CHAPTER XXI 1553 Mary's marriage in question--Pole and Courtenay--Foreign suitors--The Prince of Spain proposed to her--Elizabeth's attitude--Lady Jane's letter to Hardinge--The coronation--Cranmer in the Tower--Lady Jane attainted--Letter to her father--Sentence of death--The Spanish match.

To Mary there were at present matters of more personal and pressing moment than the fate of her ill-starred cousin. It was essential that the kingdom should be provided as quickly as possible with an heir whose title to the throne should admit of no question. Mary was no longer young and there was no time to lose. The question in all men’s minds was who was to be the Queen’s husband. Amongst Englishmen, Pole, who, though a Cardinal, was not in priest’s orders, and Courtenay, the prisoner of the Tower, were both of royal blood, and considered in the light of possible aspirants to her hand. The first, however, was soon set aside, as disqualified by age and infirmity. Towards Courtenay she appeared for a time not ill-disposed. His unhappy youth, his long captivity, may have told in his favour in the eyes of a woman herself the victim of injustice and misfortune. He was young, not more than twenty-seven, handsome—called by Castlenau “l’un des plus beaux entre les jeunes seigneurs de son Âge”—and the Queen cherished a special affection for his mother. He had been restored to the forfeited honours of his family, had been made Earl of Devonshire and Knight of the Bath. Gardiner also, whose opinion carried weight, was an advocate of the match. But on his enfranchisement from prison the young man had not used his liberty wisely. His head turned by the position already his, and the chance of a higher one, he had started his household on a princely scale, inducing many of the courtiers to kneel in his presence. Follies such as these Mary might have condoned, although the fact that she directed her cousin to accept no invitations to dinner without her permission indicates the exercise of a supervision somewhat like that to be kept over an emancipated schoolboy. But at a moment when he was aspiring to the highest rank to be enjoyed by any subject, his moral misconduct was matter of public report and sufficient to deter any woman from becoming his wife. He was also headstrong and self-willed, “so difficult to guide,” sighed Noailles, “that he will believe nobody; and as one who has spent his life in a tower, seeing himself now in the enjoyment of entire liberty, cannot abstain from its delights, having no fear of those things which may be placed before him.” To these causes, rather than to the romantic passion for Elizabeth attributed to Courtenay by some other writers, Dr. Lingard attributes Mary’s refusal to entertain the idea of becoming his wife. “In public she observed that it was not for her honour to marry a subject, but to her confidential friends she attributed the cause to the immorality of Courtenay.”201

Her two English suitors disposed of, it remained to select a husband from amongst foreign princes—the King of Denmark, the Prince of Spain, the Infant of Portugal, the Prince of Piedmont, being all under consideration. A few months ago Mary had been a negligible quantity in the marriage market; she had now become one of the most desirable matches in Europe. She was determined to follow in her choice the advice of the Emperor; and the Emperor had hitherto abstained from proffering it, contenting himself with negativing the candidature of the son of the King of the Romans. It was not until September 20 that, in answer to her repeated inquiries, he instructed his ambassadors to offer her the hand of his son; requesting that the matter should be kept secret, even from her ministers of State, until he had been informed whether she was inclined to accept his suggestion.202 The contents of the Emperor’s despatch must have been communicated to the Queen immediately before her coronation on September 30; but not being as yet made public there was nothing to interfere with the loyal rejoicings of the people, to whom the very idea of the Spanish match would have been abhorrent.

Meantime the attitude of Elizabeth was increasing the desire of the Catholic party that a direct heir should be born to the Catholic Queen. The nation was insensibly dividing itself into two camps, and the Protestant and Catholic parties eyed one another with suspicion, each looking to the sister who shared its faith for support. The enthusiasm displayed towards Elizabeth by a section of the people was not conducive to the continuance of affectionate relations between the Queen and the next heir to the throne, Pope Julius describing the younger sister as being in the heart and mouth of every one. Elizabeth was in a position of no little difficulty. She desired to continue on good terms with the Queen; she was not willing to relinquish her chief title to honour in Protestant eyes; and it is possible that genuine religious sentiment, a sincere preference for the creed she professed, may have added to her embarrassment. It may have been due to conviction that she declined to bow to her sister’s wishes by attending Mass, refusing so much as to be present at the ceremonial which created Courtenay Earl of Devonshire. It was satisfactory to know that Protestant England looked on and applauded. It was less pleasant to hear that some of the Queen’s hot-headed friends, interpreting her refusal as an act of disrespect to their mistress, had demanded—though vainly—her arrest; and though on September 6 Noailles reported to his master that on the previous Saturday and Sunday the Princess had proved deaf to the arguments of preachers and the solicitations of Councillors, and had gone so far as to make a rude reply to the last, she suddenly changed her tactics, fell on her knees, weeping, before Mary, and begged that books and teachers might be supplied to her, so that she might perhaps see cause to alter the faith in which she had been brought up. The expectation seems to have been promptly realised. On September 8 she accompanied the Queen to Mass, and, expressing an intention of establishing a chapel in her house, wrote to the Emperor to ask permission to purchase the ornaments for it in Brussels.

It was a season of sudden conversions. Elizabeth was not the only person who saw the wisdom of conforming in appearance or in sincerity to the standard set up by the Queen. Hardinge, a chaplain of the Duke of Suffolk’s—he must have succeeded to the post of the worthy Haddon—had recognized his errors; and it is believed that to him a letter of Lady Jane’s—though signed with her unmarried name—was addressed. Printed in English, and abroad, perhaps through the instrumentality of her former tutor, Aylmer, it is an epistle of expostulation, reproof, and warning, couched in the violent language of the time. To her “noble friend, newly fallen from the truth” she writes, marvelling at him, and lamenting the case of one who, once the lively member of Christ, was now the deformed imp of the devil, and from the temple of God was become the kennel of Satan—with much more in the same strain. It has not been recorded what effect, if any, the missive produced upon the delinquent to whom it was addressed.

Elizabeth, for her part, had effectually made her peace with her sister. The coronation, on October 10, found their relations restored to a pleasant footing, and Elizabeth’s proper place at the ceremony was assured to her. To Mary, a sad and lonely woman, the reconciliation must have been welcome. To Elizabeth the material advantages of standing on terms of affection with the Queen will have appealed more strongly than motives of sentiment; and that her attitude was surmised by those about her would seem to be shown by a curious incident reported in the despatches of the imperial ambassador.

As the younger sister bore the crown to be placed upon Mary’s head, she complained to M. de Noailles, who stood near, of its weight. It was heavy, she said, and she was weary. The Frenchman replied with a flippant jest, overheard by Charles’s ambassador, though Noailles himself, perhaps convicted of indiscretion, makes no mention of it in his account of the day’s proceedings. Let Elizabeth have patience, he replied. When the crown should shortly be upon her own head it would appear lighter.203

Outwardly all was as it should be. Mary held her sister’s hand in an affectionate clasp, assigning to her the place of honour next her own at the ensuing banquet, and court and nation looked on and were edified.

Gardiner, now not only Bishop of Winchester but Lord Chancellor, had performed the rites of the coronation, in the absence of the Archbishops, both in confinement. The Tower had been once more opening its hospitable doors, and a fortnight earlier its resident diarist had noted Cranmer’s arrival. “Item, the Bishop of Canterbury was brought into the Tower as prisoner, and lodged in the Tower over the gate anenst the water-gate, where the Duke of Northumberland lay before his death.”

Nor was Cranmer the only churchman to find a lodging there. Doctor Ridley had preceded him to the universal prison-house, and on the same day that the Archbishop took up his residence in it “Master Latimer was brought to the Tower prisoner; who at his coming said to one Rutter, a warder there, ‘What, my old friend, how do you? I am now come to be your neighbour again,’ and was lodged in the garden in Sir Thomas Palmer’s lodging.”

Ominous quarters both! It was a day when the great fortress received, and discharged, many guests.

If Cranmer had drawn his imprisonment upon himself, the imprudence to which it was due did him honour. He had at first been treated by Mary with an indulgence the more singular when it is remembered that he had been the instrument of her mother’s divorce, and a strenuous supporter of Lady Jane. Prudence would have dictated the adoption on his part of a policy of silence; but, confined to his house at Lambeth, and regarding with the bitterness inevitable in a man of his convictions the steps in course of being taken for the restoration of the ancient worship, the news that Mass had been once again celebrated in Canterbury Cathedral, and that it was commonly reported that it had been done with his consent and connivance, was too much for him. Feeling the need of clearing himself from what he regarded as a damaging imputation, he wrote and spread abroad a declaration of his faith and opinions, adding to it a violent attack upon the rites of the Catholic Church. By Mary and her advisers the challenge could scarcely have been ignored; and it was this document, read to the people in the streets, which was the cause of the Archbishop being called before the Council and committed to the Tower on a charge of treason accompanied by the spreading abroad of seditious libels.204

The Tower continued to be, in some sort, the centre of all that was going forward. On September 27, two days before the coronation, Mary had again visited the fortress whither she had so nearly escaped being brought in quite another character and guise. Elizabeth came with her, and she was attended by the whole Council—just as they had, not three months before, attended upon Jane, the innocent usurper. And somewhere in the great dark building the little Twelfth-night Queen must have listened to the pealing of the joy-bells and to the acclamations of the people who had kept so ominous a silence when she herself had made her entry. Perhaps young Guilford Dudley too, who a week or two before had been accorded “the liberty of the leads on Beacham’s Tower,” may have stood above, catching a glimpse of the show, and remembering the day when he and his wife had their boy-and-girl quarrel, because she would not make him a King.

The two questions of the hour were those relating to the Queen’s marriage and to matters of religion. When Parliament met on October 5, the news of the Spanish match had not been announced, and the bills of chief interest passed were one dealing with the important point of the validity of Katherine of Aragon’s marriage, and a second, which, avoiding any discussion of the Papal supremacy, the only thoroughly unpopular article of the Catholic creed, cancelled recent legislation on ecclesiastical matters, and restored the ritual in use during the last year of Henry’s reign. The other important measure carried in this session was the attainder of Cranmer, Lady Jane and her husband, and Sir Ambrose Dudley.

So far as Lady Jane was concerned the step was purely formal, intended to serve as a warning to her friends, and it was understood on all hands that a pardon would be granted to the guiltless figure-head of the conspiracy. Yet to a nervous child, not yet seventeen, there may well have been something terrifying in the sentence hanging over her, and it seems to have been about this time that she addressed a letter to her father which could scarcely have been otherwise conceived had she expected in truth to suffer the penalty due to treason.

“If I may without offence rejoice in mine own mishap,” she wrote, “meseems in this I may account myself blessed, that washing mine hands with the innocency of my fact, my guiltless blood may cry before the Lord, mercy, mercy to the innocent. And yet I must acknowledge that being constrained, and, as you wot well enough, continually assailed, in taking upon me I seemed to consent, and therein offended the Queen and her laws, yet do I assuredly trust that this mine offence towards God is much the less, in that being in so royal an estate as I was, mine enforced honour never agreed with mine innocent heart.”205

The trial was held on November 13, on which day Cranmer, with Guilford, and his brother, and Lady Jane, were all conducted on foot to the Guildhall to answer the charge of treason.

The Archbishop led the way, followed by young Dudley. After them came Lady Jane, a childish figure of woe, dressed in black, with a French hood, also black, a book bound in black velvet hanging at her side, and another in her hand.

Her condemnation was a foregone conclusion, and, pleading guilty, she was sentenced to death, by the axe or by fire, according to the old brutal law dealing with a woman convicted of treason. As she returned to the Tower a demonstration took place in her honour, not unlikely to be productive of some uneasiness to those in power, and little calculated to serve her cause.

The London populace were more favourably disposed towards her in misfortune, than in her brief period of prosperity. The sight of the forlorn pair, still no more than boy and girl, touched and moved the multitude, and crowds accompanied them to their place of captivity. It is said that this was the solitary occasion upon which she and Guilford Dudley met during their imprisonment.

Another cause, besides simple pity, was perhaps responsible for the tenderness displayed towards the Queen’s rival. A week or two before the trial the news of the Spanish match had been made known to the public, and may have had the effect of suggesting doubts as to the wisdom of the enthusiastic welcome given to Mary. At the beginning of November the affair had been undecided, and Gardiner was telling the Emperor’s envoy candidly that, if the Queen asked his advice, he would counsel her to choose an Englishman for her husband. The nation, he added, was deeply prejudiced against foreign domination, especially in the case of Spaniards, and the proposed union would also produce war with France.

Mary’s mind, however, was made up, nor had she any intention of being swayed by Gardiner’s advice. On the night of October 30 she took the singular step of summoning the ambassador, Simon Renard, to her apartment; when, in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, and after repeating on her knees the Veni Creator, she gave him her promise to wed the Prince of Spain. In the face of the curious determination thus shown to bind herself by a contract irrevocable in her own eyes, it is strange to find historians attributing to her a continued leaning towards Courtenay.

When the fact got abroad that the Emperor’s son was destined to become the Queen’s husband, London thrilled with indignation; whilst Parliament made its sentiments plain by means of a deputation which, in an address containing an entreaty that she would marry, expressed a hope that her choice would fall upon an Englishman. But Mary was a Tudor. Dispensing with the customary medium of the Chancellor, she gave her reply in person. Thanking the petitioners for their zeal, she declared herself disposed to act upon their advice and to take a husband. It was, however, for herself alone to select one, according to her inclination, and for the good of her kingdom.

Simon Renard, reporting the scene, observed that her speech had been applauded by the nobles present, Arundel informing the Chancellor in jest that he had been deprived of his office, since the Queen had undertaken the functions belonging to it. In the pleasantry the Emperor’s envoy detected a warning that should Gardiner continue his opposition to the match he would not long retain his present post.206

The Bishop yielded. He may have agreed with Renard. At all events, the Queen being determined, and recognising that he was unable to deter her from the measure upon which she had decided, he took the prudent step of putting himself on her side. His opposition removed, Renard was able to inform his master, on December 17, that Mary had received him in open daylight, had informed him that the necessity for secrecy was at an end, and that she regarded her marriage as a thing definitely and irrevocably fixed.207

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