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.They had also contacted Courtenay, who was still sulking in Brussels and imagining - perhaps with good reason - that Ruy Gomez had hired an assassin to kill him, and obtained his agreement to marrying the Lady Elizabeth.Whether Elizabeth knew anything of the plot is open to question.Her past experiences should have taught her that it would have been foolish, not to mention fatal, to involve herself in a treasonable conspiracy, yet in February 1556 the Constable of France wrote to de Noailles, warning him to take care and 'above all restrain Madame Elizabeth from stirring at all in the affair of which you have written to me; for that would be to ruin everything'.This reads as if the princess was eagerly supporting the plotters, but the Constable may have been misled by de Noailles or could have been making assumptions.Foreign intelligence could be notoriously inaccurate, but there is no doubt that people close to Elizabeth knew what was going on.When Charles V, crippled with arteriosclerosis, finally abdicated on 16 January, Philip and Mary became King and Queen of Spain, the Netherlands, Spain's possessions in Italy and the Spanish colonies in the Americas.The German electors, however, chose Charles's brother, the Archduke Ferdinand, as the new Holy Roman Emperor in preference to Philip.The Emperor therefore ceded Austria, Burgundy, some of his territory in Italy and his German possessions to his brother.Philip had by now lost all interest in England, save for protecting the interests of the Lady Elizabeth and treating the kingdom as a potential source of manpower for his wars.Mary was still writing to him, begging him to return to her so that their marriage might bear fruit, but he fobbed her off with meaningless promises whilst trying to persuade her that it was her duty to provide him with men for his army.The Council responded to her tentative requests by pointing out that her marriage treaty expressly forbade it, and even if it did not, England was in no financial state to contemplate a war, especially in support of the interests of a foreign power.On 16 February, Mary reached the age of forty, but she looked older.De Noailles asserted that she had aged ten years during the past months.Her face, although still pink and white, was heavily wrinkled, and she appeared thinner than ever.Michieli was of the opinion that her ugliness was compensated for by her becoming dignity.Worsening eyesight made her peer at people with alarming intensity; her sight had suffered through her regular habit of writing to Philip by candlelight in the small hours of the morning.It was said now that she usually slept for at most four hours at night.De Noailles was told by a lady who slept in the Queen's chamber that Mary's dreams of love and passion were so vivid that she often lost complete control of herself in bed, apparently reliving the delights of Philip's lovemaking.In her waking hours, he reported, she spent her time weeping, sighing and raging against her people, and was in such 'depths of melancholy that nothing seemed to remain for her but to imitate the example of Dido', who had committed suicide.'But that she will not do,' for suicide was a mortal sin.Instead, she told her ladies, that 'As she had done all possible to induce her husband to return, and as she found he would not, she meant to withdraw utterly from men and live quietly, as she had done the chief part of her life before she married.' In future, religion would be her chief consolation.No one could have doubted the depths of her faith.She was punctilious in her religious observances and was attending mass nine times a day.Her obvious emotion at public church ceremonies was enough to inspire observers with awe, as when she kissed the sores of forty scrofula victims with ecstatic devotion.Unpopular with her subjects she might have been, but those who knew her and worked for her would hear no ill spoken of her.To them, she was kindness personified, unselfish and sensible of their feelings.This consideration extended itself to her refusal to go on an annual progress in case it placed too great a financial burden on her subjects.Naturally, there may also have been an underlying fear that her reception from those subjects would not be a warm one.Religious persecution on so great a scale had now turned most of them against her.Cranmer was formally degraded by Bishops Bonner and Thirlby on 14 February.The former archbishop wept at the loss of his primacy and when, ten days later, the Queen signed his death warrant, he capitulated and issued a series of abject recantations, having been led by the authorities to believe that his life would be spared.But the Queen 'would nothing relent', remembering not only his heretical policies and prayer books, but also the fact that this was the man who had declared her parents' marriage null and void and herself a bastard.The Council might deliberate over whether political capital might be made of making Cranmer's recantations public - in the end they were suppressed — but the former archbishop's fate was certain.*Sir Henry Dudley was back in France that March, raising an invasion force that would land on the Isle of Wight and march on London.Courtenay was keeping a low profile, but a suspicious King Philip had arranged for a careful watch to be kept on him in Brussels.The conspiracy was now far-flung and unwieldy, depending on too many people, and early in March one of them, Thomas White, an Exchequer official, panicked, and told Cardinal Pole all he knew.The subsequent arrests of twenty suspects were followed by a series of interrogations, some under torture, in which most of the accused confessed all the details of the plot.What did set alarm bells ringing was the number of conspirators who had connections with the Lady Elizabeth.John Bray was her neighbour at Hatfield, Sir Peter Killigrew was her friend, a number of others were her servants, and one, Sir John Perrot, claimed to be one of Henry VIII's bastards and her half-brother.'Never is a conspiracy discovered in which either justly or unjustly she or some of her servants are not mentioned,' commented Michieli.Several of the accused referred to de Noailles's involvement, and the Council considered deporting him 'as a plotter and contriver against the State and the person of the sovereign', but they were pre-empted by Henry II, who swiftly recalled him.Henry Dudley escaped arrest also by virtue of being in France.The ramifications of the plot seemed endless, and extended even to some of the councillors themselves.Mary was 'deeply troubled'; it seemed to the Queen as if the whole fabric of her government was crumbling, and that her authority carried little weight, and she complained in her letters to Philip that she needed his presence more than ever.She saw treason everywhere, distrusting not only her councillors but also her personal attendants, and as March turned into April she took steps to ensure that the continuing interrogations were handled only by men such as Rochester, Jerning-ham and Englefield, who had served her for many years and proved themselves trustworthy.In the middle of March Mary instructed Sir John Mason to 'pray the King her consort to be pleased to say frankly in how many days he purposed returning', and to ask whether she should continue to maintain the fleet that she had kept waiting in readiness to bring him home
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