Chapter XII: Book III (2)

The conviction that she was to be childless was only gradually forced upon Mary; for she had prayed and yearned so much for motherhood that she could hardly believe that heaven would abandon her thus. In her mind a son born of her and Philip would have made England, as she said, Catholic and strong for ever; and as the bitter truth of her barrenness came home to the Queen she sank deeper into gloomy despondency, increased by the knowledge that her beloved husband, polite and considerate though he was to her, was obliged to leave her, with the tacit understanding that their marriage had failed in its chief object. Mary passionately longed to bring about peace between her husband’s country and France. She knew that the revolutionary movement in and about London was being actively fomented by French intrigue; that the crowd of pamphlets and scurrilous publications attacking her and her faith were being paid for with French money; and that unless peace was soon made or the agitation stopped England would be drawn into the war and her throne would be in peril. But her efforts towards peace met with little real aid from the French, for any step that consolidated her position and gave time for Spaniards and Englishmen to settle down under one system would have meant ruin to France; and Mary’s Council, and more reluctantly Mary herself, was obliged to turn to the other alternative, and attempt to suppress the organised manifestations of rebellion against her rule.

The burning of heretical and treasonable books, and even of the Edward VI. prayer book, was but a prelude to the burning of bodies, and Renard warned the Emperor that before Philip had been gone six months from England the holocaust would begin. It matters little whether the persecutions were religious or political—the apologists of Mary and Elizabeth respectively strive to prove that their victims in each case were political criminals; and doubtless, according to the letter of the law, they were—but it was clear to Philip and his father, that whatever excuse might be advanced for the burning of Englishmen by Mary’s Council, the executions would increase the ill-feeling against Spain, and make English resources less available to them against France. But notwithstanding this Charles would wait no longer for his son, and peremptorily ordered him to return to Flanders.

Philip accompanied his wife in state through London from Hampton Court to Greenwich[157] for the farewell; and there urged her—as he did her Council—to be moderate in punishment. Mary herself was kindly and gentle; but she was a Tudor Queen, and she lived in an age when the life of the individual was considered as nothing to the safety of the State as constituted. Moreover, counsels of moderation coming from Philip of Spain, the patron of the Inquisition, could hardly have sounded very convincing; though they were sincere in the circumstances, for Philip was a statesman before all things, and persecution in England at the time was contrary to his policy. In any case Philip did his best to keep his hand on the brake before saying goodbye to his wife. Mary was in the deepest affliction when she took leave of him on the 29th August 1555, though she struggled to retain her composure before the spectators of the scene. With one close embrace she bade him farewell, and sought solitude in a room of which the window commanded a view of the Thames. So long as the barge that bore him to Gravesend was in sight Mary’s tear-dimmed eyes followed it yearningly; whilst Philip, courteously punctilious, continued waving his hand and lifting his plumed cap to her until a turn in the river shut him from her sight.

Renard was right. No sooner had Philip gone than the fires blazed out. Hooper, Rogers, Saunders and Tayor, were burnt a fortnight afterwards; then Ridley and Latimer some weeks later, to be followed in a few months by Cranmer and the host of others less distinguished. Gardiner, Mary’s prime minister and only able councillor, died in November, just after the opening of parliament; and then, with Pole, practically a foreign ecclesiastic, as her only guide, with a divided Council, and herself in utter despondency, Mary sank deeper and deeper into impotence. Philip had ordered before he left that minutes of all the Council meetings should be sent to him, but he soon found it difficult to control, for his own ends, the action of ministers far away; and when soon afterwards he began to press for English ships to fight the French at sea, he found the Queen’s Council tardy and unwilling. The ships, they said, were not ready; but as soon as possible some would be sent to guard the Channel. This did not suit Philip. The ships must be instantly fitted out and commissioned; not at Dover, as the Council had promised, but at Portsmouth, to guard the Emperor’s passage to Spain. This, of course, was the thin end of the wedge; what he really needed—and it was now the only benefit he could hope for from his marriage—was that an English fleet should be at his disposal to attack France. The coolness of the English Council and the continued refusal to accede to Mary’s request and give him the crown matrimonial of England, soon changed Philip’s attitude, and the suavity that had so remarkably characterised him in England gave way to his usual dry _hauteur_ towards Englishmen whom he met in Brussels.

He had found his father in the last stage of mental and bodily depression. All had gone ill with him; and the burden of his task, as far from fulfilment as ever, was greater than he could any longer bear. ‘Fortune,’ he said, ‘is a strumpet, and reserves her favours for the young;’ and so to the young Philip he had determined to transmit his mighty mission of Christian unification as a means of Spanish predominance. In October 1555, in perhaps the most dramatic scene in history, the Emperor solemnly handed to Philip the sovereignty of Flanders; and on the 16th January 1556, the assembly of Spanish grandees, in the great hall of the palace of Brussels, witnessed the surrender of the historic crowns of Castile and Aragon by Charles V. to his beloved only son. Heart-broken Mary Tudor from that day was Queen of Spain, as well as Queen of England. The title was a hollow one for her, though, for her mother’s sake and her own, she loved the country which alone had succoured them in their trouble; for Philip’s accession made the return of her husband to her side more than ever remote. Philip had promised faithfully to come back, and in his letters to her he repeated his promise again and again. On one occasion when he was indisposed, Mary sent a special envoy with anxious inquiries after his health. There was nothing more the matter than the result of some little extra gaiety on Philip’s part; and he reassured his wife and announced his immediate visit to England. The English messenger, overjoyed at the good news, said to some of Philip’s gentlemen, that, though he was delighted to be able to bear the glad tidings to the Queen, he would take care not to tell her that his Majesty had exposed himself twice to the dreadful weather then prevailing, and of his dancing at weddings, as the Queen was so easily upset and was so anxious about him that she might be too much afflicted.[158]

But still Philip came not; and soon afterwards Mary was thrown into despair by the order from Brussels, that the King’s household in England was to proceed to Spain. The English people followed the Spanish courtiers with reviling when they embarked, for the fear of being drawn into the war was stronger than ever; but to the Queen their departure was a heavy blow, for it meant that her husband would live in England no more. For a few months in the early part of 1556, the alliance of the Pope and the King of France against the Emperor and Philip was broken up by the settlement of a truce between the latter and the French King; and for a time matters looked more hopeful for Mary; but in the summer of 1556, the war with France broke out again, and Philip found himself face to face with a powerful coalition of the Papacy, France and the Turk. It meant a war over half of Europe, and now if ever England might aid its Spanish King Consort. Philip wrote constantly urging the English Council to join him in the war against France; but met only with evasions. Mary was breaking her heart in sorrow and disappointment, but was willing to do anything to please Philip. She had, moreover, her own grudge against France; for Noailles and his master had left no stone unturned to ruin her from the first day of her accession. But her Council, and above all, her subjects, had always dreaded this as a result of her Spanish marriage, and were almost unanimously opposed to the entrance of England into a strife which mainly concerned the supremacy of Spain over Italy. Mary, moreover, was in the deepest poverty, owing to her own firm resolve against all advice to restore to the church the forfeited tenths and first fruits; and the forced loans collected from the gentry, it was untruly said at the instance of the Spaniards for the purposes of their war, had caused the deepest discontent in the country.

It was clear that nothing more could be got from England for Spanish objects unless some special effort were made, and Philip was forced to undertake the journey himself to try the effect of personal pressure. Mary’s joy at the news of his coming was pathetic in its intensity, though Pole warned her that, as had happened on other occasions, Philip might not be able to come after all. The hope of seeing her husband again seemed to give her new life, and she hurried to London, visiting Pole at Lambeth on the way, and exerting herself to the utmost to win him to her side. Thenceforward for weeks, whilst the King’s voyage was pending, the English Council sat nearly night and day, and couriers incessantly hurried backwards and forwards to and from London, Brussels, and Paris.[159] The French reinforced their troops around Calais and Guisnes, and all the signs pointed to the approach of a war between England and France at the bidding of Philip.

The King landed at Dover on the 18th March 1557, and again all his haughty frigidity gave way to genial smiles for all that was English.[160] To the Queen’s delight he spent two quiet days with her alone at Greenwich, and then rode through London to Whitehall by her side as she sat in her litter. Their reception by the citizens was polite, but cold; for though Philip personally was not unpopular, the idea of going to war with France for another nation’s quarrel was distasteful in the extreme to Englishmen of all classes. What complicated the situation infinitely was that Philip was at war with the Pope—that violent, headstrong enemy of his house and nation, Cardinal Caraffa, Paul IV.—and Pole, as legate, could not even greet the King, much less acquiesce as a political minister in a war against the Papacy on the part of England. Mary, too, was torn between her devotion to the Church on the one hand and her love for her husband on the other. Her idea, and that of her Council, was to provide a subsidy and an English contingent to Philip, without entering into a national war; and this much, under the existing treaty between Charles v. and Henry VIII. in 1543, Philip had a right to claim if he was attacked by France.

But the King wanted more from his wife’s country than that which he could have claimed even if he had not married the Queen, and he ceaselessly urged upon Mary, and upon her Council, heavily bribed to a man, the granting of much greater aid than that offered. He was at last successful in this, though it was still arranged that there was to be no declaration of war by Mary against France, the English forces being used only for the defence of Flanders and the territory of Calais. There were to be 8000 infantry and 1000 horse, and an English fleet with 6000 fighting men was to be raised and maintained, half at the cost of England and half by Philip.

When this had been arranged, France struck her counterblow, for it was clearly better for her to be at open war, in which she could adopt reprisals on the Scottish border, than to fight English contingents in Philip’s service. The English Protestant exiles in France were made much of and subsidised; and hare-brained Stafford and his crew of foolish young gallants sailed from Dieppe on Easter Sunday to seize the crown of England for himself. He captured Scarborough, but himself was captured directly afterwards, and incontinently lost his head. It was a silly, hopeless business; but the rebels had started from France, and had been helped by the French King, and the fact was argument enough. On the 6th June 1557, war was declared between England and France, and Philip, at last, saw some return for his marriage in England. He hated war, and his methods were in all things different from those of a soldier; but his best chance of securing a durable peace was to show his strength whilst his hold over English resources lasted, and it was clear from Mary’s declining health that this would not be long.

At the beginning of July, Philip rode for the last time from Gravesend through Canterbury to Dover, his ailing wife being carried in a litter by his side. On the 3rd July he bade her farewell as he stepped into the barge that carried him to the galleon awaiting him, and Mary, with death in her heart, turned her back to the sea, and went desolate to her home in London.

The combined army in Flanders was commanded by the brilliant young soldier, Emanuel Philibert of Savoy, who had 50,000 men, whilst the French army, under Constable Montmorenci, reached barely half that number. Savoy began the campaign by several rapid feints that deceived the French, and then suddenly invested St. Quintin, into which Coligny with 1,200 men just managed to enter before Savoy reached it. Finding himself in a trap, Coligny begged Montmorenci to come to his relief. The first attempt at this failed; and on the the 10th August the French main body made a desperate effort to enter the town by boats over the Somme. This was found impossible, and Montmorenci’s force was surprised and taken in the rear by Savoy’s superior strategy. The order to retire was given too late, and the French retreat soon became a panic-stricken rout. Six thousand Frenchmen were killed, and as many more captured, with all the artillery and Montmorenci himself; and there was no force existent between Savoy’s victorious army and the gates of Paris. Philip was at Cambrai during the battle; and if he had been a soldier, like his cousin Savoy, or even like his father, he might have captured the capital, and have brought France to her knees. But he turned a deaf ear to Savoy’s prayers, and lost his chance, as he did all his life, by over-deliberation. _Te Deums_ were chanted, votive offerings promised, joy bells rung, but Philip’s host moved no further onward. St. Quintin itself held out for a fortnight longer; and murder, sack, and pillage, by the rascal mercenaries of Philip, held high saturnalia, in spite of his strict command, and to his horror when he witnessed the havoc wrought: and then, with the fatal over-deliberation that ruined him, he tamely quartered his men in the conquered territory instead of pressing his victory home.

The Germans, discontented with their loot, quarrelled and deserted by the thousand; the English, sulky and unpaid, grumbled incessantly; and the Spaniards asserted that they had shown no stomach for the fight before St. Quintin. Their hearts, indeed, were not in the war, for it concerned them not, and they demanded to be sent home. In London, the most was made of the victory of St. Quintin by the Queen’s Government. Bonfires blazed in the streets, free drink rejoiced the lieges, and Pole, in the Queen’s name, congratulated Philip upon so signal a mark of divine favour; but the people wanted to gain no victories for foreigners, and obstinately refused to be glad. Philip, as usual, was pressed for money, and rather than keep the unruly English contingent through the winter, he acceded to their request to be allowed to go home.

Whilst Philip’s forces were melting away in idleness the fine French army under Guise, who were fighting the Spaniards outside Rome, were suddenly recalled by Henry II. to the Flemish frontier. The Pope was then obliged to make terms with Alba, and withdrew from the war, leaving the greater antagonists face to face. The English fortress of Calais had been neglected, and at the declaration of war Noailles, on his way back to France, had reported that it might be captured without difficulty. Guise and his army from Italy suddenly appeared before the fortress, and stormed and captured the Rysbank-fort on the sandy island forming Calais harbour. The news, when it came the next day (4th January 1558), to Mary, found her again in high hopes of a child; and she received it bravely, setting about means to reinforce the town without the loss of a day. Lord Pembroke was ordered to raise a force of 5000 men and cross to Philip’s town of Dunkirk. But before they were ready matters were desperate, for treachery was at work within and without the fortress of Calais. Lord Grey de Wilton at Guisnes was also in evil case; ‘clean cut off,’ as he says, ‘from all aid and relief. I have looked for both out of England and Calais, and know not how to have help by any means, either of men or victuals. There resteth now none other way for the succour of Calais, and the rest of your Highness’s places on this side, but a power of men out of England, or from the King’s Majesty, or from both.’ A first attempt to storm the citadel of Calais failed, but a few days later a great force of artillery was brought to bear. Wentworth, the governor, and Grey, the governor of Guisnes, sent beseeching messages to Philip for relief, but the time was short, and no sufficient force to attack Guise could be raised. Philip from the first had been impressing upon the English Council the need for strengthening Calais; but, as we have seen, they were overburdened, without money, and without any able leader. Calais had been left to its fate, and on the 8th January 1558 the place cheerfully surrendered to the French. A few days afterwards Guisnes fell, and the last foothold of the English in France was gone for ever.

When Guise had first approached Calais, Philip instructed his favourite Count de Feria to hasten to England and insist upon reinforcements being sent. Before his departure Calais fell, and on arriving at Dunkirk to embark he learnt of the loss of Guisnes; whereupon he delayed his departure for a day, in order not to be the bearer of the last bad news. The tidings of the English defeats had fallen like a thunderbolt upon Mary and her advisers; but there was no repining yet, so far as the Queen was concerned, for God might yet, she hoped, send her a son, and then all would be well. She would, she said, have the head of any councillor of hers who dared to talk about making peace without the restitution of the captured fortresses; and church and laymen alike opened coffers wide to provide funds for avenging English honour and protecting English soil.

Feria arrived in London on the 26th January, though the primary reason of his mission had disappeared when Calais fell. He saw Mary immediately, and found her stout of heart and hopeful, desirous of all things to please her husband, though doubtful about the goodwill of her Council. Two days afterwards Feria met the Council in Pole’s room, and presented his master’s demands. Mary had told the ambassador that both they, and the people at large, were murmuring that the war was of Philip’s making, and she thought that it would be well boldly to face and refute that point before it was advanced by the councillors. The Council listened politely to the King’s message, and recognising that they had before them the ideas not only of King Philip, but of their own Queen as well, took time to reply. A day or two afterwards the Council visited Feria, and Archbishop Heath, the chancellor, delivered their answer. It was couched in submissive language towards Philip, and told a sorry story. Far from being able to send any troops across the sea, they badly wanted troops for their own defence. The coast and the Isle of Wight were at the mercy of the French, and an invasion was threatened over the Scottish Border. But if King Philip would send them 3000 German mercenaries, for which they would pay, they would quarter them in Newcastle to protect the north country, and they would then arm a hundred ships in the Channel with a considerable force of men, some of whom might be used, at need, for Philip’s service. Feria reported that the 5000 Englishmen he had seen at Dover, intended for embarkation, were disorderly rascals, useless as soldiers, and he and his master agreed that nothing could now be expected from England in the form of a military contingent for foreign service.

The country, says Feria, is in such a condition that if a hundred enemies were to land on the coast they could do as they liked.[161] Confusion was spreading throughout all classes in England, owing to the dislike of the war for the sake of Spain, and to the disquieting news of the Queen’s health. Not a third of the usual congregation go to church since the fall of Calais, reported Feria; and when, in a conversation with the Queen, the ambassador explained to her how the Spanish nobility were bound to contribute so many mounted men each, in case of war, Mary sadly shook her head at the idea of applying any such rule to England. ‘Not all the nobility of England together,’ she said, ‘would furnish her with a hundred horse.’ Parliament was sitting, and at the demand of money tongues began to wag that it was to send across the sea to the Queen’s Spanish husband, whose proud envoy could only sneer and scoff at the clumsy English way of raising funds for their sovereign, and tell everybody that he would be only too glad if he could prevail upon them to raise the necessary money for their own defence, for his master wanted none of it from them.

Philip did not go so far as that, for he was very hard pressed indeed, and urged upon Mary some other way of collecting funds besides the parliamentary vote. In vain Gresham tried to borrow £10,000 in Antwerp on the Queen’s credit; attempts to cajole more money from the church and the nobles were made with but small result. The money from the parliamentary grant and other sources that could be got together was sent to Flanders to pay for the raising of German levies for the English service; and at once the murmurs in London grew to angry shouts, that English money was being sent out for King Philip. The fitting out of the English fleet, ostensibly for coast defence, was hurried forward, for the distracted English councillors were deluded into the idea that a great combined movement would be made to recover Calais: they were frightened by a false rumour that there was a strong French fleet at Dieppe, that the Hanse Towns and Denmark would descend on the east coast; anything to get them to push forward a strong fleet, really, though not ostensibly, for Philip’s purpose. But Philip took care when the fleet was ready that Clinton should use it as he desired;[162] and the much talked of 3000 German mercenaries never came to England, but in due time were incorporated in Philip’s army. It is curious to see how cleverly Feria and his master worked off the Queen against her councillors, and vice versa. With regard to these mercenaries, for instance, though the King was constantly sending letters and messages to his wife, he purposely refrained from mentioning his desire to make use of the Germans, for whom she had paid. ‘I am writing nothing of this to the Queen,’ he wrote; ‘I would rather that you (Feria) should prudently work with the councillors to induce them to ask _us_ to relieve them of these troops.’[163]

Mary’s hopes of progeny were once more seen to be delusive; and she, in deep despondency now, was seen to be rapidly failing. Pole also was a dying man, said Feria; and all the other councillors, though constantly clamouring for Spanish bribes, were drifting away from the present regime. ‘Those whom your Majesty has rewarded most are the men who serve the least: Pembroke, Arundel, Paget, Petre, Heath, the Bishop of Ely and the Controller.’ Even Philip himself was ready now to turn to the rising sun, and away from his waning wife. ‘What you write (he replied to Feria) about visiting Madam Elizabeth before you leave England, for the reasons you mention, seems very wise; and I am writing to the Queen that I have ordered you to go and see the Princess, and I beg the Queen also to order you to do so.’[164] When Feria had frightened the Queen and Council out of all that was possible, he went to Hatfield to see Elizabeth, with all manner of kind messages and significant hints from Philip; and sailed from England in July, leaving as his successor a Flemish lawyer named D’assonleville.

Mary had lost all hope. She knew now, at last, that she would never be a mother: the persecutions for religion, and above all the war for the sake of Philip, had made her personally unpopular, as she never had been before; she had not a single, honest capable statesman near her, Pole being now moribund, but a set of greedy scamps who looked to their own interests alone; and the doomed Queen saw that not for her was to be the glory of making England permanently Catholic, and ensuring uniformity of faith in Christendom. As the autumn went on the Queen’s condition became more grave, and constant fever weakened her sadly. In the last week of October D’assonleville wrote to Philip that the Queen’s life was despaired of, and Feria was instructed to make rapidly ready to cross, and stay in England during the period of transition that would supervene on her death. On the 7th November D’assonleville wrote again, urging that, as Parliament had been summoned to consider the question of the succession, it would be well that Philip himself should if possible be present. This was true; but Philip had his hands full, and, even for so important an errand as this, he could not absent himself from Flanders; for the peace commissioners from England, France, and Spain were in full negotiation, and peace to him now was a matter of vital importance.

Feria arrived in London on the 9th November, and found Mary lying in her palace of Saint James’s only intermittently conscious. She smiled sadly as the ambassador handed her Philip’s letter, and greeted her in his name; but she was too weak to read the lines he had written, though she indicated that a favourite ring of hers should be sent to him as a pledge of her love. Her faithful Clarentius and beloved Jane Dormer, already betrothed to Feria, whom she afterwards married, tended her day and night: but most of the others who had surrounded her in the day of her glory were wending their way to Hatfield, to court the fair-faced young woman with the thin lips and cold eyes who was waiting composedly for her coming crown. Feria himself took care to announce loudly his master’s approval of Elizabeth’s accession when her sister should die; and did his best to second the Queen’s efforts to obtain some assurance from the Princess that the Catholic faith and worship should be maintained in England. Elizabeth was cool and diplomatic. She knew well that she must succeed in any case, and was already fully agreed with her friends as to the course she should take, careful not to pledge herself too far for the future; and when Feria, leaving the Queen’s deathbed, travelled to Hatfield to see the Princess, she was courteous enough, but firmly rejected every suggestion that she should owe anything to the patronage of the King of Spain.

Mary in her intervals of consciousness was devout and resigned, comforting the few friends who were left to sorrow around her bed, and exhorting them to faith and fortitude. It was the 17th November, and the light was struggling through the murky morning across the mist upon the marshes between Saint James’s and the Thames, when the daily mass in Mary’s dying chamber was being celebrated. The Queen was sick to death now, but the sacrament she ordered for the last time riveted her wandering brain, and the clouds that had obscured her intelligence passed away, giving place to almost preternatural clearness. She repeated the responses distinctly and firmly; and when the celebrant chanted ‘_Agnus Dei qui tollis peccatur mundi_,’ she exclaimed with almost startling plainness, ‘_Miserere nobis! Miserere nobis! Dona nobis pacem_‘; then, as the Host was elevated, she bowed in worship, with closed eyes that opened no more upon the world that for her had been so troubled.

And so, with a prayer for mercy and peace upon her lips, and her last gaze on earth resting upon the holy mystery of her faith, Mary Tudor went to her account.[165] Her life was but a passing episode in the English Reformation; for she was handicapped from the first by her unpopular marriage, and the unstatesmanlike religious policy of her ecclesiastical advisers. Like her mother, and her grandmother Isabel, she would deign to no compromise with what she considered evil. ‘Rather would I lose ten crowns if I had them,’ she exclaimed once, ‘than palter with my conscience’; and, though to a less exalted degree, this was Philip’s attitude of mind also. Fate cast them both in an age when rigidity of belief was breaking down before the revival of ancient learning, and the widened outlook of life growing from the renaissance. They were pitted against rivals whose convictions were as wax, but who were determined not only to win but to appear right in this world, at any sacrifice of principle; and the fight was an unequal one. Mary could not change—only once under dire compulsion did she even pretend to give way in the matter of religion—Elizabeth changed as often and as completely as suited her purpose: Philip had only one invariable set of convictions and methods, his rivals had none, but invented them and abandoned them as occasion served.

And so Mary Tudor failed; pitiably, because she was naturally a good woman, who did her best according to her conscience. But the defects of her descent were too strong for her: she was a Tudor, and consequently domineering and obstinate; she was a grand-daughter of Isabel the Catholic, and as a natural result mystically devout and exalted, caring nothing for human suffering in the pursuit of her saintly aims; she was an English Queen, proud of her island realm; a Spanish princess, almost equally proud of the land of the Catholic kings; and, to crown all, she was the consort of Philip II., pledged to the cause for which he lived, the unification of the Christian faith and the destruction of the power of France. Within a year of her death England was a Protestant country, and Philip was married to a French princess.