Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [95]
As Renard reported, “arquebusers, arrows and other weapons were being collected in various houses,” giving rise to fears that during the coronation procession “some attempt might be made against [the Queen’s] person.”6 A number of former Edwardian councillors called for unprecedented change, arguing that the coronation should be postponed until after Parliament had met and confirmed Mary’s legitimacy.7 The imperial ambassadors believed that such “novelty” was intended to “cast doubts upon and put in question the Queen’s right to the throne, to render her more dependant on [her] council and Parliament than she should be [and] bridle her so that she cannot marry a foreigner.” It was a proposal born of the fears raised by accession of the country’s first female sovereign, and one that Mary rejected outright.8
The coronation had been set for October 1, a Sunday, according to tradition. Although the 1552 Act of Uniformity remained in force and Mary was to be crowned supreme head of the Church, the coronation ceremony was to proceed as a full Catholic Mass. Recognizing the potential illegitimacy of the ceremony, Mary requested that Pole, the papal legate, absolve her and her bishops on the day of the coronation so that they might be able to say Mass and administer the sacraments without sin.9 Moreover, concerned that the oils to be used in the anointing, which had been consecrated by an Edwardian minister, “may not be such as they ought,” she asked the imperial ambassadors to write to the bishop of Arras, Charles’s chief minister in Brussels, to secretly prepare specially consecrated oil for her anointing.10 The conservative Bishop Gardiner, recently freed from the Tower, was chosen to perform the rite in place of Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, who remained imprisoned. With the amendments made, all was ready for the pageantry to begin.
ON THURSDAY, September 28, Mary departed St. James’s Palace for Whitehall, accompanied by her sister, Elizabeth, now heir apparent, and their former stepmother Anne of Cleves. At Westminster, Mary boarded her barge and was escorted down the Thames to the Tower by the lord mayor, the aldermen of London, and the companies, their boats festooned with banners and flying streamers.11 As the flotilla approached the Tower, a salute was fired. At the Watergate, Mary thanked the city officials, and then, amid a cacophony of trumpets, musicians, singers, and the pounding of cannon, she entered the Tower.12
On Saturday, the eve of the coronation, a symbolic chivalric ritual dating back to the fourteenth century was performed. Fifteen young nobles were created knights of the bath. A ceremony of naked bathing, shaving, and prayer marked their coming of age as warriors.13 It was a male rite of passage, an exercise in chivalric kingship, and a means of rewarding loyalty and service to the Crown. Many of those given the honor were those of Mary’s servants who had acted in her defense in the succession crisis, men such as Sir Henry Jerningham and Robert Rochester. Not for the last time, Mary’s gender necessitated the redefining of ritual as the lord steward, the earl of Arundel, deputized in Mary’s place. On Saturday morning the chosen gentlemen plunged naked into a wooden bath in the chapel of the Tower before reemerging to kiss Arundel’s shoulder.
At three that afternoon, as guns fired from the ramparts and bells rang from the churches all around, Mary departed the Tower for the coronation procession. The event, another tradition dating from the reign of Richard II, was an opportunity for Londoners to see their sovereign before the coronation the following day. First, the queen’s messengers rode out from the courtyard of the Tower, followed by trumpeters, esquires of the body, the knights of the bath, heralds, bannerets, and members of the council and clergy, some in gold, some