Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  In 1555, on much the same note, another woman resigned her post. Recent years had been hard for Mary of Hungary, the regent of the Netherlands, forced increasingly to act as amanuensis to her depressed and ailing brother Charles V, who was planning to set aside his titles and responsibilities and retire to a religious life. Mary had to assist him in his struggles to determine how best to bequeath his immense lands and to attempt to heal the breach this issue was making within the Habsburg family.1

  Knowing that their widowed sister Eleanor, the dowager Queen of France, would join Charles in his retirement, Mary of Hungary was determined to make a third. Once, familial duty (to which she and Eleanor both subscribed) had seen them placed on opposite sides of Europe’s great political divide. But now sisterhood trumped politics at last. Mary had asked to resign her position before but now she argued her case in an extraordinary letter:

  . . . it is impossible for a woman in peacetime, and even more in time of war, to do her duty as regent towards God, her sovereign, and her own sense of honour. For in peacetime it is unavoidable, in addition to all the meetings and cares of daily affairs which any government brings with it, that whoever guides the government of these provinces must mix with as many people as possible, in order to win the sympathy of both nobility and middle classes . . . For a woman, especially if she is a widow, it is not feasible to mix thus freely with people. Of necessity I myself have had to do more in this respect than I really wanted. Moreover, a woman is never so much respected and feared as a man, whatever her position.

  If one is conducting the government of these countries in time of war, and one cannot in person enter the battle, one is faced with an insoluble problem. One receives all the blows and is blamed for all mistakes made by others . . .

  It was a theme to which she would return: that ‘as a woman I was compelled to leave the conduct of war to others’. It was one other female rulers knew.2

  Mary of Hungary: ‘a woman of fifty who has served for at least twenty-four years’, she wrote, and served, moreover, ‘one God and one master’, was finally allowed to have her way. Her brother was retiring and to serve his son, Philip, would be to find herself ‘learning my ABC all over again’. Philip of Spain had been slow to visit his Netherlands territories and Mary had already written to him tartly: ‘Anything is better than to wait until your lands are lost to you, one by one . . .’

  The ceremony by which, on 25 October, Mary quit her post and Philip took possession of the Netherlands, was emotive. Mary told the Estates General, with which she had so often been at odds that:

  if my capacities, my knowledge, and my powers had been equal to the good will, the love and the devotion with which I have given myself to this office, I know for certain that no ruler could have been better served and no land better governed than you.

  Preparing to leave the country she had governed for almost a quarter of a century, Mary of Hungary made her will. She concluded by requesting, with unexpected softness, that a certain gold heart that she wore, which had been left her by her long-dead husband, should be melted down and the proceeds given to the poor. It had been worn by two people who ‘though parted for a long time in body have never been so in love and affection’, so it was fitting that on her death ‘it should be consumed and change its nature as the bodies of these lovers have done’.

  The following autumn Mary travelled to Castile with her siblings (not without qualms, since Spain was foreign territory to her), but only eighteen months later, in February 1558, Eleanor died, leaving her lonely. Bereft, and despite her conflicted feelings about the responsibilities of public life, Mary sought to find herself another role as advisor to her niece Juana, Philip’s sister, who was acting as regent of Spain while he was in the north. But Juana rejected Mary’s offer with some coldness, saying, probably with truth, that Mary’s character would make it impossible for her to take the back seat.3

  Charles V and Philip sought to persuade Mary of Hungary to resume the regency of the Netherlands. ‘Explain to her what a support her presence will mean’, Philip wrote to an intermediary. ‘Finally, offer her a large income and great authority, and give her hope there will be peace, and that this will last a long time, as the rulers are all exhausted.’ Mary’s reluctant agreement was rendered irrelevant by her own death, eight months after her sister’s.

  33

  Sisters and rivals

  England, 1555–1558

  Mary of Hungary died on 18 October 1558. By that time, in England, another and far from reluctant woman was preparing to assume power. The second half of Mary Tudor’s reign was in some sense a battle between Mary and her sister Elizabeth – between Catholic and Protestant – and it was far from clear who would win.

  In the spring of 1555 Elizabeth Tudor was summoned from her imprisonment at Woodstock to Hampton Court, where her sister Mary triumphantly awaited the child who would sweep Elizabeth from the succession. There were rumours at the end of April that the queen had been delivered of a son, The bells rang out in joy. But it was a miscarriage – or worse, a mistake, a phantom pregnancy. Early in May the French ambassador heard that all the thirty-nine-year-old queen’s symptoms had been the result of ‘some woeful malady’.

  Mary Tudor’s mistake has been used to the detriment of her reputation; a sign of her obsessive personality, even a cause of comedy. But it would be fairer to blame the medical knowledge of the sixteenth century. Mary herself had only slowly been convinced by her doctors that she was pregnant – just as her mother Katherine had been convinced, on the occasion of her first miscarriage, that she was still carrying another baby.

  Through May, June and July Mary waited in her birthing suite, quietly emerging in August to hear that her husband Philip of Spain was going away. The Habsburg Empire was once again at war with France, and Philip was to assume his father’s duties. As emperor Charles V resigned to Philip first the lordship of the Netherlands and then the two Spanish crowns of Castile and Aragon, he sent a message of congratulation to Mary on ‘being able for the future to style herself the Queen of many and great crowns, and on her being no less their mistress than of her own crown of England’. But this was to make no distinction between the role of a queen regnant and of a consort.

  It was beginning to look likely that Mary Tudor would die childless, which left the succession in jeopardy. Ironically Elizabeth (heretic though she may be) was, from Spain’s viewpoint, a better candidate than the French-dominated Mary, Queen of Scots. A female could, after all – her brother Edward’s point – be safely married to a Catholic prince and converted that way.

  In November 1556 Elizabeth Tudor was invited to the court for Christmas but by the first week of December she was on her way back to Hatfield. She had almost certainly been instructed to marry a suitor of her brother-in-law Philip’s choosing: the titular Duke of Savoy, cousin-by-marriage to Philip of Spain, whose dukedom, however, had been seized by the French in 1536.

  Elizabeth seems swiftly to have refused. She never met the two Habsburg relatives (his cousin Christina of Denmark and his illegitimate half-sister Margaret, the Duchess of Parma), whom Philip sent over to persuade her. Christina, after her refusal to marry Henry VIII, and despite being in love with another man, had in 1541 been married off by her uncle Charles V to the heir to the duchy of Lorraine. Her husband had died early, however, and though Christina was regent for their young son, in 1552 the French had invaded Lorraine, taking the boy back to be brought up at the French court and causing Christina to flee back to the Netherlands and her aunt Mary of Hungary’s protection.

  Philip saw Elizabeth as a valuable pawn in Habsburg policy and his protection would shield Elizabeth for the rest of her sister’s reign. That protection was increasingly needed. Whether or not Mary believed the failure of her pregnancy was a sign of God’s displeasure, a sign that her country had to be cleansed, the fires of Smithfield, where heretics were burnt at the stake, have nevertheless defined ‘Bloody’ Mary’s posthumous reputation.

 
It was the Protestants who had the chance to write the history but the facts cannot be denied. The reigns of the Protestant Edward and Elizabeth each saw two heretics burnt (although others died for other religion-related crimes, including some two hundred Catholic priests or sympathisers under Elizabeth). Mary burnt almost three hundred. Mary’s initial instruction had been that the penalty should be exacted ‘without rashness’, but that obdurate heretics who refused to recant should die was an all but universal tenet. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Cranmer, who himself famously died in Mary’s fire, had prepared measures, at the end of Edward’s reign, to punish obstinate Catholics in the same way.

  The first man died in the fires on 1 February 1555. Some fifty women perished too, including the nightmare of the pregnant woman in the Channel Isles who gave birth at the stake only to have her baby flung back into the flames.

  The crunch for Mary (as for Elizabeth) may have been the question of conformity to the law. Unfortunately Calvin was at this moment urging true believers to declare their beliefs openly. There was also a political element to the story: some who claimed to act for the Protestant cause had found an unlikely ally in Catholic France.

  At the start of her reign Mary refused to accept that the interests of France and of the Habsburg Empire could never agree for long. Like the ladies of an earlier generation she had, within weeks of her accession, offered herself as a mediator. The French responded derisively but a year later, in 1554, Mary had by no means abandoned the idea; early in 1555 the French ambassador de Noailles believed her health had even been improved by hopes of a European peace. But when France and the Habsburgs finally agreed a short-lived truce in February 1556, Mary had played no role in the discussions, and now France was active in support of rebellion against Mary.

  By the autumn of 1556 France and the Habsburgs were once again at war, with a French army attacking the Netherlands. By March 1557 Philip had urgent reason to seek English support. He arrived at Greenwich on 19 March, to resume his marital duties and to persuade England into the war. Parliament and council had long opposed Mary’s desire to send troops and money to her husband’s fight; something the terms of the marriage treaty had been designed to prevent. But French support for yet another minor rebellion in England helped to change the minds of the English government: a support so ill-timed that it has been suggested the whole thing was the work of Spanish agent provocateurs.

  War against France, at this point, was war against the pope. Small wonder that the French ambassador commented that a distraught Mary was on the eve ‘of bankrupting either her own mind or her kingdom’. But some of the rhetoric of war was interesting. Thomas Stafford, the rebel leader, used as justification for his act the theory that Mary had broken the terms of her father’s will by marrying without the declared consent of the councillors Henry had appointed for the under-age Edward. (Absurd but noteworthy, in that it was not a charge ever likely to be levelled against a male monarch.) Mary, speaking to her council ‘expounded to them the obedience which she owed her husband and the power which he had over her as much by divine as by human law’.

  In June a herald was sent to the French court, to – literally – throw down the gauntlet. Henri II dismissively declared that:

  as the herald came in the name of a woman it was unnecessary for him to listen to anything further, as he would have done had he come in the name of a man to whom he would have replied in detail . . . ‘Consider how I stand when a woman sends to defy me to war.’

  But Philip was able to send to France a six-thousand-strong English army. He himself sailed from Dover on 6 July, never to return. The siege of Saint-Quentin was considered a notable Anglo-Spanish victory but the campaign went sour when, in January 1558, the French took Calais. England’s last remaining continental outpost had been in her possession for two centuries and its loss was a humiliation for England abroad, and a personal failure for Mary. The Protestant martyrologist John Foxe reported that, in her unhappy latter days, she told her trusted lady, Susan Clarencius, that although she regretted the absence of her husband Philip, it was Calais the embalmers would find engraved upon her heart.

  It was another lesson, and one Elizabeth Tudor was surely learning, that war was an evil to be avoided at all costs: a reason to be wary of foreign alliances, and foreign allies.

  In January 1558 Mary once again informed her husband that his last visit had left her pregnant. He expressed proper delight but probably few this time thought it anything other than a phantom pregnancy. By April Mary knew she had been mistaken; and everyone knew her half-sister Elizabeth was likely to be her heir. The Venetian ambassador had written the year before that ‘all eyes and hearts’ were turned towards Elizabeth as Mary’s successor, and that she or her people were found behind every plot. When in the late summer of 1558 it became clear that Mary was very ill, Elizabeth had a network waiting.

  At forty-two, Mary Tudor had endured a lifetime of difficult health, often beset by stress-related problems; something that was true of many of the women in the latter half of this story. In early October the queen’s condition worsened and on 28 October Mary added a codicil to her will. If she continued to have no ‘fruit nor heir of my body’, she would be followed by ‘my next heir and successor by the Laws and Statutes of this realm’: Elizabeth.

  Philip’s special ambassador, De Feria, rushed to Hatfield, where he found Elizabeth impatiently waiting. Wanting Elizabeth to acknowledge her debt to Philip and Spain, he instead heard her declare that the affection of the people would bring her to the throne; an affection Mary had lost ‘because she had married a foreigner’. De Feria warned that ‘she is determined to be governed by no one’. And so it would prove.

  In the early morning of 17 November, Mary Tudor slipped quietly away. The blame game would quickly take over her memory. By 1588, the Protestant exile, Bartholomew Traheron, could write that she was ‘spiteful, cruel, bloody, wilful, furious, guileful, stuffed with painted processes, with simulation and dissimulation, devoid of honesty, devoid of upright dealing, devoid of all seemly virtues’. Five years after Mary’s death, in his Book of Martyrs, John Foxe would have his say.

  The Venetian ambassador Michieli had written of Mary Tudor that:

  in certain things she is singular and without an equal; for not only is she brave and valiant unlike other timid and spiritless women, but so courageous and resolute, that neither in adversity nor peril did she ever display or commit any act of cowardice or pusillanimity, maintaining always, on the contrary, a wonderful grandeur and dignity . . .

  But his description was coloured by the fact he believed her sex ‘cannot becomingly take more than a moderate part in government’.

  The gynocracy debate had, moreover, just seen its most famous contribution. In the spring of 1558 the Scottish reformer John Knox published his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, claiming that to put a crown on a woman’s head was as inappropriate ‘as to put a saddle upon the back of an unruly cow’: ‘the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice’. It was, he wrote, ‘a thing most repugnant to nature that women rule and govern over men’.1

  Women in general, Knox declared, were ‘weak, frail, impatient, feeble and foolish: and experience hath declared them to be inconstant, variable, cruel and lacking the spirit of counsel and regiment’. Mary Tudor was the ‘horrible monster Jezebel’. Nor was Knox’s the only voice; other writers, such as Christopher Goodman, Anthony Gilby and Thomas Becon, likewise linked their attacks on Mary’s Catholicism with her sex.

  But facts speak louder than words and the fact was that Mary Tudor had ruled England with a successful assumption of authority. As John Aylmer wrote in his 1559 refutation of John Knox (An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjectes, agaynst the Late Blowne Blaste, concerninge the Government of Wemen): ‘it is not in England so dangerous a matter to have a woman ruler as men take it to be’. Mary Tudor, granddaughter of Isabella of Castile, had proved it was a possibility. That was
her legacy, her gift to the women who came after her. Although she never wanted it to be her Tudor half-sister Elizabeth, who would benefit most immediately.

  34

  ‘if God is with us’

  France, 1558–1560

  As Mary Tudor died and Elizabeth Tudor came to the throne, in France the three women who would one day be called upon to take charge of a realm still saw their future as subsumed in a husband’s authority. But Europe’s religious divides already underpinned the fabric of their lives, whether or not the process was plain to see.

  In April 1558, the fifteen-year-old Mary Stuart achieved the destiny for which she had been reared: marriage with François, the fourteen-year-old French dauphin. The recapture of Calais was a victory led by Mary’s Guise family and this was their reward. The ceremonies were spectacular, albeit that Mary’s vivid white-clad beauty showed up her new husband’s puny frailty.1

  ‘These nuptials really were considered the most regal and triumphant of any that have been witnessed in this kingdom for many years’, wrote the Venetian ambassador, ‘from the pomp and richness of the jewels and apparel both of the lords and ladies; or from the grandeur of the banquet and stately service of the table, or from the costly devices of the masquerades and similar revels’.

  At the state banquet that followed the ceremony, six clockwork-powered mechanical ships with silver masts sailed over the billowing cloth waves of a painted sea. Each was captained by a royal man, who invited aboard the lady of his choice. King Henri II chose Mary herself and the dauphin his mother, Catherine de Medici. Marie de Guise, unable to leave Scotland to be present at the ceremony, appointed her mother to represent her in the negotiations. But the important deal was the one made behind the scenes.

  The official marriage treaty (like those of Mary Tudor and of Isabella of Castile before her) carefully preserved the independence of the Scottish nation. But under the instruction of her Guise uncles the fifteen-year-old queen had some days earlier signed another, secret, treaty by which Scotland, should she die childless, would become the property of France. Would Elizabeth Tudor, even at fifteen, have signed away her country so blithely?