Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [92]
FIVE DAYS AFTER Mary had taken possession of the Tower and a month after the king’s death, the coffin of the late Edward VI was carried from Whitehall to Westminster Abbey. Mary had initially expressed her intention to have him buried “for her own peace of conscience” according to the “ancient ceremonies and prayers” of the Catholic Church, fearing that if she “appeared to be afraid” it would make her subjects, particularly the Lutherans, “become more audacious” and “proclaim that she had not dared to do her own will.”10 But in a confidential memorandum, Renard advised caution: if Mary inaugurated her reign in this fashion, she would “render herself odious and suspect.” Burying Edward, who had lived and died a Protestant, with Catholic rites might “cause her Majesty’s subjects to waver in their loyal affection.”11 Mary agreed to compromise. On August 9, while Mary and her ladies heard a Requiem Mass for the repose of his soul in a private chapel in the Tower, Edward was buried in the abbey in a Protestant service conducted by Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury.12
Outside the Tower, there was evidence that religious change had already begun. Even before Mary had reached London, altars and crucifixes had started to reappear in the city’s churches, and Matins and Evensong were being recited “not by commandment but by the devotion of the people.” As the chronicler Wriothesley described, at St. Paul’s “the work that was broken down of stone, where the high altar stood, was begun to be made up again with brick.” And on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, a Latin Mass was said there.13
But amid such demonstrations of enthusiasm for the old religion, violent disturbances erupted across London. On Sunday, August 13, during a sermon at St. Paul’s Cross, Gilbert Bourne, chaplain to the bishop of London, was “pulled out of the pulpit by vagabonds” and “one threw his dagger at him.”14 The following Sunday, crowds there were met by the captain of the Guard and more than two hundred guardsmen to protect the preacher. Defamatory pamphlets exhorting Protestants to take up arms against Mary’s government littered the streets. “Nobles and gentlemen favoring the word of God” were asked to overthrow the “detestable papists,” especially “the great devil” Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester.15 A number of leading Protestant figures, including John Bradford, the prebendary of St. Paul’s, and John Rogers, the canon of St. Paul’s, were arrested, and leading reformist bishops such as John Hooper, bishop of Worcester and Gloucester, and Hugh Latimer, bishop of Worcester, were imprisoned some weeks later. In September, Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, was imprisoned for treason for his role in Lady Jane’s attempted coup.
In mid-August, as violence and alarm spread, Mary issued her first proclamation, intended to avoid “the great inconvenience and dangers” that had arisen in times past through the “diversity of opinions in questions of religion”:
Her Majesty being presently by the only goodness of God settled in the just possession of the imperial crown of this realm and other dominions thereunto belonging, cannot now hide that religion which God and the world knoweth she hath ever professed from her infancy hitherto, which her majesty is minded to observe and maintain for herself by God’s grace during her time, so doth her highness much desire and would be glad the same were all of her subjects quietly and charitably embraces. And yet she doth signify unto all her Majesty’s said loving subjects that of her most gracious disposition and clemency her highness mindeth not to compel any her said subjects thereunto unto such time as further order by common assent may be taken therein.
Mary called on her subjects “to live in quiet sort and Christian charity” and told them that further religious change would be settled by “common consent,