Mary Tudor

by David Loades

  Marriage was a different sort of issue altogether. For more than twenty years Mary had been kept in a state of enforced celibacy, first by her father and then by her brother’s council. Now she was entirely free to marry whom she pleased – and as she was already thirty-seven there was no time to waste. Not surprisingly, this unprecedented situation daunted her. As a virgin of impeccable credentials, she did not want to appear too keen, and began to make deprecating noises. She did not really want to marry at all, but she realised that it was her duty in the interests of her realm – and more in the same vein. Only her cousin Reginald Pole, with a worldly wisdom that few have given him credit for, urged her to remain single and trust in God.[193] In this predicament, Mary remembered (and repeated) her old promise never to marry without the Emperor’s consent, and asked Renard what she should do. Charles knew what he wanted, but did not know whether it would be possible. His only son, Philip, the Prince of Spain, was a widower, deep in negotiations with the Portuguese for the hand of the infanta. He might no longer be available; moreover the Emperor was very aware of English xenophobia. Philip was notoriously hispanophile, and this had stirred up considerable trouble in the Low Countries not very long before. Briefly Charles toyed with the idea of entering the lists himself, believing that he might be acceptable to the fickle islanders, but he quickly decided that he was too old, and that his health was uncertain. His candidate would have to be Philip, but until the Portuguese negotiation could be put aside, he instructed Renard to hint at the desirability of a domestic marriage.[194]

  This option was also the preference of a number of members of Mary’s council, including her lord chancellor; they were keenly aware of the points that her opponents had scored in the summer by harping upon the danger of a foreign king. Unfortunately, the only available candidate was the feckless Edward Courtenay. Courtenay was the son of the Marquis of Exeter, who had been executed in 1538, and he had grown up from boyhood in the Tower of London. Aged twenty-seven in 1553, he was well educated, personable enough and reputed to be a Catholic; but he had no self-control, and not the faintest idea of how to behave in the world. Mary created him Earl of Devon on 3 September, but refused to show the slightest interest in marrying him.[195] As Charles succeeded in blocking off the only other plausible candidate – the perennial Dom Luis of Portugal – by October it was clearly a case of Philip or nobody. The prince had by this time declared his availability, and Renard was instructed to open a formal negotiation.

  The ambassador feared a stiff battle with Courtenay’s supporters, being particularly suspicious of the ‘chatter’ of the queen’s ladies, but it turned out to be no contest. Renard presented a portrait of the prince, and, as he put it, caused the queen to fall ‘half in love’ with him. After years of repression, Mary was both excited and terrified at the prospect of having a man of her own. On 28 October she accepted the Emperor’s proposal, saying that she trusted him with her life – and promptly burst into tears. The following day she swore on the sacrament that she would marry Philip.[196] Unfortunately this highly emotional commitment was entered into without consulting – or at first informing – her council. When they found out, they accepted her decision with a good grace, but it had not been a wise way to proceed.

  There were good arguments in favour of the Prince of Spain. He was impeccably royal, and Catholic, and experienced in the ways of the world. Although only twenty-six, he was already a widower with one son, and he represented the traditional Habsburg alliance. However, there were also good arguments against, and these were given no countenance – by Mary at least. He was purely Spanish, had no knowledge of England or its customs, and spoke no word of the language. He was also his father’s heir in respect of Spain and the Netherlands, which meant that he would shortly have enormous resources and (probably) no time to devote to England. There were also other considerations. While he liked the idea of being a king, he did not particularly fancy a spinster eleven years older than himself, whom he persistently described as his muy cara y muy amanda tia (‘dear and beloved aunt’). He had also played no part in the negotiations, which had been conducted entirely by Charles, and (like Renard) regarded England as a country of barbarians and a land riddled with heresy.[197]

  THE DRAFT ARTICLES OF MARRIAGE, 7 December 1553

  As soon as may be a true marriage shall by words of the present tense be contracted and consummated between the prince and the queen in person in England. Prince Philip shall so long as the matrimony endures enjoy jointly with the queen her style and kingly name and shall aid her in her administration. The prince shall leave to the queen the disposition of all officers, lands and revenues of their dominions; they shall be disposed to those born there. All matters shall be treated in English. The queen shall be admitted to the society of the dominions the prince has or as during the matrimony may come to him. For her dowry, if she outlives the prince, she shall receive £60,000 at 40 Flemish groats the £ from the realms of the emperor, £40,000 from Spain, Castile and Aragon and their appurtenances – Brabant, Flanders, Hainault, Holland, as Margaret, widow of Charles, Duke of Burgundy, received – provided the lands are still in the prince’s patrimony; otherwise adjoining lands of the same value to be substituted within three weeks.

  Lest controversy for the succession arises, it is ordered: in England males and females of the marriage shall succeed according to law and custom. There shall be reserved to Don Carlos of Austria, Infante of Spain,* and his heirs general, all rights which belong or shall belong to the prince by the death of the queen his grandmother or Charles V in Spain, Two Sicilies, the Dukedom of Milan, and other dominions of Lombardy and Italy, with the burden of the said dowry. If Carlos dies and his issue fails, the eldest son of this marriage shall succeed there and in all the emperor’s dominions in Burgundy and Lower Germany – the dukedoms of Brabant, Luxembourg, Gelderland, Zutphen, Burgundy, Friesland, the counties of Flanders, Artois, Holland, Zeeland, Namurs-Friesland – the land beyond the isles and all others. If Carlos or his heirs live and there is any male child by this marriage, Carlos and his descendants shall be excluded from the Lower Germanies and Burgundy, which shall descend to the eldest son of this marriage. Other children of the marriage shall he allotted portions in England and Lower Germany. No sons of the marriage shall pretend any rights in Spain or other dominions reserved to Carlos other than given by the father or grandfather. If only females are born of the marriage, the eldest shall succeed in Lower Germany. Should she marry outside England or Lower Germany, without Carlos’s consent, the succession shall revert to him and his heirs general, but she and other daughters shall be endowed of lands in Spain and Lower Germany. If Carlos’s issue fails, and women only remain by this marriage, the eldest daughter shall succeed in Spain, England and the rest. Whoever succeeds shall leave to every dominion their privileges and customs to be administered by their natives. The dominions of the emperor, the prince and his successors, and the queen shall aid one another according to the treaty at Westminster [February] 1543 and declared at Utrecht 26,January 1546.†

  [Paraphrase. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Mary I, 1553–1558, edited by C. S. Knighton (1998), no. 24. Original MS TNA SP11/1, no. 20.]

  * Philip’s son by his first marriage.

  † The treaty of alliance by which Henry had entered his last war with France.

  Meanwhile, Parliament had (mostly) done what was expected of it. It had reinstated Catherine’s marriage to Henry, thus removing the anomaly of having a sovereign lady who was technically illegitimate. It had also repealed both the first and second Acts of Uniformity, and the other statutes that had made up Edward’s religious settlement. As from 20 December the Church of Henry VIII was resurrected. Parliament had not, however, touched the royal supremacy, and it had declined to reinstate the see of Durham, in spite of the fact that the queen had restored Cuthbert Tunstall as its bishop. It had also petitioned the queen to marry within the realm, having no means of knowing that she had already decided otherwise.
Mary’s reaction was an emotional tirade, telling them to mind their own business.[198] Technically, as her council realised, she was perfectly within her rights. Although a royal marriage was a matter of state, it was also intensely personal, and the decision was the monarch’s own. Nevertheless she was not the only person to feel strongly about this issue. As Renard had realised from the beginning, one of the principal difficulties with the Spanish match would be to sell it to ‘the people’, by which he meant not the man and woman in the street, but the nobility and gentry without whose cooperation the country could soon become ungovernable. Mary had dealt with this problem by ignoring it, and it remained to be seen whether her gamble would pay off. Before the end of the parliamentary session, surreptitious meetings were being held in London, and a conspiracy was forming. Some of those involved were MPs, most had some association with one or other of the Edwardian governments, and all were resolute opponents of the Spanish marriage.[199]

  Because of the sporadic way in which this conspiracy developed, there are a number of uncertainties about its precise aims. According to later testimony, one of the conspirators (William Thomas, a former clerk of the privy council) had spoken of assassinating the queen, but he was immediately ruled out of order. The government later claimed that it was a Protestant plot, intending to rescue and reinstate Jane Grey, but Jane was already a thoroughly discredited cause, and although some Protestants were undoubtedly involved, no one attempted to make an issue of religion at the time.[200] During the planning of the rebellion, and through the rebellion itself and the trials that followed its collapse, the protagonists claimed that their sole aim had been to force the queen to abandon her intended marriage by a display of political and military force. They may have been honest, but some of them at least must have known Mary’s famous obstinacy and realised that it would be easier to break her than to make her bend. They were alleged to have been in touch with Elizabeth, and had certainly consulted the French ambassador.[201] Had the plot developed the momentum that its originators had hoped to find, it would probably have resulted in Mary’s overthrow, with French support, and her replacement by her younger sister – in which case Mary might well have been ‘sent to the Emperor’ as she had once desired.

  However, everything went wrong. One of the plotters – it is not known who – approached the Earl of Devon, who was deeply and rather publicly chagrined that the queen was showing no interest in him. He expressed sympathy, and apparently offered support. How much Courtenay knew is unclear, but he knew that dissent was stirring and that rebellion was intended. Both the lord chancellor and Simon Renard had their ears to the ground, and picked up tremors. Knowing his man, Gardiner sent for Courtenay and extracted from that weak and foolish young man whatever it was that he knew. At the same time Renard, overreacting as usual to rumours of French machinations, advised the queen to take urgent steps to protect herself against a mixture of invasion and insurrection.[202] In so doing he wrong-footed the lord chancellor, who was by no means convinced that the situation was either desperate or urgent, and who was trying to protect Edward Courtenay from himself. On 12 January 1554, when the council first began to exhibit signs of anxiety about rumours emerging from Devon, he tried to calm things down, and as a result was later accused (by Renard) of having been in league with the conspirators.

  The rebels’ plan, which was still embryonic at this stage, was for a threefold demonstration of force, to be raised in Leicestershire, Devon and Kent, and converging on London. This was not supposed to happen until Easter, by which time it was hoped that French backing would also be in place. However, as Noailles reported on 12 January, ‘the Queen and the Lords of her Council are working to break up the plot … and thus those who are in [it] will have to take up arms sooner than they think’.[203] One of the plotters, Sir Peter Carew, had been testing the water in the south-west by circulating alarming rumours about what the soldiers accompanying a Spanish prince would get up to on their arrival. He created some panic, but no will to resist. However, when he was summoned to the council to explain himself, his fellows naturally assumed that all was about to be revealed. Attempts were therefore made to create premature explosions in both Leicestershire and Kent, where mines had supposedly been laid. The protagonists in Leicestershire were the Duke of Suffolk and his two brothers, Thomas and John Grey. The duke’s involvement was an act of both folly and ingratitude, and was to prove fatal to himself, his daughter and his son-in-law, but it accomplished precisely nothing. No one responded to their trumpets, and within days all of them were lodged in the Tower.

  Only in Kent did the cry ‘no foreign king’ awaken an actual physical response. The plotter in this instance was Sir Thomas Wyatt, and he had a network of friends and considerable influence in the county.[204] On 19 January a group of disaffected gentlemen met at Wyatt’s home – Allington Castle – and the following day mobilisation began. By the 22nd the council had been alerted. ‘We do understand that they pretend to be … our loyal subjects and that they have assembled our people only for the impeachment of the marriage …’ Influenced by Gardiner, negotiation was offered, but that was the last thing Wyatt wanted. He was trying to raise a power, and sweet reasonableness did not suit him at all. He rejected the overture, and by the 28th had about 3,000 men under arms. On the same day that venerable warrior, the Duke of Norfolk, set out from London with a hastily assembled force to confront what was now clearly a rebellion. Unfortunately most of his troops consisted of the London militia, the so-called trained bands, who were strongly sympathetic to Wyatt. On the 29th at Rochester Bridge they deserted en masse to the rebels, leaving the duke and a handful of the royal guard to extricate themselves as best they could.[205] This was not only a major setback in itself, it also cast considerable doubt upon the loyalty of the capital, and the loss of London would have been a major disaster. Loyal retinues had been summoned, but hardly any had yet arrived, and if Wyatt had followed Norfolk’s defeat with an immediate advance upon London, he might have won. However, he delayed for three days and in that time his opportunity (if it ever existed) disappeared.

  After the desertion of the Londoners, Mary was bombarded with conflicting advice. Most of her council appear to have thought that she should abandon the city and retreat to a place of greater safety. Renard thought otherwise, and in this case he was right. Mary was never short of courage when her mind was made up, and on 1 February she went to the Guildhall and made a rousing speech, calling upon the citizens’ loyalty. Much of what she said was disingenuous, if not dishonest, but it did not matter.[206] The Tudor magic worked, and when Wyatt reached Southwark on 3 February, he found London Bridge closed against him. For three days he hesitated, trying to make contact with his friends in the city, and then on the 6th he marched up river to Kingston Bridge in order to approach London directly from the west. By this time the retinues of such loyal peers as the Earl of Pembroke and the Marquis of Winchester were in place, and when Wyatt reached Temple Bar he found a sizeable force arrayed against him. The court was at St James’, and there was a brief panic, but almost no fighting.[207] When it became clear that all the city gates were securely held, and there was not going to be a sympathetic rising in London, Sir Thomas and his colleagues surrendered, and as many of his men as could do so simply faded away, leaving about 500 in government hands. In spite of this anticlimax, the danger had been acute for a few days, and it remained to be seen what lessons the queen would draw.

  MARY’S GUILDHALL SPEECH, 31 January 1554

  But her Highness doubting that London, being her Chamber and a city holden of dear price in her princely heart, might, by WYAT and such ruffens as were with him, be in danger of spoil, to the utter ruin of the same: her Highness therefore, as a most tender and loving Governess, went the same day in her royal person to the Guild Hall to foresee those perils.

  Where, among other matters proceeding from her incomparable wisdom, her Grace declared how she had sent that day two of her Privy Council to the traitor WYAT: desirous
rather to quiet their tumult by mercy than by the justice of the sword to vanquish: whose most Godly heart fraight[ed] with all mercy and clemency. Abhorred from all effusion of blood, Her Highness also there showed the insolent and proud answer returned from WYAT: whereat the faithful citizens were much offended; and in plain terms defied him as a most rank traitor, with all his conjurates.

  And touching the marriage, her Highness affirmed that nothing was done herein by herself alone, but with consent and advisement of the whole Council, upon deliberate consultation, that this conjunction and Second Marriage should greatly advance this realm (whereunto she was first married), to much honour, quiet and gain.

  ‘For,’ quod her Grace, ‘I am already married to this Common Weal and the faithful members of the same, the spousal ring where of I have on my finger: which never hitherto was, nor hereafter shall be, left off. Protesting unto you nothing to be more acceptable to my heart, nor more answerable to my will, than your advancement in wealth and welfare, with the furtherance of GOD’S glory.’ And to declare her tender and princely heart towards them she promised constantly not to depart from them, although by her Council she had been much moved to the contrary: but would remain near and prest to adventure the spense* of her royal blood in defence of them.