Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [74]
To have fled would have been to gamble. If Edward died when Mary was abroad, she would have no hope of succeeding. If she stayed, she might be deprived of her household and be left to face dangers alone. There was both “peril in going and peril in staying.” Having set the plan into motion, Mary procrastinated, then changed her mind. She accepted that to win her rightful throne and restore Catholicism, she needed to be in England. She resolved to stay and fight.
CHAPTER 31
AN UNNATURAL EXAMPLE
The Lady Mary sent one of her servants to me today to tell me that a publication was recently made in that part of the country where she lives, forbidding, as she hears, chaplains or others to say mass or officiate at all in her house according to the rites of the ancient religion, under certain heavy penalties both civil and criminal. She requested therefore that I should remonstrate with the Council on the first opportunity and declare that she demanded and would persist in her demand to live according to the ancient religion, in virtue of what had passed in this matter. She requested me also to inform your Majesty and the Queen [Dowager of Hungary].1
—AMBASSADOR JEHAN SCHEYFVE TO THE EMPEROR, JULY 26, 1550
WITH THE ESCAPE PLAN ABORTED, MARY PREPARED TO LEAVE Woodham Walter and sent her chaplain, Francis Mallet, ahead to Beaulieu to arrange Mass for her arrival. When Mary was delayed, Mallet performed the service anyway with many of her household servants in attendance. The incident gave the Council the pretext it had been looking for. Orders were dispatched for Mallet’s arrest, and Mary was summoned to court. Again she refused to attend, claiming ill health—“being the fall of the leaf”—and petitioned the Council to rethink the enforcement of the statutes.2 The Council responded that the dispensation regarding Mary’s freedom of worship had been made to the imperial ambassador for his sake and for your own also, that it should be suffered and winked at, if you had the private mass used in your own closet for a season, until you might be better informed, whereof there was some hope, having only with you a few of your Chamber, so that for all the rest of your household the service of the realm should be used, and none other. Further than this the promise exceeded not.3
Mary made a fresh appeal to the emperor, who instructed Scheyfve to secure unconditional assurances. As he added in his dispatch, “You will persist in your request at all costs. Give them plainly to understand that if they decide otherwise, we will not take it in good part, or suffer it to be done.”4
BY CHRISTMAS, MARY had run out of excuses to avoid attending court and all three Tudor siblings gathered for the reunion, postponed from the previous year. Edward, now twelve, rebuked Mary for hearing Mass in the chapel. She continued to argue that he was not yet old enough to make up his own mind about religion. He demanded her obedience, she resisted, and both were reduced to tears. Writing later to the Privy Council, she blamed its members for turning her brother against her:
When I perceived how the King, whom I love and honour above all things, as by nature and duty bound, had counselled against me, I could not contain myself and exhibited my interior grief…. I would rather refuse the friendship of all the world (whereunto I trust I shall never be driven), than forsake any point of my faith.5
But though Edward protested that he thought “no harm of her,” he remained determined that she submit. He would “inquire and know all things.” On January 17, 1551, Mary received letters from the Privy Council ordering that Mass must no longer be heard in her household. While claiming her “general health and the attack of catarrh in the head” did not permit her to answer their points “in detail, sentence by sentence,” she vehemently disputed the assertion that no promise had been made to Charles V as to the practice of the Mass:
God knows the contrary to be true: and you in your own consciences (I say to those who were then present) know it also