Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  As early as September 1553, Elizabeth felt it necessary to make the first move. Begging an interview with her sister, she pleaded mere ignorance of, rather than hostility to, the Catholic faith, ‘having been brought up in the creed which she professed’. She requested instructors. A few days later she attended Mary’s Chapel Royal, but made sure observers noted her ostentatiously ‘suffering air’. Very soon, the Venetian ambassador noted that Mary was treating her sister with fresh hostility. When Mary Tudor had parliament declare her parents’ marriage valid, old wounds reopened. As for the succession, Mary must have hoped that the problem would resolve itself naturally. When Elizabeth left court in December, her absence must have been the more welcome for the fact that her sister Mary was about to marry.

  Mary would declare that she had never, as a private individual, sought marriage, ‘but preferred to end her days in chastity’. Nevertheless Renard, at his first private audience, told Mary that his master Charles V was conscious that ‘a great part of the labour of government could with difficulty be undertaken by a woman’ and advised her to choose a husband quickly. But the question of consort was seen, with good reason, as being one of the central problems for a female monarchy.

  The book of Genesis gave it as part of Eve’s punishment: ‘thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee’. The fear was that the husband of a queen regnant would be master not only of her but of her country. Indeed, a preface to A Glasse of the Truth (a pamphlet in which Henry VIII was widely supposed to have had a hand, supporting his repudiation of Katherine of Aragon) had declared that if a woman shall chance to rule, ‘she cannot continue long without a husband, which by God’s law must then be her governor and head, and so finally shall direct the realm’.3

  Mary Tudor faced the same arguments that would later revolve around the famously vexed question of Elizabeth Tudor’s marriage: the dangers of faction if she married within the realm, and the danger that England would be subjugated to a foreign power if she married out of it. But in Mary’s case the clamour seemed to sound less loudly. Not only if, but who, Mary would marry was decided quickly.

  In her childhood Mary Tudor had been betrothed to her cousin Charles V, but although Charles was now a widower, his health made another marriage unlikely. Charles’s son Philip, his father’s regent in Spain, was a widower, having made a first marriage with his cousin, the short-lived Maria of Portugal. More than a decade younger than Mary, he was as Catholic as she. This last was important: the Counter-Reformation had given a new impetus to the international Catholic community. But Protestantism, too, was now more forceful. Lutheranism looked like yesterday’s creed, and ‘the wolves’ were coming out of Geneva, with the harsher doctrines of Calvin on their lips.

  Charles V proposed Philip as Mary’s husband almost before the ink was dry on the letters that announced her accession and at the end of October 1553, Mary agreed. The Venetian ambassador reported that ‘Being born of a Spanish mother she was always inclined towards that nation, scorning to be English and boasting of her descent from Spain’. The imperial ambassador, Renard, was quickly established as her secret counsellor, with Mary begging him (‘If it were not too much trouble for you’) to come secretly to her privy rooms under cloak of darkness. Mary of Hungary had sent both the able and ingratiating Renard to speed the matter and Titian’s portrait of Philip to England.

  Only a fortnight after Queen Mary agreed to marry Philip of Spain, parliament presented a petition that she would reconsider and marry within the realm. Mary’s reply was singular, based less on the protection of a powerful Spanish alliance than on her personal preference. ‘Where private persons in such cases follow their own private tastes, sovereigns may reasonably challenge an equal liberty.’ In November a deputation of MPs tried, unavailingly, to dissuade Mary from the Spanish marriage.

  There were, everyone agreed, to be provisos to the match. Mary told Renard that in her private capacity she would love and obey her husband, ‘but if he wished to encroach in the government of the kingdom she would be unable to permit it’. This was essentially the deal Isabella of Castile had made but it would inevitably have practical difficulties. Isabella’s partnership with Ferdinand of Aragon had worked not only because of personal compatibility, but because hers was by far the larger kingdom. Here, the balance of power lay with Philip of Spain.

  In France, Henri II said that once Philip was married to Mary, ‘he shall be King himself, and then what councillors will or dare counsel against his King’s pleasure and will?’ Henri told Mary’s ambassador that ‘a husband may do much with his wife’, and that it would be hard for a woman ‘to refuse her husband anything that he shall earnestly require of her’, adding that he knew marital authority to be ‘very strong with ladies’.

  Henri was, naturally, partisan. It was the old problem: an Anglo-Habsburg alliance was a dangerous prospect for France, which would thus be surrounded. But his opinion was shared by many. Mary’s ambassador was accordingly instructed by her council to stress that ‘if the marriage took place the government of the realm should always remain in her Majesty and not in the prince’. Bishop Gardiner preached that Philip ‘should be rather a subject than otherwise; and that the Queen should rule all things as she doth now’.

  The final terms of the marriage treaty – published in January 1554 to allay popular concern and ratified by parliament in April – stipulated that Philip could not introduce foreign office holders, nor involve England in foreign wars. If Mary died without children, he would have no further role in English affairs. Should a child be born of the marriage, it would inherit not only England but the Low Countries. (Spain would go to Don Carlos, the son of Philip’s first marriage.) Terms highly advantageous to England – in theory. But the practice might be a different story, not least as Philip, when he saw the terms, made a secret but solemn vow not to consider himself bound by them.

  From the start, the Spanish marriage met the deepest public hostility. When an imperial embassy arrived in London in the first days of 1554, even the schoolboys in the streets threw snowballs at the ambassadors. Within weeks came news of the so-called Wyatt rebellion – a series of coordinated risings planned to take place across the country – the aim of which was to dethrone Mary and replace her with Elizabeth. But the plot leaked in early January, and it was only Sir Thomas Wyatt himself (the son of the poet, Anne Boleyn’s admirer) who, at the end of that month, marched on London with a Kentish army.

  Some of Mary’s own troops went over to Wyatt, rather than be ruled by ‘Spaniards or strangers’. But Queen Mary showed herself to advantage in this crisis, even asking to go and fight in person. Riding to rally her troops in the City, she had, she said, been wedded to her realm at her coronation, ‘the spousal ring whereof I wear here on my finger, and it never has and never shall be left off’:

  I cannot tell how naturally the mother loveth the child, for I was never mother of any. But certainly, if a prince and governor may as naturally and earnestly love her subjects, as the mother doth the child, then assure yourselves that I, being your lady and mistress, do as earnestly and tenderly love and favour you.

  In the same sentence, Mary figured herself as a mother and as a prince. It was the same sense of a monarch’s being above sex that allowed a king to be described as a nursing father. Mary promised, furthermore, that unless both houses of parliament were content that the marriage would be for the benefit of the whole realm, ‘then I will abstain from Marriage while I live’.

  London stood; Wyatt surrendered his arms and was taken to the Tower. In February, Mary reluctantly consented to the execution of the girl who had so briefly been raised up to supplant her, the hapless Jane Grey. In March Elizabeth Tudor, the intended beneficiary of Wyatt’s plot, was charged as an accessory and found herself a prisoner in the Tower. She must have felt she was following in her mother’s footsteps, in the most horrifying way.

  But she admitted nothing. Such written evidence as existed proved nothing and when Wyatt
was executed on 11 April, his speech from the scaffold exonerated her completely. The terms of her imprisonment became lighter. When fresh guards appeared at the Tower early in May, she was still in a terrified state, asking whether Jane Grey’s scaffold had been taken away. But the guards were there to escort her away from the Tower, to house arrest in Woodstock where, warmed by the popular support shown her on the journey, she would spend a year in comfortable captivity.

  The parliament of April 1554 confirmed that the status of a ruling queen was identical with that of a king and that Mary would remain ‘sole and solely queen’ after her marriage. But when, at the end of July, Mary married Philip in Winchester Cathedral (the ceremonies based on those that had tied Katherine of Aragon to Prince Arthur in an earlier Anglo-Spanish alliance), the old Catholic marriage service saw her promising ‘to be compliant and obedient . . . as much in mind as in body’.

  Once again, however, the messages were infinitely mixed. At the feast which followed the ceremony Mary Tudor was served on gold plate and Philip of Spain on silver. But she endowed Philip with her worldly goods, while he endowed her only with his movable ones; that is, not his territories.

  As Philip moved into the rooms once known as the queen’s apartments, with Mary taking the king’s, it seemed as if Philip and his Spanish entourage were determined to prove that the worst fears of the English would not be fulfilled and to use his position as queen’s consort tactfully. On a personal level his behaviour was positively emollient. He had been warned to ‘caress’ the English gentry. Two days after his marriage, he assured the council that he was there to advise but that on any question ‘they must consult the Queen, and he would do his best to assist’. Mary for her part insisted that – in his advisory capacity – Philip should always be informed of the council’s discussions (by a note in Spanish or Latin, since he spoke no English), and that all Council papers were to be signed by him as well as her.

  Habsburg negotiators insisted that his name should precede hers on official documents: ‘Philip and Mary by the grace of God King and Queen of England’. They claimed that ‘no law human or divine, nor his highness’s prestige and good name’ would allow otherwise. A newly minted coin featured both their images, at the same height, with a single crown floating above their head. The Spanish believed that Philip would provide an element necessarily lacking in Mary’s female monarchy; that he would ‘make up for other matters which are impertinent to women’. But parliament would neither grant Philip a matrimonial crown nor any official authority. Philip was angered by this, although Mary seems to have understood that her people would never accept any alternative.

  In the autumn of 1554 Mary, ecstatic, was convinced she was pregnant with a child who would consolidate her marriage, confirm her husband’s status and ensure a Catholic future for the country. The parliament of November, however, confirmed measures to define, and limit, Philip’s powers as regent should Mary die in childbirth but leave a living child. Advised by a council of peers, he could have ‘rule, order and government’ of child and country during the child’s minority but could not call parliament, declare war or arrange the marriage of the child without the consent of the peers. It was the deal Margaret Tudor had in Scotland, effectively. Should both mother and child die, the default heir was Elizabeth. Mary herself was said to prefer Margaret Douglas (yet another woman), the child of Margaret Tudor’s second marriage but perhaps that was seen as an overthrow of the natural order, on the scale of Jane Grey.

  One of the matters on which Philip wished to help his wife was the full restoration of Catholicism, and of the pope’s authority. That was in part the reason he stayed in the country for a full year, considerably longer than had at first been expected. But here too Mary’s signals were considerably less simple than her later reputation might lead us to expect.

  Mary was not the backward-looking bigot of legend. She had been raised in the humanist tradition that pushed for reform with a small r; reform from within the Catholic church. Her concern to restore the Latin service and the centrality of the Mass did not prevent her placing more emphasis on preaching, education and the importance of good works than Catholic hardliners, who stressed the transformative power of religious ceremony alone, would allow. At the end of her reign she was still encouraging plans for a new English translation of the New Testament. She employed a number of Protestants in her service and remained close to Lady Anne Bacon, a noted Protestant.

  One huge sticking point was the question of church lands. Those who had profited from the dissolution of the monasteries were in no hurry to give back their booty. That also went for the Crown itself, to a degree. Here, Mary Tudor differed even from the man who became known as her chief advisor. Reginald Pole was her kinsman, with Plantagenet blood in his veins. Long exiled for his faith, he had years before, in Italy, been one of the group that hoped to bring about an accommodation between the Lutherans and the Catholic church. But by the 1550s his view had probably hardened; certainly, spirituali views were out of synchrony with tougher times. Pole insisted, from abroad, that all ecclesiastical property should be returned and that parliament should instantly restore papal supremacy. Mary understood that this was a political impossibility. Not until November 1554 was Pole was allowed to return to England as papal legate, and by this time, it was possible for a prayer for the pope to be included in parliament’s opening ceremonies.

  When Pole attended the court ceremonies which celebrated the country’s return to the Catholic fold, he made a speech praising Philip as a king of ‘great might, armour and force’ and spoke of how miraculously God had preserved ‘a virgin, helpless, naked and unarmed’: Mary. A few days later, at St Paul’s, Bishop Gardiner preached a sermon with an interesting view on the same theme. ‘When King Henry was head perhaps there was something to be said for it, but what a head was Edward . . . Nor could the Queen, being a woman, be head of the Church . . .’ Women were openly assuming rule as never before; women were finding themselves at the forefront of opposing sides of the religious divide. But the two positions did not necessarily agree.

  32

  ‘not one year of rest’

  Scotland, the Netherlands, 1554–58

  As Mary Tudor came to the throne, two other women – Marie de Guise and Mary of Hungary – occupied positions of power in western Europe. Neither, however, was finding her position easy.

  Inevitably, the effects of Mary Tudor’s accession and marriage were felt north of England’s border. Marie de Guise wrote politely to the new English queen, expressing the hope for a continued peace, and Mary Tudor answered in kind. But that was far from the whole story. They shared a Christian name and a faith but in terms of the great power struggle of Europe, their allegiances were very different: Marie’s to France and Mary’s to the Spanish Habsburg family.

  While Marie de Guise tried to steal support away from the governor of Scotland, Arran, and sought to recruit a powerful Scottish noble – the Earl of Lennox – to her side, Mary Tudor’s government was urging Lennox to double-cross her: to ‘secretly enter into communication with the Regent [Arran] against the Dowager, with a view not only to driving her from the country, but to making himself King if possible and throwing Scottish affairs into confusion’. So much for the sisterhood of queens.

  Marie was to be the winner. In December 1553 she sent an envoy to the French court to discuss the Scottish situation. France needed to ensure that Scotland was ruled by an ally more secure than the ever-uncertain Arran. The result was that increasing pressure was placed on Arran to resign and cede the regency to Marie and on 19 February 1554 he signed an agreement to do so.

  There were questions, also, as to the precise status and household of Mary, Queen of Scots in France, as she entered her teenage years. Marie’s brother, Cardinal de Guise, proposed that at just eleven (considerably younger than the usual age) she should be declared of age and ‘take up her rights’, including the right to appoint her own deputy; her mother, naturally.

  On 12
April 1554 Marie de Guise proceeded up from the palace of Holyrood to the Tolbooth, there to be solemnly invested with the Honours of Scotland: the sword, the sceptre, and the crown. In France, the young Mary, Queen of Scots wrote a neat showpiece letter to Queen Mary of England: ‘May it please God, there shall be a perpetual memory that there were two Queens in this Isle at the same time, as united in inviolate amity as they are in blood and near lineage’. In Scotland, Marie de Guise, now officially her daughter’s alter ego and Queen Regent of Scotland, rode back to Holyrood accompanied by all the accoutrements of male authority.

  Significantly, the French ambassador, the Sieur d’Oysel, King Henri’s representative, performed the ceremony. One of Marie’s first acts – replacing Arran’s choices with her own, mostly French, appointments – was to make d’Oysel lieutenant-governor. Once again a royal wife had to juggle the demands of her natal and her marital country; once again she saw them as identical. Once again, her Scots subjects would disagree.

  Marie’s concerns were to restore royal authority to a faction-ridden country, centralise government and improve the administration of justice (though she complained that Scotsmen, convinced the old ways were best, ‘would not endure it’). As Marie would later write to her brother, Cardinal de Guise in France:

  It is no small thing to bring a young nation to a state of perfection and to an unwonted subservience to those who wish to see justice reign . . . I can safely say that for twenty years past I have not had one year of rest, and I think that if I should say one month I should not be far wrong for a troubled spirit is the greatest trial of all . . .