Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [91]
Huddled under a cloak, Renard would slip quietly in through the back door of the queen’s privy apartments. She would encourage him to come in disguise and under cover of darkness.
Sir, If it were not too much trouble for you, and if you were to find it convenient to do so without the knowledge of your colleagues, I would willingly speak to you in private this evening…. Nevertheless, I remit my request to your prudence and discretion. Written in haste, as it well appears, this morning, 13 October. Your good friend, Mary.16
To consult an ambassador as though he were a secret counselor upon the domestic affairs of the kingdom was a highly unusual step for a monarch to take. But from her earliest days Mary had pledged herself to the emperor. On July 28, when the imperial ambassadors had journeyed to meet Mary at Beaulieu, she had declared that “after God, she desired to obey none but” her cousin Charles, “whom she regarded as a father.”17 After her accession, she wrote thanking him for his congratulations, adding, “May it please your Majesty to continue in your goodwill towards me, and I will correspond in every way which it may please your Majesty to command, thus fulfilling my duty as your good and obedient cousin.”18 It was a sign of things to come.
CHAPTER 39
CLEMENCY AND MODERATION
A WEEK BEFORE MARY’S CEREMONIAL ENTRY INTO LONDON, JOHN Dudley, the duke of Northumberland, and his accomplices, Sir John Gates and Sir Thomas Palmer, were brought back to London under heavy guard.1 Despite a proclamation ordering citizens to allow the prisoners to pass by peacefully, the mounted men at arms struggled to hold back the large crowds.2 As they made their way to the Tower from Shoreditch, Londoners filled the streets to watch, throwing stones and calling out “Death to the traitors!” and “Long live the true queen!” Pausing at Bishopsgate, the earl of Arundel made Northumberland take off his hat and scarlet cloak to make him less conspicuous among the group of prisoners. For the rest of the journey to the Tower, he rode bareheaded through the streets, his cap in his hand.3
Two weeks later the duke was tried and condemned to death. During his time in the Tower he was assailed by remorse for his sins, begging to be pardoned and professing his adherence to Catholicism: “I do faithfully believe this is the very right and true way, out of which true religion you and I have been seduced this xvj years past, by the false and erroneous preaching of the new preachers.”4 His apostasy did not save him. He went to the block with Gates and Palmer in front of a huge crowd on August 22.5
None of the other July rebels was executed, and both Lady Jane Grey and her husband, Guildford Dudley, remained in the Tower in honorable imprisonment. The emperor urged Mary to act against them, but she “could not be induced to consent that she should die.”6 Jane had written a long confession explaining that she had known nothing of the plan to declare her queen until three days before she was taken to the Tower and had never given any consent to the duke’s intrigues and plots. Upon the proclamation of Mary’s accession, she had, she claimed, gladly given up the royal dignity as she knew the right belonged to Mary.7 Mary acknowledged her submission and showed a spirit of temperance toward her. Her mother, the duchess of Suffolk, was a long-standing acquaintance and had spent Christmas with Mary the previous year. “My conscience,” Mary declared to the ambassador, “will not permit me to have her put to death.”8
On July 31, upon the petition of his wife, Frances, Mary released the duke of Suffolk from the Tower, even though he had been strongly implicated in Northumberland’s coup to place Jane on the throne. As Renard reported, “many who judge her actions impartially, praise her clemency and moderation in tempering