After the Rebellion
Mary's advisers opposed pardoning her enemies. The emperor and his ambassador also reproached her for sparing, and even freeing, men who had plotted against her and might plot again, asking how Philip could feel safe living in a land where his enemies enjoyed liberty. Bishop Stephen Gardiner held that mercy to the nation required destroying conspirators and traitors. After the rising, which had badly frightened her, Mary took her advisers' advice. She signed the death warrant of Jane Grey, who had never wished to be queen of England, and put to death Jane's husband, who had wished to rule the country. Jane, seventeen, without protesting the queen's order or shedding a tear, met death with courage and calm (12 February 1554). Her father, the Duke of Suffolk, was beheaded, and hundreds of minor rebels were hanged. Some conspirators were kept alive for a time in the hope of getting information from them. Wyatt at first blamed Elizabeth for the plan of revolt, but at his execution (11 April 1554) he cleared her of knowledge of it. Courtenay was released from prison after a year and then banished. Charles advised Mary to destroy Courtenay and Elizabeth, who would always threaten her existence. Mary kept Elizabeth a month at St. James's Palace and then two months under arrest in the Tower.
Renard pressed for Elizabeth's immediate execution, but Mary, since Elizabeth's treason was not proved, refused. The frightening days Elizabeth passed left her anxious and suspicious, and the effects showed in her own reign. As Mary Tudor feared her, Elizabeth, once queen of England, feared Mary Stuart. On 18 May the future queen of England was moved to Woodstock and kept under watch. Fear of Elizabeth's coming to the throne again turned Mary Tudor's thoughts toward marriage, in the hope of a child.
Philip and the Hope of a Child
Philip remained cool and showed no wish to marry Mary. On 6 March 1554 he was married to Mary by proxy, but did not reach England until 20 July. His patience of body and spirit astonished the English. His triangular face, from broad brow to narrow chin, was framed by yellow hair and beard. He was a pleasant, witty man, kind and open to all, and in his conduct and that of his companions there was no sign of regarding the English as savages. He even sent Elizabeth a courteous message, perhaps foreseeing that Mary would bear no child and Elizabeth would come to rule England, and that Elizabeth's accession would be better for Spain than that of Mary Stuart, long tied to France. Although Mary was older than Philip, she chose him as husband with burning love and feeling. She, who had been starved of love for years, was overjoyed to see that she had won the heart of a powerful and vigorous prince. So she gave herself to him so completely that her courtiers thought England had become Spain's subject. Mary wrote to the King of Spain with gratitude and humility: "My joy is too great for words. Considering the virtues and perfections of my crowned husband, I pray God to grant me the gift of pleasing him ever more."
Her intense wish for a child and an heir to the English throne at last led her to think herself with child. She took the stopping of her monthly courses for pregnancy and, hoping for a child, forgot that this had happened to her before. Digestive trouble strengthened her belief, and the Venetian ambassador wrote in his report that the queen's body showed the signs. For a time Mary was glad that she too, like the humblest woman in her realm, would have a child, and it is hard for us to imagine her disappointment and heartbreak when the physicians told her that the swelling was from dropsy. Meanwhile the news of the queen's pregnancy spread through England, and the people gave thanks and prepared for celebrations. Soon a rumor said that the queen had borne a son. People at once closed their shops and held feasts in the streets; church bells rang, and a priest announced that the infant was "healthy and fair" and worthy of a prince. Mary, heartbroken and shamed before the people, hid herself from them for several months.
The Return to Rome
She had allowed Cardinal Pole to return to England on certain terms. But since the cardinal opposed the queen of England's match with the Spanish royal house, Charles kept him for a time at Brussels. After the marriage, the emperor dropped his opposition, and the cardinal crossed the Channel (20 November 1554) and after twenty-two years returned home as the pope's legate. The warm welcome of the government's leaders, the clergy and the people left no doubt that England was glad to renew its tie with the pope. After his return Cardinal Pole warmly greeted Mary: "Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women," and hoped soon to be able to say to the queen, "Blessed is the fruit of thy womb." When the members of Parliament learned that Cardinal Pole bore a message in which the pope absolved the holders of confiscated Church property, they knelt and asked God's pardon for their past attacks on the Church, and Bishop Gardiner absolved all the penitents. The pope again became head of the Church of England, and the Church's revenue and the "first fruits" of the clergy's income went to him. The bishops' courts reopened, and priests again claimed the tithes of their districts. Restrictions were laid on the Lollard movement, as before Henry VIII, and censorship of the press passed from the state to the Church. After twenty years of turmoil and struggle, England was back in its old state. Philip stayed thirteen months with Mary, but when he finally despaired of her bearing a child he asked leave to return to Brussels, where his father's abdication required his presence. With a heavy heart Mary granted his request, saw her husband off to the boat waiting on the Thames, and watched it from a window as far as the eye could see (28 August 1555). Philip told himself that by spending time with a sick woman he had done his duty. In Brussels he put the bitter memory of the hard months he had spent in England out of his mind.
Cardinal Pole was now the most powerful and influential man in England. He put the English Church in order and, with Mary's help, reopened some of the monasteries and nunneries that had been dissolved. Mary now consoled and occupied herself by reviving the old rites, by having crucifixes and sacred pictures set in the churches, by walking in processions of priests, children and devout guilds, and by kneeling in church at Mass. On the last Thursday before Easter (1556), kneeling on the ground, she washed and kissed the feet of forty-one old women and gave them all alms. The queen, who had forgotten her dream of motherhood, found comfort now only in religion.
Heresy and Persecution
But she could not revive the past as she wished. New ideas had taken hold of the minds of townspeople, and dissenting sects secretly spread their beliefs and writings in the country. The activity of groups that denied the divinity of Christ, the existence of the Holy Spirit and the transmission of Adam's sin to mankind alarmed Mary deeply. She, who had received from religion only a simple, formal faith, thought these heretical ideas a crime and worse than treason. She asked herself whether the misguided spreaders of these heresies had understood people's spiritual needs better than her beloved cardinal. She was told that a preacher in a church had prayed that God would either guide her to the right path or take her from the world. One day the carcass of a dog, its head shaved like a monk's and a rope round its neck, was thrown through the window of the queen's room. Mary was pained that French Protestant exiles, whom she had allowed to leave England freely, were scattering pamphlets calling the queen a deceiving reactionary and the Latin services the embodiment of unbelief. Some of these tracts urged the English to rise against the queen. At a meeting of 17,000 people at Aldgate (14 March 1554, the book's date) a speaker asked the people to overthrow Mary and set Elizabeth on the throne. English Protestants abroad were busy stirring their countrymen.
As her nature inclined, Mary kept giving generously until 1555. What made her the most hated queen of England? The provocative attacks of her opponents, who had no respect for her person, faith and feelings; fear that opposition to Catholicism was a cover for political revolt; the hardship and failure that had crushed her spirit and taken from her the power of sound judgment; and her unquestioning trust in the counsel of her advisers, Philip, Gardiner and Pole, who held that religious unity was indispensable to the nation's stability and survival. Philip later applied in the Netherlands the principle he held. Gardiner had sworn (in the spring of 1554) that three Protestant bishops, Hooper, Ridley and Latimer, would be burned if they did not recant. Cardinal Pole was by nature gentle like the queen, but rigid and stubborn in his religious beliefs. He loved the Church so much that he felt aversion to those who doubted the soundness of its teachings or its authority. Pole had no direct hand in the punishments of religious dissent in Mary's time; the cardinal tried to prevent excess, and once saved twenty people whom Bishop Bonner had condemned to the stake. Yet he told the clergy that if peaceful means failed, the chief spreaders of heresy should be "killed and cast away like the rotten limbs of a body." Mary herself at first treated Protestants with leniency, saying: "In our view severe punishment of the misguided should be avoided; those who deceive the simple with their teaching should be treated gently." At first, though she approved persecution of Protestants, she herself did not harass them. But when the war with France brought misfortune to her and England (1558), Mary thought England's defeat was caused by the Creator's anger at her gentleness toward the misguided, and from then on she pursued the persecution of Protestants zealously.
Gardiner led the killing of Protestants in his country by summoning (22 January 1555) six priests who would not recognize Catholicism in England. One of the accused recanted; the other four, among them John Hooper, deposed Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester, were burned (4–8 February 1555). Gardiner seems to have been pained after this killing, for he stopped the killing of opponents, lost his health, and died in November of that year. After him Bishop Edmund Bonner took up the burning of Protestants. Philip, still in England, advised him to avoid extremes; and when Bonner condemned six more to the stake, Renard, the emperor's ambassador, protested this "savage insolence," and Philip's confessor, a Spanish friar, called these killings inconsistent with Christ's love and forgiveness. After five weeks' delay Bonner carried out his sentences. He thought himself a gentle, tolerant man, and by the custom of the day he was right, since the queen's privy council reproached him for slackness and delay in suppressing heresy. By promises he tried to bring the condemned to recant, often offering them easy and respectable posts, but where promises failed he punished them mercilessly. Most of the condemned were simple workers who in the earlier reign had grown used to reading the Bible and drew from it beliefs like those of the Protestants. The persecutors seem to have thought that the heads of the Church who had spread Protestantism in the land should atone for their sins by martyrdom. In September 1555 Cranmer, sixty-six, Ridley, sixty-five, and Latimer, eighty (the book's ages), were brought from the Tower to Oxford for trial.
Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer
Latimer had stained his standing by advising the burning of Anabaptists and pious Franciscans in Henry VIII's time. Ridley had approved Jane Grey's unlawful rule, called Mary a bastard, and helped remove Bonner and Gardiner from their sees. Cranmer, the mind behind the English Reformation, had annulled Henry's marriage to Catherine, recognized Anne Boleyn as Henry VIII's lawful wife, replaced the Mass with the Book of Common Prayer, persecuted Frith, Lambert and other Catholics (so the book), approved Edward's transfer of the crown to Jane Grey, and called the Mass an embodiment of unbelief and impiety. All these men had spent about two years in the Tower awaiting death.
Cranmer was tried at Oxford on 7 September, and his judges left nothing undone to make him repent. He held to his belief and was found guilty by the court. But since Cranmer was an archbishop, the sentence was sent to the pope for confirmation and Cranmer himself was returned to the Tower. On 30 September Ridley was brought to court. He too did not give up his faith and belief. The same day Latimer was summoned before the Church court. This old man, who no longer cared for the world, wore a threadbare gown and a cap over a skullcap covering his white hair; his spectacles hung from his shoulder and a New Testament was in his belt. He too refused to admit transubstantiation. The two men were condemned on 1 October and burned on 6 October (the book's date). The condemned knelt and prayed before the pile of wood prepared for them. Then they were chained to the stake, and the wood was lit. Latimer then turned to Ridley and said: "Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out." On 4 December Pope Paul IV confirmed Cranmer's condemnation. The first Protestant archbishop of Canterbury, learning of his approaching death, at first lost his nerve. For the man from whose pen had come so stirring a work as the Book of Common Prayer, it was hard to face death without pain of body and mind. Apparently at Cardinal Pole's urging he "denounced and condemned all the heresies and errors of Luther and Zwingli," and admitted the truth of all the beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church, including the seven sacraments, transubstantiation and the existence of purgatory. This confession should have reduced his sentence to imprisonment, but (according to Foxe) Mary judged his confession hypocritical and ordered his execution.
At dawn on the day of his execution (21 March 1556), in St. Mary's Church at Oxford, Cranmer read his recantation for the seventh and last time. Then, before the astonished eyes of those present, he said, in substance: "And now I come to the matter that troubles my conscience more than anything I have done or said in my whole life: the writings contrary to the truth which I wrote out of fear for my life, and which I now deny ... I mean the papers and letters I have written or signed since the day of my disgrace began ... and since I have sinned with my hand by writing against my conscience, it is right that my hand should be punished first ... and burn to ashes in the fire. As for the pope, I count him the Antichrist." When he was set on the pile and the fire kindled, before it reached his body, according to Foxe, Cranmer held his hand in the flame, "firm and unmoving ... so that people might see his hand burn before his body. And as he repeated the words of St. Stephen, 'Lord Jesus, receive my spirit,' he died among the flames."
The Cost of the Persecution
By Cranmer's death the persecution of Protestants had reached its height. Nearly 300 more were martyred, 273 of them in the last four years of Mary's rule. After sending the people in groups to the fire, the persecutors found they had made a mistake. The martyrdom and sacrifice of the Protestants gave Protestantism the strength and firmness of early Christianity; the faith of many Catholics, who saw the Protestants' steadfastness and courage in death, was shaken, and they were ashamed of their queen's acts. Bishop Edmund Bonner, though he had little inclination to kill Protestants, because most of the martyrs died within his diocese, became known as "Bloody Bonner," and a woman called him "a professional murderer and the executioner of all the bishops of England." Hundreds of English Protestants took refuge in Catholic France and never ceased working to overthrow the tyranny in their homeland. Henri II of France, though he himself persecuted French Protestants, supported the English exiles in the hope of overthrowing Mary, who by marrying the King of Spain had set France in a ring of enemies. In April 1556 the government's agents uncovered a plot to overthrow Mary and put Elizabeth in power, led by Sir Henry Dudley. A number of people, among them two of Elizabeth's household, were arrested for taking part in it. One of the prisoners named Elizabeth and the King of France as responsible. The plot was put down, but the event made Mary fear an attempt on her own life.
A group of English exiles met difficulties that show the narrowness and rigidity of the time. John a Lasco, a Polish Calvinist, had come to London in 1548 and founded the first Presbyterian church in the city. A month after Mary's accession, a Lasco and a group of his congregation left London in two Danish ships. At Copenhagen they were told they could land only if they accepted the Lutheran confession, and the exiles, stubborn Calvinists, refused. Unable to land in Denmark, the exiles turned to Wismar, Lübeck and Hamburg. But the authorities of these cities too drove them off because they were not Lutherans: the German Lutherans, instead of sympathizing with the victims of Mary's government, called them misguided "martyrs of the devil" because they denied the real presence of Christ in the sacrament. Calvin condemned the Lutherans' sectarian harshness, and in that same year (1553) had Servetus burned alive. After spending the winter wandering in the North Sea, the exiles finally settled at Emden.
War, Calais and Mary's Death
Mary passed her life in misery and distress. Her devout husband, who was now at war with both the pope and France, returned to England (20 March 1557) and asked the queen to declare war on France in his support. To satisfy the English, Philip advised Mary to lessen religious persecution. But it was no longer possible for her to win the people to herself; barely a month after Philip's return, Thomas Stafford, a relative of Cardinal Pole, raised a rebellion to free the English from Mary and Philip. The rising was crushed and Stafford was hanged (28 May 1557). That same month the pope added to Mary's troubles by removing Cardinal Pole from his post as legate and accusing him of heresy. On 7 June, to please Philip and in the belief that Henri II had a hand in Stafford's rising, Mary declared war on France. Having gained what he came for, Philip left England in July; and Mary, who knew she would not see him again, said: "I shall be deprived of the company of men for the rest of my life." In this forced war England lost the city of Calais, which had been in English hands two hundred and eleven years (6 January 1558); thousands of English men and women who lived in the city fled home empty-handed and spread the sad charge that Mary's government had been negligent in defending the last English possession in Europe. Philip, for his own advantage and without asking the French to return Calais to England, made peace with France. The precious port of Calais had long been counted "the brightest jewel in England's crown." Mary herself admitted its worth: "After my death, when you open my heart, you will find Calais in it."
At the start of 1558 Mary again thought herself with child. Since she foresaw a dangerous confinement, she wrote her will and summoned Philip to England for the happy event. Philip congratulated her but did not bear the trouble of the journey, for Mary was mistaken about her pregnancy. Mary was now wholly broken and wretched, and perhaps touched to some degree by madness. For hours she sat on the floor of her room with her chin on her knees; she wandered like a ghost in the palace corridors; or wrote tear-stained letters to Philip. Philip, who saw her death near, instructed his agents in England to incline Elizabeth to marry a Spanish nobleman or himself.
In the last summer of Mary's life plague spread in England, and in September 1558 it struck the queen. This illness, together with the dropsy she had suffered from for years and "many black sores" that had appeared on her body, left her weak and weary of life. On 6 November she sent the crown jewels to Elizabeth. Love for the Church moved the queen to spare England chaos by this generous act and by naming her lawful successor. For hours she lay unconscious in bed. Once, on coming to, she told those around her she had dreamed of children playing happily around her. At dawn on 17 November she attended Mass and shortly after closed her eyes on the world forever.
The same day Cardinal Pole, who like his queen had suffered failure, also departed from the world. In weighing the cardinal's deeds we cannot forget that at the start of the last month of his life he had condemned three men and two women to death for heresy. It is true that in that age of frenzied certainty all religious groups, except the Anabaptists, held that a nation's religious unity must be kept even at the price of the death of the rebellious; yet nowhere in the Christian world, not even in Spain itself, were so many people killed for their religious faith as in the time when Reginald Pole ruled the English Church.
A Measured Judgment
About Mary herself we should avoid hasty judgment. Suffering, hardship, illness and many painful mistakes had darkened and withered her mind and spirit. Her kindness and compassion gave way to cruelty and hardness when she saw that her enemies were plotting to overthrow her rule. She trusted too much the words of church leaders who wanted revenge on those who had formerly persecuted them. To the end of her life she believed that by killing people she was serving the religion that had kept her alive. It is not right to call her "Bloody Mary" unless we apply the epithet to all the people of her age. The name keeps us from knowing a person who had many lovable qualities. She was completing the work begun by her father of freeing England from Rome's rule, in the sense that she acquainted England, still Catholic, with the ugly side of the Church to which she had given herself. For this reason, at her death England was readier to accept the new religion she had worked so hard to suppress.