the thought of a Catholic on the throne. This explained his exclusion of Mary, despite his fondness for her, but the exclusion of Elizabeth can only have been on grounds of her sex. By a dynastic quirk all of Henry VIII’s heirs but Edward had been female. Since he had no son of his own Edward was bound to pass his crown to one of these women, yet in his “Device” he specifically named their male offspring as his heirs. Assuming that Edward was determined to assure himself a male successor, it was obvious he could not look to his unmarried Protestant sister Elizabeth to produce his heir, so he named the sons of his remaining female relatives. There was only one difficulty: none of the five women had any sons.

Here Dudley’s determination to hold onto his power fell into line with Edward’s rearranged succession scheme—and of course, the entire plan may well have been Northumberland’s creation. Before the Device was drawn up the duke had announced that his son, Guilford Dudley, would marry Jane Grey, eldest daughter of Henry Grey, duke of Suffolk, at the end of May. Jane Grey stood second in Edward’s Device, but the woman who stood first, Jane’s mother Frances, was not likely to have more children. Thus if all went well, the son of Jane and Guilford Dudley would be the next ruler of England, and his grandfather Northumberland would be allied to the royal house by marriage. Three other matches were arranged at the same time, all of them intended to strengthen Northumberland’s faction. Herbert’s eldest son was to marry Jane Grey’s sister Catherine, while the third Grey daughter was betrothed to a man not previously aligned with the duke (and not related to the bride’s family), Lord Grey. Finally, Dudley’s daughter Catherine was to marry the son of the earl of Huntingdon—another influential man who had not until now been of the duke’s faction.
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Jane Grey married Guilford Dudley on May 21, with no public announcement of the altered succession. To allay Mary’s suspicions about his scheme Dudley went out of his way to put himself on good terms with her. He kept her informed of Edward’s condition, though he was careful not to go into detail. He even sent her “her full arms as Princess of England, as she used to bear them in her father’s lifetime”—contradicting his earlier insistence to Scheyfve that the title “Princess of England” was not hers to use or claim.
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But there was no mistaking the purpose behind the match he made for his son, his amassing of money and provisions, and his sending of his most trusted followers to many of the chief castles and strongholds to secure them in case of rebellion. The king was slowly dying; once he was dead there would be a struggle for the throne, and Dudley meant to be the victor.