CHAPTER XIX 1553 Northumberland at bay--His capitulation--Meeting with Arundel, and arrest--Lady Jane a prisoner--Mary and Elizabeth--Mary's visit to the Tower--London--Mary's policy.

The unanimous capitulation of the Council, in which he was by absence precluded from joining, sealed Northumberland’s fate. The centre of interest shifts from London to the country, whither he had gone to meet the forces gathering round Mary. The ragged bear was at bay.

Arundel and Paget had posted northwards on the night following the revolution in London to inform the Queen of the proceedings of the Council and to make their peace with the new sovereign; Paget’s success in particular being so marked that the French looker-on reported that his favour with the Queen “etait chose plaisante À voir et oir.” The question all men were asking was what stand would be made by the leader of the troops arrayed against her. That Northumberland, knowing that he had sinned too deeply for forgiveness, would yield without a blow can scarcely have been contemplated by the most sanguine of his opponents, and the singular transmutation taking place in a man who hitherto, whatever might have been his faults or crimes, had never been lacking in courage, must have taken his enemies and what friends remained to him by surprise.

“Bold, sensitive, and magnanimous,” as some one describes him,180 he was to display a lack of every manly quality only explicable on the hypothesis that the incessant strain and excitement of the last three weeks had told upon nerves and spirits to an extent making it impossible for him to meet the crisis with dignity and valour.

Hampered with orders from the Council framed in Mary’s interest and with the secret object of delaying his movements until her adherents had had time to muster in force, he did not adopt the only course—that of immediate attack—offering a possibility of success, and had retreated to Cambridge when the news that Mary had been proclaimed in London reached him. From that instant he abandoned the struggle.

On the previous day the Vice-Chancellor of the University, Doctor Sandys, had preached, at his request, a sermon directed against Mary. Now, Duke and churchman standing side by side in the market-place, Northumberland, with the tears running down his face, and throwing his cap into the air, proclaimed her Queen. She was a merciful woman, he told Sandys, and all would doubtless share in her general pardon. Sandys knew better, and bade the Duke not flatter himself with false hopes. Were the Queen ever so much inclined to pardon, those who ruled her would destroy Northumberland, whoever else were spared.

The churchman proved to have judged more accurately than the soldier. An hour later the Duke received letters from the Council, indicating the treatment he might expect at their hands. He was thereby bidden, on pain of treason, to disarm, and it was added that, should he come within ten miles of London, his late comrades would fight him. Could greater loyalty and zeal in the service of the rising sun be displayed?

Fidelity was at a discount. His troops melted away, leaving their captain at the mercy of his enemies. In the camp confusion prevailed. Northumberland was first put under arrest, then set again at liberty upon his protest, based upon the orders of the Council that “all men should go his way.” Was he, the leader, to be prevented from acting upon their command? Young Warwick, his son, was upon the point of riding away, when, the morning after the scene in the market-place, the Earl of Arundel arrived from Queen Mary with orders to arrest the Duke.

What ensued was a painful spectacle, Northumberland’s bearing, even in a day when servility on the part of the fallen was so common as to be almost a matter of course, being generally stigmatized as unworthy of the man who had often given proof of a brave and noble spirit.181 As the two men met, it may be that the Duke augured well from the Queen’s choice of a messenger. If he had, he was to be quickly undeceived. Arundel was not disposed to risk his newly acquired favour with the sovereign for the sake of a discredited comrade, and Northumberland might have spared the abjectness of his attitude; as, falling on his knees, he begged his former friend, for the love of God, to be good to him.

“Consider,” he urged, “I have done nothing but by the consents of you and all the whole Council.”

The plea was ill-chosen. That Arundel had been implicated in the treason was a reason the more why he could not afford to show mercy to a fellow-traitor; nor was he in a mood to discuss a past he would have preferred to forget and to blot out. It is the unfortunate who are prone to indulge in long memories, and the Earl had just achieved a success which he was anxious to render permanent. Disregarding Northumberland’s appeal, he turned at once to the practical matter in hand. He had been sent there by the Queen’s Majesty, he told the Duke; in her name he arrested him.

Northumberland made no attempt at resistance. He obeyed, he answered humbly; “and I beseech you, my Lord of Arundel, use mercy towards me, knowing the case as it is.”

Again Arundel coldly ignored the appeal to the past.

“My lord,” he replied, “ye should have sought for mercy sooner. I must do according to my commandment,” and he handed over his prisoner forthwith to the guards who stood near.

For two hours, denied so much as the services of his attendants, the Duke paced the chamber wherein he was confined, till, looking out of the window, he caught sight of Arundel passing below, and entreated that his servants might be admitted to him.

“For the love of God,” he cried, “let me have Cox, one of my chamber, to wait on me!”

“You shall have Tom, your boy,” answered the Earl, naming the lad, Thomas Lovell, of whom, a few days earlier, he had taken so affectionate a leave. Northumberland protested.

“Alas, my lord,” he said, “what stead can a boy do me? I pray you let me have Cox.” And so both Lovell and Cox were permitted to attend their master. It was the single concession he could obtain.182

Thus Northumberland met his fate.

The Queen’s justice had overtaken more innocent victims. Lady Jane’s stay at Sion House had not been prolonged. By July 23, not more than three days after she had quitted the Tower, she returned to it, not as a Queen, but as a captive, accompanied by the Duchess of Northumberland and Guilford Dudley, her husband. More prisoners were quickly added to their number. Northumberland was brought, with others of his adherents, from Cambridge. Northampton, who had hurried to Framlingham, where Mary then was, to throw himself upon her mercy, arrived soon after; with Bishop Ridley, who, notwithstanding his recent declamations against the Queen, had resorted with the rest to Norfolk, had met with an unfriendly reception from Mary, and was sent back to London “on a halting horse.”183

It is singular that to the Duke of Suffolk, prominent amongst those who had been arrayed against her, the new Queen showed unusual indulgence. So far as actual deeds were concerned, he had been second in guilt only to Northumberland; though there can be little doubt that he was led and governed by the stronger will and more soaring ambition of his confederate. Lady Jane being, besides, his daughter, and not merely married to his son, it would have been natural to expect that he would have been called to a stricter account than Dudley. He was, as a matter of course, arrested and consigned to the Tower; but when a convenient attack of illness laid him low—a news-letter reporting that he was “in such case as no man judgeth he could live”184—and his wife represented his desperate condition to her cousin the Queen, adding that, if left in the Tower, death would ensue, Mary appears to have made no difficulty in granting her his freedom, merely ordering him to confine himself to his house, rather as restraint than as chastisement.185

Mary could afford to show mercy. On August 3 she made her triumphal entry into the capital which had proved so loyal to her cause, riding on a white horse, with the Earl of Arundel bearing before her the sword of state, and preceded by some thousand gentlemen in rich array.

Elizabeth was at her side—Elizabeth, who had learnt wisdom since the days, nearly five years ago, when she had compromised herself for the sake of Seymour. During the crisis now over, she had shown both prudence and caution, playing in fact a waiting game, as she looked on at the contest between her sister and Northumberland, and carefully abstaining from taking any side in it, until it should be seen which of the two would prove victorious. To her, as well as to Mary, a summons had been sent as from her dying brother; more wary than her sister, she detected the snare, and remained at Hatfield, whilst Mary came near to falling a prey to her enemies. At Hatfield she continued during the ensuing days, being visited by commissioners from Northumberland, who offered a large price, in land and money, in exchange for her acquiescence in Edward’s appointment of Lady Jane as his successor. If Elizabeth loved money, she loved her safety more; and returned an answer to the effect that it was with her elder sister that an agreement must be made, since in Mary’s lifetime she herself had neither claim nor title to the succession. Leti,186 representing her as regarding Lady Jane as a jeune Étourdie—the first and only time the epithet can have been applied to Suffolk’s grave daughter—states that she indignantly expostulated with Northumberland upon the wrong done to herself and Mary. She is more likely to have kept silence; and it is certain that an opportune attack of illness afforded her an excuse for prudent inaction. When Mary’s cause had become triumphant she had recovered sufficiently to proceed to London, meeting her sister on the following day at Aldgate, and riding at her side when she made her entry into the capital.

The two presented a painful contrast: Mary prematurely aged by grief and care, small and thin, “unlike in every respect to father or mother,” says Michele, the Venetian ambassador, “with eyes so piercing as to inspire not only reverence, but fear”; Elizabeth, now twenty, tall and well made, though possessing more grace than beauty, with fine eyes, and, above all, beautiful hands, “della quale fa professione”—which she was accustomed to display.

Her entry into the City made, Mary proceeded, according to ancient custom, and as her unwilling rival had done three weeks before, to the Tower, where a striking scene took place. On her entrance she was met by a group of those who, imprisoned during the two previous reigns, awaited her on their knees. Her kinsman, Edward Courtenay, was there—since he was ten years old he had known no other home—and the Duchess of Somerset, widow of the Protector, with the old Duke of Norfolk, father to Surrey, Tunstall, the deprived Bishop of Durham, and Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester. In Mary’s eyes some of these were martyrs, suffering for their fidelity to the faith for which she had herself been prepared to go to the scaffold; for others she felt the natural compassion due to captives who have wasted long years within prison walls; and, touched and overcome by the sight of that motley company, she burst into tears.

“These are my prisoners,” she said, as she bent and kissed them.

Their day was come. By August 11 Gardiner was reinstated in Winchester House, which had been appropriated to the use of the Marquis of Northampton, now perhaps inhabiting the Bishop’s quarters in the Tower. The Duke of Norfolk, the Duchess of Somerset, Courtenay, were all at liberty. Bonner was once more exercising his functions as Bishop of London. But their places in the old prison-house were not left vacant: fresh captives being sent to join those already there. Report declared—prematurely—that sentence had been passed on Northumberland, Huntingdon, Gates, and others. Pembroke, notwithstanding the zealous share he had taken in proclaiming Mary Queen, as well as Winchester and Darcy, were confined to their houses.

All necessary measures had been taken for the security of the Government. It was time to think of the dead boy lying unburied whilst the struggle for his inheritance had been fought out. In the arrangements for her brother’s funeral Mary displayed a toleration that must have gone far to raise the hopes of the Protestant party, awaiting, in anxiety and dread, enlightenment as to the course the new ruler would pursue with regard to religion. Permitting her brother’s obsequies to be celebrated by Cranmer according to the ritual prescribed by the reformed Prayer-book, she caused a Requiem Mass to be sung for him in the Tower in the presence of some hundreds of worshippers, notwithstanding the fact that, according to Griffet, “this was not in conformity with the laws of the Roman Church, since the Prince died in schism and heresy.”187

It was the moment when Mary, the recipient, as she told the French ambassador, of more graces than any living Princess; the object of the love and devotion of her subjects; her long years of misfortune ended; her record unstained, should have died. But, unfortunately, five more years of life remained to her.

The presage of coming trouble was not absent in the midst of the general rejoicing, and the first notes of discord had already been struck. Emboldened by the Requiem celebrated in the Tower, a priest had taken courage, and had said Mass in the Church of St. Bartholomew in the City. It was then seen how far the people were from being unanimous in including in their devotion to the Queen toleration for her religion. “This day,” reports a news-letter of August 11, “an old priest said Mass at St. Bartholomew’s, but after that Mass was done, the people would have pulled him to pieces.”188 “When they saw him go up to the altar,” says Griffet, “there was a great tumult, some attempting to throw themselves upon him and strike him, others trying to prevent this violence, so that there came near to being blood shed.”189

Scenes of this nature, with the open declarations of the Protestants that they would meet the re-establishment of the old worship with an armed resistance, and that it would be necessary to pass over the bodies of twenty thousand men before a single Mass should be quietly said in London, were warnings of rocks ahead. That Mary recognised the gravity of the situation was proved by the fact that, after an interview with the Mayor, she permitted the priest who had disregarded the law to be put into prison, although taking care that an opportunity of escape should shortly be afforded him.190

A proclamation made in the middle of August also testified to some desire upon the Queen’s part, at this stage, to adopt a policy of conciliation. In it she declared that it was her will “that all men should embrace that religion which all men knew she had of long time observed, and meant, God willing, to continue the same; willing all men to be quiet, and not call men the names of heretick and papist, but each man to live after the religion he thought best until further order were taken concerning the same.”191

Though the liberty granted was only provisional and temporary, there was nothing in the proclamation to foreshadow the fires of Smithfield, and it was calculated to allay any fears or forebodings disquieting the minds of loyal subjects.

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