Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

SUSAN BRIGDEN

conspirators, with Thomas Wyatt, who opposed Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain and conceived a shadowy plot to place Elizabeth on the throne. 25 As the conspiracy was discovered he escaped to France and joined Sir Peter Carew in exile, where they were suspected of planning an invasion of the English coast. 26 When his fellow conspirators began to doubt his allegiance – ‘perceyving hym nothing forwarde but ever to draw back’ – Pickering, fearing assassination, left their company secretly and travelled in Italy and Germany. 27 Pardoned in December 1554, he came home to England. In March 1558 he went to Germany to recruit soldiers in Germany for Mary’s defence of Calais. 28 When Elizabeth ascended the throne he might have expected high office, at the least. An ambivalent picture of Pickering emerges. His friend Carnesecchi described him as ‘cavalliero et literato ’. Asked what they had talked about in France, Carnesecchi remembered nothing in particular, except that ‘it delighted him more to talk of love than of religion’. 29 But reformers claimed him as one of their own and, as became Edward’s ambassador, Pickering professed himself evangelical. Carnesecchi recalled him ‘making open profession of believing as his king did and speaking freely’. 30 To amuse his life-long friend William Cecil, and himself, Pickering mocked the ‘company of vncomly cardinalles’, reporting the endless popish ceremonies at Michaelmas 1551: ‘at last wt divers benediccions and combersom cortoyses this pageant … ended wt a masking mas of romishe requiem’. 31 At Rheims in October 1552, when the cardinal of Lorraine showed him the sacred ampoule holding the ‘precius oyntement’ which sanctified the French crown, ‘sent from heven above a 1000 yeres ago and ever since by a miracle preserved’, by which the French kings cured scrofula, ‘I iudged by his lookes he thought I lytle beleved’. 32 John Jewel described Pickering, the queen’s suitor, as ‘a wise and religious man, and highly gifted as to personal qualities’. 33 An ambassador sent by Edward to reside at the French court might well combine courtly grace with loyal adherence to evangelical religion. 25 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the reign of Mary I, 1553-1558 , ed. C.S. Knighton (London, 1998) ( CSPDom, Mary ), 40; Calendar of Letters, Despatches and State Papers, relating to the Negotiations between England and Spain , XII, Mary, January-July 1554 , ed. Royall Tyler (1949) ( CSPSp ), pp. 94, 124, 130; E. Harris Harbison, Rival Ambassadors at the Court of Queen Mary (Princeton, 1940), pp. 111, 121, 125, 126. 26 Harbison, Rival Ambassadors , pp. 156-7. 27 TNA, SP 69/4, fo. 65r-66r ( CSPFor, Mary , 198, p. 79); CSPSp , XII, pp. 252-3. 28 CSPDom, Mary , 728, 776-7. 29 PC , II(2), p. 512. ‘ Si diletettava più presto di parlare d’amore che della religione’. 30 PC , II(2), p. 512. ‘ che faceva professione aperta di creder come il re suo con parlare liberamente ’.

31 TNA, SP 68/9, fo. 4r-v ( CSPFor, 1547-1553 , 455, pp. 176-7). 32 TNA, SP 68/10, fo. 84r ( CSPFor, 1547-1553 , 567, p. 222). 33 The Zurich Letters , A.D. 1558-1579 , ed. H. Robinson (Parker Society, Cambridge, 1842), p. 34.

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