6 1553: Crisis and Catastrophe

The year 1553 opened without any premonition of the dramatic events which it was to contain. A parliament had been convened for 1 March, and preparations for the session were already in hand.¹ The chief need was for money, and a subsidy bill, only the second of the reign, was proposed. The whole council approached this necessity with some trepidation. Not only had the last subsidy been imperfectly collected, thanks to the troubles of 1549, but there were problems about demanding direct taxation in peacetime. There were precedents. Thomas Cromwell had succeeded in 1534, arguing the king’s general need to defend and govern his realm, and the subsidy of 1540 had also been voted when there were no formal hostilities to justify it.² On the other hand, Henry VIII had been an imperious king, whom it had been hard to gainsay, and there was an understandable reluctance to test the limits of his son’s authority in the same way. Northumberland was so concerned about the possible effect of such a demand that he even suggested putting the session off until the autumn.³ A subsidy voted in the spring would have to be collected during the summer, when the popular mood was always at its most volatile, whilst one voted after the harvest had been gathered would be collected during the winter. However, either the Lord President did not press his point, or the council did not accept it, because the session went ahead as planned. There could be no question of the reality of the need, nor of Dudley’s awareness of it. Writing to the council on 28 December, he observed, fairly enough:

These things are now so onerous, having been all this time put off as best we could, that without your speedy help dishonour and peril may follow. Sale of lands must be the most honourable means; you have tried calling in debts and seeking every man’s doing in office—yet you perceive this cannot salve the sore so long suffered to fester…⁴

This situation he went on, rather less fairly, to blame mainly on the late Protector ’who took up the protectorate and government of his own authority…and by [his] unskilful protectorship and less expertise in government plunged into wars’. At the end of the day, Northumberland’s anxiety to get the credit for solving the problems which his predecessor had allegedly created, proved to be greater than his reluctance to meet parliament. There was also the related matter of the reform of the revenue courts to be attended to, in response to an initiative from the Lord Treasurer, and the planned dissolution of the diocese of Durham to be formalized.

The succession did not feature in these plans, any more than it had done in the previous year. The fact that the king had already begun to toy with the subject merely reflected his own sense of responsibility, and not any perceived need. With the benefit of hindsight it seems immensely significant that Edward had a bad cold at Christmas, and that his journal suddenly ended on 30 November 1552. At the time the cold seemed no worse than several others he had suffered from, and he may simply have decided that the journal, which had probably begun as a school exercise, was no longer a worthy occupation for a sovereign prince in his sixteenth year. The real responsibilities of government, for which he had been consciously preparing for the last two years, had almost arrived. Whether his thoughts on the succession were prompted or spontaneous, we do not know, but the extraordinarily messy document which now survives in the Petyt MS was certainly not the work of a mature political mind.⁵ The handwriting is the king’s own, and is firm and legible, indicating, as Jordan argued, a date not later than February, and possibly an intention to take the issue to parliament.⁶ Edward knew perfectly well that if he married and had issue of his own there would be no problem to address, so the fact that he does not allude to that situation does not prove that he already realized it to be impossible. He was only concerned with the eventuality of his death without issue, and the fact that he provided for the possibility of his heir having already achieved his majority indicates that he was not thinking in the short term. Two things are immediately noticeable about his plan, and they may be connected. One is the exclusive preoccupation with ’heires masles’, and the other is the absence of any reference to his father’s will, or to the statute which had authorized it. In January 1553 the lawful heir, in the event of Edward’s death without issue, was his half-sister Mary, unless she should have been foolish enough to marry without the consent of the council.⁷ If she should have died, or excluded herself, then the next heir was Elizabeth. Only if both these princesses were deceased, or married without consent, would the crown have descended to Henry’s niece. Lady Frances Brandon, and the heirs of her body. If there was an alternative to this order, it was that of ’divine right’. It could be argued, and the catholic Church did argue, that Henry’s succession act was ultra vires, and that his only true heir, even in preference to Edward himself, was his legitimate daughter Mary. After her, in default of offspring, the crown should pass to the oldest descendant of Henry’s elder sister, Margaret. In 1553 that person was the 11-year-old queen of Scots, betrothed to the Dauphin and living at the French court.

The king completely ignored his half-sisters, and the queen of Scots, starting his scheme with ’the L. Frauncese’. The reasons for this need to be unravelled, for they are crucial to an understanding of the relationship between Northumberland and Edward during the last six months of the latter’s life. Mary’s exclusion has always been explained in terms of religious incompatibility, and of the threat which she was perceived to offer to the Edwardian settlement.⁸ That is valid, but is by no means the whole story. Whoever was responsible for the king’s ’Device’ also seems to have believed that her illegitimacy was more important than her statutory rehabilitation. Moreover Elizabeth’s religion was by no means incompatible, and her relations with her half-brother had always appeared to be good. Consequently her exclusion has been explained in terms of Northumberland’s influence, on the grounds that he preferred his biddable daughter-in-law to the enigmatic and tough-minded princess. However, an acute aversion to the state of illegitimacy, and a willingness to believe all that was said to the detriment of both Henry VIII’s first two marriages, could be sufficient explanation for both exclusions. By no stretch of imagination could the queen of Scots be described as illegitimate, but she was an alien born and reared, and at this stage no one in England seems to have given her a second thought as a claimant. Perhaps the most important consideration of all was that all the visible candidates, even into the next generation, were female, and Edward shared, to an extreme degree, his father’s aversion to a female succession.⁹ This was not as irrational as it might appear to a late twentieth-century mind, because of the perceived inevitability of marriage and the ill-defined powers of the crown matrimonial. The main reason why Henry had moved heaven and earth to get a male heir was to preserve his realm from foreign domination or domestic faction. In 1553 that danger was acute in that both the king’s half-sisters were unmarried, and if either of them should succeed the Tudor dynasty might well come to an end. These considerations seem to have weighed heavily with the young man as he jotted down his not very coherent thoughts:

For lakke of issu of my body…to the issue masle…To the Lady Fraunceses heires masles if she have any such issue befor my death to the Lady Janes heires masles, To the Lady Katerins heires masles, To the Lady Maries heires masles, To the heires masles of the daughters wich she shal have hereafter. Then to the Lady Margets heires masles. For lakke of such issue, To th ’eires masles of the L. Janes daughters. To th’eires masles of the L. Katerins daughters, and so forth til you come to the L. Margets daughters heires masles.¹⁰

This extraordinary genealogical wild-goose chase through three generations could have lasted upwards of twenty years, as sons were envisaged to daughters who had not yet been born. As if this was not sufficiently eccentric, after some rational suggestions for the organization of another royal minority, in clause 5 the king returned to his besetting problem,

If I died w^t out issu, and there was none heire masle, then the L. Fraunces to be govvernres. For lakke of her…her eldest daughters, and for lakke of them the L. Marget to be gowernres after as is aforsaid, til summe heire masle be borne, and then the mother of that child to be gowernres.

These are not the thoughts of a practical politician, but of a person pursuing an obsession. Should Edward die before either he or any of his multitude of female kinsfolk can either beget or bear a son, the monarchy is to be placed in abeyance until the magic feat is performed! Such a proposal lacked any kind of sense. The only rational way to exclude a female succession was to follow France and adopt the Salic law. However, that was scarcely an option, given the extraordinary dearth of royal kindred. Not only were there no cadet branches of the Tudor family, none of the lines stemming from the sons of the prolific Edward III ran in an unbroken male line to the mid-sixteenth century.¹¹ It is hardly surprising that the ’Device’ was not presented to parliament, nor apparently discussed in council. It amounted to little more than ingenious and rather far-fetched speculation. It is hard to believe that Northumberland, or any other responsible adviser, had any share in the preparation of this document. The question is whether anyone knew about it at all until the king’s fluctuating health suddenly made the issue not only real but urgent.

Careful consideration of the ’Device’ should therefore prompt a cautious reappraisal of the view that the Lord President exercised a Svengali-like domination over his young master. Edward was growing up fast, and extremely conscious of Ms royal dignity. Nearly twenty years ago, Professor Hoak drew our attention to a fascinating French account of the inwardness of the king’s relationship with his chief councillor. According to this observer, probably a servant of the French ambassador, Edward

revered him as if he were himself one of his subjects—so much so that the things which he knew to be desired by Northumberland he himself decreed in order to please the Duke and also to prevent the envy which would have been produced had it been known that it was he who had suggested these things to the king…¹²

This ascendancy the duke preserved, partly by planting his loyal familiar, Sir John Gates, as Vice-Chamberlain of the Household, and partly by private nocturnal visits to the royal bedchamber.

When there was anything of importance which he wanted to be done or said by the king without it being known that it had proceeded by his motion, he visited the king secretly at night in the king’s chamber, unseen by anyone, after all were asleep…

This account is not dated, but cannot be earlier than the beginning of Bois-dauphin’s mission in July 1551. It sounds very convincing, but should probably be classed as servants’ gossip. Northumberland may well have paid private visits to the king, but the kind of total secrecy implied would have been impossible given the strict organization of the Privy Chamber watch.¹³ Moreover he would have been wasting his time, since Edward’s decisions were popularly attributed to him anyway. What is being reported here is a somewhat distorted version of the king’s political education, which we know Northumberland was controlling in the latter part of 1551 and well into 1552. We should not assume that the boyish desire to please, even if it existed in the form described in the summer of 1551, was necessarily present to the same degree by the end of the following year. The award of an annuity to John Knox, pending a more substantial preferment, just a few days after Northumberland had declared that he would have nothing more to do with him;¹⁴ the substantial re-endowment of the northeastern bishoprics, contrary to his clearly expressed intention; and the continuing failure to appoint to Durham in spite of his persistent representations, all suggest that the duke’s will was not law by the beginning of 1553.¹⁵ The young king was beginning to develop a will of his own, and the appearances which Northumberland had been promoting for two years for his own purposes were now beginning to acquire substance. If he wanted to retain his authority, he would have to adjust to the changing circumstances.

Behind an intermittent smokescreen of sickness and self-pity, he embarked upon this essential task. He had known that it would happen, and had prepared for it as best he could, but he could not have foreseen the combination of stubborn wilfulness and increasing physical debility which Edward began to exhibit as the year advanced. His own health may well have been fragile, but, as before, it did not inhibit his political energy: ’bear with my infirmity’, he wrote to the council on 28 December, ’for I mean as well to master and country as the fittest.’¹⁶ For the time being, business continued much as usual, but with a number of indications of the king’s developing role. On or about 15 January Sir William Petre, one of the Principal Secretaries, drew up a memorandum for the conduct of council business which appears to represent an important advance.

5.

A memorial to be delivered to his majesty on Saturday night by a secretary, and thereupon the matters to be appointed to several days.

6.

On Friday afternoon a collection to be made of things done the week past, with a note of the principal reasons for any conclusions.

7.

This collection to be presented on Saturday morning and his majesty’s pleasure to be known on things concluded, and suits of importance to be moved that time.

8.

On Sunday his majesty hearing by a secretary such more matters as are arisen, will appoint days for their consideration…¹⁷

Edward annotated and endorsed this paper, which does not in itself prove anything, because as we have seen he had been drawing up ’political papers’ for some time, but in this case the agenda suggested does not appear to be cosmetic. When the king wishes to hear ’the debating of any matter’ he will give the council due notice. One of his own notes suggested that if fewer than four councillors were present at a meeting and an urgent matter arose ’they shall declare it to the King’s Majesty and before him debate it’, but not reach a decision ’without it require wonderful haste’.¹⁸ The reality of these procedural changes seems to be confirmed by a number of memoranda of ’matters to be moved to the king’, in the hands of Petre, Cecil, or one of the council clerks, which are variously dated between January and June 1553,¹⁹ and remain among the domestic state papers. There is no suggestion here that the king was controlling the agenda, an impression which could be given by some of his earlier exercises. Nor did he intend to be present at regular council meetings. He would receive summaries of the council’s proceedings, and deal with matters which had been referred to him for decision. The notice to be given of debates in the king’s presence was a warning for them to attend upon him, not the other way round. Whether these policy discussions should be called ’councils of state’ or not is hardly an issue. Edward intended to do what his adult predecessors had always done, summon his councillors, or such of them as he chose, to advise him on ’matters of state’. Such meetings would not, and never had in the past, constitute minuted sessions of the Privy Council.

Although it meant the occasional frustration of his wishes, the duke of Northumberland had everything to gain from this situation if he handled it correctly. If he was to convert dominance over a boy into influence over a mature man, and retain the king’s confidence for the foreseeable future, he had to nurture these fledgling aspirations, not suppress or divert them. Consequently, although the preparations for parliament were largely in his own hands, he carefully wrote to Lord Darcy to know the king’s pleasure over the appointment of a Speaker for the House of Commons, the naming of a preacher, and the nature of the service which should accompany the opening.²⁰ Cecil had sent him a memorandum of business, which he returned with the comment that he thought it too defensive and apologetic: ’I believe we need not imagine the objections of every froward person, but burden their minds and hearts with the king’s undeniable extreme debts and necessity.’²¹ Nor should any apology be offered for the king’s liberality to his servants, a subject which the Secretary clearly believed was likely to attract criticism. As usual councillors and officers of the household deployed their influence and patronage in pursuit of a tractable House of Commons, and as usual they were only partially successful. Perhaps a couple of dozen placemen were deployed to assist the council’s management tactics, but not by any stretch of imagination could the parliament be described as packed.²² Rather unusually, the king himself seems to have instructed his council to secure the return of one or two favoured servants, and he interested himself busily in the preparation of the agenda, although there is no sign that he contributed anything distinctive to the process. In the event it was probably Cecil, with Northumberland breathing down his neck, who drafted the subsidy bill. The duke considered strengthening his hand in the House of Lords by summoning those eldest sons of peers who held courtesy titles of nobility, most notably his own son the earl of Warwick, but the plan was not realized.²³ A number of licences were issued to peers to absent themselves from parliament, but there is no reason to suppose that this was a device to keep away potential troublemakers. The earl of Cumberland might have come into that category, and so might Lords Mordaunt and Vaux, but hardly such important office-holders as Lords Wharton and Darcy, to say nothing of the bishops of Peterborough, Salisbury, and Coventry.²⁴ In the event the session was organized with exemplary efficiency, and lasted exactly a month, the shortest of the entire century. The subsidy bill required an initial shove by the council when it was introduced in the Commons on 6 March, but went through all readings in Both Houses in less than a fortnight without any recorded opposition. Bills authorizing the king to reorganize his revenue courts by letters patent, and dissolving the ancient see of Durham, were also pushed through, the latter receiving three readings in a single day in the House of Lords, but other legislation was extremely meagre.²⁵ William Cecil must have looked back on this achievement with nostalgia in later years.

However, if the conduct of business gave grounds for satisfaction, the king’s health did not. He was well enough to open the session, but only Just. The ceremony was held in the royal residence at Whitehall, rather than in the palace of Westminster nearby, and the speech from the throne was delivered by the Lord Chancellor. He was somewhat better by the end of the month, when he seems to have closed the session in the normal way, but the usual Easter move to Greenwich was cancelled and the king remained at Westminster.²⁶ There is no reason to doubt the conventional diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis, but it is important to remember that contemporary diagnostics were not able to identify it, or to give any informed opinion of the seriousness of Edward’s condition until very late in the day. The nature of the illness is that it progresses by rallies and relapses. There was a panic as early as the beginning of February, and the Princess Mary was sent for, being met on the outskirts of London and conducted to court with full honours by Lord William Howard and the earl of Warwick.²⁷ On that day, 6 February, the king was too ill to see her, but a few days later the fever had subsided, and they had a cordial meeting. The question which must have been in the minds of the council was not even alluded to. By the end of February he was conducting business with an appearance of normality, and in spite of the curtailed opening of parliament there was cheerful and relieved talk of his recovery. Throughout March he remained weak, and stayed indoors, but only the pessimistic Scheyfve thought that he was in any serious danger. Northumberland, the ambassador reported, was keeping Mary carefully informed of any change in her brother’s condition. During April the tension was further relaxed. The king was allowed to take the air in the mild spring sunshine, and on 11 April to make his delayed journey to Greenwich.²⁸ At the end of the month he may have suffered some relapse, because the new French ambassador, Antoine de Noailles, was unable to present his credentials, and reported a general gloom when he dined with the council. However, the black mood did not persist, and by 7 May Petre could write to Cecil that the king was much amended, and expected soon to be able to ’take the air’ again,²⁹ Cecil himself was absent from the court at this point, suffering from some unidentified malady. The suggestion that he was malingering is probably misplaced, because although there was intense intermittent anxiety at court, there was no sense of an impending political crisis. As far as anyone knew at that time, if Edward should die his father’s succession act would apply, and Mary would succeed. That would certainly mean major changes, and the power structure would change, but there was no reason to suppose that heads would roll. In fact Cecil was absent during the calm before the storm, and walked straight into it on his return.

Throughout most of May the appearance of ’business as usual’ was sustained. On the same day that Petre wrote to Cecil, Northumberland also wrote, announcing cheerfully that ’our sovereign lord doth begin very joyfully to increase and amend, they [the royal physicians] having no doubt of the thorough recovery of his highness…’.³⁰ A few days later the king sat at a window to watch Hugh Willoughby’s ships drop down river on their way to seek the north-east passage, and on 17 May he briefly received the French ambassador.³¹ No one doubted that he was still sick, but the threat to his life appeared to have receded. It was at this juncture, on 21 May, that Northumberland brought to fruition a series of matrimonial negotiations upon which he had been engaged for many months. His efforts to match his fourth son Guildford with Margaret Clifford, the daughter of the earl of Cumberland, having finally come to nothing in spite of the king’s support, he turned his attention to his ally and friend, the duke of Suffolk. The fact that he had preferred the Cliffords to the Greys demonstrates that his plans were unconnected with the succession issue. The duchess of Suffolk and the countess of Cumberland had been sisters—both daughters of Mary Tudor, Henry’s sister—but the countess had died in 1547. The duchess of Suffolk was the same ’Lady Fraunces’ who featured in the king’s ’Device’, but it seems that no one except Edward knew that at this point. Both Jane Grey, Frances’s daughter, and Margaret Clifford were members of the royal kindred, and Jane was slightly closer to the throne because her mother was the elder, but neither were thought of as serious claimants. At the end of April, when Scheyfve was already convinced that Northumberland was hatching some nefarious plot, he had no idea what it might be, and did not connect it with the intended wedding, merely commenting that Guildford was to marry ’the duke of Suffolk’s eldest daughter, whose mother is third heiress to the crown by the testamentary disposition of the late king…’. At the same time Guildford’s sister Catherine was married to Henry Hastings, the heir to the earl of Huntingdon, and Jane’s sister, also Catherine, to Henry Herbert, son of the earl of Pembroke,³² With hindsight these marriages seem to have been very significant, but in fact they were routine actions of dynastic politics; less significant when they took place than the wedding of Lord Lisle to Anne Seymour three years before. Jane was something of a matrimonial prize, not because of her royal blood but because she was well known to Edward, being much of an age, and a great favourite of his. There had even been talk of him marrying her himself at one point. Unfortunately she had no desire to marry Guildford, and, although hard evidence of their relationship is lacking, it was certainly believed afterwards that she was constrained by her unsympathetic parents. Guildford may have needed little urging, but it seems that he was not indulged in the way his brother Robert had been. The weddings took place at Durham Place, and although the king was not present, the arrangements had his full approval.

However, within a few days Edward’s hopeful remission came to an end, and his condition began to deteriorate alarmingly. Scheyfve had a reliable informant within the Privy Chamber, and by 11 June was able to give a circumstantial account of the king’s condition which left little to the imagination.³³ There was now recognized to be a serious possibility that the king would die, and the ambassador’s prognostications, which had been gloomy for months, were now generally shared. Northumberland, and Edward himself, now faced for the first time the conviction that a crisis was imminent, and the duke the probability that he had been building his political house upon the sand. His whole strategy had been geared to the power structure of Edward’s court as it would be in 1555, and suddenly all his efforts seemed to have been in vain. It was probably at this juncture that the king produced his ’Device’. Even on 12 June, when Scheyfve repeated his conviction that Northumberland had formed a mighty conspiracy against the princess, ’and feels confident that he will prevail’, he still had no idea of what was intended. In other words he was repeating popular rumours, with no specific information. Given the precision of his sickroom reports, it seems certain that Jane’s claim could not have been unveiled any earlier. This must have been improvised at the last minute to remedy the defects of the ’Device’ as it then stood. The duchess of Suffolk had not conceived for several years, and there was no chance of her bearing a son before the king’s death. Jane was newly wed, but even the promptest conception could not have produced a son in less than nine months, and there was little chance that Edward could last that long. None of the other ladies mentioned were even wed. So either the contingency plan had to be put in operation, and the duchess made regent for the unborn heir, or the ’Device’ had to be abandoned and the statutory order followed, or the wording had to be altered. The first option was a political impossibility which could not be seriously considered, and the second was unacceptable to the king. So the wording had to be altered. This was accomplished very simply by inserting the words ’and her’ between ’Lady Jane’ and ’heires masks’, thus making the 17-year-old Jane Dudley queen, with remainder to any son she might bear. Such a solution had no logic to commend it, since Jane’s mother, through whom she derived her claim, was still alive. There may well have been serious doubts about the suitability of the duke of Suffolk for the crown matrimonial but that scarcely strengthens the case. We do not know who actually made the alteration. It may well have been Northumberland, but Edward must have accepted it despite his dislike of a female succession, because he liked and trusted Jane. However, in the circumstances it is hardly surprising that when the news of this development was released it served to confirm the existence of Scheyfve’s ’mighty plot’, and to exacerbate the fear and suspicion with which the duke was already regarded. Should Edward convert his ’Device’ into a will it would inevitably be subjected to legal challenge. Could the king, as a minor, make a lawful will at all? Could any king demise the crown by will mere moto suo, without the consent of parliament? Recent precedent suggested that the answer to both these questions should be in the negative. Nevertheless on 12 June Edward sent for his chief justices and other law officers, and instructed them to draw up a formal will on the basis of his ’Device’.³⁴

Northumberland’s initial reaction to the king’s resolution can only be guessed. He had taken some care to repair his relations with the Princess Mary, as though he expected the statutory succession to be followed, if it should come to that. She had carried out a big exchange of lands with the king in April, and although that was not necessarily a sign of favour, she also received a substantial grant of lands in Hertfordshire on 6 June, barely a week before Edward dropped his bombshell.³⁵ There is no substantial evidence to suggest that the duke had been plotting for months to deprive her of the succession. It was rather that the king’s obsessive determination presented him with a gambler’s opportunity. In the short term there was nothing to be gained from opposing Edward’s will. If he should recover, he would not quickly forget those who had moved to thwart him, and. if he should die, that would be the moment to decide what to do. So Northumberland would have no truck with those who tried to claim that altering the succession was high treason. It could not be treason to obey the king’s express command, so when Sir Edward Montague and his colleagues tried to claim that they could not draw up a will to the king’s specifications because of the Henrician succession act, the duke flew into a rage and threatened them with physical violence.³⁶ His loss of temper was probably due to the fact that he knew exactly how strong an argument they were deploying, but could not afford to acknowledge the fact. On. 15 June Edward sent for the judges again, and commanded them on their allegiance to do his bidding, whereupon the lords of the council correctly advised them that it would be manifest treason to refuse.³⁷ However divided the council may have become later, at this stage they were unanimous in accepting the king’s action, and Montague, comforting himself with the thought that ’the making of the book without the execution of it was no treason’, proceeded to draft the letters patent. He solemnly warned the council that the king could not abrogate a statute by letters patent, but even so some of his colleagues refused to support his action.³⁸ On 21 June a specially convened gathering of notables, including the whole Privy Council, the officers of the household, the civic dignitaries of London, and twenty-two peers other than the council, signed the document and swore an oath to observe its provisions.³⁹ In spite of this, it never became a legally binding instrument, for it never passed the seals, and no official record of it now survives. It would seem that the officers of the chancery were also anxious to protect themselves against the possible consequences of an ill-considered action; or perhaps the law officers had a second line of defence. How much these signatures and oaths would actually be worth once Edward’s fervent and Inflexible will was removed also remained to be seen.

By June the succession crisis occupied the whole political horizon, and It Is not surprising that other business should have been relegated to the sidelines, but earlier in the year the work of government had proceeded much as before. Although it was normally in England’s interest to promote hostilities between the emperor and the French, by the end of 1552 Northumberland’s balancing act made peace a preferable option. Too close a friendship with the emperor might provoke the French to attack Calais—always a lurking fear, in spite of the recent treaty. On the other hand ’amity’ with Henry II could easily mean difficulties in Antwerp, and, with both sides quick to take offence, it would be better if there was no war to provide a pretext for hostile actions. Consequently, towards the end of December the council decided to send out special envoys to each of the belligerents, indicating Edward’s willingness to arbitrate their quarrel.⁴⁰ The two men chosen for these potentially sensitive missions were Northumberland’s brother, Sir Andrew, and his son-in-law Sir Henry Sidney. Neither had any diplomatic experience, and Sidney was very young, so their selection has been taken as further evidence of how completely English policy was driven by Dudley priorities at this time. However, it appears from a letter written to Cecil by the duke on 28 December that he had not been personally responsible for their selection.⁴¹ This would suggest that they were chosen, not for their skill but for their status as known intimates of both the king and the Lord President. Henry VIII, and other kings before him, had used their personal servants, and Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, in the same way. If their initial soundings were successful, they could be followed up by professional diplomats; if not, they could be written off without any serious loss of face. Dudley, chosen to visit the emperor, called first on Scheyfve in London, considerably to the ambassador’s surprise. On 8 January he was received by Mary of Hungary in Brussels, and then set out, in defiance of all the best advice, to intercept Charles as he Journeyed towards Flanders. Sir Richard Morison, the accredited ambassador, who was travelling with the emperor, was unaware of Dudley’s mission until he met him at Treves. Whether the council had neglected to write to him., or had deliberately kept him in the dark in case he should hinder the mission, is not clear. Once they had met, Morison did his best to further Dudley’s efforts, but the latter’s impatience was a serious handicap. Eventually he saw the emperor twice, and Charles told him that, while he was well disposed to peace, he was not at all disposed to trust French assurances, and would make no move until he knew Henry’s mind more fully.⁴² On 4 February Dudley was recalled, and Morison instructed to keep the matter fresh in the emperor’s mind. Sidney certainly visited the French court at about the same time, but it is not certain that he ever saw the king, or delivered his message in person. On 15 February Sir William Pickering, the resident ambassador, reported that he had delivered a letter from Edward, and Henry’s response had been that he would willingly negotiate, provided that the emperor declared his position first.⁴³ What part Sidney played is not clear, except that Pickering solicited his good offices in an attempt to persuade the council to recall him.⁴⁴

Scheyfve was pleased with these inconclusive exchanges, because he believed that Northumberland’s desire to cajole the emperor into negotiations was responsible for the marked improvement in Mary’s position which he noted at the same time. He also believed that Northumberland was becoming increasingly autocratic and insecure, although the duke’s surviving correspondence from. January and February does not suggest either of those things. The fact that he was hated by the religious conservatives no doubt seemed important to the ambassador, who sympathized strongly with their position, but was actually of little significance as long as the king lived. Northumberland went out of his way to persuade Scheyfve of his sympathy with the emperor’s position, and of his distance from the French, but in the circumstances such statements are no reliable guide to his true thinking.⁴⁵ His real priority in early March seems to have been to bring the European war to an end, and perhaps even to recreate the situation of 1518, with himself in the role of Wolsey, Throughout that month the resident ambassadors sought to keep the English initiative alive. Both sides were still bidding too high for serious negotiations to begin, but no one questioned Edward’s earnestness in a good cause, and the papacy also entered the arena as a rival mediator, which caused the English efforts to be redoubled. On 1 April the council approved the instructions to two sets of commissioners, sent to the hostile courts to endeavour to break through the barriers of mutual suspicion and distrust.⁴⁶ Nicholas Wotton and Sir Thomas Chaloner were added to Pickering’s existing presence in France, Chaloner also being designated as the ambassador’s successor. At the same time Thomas Thirlby and Sir Philip Hoby were sent to join Morison in Brussels, with a similar intention that Hoby should replace the latter at the end of the negotiations.⁴⁷ The whole exercise quickly proved to be futile. Henry was not interested in ending a war which was going rather well for him. Although his resources were badly stretched, his ally Maurice of Saxony was scoring striking successes against the imperial armies, and even if he had wanted to he might not have been able to call him. off. In Brussels the problem was different. The emperor’s health was so poor that all negotiations were referred to the regent, indeed there were persistent rumours of Charles’s death. Mary had no desire to negotiate at a disadvantage believing, rightly, that the military situation would improve in time. At the same time the English council had the ingenious idea of making both sides more amenable by doing a deal with the German protestants, and called up the experienced Christopher Mont for consultations.⁴⁸ This idea was not as wild as it might appear. If the English commissioners could broker an agreement between the emperor and his German enemies, it would not only make Charles more amenable to a general peace, it would also cut the ground from under the French war effort. However, all such hopes, reasonable or unreasonable, were soon to be dashed. On 4 June Wotton and Chaloner reported that Henry would make no concessions, and would respond only to a direct approach from the emperor.⁴⁹ Four days later Thirlby and Hoby had been dismissed by the regent with the verdict that there was no possible grounds for mediation. The best that could be said for six months of diplomatic effort was that it had done no harm, and had not actually damaged English relations with either side. Indeed relations with the regent had probably improved, in spite of her negative final conclusion. A few days later the envoys were able to take their leave of Charles, who was bedridden and weak, but in full possession of his faculties. Consequently the crisis of Edward’s health arrived at a moment when English foreign policy was not going anywhere in particular, but at which all options were open. Neither war nor the threat of war was forcing the council’s hand in June 1553.

If Northumberland’s foreign policy was unproductive during the first half of 1553, the same cannot be said of other activities. In spite of the efforts of Thomas Gresham, the cloth trade to Antwerp remained slack after the slump of 1551. In addition to the economic circumstances, the emperor’s decision in that year to let the Inquisition loose on the city did not help, and even the ultra cautious Merchant Adventurers were beginning to think that the time had come to broaden their horizons, especially as their victory over the Hanse had gone some way towards opening the Baltic. Individual English merchants had been probing far afield as early as 1470, when the first Bristol ship was recorded in the Azores, but the collective enterprise which supported the Cabots’ voyages in the 1490s had not been sustained. William Hawkins had taken a ship as far as Brazil in the 1530s, but nothing much had come of his adventure, which had not shown an immediate profit. This was partly because, in spite of urging, Henry VIII had shown no interest in commercial expansion. The royal navy had made enormous strides under his eager patronage, but his concern had been almost entirely military.⁵⁰ As long as there were French galleys to be fought in the Channel, he was not prepared to invest money in developing the maritime base. Nor were the Londoners, who could derive a secure and increasing profit from the Low Countries trade, prepared to take unnecessary risks, or to press the king for a change of priorities. These attitudes had begun to change in the wake of the ’Reneger incident’ in 1545, when a Southampton merchant, exasperated by the religiously motivated harassment from, which he was suffering in Spain, took the law into his own hands and seized an inward bound West Indiaman with a rich cargo.⁵¹ The imperial ambassador complained bitterly, and the Privy Council slapped Reneger gently on the wrist, giving him the command of a royal ship. The Lord Admiral at the time had been John Dudley, then Viscount Lisle. If Anglo-Spanish relations had become strained after the establishment of the royal supremacy, they became glacial with the advance of England into fully fledged protestantism, and the willingness of individual English merchants to defy the Spanish authorities was consequently enhanced. Some sort of an organized voyage was made to Morocco in 1551, but very little is known about it. In 1552 three ships out of London visited the Barbary coast, trading cloth and ironmongery for sugar and saltpetre. The Barbary corsairs were the implacable enemies of Spain, and many of the Jewish middlemen used by the English traders came of families expelled from Spain some sixty years before. Early 1553 saw a further escalation of this process when another expedition traded as far south as the Guinea coast, in what is now known as Sierra Leone. This voyage was commanded by Sir Thomas Wyndham, the Master of Naval Ordnance, and accompanied by two royal warships which had been leased to Wyndham for the occasion.⁵² Although the voyage was not a success, and Wyndham died in the course of it, it signalled an important move in the direction of royal involvement. The capital had been privately raised, and we do not know the identity of the investors, but in view of Wyndham’s position, it is quite likely that courtiers and councillors were among them. Angry Spanish protests were ignored, and, since the council was endeavouring to improve relations with the emperor at the time, this indicates that the adventurers must have had protection at the highest level.

The most significant venture, however, and the one in which the ailing king was particularly interested, was the search for a new route to China. China had existed on the fringes of European consciousness for a long time, and by the middle of the sixteenth century the Portuguese had established direct contact. However, they had hardly begun to tap what was correctly identified as a vast market, and one which lay very largely within temperate latitudes. This made it an extremely attractive outlet for woollen cloth, which tended not to sell well in the tropics. In order to exploit this market, and avoid tangling with the Portuguese, who had a powerful commercial and political presence in the far east, it was very desirable to find a new, and if possible shorter, route. Sebastian Cabot almost certainly had his own ideas about that, and was listened to with respect in the City. He played a leading part in the consortium which was established to fund and direct such an exploration, but was persuaded that his advancing years made it impracticable for him to take part in person. The other inspirer, with similar ideas although less practical experience, was the English cosmographer John Dee. Dee had been introduced to the Dudley family via John Cheke and William Cecil, and became a close friend both of the young earl of Warwick and of Sir Henry Sidney.⁵³ Towards the end of 1552 it was decided to invite subscriptions towards a commercial enterprise designed to open up a new route to China around the north of the Eurasian land mass—what would later be known as the north-east passage. Some 240 shares were sold, at £25 each, mostly to London merchants, but also to a significant number of aristocrats and councillors, including Winchester, Bedford, Arundel, Pembroke, and Cecil.⁵⁴ It is not known that Northumberland or any of his family were shareholders, and the extent of Ms direct commitment is in doubt, but his relations with both Dee and Cecil were sufficiently close to be evidence of at least a general support. The three ships commissioned for the voyage were the Edward Bonaventure of 160 tons, the Bona Esperanza of 120 tons, and the Bona Confidentia of 90 tons, all belonging to members of the Merchant Adventurers company. On 10 May were issued ’Three several letters of commendation or safe conduct and passports for the three ships going to the new found lands, written…to all kings, princes and other states…’, in Latin, Hebrew, and Chaldean.⁵⁵ This assumption that the rulers of the far north (to say nothing of the emperor of China) would be familiar with one of the languages of the ancient near east, is a forceful reminder of what an extraordinary feat of optimism and confidence the whole enterprise represented. Other letters were also carried, of a more fulsome and less formal nature, in which Edward addressed all his fellow sovereigns in the name of God and of trade. The expedition was commanded by Sir Hugh Willoughby, under licence from the Lord Admiral, with the experienced Richard Chancellor as Pilot Major. The ships were victualled for eighteen months and carried a total complement of 110 men. The ordinances and regulations for the fleet were drawn up in the name of Sebastian Cabot, but the use of English, and the insistence on the Prayer Book for onboard worship, suggests that he can only have been partly responsible. In spite of the brave start which the king witnessed, the fleet did not clear the Thames estuary until 24 May, and thereafter made such slow progress that Edward was already dead before they reached the Lofoten Islands, about 14 July.⁵⁶

The eventual fate of Willoughby and Chancellor, and the nature of their achievement, are not part of this story, but the first half of 1553 marks a turning-point in the maritime history of England, the importance of which can hardly be overemphasized. For the first time royal authority, in the form of the council, was substantially involved in the promotion of longdistance trade. This was quite different from the small-scale direct patronage which Henry VII had given John Cabot, and represented a shift in government policy which the long reign of Elizabeth was to render permanent. By investing directly in the voyages of John Hawkins Elizabeth was to carry the process a stage further. Edward did not, as far as we can tell, contribute ships to any enterprise as a form of investment, although the terms upon which the Primrose and the Moon were made available to Sir Thomas Wyndham do not suggest a straightforward lease. The council book records:

A letter to the Admiraltie to deliver to George Bowes, mayor of London, William Garnet, one of the Sheriffs, John York and Thomas Windham or their assigns the ship called the Primrose and the pinnace called the Moon with all the tackle and apparel in them belonging, taking sufficient bond of them for the delivery to his Majesties use by midsummer 1554’ one other ship and pinnace of like goodness and burden and as well apparrelled and trimmed…⁵⁷

Nothing is said about any share of the profit, and in the event there was none, but this seems to represent a half-way house between the traditional commercial lease and the new system developed in the 1560s. There is no direct evidence of who was responsible for this shift in policy, and it may have resulted from force of circumstances rather than personal initiative. But it certainly occurred between 1550 and 1553 when, by general consent, John Dudley was the leader of the council and the principal manager of affairs. If we also take into account the fact that the navy was well and carefully maintained during these years, that Clinton, the Lord Admiral, was a close ally of Dudley’s, and that several others known to have been in his confidence—Wyndham, York, Dee, and Cecil—played leading parts, the circumstantial evidence certainly points to him. Whether this sprang from an enlightened perception of England’s long-term needs, or from the urgent necessity to raise more revenue from the commercial wealth of London, must remain an open question, but in truth there was no great distance between the two factors. In Henry VIII’s reign England had been a formidable naval power, but a negligible force in the great navigational and commercial expansion which was then going on. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign English navigators, cartographers, and explorers were second to none. Northumberland presided over the beginnings of a maritime revolution about which, as far as I am aware, he never made any recorded comment.

As we have seen, the idea that the duke’s financial policy was an unmitigated disaster has long since been revised. Bonds to Anthony Fugger, Caspar Schetz, and other bankers were discharged at regular intervals, the cancelled obligations being returned to the council by Gresham, and thence passed on either to the Lord Treasurer or to the City, as appropriate.⁵⁸ On 5 May 1553 the officers of both the Staplers and the Merchant Adventurers came before the council and agreed to discharge Crown debts in Antwerp to the considerable sum of £36,371, due on five different obligations: ’in consideracion whereof the Lordes have promised that the seyd Merchauntes, aswell Staplers as Adventurers, shalbe answered here of the sayd sumes that they shall disburse beyonde the sees after such rate as here after shalbe agreed uppon.’⁵⁹ Inevitably a lot of this debt was recycled but the overall burden was gradually reduced. By the time of the king’s death it stood at no more than £110,000, and was costing about £1,200 a month to service. Thanks to Gresham’s successful manipulations the interest rate averaged no more than 13 per cent, which represented a better ’credit rating’ than either the Valois or the Habsburg could achieve. Throughout the spring the king’s agent continued to struggle with the exchange rate. In February he suffered a setback when it fell from 19s. 9d. to 19s., but by the end of April he was able to report that it had risen to 20s., and that he was able to buy bullion.⁶⁰ He urged the council to persuade or force the merchants with whom they were negotiating for loan repayments to accept an exchange rate of 23s. 4d., in which case ’the exchange will doubtless rise, and never likely fall again…‣.⁶¹ In this manœuvre it would appear that he was largely successful. No new coin seems to have been issued during this period to assist his efforts, and, although some base coin was recycled, this did not result in any significant improvement.⁶² Parliament, as we have seen, voted a standard subsidy plus a tenth and fifteenth, the first instalment of which was due in June. In spite of the grumbling this was paid with reasonable promptness, but none of it reached the Exchequer in time to make any difference to Northumberland. The government’s principal source of supplementary income continued to be the sale of lands, which brought in about £145,000 between Michaelmas 1552 and the end of the reign.⁶³ Financial reform occupied an important place on the parliamentary agenda in March. Not only was the king empowered to merge or abolish the independent revenue courts by letters patent, procedures for the collection of both lay and clerical taxation were tightened up, and another act augmented the powers of the Crown to control the export of bullion, alsogiving the council greater discretion to act.⁶⁴ ’Although the economies recommended by the 1552 commission were largely ignored, and the house hold expenditure in the last full year of the reign amounted to nearly £56,000, the overall financial situation was improving rather than deteriorating.

The marquis of Winchester may well have wanted to reduce the revenue courts in order to simplify administration and revitalize the Exchequer. However, he may also have wished to revive the type of Chamber finance which had flourished under Henry VII and Wolsey, and which had been effectively ended by Cromwell’s development of the independent courts. This would have been entirely consistent with Northumberland’s desire to strengthen the personal authority of a monarch with whom he expected to be on exceptionally good terms. A means of doing this lay ready to hand in what was usually known as the King’s Coffers. This was not a spending department in the ordinary sense, but rather a glorified expansion of the Privy Purse.⁶⁵ Between 1542 and 1547 Sir Anthony Denny, as Chief Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and Keeper of the Palace of Westminster, had held four separate accounts, and had been responsible for the custody of a great deal of money. When his account was taken in February 1548 he was held responsible for £246,404, the great bulk of which (over £200,000) had been spent on the king’s building projects, on furnishings, jewellery, plate, and private rewards.⁶⁶ One of these accounts was the Privy Purse proper—’Thordinary paymentes made by vertue of thoffice of the Grome of the Stole’. This amounted to a little more than £3,000, the remainder being held and dispensed by virtue of his custody of the Palace, although it was no accident that so sensitive a position was in the hands of one of the king’s most intimate servants. On Henry VIII’s death the coffers, allegedly then containing some £11,500, were removed from Westminster to the Tower of London on the orders of the earl of Hertford, who was later accused of having purloined it.⁶⁷ There is no evidence to substantiate such a charge, but Denny’s functions at Westminster were greatly reduced during the remaining months of his charge. The main expenditure for which he had been responsible seems to have been carried by the court of Augmentations. It certainly did not revert to the Treasury of the Chamber, from which Cromwell had removed it. That account continued to be almost entirely concerned with the wages of the Chamber staff. In August 1547 Sir Michael Stanhope became Chief Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, and, over the remaining months of his accounting period, Denny was issuing money to Stanhope for the Privy Purse expenses, but had lost the custody of the main coffers, which remained at the Tower.⁶⁸

Denny died in August 1549, and Stanhope was removed in the wake of the Protector’s fall. The Privy Purse then passed to the four Principal Gentlemen in commission, while their clerk, Peter Osborne, kept the account.⁶⁹ At first it seems that Osborne handled only the small-scale payments which had previously been made by Stanhope, while Sir John Williams as Master of the Jewel House took over responsibility for the coffers proper. The Privy Purse account from 10 January 1550 to 1 January 1552 shows expenditure of a little under £4,000.⁷⁰ However, in January 1552 a significant reorganization took place. Osborne took over from Williams £16,687.7s. 11d., including arrearages of £826. 11s. 10d., which was presumably the balance remaining in the coffers, and when he accounted himself for the period from January 1552 to May 1553, the total which he answered for was £39,948, exclusive of £600 which had been stolen, and for which he was allowed.⁷¹ Osborne’s ’file’ shows him to have been acting in very much the same way that Denny had acted in the last years of the previous reign. The king’s ’secret affairs’ included the wages of soldiers, payments for goldsmith’s work, part of the ordinary charges of the household, repayments in Antwerp, and several payments to the treasurer of the navy. On 15 May 1553, when he rendered his account, Osborne handed over a balance of £1,647 to Sir Andrew Dudley, who seems to have been handling the Privy Purse proper at least since the reorganization.⁷² Professor Hoak has traced the origin of this arrangement to a memorandum written by the earl of Warwick to Cecil in June 1551, urging the need for a special account which should be outside the control of the normal revenue courts.⁷³ The fact that Osborne was also appointed King’s Remembrancer of the Exchequer on 7 September 1552 no doubt facilitated understanding between the two financial systems, but was not designed to bring the coffers under Exchequer control.⁷⁴

Exactly why Mildmay and Berners were commissioned to take Osborne’s account on 15 May is not clear. There may have been no particular significance in the date, and the account may have been no more than a routine check. However, the fact that Osborne surrendered his cash balance suggests that he was not intended to continue in post. We do not know whether he was replaced, or whether the coffers were discontinued at that point. There is no further reference to them in the last two months of Edward’s reign, and Mary does not seem to have inherited such a system. Her own use of Sir Edmund Peckham in 1553/4 was analogous, but not the same, and the Privy Coffers, as such, were never resurrected. We are therefore left with some unanswered questions about Peter Osborne and his activities. The coffers were established to be a flexible revenue department under the direct control of the Privy Chamber, which was in turn closely monitored by the council, Dudley and his friends having the ascendancy in both. This could well have been a part of Northumberland’s strategy for retaining political control, but Osborne’s accounts do not suggest that the money was in any way misappropriated. It was probably intended that the coffers would be supplied with monies received from the collection of debts due to the Crown, upon which great emphasis was being placed in 1552, On 8 February the treasurers of all the revenue courts, including the Exchequer, were instructed to pay weekly to Osborne all ’sommes of monye…which…hath byn levyid of the dettes and Arrerages dew unto his majestic within his said courte(s)’.⁷⁵ However, it seems unlikely that almost £40,000 would have been recovered in this way in about fifteen months and the coffers were almost certainly replenished from other sources as well. It is possible that the discontinuance of the coffers was never intended, and that Osborne was simply moved aside in order to make way for an officer who would be appointed by the king personally, in which case the move could be seen as an attempt to increase Edward’s direct control, in the manner of his father and grandfather. His rapidly worsening illness and early death would obviously have prevented that from happening, and leaves the whole matter in the realm of conjecture. What is clear is that the king’s coffers constituted a major spending department, adapted by Dudley from earlier practices, and largely controlled by his agents. It stood outside the normal accounting procedures, and therefore needed a special commission to assess it. In spite of these circumstances Osborne clearly felt that he had nothing to hide, and he was almost certainly right. In spite of the criticisms heaped upon Northumberland’s financial administration by the Marian council, Osborne was never mentioned, and his subsequent career is best known for his membership of several Elizabethan parliaments.

The relative success of the financial administration over the last two years of the reign was obtained partly by ruthless economies in certain directions. Officials, like diplomats, constantly complained of lack of money, and too much attention should not be paid to cries of despair like that uttered by Sir Philip Hoby in August 1552: ’For God’s sake’, he wrote to Cecil, ’Help the miseries of the ordnance office for lack of money.’⁷⁶ Hoby’s lament was detailed and circumstantial, and no doubt reflected a genuine crisis, but it should not be taken to mean that the whole military establishment was in terminal decline. Very broadly the strategy seems to have been to maintain the navy and the garrison of Calais, but to run down or discontinue the garrisons of the elaborate coastal fortifications which Henry VIII had built between 1539 and 1544. This was perfectly justifiable on the grounds that a full-scale war was extremely unlikely after March 1550, and that Calais was the only piece of English territory which could not be defended by the fleet. In May 1552 some of the coastal forts in Devon and Cornwall were placed on a care and maintenance basis, and the blockhouses in Kent were surveyed, although it is not clear that any further reductions were made there.⁷⁷ After the surrender of Boulogne the garrison was not disbanded but redeployed within England, part on the Scottish borders, and part to those counties where disaffection was particularly feared, or which were felt to be vulnerable to attack. In July 1550 mobile bands of 100 or 200 men were sent to Suffolk, Essex, Sussex, Kent, Hampshire, and Dorset, perhaps because such bands were felt to be more useful than garrisons tied down to particular forts.⁷⁸ In June 1553, at the very end of the reign, a few more garrisons were stood down, and the ordnance recalled to the Tower. About half of the foreign mercenaries which had played such a key role in suppressing the disorders of 1549 were paid off in the summer of the following year. The remainder, about 800 in number, were gradually phased out over the next two years, except for a few bands who remained on the Scottish border, where the local levies were thought to be particularly unreliable.

In spite of the persistent anxiety about disaffection, which continued to absorb a disproportionate amount of council time, and the ale bench attacks upon Northumberland, reports of which came in almost daily, there were no serious disorders after the end of 1549. This was no doubt partly due to the debilitating affect of the sweating sickness, particularly in 1551, but it was quite reasonable of the council to conclude by the summer of 1552 that the expensive professional gendarmerie set up in December 1550 was no longer required. No doubt saving £20,000 a year was a major consideration, but money had been, if anything, even shorter when they had been established. What had changed was not the ability to pay such men, but the priority which they represented. The existing security provision had been substantially enhanced in December 1551, at the time of the duke of Somerset’s trial, but had never, in fact, been called upon. On the other hand, the system of licensed retaining continued to be expanded. On 3 May Sir Henry Neville and Sir William Fitzwilliam were each licensed for 20 men, Sir Henry Gate and Sir Nicholas Throgmorton for 25, and Sir Henry Sidney for 50.⁷⁹ The last licences were issued on the very eve of the crisis, 24 June 1553, to the Kentish quartet of Sir George Harper, Sir Henry Isley, Sir John Guildford, and Cuthbert Vaughn.⁸⁰ Northumberland accepted, in substance if not in form, the plan for a select militia which Sir Thomas Wyatt had presented to the council in the wake of the 1549 disturbances:

to streangthen the kings part with apower of the choise of his most able and trusty subjectes, which might be upon a very short warninge in a reddines, wel armed and ordered against al suddin attemptes either at home or abrode.⁸¹

However, Wyatt’s intention had been to defend the council against popular insurrection, not to win a civil war in which the aristocracy was divided: ’on the one side’, he wrote, ’is the king his aucthority all the nobilyty and gentlemen of any credit…’. That had been true in 1549, but what might happen in the different circumstances of 1553 was another matter. Even in the last days of Edward’s life, Northumberland was making no attempt to prepare the kind of private army upon which a fifteenth-century magnate of similar status would have relied. Apart from paying off the German and Italian mercenaries, the run-down of the extraordinary security precautions of 1550 and 1551 did not weaken his position as much as might be imagined. Licensed retaining was quite a good way of protecting civil authority against rebellion, but it was no protection at all against a disaffected noble faction, and we must conclude that right up to the king’s death Northumberland was concerned with social discipline in the ordinary sense rather than preparing to fight for a crown.

As we have already seen, the protestant establishment was in a certain disarray by the spring of 1553. The council was at odds with the most senior and responsible bishops over the codification of the canon law, and the long-threatened expropriation of Church plate and other ’surplus’ goods had at last been ordered in January.⁸² Inventories had already been prepared and commissions appointed, but the latter dated back to 1549 and needed replenishing. The commissioners were now instructed to complete their work by the end of May, but many complications had arisen to make that unrealistic. Goods inventoried in 1552 had since disappeared. Inventories had been lost, or were challenged as inaccurate. Illicit sales had taken place. There was no overt resistance, but it was uphill work, and even those protestant zealots who in theory applauded the action, found it distasteful in practice: ’they took the spoil of that which King Henry could not take for shortness of life’, as one of them later wrote.⁸³ At the same time the council’s intervention in ecclesiastical affairs was by no means always negative. In June 1552 a letter was sent to the Dean and Chapter of Exeter ’to continue the Divinitie lectureship in the cathedral as the king’s visitors have appointed it’. John Hooper, newly appointed to the combined sees of Gloucester and Worcester, was discharged of all first fruits and, contrary to the normal trend, given the lordship and manor of Alchurch in Worcestershire, worth a thousand marks a year.⁸⁴ In October 1552 Peter Martyr Ver-migli and his wife were granted free denizenship, and on 10 May Philip Melanchthon was offered the chair at Cambridge formerly held by Martin Bucer.⁸⁵ Cranmer had been trying to induce Melanchthon to come to England for several years, and it looks as though he was on the point of success. The German must have responded favourably, because on 6 June the treasurer of Augmentations was instructed ’to deliver to the Archbishop of Canterbury £100 to be sent overseas by him for the expenses of Philip Melanchthon coming to his majesties presence’.⁸⁶ This was too practical to have been mere wishful thinking, and it looks as though it was Edward’s death rather than the superior attractions of his homeland which prevented Luther’s greatest disciple from crossing the North Sea. How Cranmer had managed to persuade a council allegedly dominated by radical and hostile influences to import this great but relatively conservative reformer must remain an unanswered question. Did the king give the order himself? Was Northumberland trying to back off from his radical allies? Or was the archbishop not quite as powerless as we have been led to suppose? The latter seems unlikely, because pressure upon ecclesiastical property, to which he was strongly opposed, continued. In October 1552 the bishop of Hereford was virtually ordered to hand over his London house to Lord Clinton, and the following month the bishop of Carlisle was pressed into selling his lordship of Horncastle in Lincolnshire to the same man. In April 1553 the Dean and Chapter of Chester were licensed to grant to Sir Richard Cotton land to the large annual value of £603.18s. 10d., which must have constituted the bulk of its landed estate.⁸⁷ The forty-two articles were finally issued with a council letter on 9 June enforcing their use, but even that was not without controversy. The printed version bore upon its title-page the legend Articles agreed on by the Bishops and other learned and Godly men, clearly implying that it had been authorized by convocation, which in fact had never seen it. Cranmer, much as he wanted the articles promulgated, could not refrain from protest against this misrepresentation, but was merely told that it had been intended to issue them in the time of convocation.⁸⁸ Why it had not been done was not explained, and it seems that as the crisis over the king’s will approached, relations between Edward’s secular advisers and his chief spiritual counsel, who should have had a powerful voice on such an issue, had never been worse.

By the middle of June it was generally known that the king was dying, and widely rumoured that there was a plot to deprive Mary of the succession. This was inevitably attributed to Northumberland rather than Edward. The people who were most interested in this impending crisis were the French. Boisdauphin had been replaced as ambassador at the end of April by the acute Antoine de Noailles, but the king was too ill to receive his credentials until 17 May. Conversations with the council, particularly the duke of Northumberland, and the evidence of his own eyes, convinced Noailles that there were great possibilities for a French coup in Edward’s febrile determination,⁸⁹ Mary, as everyone understood, had been the emperor’s protégée for many years. The prospect of England’s friendship, or even neutrality, under her rule was remote. It was therefore very much in Henry’s interest to support the plotters, whoever they were. Noailles discreetly communicated this to Northumberland before the end of May, without committing his master to anything specific.⁹⁰ Since the beginning of the year, the duke had been anxious to improve his relations with the emperor, but Noailles’s arrival, and a special mission from Claude de l’Aubespine, the First Secretary of the French council, at the end of May seem to have convinced him that he should invest in a different bank. Inevitably Scheyfve picked up rumours of these developments, and reported them, to Brussels with some alarm. He had heard that 1’Aubespine had made ’offers of service, going so far as to say in so many words that the duke’s cause should also be the king’s’.⁹¹ In fact there seems to have been no clear understanding, because beyond the exclusion of Mary the two parties had no common aim. Northumberland intended to honour Edward’s wishes and in the process to strengthen both the protestant religion and his own power base. Henry had no interest in promoting either the Dudleys or the heretics, and had his own candidate in the background in the person of Mary Stuart. Nevertheless it is quite probable that Noailles gave Northumberland a broad diplomatic hint that French support would be available if he should persevere in. the course which was being set. How much this may have weighed with the duke is uncertain. He knew perfectly well that an unpopular regime propped up by the French would have no serious chance of survival. On. the other hand, he may have calculated that Mary would depend for success upon Imperial support, if she decided to press her claim at all, and that the French would be needed to neutralize that threat. Until the beginning of June neither the emperor nor the regent had been much disturbed by Scheyfve’s warnings; perhaps they underestimated the accuracy of his information as he had not always been correct in the past. However, l’Aubespine’s mission seems to have galvanized Charles into action. He began, to take seriously the imminence of Edward’s death, and of a disputed succession in which he would have a vital interest. On 23 June he dispatched a high-powered special mission, ostensibly to commiserate with Edward on his illness, but in reality to keep a close eye on events after his death. The leader of this embassy, the Sieur de Thoulouse, was high powered only in rank, but Jean de Montmorency, Sieur de Courrièxes, was a man of some ability, and Simon Renard was one of the best diplomatic brains of his generation.⁹² They arrived in London only hours before Edward’s death on 6 July—too late for their ostensible mission, but in the nick of time for the real one.

By the beginning of July the end was expected almost hourly, and Scheyfve’s dispatches read like sickroom bulletins. However he got his information it was swift, and substantially accurate. At the same time he reported that the Tower of London was being reinforced, that troops were gathering in proximity to London, and that the king’s ships in the Thames were being mobilized.⁹³ The king died in the evening, surrounded by his closest friends and servants, and the decisive moment had arrived. Edward’s wishes now counted for nothing, and Northumberland was free to act as his own interests and conscience dictated. It is important to realize that, up to this point no one had acted treasonably, in spite of the accusations which had flown backwards and forwards, and that when legal proceedings were eventually initiated against the losing side, no offence was alleged to have taken place before 6 July. If, as seems likely, the driving force behind the alteration of the succession was Edward himself, it then has to be explained why the council, and particularly Northumberland, did not simply abandon his rather ridiculous ’will’ and take refuge in safer courses. Some of them certainly felt that they were bound by an oath which could not be lightly disregarded. Archbishop Cranmer subsequently explained his conduct in that way, and, although his conscience may have been unusually sensitive on that score, he was certainly not alone. At the same time, virtually every contemporary observer who had any knowledge of the circumstances thought that the plot would succeed. Reporting an interview with Northumberland just before Edward’s death, Noailles wrote:

I sounded him out so far on the illness and exhaustion of [the king] and also on the proposal which your Majesty had M. de 1’Aubespine make to him that he finally disclosed much to me. He told me that they had provided so well against the Lady Mary’s ever attaining the succession, and that all the lords of the council were so well united, that there is no need for you, Sire, to enter into any doubt on this score…⁹⁴

The ambassador went on to conclude that he believed that the crown would pass first to a regent, until the fury of the people had been pacified. Although recently arrived, he knew how unpopular the coup would be, but did not consider that to be a decisive factor, and seems to have had some knowledge of the ‘Device’ in its penultimate form, before the succession was settled on Jane. Simon Renard, who was the brains of the imperial mission, rapidly came to a similar conclusion. Although his sympathies were entirely with Mary, and he believed that three-quarters of the population supported her, he still believed that Jane Grey would secure the crown. ‘The actual possession of power’, he wrote along with his colleagues, ‘is a matter of great importance, especially among barbarians like the English’,⁹⁵ so that, in any contest between justice and force, force would win every time. The emperor shared this view, and made a pessimistic prognosis of Mary’s chances. Noailles believed that the imperial ambassadors were briefed to assist the princess’s cause in every way possible, but he was wrong. In fact Charles’s instructions were that they should only assist Mary’s cause if she appeared to have a realistic chance of success. Otherwise they were to do business with the new government as though it was legitimate, his priority being to avoid giving the French any pretext to interfere.⁹⁶ Consequently in the first few days after Edward’s death both the major European powers were sitting on their hands assuming that Northumberland would win. It is therefore not surprising that he came to the same conclusion himself, and embarked upon the course which was to have such fatal consequences.

The king’s death was concealed for two days, which was a routine precaution, but in this case allowed time for the council to decide whether to persevere with Edward’s plan or not. Rumours had been flying around the country for weeks, and were constant during the first week of July. Mary, knowing how imminent her brother’s death was, and knowing perfectly well what the council might do, left her house at Hunsdon on 5 July and travelled by way of Sawston to Kenninghall in Norfolk. She may have been specifically warned, as tradition has it, but she could equally well have heeded the persistent rumours.⁹⁷ Meanwhile the general opinion was that the young king was being poisoned by the duke of Northumberland. Just about every contemporary chronicle and diary refers to the same charge, which is a good example of the worthlessness of public opinion. Not only is there no scrap of evidence which would suggest such a crime, but the duke was the man who had gambled most heavily on Edward’s life, and had the most to lose by his death.⁹⁸ Although they tell us nothing about the king’s fatal illness, such reports say a great deal about how the duke was regarded. Some of them may have been concocted afterwards, when failure had made him fair game, but his reputation seems to have been that of a ruthless man who would stick at nothing to gain his ends. On 7 July, before the king’s death was announced, Sir James Croft was replaced as Constable of the Tower by Lord Clinton, and a rather half-hearted attempt was made to ensnare Mary by pretending that her brother wanted to see her. However, it soon transpired that Northumberland was much less well prepared for a crisis than he was reputed to be. He did not have a large private army, and the mercenaries who might have responded to his call as their paymaster were far away on the Scottish borders. His own retinue, and those of his brother and sons, numbered only a few hundred men. The retinues of his allies and associates, upon whom the council had relied so heavily for domestic security, were only as reliable for his purposes as those allies and associates themselves. At the same time what might be described as the public forces of the realm—the gentlemen and yeomen of the household and the crews of the king’s ships—owed their allegiance to the Crown, and not to the house of Dudley. In a similar situation in 1483 the duke of Gloucester had overawed London with a large army of loyal northerners in his own livery. Northumberland had no such resource. The outcome of his gamble therefore depended entirely upon what Mary was able and willing to attempt.

Her past record did not promise much. Pressured by her father in 1536, she had surrendered. Confronted with similar pressure from the council in 1550 she had attempted to run away, and had then panicked and stayed where she was. When they found that she had left Hunsden for Norfolk, the council assumed that she was again attempting to flee to the continent, and alerted the fleet to intercept her. In fact nothing was further from her mind, and the rapid sequence of events which then followed demonstrate that she (or someone on her behalf) had laid careful and thorough plans. Following her endowment in accordance with the terms of her father’s will, Mary had become the greatest landholder in East Anglia, with an income approaching £4,000 a year.⁹⁹ Most of these manors came from the former Howard estates, and the princess inherited much of the Norfolk clientage along with them. Although she had had only a short time in which to establish herself in that specific context, she had been a popular figure for many years, and rapidly built up a loyal following among the East Anglian gentry, a number of whom entered her service. She therefore enjoyed the service of a small but extremely loyal affinity, and was much less dependent upon the support of other peers than was her chief rival. On 7 July she reached Euston Hall, near Thetford, and was there overtaken by a messenger described as ’her goldsmith’, who was probably a man named Robert Reynes. This messenger told her of her brother’s death the previous day, but she suppressed the news, fearing that it was a snare.¹⁰⁰ Her doubt was well founded, for, however the news was obtained, it was unofficial, and if she had moved to claim the crown while Edward was still alive, she would have been guilty of treason. It was not until the following day, when she had arrived at Ken-ninghall, that Mary received confirmation that her brother was no more, and that the time to act had come. Given the agonies of hesitation which she had endured in 1550, her speed and resolution on this occasion were remarkable. It was as though she had become a different person. The main reason for this is probably that her conscience spoke clearly. With her brother dead, she was the lawful queen, both by God’s decree and parliament’s, and she had a clear duty to claim her inheritance. To have done anything else would have been to betray her trust. Not only had she reached this decision before the event, it seems clear that letters and proclamations announcing her accession had already been drafted, and that her affinity had been warned to be ready to ride to her at an hour’s notice. Having disclosed the situation to her household, and received their loyal acclamation, the next day, 9 July, she sent out the prepared letters, probably dozens if not scores in number, calling upon her loyal subjects to proclaim her, and to dispatch forces to her immediate aid.¹⁰¹ At the same time, a carefully worded missive was sent to the council in London, commanding their allegiance. Within twenty-four hours her followers, headed by Sir Henry Bedingfield and Sir John Shelton, had begun to arrive at Kenninghall, accompanied by bands of men, not large but well armed and provisioned for action.

This was the last reaction which Northumberland had expected, and demonstrates the weakness of his intelligence system. He had been prepared for panic-stricken flight, or for a desperate appeal to the emperor, but this instant and extremely practical response took him completely by surprise. Having decided to stand by Edward’s disposition, the council made their own arrangements, promptly but without any sense of emergency. The Lord Mayor and aldermen of London were sworn to Queen Jane, and letters were sent out to sheriffs and justices of the peace, announcing her accession, and ordering them to repress any stirs or disorders—very much the sort of letter which would be sent out at the beginning of any new reign.¹⁰² The only distinctive feature was that Mary was declared to be in light towards the coast, either to pass overseas or to wait for military support from abroad. On 9 July Bishop Ridley preached to an unreceptive audience in the City, declaring that both Mary and Elizabeth were bastards incapable of succeeding, who by their marriages might have brought the realm into subjection to a foreign power.¹⁰³ This sermon was a mistake. By-offering explanations it appeared to apologize for a situation which in theory had come about by applying the natural and divine law of the succession, It also drew attention to the claims of the two princesses. In spite of their protestantism the Londoners needed no reminding of Mary’s claim, and Jane’s entry to the Tower on the following day was greeted with ominous silence and a few hardy protests. However, those with long memories might have recalled that Anne Boleyn had been similarly greeted twenty years before, without it making any significant difference to her position. The yeomen of the guard were sworn to the new queen, and the protesters set on the pillory.¹⁰⁴ Also on 10 July Mary’s letter reached the council out of Norfolk, and they knew that Jane was not going to succeed by default. However, the seriousness of Mary’s challenge remained to be tested, because the council had no reliable information about what was happening. If they had, they might have replied with something more substantial than words, because although the princess’s support was growing by the hour, the progress of her cause, even in her centre of greatest support, was not unchallenged. The first reaction of most of the major towns in East Anglia was to accept Jane. Norwich, Ipswich, King’s Lynn, and Great Yarmouth all started to go down that road, although it appears that in each case the ruling group was divided.¹⁰⁵ Moreover, Northumberland’s son, Lord Robert Dudley, from his base in Norfolk, was making his presence felt. If the council had moved immediately to support him, and sent a force north at once, Mary’s power might have been strangled in its cradle, for she had as yet no captain with military experience and prestige, and only a few thousand men.

For two or three days the issue hung in the balance, and it seems to have been the resolution of Mary’s still comparatively small following which tipped the balance. According to the enthusiastic Robert Wingfield, who wrote an eyewitness account a few months later, it was the spontaneous action of ordinary people which forced the issue.¹⁰⁶ The crews of six of the king’s ships, forced into the Orwell by bad weather, mutinied against their officers, and declared for Mary. The earl of Oxford was won over by his ’menial servants’ against the wishes of his gentlemen retainers. However, Wingfield also makes it clear that the initial momentum was sustained by local gentlemen who were not part of the princess’s immediate affinity, men such as Sir John Mordaunt, Sir William Drury, Sir Richard Southwell, and Thomas, Lord Wentworth.¹⁰⁷ It seems clear that Mary’s cause was promoted by committed and effective agents, such as Henry Jerningham, who made it their business to tackle community leaders and to spell out the merits of Mary’s case, not omitting to stir up that hostility to the Dudleys which was never very far below the surface. By 13 July it was already clear that a military operation would have to be mounted swiftly if the growing but still leaderless army at Kenninghall was to be defeated. This created other problems which reveal the inadequate state of Northumberland’s preparations. He had no network in East Anglia which could raise a comparable force—Lord Robert’s modest following being far too small. This meant that he would have to commit the councillors’ retainers and the household troops which were gathered near London. That in turn meant relying on the Tower garrison to cover the City, and bringing in additional forces from further afield, if they could be found. It would also take at least three days to get an army up into Norfolk, and in that time Mary’s following might have doubled in size. The longer she was unchallenged the more her confidence grew, and that confidence was infectious. Moreover there was a problem of leadership. Northumberland himself was the most accomplished, and the most feared soldier in the realm, particularly in Norfolk. On, the other hand he did not trust the resolution of some of his colleagues, and wished to remain in London to preserve the common front. Jane herself refused to contemplate sending her father, the duke of Suffolk, who was reliable, if not very competent. By 13 July Dudley had decided that he would have to go himself, and rely on Suffolk to hold the council together.¹⁰⁸ On the morning of 14 July he set out with about 1,500 men and a small artillery train. The citizens solemnly watched him depart but, as the duke himself is alleged to have remarked, ’no man saith Godspeed’. It was not a good omen.

Before he left, Northumberland harangued the council; not, as he hastened to point out, because he did not trust them, but in order to ’put them in remembrance’ of the cause they were defending ’what chance of variance soever might grow amongst you in my absence…’.¹⁰⁹ He had good cause to be concerned for a number of reasons. On 12 July Lord Cobham and Sir John Mason had waited upon the imperial ambassadors to inform them that as their credentials were to King Edward, they should consider their mission discharged and go home. The councillors also made it clear that the envoys were suspected of being behind Mary’s unexpected resolution, and warned of dire consequences should they endeavour to communicate with her.¹¹⁰ Renard responded with pained surprise. They had come, he assured his visitors, simply to express their master’s goodwill towards England. They had no instructions to support Mary, or to communicate with her in any way. At the same time they thought that the English council should know that the apparent French willingness to support Jane was insincere. The French wanted Mary excluded, not in order to help Northumberland and his friends, but in order to stir up civil strife. Once that had been achieved they would intrude their own candidate, Mary Stuart. His words struck a responsive note. Cobham and Mason, who were not part of Northumberland’s affinity, withdrew their request that the ambassadors should leave, and instead arranged a meeting for them with a larger group of councillors on the following day. Northumberland, who was still in London, was not informed.¹¹¹ Just a week after Edward’s death, the unity of the council was beginning to break down.

This happened partly because Dudley had made some serious tactical errors. The earl of Arundel had been severely harassed for his part in the supposed conspiracy of Somerset, and had been held in the Tower until December 1552. On 2 December he had made his submission before the council, and his fine had been set at 6,000 marks, covered by a recognizance for 10,000.¹¹² As late as 10 May 1553 the fine had been revised to £3,221, to be paid in yearly instalments of £303. 6s. 8d.¹¹³ Yet a month later he was recalled to the council and his fine remitted. He signed the instrument recognizing Jane’s right to the succession, but so rapid a rehabilitation cannot have represented a real change of heart. Northumberland no doubt believed that he had secured his acquiescence, if not his support, but it was a transparent gesture, and Arundel was one of the first to break ranks. The others who met the imperial ambassadors on 13 July were Shrewsbury, Pembroke, Bedford, and Petre. They did not give any immediate assurances, but merely requested that Renard and his colleagues should remain in London for the time being, while their message was communicated to the rest of the council. Lord Paget did not, apparently, attend this meeting, but his rehabilitation had followed a similar course to that of Arundel, and for the same reason. Originally fined £5,000 for his supposed offences, his penalty had been reduced to £4,000 in October 1552, and then in December he had received a full pardon for everything except his debt.¹¹⁴ By the end of February 1553 he had paid his debt in full, and his coat of arms had been restored to him.¹¹⁵ In March he had again been received at court, and at about the time of Edward’s death he had been summoned to rejoin the council. Like Arundel, he had made a gesture of accepting Jane, but he had no loyalty to Northumberland, and every incentive to betray him.

The duke did not know of these clandestine moves, but he did know that his gamble was hanging by a thread, and before he left London he dispatched his soldier kinsman Henry Dudley on a secret mission to France. Dudley’s brief was to follow up Noailles’s hints, and to secure from the king himself a positive undertaking of support.¹¹⁶ It was later alleged that Dudley was authorized to offer the surrender of Calais, and even Ireland, in return for such assistance, but there is no real evidence to support such a charge, and it is intrinsically improbable because his mission was not intended to achieve a formal diplomatic result. He reached the French court at Compiègne about 18 July, and was received by the king, who seems to have given the required undertaking, but informally and with no timetable attached.¹¹⁷ By the time that Dudley reached Calais on his way back, it was already too late. On 26 July he was arrested there by the Governor, Lord William Howard, on the orders of Queen Mary’s council. Northumberland’s position had collapsed with a speed which astonished everyone, including those most directly involved. On 14 July it was still expected that Lord Clinton and the earl of Oxford would reinforce the duke as he moved north, isolating Mary’s East Anglian stronghold from the rest of the country. Clinton did indeed arrive at Cambridge, although with less force than expected, but Oxford defected to the princess, and the loss of his power base in the home counties may well have been crucial. On 15 July Mary moved her swelling but still rather undisciplined army from Kenninghall to Framlingham. Her advisers were still expecting a serious conflict, and Kenninghall was not easily defensible. Men of substance were joining her every day with their followings—Lord Windsor, Sir Edward Hastings, Sir Edmund Peckham, Sir John Williams, and a number of others—but the great lords were not moving. Only the earls of Oxford and Bath represented the highest rank of the peerage in her camp, and Bath lacked the power commensurate with his rank. On the other hand the protestants, who were expected to rally to Jane’s standard, were doing no such thing. Reformed strongholds such as Coventry proclaimed Mary and sent men to her assistance, while Northumberland’s favourite bishop, John Hooper of Worcester and Gloucester, did the same.¹¹⁸ Had the council remained substantially united in support of Jane, there would almost certainly have been serious fighting, and no predictable outcome. In those circumstances the majority of the non-conciliar peers would probably have supported their colleagues, and given Northumberland sufficient critical mass to make his superior military talent effective. But the best general can do nothing without soldiers, and the defection of most of the council between 16 and 19 July was crucial. On 16 July, in spite of his success in sowing the seeds of doubt, Renard remained convinced that Jane’s party would stay together, and he ignored an appeal from Mary for imperial assistance. In so doing he promoted her cause better than he knew, for had it become known that the princess was proposing to invite foreign intervention her popularity might have suffered a severe setback. On 18 July, with rumours lying that Mary’s force had now reached 30,000, a number of councillors met at the earl of Pembroke’s residence at Baynard’s castle to consider their position. The lead was taken by Pembroke himself and the earl of Arundel.¹¹⁹ The latter apparently denounced Northumberland as a bloodthirsty tyrant, and declared that Mary had the best title to the crown. Those present endorsed his views, and the council effectively divided at that point. On the following day, 19 July, the defectors proclaimed Mary in London, amid universal rejoicings, and Suffolk, who still held the Tower along with Northampton, Cranmer, and a few others, was effectively defeated. As late as 17 July fresh supplies of arms had been, sent to the Tower, but there was to be no fighting. Suffolk surrendered, and himself informed his daughter that she was no longer queen.

Meanwhile Northumberland had reached Cambridge, where Clinton joined him, but reports of Mary’s strength, followed by news of what was happening in London, undermined his position: ’alle was agayns ym-selff, for ys men forsok hym’, as Henry Machyn wrote.¹²⁰ In fact he was not totally deserted, for a number of the household troops, perhaps as many as half, remained loyal to him, or possibly to the memory of their late master, but there were not enough of them to fight a campaign.¹²¹ Flight does not seem to have been an option which occurred to him. Faced with the coup in London, he proclaimed Queen Mary in his turn, and awaited events. The sentiments of London are well authenticated. One eyewitness reported:

I saw myself money thrown out at windows for joy. The bonfires were without number, and what with shouting and crying of the people, and ringing of bells, there could no man hear what another said…¹²²

However, in relation to Mary, Northumberland got what might be described as the ’loser’s press’, just as Mary herself was to do in relation to Elizabeth. Within a few weeks everyone was remembering how much they had hated and mistrusted the ambitions of the fallen duke, but the absence of actual fighting tends to conceal what a close run thing it was. Mary certainly had more popular support all over the country, but probably no more than her mother had had in 1533, We do not know what would have happened if Catherine had attempted to lead an insurrection against her husband, but Henry feared the possibility. Nor do we know what would have followed if Mary had led the Pilgrimage of Grace with the resolution which she showed in 1553. Such speculations, however, should warn us not to explain Mary’s triumph over Jane simply in terms of overwhelming spontaneous support. Northumberland was no Henry VIII, but more to the point he was completely unprepared for the crisis which actually overtook him. He was already losing his grip upon the situation before the council defected, and that was why they did it. Neither Noailles nor Renard played any significant part. The latter encouraged a split which would probably have happened anyway, but as late as 19 July he was still convinced that Northumberland would win, and flabbergasted when he was told later the same day that the council had proclaimed Mary in London.¹²³ At the same time Noailles wrote, ’I have witnessed the most sudden change believable in men, and I believe that God alone has worked it.’¹²⁴

The fact is that the plan to exclude Mary and Elizabeth in favour of Jane was formulated by Edward only a short time before his death, and with a feverish disregard for advice, constitutional and otherwise. Northumberland’s decision to implement it once Edward was dead was a gamble based upon a complete misjudgement of Mary. He feared imperial intervention, and took steps to frustrate it, but he did not expect resolute action from the princess herself. He had troops, but not enough for serious fighting. Once they had failed to deter Mary’s mobilization, they had failed of their whole purpose. The aristocracy was totally divided, except upon one crucial point; a civil war was the worst of all possible evils, and would open the floodgates to popular insurrection in the manner which had so nearly happened four years before. Better a usurpation than that; but better still a Tudor princess who was prepared to show the traditional spirit of her lineage. Northumberland lost the war of nerves, and his own affinity was too small to enable him to fight his way out of a corner. He had relied upon controlling the machinery of state, and had fallen into Somerset’s error of forgetting that he was not the king. Unfortunately we do not know how the battle within the council was resolved. The defectors had almost certainly made up their minds to act by the evening of 18 July, and yet as late as the morning of 19 July they signed, along with Suffolk, Crammer, Goodrich, and others, a letter to Lord Rich in Essex, informing him of the treachery of the earl of Oxford, and requiring his continued loyalty to Jane.¹²⁵ Before the end of the same day the same men signed a letter to Northumberland, instructing him to disband his forces and await the pleasure of Queen Mary,¹²⁶ The following morning, 20 July, Lord Paget and the earl of Arundel were dispatched to Framlingham bearing a letter of extraordinary abasement, even by the standards of the mid-sixteenth century.

we your most humble, faithful and obedient subjects, having always (God we take to witness) remained your highness’s true and humble subjects in our hearts ever since the death of our late sovereign lord and master your highness’ brother, whom God pardon, and seeing hitherto no possibility to utter our determination therein without great destruction and bloodshed both to ourselves and others till this time, have this day proclaimed in your city of London your majesty to be our true natural sovereign liege lady and queen…¹²⁷

The writers then went on to beseech pardon by the (relatively) unspotted hands of their messengers. It is difficult not to dismiss this as sheer hypocrisy, at least on the part of some of the signatories, but a genuine dilemma can be read between the lines. Had Mary not moved resolutely, her cause would not have been worth fighting for, and until the situation actually arose, no one had known what would happen. By the time that Paget and Arundel reached Framlingham, the only real issue was how the new queen would deal with her erstwhile opponents. Everyone ran for cover, and those who had begun to move in the wrong direction hastened to cover their tracks. But the problems were not all on one side. Those who had joined Mary at Kenninghall and Framlingham had perforce provided her initial council, but they were not a very promising collection in terms of political experience.¹²⁸ She had little option but to pretend to believe the professions of the councillors if she wanted to avail herself of their services, and most of them were received, even if they were not at once readmitted to office.

For Dudley and his affinity, however, there could be no instant rehabilitation. After a bloodless victory, Mary was inclined to clemency, but she could not afford to be too easy. Northumberland surrendered to the earl of Arundel on 24 July at Cambridge, and it is reasonable to suppose that those who accompanied him to the Tower on 25 July were arrested with him; Sir Thomas Palmer, Sir Henry Gates, Sir John Gates, Lord Hastings, the earl of Huntingdon, and most of his family, Andrew, Ambrose, Henry, and John.¹²⁹ On 26 July they were joined by the marquis of Northampton, Lord Robert Dudley, Sir Edward Montague, Sir Roger Cholmley, and Sir Richard Corbet.¹³⁰ On the following day the duke of Suffolk, Sir John Cheke, Sir John, York, and Richard Cox were added to the tally. Jane and Guildford may never have left the Tower, arid if they did they did not get far, because, according to one report, they were brought in with the duchess of Northumberland as early as 23 July,¹³¹ The earl of Rutland and Lord Russell, the earl of Bedford’s son, were sent to the Fleet, and finally, on 6 August, the other Henry Dudley, Northumberland’s messenger to France, arrived under arrest from Calais.¹³² There were other arrests, including some of the gentlemen pensioners who had remained with Northumberland, and Nicholas Ridley, the bishop of London, whose sermon had singled him, out for retribution, but, rather surprisingly, not Lord Clinton, nor Cranmer, nor Sir William Cecil. Considering the nature of what had happened it was a very modest tally, and consisted mostly of Northumberland’s affinity. Only Suffolk, Northampton, Rutland, and Huntingdon could really be classed as allies rather than followers. This was to some extent dictated by Mary’s own needs, as we have seen, but it also reflects her particular animosity against the Dudleys.¹³³ It was both convenient and congenial to her to place the weight of blame on the duke, and also fitted comfortably with popular prejudice. Not only was Northumberland held entirely responsible for the plan to place Jane on the throne, Mary also seems to have chosen to blame him for her brother’s regrettable religious policies. In short he became the scapegoat for what the new queen regarded as the disgraceful aberrations of the previous four years.

All the prisoners were questioned by the new council in the early days of August, and the duke of Norfolk, newly released from the Tower himself, was appointed High Steward for the trial of the noble defendants, which was held on 18 August, Warwick and Northampton offered no defence, but Northumberland argued two points, firstly that all his actions had been approved under the broad seal of England, and secondly that many of his judges were as guilty as himself, and no fit persons to be members of the court.¹³⁴ The first point had no substance in law, because the seal of a usurper has no validity, and the second, which was a political point, was a waste of breath in the circumstances. He comported himself with dignity, and, being condemned, requested the privilege of a nobleman’s death, which was granted. He also asked to speak with four of the council concerning the secrets of state which were his particular knowledge, and to ’confess to a learned divine’. This was to be a more significant matter than anyone at the time realized, because the divine with whom he spoke was his old enemy Stephen Gardiner.¹³⁵ The former bishop of Winchester, newly released from imprisonment, was about to be restored to his see and already named as Lord Chancellor. Exactly what transpired between them we do not know. Gardiner may have offered to use his influence in return for a public recantation, or the offer may have come from the duke. Whichever way it was, Northumberland let it be known that he was prepared to renounce the protestant faith which he had proclaimed strongly, and with every sign of sincerity, for at least five years. His execution, already ordered for the morning of 21 August, was stayed after the crowd had already assembled and the executioner was in place.¹³⁶ Instead he was paraded to mass in the chapel of the Tower, in front of a distinguished audience of dignitaries and citizens of London. At the end of the service he addressed the assembled congregation, saying:

Truly, I profess here before you all that I have received the sacrament according to the true Catholic faith; and the plagues that is upon the realm and upon us now is that we have erred from the faith these sixteen years. And this I profess unto you all from the bottom of my heart…¹³⁷

The twentieth century has witnessed so many show trials, and protestations of a similar nature, that we have no right to be surprised or incredulous at such a performance. Perhaps Northumberland expected to buy his life with such a submission, or perhaps he genuinely believed that the death of the young king and the failure of his own plans were a divine judgement upon a heretical people. In spite of his status he was a simple man in such matters, not intellectual, or even particularly thoughtful. Nor did his faith have any strong theological roots. He seems to have drifted into reform, and from reform into protestantism, on the tide of political opportunism: saying the right things, but perhaps hardly knowing himself what he believed. Faced with the imminence of eternity, the certainties of the new faith may well have broken in his hand, and driven him back to the unchallenged Church with which he had grown up. Equally his professed conversion may have been no more genuine than his earlier professions of piety. We cannot get beyond his words, which were clear enough, and gave great gratification to the queen, and to Renard, who declared that they had edified the people more than a month of sermons. The protestants were equally dismayed. ’Woe worth him!’, his daughter-in-law is alleged to have said on hearing the news, ’who would have thought he would have done so?’¹³⁸ Four of his colleagues appeared with him in the chapel, and made similar statements, Northampton, Palmer, Henry Gates, and his brother Andrew. None of his sons offered, or could be persuaded, to make a similar gesture. But in spite of the stir which it made at the time, his apostasy changed little. As it transpired, the protestants were well rid of a man. who had acquired such an evil reputation, and could concentrate instead upon the godly virtues of the late king. Nor did it serve to secure his own pardon. Before the end of the same day the Lieutenant of the Tower warned him to prepare for death the following morning, and in a sudden agony of mind he sat down and wrote to the earl of Arundel—of all people—a letter reminiscent of one of the speeches which Shakespeare was later to put in the mouth of Claudio in Measure for Measure:

Honourable lord, and in this my distress my especial refuge; most woful was the news 1 received this evening by Mr. Lieutenant, that I must prepare myself against tomorrow to receive my deadly stroke. Alas my good lord, is my crime so heynous as no redemption but my blood can wash away the spots therof? An old proverb there is and that most true that a living dog is better than a dead lion. O that it would please her good grace to give me life, yea, the life of a dog, that I might live and kiss her feet, and spend both life and all I have in her honourable service, as I have the best part already under her worthy brother and her most glorious father. O that her mercy were such as she would consider how little profit my dead and dismembered body can bring her, but how great and glorious an honour it will be in all posterity when the report shall be that so gracious and mighty a queen had granted life to so miserable and penitent an object. Your honourable usage and promises to me since these my troubles have made me bold to challenge this kindness at your hands. Pardon me if I have done amiss therein and spare not I pray your bended knee for me in this distress, ye God of heaven it may be will requite it one day on you and yours. And if my life be lengthened by your mediacion and my good Lord Chancellor’s (to whom 1 have also sent my blurred letters) I will vow it to be spent at your honourable feet. O my good lord remember how sweet life is, and how bitter ye contrary. Spare not your speech and pains for God I hope hath not shut out all hope of comfort from me in that gracious, Princely and womanlike heart; but that as the doleful news of death hath wounded to death both my soul and body, so that comfortable news of life shall be as a new resurrection to my woeful heart. But if no remedy can be found, either by imprisonment or confiscation, Banishment and the like, I can say no more but God give me patience to endure and a heart to forgive the whole world.

Once your fellow and loving companion, but now worthy of no name but wretchedness and misery, JD¹³⁹

If this letter is authentic, and there must be some doubt since it survives only in transcript, it can only be described as the triumph of optimism over both dignity and common sense. Both Arundel and Gardiner had suffered at his hands in the days of his prosperity, and it is hard to see why he expected either of them to put themselves out for him when fortune had deserted him. Perhaps after his co-operation over the mass he had expected reward, and sudden devastating disappointment had deprived him of his normal sense of reality. He had also devoted his whole adult life to the service of the Crown, and had considered it his duty to accommodate every change of the royal mood. That was why he had striven so hard to make Edward’s will effective at the end of his life. He was equally willing to serve Mary in the same uncritical spirit, and it was her rejection of that service, as much as the imminence of death, which drove him to such eloquent despair. Such a position had an integrity of its own which needs to be taken into account, and which reflected a common contemporary morality, but it does not show up too well in the spotlight which John Foxe was shortly to turn on the victims of Mary’s government.

On, the morning of 22 August Northumberland, together with his two faithful henchmen, Sir Thomas Palmer and Sir John, Gates, was handed over by the Lieutenant to the sheriff of London. According to one contemporary account, Gates took a dignified farewell of his former patron, and the two men exchanged forgiveness.¹⁴⁰ Palmer spoke briely, acknowledging his faults, and admitting that his zeal for the reformed faith had been a sham. The duke, as was expected of the principal actor in the drama, made a longer and more elaborate oration, several reports of which survive. His sentiments were extremely correct, in the best tradition of scaffold speeches, where the victim was expected to confess his (or her) fault, to acknowledge the justice of the sentence, and to beg for the forgiveness of the onlookers:

Indeed I confess unto you that I have been an evil liver and have done wickedly all the days of my life…Do you think, good people, that we…be wiser than all the world besides, even since Christ? No, I assure you, you are far deceived. I do not say so for any learning that I have, for God knows I have little or none, but for the experience which 1 have had…¹⁴¹

Fortune had spoken with the voice of God. He went on to confess his specific offences against the queen, and to beg her forgiveness, but even in this extremity he refused to admit sole responsibility for the plot in favour of Jane, ’not I alone the original doer thereof J assure you, for there were several other which procured the same…’.¹⁴² In the circumstances this is unlikely to have been mere rhetoric, but he would name no names, and the late king was nowhere alluded to. In conclusion he reaffirmed, as he was bound to do, his loyalty to ’the true catholic faith’, which he urged all his hearers to embrace. He was attended on the scaffold by Nicholas Heath, whose deprivation from the see of Worcester he had secured, and who was now in the process of restoration. But whatever consolation Heath may have been able to offer him, it could not have included reconciliation to the catholic Church. Heath, like all the rest of Mary’s bishops, was a schismatic, out of communion with Rome, as was the queen herself. What Northumberland and his colleagues meant by the ’true catholic faith’ was presumably the faith of the Henrician Church, although neither Renard nor any other foreign observer was disposed to quibble in such a way. Antonio Di Guaras, who was an eyewitness, recorded his last moments: ’he again stretched himself out, as one who constrained himself, and willed to consent patiently without saying anything, in the act of laying himself out inactively and afraid, he smote his hands together, as one who should say this must be, and cast himself upon the said beam.’¹⁴³

An authorized version of his speech was immediately published by the queen’s printer, John Cawood, and translated into Latin, Italian, and German over the next few months,¹⁴⁴ As John Foxe was later to put it:

he denied in word that true religion, which before time, as well in King Henry the Eighth’s days as in King Edward’s, he had oft evidently declared himself both to favour and further; exhorting also the people to return to the Catholic faith, as he termed it; whose recantations the Papists did forthwith publish and set abroad, rejoicing not a little at his conversion, or rather subversion, as it then appeared.¹⁴⁵

Northumberland died a martyr to no cause, and respected by neither side in the developing ideological conflict. He lost his life, like many noblemen in earlier generations, and some after, for having taken a political, gamble and lost. At the end he cut an extraordinarily unheroic figure: less dignified than his father, who had had far better cause to protest against the injustice of fate. An unreflective man, who had lived on his wits, in his prosperity he had commanded service, but little loyalty or affection, and in adversity-he was abandoned by most of those who owed him gratitude. Whatever he might profess, the queen held him uniquely responsible for the attempt upon her crown, and the three who died on 22 August were the only direct victims of the failed coup. Northampton, Andrew, Ambrose, John, Henry, and Robert all escaped the axe, although all were indicted, tried, and condemned. John fell mortally sick and died a few days after his release from prison, on 21 October 1554.¹⁴⁶ Guildford and Jane were executed under the sentences passed against them in August, but as a direct result of Wyatt’s insurrection in January and February 1554.¹⁴⁷ The duke of Suffolk, who was probably the most guilty man after Northumberland, was inexplicably released a few days after his arrest, and never even charged. If it had not been for his foolish involvement with Wyatt, he might have escaped altogether. As it was he was arraigned at Westminster on 17 February 1554, and executed on February 23.¹⁴⁸

The rehabilitation of the Dudleys was slow, because Mary had no intention of allowing them to recover even a shadow of their former strength and coherence. Moreover none of the duke’s sons had followed his example in renouncing their protestantism. Whether the duchess was imprisoned, and if so for how long, is not clear. She was not charged with any offence, and seems to have retained control of her jointure lands. She was pardoned on 2 May 1554, and on 19 June executed an exchange of lands with the Crown, surrendering manors at Knole and Sevenoaks in Kent in return for others in Warwickshire and Staffordshire.¹⁴⁹ At the same time she successfully petitioned the Exchequer to be admitted to her lands at Fecknam and Henly in Arden. Jane was by no means left penniless by her husband’s execution, but she seems nevertheless to have been devastated by the catastrophe to her family. She spent the summer of 1554 haunting the court with petitions in favour of her sons, and seems to have met with kindness and favour, particularly from some of Philip’s servants after his arrival in July. Her eldest son, the earl of Warwick, was released in early October, already seriously ill, and died on 21 October, without ever securing his pardon. Jane herself died at her house in Chelsea on 15 January 1555, at the age of 46.¹⁵⁰ It may have been because of her deteriorating health that Ambrose, Robert, and Henry were released from the Tower shortly before that time, and received their pardons a week after her death. She must have been aware that this was impending before she died, because she made her will knowing that Ambrose, who was now the heir, had been pardoned for life only, and not restored in blood. As he was thus incapable of inheriting, she left all her lands in trust to her son-in-law Sir Henry Sidney and three others In consideration that they should have special regard to aiding her sons and daughters’. She also remembered ’my lord, my dear husband’ with more than dutiful affection. If John had died unloved by the world, he had left a grieving widow, who did not long survive him.¹⁵¹

Within a few days of their release, and almost immediately after their mother’s funeral, Ambrose and Robert Dudley were back at court. This was not because the queen had suddenly developed a soft spot for the Dudleys, but because Philip was trying to improve his relations with the English aristocracy. In January 1555 he decided to stage a joust of the kind which had been so much favoured by Henry VIII—’a grett ronnyng at the tylt at West-mynster with spayrers, boyth Englys men and Spaneards’ as Henry Machyn noted.¹⁵² Ambrose and Robert appeared among the defenders, although their skills can hardly have been sharp after nearly eighteen months, incarceration. Andrew, who was not required for this public relations exercise, may have been released at the same time, but he was not pardoned until 5 April Just over a fortnight later he was granted an annuity of £100 a year, and on 30 May his goods were returned to him. His lands at the time of his attainder had been valued at no more than £160, so although there is no sign of those lands being returned by the summer of 1555 he had more or less recovered his earlier modest prosperity.¹⁵³ Ambrose was restored in blood and his lands returned to him on 17 July 1556.¹⁵⁴ Henry had been pardoned at the same time as his brothers, and was restored in blood on 5 July 1556, but received only an indirect restitution. His young wife Margaret, the daughter of Lord Audley, had been under 14 at the time of their marriage. By the time of Henry’s attainder she must have attained the age of 16 and obtained her inheritance, because it was forfeited to the Crown. When he was restored, his wife’s lands were returned to her, to the value of £1,080 a year, but he seems to have received nothing himself.¹⁵⁵ Finally, on 30 January 1557, Robert was similarly restored, being granted his goods and the manor of Hemsby, a portion of his former lands.¹⁵⁶ All three of the younger Dudleys served in the expeditionary force which the earl of Pembroke led across the Channel in the summer of 1557 as a contribution to Philip’s war effort against the French. This was not necessarily a mark of favour, as a deliberate effort seems to have been made to send potential troublemakers and malcontents to earn their keep abroad. Henry was killed at the seige of St Quentin on 27 August, but Ambrose and Robert returned to the modest lifestyle which was all that Queen Mary was prepared to allow them.

The queen’s health, however, was poor, and after the spring of 1557 Philip assiduously stayed away from her. It was during these months, after his return from France, that Robert renewed his acquaintance with his onetime fellow prisoner, Princess Elizabeth. We know very little about how this came about, just as we know little of Sir William Cecil’s developing relationship with her at the same time. Although it was dangerous to do so, by the summer of 1558 ambitious men were cautiously gravitating towards the heir to the throne, and Robert Dudley, from his base in Norfolk, was one of them. On 11 November 1558 Queen Mary died, and the following day he became Master of the Horse to the new queen.