Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  There is no doubt that the religious reforms had the active support of the young king. That fact, in a sense, gave Mary Tudor her opportunity. Writing to express her horror at the changes quickly imposed on the celebration of the Mass (communion in both kinds for laity as well as clergy, and a denial of the real presence), she insisted that she would ‘remain an obedient child’ to her father’s ordinances, until such time as her brother should ‘have perfect years of discretion’: a waiting game. The more evangelical the doctrine propounded, the more furiously Mary’s household practised according to the old forms. But for a time she was given a measure of leeway, with Edward’s council ever conscious of her watchful Habsburg relatives.

  When, late in 1549, ‘Protector’ Somerset was deposed from the pre-eminent position he had taken upon himself, there were rumours Mary would become her half-brother’s regent. Instead John Dudley, a successful military commander and fellow reformer, thrust himself into power. As the new forces on the council struck an alliance with France, sidelining the Habsburg interest, Mary was placed under increasing pressure to cease having the Mass said, even in her private household.

  Even before this, Mary had felt her position to be sufficiently precarious that she told the Habsburg ambassador she might need to flee the country. In 1550, it seemed that would indeed become a necessity, and a plot was hatched between Mary Tudor, the ambassador, and Mary of Hungary, who sent three ships to stand by off the Essex coast, waiting to snatch her away.

  Edward VI wrote indignantly of how ‘you, our nearest sister’ wished ‘to break our laws and set them aside deliberately and of your own free will . . . I will see my laws strictly obeyed’. By contrast, the Christmas celebration of 1550 brought the king’s other sister Elizabeth to London ‘with a great suite of gentlemen and ladies’, escorted by a hundred of the king’s horse and formally welcomed by the council. The point being, as the imperial ambassador bitterly pointed out, to show that she who had embraced the new religion had ‘become a very great lady’. Elizabeth was preferred to Mary by the new elite, being ‘more of their kidney’.

  Elizabeth’s image as a virtuous Protestant princess had been somewhat besmirched, less than two years before, by the scandal of her ‘affair’ with Thomas Seymour, the brother of Protector Somerset, who had married the widowed Katherine Parr. It started out as a distasteful story of bedroom romps in which the forty-year-old Seymour smacked the teenaged Elizabeth’s bare backside. But when Katherine Parr died after giving birth to Seymour’s child, it became clear Seymour sought to marry Elizabeth, a girl with a claim to the throne.

  The early months of 1549 saw what must, for the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth, have been a terrifying official inquiry, with her servants, including her governess and surrogate mother Kat Ashley, incarcerated in the Tower. She herself fought free, although Seymour went to the block. Elizabeth’s famous comment that ‘this day died a man of much wit and little judgement’ is probably apocryphal but she had shown that when danger threatened, she could act not from the heart but from the head.

  The Seymour affair may have reinforced the lesson her mother’s fate could have taught her: that sex is dangerous. For the moment, she concentrated on displaying the kind of maidenly modesty that would speedily ensure her complete rehabilitation in the eyes of Edward VI’s court. Kat Ashley’s husband recalled the ‘free talk’ and ‘trim conferences’ which took place between Elizabeth and those she gathered around her, notably her tutor Roger Ascham. She appeared in the demure garb that befitted Edward’s ‘sweet sister Temperance’, deliberately positioning herself in contrast to the Catholic Mary.

  When, in March 1551, Mary came to London, she rode through the streets escorted by a host of gentlefolk, each carrying their rosary. The council reacted, at first, merely with a war of attrition against members of Mary’s household. Soon, however, she was under such pressure that Mary of Hungary wrote to the imperial ambassador that if they took the Mass away from Mary Tudor she would have to endure it but if they tried to force her into ‘erroneous practices . . . it would be better for her to die than to submit’.

  Once again, however, all the participants drew back from the brink. This was in part because of continental troubles that entailed a need to secure England’s wool trade with the Netherlands, although Mary of Hungary, afraid England would join with France, proposed invading England to place Mary Tudor on the throne and secure the precious trade that way.1 Edward’s councillors were no doubt conscious that Mary was still, by the terms of their father’s will, her brother’s heir. This consciousness was about to grow more acute as 1552 turned to 1553 and Edward caught first one cold, then another, which he failed to shake off.

  As his health worsened, the young king, committed to his position as defender of the reformed faith, was for obvious reasons determined his throne should not pass to Mary. If it did, Edward told a reluctant lord chief justice, ‘it would be all over for the religion whose fair foundation we have laid’.

  Less obviously, he determined that Elizabeth had also to be excluded, despite her adherence to the new faith. Elizabeth, he explained, was the daughter of a disgraced woman ‘more inclined to couple with a number of courtiers rather than reverencing her husband, so mighty a King’. Perhaps the truth was that Elizabeth Tudor was too much her father’s daughter to consent to the overturning of his will, or that John Dudley, now running England behind the cloak of the royal council, knew she would never be his puppet.

  More probably, it was because, still unmarried, she could yet be married to a Catholic prince, and (such was the perception) thus find her country returned to Catholicism. If Edward’s sisters married abroad, their ‘stranger’ husband would, as Edward put it, work to have the laws and customs of his own native country ‘practised and put in use within this our realm . . . which would then tend to the utter subversion of the commonwealth of this our realm, which God forbid’. Better the princesses should be ‘taken by God’ than that they should so imperil the true religion, thundered one of Edward’s bishops supportively.

  Instead it was Edward’s intention ‘to appoint as our heir our most dear cousin Jane’. The eldest daughter of Frances Brandon, eldest daughter of Henry VIII’s younger sister Mary, Jane Grey was not only herself ardently Protestant but had recently been married to Guildford Dudley, John Dudley’s son.

  Not that Edward wanted to leave his throne even to Jane, a safely Protestant and safely married woman. The irony is that, because of the efforts his father and grandfather made to clear the Tudor path of any potential rivals, he had little choice. With Edward’s death imminent, questions of whether a woman could succeed were irrelevant. The only question was which woman would?

  A paper in Edward VI’s handwriting, entitled ‘My device for the succession’, followed his father’s will in excluding the Scottish line descended from Henry VIII’s elder sister Margaret Tudor; a line which was now represented by the Catholic Mary Stuart. The line of Henry’s younger sister Mary had likewise so far produced only females, since Frances Brandon had no sons. Edward’s original ‘device’ had been that the throne should pass not to Lady Jane herself but to her ‘heirs male’. Events, however, overtook him. In May, with the king’s health visibly worsening, he altered ‘the heirs male of the Lady Jane’ to ‘Lady Jane or the heirs of her body’.

  The so-called gynocracy debate had not been silent in these years, as witness Sir Thomas Elyot’s Defence of Good Women, written in the 1530s and published in 1540, which defended Katherine of Aragon and her daughter’s right of succession. And witness too the English publication, in 1542, of the volume Thomas Agrippa had dedicated to Margaret of Austria. With the birth of Edward, the pamphlet debate had seemed an intellectual game, rather than a real consideration of political possibilities.

  What had been a game was, however, about to become reality.

  PART V

  1553–1560

  A Queen ought to be chosen when she shall be wedded of the most honest kindred and people. For often
times the daughters follow the teachings and manners of them that they be descended from . . . A Queen ought to keep her daughters in all chastity. For we read of many maidens that for their virginity have been made queens.

  The Game and Play of the Chess, William Caxton’s translation of Jacobus de Cessolis, ?1474

  31

  ‘Herculean daring’

  England, 1553 – 1554

  Mary Tudor’s half-brother Edward VI had died on 6 July 1553, having survived their father Henry VIII by only six years and now another girl had been proclaimed queen. Lady Jane Grey, the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s younger sister, had been nominated to the crown by Edward’s will. But Mary Tudor, Henry’s eldest daughter, was determined she should never be crowned.

  The move that followed, wrote Robert Wingfield in his Vita Mariae Angliae Reginae (Life of Queen Mary of England) ‘should have been judged and considered one of Herculean rather than womanly daring, since to claim and secure her hereditary right, the princess was being bold as to tackle a powerful and well-prepared enemy . . .’

  For too many of her thirty-seven years, Mary Tudor had been able to mount only a passive, if stubborn, resistance to the blows life had dealt her. But in 1553 she had a chance to act. To act as her mother Katherine had wanted; and act as her grandmother Isabella had done. Most of her contemporaries thought she was mad when she unfurled her standard at the castle of Framlingham in Suffolk and had herself proclaimed queen. But everything in Mary Tudor’s heritage told her the crown was a prize worth fighting for.

  Mary set up her rival banner on the very day after the royal council proclaimed Jane queen. Many flocked to what they saw as the true Tudor monarchy. As the Genoese merchant Baptista Spinola reported: ‘the hearts of the people are with Mary, the Spanish Queen’s daughter’. To cooler observers the thing seemed impossible. The Habsburg ambassadors reported that all the country’s forces were in the hands of the men who had proclaimed Jane Grey. But as Mary rode hard across country, those hostile forces close behind her, the people rallied to her standard.

  As it became clear King Henry’s daughter would not passively accept what many saw as a perversion of the natural order, the magnates of East Anglia – Sir Richard Southwell and the Earl of Sussex, the nobles and the knights – came to join her, mustering their local forces. On 12 July she reached Framlingham, a castle she had only recently acquired and a great fortress that might have been designed for just such an eventuality. As the imperial ambassador triumphantly reported: ‘A great concourse of people were moved by their love for her to come and promise to support her to the end.’ Local justices came; ordinary people brought cattle instead of money. In Orwell harbour, a squadron of five ships went over to her when the common sailors mutinied against their officers. Mary Tudor issued a proclamation, ‘not doubting that all our true and faithful subjects will so accept us, take us, and obey us as their natural and liege sovereign lady and Queen’.

  In London meanwhile, even the members of the royal council who had pressed Lady Jane Grey to the throne were beginning to suffer ‘a kind of remorse’. On 18 July the councillors holding the Tower, where Jane was lodged for safety, turned it over to the supporters of Queen Mary, only too relieved to abandon a policy of which they had never really approved. The next day, in London, Mary Tudor was proclaimed queen, and on the 21st, John Dudley – Jane Grey’s father-in-law and the man behind her elevation to the throne – himself threw his cap into the air and hailed Mary’s sovereignty. In the Tower, the trappings of sovereignty were stripped from Lady Jane

  Enclosed at Hatfield, Mary’s half-sister Elizabeth Tudor had taken no part in the affray. Instead, she wrote to Mary, offering her congratulations. To have staked a claim of her own to the throne would have been neither a practical nor, for her, ethical possibility. While many supported Mary from civil loyalty rather than Catholic faith, many of the Protestant party might have followed Jane rather than Elizabeth. More importantly, by the dynastic rules to which Elizabeth herself subscribed, the throne, for the moment, belonged to Mary; their father had willed it so. Although Elizabeth may already have hoped that the much older Mary would not hold it indefinitely.

  Mary Tudor made her royal entry into London on 3 August, resplendent in purple velvet and satin, as a contemporary chronicle reported, ‘all thick set with goldsmith’s work and great pearls’. Elizabeth and her entourage rode directly behind her. There were also ‘a great number of other ladies’, a sign that under a female ruler the women directly around the monarch’s person would come more to the fore.

  Even at that moment Queen Mary’s sex caused controversy. Some of Edward VI’s councillors suggested the coronation should be postponed until parliament had confirmed Mary’s legitimacy. England had not had a ruling queen since Saxon days. In 1135, when William the Conqueror’s granddaughter Matilda had attempted to succeed her father, it sparked a long civil war with her cousin, Stephen. Matilda was never crowned, having in the end to be content with the title ‘Lady of the English’ and an agreement that after Stephen’s death the crown would pass to her son, not his. The idea that women could thus transmit their claim to the throne, as Margaret Beaufort had transmitted hers to her son Henry VII, was much less controversial than the idea they might take it themselves.

  Other powerful women in first half of the sixteenth century had been regents rather than queens regnant and the idea that a woman might deputise for (or exercise influence on) a man was more acceptable than the idea that she might rule in her own right. Even then, only a century earlier, the attempts of Margaret of Anjou to govern on behalf of her incapable husband had been met with chauvinistic horror.

  Isabella of Castile represented a precedent that must have been ever-present in her granddaughter Mary’s mind, but four centuries after Matilda, the Aristotelian concept of society as a family, ruled over by a father, still held sway in most Western societies. There wasn’t even the language: a queen was a king’s wife.1 Both Mary and Elizabeth Tudor would describe themselves as ‘princes’, while a successful woman was often described as being no longer wholly belonging to her sex.

  In these puzzling first days of Queen Mary’s rule, care would be taken to declare she had the same authority as a male ruler. But, reported Simon Renard, the new imperial ambassador, when Mary summoned her council before embarking on the extensive coronation festivities, she sank to her knees before them. ‘She had entrusted her affairs and person, she said, to them . . .’ They were taken aback by this ‘humble and lowly discourse, so unlike anything ever heard before’. Unlike anything they would have heard from her father Great Harry, or even from his son.

  How to crown the queen; with what rituals and festivities? With those of a king – nearly. The ceremonial was taken from the usual manual for such ceremonies, the Liber Regalis, but with a curious admixture of messages. Where a king would ride through the streets on the day before his coronation, Mary Tudor was carried in a litter. Tudor women habitually kept their hair bound but hers was loose, as a consort queen’s would be, in token of her fertility. Mary wanted to invoke the idea that she was married to her country.

  A peer deputised for her at the ceremony to create fifteen new Knights of the Bath; it was obviously inappropriate for a woman to partake in the bathing and robing rituals that marked an important stepping stone of masculine chivalry. But the next day, 1 October, Mary proceeded to Westminster Abbey, with the Earl of Arundel carrying the sword of state before her; the same military symbol that had caused such controversy at the coronation of Mary’s grandmother, Isabella, some seventy years before.2

  Mary’s garments were not notably different from a king’s ceremonial robes. Like any male king, she prostrated herself on the floor of Westminster Abbey, was anointed ‘on the shoulders, on the breast, on the forehead and on the temples’, crowned and presented with all the ceremonial regalia. But she merely touched the spurs, instead of attaching them to her heels, and while she was given the king’s sceptre to hold in her right hand she a
lso held in her left ‘a sceptre wont to be given to queens, which is surmounted by doves’. A queen consort, rather than regnant, traditionally had a pacific and intercessory role.

  This coronation was always going to be something of a mish-mash and not only because of the sovereign’s sex. In religious terms, Mary Tudor was determined to put the clock back to where it had been before her father’s break from Rome but it would take time for her changes to come into effect.

  An evangelical sermon preached one week outside St Paul’s Cathedral was followed by a strongly Catholic one the next; the Catholic preacher had, amid some difficulty, to be rescued from the furious crowd. On 18 August Mary issued a proclamation that while she herself would always practise the religion ‘which God and the world knoweth she hath ever professed from her infancy’, because ‘of her gracious disposition and clemency her highness mindeth not to compel any her said subject thereunto unto such time as further order by common consent’.

  No one can have thought it was going to rest there. Indeed, Mary told one foreigner she wished to restore papal authority but that, as yet, such matters should not be spoken of publicly. In August she wrote to the pope, professing that ‘his Holiness had no more loving daughter than herself’.

  Elizabeth Tudor later described the relationship between queen and country as a marriage. In Mary’s case the honeymoon was over almost immediately, as too was the brief community of interest between the sisters. The imperial ambassador Renard was soon reporting that Mary wanted to disbar Elizabeth from the succession because of her ‘heretical opinion and illegitimacy, and characteristics in which she resembled her mother’. Anne Boleyn ‘had caused great trouble in the kingdom’ and Mary was all too sure Anne’s daughter would do the same ‘and particularly that she might imitate her mother in being a French partisan’. Queen Mary, Renard noted, ‘still resents the injuries inflicted on Queen Katherine, her lady mother, by the machinations of Anne Boleyn’.