Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [82]
AS EDWARD LAY on his deathbed, struggling to breathe, Northumberland took the first steps to execute the plan. He needed to ensure that Mary did not become suspicious of his intentions for the succession and sought to lull her into a false state of security, regularly sending her news of the king’s health and promising that if he should die she would be queen with his assistance. At first Mary believed him, but then she learned the truth. On or about July 1, her closest advisers told her of Northumberland’s deceit.
Mary acted swiftly. She feigned ignorance and tricked the duke into thinking he could get possession of her whenever he pleased. She was then staying at Hunsdon in Hertfordshire, no more than twenty miles from his grasp. Yet her household servants had already formulated a plan for her escape. She had been summoned to Edward’s bedside, but on July 3 she received a tip-off from a spy at court that the king’s end was near. On the night of the fourth, she fled with six attendants, four men and two women. The pretext was the illness of her physician, Rowland Scurloch, which forced her to move household for risk of infection. Through the night Mary and her party traveled, riding north through Hertfordshire to Sawston Hall in Cambridgeshire, the home of Sir John Huddleston, a local Catholic gentleman. At first light, Mary rose, heard Mass, and then set out once again. There would be perilous consequences for Huddleston’s loyalty to the princess: when Northumberland’s men arrived the following day and realized that Mary had fled, they burned his house to the ground.
Instructions were hurriedly dispatched to lieutenants and justices across the country, notifying them of Mary’s escape and ordering them to prepare to muster troops at an hour’s notice and to maintain continual watch:
These shall be to signify unto you that the Lady Mary being at Hunsdon is suddenly departed with her train and family toward the sea coast at Norfolk, upon what occasion we know not, but as it is thought either to flee the realm or to abide there some foreign power …
Wherefore to avoid the danger that may ensue to the state and to preserve the realm from the tyranny of foreign nations which by the said Lady Mary’s ungodly pretenses may be brought into this realm to the utter ruin and destruction of the same, we have thought good to require and charge you, not only to put yourselves in readiness after your best power and manner for the defence of our natural country against all such attempts, but likewise exhort you to be ready upon an hour’s warning with your said power to repair unto us…. From Greenwich, the 8th of July.16
From Sawston, Mary rode the next twenty-eight miles virtually nonstop. Finally she reached Hengrave Hall, the seat of the earl of Bath, just outside Bury St. Edmunds. There she rested briefly before continuing on to Euston Hall, where she was met by the dowager Lady Burgh. When she had been informed of the king’s death on the previous day, the sixth, she had reacted with cautious suspicion: the messenger, Robert Reyns, had been sent by Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, a gentleman of Edward’s Privy Chamber who was known for his Protestant sympathies. Whatever the truth, the message had made flight more urgent. Mary hurried on to her seat at Kenninghall, Norfolk, where the news of the king’s death was confirmed.
CHAPTER 35
FRIENDS IN THE BRIARS
The 10. of July, in the afternoon, about 3. of the clock, Lady Jane was conveyed by water to the Tower of London, and there