Inglorious Royal Marriages

by Leslie Carroll

  Sir John Brydges, Lieutenant of the Tower of London, became the beneficiary of Jane’s prayer book. At his behest, she had penned an inscription to him shortly before her execution.

  “. . . Live still to die,” she wrote, “that by death you may purchase eternal life. . . . For, as the preacher sayeth, there is a time to be born and a time to die; and the day of death is better than the day of our birth. Yours, as the Lord knoweth as a friend, Jane Duddeley [sic].”

  She may never have liked her husband. She certainly hadn’t loved him. And his parents, the parties most responsible for her mismatched union to their dull and petulant mama’s boy, had brought her nothing but trouble. But when all is said and done, from the day they were united in wedlock to the day of their deaths, the girl the world knew then and still remembers only as Lady Jane Grey, acknowledging the legal and holy ties that, like it or not, bound them till their last breaths, referred to herself as Guildford’s wife, Jane Dudley.

  MARY I

  AND

  PHILIP II OF SPAIN

  MARRIED: 1554–1558

  Few royal marriages are as inglorious as Mary Tudor’s. Wed relatively late in life, she was in many ways as naive as her teenage counterparts who hoped for a love match filled with bouncing babies to continue the dynasty—only to be disappointed by a husband who secretly mocked her, found her physically repellent, and couldn’t get away from her fast enough, rendering her an international laughingstock. Might Mary have enjoyed a happier future without Philip of Spain?

  The first prospective marriage of Mary Tudor, the only surviving child of Henry VIII and his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, was arranged when the gray-eyed, golden-haired princess was barely potty-trained. Henry betrothed this apple of his eye to the dauphin of France, the first son of his rival François I, when Mary was only two years old.

  But political bedfellows changed over the years, so her father sought to shore up different international alliances as time went on. In 1522, when Mary was six, she was betrothed to her Spanish first cousin, Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. However, the lantern-jawed Charles, the son of her mother’s madly unhappy elder sister, known as “Juana la Loca”—was twenty-one years old at the time; he had no interest in waiting for a little girl to grow up before he could marry.

  Over the next few years, Henry would consider hitching young Mary to her Scottish first cousin James V, the son of his elder sister, Margaret, yoking his daughter to other French princes; or uniting her with the Duke of Milan, Francesco Sforza. All of it came to naught. Of course, back then, Henry assumed he would have sons to inherit his own throne, and that Mary’s marriage would merely be another necessary international alliance—a peace treaty, really—with one of England’s enemies.

  That was before Henry’s passion for Anne Boleyn led to his break with the Church of Rome over their refusal to nullify his marriage to Katherine, rendering Mary retroactively illegitimate. Mary’s own royal household was dismissed. She was stripped of her royal title, to be known henceforth only as the Lady Mary, and was compelled to dance attendance on her infant half sister, Anne’s daughter Elizabeth, whom she ever after resented. At her own peril, risking a charge of high treason, and her father’s immense and very public displeasure, Mary consistently denied the English clerics’ verdict that her mother had always lived in sin with her father and was not the true queen of England. Moreover, she refused to repudiate the Roman Church. Her “Spanish blood”—another dig at her beloved mother’s lineage, was blamed for her obstinacy. It was only under threat of death that Mary signed a confession on June 22, 1536, betraying her mother and torturing her soul with the admission that her father was the supreme head of the Church in England.

  The stress of obeying the dictates of her conscience nearly overwhelmed her. In midadolescence Mary had been a precious and precocious child, proficient in several languages as well as music and dance, who loved to hawk and hunt and was as passionate about jewelry and fine clothes as she was fond of gambling. By the time she reached her maturity, she was a frail and fragile young woman, small for her age and plagued with health problems, including violent headaches, stomach complaints, and irregular—and very painful—menses. Her self-esteem was permanently stunted. In nearly everything but her rock-solid faith in Catholicism, she was riddled with doubt.

  Although Henry had disinherited his daughters, his Third Succession Act of 1544 restored them to the line of succession: Their reigns would follow, in order of their birth, after the death of his only son, Edward. But when fifteen-year-old Edward was dying, he reordered the succession to favor their Protestant cousin Lady Jane Grey. After Jane succeeded Edward on July 9, 1553, Mary quickly mobilized her adherents, and within ten days Jane was deposed and Mary claimed her rightful place in the succession—and the crown.

  However, Mary did not make her formal entry into London until seven p.m. on August 3. Petite, woefully nearsighted, and missing many of her teeth, England’s first true queen regnant, a thirty-seven-year-old virgin, was resplendent in a gown of violet velvet and kirtle of purple satin “all thicke sett with gouldsmiths worke and great pearle,” according to a contemporary account. She wore “. . . a rich baldrick of gold pearl and stones about her neck, and a rich billement of stones and great pearl upon her head.” Her trailing sleeves and skirts were also embroidered with gold. Even her palfrey was trapped in a full-length cloth of gold caparison. Mary led a magnificent procession of nobles and courtiers to the Tower of London, where she laid claim to it as queen amid “a terrible and great shott of guns . . . lyk to an earthquake.” Following the celebratory cannonade, she released the political and religious prisoners that had long been held there, including her kinsman Edward Courtenay, a great-grandson of King Edward IV.

  Mary had a strong personality, and from the outset she intended to take an active role in the governance of her realm. Contrary to centuries of Protestant propaganda, she worked very well with her councilors and did not take her marching orders from Spain and her cousin Charles V and his emissaries. But winning the populace to her side as their new sovereign would be an uphill battle in every way. Becoming England’s first adult queen in her own right was difficult enough. In addition, Mary Tudor still clung piously to the Roman religion during a time of fervent evangelism. And, being half Spanish, she had indeed always been most comfortable around her mother’s Iberian attendants; the Spanish ambassadors to England had become her chief confidants, although they did not dictate her policies. Loyal to a fault, Mary also surrounded herself with trusted friends. Among them was the beloved cousin who had been raised in her household, Margaret Lennox, the daughter of her aunt Margaret Tudor from her marriage to Archibald Douglas. The Countess of Lennox became one of the most favored persons in the realm, the recipient of substantial largesse in the form of real estate and material goods.

  Mary’s coronation was an unprecedented event that was weeks in the making. On September 27, she and the Princess Elizabeth arrived at the Tower of London by barge escorted by a spectacular flotilla. For the September 30, 1553, journey from the Tower to Westminster Abbey, with the canopy of state above her head, Mary rode in a chariot covered in cloth of gold, preceded by a parade of barons, knights, judges, bishops, and councilors. Everyone was arrayed in sumptuous finery, a grand display of colorful silks, velvets, and cloth of silver and gold. Pageants were staged in her honor along the route. Mary wore a blue velvet gown trimmed with powdered ermine, although the grandeur of the image was somewhat marred when she had to clasp her headgear throughout the journey because the gold trelliswork cap and gilded garland studded with pearls and precious gemstones were too heavy for her small frame.

  Edward VI’s 1552 Act of Uniformity, parliamentary legislation designed to make England a more Protestant country, still remained in force, and Mary was about to be crowned as the supreme head of the Church. However, she had obtained absolution for her coronation to proceed as a full Catholic Mass from the pa
pal legate, her kinsman Reginald Pole. Wearing the traditional crimson velvet mantle in the manner of male monarchs, on October 1, 1553, Mary was crowned by her old friend Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester and Lord Chancellor. As she had refused to be anointed with oil that had been consecrated by one of Edward VI’s evangelical clerics, she had secretly secured specially consecrated oil from the bishop of Arras in Brussels. The vial arrived from the Low Countries in the nick of time.

  Mary’s coronation made history, because in a way, the participants were winging it: There was no existing precedent to crown a queen regnant of England. The five-hundred-year-old ceremony followed the same ritual for male rulers, investing Mary with all the powers granted to her predecessors. She adopted the royal motto “Veritas Temporis Filia”—“Truth Is the Daughter of Time”—meaning, perhaps, that in the fullness of time, she had been able to restore the truth about the legitimacy of her parents’ marriage, and by extension, her legitimacy as Henry and Katherine’s daughter, and as England’s rightful monarch.

  Unsurprisingly, Mary’s first Parliament reinforced the terms of the Third Succession Act and upheld the legality of her parents’ union. The next step was the repeal of all of Edward VI’s religious legislation, turning back the clock to 1539, although here Mary was compelled to compromise. Those landowners who had profited from the dissolution of the monasteries during the Reformation, receiving swaths of Church properties, were not inclined to hand them back. Mary would need their support for her ambition to restore England to the Roman fold.

  Although history paints her as more of a religious tyrant than her younger brother, the Catholic Mary and her council initially did no more than the Protestant Edward and his ministers had done with regard to making and enforcing new laws and strictures governing the practice of religion. Yet many of her subjects weren’t keen to embrace the preaching of papists, no matter how learned. One Sunday morning, a Catholic chaplain, Gilbert Bourne, preached outdoors at St. Paul’s Cross, the same site where a Protestant cleric had spoken the previous week. An angry crowd gathered below began to murmur that Bourne’s words were an abomination, and soon shouts of “[T]hou lyest” and “Kill him! kill him!” filled the air. A dagger whizzed past his head, bouncing off the side post of the pulpit. Ushered to safety, Bourne was lucky to escape with his life.

  The queen was able to form a council comprised of men who had always remained loyal to her, with holdovers from Edward VI’s reign. It would seem at first glance that, with different religious agendas, they might be at odds. But what the councilors shared in common was years of government experience and the fact that they were loyal and devoted servants to the crown, no matter which Tudor wore it.

  Even before Mary’s coronation had taken place, ministers began raising the subject of her marriage; naturally, these men assumed that a femme sole, in the formal parlance, could not efficiently govern the realm, and that she needed a husband to do it for her. Mary, too, was an old-fashioned girl, sharing the popular belief that a woman was incapable of ruling alone. Besides, she knew very well that she needed an heir to continue the succession. She did not get along with Elizabeth and despaired of her Protestant half sister ruling the realm, which she would do, in accordance with Henry VIII’s will, if Mary died childless.

  However, Mary’s choice of a bridegroom shocked and appalled her ministers and subjects. And yet it should not have been remotely surprising. To wed the queen of England, of course the man would have to be of royal blood. And a good Catholic. At the suggestion of her cousin Charles V, who was the Spanish king as well as the Holy Roman Emperor, Mary set her cap at his oldest, not to mention his only legitimate son: the heir to Charles’s Spanish throne, her handsome cousin Philip. Both Mary and Philip were also descendants of John of Gaunt, the third son of Edward III, who was quite the prolific sire over the course of three marriages.

  Because Charles had enough to govern, Philip had been acting as king of Spain since 1543, although he hadn’t formally inherited the crown. Therefore, he already had years of experience as a ruler—yet another feather in his cap. Philip had also been married as a teenager to another cousin, the infanta Maria Manuela of Portugal, who had died in childbirth. Their son, Don Carlos, was now nine years old.

  As part of the marriage negotiations, a portrait of the prospective groom, painted by Titian, was sent to Mary in September 1553. Eleven years younger, Philip was a genealogical generation removed from Mary, being a great-grandchild of that royal power couple Ferdinand and Isabella, whereas Mary was one of their grandchildren. Because of their age difference, Philip had always referred to her not only as his cousin, but, somewhat embarrassingly, as his cara y muy amada tía—his dear and beloved aunt.

  Mary had zero experience in the ways of men. And while she knew perfectly well that she was obligated to choose a husband for dynastic and political reasons, like her father before her she, too, hoped to marry for love, desiring a man with whom she could live in harmony and who would be a constant presence in her life. Yes, it was a wildly romantic notion, and by and large an unrealistic one, but given the upheaval of her girlhood and her parents’ unhappy marriage, she certainly had a right to expect something more. When it came to Philip, Mary became a teenage girl all over again, her untested heart experiencing the pangs of emotion for the first time. Through Philip’s paternal line, the Flemish Hapsburgs of Burgundy, he had inherited their strikingly pale complexion, large jaw, and fleshy lips—a combination that Mary found particularly alluring. Titian’s portrait showed a trim figure of middling height with finely shaped calves. In a word, Philip of Spain was dreamy. And because Spain was a Catholic country, Mary’s marriage to Philip would help her accomplish the number one item on her agenda: to restore England to the bosom of the Roman religion.

  Well—a foreign match would have been all very well and good for Mary when she was just a princess whose father, or a long-lived brother, wore England’s crown, but that was not the scenario. Her prospective union to a Spanish prince was not remotely the same as Henry VIII wedding a Spanish infanta. Mary’s mother had been merely a consort. Under the English common law doctrine known as jure uxoris, upon her marriage a woman’s property and titles held in her own right became her husband’s as well. Therefore, it was not a stretch of the imagination to fear that any man Mary married would become king of England in fact as well as in name. Under the terms of their marriage treaty, Mary’s maternal grandparents, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, remained sovereigns of their respective realms after they wed. But the laws of Spain were vastly different from those of England.

  As for the twenty-six-year-old Philip, back in Spain, he had been in negotiations for a match with the current infanta of Portugal when his father communicated his desire for the English union. Dutiful son that he was, Philip had replied, “All I have to say about the English affair is that I am rejoiced to hear that my aunt has come to the throne . . . as well as out of natural feeling . . . because of the advantages mentioned by your Majesty where France and the Low Countries are concerned.” A Spaniard on England’s throne checkmated their mutual enemy, France, from considering invasion. And with a single stroke of the pen on a marriage treaty, a potential King Philip of England would be transformed from a foreign oppressor of the Dutch (as Spain possessed the Netherlands, which chafed under their rule) to their valuable trading partner (because England had an economic relationship with the Low Countries). Philip then added, “As your Majesty feels as you say about the match for me, you know that I am so obedient a son that I have no will other than yours, especially in a matter of such high import.”

  However, the Spanish ambassador Simon Renard was concerned about the “common rumour” that Mary intended to wed a fellow Englishman instead—her kinsman Edward Courtenay, the Earl of Devon. The queen adamantly assured Renard that she “knew no one in England with whom she would wish to ally herself.” Not only would an English marriage create factions among the courtiers,
but Courtenay had behaved in a debauched manner since his release from the Tower upon Mary’s accession, and for that reason alone was not husband material.

  So, on October 10, on behalf of Charles, his imperial sovereign, Renard formally offered Mary his son Philip’s hand in marriage. Over the moon, Mary called it a “greater match than she deserved,” although she admitted that “she did not know how the people of England would take it.” Then, although the queen knew that the main purpose of a royal marriage was to beget an heir, she expressed a bit of squeamishness in that regard, even as she privately found Philip extremely attractive. “If he were disposed to be amorous, such was not her desire, for she was of the age your Majesty knew of [thirty-seven, considered middle-aged at the time], and had never harboured thoughts of love.” This remark may have been merely a bit of self-preservation, preparing herself for a situation where Philip might not find her physically attractive, given their difference in ages. Nonetheless, she would “wholly love and obey him to whom she had given herself, following the divine commandment and would do nothing against his will.” Then, fearing that her remark might have been misleading, she emphatically added that if Philip desired to “encroach in the government of the kingdom, she would be unable to permit it, nor [would she allow it] if he attempted to fill posts and offices with strangers [foreigners], for the country itself would never stand such interference.” Just as her maternal grandmother Isabella of Castile had done, Mary would compartmentalize her roles as a wife and as a queen.

  Mary’s councilors, as well as her subjects, had a massive problem with her selection of Philip. They believed that no matter what she intended, at the end of the day the man she married would master and govern her and, by extension, England. But if an English queen wed a foreigner, he might seek to conquer England, absorbing the realm into his own empire through their marriage treaty. Arguing against the match, Sir Francis Englefield reminded Mary that Philip had a kingdom of his own to rule, which he was unlikely to quit to dwell in England. Moreover, his own subjects spoke ill of him. Another courtier, Edward Waldegrave, tried to scare Mary out of the prospective union with Philip by suggesting that it would provoke a war with France.