The plan for Mary’s flight was put together over a two-month period between May and July 1550 and the princess was very much its moving force. She had convinced herself that not just her religion but her life was in danger. This was the answer she gave to Van der Delft, when he pointed out to her that, if the king died, her absence could deprive her of the crown and would probably ensure the triumph of religious change for good:‘If my brother were to die, I should be far better out of the kingdom; because as soon as he were dead, before the people knew it, they would despatch me too; there is no doubt of that, because you know that there is nobody about the king’s person or in the government who is not inimical to me.’ The problem with following the emperor’s advice on temporising was that her own, grim experience told her quite the reverse: ‘I fear I may tarry too long,’ she said. ‘When they send me orders forbidding me the mass, I shall expect to suffer as I suffered once during my father’s lifetime; they will order me to withdraw thirty miles from any navigable river or sea-port, and will deprive me of my confidential servants, and, having reduced me to the utmost destitution, they will deal with me as they please. But I will rather suffer death than stain my conscience.’ Her suspicion of the council was profound. They were ‘wicked and wily in their actions and particularly malevolent towards me’.
20
As in her earlier correspondence with the emperor, Mary was probably overstating her case. But what matters is her utter conviction that those in power meant not just to restrict her but to destroy her. This visceral fear explains the contradictions in her position. She would suffer death for her faith and yet the reason she wanted to flee was that she was afraid she would be killed by order of Edward VI’s advisers; she was concerned for her household but willing to implicate them in her flight and leave them to their fate; she believed that she had a great deal of support at popular level but would not acknowledge that abandoning England would leave the people deprived of hope.
Mary had given some thought to the details of her escape.Van der Delft acknowledged that the first plan developed was Mary’s idea and he believed it could be made to work. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that he hoped it would work, because it relieved him of involvement, and the thought that he might be compromised alarmed him. Like Mary, he had a regard for his own personal security and that of his family. His desire to be of service to the princess was tinged with growing anxiety, especially as he was ill and arrangements were already in hand for him to leave England himself.
The essence of Mary’s scheme was that she should be as close to the sea as possible, to facilitate her escape by water. At the beginning of May 1550 she had moved from New Hall to Woodham Walter in Essex, and one part of the plan was already in place. The move could easily be explained. New Hall needed cleaning and with the summer season approaching, she wished to resume taking sea baths for her health. Her house was regularly provisioned by boat and the comings and goings of these supplies would provide ideal cover for a vessel organised by Robert Rochester, the controller of Mary’s household, to remove the princess from her native country. As with so many perilous undertakings, the devil of the plan was in the detail. Royal lady as she was, Mary did not initially contemplate going alone. She wanted with her ‘four of her ladies whom she trusts more than the rest’ (interesting to note that she evidently had reservations about some of them) plus Rochester himself and two unnamed gentlemen, one of whom was ‘very rich but would willingly give up all that he possesses to follow my lady to a place of safety’. Apart from these people, Mary would take nothing with her ‘except her rings and jewels. The plate she uses belongs to the king,’ wrote the ambassador, ‘as, I suppose the tapestries and other furniture do.’
21
Van der Delft said that no one apart from himself, his secretary and Rochester knew of the princess’s plan. Whether that was true or not, it involved too many people to be practical.Then the possibility of a boat being procured in England evaporated. The month of May came and went with Mary still in Essex and still exhorting the ambassador and his master to help her leave. Matters stalled when the government introduced restrictions on all movements at night, so that ‘no roads or cross-roads, no harbours or creeks, nor any passage or outlet’ escaped the vigilance of ‘good folk who had something to lose’.This was a reference to the possibility of further summer uprisings like those of the preceding year, but a secondary motive for the council may have been to restrict Mary and frustrate her possibility of flight.
The plan that was finally put into action took shape after Charles V had left Brussels and was approved by him on 25 June. Its driving force may have been his sister, Mary of Hungary, the regent of the Low Countries, who was more inclined to make decisions and take action. She also wanted to ensure that any repercussions were minimised, particularly in the event of failure.This meant waiting until Van der Delft had left, so he could not be implicated, and it also required that his successor, Jehan Scheyfve, a man of whom the regent did not think much, was kept completely in the dark. Thus it fell to Jehan Dubois, secretary to the imperial embassy in London, to take on the burden of managing the revised escape plan. He was more than equal to the task; in fact, he carried out his part of it in exemplary fashion. But it did not succeed.
The emperor foresaw difficulties when he gave his sister his guarded approbation. All concerned should be aware of the need for flexibility and not try ‘to reckon the thing too exactly from day to day, as if the sea were a fixed and invariable factor, permitting such undertakings as may be carried out on land’. He thought that there was inevitably some danger and that speed was vital, or the details might leak out. ‘As for disguising our cousin,’ he wrote, ‘I will leave that to those in charge … but no disguise need be used as to whether or not I knew of the undertaking, and it will be better to be quite open about it … for we have the best of reasons and have done all we could to protect our cousin’s person and conscience … and holding back as long as possible from this extreme measure, which it has now become imperative to resort to because of the attitude adopted in England.’ Charles was evidently not given to cloak-and-daggery and he was determined to put the blame on Edward’s councillors. He was more concerned that the pursuit of Scottish pirates, the pretext for his ships being in English waters, could lead to difficulties if the ambassadors expected from Scotland at any time arrived in Brussels before the ships set sail.
22
In the event, none of the difficulties foreseen by Charles V happened. The reason Mary did not leave was straightforward. She had changed her mind. Or, put another way, when faced, at last, with the opportunity to go, she could not bring herself to do it. Conflicting emotions battled within her, but even as she struggled with her packing, she knew she would stay. In the end, she accepted that her future lay in England. It was a momentous decision and it was in no small part due to Robert Rochester, who intervened to save his mistress from herself.Without his influence and his deft direction of her conscience, it would have been harder still for her to ignore what she knew was likely to be her one and only opportunity of flight. At the crucial moment, he relieved her of dealing with the situation by assuming control of it himself.
We do not know exactly what passed between Mary and Robert Rochester, but it can be inferred from what he told the exasperated and anxious Dubois, who had rowed ashore on 1 July. He soon found out that it was the controller who had ‘raised several difficulties tending to delay us in taking our load on board’.These would be better explained if Dubois could meet Rochester in the nearby churchyard of St Mary’s, and the secretary soon found himself in earnest, if very quiet, discussion with Mary’s servant, pretending to bargain over the price of corn.
In order to talk better, and not to attract attention by skulking around among the gravestones, the two men soon went off to a safe house, where they walked up and down in the garden. Here Rochester revealed what was troubling him so much: ‘… he saw no earthly possibility of bringing my Lady down to the water-side without running grave risks because of the watch that was posted every night … the suspicions of certain of her household which was not so free of enemies of her religion as she imagined, and the danger she would incur of being held back’. But then he went on to reveal the true reasons for his doubts:
Also, were she to go now that there was no pressing reason, for she was still as free to live as she liked as she had ever been, it might be imagined a mighty scandal would be raised. He also mentioned that she would lose all hope of the succession were her brother to die, and asserted that she still had plenty of time in which to escape. He was convinced that she would in no way be molested before the end of the parliament that was to meet the following Michaelmas at the earliest …
And by that time, he said, it would be winter and she would be at her house at St Osyth, ideally placed for an escape by sea should one be necessary. He went on to tell Dubois that ‘I would give my hand to see my Lady out of the country and in safety, and I was the first man to suggest it. And if you understand me, what I say is not that my Lady does not wish to go, but that she wishes to go if she can.’
23
This strange sentence, with its undertones of a decision being constantly re-evaluated and deferred, was not lost on Dubois.
Mary continued to prevaricate and to worry about how the emperor would take it if, as she lamented,‘it would be impossible to go now, after I have so often importuned his majesty on the subject’. She did not want to tell Dubois outright that she was staying and her often repeated ‘but what will become of me?’, a rhetorical question asked of herself rather than anyone else present, shows that the mental turmoil had not subsided. At the last, Dubois was compelled to leave because the local authorities realised what was going on. Their manner of handling the affair showed a sense of consideration for Mary, ‘whom we hold as high as the king’s person’, but their intervention, with its threat to confiscate Dubois’ cargo of corn, brought matters to a head. It seems quite possible that Rochester had alerted them. Dubois did not tarry. He knew very well he must avoid further attention.
If Mary thought that this would all blow over and nothing of it would be publicly known, she was badly deceived. As Edward VI himself reported in his diary, ‘Sir John Gates was sent into Essex because it was credibly informed that Scepperus was to steal her away to Antwerp.’ Gates was a crony of John Dudley’s, and his presence with a troop of horse made the strong statement that Mary was being watched carefully. In some parts of the Low Countries it was reported that the princess had already landed and, the following month, the English ambassador to France reported that Henry II had ‘confidentially informed him of a design by the Lady Regent to send Scepperus to the English coast to carry away the Lady Mary’.
24
No doubt the French king passed on this snippet with a great deal of satisfaction.
Dubois returned for a while to Flanders and wrote up his report during the voyage back, which was as stormy as the one that had brought him on his unfulfilled mission, and very long. He was unable to deliver his account of what had happened before mid-July. In it, he said that he suspected that Rochester had ‘made out the situation in Maldon to be more dangerous than it was in reality’. He was almost certainly right. Now his chief concern was how the regent would take the news that, after all, Mary was still in England.
Mary of Hungary was annoyed by what had happened but most of her ire seems to have been directed at the unfortunate Scepperus, who wrote her an embarrassed letter asking for her pardon for not providing sooner the details of his expedition. The situation was complicated by the fact that Van der Delft died within weeks of returning from England and there was some worry about whether he had let others in on the secret. CharlesV regretted that the enterprise was not successful ‘because of the danger that may menace the person concerned’. He was rather thrown by his sister’s complete denial to the English ambassador at her court of any knowledge of the affair, since he had been prepared to acknowledge it himself. But Mary of Hungary produced a remarkable performance when the subject was raised. She would never receive her cousin unannounced and without Edward VI’s knowledge and consent. To which Chamberlain, the ambassador, confirmed that, of course, the council only wished to treat Mary well ‘and serve her as the king’s sister and near relative of his majesty’.
But the regent was plainly impatient with her English cousin. She told Scheyfve to pass her words on to Mary in England,‘so that she may better know how to conduct herself in this matter … and in the circumstances she could not do better than live quietly in her own house as she has done up to the present’.
25
It is not surprising she was lacking in compassion, as her own life had been so difficult. Her young husband, Louis II of Hungary, was routed by the Turks at the battle of Mohács in 1526, and she learned of his ignominious flight and death only some weeks later. Young, striking and childless, she nevertheless set her face against remarriage and, in this respect, her brother could not command her. She had ruled the Low Countries on his behalf since 1531, never quite meeting his demands, always conscious of the burden that she knew was getting heavier with time. The effort, and her own no-nonsense character, made her hard on others. She had little time for Mary, whom she saw as a self-pitying ditherer. Her view was that the princess would have to put up with religious restrictions, even the withdrawal of the mass from her household. When summoned to join the emperor in Augsburg at the end of the summer, Mary of Hungary seems to have persuaded Charles that no further rescue attempts should be made.This doughty Habsburg queen was much more concerned in 1550 about constant depredations of Scottish pirates on her fishing fleets than she was about Mary Tudor.