Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [134]
Philip sought to stay in touch with English affairs through a body of advisers—a Council of State—that he established on his departure. The councillors were to reside at court, consider “all causes of state and financial causes and other causes of great moment,” and write to Philip three times a week.15 The reports, in Latin, were written by First Secretary Sir William Petre and then returned by Philip’s secretary, annotated with comments in the margin or at the foot of the page. “It seems well done”; “the King is most grateful to be told”; “the King explains his wishes in letters to the councillors”: such were typical of Philip’s comments on matters ranging from prospective legislation and the nomination or recall of ambassadors to the condition of the shires and the defense of the realm.16 Important statutes and proclamations continued to be sent to the king for his signature, but as he turned his attention to the Netherlands, his correspondence became less frequent.
In October 1555, Charles resigned the lordship of the Netherlands to Philip and in January 1556 the crowns of Aragon and Castile. He sent a message with one of his gentlemen to Mary “with congratulations on her being able for the future to style herself the Queen of many and great crowns, and on her being no less their mistress than of her own crown of England.”17 Philip now desired power in England in his own right, not simply as a regent for the heir. He began to put pressure on Mary that he be crowned and even suggested this might be a condition of his return to England.18 On October 12, Badoer wrote that “the King of England had informed his wife that he was most anxious to gratify her wish for his return, but that he could not do so without being given an honourable share in the government of the realm.”19
Yet Mary hesitated to propose his coronation. Parliament was full of opposition, and, as she relayed to Badoer, “she knew it to be impossible to form either of these important resolutions without greatly endangering her crown, but that she hoped in the course of a short time to comfort the King with what he seems to desire.”20 At the end of December, Mary wrote to Philip, “apologising for her non-adoption of any of the resolutions desired by him in the matter of the coronation, or with regard to waging war on the Most Christian King [of France].”21 Rumors were circulating of Philip’s lascivious antics abroad, and Mary began to lose hope of her husband’s imminent return.22 As Noailles recounted in a letter of December 30, Mary “told her ladies, that she had done all possible to induce her husband to return, and as she found he would not, she meant to withdraw utterly from men, and live quietly, as she had done the chief part of her life before she married.”23
CHAPTER 57
COMMITTED TO THE FLAMES
ON THE MORNING OF MARCH 21, 1556, THOMAS CRANMER, THE sixty-six-year-old former archbishop of Canterbury, was burned alive in the town ditch in Oxford. Thrusting his hand into the flames, he spoke the words “For as much be as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall first be punished therefor.”1
Cranmer was the highest profile of the Marian martyrs and one Mary had always been determined to condemn as a heretic. It was he who had encouraged her father’s break with Rome; he who had, as archbishop of Canterbury, declared Katherine of Aragon’s marriage invalid; and he who had performed the wedding of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Upon Mary’s accession he had been condemned with Lady Jane Grey and three of Northumberland’s sons for high treason for his support of Jane’s accession, but his sentence had not been carried out.
Mary bore Cranmer a deep and personal grudge, and even though Church law said that as a repentant heretic he should be pardoned, she was determined that he burn. She wanted his death to be for heresy, not for secular offenses. Given his status as archbishop of Canterbury, she had had to wait for the restoration of papal jurisdiction. For two and a half years he had languished