Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [80]
THE YEAR 1552 SAW THE CLIMAX OF THE EDWARDIAN REFORMATION. In the Second Book of Common Prayer and Forty-two Articles, the Real Presence in the Eucharist was rejected outright; altars were stripped from churches throughout the country and replaced by Communion tables; and images were whitewashed.1 The long-term survival of the new Protestantism was, however, under threat. By the terms of Henry VIII’s will, Mary was Edward’s heir, but it was clear that she would halt the process of reformation and restore Catholicism. It was a prospect that Edward would not countenance. He needed to overturn his father’s will and the parliamentary statute of 1544 that had decreed Mary his successor.
On February 10, 1553, Mary rode to court along Fleet Street, accompanied by more than two hundred lords and ladies. She was met on the outskirts of the city by John Dudley and knights and gentlemen, who escorted her to the gates of Whitehall. There she was “more honourably received and entertained with greater magnificence” than ever before, “as if she had been Queen of England.”2 But for several days, Edward could not see her, having contracted a “feverish cold.” Following Mary’s visit, the fifteen-year-old’s health deteriorated further, though his decline was concealed from both his sisters. Mary heard falsely that he was better and sent a letter giving thanks for his recovery and praying “with long continuance in prosperity to reign.”3 It would be her final contact with her brother.
Among the Council there was a growing sense of fear that the king would soon die. His doctors believed he had a “suppurating tumour” of the lung, exacerbated by a hacking cough and a fever. “The sputum which he brings up is livid, black, fetid and full of carbon; it smells beyond measure; if it is put in a basin of water it sinks to the bottom. His feet are swollen all over. To the doctors all these things portend death, and that within three months, except God of His great mercy spare him.”4
Writing at the end of May, Scheyfve described how Dudley, who had become duke of Northumberland in October, “and his party’s designs to deprive the Lady Mary of the succession to the crown are only too plain. They are evidently resolved to resort to arms against her, with the excuse of religion among others.”5 By mid-June, it was obvious that Edward did not have long to live. Another successor needed to be found.
In early spring, Edward had drawn up in his own hand “My Device for the Succession” by which he sought to direct the succession and, specifically, disinherit his sisters. Mary and Elizabeth were excluded on the grounds that they were both bastards. The line of succession was transferred to the family of Edward’s cousins the Greys—the male heirs of Frances Grey, duchess of Suffolk, the daughter of Henry VIII’s sister Mary, and the male heirs of her eldest daughter, Lady Jane Grey.6 Women were, Edward determined, unfit to rule in their own right and through marriage might subject the realm to foreign domination. Edward was relying on a yet-unborn male heir. It was a last-ditch attempt to avert a female succession.
On May 21, Lady Jane Grey was married to Guildford Dudley, Northumberland’s son. But within days, Edward’s health deteriorated rapidly. There would be no time for Jane to become pregnant. Edward was forced to overcome his misogyny and, in his own hand, to alter his device. Whereas originally he had left the crown to the “Lady Jane’s heirs male” he edited the text and changed it to “Lady Jane and her heirs male.”7 The Protestant Lady Jane was preferred as Edward’s successor to the throne.
Three weeks later, Sir Edward Montagu, the lord chief justice, and other senior lawyers of the King’s Bench were summoned to the king’s bedside at Greenwich. To make the succession legal, they were required to draw up letters patent to give legal effect to the terms of the revised “device.” Montagu refused, declaring he would not be involved with any changes to the succession and asserting that letters patent could not overturn statute; Parliament