d about London; the people said it
should not be till they had fought for it. A disturbance at Greenwich,
on the 25th of September, extended to Southwark, {p.060} where
Gardiner's house was attacked,[135] and a plot was discovered to
murder him: in the day he wore a shirt of mail under his robes, and he
slept with a guard of a hundred men. Threatening notices were even
found on the floor of the queen's bed-room, left there by unknown
hands. Noailles assured the lords that his own government would regard
the marriage as little short of a declaration of war, so inevitably
would war be the result of it; and Gardiner, who was unjustly
suspected of being in the Spanish interest, desired to delay the
coronation till parliament should have met; intending that the first
act of the assembly should be to tie Mary's hands with a memorial
which she could not set aside. She inherited under her father's will,
by which her accession was made conditional on her marrying not
without the consent of the council; parliament might remind her both
of her own obligation to obey her father's injunctions, and of theirs
to see that they were obeyed.

[Footnote 135: Noailles; Renard.]

With the same object, though not with the same object only, the lords
of the council supported the Bishop of Winchester. They proposed to
alter the form of the coronation oath, and to bind the queen by an
especial clause to maintain the independence of the English Church--a
precaution, as it proved, not unnecessary--for the existing form was
already inconvenient, and Mary was meditating how, when called on to
swear to observe the laws and constitutions of the realm, she could
introduce an adjective _sub silentio_; she intended to swear only that
she would observe the JUST laws and constitutions.[136] But she looked
with the gravest alarm to the introduction of more awkward phrases; if
words were added which would be equivalent (as she would understand
them) to a denial of Christ and his Church, she had resolved to refuse
at all hazards.[137]

[Footnote 136: Renard to Charles V.: _Rolls House
MSS._]

[Footnote 137: Ibid.]

But her courage was not put to the test. The true grounds on which the
delay of the coronation was desired could not be avowed. The queen was
told that her passage through the streets would be unsafe until her
accession had been sanctioned by parliament, and the act