CHAPTER XIII 1552 Northumberland and the King--Edward's illness--Lady Jane and Mary--Mary refused permission to practise her religion--The Emperor intervenes.

For the moment master of the field, Northumberland addressed himself sedulously to the task of strengthening and consolidating the position he had won. In the Council he had achieved predominance, but the King’s minority would not last for ever, and the necessity of laying the foundation of a power that should continue when Edward’s nominal sovereignty should have become a real one was urgent.

The lad was growing up; nor were there wanting moments causing those around him to look on with disquietude to the day when the nobles ruling in his name might be called upon to give an account of their stewardship. A curious anecdote tells how, as Northumberland stood one day watching the King practising the art of archery, the boy put a “sharp jest” upon him, not without its significance.

“Well aimed, my liege,” said the Duke merrily, as the arrow hit the white. “But you aimed better,” retorted the lad, “when you shot off the head of my uncle Somerset.”125

It was a grim and ominous pleasantry, and in the direct charge it contained of responsibility for the death of Edward’s nearest of kin another shaft besides the arrow may have been sent home. The Tudors were not good at forgiving. Even had the King seen the death of the Duke’s rival and victim without regret, it was possible that he would none the less owe a grudge to the man to whom it was due; nor was Northumberland without a reason for anticipating with uneasiness the day when Edward, remembering all, should hold the reins of Government in his own hands.

Under these circumstances it was clearly his interest to commend himself to the young sovereign, and the system he pursued with regard to his education and training were carefully adapted to that purpose. Whilst the Protector had had the arrangement of affairs, his nephew had been kept closely to his studies; Northumberland, “a soldier at heart and by profession, had him taught to ride and handle his weapons,” the boy welcoming the change, and, though not neglecting his books, taking pleasure in every form of bodily exercise;126 not without occasional pangs of conscience, when more time had been spent in pastime than he “thought convenient.”

“We forget ourselves,” he would observe, finding fault with himself sententiously in royal phrase, upon such occasions, “that should not lose substantia pro accidente.”127

It had been the Protector’s custom to place little money at his nephew’s disposal, thus rendering him comparatively straitened in the means of exercising the liberality befitting his position; and part of the boy’s liking for the Admiral had been owing to the gifts contrasting with the niggardliness of the elder brother. Profiting by his predecessor’s mistakes, Northumberland’s was a different policy. He supplied Edward freely with gold, encouraged him to make presents, and to show himself a King; acquainting him besides with public business, and flattering him by asking his opinion upon such matters.128

The Duke might have spared his pains. It was not by Edward that he was to be called to account. But at that time there were no signs to indicate how futile was the toil of those who were seeking to build their fortunes upon his favour. A well-grown, handsome lad, his health had given no special cause for anxiety up to the spring of 1552. In the March of that year, however, a sharp and complicated attack of illness laid him low and sowed the seeds of future delicacy.

“I fell sick of the smallpox and the measles,” recorded the boy in his diary. “April 15th the Parliament broke up because I was sick and unable to go abroad.”

To us, who read the laconic entry in the light thrown upon it by future events, it marks the beginning of the end—not only the end of the King’s short life, but the beginning of the drama in which many other actors were to be involved and were to meet their doom. As yet none of the anxious watchers suspected that death had set his broad arrow upon the lad; and in the summer he had so far recovered as to be sending a blithe account to Barnaby Fitzpatrick, then in France, of a progress he had made in the country, and its attendant enjoyments. Whilst his old playfellow had been occupied in killing his enemies, and sore skirmishing and divers assaults, the King had been killing wild beasts, having pleasant journeys and good fare, viewing fair countries, and seeking rather to fortify his own than to spoil another man’s129—so he wrote gaily to Fitzpatrick.

Meantime his illness, with the dissolution of Parliament consequent upon it, had probably emptied London; the Suffolk family, with others, returning to their country home. In July Lady Jane was on a visit to her cousin, the Princess Mary, at Newhall; when, once more, an indiscreet speech—a scoff, on this occasion, directed against the outward tokens of that Catholic faith to which Mary was so vehemently loyal—may, repeated to her hostess, have served to irritate her towards the offender against the rules of courtesy and good taste. Under other circumstances, it might have been passed over by the older woman with a smile; but subjected to annoyance and petty persecution by reason of her religion and saddened and embittered by illness and misfortune, the trifling instance of ill-manners on the part of a malapert child of fifteen may have had its share in accentuating a latent antagonism.

In the course of the previous year a controversy had reached its height which had been more or less imminent since the statute enjoining the use of the new Prayer-book had been passed, a work said to have afforded the King—then eleven years of age—“great comfort and quietness of mind.” From that time forward—the decree had become law in 1549—there had been trouble in the royal family, as might be expected when opinion on vital points of religion, the burning question of the day, was widely and violently divergent, and friends and advisers were ever at hand to fan the flame of discord in their own interest or that of their party. No one could be blind to the fact that the ardent Catholicism of the Princess Mary, next in succession to the throne, constituted a standing menace to the future of religion as recently by law established, and to the durability of the work hastily carried through in creating a new Church on a new basis. Furthermore it was considered that her present attitude of open and determined opposition to the decree passed by Parliament was a cause of scandal in the realm. It was certainly one of annoyance to the King and Council.

Cranmer would probably have liked to keep the peace. An honest man, but no fanatic and holding moderate views, he might have been inclined, having got what he personally wanted, to adopt a policy of conciliation. Affairs had gone well with him; his friends were in power; and, if he failed to inspire the foreign divines and their English disciples with entire trust, it was admitted in 1550 by John Stumpius, of that school, that things had been put upon a right footing. “There is,” he added, “the greatest hope as to religion, for the Archbishop of Canterbury has lately married a wife.”130

Matters being thus comfortably arranged, Cranmer, if he had had his way, might have preferred to leave them alone. But what could one man do in the interests of peace, when Churchmen and laity were alike clamouring for war, when the King’s Council were against the concession of any one point at issue, and the King himself had composed, before he was twelve years old, and “sans l’aide de personne vivant,” a treatise directed against the supremacy of the Pope? To the honour of the King’s counsellors, few victims had suffered the supreme penalty during his reign on account of their religious opinions;131 but Gardiner and Bonner, as well as Bishops Day and Heath, were in prison, and if the lives of the adherents of the ancient faith were spared, no other mitigation of punishment or indulgence was to be expected by them.

Under pressure from the Emperor the principal offender had been at first granted permission to continue the practice of her religion. But when peace with France rendered a rupture with Charles a less formidable contingency than before, it was decided that renewed efforts should be made to compel the Princess Mary to bow to the fiat of King and Council. Love of God and affection for his sister forbade her brother, he declared, to tolerate her obstinacy longer, the intimation being accompanied by an offer of teachers who should instruct her ignorance and refute her errors.

Mary was a match for both King and Council. In an interview with the Lords she told them that her soul was God’s, and that neither would she change her faith nor dissemble her opinions; the Council replying by a chilling intimation that her faith was her own affair, but that she must obey like a subject, not rule like a sovereign. The Princess, however, had a card to play unsuspected by her adversaries. The dispute had taken place on August 18. On the 19th the Council was unpleasantly surprised by a strong measure on the part of the imperial ambassador, in the shape of a declaration of war in case his master’s cousin was not permitted the exercise of her religion.

The Council were in a difficulty. War with the Emperor, at that moment, and without space for preparation, would have been attended with grave inconvenience. On the other hand Edward’s tender conscience had outrun that of his ministers, and had become so difficult to deal with that all the persuasions of the Primate and two other Bishops were needed to convince the boy, honest and zealous in his intolerance, that “to suffer or wink at [sin] for a time might be borne, so all haste possible was used.”

A temporising answer was therefore returned to the imperial ambassador, “all haste possible” being made in removing English stores from Flanders, so that, in case of a rupture, they might not fall into Charles’s hands. This accomplished, fresh and stringent measures were taken to compel the Princess’s obedience; her chief chaplain was committed to the Tower, charged with having celebrated Mass in his mistress’s house, and three of the principal officers of her household were sent to join him there as a punishment for declining to use coercion to prevent a recurrence of the offence.

An interview followed between Mary and a deputation of members of the Council, who visited her with the object of enforcing the King’s orders. The Princess received her guests with undisguised impatience; requested them to be brief; and, having listened to what they had to say, answered shortly that she would lay her head upon a block—no idle rhetoric in those days—sooner than use any other form of service than that in use at her father’s death; when her brother was of full age she was ready to obey his commands, but at present—good, sweet King!—he could not be a judge in such matters. Her chaplains, for the rest, could do as they pleased in the matter of saying Mass, “but none of your new service shall be used in my house, or I will not tarry in it.”

Thus the controversy practically ended. The Council dared not proceed to extremities against the Emperor’s cousin, and tacitly agreed to let her alone, having supplied her with one more bitter memory to add to the account which was to be lamentably settled in the near future.

---