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of giving way and restoring Pole’s legation, even though no charges had been leveled against him, while Mary refused to send Pole to Rome in exchange for Peto. Instead, she dispatched fresh instructions to Carne as to how to react if actual charges of heresy were made against Pole. If Pole were found guilty of heresy, Carne was to declare that Mary would be his “greatest enemy,” but unless or until proof of such a crime could be found, she would take him for a good and Catholic man. Moreover, Mary argued, as an Englishman and archbishop of Canterbury, Pole must be tried in England, as Cranmer had been two years before. If the pope refused the request, Carne was instructed to leave Rome, but only after informing all the cardinals that “the Queen and Council and the whole kingdom of England, will never swerve from their devotion, reverence and obedience to the See Apostolic and to his Holiness’ successors, although for a certain period they were compelled not to obey Pope Paul IV.”13 Charges were not made and diplomatic relations were not broken off, though rumors circulated around the curia that England was about to go into schism once more.

The conclusion of peace between Philip and the pope on September 12, 1557, was greeted with great jubilation in London.14 By one of the articles of the Treaty of Cave between the pope and the Habsburgs, it was agreed that Pole’s legation would be restored, though this never happened. Pole’s position remained unchanged, and he continued, unsuccessfully, to petition the pope for vindication. He talked of the “sword of grief” with which the pope had pierced his soul.15 The man who had absolved England from heresy three and a half years earlier was now a fugitive heretic. Pole could not accept that Paul IV, his former friend, had turned against him. He wrote to the pope, begging him to say he had only been testing Pole’s loyalty “as Christ is wont to place his dearest children in purgatory to try them.”16

Just four years before, Mary had described herself as the Holy See’s “most obedient and affectionate” daughter; his Holiness had no more loving daughter than herself. Now, as the last months of her life drew near, her relations with the pope became significantly strained.17 It was a great irony that upon Mary’s death, the pope would initially express gratification upon the accession of Elizabeth as an improvement on her sister.18

CHAPTER 64

READINESS FOR CHANGE

IN 1557, GIOVANNI MICHIELI, THE VENETIAN AMBASSADOR, LEFT England. In his final report, the relacione, he gave a detailed account of the character and concerns of the then-forty-one-year-old queen.

Above all, he praised Mary’s devotion and piety. “Besides her noble descent,” he wrote, she was “a very great and rare example of virtue and magnanimity, a real portrait of patience and humility, and of the true fear of God.” Indeed, few women in the world were known to be more “assiduous at their prayers than she is,” always keeping to the canonical hours and observing Communions and fast days. She had lived a life “little short of martyrdom, by reason of the persecution she endured.”

In her youth, he reflected, Mary “was considered not merely tolerably handsome, but of beauty exceeding mediocrity.” However, the queen’s aspect was now “very grave,” with “wrinkles, caused more by anxieties than by age, which make her appear some years older.” Though “like other women,” she could be “sudden and passionate, and close and miserly,” she maintained a “wonderful grandeur and dignity.”

Despite being “valiant” and “brave,” Mary was prone to “deep melancholy”—a product, Michieli surmised, of “monstrous retention” and “suffocation of the matrix [womb],” a disease thought to be caused by the retention of menstrual fluids and a condition from which she had suffered for many years. But “the remedy of tears and weeping, to which from childhood she has been accustomed, and still often used by her” was no longer sufficient and now she required to be “blooded either from the foot or elsewhere, which keeps her always pale and emaciated.”