Chapter IV (2)

Gresham’s instructions are dated two days after this letter was written, 12th March. He had previously been dismissed from his former post as royal financial agent at Antwerp, and his reappointment was probably owing to the fact that in the narrow condition of the national finances he alone had sufficient authority on the Continental money market to raise the funds required. He was to bargain for the loan of £100,000 that had been offered through one Germayn Scholl for one year, and to ascertain what powder and other munitions of war could be obtained in Flanders for English use.[122] Scholl was Gresham’s kinsman by marriage, but the bargain does not seem to have been fully concluded, only £10,000 being obtained from that source,[123] Gresham remaining in Flanders until the summer, spending much of the money he could raise in munitions of war. He had been instructed to present letters of recommendation to King Philip, and to acquaint him with all he did. But Gresham, who was no admirer of the Spanish faction, appears to have been somewhat remiss in paying court to the King, for he failed to mention anything about him in his letters. Mary, who was always hankering for news of her husband, began to get restive at the omission, and her Secretary, Boxall, writes a private letter to Gresham in April hinting to him that he will make things easier all round if he will pay more court to the King, as the Queen asked about him. Gresham promptly took the hint and wrote a long letter to Mary, saying that he had just seen King Philip at a monastery outside Brussels, where he had passed Easter, “who is in right good health as your Majestie’s own harte can desyre.”[124]

Whilst Gresham in Flanders was thus borrowing and spending money, Feria was chafing at the lack of sympathetic activity in the Councillors in the direction he desired. Writing to Philip in March, he says: “Before God, I can do no more, Sire! I do not know what to make of these people. For, believe me, your Majesty, from morning to night and from night to morning they are changing their minds about everything, and do what I can it is impossible for me to make them understand what a state they are in—the worst, surely, that ever people were in before. If it were only for their own sakes, I should like to leave them to the mercy of those who would treat them as they deserve; but I am afraid that they will drag us after them, as your Majesty knows. The Queen does, and says, all she can, and she really has spirit and goodwill; but in all else there is nothing but trouble. As for the Cardinal, he is a dead man; and although he has plucked up a little with what they write to him every day from Italy since the loss of Calais, he is not so warm as I should have liked to see him. Of all the rest of them, I really do not know which is the worst disposed to your interest. But I know that those whom you have favoured most serve you the least.”[125]

Feria noticed that Mary grew ever thinner and more despondent. She slept badly and was devoured with anxiety and yearning for her husband, whose letters came to her so rarely. Both she and Pole, indeed, were now almost negligible forces; and Feria began to plot with a few of the Councillors upon whom he could depend to take into his own hands practically the direction of affairs. How it was managed is well set forth in a letter of his to the King of 1st May, 1558. He has, he says, been able to hold a private conference with Privy Seal (Bedford) and the Admiral (Clinton) “about that enterprise they had proposed to me, and also to press them about the land armaments.” They were of opinion that they could raise a land army, and that the recovery of Calais would not be so difficult as people imagined. “They say that they could get together 12,000 English and German infantry, 3,000 horse (2,000 Germans and 1,000 English), 2,000 English pioneers, and if your Majesty did not think well of the _enterprise_ they might be used for other purposes. I did not dwell so much upon this point as upon getting the force together. They think, and quite rightly, that it is useless to deal with this matter with more than four or five persons who will be in favour of it; and they propose besides themselves Jerningham, the Master of the Rolls, who was the Solicitor-General (Cordell), and the Controller (Rochester), although the latter is a man who always raises difficulties to everything. I think that these three will suit best for the purpose, as they are favoured by the Queen.

“I know of no other way to remedy matters but this: that your Majesty should write to the Queen saying that on mature deliberation you have decided that the best course will be for her Majesty to raise these troops, beginning with the money voted by Parliament: for as soon as the people see your Majesties determined to avenge the loss of Calais you believe that they will favour the enterprise, since no prince ever begins a war with all the money in hand necessary to finish it. You might add that nothing should be said about spending the Parliament money, but that it should be entrusted to some person for the object in view. Paget thinks that Bacon would be a fit person for this, and the Queen would agree to him. Your Majesty should also write to her that the business should be discussed with nobody but the five persons mentioned. Paget, Clinton, myself, and Figueroa think that this is the last thing we can do. Paget thought lately that Rutland would be the best man to command this force, and we think that Clinton and the Vice-Admiral should conduct the fleet. The fleet is now ready and is costing money with no profit. Even if your Majesty does not think well to press the Queen about the foregoing business you might send her instructions at once as to what she is to do with this fleet.”[126]

It will be seen by this that the plan was to use every atom of the force raised in England and with English money, not for the defence of the country itself, which had been the first pretext for raising it, but to send across the sea, either to aid in the recovery of Calais or, at Philip’s option, for any other purpose he might choose, and that similarly the fleet was to be placed at his disposal.[127] It is quite plain from the way in which Feria writes of her that Mary was simply to be told what to do by Philip, and that she was expected to do it without demur. How completely she hung upon Philip’s words, and subordinated everything to his wish, is seen in a paragraph in the same letter as that quoted above from Feria to the King. A Swedish envoy had arrived in England with an offer of marriage to Elizabeth from Prince Eric, the heir to the crown. He had been already several days in London and had not even asked audience of the Queen, though he had committed the gross breach of propriety of going down to Hatfield and delivering the Prince’s letter to Elizabeth before he saw Mary. The poor Queen was terribly upset at this; and hearing that Feria was despatching a courier to Antwerp, she feared that he was going to write to Philip about it. Sending for Feria she with tears and reproaches upbraided him for his supposed intention, and said that she herself was going to write to her husband telling him all about it. “When the ambassador from Sweden first came,” writes Feria, “she was in great trouble, fearing that your Majesty would blame her for not having carried through that affair last year [_i.e._, the marriage of Elizabeth with Savoy]. Since then, however, Madam Elizabeth has replied that she will not marry; and the Queen is more tranquil, but she is intensely impassioned in the matter; and one of the reasons for her grief at the pregnancy having turned out fallacious is the fear that it will cause you to press her in this other business [_i.e._, the marriage of Elizabeth]. Both Figueroa and I think that your Majesty ought to do so _apropos_ of the coming of this Swedish ambassador and the failure of the pregnancy. But it is necessary that such pressure should not come at the same time as the matter of the land armament, or it will upset the business altogether. In short, Sire, I believe that the Queen will not stand in the way of her [_i.e._, Elizabeth] being Queen if God does not send you children.”[128]

Already Elizabeth’s sun was seen to be in the ascendant, and, regardless of the feelings of her sister the Queen, it suited Spanish policy to ensure her marriage, if possible, with a nominee dependent upon Philip. How anxious Philip personally was not to lose touch of Elizabeth at this juncture is seen in his reply at the end of May to a suggestion of Feria that the latter should go to Hatfield and pay his respects to her before he left England: “What you say about visiting Madam Elizabeth before you depart appears to me to be very wise, for the reasons you point out, and I am writing to the Queen, saying that I have ordered you to go. You will act accordingly; and I have no doubt that when the Queen sees the firmness with which I write on the subject she will consent.”[129] Philip’s fiery and impetuous ambassador Feria went considerably beyond his master in his high-handed dealing with the English Government; for Philip’s methods were diplomatic and far-seeing, and his object was not to ride roughshod over his wife’s country, as Feria would have done, but to use its resources for his ends, as if without design, and to perpetrate his hold upon it after his wife’s death.

Mary, still suffering from her usual indispositions, persuaded herself in May that Philip was coming over to see her again. It was, as Feria said, unreasonable; for Philip was overweighted with business, arranging the summer campaigns and a thousand other things: but Mary, full of hope again, caused herself to be carried to St. James’s to be ready to receive her husband, and had horses and lodgings prepared for him from Dover to Gravesend and an escort of ships at Dover to convey him across. Feria told her blankly that the King was too busy to come, and again pressed her about raising the land army to reinforce Philip in Flanders. He found her less ready in the matter than he had hoped—“for the Cardinal and Council persuade her as they like”—and she wearily suggested that Clinton should go to Brussels to discuss the matter with the King. “This,” said Feria, “was only because they think that I push them too hard; and they believe they can deal more easily with your Majesty, their real object being to upset the scheme altogether;” and the ambassador continues by recommending the King when Clinton arrived in Brussels to deal with him high-handedly, blaming the Council angrily for their slackness in the past. Clinton was evidently the most pliant tool of all; and yet, even of him, Feria writes: “Nothing that he says will be true, unless he thinks it will be investigated. I have had no end of trouble about this, for they do nothing but lie and prevaricate.”

All this haughty pressure on the part of Feria, and the servile compliance of Paget and the rest of the Spanish clique, in order to bully the English into raising a large force to join Philip’s army on the pretext of recovering Calais, was seen by the politic King to be unwise. The English fleet, with its seven thousand soldiers on board, might be useful for him in many ways, and he made much of Clinton when he saw him in Brussels, urging him to have the fleet provisioned and ready for service whenever ordered from June to September; but the raising of a land army of Englishmen did not suit him: in the first place because it would pledge him to a regular campaign against the French in Calais for the ultimate benefit of England alone, to the neglect of the Flemish frontier that concerned him most, and secondly, as he says, because “the English, as they would arm unwillingly, however much they were pressed and encouraged, would not be of much use. I can even see that they might cause more inconvenience than otherwise. Either they might come so badly organised and weak as to be easily defeated, which would be most injurious, or they might force me to go to their rescue, and upset my own plans.” The King was of opinion that the English had much better concentrate their land strength on the Scottish frontier and in Ireland, so long as he was allowed to do as he liked with the English fleet.

The meaning of this is made abundantly clear, and Philip’s own foresight vindicated by the sequel. If the English Council were encouraged to employ all their own forces on the Scottish Border it was foreseen that they would not need the three thousand or more German auxiliaries which were now mustering on the Rhine under the leader Wallerdun, much of the money for them having been already disbursed by the English special agents in Flanders, Sir William Pickering and others. Feria, in his letter of 18th May to the King, says: “I understand that these people already repent of having asked for the three thousand Germans, for their view now is only to defend their own shores, and the Scots will not trouble them. They have said nothing to me about it yet, but I know that what I say is true.... If they do not want to bring these 3,000 Germans over, your Majesty might consider whether you will ask for them for yourself.” This, although it was exactly what Philip himself desired and intended, was only effected after much wrangling about the money spent and the responsibility incurred by the English Council. Philip, writing on the 10th June, instructs Feria cunningly to manage so that the Council may be got to propose that the German mercenaries might be taken off their hands as a favour; but if they could not be got to see it in this light that the Queen should be told in confidence that the King needed the Germans very much. The Council proved recalcitrant; for, as they said, they had spent already a large sum upon the mercenaries, and might need them; but they had to give way before the pressure of the Queen and Feria, insisting ultimately, however, that Philip should pay the sum of £2,000 for which Gresham had made himself responsible but had not paid for the arms supplied. The recruiting money of the Germans and first month’s pay was lost.

Relations between the imperious Feria and the English Council became daily more strained, every unimportant point was made a question of dignity by the ambassador,[130] and the sick, disconsolate Queen between the jarring elements, wishing to conciliate both sides, was rendered doubly unhappy. From Feria’s contemptuous and insulting references to Pole it is evident that the Cardinal declined to become an instrument for purely Spanish ends; whilst all the rest of the Councillors are dismissed by the ambassador in his letters to the King as lying rascals intent only upon plunder. Looking beyond Feria’s intemperate, angry words, the principal sin of the Councillors in his eyes seems to have been a disinclination to squander money of which the nation was so sorely in need upon raising forces without some assurance that they would be used for English ends. Already people were grumbling that the powerful fleet under Clinton was to be merely an auxiliary of Philip in the war, at his entire disposal, and the continued bad fortune that followed the Spanish arms increased the anger in England at being thus tied to the tail of Philip in the war, without any attempt being made by him to recover the lost English fortresses.

So far from doing this, indeed, news came early in July that Dunkirk, one of the most useful of his ports, within a few miles of Calais, had been captured by the French, as well as Thionville, an important fortress. Mary was panic-stricken at the news, and summoned Feria from Durham House to say that she must at once send off a courier to Philip to know the truth. Feria made light of the news, and said it was not worth while to send in such haste, and the overburdened Queen broke out in angry reproaches at his indifference. How could her merchants send their wool to Flanders, she asked, if Dunkirk was in French hands? and yet Feria treated the matter as of no importance. But when the ambassador suggested that the English fleets in Plymouth and Dover should at once sail to Dunkirk to help the King, Mary eagerly assented, though the Council at once vetoed it; for, said they, the French have also captured Alderney, and it behoved the admiral to go there first. “And really, to tell your Majesty the truth,” wrote Feria, “I did not dare to contradict them, for I saw that if but four French ships were to land their companies in England they would overturn everything.” This was written in July, and shortly afterwards Feria, having hectored the English Queen and Council thus into placing the English fleet almost entirely at Philip’s disposal, and having raised and paid three thousand German mercenaries which he had appropriated, took his leave and returned to Flanders, first visiting Elizabeth at Hatfield, much, he says, to her and his pleasure: “for reasons which I will tell your Majesty when I see you.”

Mary now was a mere shadow. The cruel persecutions and the loss of Calais together had completely destroyed the belief of the people in her power to rule England for its own benefit. Her father and grandfather, and even the greatly inferior Northumberland, had managed to maintain the balance of power between the two great Continental rivals upon which the importance of England depended. Mary from the first day of her accession, as we have seen, had neglected this essential point in English policy, and had ended by becoming a mere satellite of the Spanish King, involving her country thus in a ruinous war, in which it had lost much and had nothing to gain. The Council, against which Feria raged so savagely, was, it is true, after the death of Gardiner, composed of men of no commanding ability; but it had done its best to prevent the utter subjection of England to Philip’s aims. The success of its efforts was not great; for as Feria’s correspondence shows the most active members of the Council were bought body and soul by Spain, and Mary was in most cases ready to back up Feria’s arrogant hectoring with her royal authority. For her, in her forlorn condition, the first consideration was to please her husband and prevent the Catholic power, upon which she increasingly depended, from collapse.

Her great hope was that Philip might be lured back again to her side to live in prosperity and peace. Again and again her fond hopes were disappointed, and, a prey to a constitutional disorder, she sank deeper and deeper in despondency. After Feria left her in July she continued ailing, whilst those around her, seeing the approach of the inevitable change, busied themselves in plans which might, if they were fortunate, save them from disaster in the future. For men of all opinions recognised that it was not alone a woman who was dying, but a political and religious system that had failed; and vengeance was sharpening its knife, whilst those who had thus made England the servant of a foreigner and a prey to the bigots were trembling for the wrath to come.

Early in September a fever came to add to the Queen’s ailments, and this, being an unusual symptom with her, caused grave anxiety; but Philip’s Flemish councillor Dassonleville, who was in London to inquire whether any league was being negotiated between England, Sweden, and Denmark, wrote early in October that both the Queen and Cardinal Pole were better than they had been since the beginning of their maladies. Parliament met at Westminster on the 5th November, and in it resounded loud complaints, bold and unsuppressed now, of the cost and damage to England caused by the war undertaken to please King Philip, and suggestions were made that the peace negotiations already in progress should be actively pushed. The great question, moreover, that was occupying all minds was that of the succession to the Crown when the Queen should die. “If your Majesty could have been present it would have been of the greatest importance in moving the Parliament to your desires,” wrote Dassonleville. “But if that be impossible, and important affairs should detain you in Flanders, the coming of the Count de Feria, who is much liked here,[131] would serve, nevertheless, to direct affairs so far as the time will allow. Many of the Council are beginning to understand how necessary the alliance of Flanders is to this realm, the salvation of which depends upon it, as England cannot alone withstand for long the efforts of its old enemies, the French and Scots, without the aid of your Majesty. The common people do not understand it yet, and talk of allying the Lady Elizabeth with the Earls of Westmorland or Arundel, and sometimes with a Prince of Sweden or Denmark, so inconstant are they.”[132]

It is quite evident that when Dassonleville speaks of the impossibility of England holding its own without Philip’s aid he meant under the existing system. In this, of course, he was right; but he overlooked the fact that if the country freed itself from the Spanish connection, which had dragged it down, and once more dexterously held the balance between the two Powers, neither would attack it, because neither would be benefited by weakening a possible useful ally. But the English people were quite awake to the alternative if Dassonleville was not, and were looking anxiously away from the sad sufferer who had failed as a Queen and was awaiting extinction in St. James’s, to the demure, self-controlled young woman who bided her time so patiently and so confidently at Hatfield. She knew now she would not have to wait long. “Sire,” continued Dassonleville, “the Queen has had some good intervals since her grave malady; and for some days past has been quieter from her paroxysms. The issue of her illness is as yet uncertain. The people make her out to be worse than the doctors say, and rumour says that a change is so imminent that it will cause the enemy to be the more obstinate about the restoration of Calais. Nevertheless, if your Majesty insists upon not making peace without it, they will have to put up with it.”[133]

This was written on the 6th November; but before the letter was despatched Dassonleville heard from Paget that the Queen’s malady being recognised as grave, the Council had requested her to make some pronouncement with regard to the succession. Mary, feeling the hand of death upon her, consented to a deputation of the Council waiting upon the Princess at Hatfield on the morrow, to tell her that the Queen was willing that she should succeed when she (Mary) should die, only begging two things of her—one to maintain the old religion, and the other to pay the debts she (Mary) had incurred. It was known by this that the gravest anticipations of the people were justified. Ten days before this Philip had learnt that his wife was not likely to live, and he had at once instructed Feria to start for England, for the special purpose of pushing forward urgently the question of Elizabeth’s marriage, which was now seen to be the only means by which he might still hold England. As has been already explained in previous pages, Mary had on each former occasion when the matter had been urged firmly stood out against it, as well as Elizabeth herself. Once the Queen had been won over for a day to the Savoy project, but Cardinal Pole had changed her mind, and nothing had been done. The bold offer of the Swedish prince had shown to Mary as well as to Philip the danger of Elizabeth’s accepting a Protestant marriage; and even at this late hour Philip determined to make a desperate effort through Feria to win Elizabeth for a nominee who would suit him. Suriano, the Venetian ambassador with Philip, writes[134] with regard to Feria’s mission: “The Count’s instructions are that he is to try and dispose the Queen to consent to Lady Elizabeth’s marriage as her sister, and with the prospect of succeeding to the Crown. This negotiation is being conducted with the utmost secrecy, as they suspect that were the French to learn of it they would easily find means to thwart the project, as the greater part of England is opposed to the Queen and most hostile to King Philip and his party, whilst strongly inclined to Lady Elizabeth, who was always attached to the French faction rather than the other.” Feria tarried a few days in Flanders when the news came that Mary was somewhat better; but Dassonleville’s and Cordova’s letters, foreshadowing, as they did, Mary’s rapid passing, sent him hurrying across to England in order to perform his mission before she should die. The great obstacle to the marriage with Savoy—apart, of course, from Elizabeth’s own reluctance—had now disappeared, for Mary had recognised her sister as her successor, without which her marriage would have been useless to Philip.

Feria arrived in London on the 9th November, and he found England in a turmoil. Whispers spread every few days that the Queen was indeed dead, and that her Council only kept back the news until King Philip should come with the strong hand. “Every man’s mynde was then travayled with a strange confusione,” says Hayward, who lived through the crisis, “all things being immoderately eyther dreaded or desired. Every report was greedily both inquired and received, all truthes suspected, diverse tales believed, many improbable conjectures hatched and nourished. Invasion of strangers, civil dissentions, the doubtfull dispositione of the succeeding prince, were cast in every man’s conceite as present perills; but noe man did buysy his witts in contriving remedyes.” Whilst her people were anxiously looking to the future, some with dread and some with hope, the Queen lay in anguish waiting for the end. It was only five years since, full of faith and belief in her system, she had passed over ruined ambitions amidst the acclamations of the people to the throne of her fathers. In that short time, with the best of intentions, she had sapped the basis of England’s international importance, she had opened wide the doors of religious persecution, and, so far as she could, had laid the resources of her country at the feet of her foreign husband. She was leaving England poorer in possessions, in power and in spirit, than it had been at any time since her grandfather brought to an end the civil strife of a century. She had sacrificed her people’s welfare and happiness, as well as her own popularity, by obstinately ignoring accomplished facts and leaning upon a foreign Power to enable her to restore a state of things that was dead.

The Queen was only partially conscious and unable to read Philip’s letter when Feria came to bring her a message from her husband, and he lost no time in travelling to Hatfield on his principal mission. Elizabeth had been so wary and diplomatic in her difficult circumstances that she was as yet an unknown quantity; and doubtless the crafty men of the world who proposed to win her for Spain anticipated no great difficulty from this reticent young woman of five-and-twenty, who had accepted Catholicism so readily. The country was profoundly divided, and it was thought that the new Queen—as Dassonleville wrote, in good faith—would be unable to establish her authority without help from abroad. It was therefore, on the face of it, not an extravagant presumption that she might prefer to follow her sister’s lead and adhere to the traditional policy of England in allying herself with the sovereign of Spain and Flanders.

When Feria arrived at Hatfield he received his first surprise. Before starting from London he had summoned the Council, and in Philip’s name had approved of Elizabeth as the heir to the Crown. Believing that this would enable him to claim Elizabeth’s thanks, he began at Hatfield to enlarge upon the service Philip had done her in thus securing to her the succession. So long as high-flown compliment had been the staple of conversation Elizabeth had given Feria as good as he had brought; but the moment he bespoke her gratitude she stopped him, and said that she would owe her Crown to no one but her people; and when he broadly hinted at the advantage to her of a marriage with her Spanish brother-in-law or a nominee of his she evaded the suggestion dexterously.[135] All through the interview she showed a determination to resist any attempts to place her in the tutelage of Philip. She answered Feria, indeed, somewhat tartly at one point, that her sister had lost her people’s love by marrying a foreigner; and the ambassador left her already convinced that she would be no docile instrument in his master’s hands, as her sister had been.

Mary and Pole lay dying at the same time, fortified by the rites of their Church, whose services were celebrated ceaselessly before their weary eyes. With the Queen there were few now to do her reverence, for most of her courtiers and Councillors were flocking to Hatfield to worship the rising sun; but Mrs. Clarencius, the Countess of Feria (Jane Dormer, Mary’s favourite maid of honour), and a few other faithful friends stood by her to the last. On the morning of the 16th November the Council assembled in her room, and Cordell, the Master of the Rolls, read aloud the Queen’s will, although Mary was unconscious at the time. Feria asserts that when the reader reached the bequests to her personal attendants the Council desired him to omit that portion. In any case, little attention was afterwards paid to the Queen’s testament, for there were none who loved or mourned the forlorn woman. Before dawn on the 17th November Mass was celebrated in the dying chamber in the Palace of St. James. Like her mother on her death-bed in similar circumstances, Mary followed the sacred office devoutly, in the full possession now of her faculties, making the responses audibly and fervently. When the celebrant appealed to “the Lamb of God who took upon Himself the sins of the world,” Mary answered clearly “_Miserere nobis, Miserere nobis, Dona nobis pacem_.”[136] These cries for mercy, for mercy and peace, were the last words of unhappy Mary Tudor. A few moments afterwards, as the priest held up before her the Sacramental Host, her eyes flushed with tears, and then closed for ever. Philip had no longer any footing in England. He must win one again by force or favour, unless Spain was to surrender her proud supremacy and Catholicism cease to rule the world.