Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [123]
A week later, the king and queen returned to Westminster Abbey for the opening of Parliament. According to Count Langosco da Stroppiana, the waiting crowds called out, “Oh how handsome the King is! … Oh! What a good husband he is! How honourably and lovingly he treats the Queen!”25 At the abbey the king and queen knelt and kissed the cross. The new bishop of Lincoln, John White, preached an English sermon, which was then summarized in Latin. The text was from Jeremiah. It said that those who had separated from the Roman Church did not harbor thoughts of peace any more than those guilty of sedition or disobedience to the king and queen. In conclusion the bishop urged the “firm establishment of our true Catholic religion.”26
CHAPTER 52
TO RECONCILE, NOT TO CONDEMN
A year has passed since I began to knock at the door of this royal house, and none has opened to me. King, if you ask, as those are wont to do who hear a knock at the door: who is there? I will reply, it is I, who, rather than consent that this house should be closed to her who now possesses it with you, preferred banishment and twenty years of exile. And if I speak thus, is it not a sufficient claim to be permitted to return home and to approach you?1
—CARDINAL POLE TO PHILIP, SEPTEMBER 1554
SINCE HIS APPOINTMENT AS PAPAL LEGATE ON AUGUST 5, 1553, Cardinal Pole had been petitioning Mary to allow him to return to England. He had traveled as far as Brussels but had been prevented from going any farther as the emperor wanted to secure Philip’s marriage to Mary before England embarked on the path of Catholic restoration.
Pole, however, argued that nothing should stand in the way of the Church’s immediate and unconditional return to Rome.2 He believed the queen’s marriage to Philip was “even more universally odious than the cause of the religion,” and Mary feared his hostility to it.3 As the months passed and there was no sign of his zealous advice being heeded, the cardinal’s letters to Mary became more and more strident. “It is imprudent and sacrilegious to say that matters of religion must be cleverly handled, and left until the throne is safely established,” he wrote; “what greater neglect can there be … than by setting aside the honour of God to attend to other things, leaving religion to the end?”4 In many ways Pole and Mary were kindred spirits. Both had suffered for their faith and lived through years of isolation in fear of death. Pole had been in exile for much of his life; both had lost their mothers to Henry VIII’s cruelty. But England had changed in his twenty-year-long exile, since Henry’s break with Rome and the execution of his elder brother, Henry, Lord Montague, and his mother, Margaret Pole. Years of antipapal propaganda had left many English people hostile to the idea of a return of papal authority. A generation had grown up knowing only the king as head of the Church. Meanwhile, Church lands had fallen into secular hands and their “possessioners” were not prepared to give them up. Finally, though, with the Spanish marriage concluded and a compromise reached, Parliament repealed Pole’s attainder for treason and the cardinal could return to England.
On November 20, some fifteen months after his appointment as legate, Pole landed at Dover. Two days later, he journeyed to London, accompanied by an ever-increasing train of English noblemen and councillors. With Londoners lining the banks of the Thames, Pole took to the river at Gravesend, his large silver cross, an emblem of his legatine authority, prominent in the state barge. At noon he arrived at Whitehall, where he was met on a landing stage by Philip. With the sword of state borne before them, the king and cardinal proceeded to the Presence Chamber, where the queen awaited them. Pole had not seen Mary since