CHAPTER 38
AT SEVEN IN THE EVENING OF AUGUST 3, 1553, MARY ENTERED the City of London, accompanied by gentlemen, squires, knights, and lords, the king’s trumpeters, heralds, and sergeants at arms with bows and javelins.
She was dressed in a gown of purple velvet, its sleeves embroidered in gold; beneath it she wore a kirtle of purple satin thickly set with large pearls, with a gold and jeweled chain around her neck and a dazzling headdress on her head. Her mount, a palfrey, was richly trapped with cloth of gold.1 As the imperial ambassadors reported, “her look, her manner, her gestures, her countenance were such that in no event could they be improved.”2 Behind her rode Sir Anthony Browne, “leaning on her horse, having the train of her highness’ gown hanging over his shoulder,” followed by her sister, Elizabeth, the Duchess of Norfolk, the Marchioness of Exeter, and a “flock of peeresses, gentlewomen and ladies-in-waiting, never before seen in such numbers.”3 It was a spectacular display of dynastic unity, of power and authority: the first formal appearance of England’s queen regnant. According to one estimate, some ten thousand people accompanied the new queen into the capital.
Mary was met at Aldgate by the lord mayor and aldermen of London. Kneeling before her, the lord mayor presented the scepter of her office as a “token of loyalty and homage” and welcomed her into the city. She returned the scepter to the lord mayor with words “so gently spoken and with so smiling a countenance that the hearers wept for joy.”4 Mace in hand, the lord mayor joined the cavalcade next to the earl of Arundel, who bore the sword of state. At St. Botolph’s Church, a choir of a hundred children from Christ’s Hospital, all dressed in blue with red caps on their heads and sitting on a great stage covered with canvas, sang choruses of welcome.5
All along the procession route the streets had been swept clean and spread with gravel so that the horses would not slip; the buildings had been decorated with rich tapestries, and spectators crowded onto roofs, walls, and steeples. As the procession moved through Aldgate, trumpets sounded from the gate’s battlements. Lining the streets through Leadenhall to the Tower were the guilds of London, all wearing their livery hoods and furs, all paying homage to their new queen. Wherever the queen passed, placards declared, “Vox populi, vox Dei”—“The voice of the people is the voice of God.”6 The streets thronged “so full of people shouting and crying ‘Jesus save her grace,’ with weeping tears for joy, that the like was never seen before,” reported the chronicler Charles Wriothesley.7 The imperial ambassadors agreed: The “joy of the people” was “hardly credible,” “the public demonstrations” having “never had their equal in the kingdom.”8
With cannons sounding from every battlement “like great thunder, so that it had been like to an earthquake,” Mary arrived at the Tower. There the lord mayor took his leave and Mary was met by Sir John Gage and Sir John Brydges, constable and lieutenant of the Tower, respectively, standing in front of rows of archers and arquebusiers. Kneeling on the green before the Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula within the Tower precinct were Edward Courtenay, who had been prisoner since the age of nine and whose father, the marquess of Exeter, had been beheaded in 1538; the aged Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk, still under sentence of death since the last months of Henry VIII’s reign; and the deprived bishops of Winchester and Durham, Stephen Gardiner and Cuthbert Tunstall. In the name of all the prisoners, Bishop Gardiner congratulated Mary on her accession. “Ye are my prisoners!” exclaimed the queen. Raising them up one by one, she kissed them and granted them their liberty. Courtenay and Norfolk were restored to their rank and estates, the deprived bishops to their sees. Then, as her standard was raised above the keep, Mary entered the Tower.9 “The people … are full of hope,” wrote the imperial ambassadors, “that her reign will be a godly, righteous and just one, and help to establish her firmly on the throne.”10
NOW IN POSSESSION of her kingdom, Mary could begin the task of governing. She had won the throne at Framlingham with a small council of her household officers, including Robert Rochester, Edward Waldegrave, and Henry Jerningham, together with figures such as the earls of Sussex and Bath, who had arrived in the early days of the coup. All were of proven loyalty, but few had political experience. Then, as Mary journeyed to London, she had been besieged with apologies and pledges of fidelity from the Edwardian councillors who had been so closely involved with Edward’s Protestant reforms and who had, just days before, conferred the crown on Lady Jane Grey. Some had displayed reluctance in agreeing to Northumberland’s plan, but all had eventually signed Edward’s “Device for the Succession.” Though Mary doubted their loyalty and their motives, most upon their submission were restored to royal favor.
To her existing council of household servants, Mary appointed experienced men such as Sir William Petre, Lord William Paget, the earls of Arundel and Pembroke, Sir John Mason, and Sir Richard Southwell. The earl of Arundel became lord steward; William Paulet, the marquess of Winchester, retained his office of high treasurer. By the time Mary reached the Tower, she had a Privy Council, a hybrid of trust and experience, of some twenty-five members.
Mary also appointed to her Privy Council men who had suffered for their views and faith under the previous regime, including those she had freed from the Tower. Stephen Gardiner was appointed to the Privy Council the day after his release and three weeks later became lord chancellor. Though he had been principal adviser to Henry VIII in the king’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon, he had become increasingly conservative in his religious views during Edward’s reign and had developed a hatred for Northumberland after being imprisoned in 1551. As far as Mary was concerned this sufficiently redeemed him, though he would never come to enjoy the queen’s full confidence. Yet Mary’s political pragmatism was resented by many of the councillors. “Discontent is rife,” the imperial ambassadors reported on August 16, “especially among those who stood by the queen in the days of her adversity and trouble, who feel they have not been rewarded as they deserve, for the conspirators have been raised in authority.”11 Although their commitment to Mary varied, they all shared a fundamental loyalty to the Tudor regime.
In all, Mary’s Privy Council numbered some forty councillors. While it was among these men that a core group formed to govern and administer the realm, it was as much in the halls and corridors of the royal household, in whispered conversations and secret meetings with the queen, that decisions were made and policies formed. Unlike the Privy Council, the upper echelons of the royal household were an exclusive preserve of trusted Catholic loyalists whom Mary relied upon. Members of Mary’s “princely affinity of proven loyalty” replaced all those who had acted against her in the succession crisis. Sir Henry Jerningham, who had been in Mary’s service since 1533, became vice chamberlain and captain of the Guard; the long-serving Robert Rochester became comptroller of the household; Edward Waldegrave, master of the great wardrobe; and Sir Edward Hastings, master of the horse. John de Vere, the earl of Oxford, whose defection to Mary in the succession crisis had proved decisive, recovered the “hereditary” position of lord great chamberlain from the marquess of Northampton.
THE ACCESSION OF a queen regnant necessitated changes in the monarch’s private apartments. The male servants of Edward’s entourage were replaced by female attendants, many of them long-serving servants from her princely household, such as Jane Dormer, Mary Finch, Frances Waldegrave, Frances Jerningham, and Susan Clarencius, who became chief lady of the Privy Chamber. Their positions close to the queen gave these women a measure of influence, especially in the early months of the reign, a fact that was of concern to the emperor. “If you have an opportunity of speaking to her without her taking it in bad part,” he instructed Renard, “you might give her to understand that people are said to murmur because some of her ladies take advantage of their position to obtain certain concessions for their own private interest and profit.”12
But it was Simon Renard, building on Mary’s familial ties and attachment to the emperor, who would enjoy an unprecedented role as secret counselor and confidant. From the start, Mary had expressed her uncertainty as to how to “make herself safe and arrange her affairs,” and, as the ambassadors reported, “still less did she dare to speak of them to anyone except ourselves. She could not trust her Council too much, well knowing the particular character of its members.”13 Just a few hours after the imperial ambassadors’ first public audience, on July 29, and within days of her accession, the queen sent all three ambassadors word that one or two of their number might go to her privately in her oratory, “entering [by] the back door to avoid suspicion.”14 The task was delegated to Renard, who from then on acted as a secret counselor, advising and admonishing Mary as to decisions to be made and actions taken. He quickly won the queen’s trust and confidence and was frequently consulted by her in secret, when none of her English advisers was present. On religion Renard told her:
not to hurry … not to make innovations nor adopt unpopular policies, but rather to recommend herself by winning her subjects’ hearts, showing herself to be a good Englishwoman wholly bent on the kingdom’s welfare, answering the hopes conceived of her, temporising wherever it was possible to do so.15
Huddled under a cloak, Renard would slip quietly in through the back door of the queen’s privy apartments. She would encourage him to come in disguise and under cover of darkness.
Sir, If it were not too much trouble for you, and if you were to find it convenient to do so without the knowledge of your colleagues, I would willingly speak to you in private this evening…. Nevertheless, I remit my request to your prudence and discretion. Written in haste, as it well appears, this morning, 13 October. Your good friend, Mary.16
To consult an ambassador as though he were a secret counselor upon the domestic affairs of the kingdom was a highly unusual step for a monarch to take. But from her earliest days Mary had pledged herself to the emperor. On July 28, when the imperial ambassadors had journeyed to meet Mary at Beaulieu, she had declared that “after God, she desired to obey none but” her cousin Charles, “whom she regarded as a father.”17 After her accession, she wrote thanking him for his congratulations, adding, “May it please your Majesty to continue in your goodwill towards me, and I will correspond in every way which it may please your Majesty to command, thus fulfilling my duty as your good and obedient cousin.”18 It was a sign of things to come.