CHAPTER 59
For many consecutive days a comet has been visible, as it still is, and with this opportunity a gang of rogues, some twelve in number … went about the city saying we should soon see the day of judgment, when everything would be burnt and consumed. These knaves, with a number of others, availing themselves of this device, agreed to set fire to several parts of the city, to facilitate their project of murder and robbery.1
—GIOVANNI MICHIELI, MARCH 17, 1556
ON MARCH 5, 1556, A BLAZING COMET APPEARED IN THE SKY OVER London. Night after night for a week it shone, and Londoners looked up at it with “great wonder and astonishment.”2 These were fearful and uncertain times; “the stout and devilish hearts of the people of England” were once again ready “to work treason and make insurrections.”3 Yet what was initially thought to be civil unrest in London would reveal itself to be much more: a plot to overthrow Mary.
Born of political disaffection and Protestant intrigue, the conspiracy sought to exploit the popular discontent that had been growing since the previous summer. “The greatest rain and floods that ever was seen in England … [in which] both men and cattle drowned” had led to poor harvests and famine across England.4 Mary’s pregnancy had been unsuccessful, the peace conference at La Marque had failed, and the religious persecution continued with the burnings of Bishops Ridley, Latimer, and Cranmer. Renard warned that “unless steps are taken to remedy this state of affairs, it is impossible that trouble will not ensue … all the executions have hardened many hearts, for it has been seen how constant, or rather stubborn, these heretics prove at the stake.” He had, the ambassador concluded, “never seen the people in such an ugly mood as they are at present.”5Rumors of sedition and incipient rebellion became commonplace amid growing fears that Philip was to be crowned. When Parliament met in October 1555, rumors circulated that the demand of a subsidy was for the king’s coronation.6
A few days into the parliamentary session, the Privy Council, fearing insurrection, closed all houses of public dancing and gambling in London on the grounds that they provided opportunities for seditious assemblies.7 At the same time, three Suffolk men were imprisoned in the Tower, one of them having declared on the day Parliament opened that “to free the kingdom from oppression it would be well to kill the Queen.”8 Seditious pamphlets, written by English exiles and filled with accounts of Habsburg tyranny in Naples and Milan, circulated on the streets of London.9 By the end of October, the queen had abandoned all hope of persuading Parliament to consider Philip’s coronation. She remained determined, however, to pass bills allowing crown lands and revenues to be returned to the Church and for the estates of Protestant exiles who had fled abroad to be confiscated.
The death on the night of November 12 of the lord chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, made Mary’s task even more difficult. His health had been failing since the spring, and he had struggled to speak at the opening of Parliament. Without her primary supporter, Mary was left to face the Commons alone. Her determination to restore the crown lands was matched by the Commons’ reluctance to let them go for fear that they would have to give up their own gains.10 Though Mary succeeded in passing this bill, the other great measure, the exiles bill, was defeated after Sir Anthony Kingston, a member of the Commons, locked the doors of the chamber, forcing a division. Three days later, Parliament was dissolved and Kingston was imprisoned in the Tower.
By the new year, discontentment had deepened. In January, as the pace of religious persecution quickened, the Council decreed that the queen’s pardon should no longer be offered to heretics at the stake because of the contempt with which the offer was habitually treated. Moreover, it ordered that those in the crowds at the burnings who were understood to be “comforting, aiding or praising the offenders, or otherwise use themselves to the ill example of others” would be imprisoned.11 On January 27, seven people—five men and two women—were burned at Smithfield and a few days later five more at Canterbury. In February, the Treaty of Vaucelles, by which hostilities between France and Spain were to be suspended for five years, left England marginalized, as it had been excluded from the negotiations. Philip, in his first act as king of Spain, was blamed for the blow to national prestige. As the comet appeared in the sky in March, Philip’s astrologers advised that a major rising was to be expected in England.12 It was in these circumstances that the plot to depose Mary, hatched on both sides of the Channel, began to take shape.
LED BY SIR HENRY DUDLEY, a cousin of the late duke of Northumberland, and with the complicity of the French ambassador, Antoine de Noailles, the conspiracy sought to break the Spanish alliance and replace Mary with Elizabeth.13 After setting fire to several areas of the city to disguise their purpose, the plotters—among whom were Sir Anthony Kingston, released from the Tower after two weeks’ imprisonment, and Christopher Ashton, Dudley’s father-in-law—planned to rob the Exchequer of £50,000 in silver bullion and flee to the Isle of Wight in two of the queen’s ships, already commandeered. There they would raise forces and effect a national rebellion while Dudley sailed from France with a number of other exiles. But before the plan could be executed, Thomas White, an Exchequer official, leaked the plot to Cardinal Pole.14 At first the Council waited, giving the conspirators time to begin executing the plot, while secretly moving bullion out of the Exchequer. Finally, on March 18, the government acted. The chief conspirators were arrested and sent to the Tower.15 The Venetian ambassador reported on the twenty-fourth:
The suspicion about the conspirators who purposed setting fire to several quarters of the city for the sake of plunder, had a different root and origin to what was reported, a plot having been lately discovered of such a nature that, had it been carried into effect as arranged, it would doubtless … considering the ill-will of the majority of the population here on account of the religion … have placed the Queen and the whole kingdom in great trouble, as it was of greater circuit and extent than had been at first supposed.16
Lengthy inquiries followed throughout March and April as the web of conspiracy became ever wider, revealing links to Exchequer officials, fugitives in France, and gentry and officials across the country, including Sir Anthony Kingston, Sir William Courtenay, Sir John Pollard, and Richard Uvedale, captain of the Isle of Wight. On April 4, Dudley and most of his fellow conspirators were declared traitors, although by remaining in France Dudley escaped arrest. Two weeks later, the rebel John Throgmorton and Uvedale were hanged and quartered at Tyburn. Kingston died on his way to London. Eventually ten men were executed.
The plot had thrown the popular discontent and the willingness of France to intervene against Mary into sharp relief. All the plotters were heretics; many of them were associates of Sir Thomas Wyatt, who had been released from the Tower six months before. Their common cause, as with Wyatt’s rebellion two years before, was the unpopularity of the Spanish marriage, added to which was the new fear that Philip might be crowned king of England.
The conspiracy left Mary in a state of profound distress. The queen “rages against her subjects,” wrote Noailles. “She is utterly confounded by the faithlessness of those whom she most trusted, seeing that the greater part of these miserable creatures [Dudley’s conspirators] are kith and kin or favoured servants of the greatest men in the kingdom, even Lords of the Council.”17 Such was Mary’s fright that she would not allow Cardinal Pole to leave her for the ceremony of his consecration to the archbishopric of Canterbury, due to take place in his cathedral on March 25. He was instead consecrated in the Friars’ Church at Greenwich.18 By the summer there was reported to be something of a “siege mentality” at court. Mary no longer appeared in public, living instead in a state of seclusion, the palace full of armed men and the queen so afraid that she dared not sleep more than three hours a night.19 “All the nobility and gentry of the country have been desired to keep on the watch and ready to present themselves on the first summons.”20
In the midst of such uncertainty, Mary grew ever more anxious for Philip’s return, as Michieli related:
For many months, the Queen has passed from one sorrow to another, your Serenity can imagine what a life she leads, comforting herself as usual with the presence of Cardinal Pole, to whose assiduous toil and diligence, having entrusted the whole government of the kingdom, she is intent on enduring her trouble as patiently as she can. 21
Two months later, he wrote:
The Queen’s face has lost flesh greatly since I was last with her, the extreme need she has of the consort’s presence harassing her … she having also within the last few days lost her sleep.22
In the middle of March, on the queen’s instructions, the English ambassador, Sir John Mason, asked Philip “to say frankly in how many days he purposed returning” to the kingdom. Mason gently suggested that the king would “comfort the Queen, as also the peers of the realm, by his presence, saying that there was no reason yet to despair of his having heirs.”23 In April, Mary changed tack, sending Lord Paget as her envoy. As Badoer wrote, “I understand that the chief object of his discourse was to inspire the King with that hope, on his return to England, of being crowned, which has never yet been given him by the Queen his consort.”24 In a letter to the emperor on July 15, Mary made clear her despair and disillusionment:
It would be pleasanter for me to thank your Majesty for sending me back the King, my lord and good husband, than to dispatch an emissary to Flanders … However, as your Majesty has been pleased to break your promise in this connection, a promise you made to me regarding the return of the King, my husband, I must perforce be satisfied, although to my unspeakable regret.25
Mary now spent her time in “tears, regrets and writing letters to bring back her husband,” oscillating between a sense of anger and abandonment.26 Increasingly she became frustrated with Philip and was reported to be “scratching portraits of her husband which she keeps in her room.”27Finally, she wrote to the emperor once more, pleading that he hasten his son’s return and arguing that it was for the safety of the realm:
My Lord and good father, I wish to beg your Majesty’s pardon for my boldness in writing to you at this time, and humbly to implore you, as you have always been pleased to act as a true father to me and my kingdom, to consider the miserable plight into which this country has now fallen…. Unless he [Philip] comes to remedy matters, not I only but also wiser persons than I, fear that great danger will ensue for lack of a firm hand, and indeed we see it before our eyes.28