Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [94]
Glad to see such “good resolves,” Mary granted her request.22 Meanwhile, as she had promised, Elizabeth attended Mass in the Chapel Royal on September 8, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin. It was clearly under duress. She had tried to excuse herself on grounds of ill health and had complained loudly of a stomachache all the way to church.23 It was a rerun of the earlier clashes between Mary and Edward, when he had implored her to submit to his authority and accept the Protestant changes. But unlike Mary, Elizabeth had no desire to be a martyr.
No one, least of all Mary, was fooled by Elizabeth’s display of compliance. Within days the imperial ambassadors were reporting that “last Sunday the Lady Elizabeth did not go to mass,” adding “the Queen has sent us word that she has half-turned already from the good road upon which she had begun to travel.”24 Mary continued to press Elizabeth as to the purity of her motives, questioning whether she really believed, as Catholics did, “concerning the holy sacrament,” or whether she “went to mass in order to dissimulate, out of fear or hypocrisy.” Elizabeth replied that she was contemplating making a public declaration “that she went to mass and did as she did because her conscience prompted and moved her to it, that she went of her own free will and without fear, hypocrisy or dissimulation.”25
Although she continued to doubt Elizabeth’s sincerity, Mary allowed her sister to remain at court and to attend her coronation. But underlying tensions remained. Within weeks Renard reported that Mary was considering barring her from the succession on account of her “heretical opinions and illegitimacy, and characteristics in which she resembled her mother.” As Anne Boleyn “had caused great trouble in the kingdom,” she feared her daughter might do the same “and particularly that she might imitate her mother in being a French partisan.” She told Renard that it “would burden her conscience too heavily to allow a bastard to succeed.”26 Mary increasingly suspected that Elizabeth went to Mass only “out of hypocrisy; she had not a single servant or maid of honour who was not a heretic, she talked every day with heretics and lent an ear to all their evil designs.”27
Finally, in early December, Elizabeth asked for permission to leave court. The sisters parted on affectionate terms. Mary gave her a coif of rich sables, and en route to Hatfield, Elizabeth stopped to write to Mary asking her for copes, chasubles, chalices, and other ornaments for her chapel. The queen ordered all these things to be sent to her, “as it was for God’s service and Elizabeth wished to bear witness to the religion she had declared she meant to follow.”28
CHAPTER 40
OLD CUSTOMS
As to the establishment of the Queen upon her throne, the preparations for the coronation are going forward apace for the first of October.1
—IMPERIAL AMBASSADORS TO THE EMPEROR, SEPTEMBER 9, 1553
FROM THE EARLIEST WEEKS OF HER REIGN, PLANS WERE PUT into place for Mary’s coronation.2 Fabrics and cloth were purchased and delivered, clothing was made ready, the nobility was summoned, and triumphal pageants were composed. By mid-September, the citizens of London had begun decorating the city; arches, scaffolds, and scenery for the pageants were erected and painted, and wooden rails were installed along the coronation procession route to hold back the crowds.3 At Westminster Abbey a great stage had been constructed for the crowning, and banners hung all around. It was as it had been for countless coronations before.
Yet amid the following of “old customs” there existed unease.4 Though everyone had resolved to make the ceremonies “very splendid and glorious,” the manner and form of the ceremony were uncertain. There were no precedents for the crowning of a queen regnant, let alone a Catholic bastard.5 The fourteenth-century guide Liber Regalis and the “Little