Part 7 (1/2)

Renard, who was only anxious that the marriage should go off quietly, agreed in the desirableness of a dissolution. He told the queen that the reform of religion must be left to a better opportunity; and the prince could not, and should not, set his foot in a country where parties were for ever on the edge of cutting each other's throats. It was no time for her to be indulging Gardiner in humours which were driving men mad, and shutting her ears to the advice of those who could ruin her if they pleased; she must think first of her husband. The queen protested that Gardiner was acting by no advice of hers; Gardiner, she said, was obstinate, and would listen to no one; she herself was helpless and miserable. But Renard was not to be moved by misery. At all events, he said, the prince should not come till late in the summer, perhaps not till autumn, not, in fact, till it could be seen what form these wild humours would a.s.sume; summer was the dangerous time in England, when the people's blood was apt to boil.[318]

Gardiner, however, was probably not acting without Mary's secret approbation. Both the queen and the minister especially desired, at that moment, the pa.s.sing of the Heresy Bill, and Renard was obliged to content himself with a promise that the dissolution should be as early as possible. Though parliament could not meet at Oxford, a committee of Convocation had been sitting there, with Dr. Weston, the adulterous Dean of Windsor, for a president. Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer had been called upon to defend their opinions, which had been p.r.o.nounced false and d.a.m.nable. They had been required to recant, and, having refused, they were sentenced (April 20), so far as the power of the court extended, to the punishment of heretics.

Cranmer appealed from the judgment to G.o.d Almighty, in whose presence he would soon stand.

Ridley said the sentence would but send them the sooner to the place where else they hoped to go.

Latimer said, ”I thank G.o.d that my life has been prolonged that I may glorify G.o.d by this kind of death.”

Hooper, Ferrars, Coverdale, Taylor, Philpot, and Sandars, who were in the London prisons, were to have been simultaneously tried and sentenced at Cambridge. These six, however, drew and signed a joint refusal to discuss their faith in a court before which they were to be brought as prisoners; and for some reason the proceedings against them were suspended; but whether they refused or consented was of little moment to the Bishop of Winchester; they were in his hands-he could try them when he pleased. A holocaust of heresiarchs was waiting to be offered up, and before a f.a.ggot could be lighted, the necessary powers had to be obtained from parliament.

The bishop, therefore, was determined, if possible, to obtain those powers. He had the entire bench of prelates on his side; and Lord Howard, the Earl of Bedford, and others of the lay lords who would have been on the side of humanity, were absent. The opposition had to be conducted under the greatest difficulties. Paget, however, fought the battle, and fought it on broad grounds: the bishops' bill was read twice; on the third reading, on the 1st of May, he succeeded in throwing it out: the Lollards' bill came on the day after, and here his difficulty was far greater; for toleration was imperfectly understood by Catholic or Protestant, and many among the peers, who hated the bishops, equally hated heresy. Paget, however, spoke out his convictions, and protested against the iniquity of putting men to death for their opinions.[319] The bill was read a first time on the day on which it was introduced; on the 4th of May it was read again,[320] but it went no further. The next day parliament was dissolved. The peers a.s.sured the queen that they had no desire to throw a s.h.i.+eld over heresy; the common law existed independent of statute, and the common law prescribed punishments which could still be inflicted.[321] But, so long as heresy was undefined, Anabaptists, Socinians, or professors of the more advanced forms of opinion, could alone fall within the scope of punishments merely traditional.

The tempers of men were never worse than at that moment, Renard wrote. In the heat of the debate, on the 28th of April, Lord Thomas Grey was executed as a defiance to the liberal party. Gardiner persuaded the queen, perhaps not without reason, that he was himself in danger of being arrested by Paget and Pembroke;[322] and an order was sent to the Lieutenant of the Tower that if the chancellor was brought thither under warrant of the council only, he was not to be received.[323]

On the other hand, twelve n.o.blemen and gentlemen undertook to stand by Mary if she would arrest Paget and Pembroke. The chancellor, Sir Robert Rochester, and the Marquis of Winchester discussed the feasibility of seizing them; but Lord Howard and the Channel fleet were thought to present too formidable an obstacle. With the queen's sanction, however, they armed in secret. It was agreed that, on one pretence or another, Derby, Shrewsbury, Suss.e.x, and Huntingdon should be sent out of London to their counties. Elizabeth, if it could be managed, should be sent to Pomfret, as Gardiner had before proposed; Lord Howard should be kept at sea; and, if opportunity offered, Arundel and Paget might, at least, be secured.[324]

But Pomfret was impossible, and vexation thickened on vexation. Lord Howard was becoming a bugbear at the court. Report now said that two of the Staffords, whom he had named to command in the fleet, had joined the exiles in France; and for Lord Howard himself the queen could feel no security, if he was provoked too far. She was haunted by a misgiving that, while the prince was under his convoy, he might declare against her, and carry him prisoner to France; or if Howard could himself be trusted, his fleet could not. On the eve of sailing for the coast of Spain, a mutiny broke out at Plymouth. The sailors swore that if they were forced on a service which they detested, both the admiral and the prince should rue it. Lord Howard, in reporting to the queen the men's misconduct, said that his own life was at her majesty's disposal, but he advised her to reconsider the prudence of placing the prince in their power. Howard's own conduct, too, was far from rea.s.suring. A few small vessels had been sent from Antwerp to join the English fleet, under the Flemish admiral Chappelle. Chappelle complained that Howard treated him with indifference, and insulted his s.h.i.+ps by ”calling them c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.ls.” If the crews of the two fleets were on land anywhere together, the English lost no opportunity of making a quarrel, ”hustling and pus.h.i.+ng” the Flemish sailors;[325] and, as if finally to complete the queen's vexation, Lord Bedford wrote that the prince declined the protection of her subjects on his voyage, and that his departure was postponed for a few weeks longer.

The fleet had to remain in the Channel; it could not be trusted elsewhere; and the necessity of releasing Elizabeth from the Tower was another annoyance to the queen. A confinement at Woodstock was the furthest stretch of severity that the country would, for the present, permit. On the 19th of May, Elizabeth was taken up the river. The princess believed herself that she was being carried off tanquam ovis, as she said-as a sheep for the slaughter. But the world thought that she was set at liberty, and as her barge pa.s.sed under the bridge Mary heard, with indignation, from the palace windows, three salvoes of artillery fired from the Steelyard, as a sign of the joy of the people.[326] A letter from Philip would have been a consolation to her in the midst of the troubles which she had encountered for his sake; but the languid lover had never written a line to her; or, if he had written, not a line had reached her hand; only a s.h.i.+p which contained despatches from him for Renard had been taken, in the beginning of May, by a French cruiser, and the thought that precious words of affection had, perhaps, been on their way to her and were lost, was hard to bear.

In vain she attempted to cheer her spirits with the revived ceremonials of Whitsuntide. She marched day after day, in procession, with canopies and banners, and bishops in gilt slippers, round St. James's, round St. Martin's, round Westminster.[327] Sermons and ma.s.ses alternated now with religious feasts, now with Diriges for her father's soul. But all was to no purpose; she could not cast off her anxieties, or escape from the shadow of her subjects' hatred, which clung to her steps. Insolent pamphlets were dropped in her path and in the offices of Whitehall; she trod upon them in the pa.s.sages of the palace; they were placed by mysterious hands in the sanctuary of her bedroom. At length, chafed with a thousand irritations, and craving for a husband who showed so small anxiety to come to her, she fled from London, at the beginning of June, to Richmond.

The trials of the last six months had begun to tell upon Mary's understanding: she was ill with hysterical longings; ill with the pa.s.sions which Gardiner had kindled and Paget disappointed. A lady who slept in her room told Noailles that she could speak to no one without impatience, and that she believed the whole world was in league to keep her husband from her. She found fault with every one-even with the prince himself. Why had he not written? she asked again and again. Why had she never received one courteous word from him? If she heard of merchants or sailors arriving from Spain, she would send for them and question them; and some would tell her that the prince was said to have little heart for his business in England; others terrified her with tales of fearful fights upon the seas; and others brought her news of the French squadrons that were on the watch in the Channel.[328] She would start out of her sleep at night, picturing a thousand terrors, and among them one to which all else were insignificant, that her prince, who had taken such wild possession of her imagination, had no answering feeling for herself-that, with her growing years and wasted figure, she could never win him to love her.[329]

”The unfortunate queen,” wrote Henry of France, ”will learn the truth at last. She will wake too late, in misery and remorse, to know that she has filled the realm with blood for an object which, when she has gained it, will bring nothing but affliction to herself or to her people.”[330]

But the darkest season has its days of suns.h.i.+ne, and Mary's trials were for the present over. If the statesmen were disloyal, the clergy and the Universities appreciated her services to the church, and, in the midst of her trouble, Oxford congratulated her on having been raised up for the restoration of life and light to England.[331] More pleasant than this pleasant flattery was the arrival, on the 19th of June, of the Marquis delas Navas from Spain, with the news that by that time the prince was on his way.

It was even so. Philip had submitted to his unwelcome destiny, and six thousand troops being required pressingly by the emperor in the Low Countries, they attended him for his escort. A paper of advices was drawn for the prince's use by Renard, directing him how to accommodate himself to his barbarous fortune. Neither soldiers nor mariners would be allowed to land. The n.o.blemen, therefore, who formed his retinue, were advised to bring Spanish musketeers, disguised in liveries, in the place of pages and lacqueys; their arms could be concealed amidst the baggage. The war would be an excuse for the n.o.blemen being armed themselves, and the prince, on landing, should have a s.h.i.+rt of mail under his doublet. As to manner, he must endeavour to be affable: he would have to hunt with the young lords, and to make presents to them; and, with whatever difficulty, he must learn a few words of English, to exchange the ordinary salutations. As a friend, Renard recommended Paget to him; he would find Paget ”a man of sense.”[332]

Philip, who was never remarkable for personal courage, may be pardoned for having come reluctantly to a country where he had to bring men-at-arms for servants, and his own cook for fear of being poisoned. The sea, too, was hateful to him, for he suffered miserably from sickness. Nevertheless, he was coming, and with him such a retinue of gallant gentlemen as the world has rarely seen together. The Marquis de los Valles, Gonzaga, d'Aguilar, Medina Celi, Antonio de Toledo, Diego de Mendoza, the Count de Feria, the Duke of Alva, Count Egmont, and Count Horn-men whose stories are written in the annals of two worlds: some in letters of glorious light, some in letters of blood which shall never be washed out while the history of mankind survives. Whether for evil or good, they were not the meek innocents for whom Renard had at one time asked so anxiously.

In company with these n.o.blemen was Sir Thomas Gresham, charged with half a million of money in bullion, out of the late arrivals from the New World; which the emperor, after taking security from the London merchants, had lent the queen, perhaps to enable her to make her marriage palatable by the restoration of the currency.[333]

Thus preciously freighted, the Spanish fleet, a hundred and fifty s.h.i.+ps, large and small, sailed from Corunna at the beginning of July. The voyage was weary and wretched. The sea-sickness prostrated both the prince and the troops, and to the sea-sickness was added the terror of the French-a terror, as it happened, needless, for the English exiles, by whom the prince was to have been intercepted, had, in the last few weeks, melted away from the French service, with the exception of a few who were at Scilly. Sir Peter Carew, for some unknown reason, had written to ask for his pardon, and had gone to Italy;[334] but the change was recent and unknown, and the s.h.i.+ps stole along in silence, the orders of the prince being that not a salute should be fired to catch the ear of an enemy.[335] At last, on the 19th of July, the white cliffs of Freshwater were sighted; Lord Howard lay at the Needles with the English fleet; and on Friday, the 20th, at three o'clock in the afternoon, the flotilla was safely anch.o.r.ed in Southampton Water.

The queen was on her way to Winchester, where she arrived the next morning, and either in attendance upon her, or waiting at Southampton, was almost the entire peerage of England. Having made up their minds to endure the marriage, the lords resolved to give Philip the welcome which was due to the husband of their sovereign, and in the uncertain temper of the people, their presence might be necessary to protect his person from insult or from injury.

It was an age of glitter, pomp, and pageantry; the anchors were no sooner down, than a barge was in readiness, with twenty rowers in the queen's colours of green and white; and Arundel, Pembroke, Shrewsbury, Derby, and other lords went off to the vessel which carried the royal standard of Castile. Philip's natural manner was cold and stiff, but he had been schooled into graciousness. Exhausted by his voyage, he accepted delightedly the instant invitation to go on sh.o.r.e, and he entered the barge accompanied by the Duke of Alva. A crowd of gentlemen was waiting to receive him at the landing-place. As he stepped out-not perhaps without some natural nervousness and sharp glances round him-the whole a.s.semblage knelt. A salute was fired from the batteries, and Lord Shrewsbury presented him with the order of the Garter.[336] An enthusiastic eye-witness thus describes Philip's appearance:-

”Of visage he is well favoured, with a broad forehead and grey eyes, straight-nosed and manly countenance. From the forehead to the point of his chin his face groweth small. His pace is princely, and gait so straight and upright as he loseth no inch of his height; with a yellow head and a yellow beard; and thus to conclude, he is so well proportioned of body, arm, leg, and every other limb to the same, as nature cannot work a more perfect pattern, and, as I have learned, of the age of 28 years. His majesty I judge to be of a stout stomach, pregnant-witted, and of most gentle nature.”[337]

Sir Anthony Brown approached, leading a horse with a saddlecloth of crimson velvet, embroidered with gold and pearls. He presented the steed, with a Latin speech, signifying that he was his highness's Master of the Horse; and Philip, mounting, went direct to Southampton church, the English and Spanish n.o.blemen attending bareheaded, to offer thanks for his safe arrival. From the church he was conducted to a house which had been furnished from the royal stores for his reception. Everything was, of course, magnificent. Only there had been one single oversight. Wrought upon the damask hangings, in conspicuous letters, were observed the ominous words, ”Henry, by the Grace of G.o.d, King of England, France, and Ireland, and Supreme Head of the Church of England.”[338]

Here the prince was to remain till Monday to recover from his voyage; perhaps to ascertain, before he left the neighbourhood of his own fleet, the humour of the barbarians among whom he had arrived. In Latin (he was unable to speak French) he addressed the lords on the causes which had brought him to England, the chief among those causes being the manifest will of G.o.d, to which he felt himself bound to submit. It was noticed that he never lifted his cap in speaking to any one,[339] but he evidently endeavoured to be courteous. With a stomach unrecovered from the sea, and disdaining precautions, he sate down on the night of his arrival to a public English supper; he even drained a tankard of ale, as an example, he said, to his Spanish companions.[340] The first evening pa.s.sed off well, and he retired to seek such rest as the strange land and strange people, the altered diet, and the firing of guns, which never ceased through the summer night, would allow him.

Another feature of his new country awaited Philip in the morning (July 21); he had come from the sunny plains of Castile; from his window at Southampton he looked out upon a steady downfall of July rain. Through the cruel torrent[341] he made his way to the church again to ma.s.s, and afterwards Gardiner came to him from the queen. In the afternoon the sky cleared, and the d.u.c.h.ess of Alva, who had accompanied her husband, was taken out in a barge upon Southampton Water. Both English and Spaniards exerted themselves to be mutually pleasing; but the situation was not of a kind which it was desirable to protract. Six thousand Spanish troops were cooped in the close uneasy transports, forbidden to land lest they should provoke the jealousy of the people; and when, on Sunday (July 22), his highness had to undergo a public dinner, in which English servants only were allowed to attend upon him, the Castilian lords, many of whom believed that they had come to England on a bootless errand, broke out into murmurs.[342]

Monday came at last; the rain fell again, and the wind howled. The baggage was sent forward in the morning in the midst of the tempest. Philip lingered in hopes of a change; but no change came, and after an early dinner the trumpet sounded to horse. Lords, knights, and gentlemen had thronged into the town, from curiosity or interest, out of all the counties round. Before the prince mounted it was reckoned, with uneasiness, that as many as four thousand cavaliers, under no command, were collected to join the procession.