The fact of Sir Robert Brackenbury having been seventy years before, in like manner, removed, and Sir James Tyrrell put in, when the princes were murdered, appeared an ominous precedent, but there was no real cause for apprehension; Mary had no wish to shed her sister's blood. Elizabeth, spite of the evidence against her, protested vehemently her innocence, and wished "that God might confound her eternally if she was in any manner implicated with Wyatt."
The Court of Spain, through Renard the ambassador, urged perseveringly the execution of Elizabeth and Courtenay. Renard represented from his sovereign that there could be no security for her throne so long as Elizabeth and Courtenay were suffered to live. But Mary replied that though they had both of them, no doubt, listened willingly to the conspirators, and would have been ready had they succeeded to step into her throne, yet they had been guilty of no overt act, and therefore, by the constitutional law of England which had been enacted in her first Parliament, they could not be put to death, but could only be imprisoned, or suffer forfeiture of their goods. Some authorities accuse Gardiner of joining in the plan for the execution of Elizabeth, at the same time that he was earnest to save Courtenay; but others exonerate him of this charge, and make him more consistent.
In the Council it was, moreover, mooted to send Elizabeth abroad, either to be kept at Brussels, or put under the care of the Queen of Hungary, or—the favourite scheme of Philip—to marry her to Philibert Emanuel of Savoy, the disinherited Prince of Piedmont. But Mary would consent to none of these plans contrary to Elizabeth's free will and consent; she therefore removed her sister from the Tower, first to Richmond, and thence, under the care of Lord Williams of Tame and Sir Henry Bedingfield, to Woodstock. Bedingfield, who was keeper, does not seem, with all his vigilance, to have been an unkind one, for he was in favour with Elizabeth after she became queen, and frequently repaired to Court to pay his respects to her. Courtenay, in the week following Elizabeth's removal from the Tower, was also sent thence to Fotheringay Castle.
Mary had dismissed her Parliament on the 5th of May. Before this dissolution the peers had unanimously enacted that the ancient penalties against heretics should be enforced. These heretics were the members of the Church which these same peers, only four years before, had, with every appearance of enthusiasm, established; and, to add to the infamy of their character, Renard, the emperor's ambassador, openly boasted of having bribed them to this work of evil. Previous to the dissolution of Parliament, the queen had taken every opportunity of parading her religion before the people. On the 3rd of May, that is, in Rogation week, she had made a procession with five bishops mitred, and her heralds and sergeants-at-arms, to St. Giles's-in-the-Field, St. Martin's-in-the-Field, and to Westminster, where they had a sermon and song-mass, and made good cheer, and afterwards went about the park, and home to St. James's Court there.
These displays, and the approaching arrival of the Prince of Spain, gave the greatest disgust to a large body of her subjects, and there were various conspiracies against her life and reputation. The Court and clergy were greatly incensed at finding a cat with shorn crown, and in the costume of a Catholic priest, hanging on a gallows in Cheapside. As Dr. Pendleton was preaching Catholicism at St. Paul's Cross, he was shot at, and narrowly escaped with his life. A strange piece of mummery was also at this time played off in the City against the queen's religion. Crowds of people, said to amount to 17,000 at one time, were daily assembled about an empty house in Aldersgate Street, from the wall of which there came a voice, which many declared was that of an angel denouncing the queen's marriage. When the crowd shouted "God save the queen," it preserved silence. When they shouted "God save the Lady Elizabeth," it answered, "So be it." When they asked what the mass was, it answered, "Idolatry."
To examine into the character of this seditious oracle, the Council deputed Lord Admiral Howard and Lord Paget. They ordered the wall to be pulled down where the voice came from, and soon laid bare the spirit in the shape of a young woman of the name of Elizabeth Crofts, who confessed that she was hired for the purpose by one Drakes, a servant to Sir Anthony Neville. "She had lain whistling," says Stowe, "in a strange whistle made for the purpose; and there were other companions—one named Miles, clerk of St. Botolph's without Aldersgate, a player, a weaver, Hill, clerk of St. Leonard's, in Forbes Lane, and other confederates with her, which, putting themselves amongst the press, took upon them to interpret what the spirit said, expressing certain seditious words against the queen, the Prince of Spain, the mass confession, &c." Some said it was an angel and a voice from heaven, some the Holy Ghost, &c. The young woman was made to stand upon a scaffold at St. Paul's Cross during the sermon, and there before all the people to confess the trick. The punishment was certainly lenient. Henry VIII. would have burned her, and hanged all her accomplices. This clemency was even confessed by the queen's Protestant enemies, as in some doggrel verses laid on the desk of her chapel—
"And yet you do seem merciful
In midst of tyranny,
And holy, whereas you maintain
Most vile idolatry."
But very different were the atrocious attacks upon her character which were scattered about, both written and printed, and many of them of a very gross character industriously thrown in her way. Of all the strange conspiracies, however, against her, the strangest was that related by Lord Bacon:—"I have heard that there was a conspiracy to kill Queen Mary as she walked in St. James's Park, by means of a burning-glass, fixed on the leads of a neighbouring house."
Spite, however, of all warnings and the most universal expression of dislike to the match, Mary persisted in her engagement of marriage with Philip of Spain, though he himself showed no unequivocal reluctance to the completion of it; never writing to her, but submitting to his fate, as it were, in obedience to the parental command. At the end of May the unwilling bridegroom resigned his government of Castile—which he held for his insane grandmother, Juana—into the hands of his sister, the Princess-Dowager of Portugal, and bade adieu to his family. He embarked at Corunna on the 13th of July
