Mary Tudor: The First Queen

by Linda Porter

  The presents Mary received for that year are among the most fully recorded of the period. Perhaps the most striking thing about the list is that there is no mention of any exchange of gifts between Mary and Philip. It was certainly the custom for an English monarch to recognise relatives and those who had served them; in 1557 the queen gave nearly three hundred separate items of plate, mostly in the form of cups, bowls and jugs. The recipients ranged from Cardinal Pole and Elizabeth, through all the bishops, the council and the nobility (including their wives), the household staff and well beyond. They encompassed her launderer, Beatrice ap Rice, who had been in her service since Mary was three years old, and Sybil Penne (the nurse of Edward VI), her fruiterer, hosier and fishmonger and the sergeant of the pastry. Appropriately, he presented the queen with a quince pie. Many others gave the queen cash, but there was evidently a fair amount of ingenuity exercised by people like Sir John Mason, who gave ‘a map of England, stained upon cloth of silver in a wooden frame, drawn with the King’s and Queen’s arms, and a Spanish book covered with black velvet’. Elizabeth, well aware of the queen’s love of clothes, gave ‘the fore part of a kirtell and a pair of sleeves of cloth of silver, richly embroidered’.8 It was a well-considered choice, for Mary was in the process of updating her wardrobe, in eager anticipation of her husband’s return.

  This time, she was not disappointed. He left Calais with a fair wind on 18 March 1557 and was reunited with his wife at Greenwich two days later. The favourable weather had speeded him along, but there was a more practical reason for his celerity; he needed English troops to help him in the renewed war with France. He had been engaged in hostilities with the pope since the autumn of the previous year, and the vengeful Paul IV, determined to requite him in kind, managed, over the winter, to draw in the French. In a two-pronged attack, the duke of Guise invaded Italy and Coligny, the admiral of France, moved against the Low Countries. Philip may have seen it coming, but it was still the most serious crisis that he had yet encountered. His resources were stretched wafer-thin and he was in urgent need of English support, on land and by sea.

  From Philip’s perspective, the Dudley conspiracy had one very positive side effect. Before the king left for Flanders in 1555, he had been disturbed by the state of disrepair of Mary’s navy. Less than ten years after HenryVIII lavished attention on the English fleet, much of it was rotting in the dockyards. Only three of Henry’s great ships were left, the result of neglect during peacetime and the strapped condition of the English treasury. Philip discovered the extent of the problem only when he requested a fleet of 12 to 14 ships to accompany his father and his aunts on their voyage back to Spain.The council told him then that it would be impossible to fit out a fleet of this size in the short timescale he required. His response was searing: ‘England’s chief defence’, he reminded Mary’s squirming ministers, ‘depends upon the navy being always ready to defend the realm against invasion, so that it is right that the ships should not only be fit for sea, but instantly available.’9 He refrained from adding that he also needed English ships to protect the galleons carrying Spanish silver from being attacked in the Channel.The last part of the long voyage from South America was often the most dangerous. His financial extremities made him the unlikely saviour of the English fleet.

  This lecture on their maritime weakness from a Spaniard embarrassed the council into action, though it is possible that they had exaggerated the condition of the ships in the first place, to avoid unwanted expense. By mid-October 1555, 15 ships were ready. At the end of the year, the royal fleet comprised 30 vessels. The prospect of invasion from France, raised by Dudley’s intrigues, provided a further spur to action. A squadron of eight royal ships was sent to patrol the English Channel and it captured most of a small fleet of French privateers off Plymouth.Two new warships, the Mary Rose and the Philip and Mary, were constructed during 1556, so that by the time Philip joined Mary at the palace where he had left her 17 months earlier, England once more had a respectable navy. In fact, on 7 June, the day war between England and France was declared, Mary had 24 royal ships at sea and 13 others ready to sail, a better record than either her father or brother. Habsburg priorities lay behind these improvements, but the credit for effecting such a comprehensive turnaround lay with the Lord High Admiral, William Howard, he of the bluff character and ribald jokes, and his subordinates, above all William Winter (whose experience outweighed concerns about his involvement in 1554 with Sir Thomas Wyatt), and the royal shipwright, Richard Bull.

  So Philip did not have to concern himself about naval preparedness in England. The major difficulty he faced, and the primary reason for his return, was the lack of political will. The council was reluctant to commit to war and so was Cardinal Pole, often used by Mary as a sounding board in her husband’s absence. Pole was concerned about the war with Paul IV; the council had more general fears: cost, the effect of famine, social unrest - all these considerations worried them.The marriage treaty, they claimed, disallowed their involvement, though it was actually ambiguous on the subject of new aggression by France. The king was banking on his hold over Mary, but her obvious pleasure in his reappearance did not mean that she would agree to browbeat her council. They all knew why he had come, though only Paget had been informally told in advance. In the face of so many obstacles, Philip resorted to the only tactic that might bring about their acquiescence. He saw them individually, rather than as a group. A direct appeal, a reminder of the personal gains, in profit and in glory, that could be expected in his service, these were more relevant incentives than national interest. The nobility knew where the source of their power lay. As the earl of Westmorland told a Scottish earl in 1557, during a discussion of identity and national loyalty: ‘As long as God shall preserve my master and mistress together, I am and shall be a Spaniard to the uttermost of my power.’10

  Philip’s persuasiveness may have helped, but the French eventually brought England into the war through their persistent support of traitors. The final straw was an ill-conceived expedition, led not by Henry Dudley or Christopher Ashton, who had wisely gone to ground in France, but by Sir Thomas Stafford, whose father had petitioned Mary for financial support when she came to the throne. Provided with a warship by the French, Stafford landed in the north of England at the end of April 1557, hoping to stir up rebellion there. In a dramatic but empty gesture, he managed to capture Scarborough Castle before tamely submitting to a force led by the earl of Westmorland, a man who clearly believed in backing up his words of loyalty to Philip and Mary with appropriate deeds.

  Stafford’s foray marked the end of the threat to Mary from her own nobility. The war had, as Philip hoped, a unifying effect on the English aristocracy.They were delighted at the opportunity to perform stirring deeds (and to gain booty, if they could) against their long-standing enemy. When the Anglo-Imperial forces laid siege to St Quentin in northern France, three of the duke of Northumberland’s sons (Henry, Robert and Ambrose) fought for their queen. Sir James Croft and Sir Peter Carew were also there and the buccaneer Peter Killigrew was rehabilitated and given a naval command a few months later.

  The English military contingent of nearly 18,000 men, commanded by the earl of Pembroke, landed in July in France.They managed to miss the decisive battle on 10 August, when Montmorency tried to relieve St Quentin. His force was scattered by troops commanded by the man who might have been Elizabeth’s husband, the duke of Savoy. Montmorency was captured, along with many others, but the town held out. When Philip arrived, tactfully placed at the head of the English force, he found that St Quentin had still not fallen. Coligny put up desperate resistance for more than two weeks. On 27 August a massive assault was made by Philip’s troops, who won a famous victory. Mary was gratified to learn that 2,000 of her Englishmen were among the first through the breach. The news was received as a triumph in London, with more street parties and rejoicing than had been seen for a good while. The self-esteem of Henry II suffered a blow, but Philip had not the men or mone
y to follow up his victory by advancing on Paris. Henry was left to sulk and to plot his revenge.

  During the course of the autumn, the pope made peace with Philip, though the Holy Father nearly lost England all over again when he announced his intention to remove Pole as papal legate. He also proposed to try the cardinal for heresy. Mary wanted to be a good daughter of the Church but she was infuriated by this display of papal interference in her domestic affairs. For a while, it seemed that the woman who had so desired to heal the breach with Rome might be moving towards her own schism. It did not come to that, but Mary’s uncompromising tone to Paul IV shows her willingness to consider such a possibility: ‘she again prays and supplicates the Pope to restore the legation of Cardinal Pole, and to pardon her if she professes to know the men who are good for the government of her kingdom better than His Holiness’.11

  But elsewhere, the queen’s position seemed strong. Any fears that the war would draw in Scotland, France’s traditional ally, were allayed when the Scottish lords refused to fight. Mary of Guise, the regent, was humiliated but there was nothing she could do. Mary Tudor, however, ended the year 1557 on a positive note.

  During that year, Philip had been with her for barely four months. Once England committed to fight the French, there was no reason for him to stay. Mary was, by this time, realistic enough to accept it with, apparently, none of the distress of their parting in 1555. As king, Philip must command his troops. She knew he could not fight a war at her side in London. But she was in much better health and spirits than two years earlier, and so she accompanied him as far as Dover. They parted in the darkness of the small hours of 3 July, in the expectation that, if the war went to their advantage, they would certainly see each other again.

  Perhaps during their brief reunion Mary found occasion to wear some of the dresses she had ordered back in the winter. One of these was the most extravagant gown in the French style Mary ever ordered. It was of white tissue with a round kirtle and sleeves also of tissue. Her husband might, though, have been more pleased with the Spanish-style gown of black velvet described in the April 1557 wardrobe accounts. It was furred with 23 sables, rather warm, one would have thought, for spring.12

  Philip was not the only one to take his farewell of Mary in 1557.Two people she had been close to in difficult times, Anne of Cleves and Robert Rochester, died in that year. HenryVIII’s fourth wife was buried in Westminster Abbey on 4 August. She had lived quietly except for her appearance at Mary’s coronation. Anne, who had been comfortable rather than wealthy over the past 20 years, left small bequests of items of jewellery to her stepdaughters. Her relationship with them was one of the pleasanter aspects of the long twilight of her years as an ex-queen in England.

  In Robert Rochester, Mary had been fortunate to have a dedicated servant with great organising ability, who was faithful to her from the moment he entered her employment. In his will, he left her £100, with the poignant comment that it was ‘a poor witness of my humble heart, duty and service’. Though he had benefited financially from Mary’s continued generosity to those who helped make her queen, there is, in his last words to her, a trace of the wistfulness of a man who knew that, in opposing her choice of husband, something intangible in their own relationship was lost permanently. Most of his estate he left to the Carthusian order, in memory, no doubt, of his brother martyred by Henry VIII 22 years earlier.

  The successes of the summer campaign in northern France were very expensive for England, even if they did inflict on Henry II the most humiliating military defeat suffered by France in the 16th century. Mary’s government knew that the French king would strike back when he could.Yet no one in London wanted to think too much about the implications.The English contingent returned home and Philip’s force, reduced for the season, retired across the border into Artois (a region that later became part of northern France). Philip was desperately short of cash to pay his soldiers and could not afford to maintain a large army.There would, in any case, be a breathing space.Winter was not a time for warfare.

  The French believed otherwise. Throughout the autumn of 1557, they prepared their revenge. Then, on the morning of New Year’s Day 1558, Nicholas Alexander, commanding a tiny force of 13 men at Newnham Bridge, awoke to find a force of more than twenty thousand Frenchmen approaching him across the frozen marshes. His fort was situated on a causeway, the main defence on the land side of Calais. It was well stocked with arms, but Alexander knew it could not be defended without reinforcements. He consulted Lord Wentworth, the lord deputy of Calais, and the decision was taken to abandon Newnham Bridge and to fall back into the town.

  Meanwhile Duke Francis of Guise, commanding the French army, divided his force, sending one part out to the coast, with orders to proceed through the sand dunes to the fort of Rysbank, which protected Calais on the seaward side. It surrendered, again without a fight, on 2 January. The next day, a few miles to the east at Hammes, another of the forts in the Pale of Calais, Edward Dudley, brother of the man whose dreams of invading England had come to naught in 1556, wrote desperately to Wentworth: ‘and surely if I had been better appointed with horsemen and footmen, I would have trusted … to have been the deaths of many more [Frenchmen]’.13 He, at least, had tried to put up resistance. But the tone of his dispatch makes it quite clear that he did not expect that help would arrive.

  The town of Calais itself was now at the mercy of the French artillery. For five days after the fall of Rysbank, the guns bombarded the old, badly fortified castle. In the town, the English fought with more conviction, but the loss of life and overwhelming numerical superiority of the French merely delayed the inevitable.Wentworth surrendered, and on 7 January Guise wrote to the mayor of Amiens, the town responsible for supplying the French army with food, to tell him the great news.‘It has’, he said, ‘pleased God to favour so greatly the enterprise that the king commanded … that He has restored to the crown that which was taken by the English’. The French then ransacked the town, house by house, and turned its inhabitants out into the countryside to fend for themselves as best they could in the dire weather. Calais had been in English hands since 1340. No wonder the French court was beside itself with joy when the news reached Henry II on 9 January. It looked as if his confidence in a bold strike at this most inauspicious time of the year had paid off, despite the initial misgivings of Duke Francis himself.

  But all was not quite over yet. A third major fortress, Guisnes, was commanded by Lord Grey of Wilton, and he was determined not to surrender. He was also the only commander in the Pale of Calais to receive any help from King Philip’s troops in the nearby Habsburg-held town of Gravelines. Grey defied the French until 21 January, when his troops threatened to throw him over the walls, telling him that ‘for his vain glory they would not sell their lives’. Grey capitulated, and he eventually became the prisoner of the count de la Rochefoucauld, who demanded 25,000 crowns for his release. Elizabeth loaned him £8,000 in 1559 and he regained his freedom, but struggled to repay his debt. He was, however, the only commander to emerge from the debacle of the fall of Calais with his reputation intact.

  The loss of Calais is one of the greatest reproaches that history has aimed at Mary. England had a presence in France for centuries; this woman, so nationalist historians have lamented, presided over nothing less than the final demise of an empire. It was also, as tradition goes, the major regret of her life. But there is no evidence that she ever spoke the words attributed to her - ‘When I am dead and opened you will find Calais lying in my heart.’ At the time, the loss of this last piece of English territory in France was blamed on treason and cowardice. This was a convenient explanation, and perhaps contains elements of the truth, but it is far from being the whole story. For Calais had been nothing more than a token of English territory on the European continent for many years. And it was an expensive and potentially dangerous one at that.

  The Pale was a small area, 20 miles by six.The town of Calais was not well fortified but the outer forts we
re in reasonably good shape, though woefully undermanned. Keeping up the defences of the area and ensuring an adequate food supply for the more than four thousand people who lived there cost a great deal of money and, as the trading status of Calais declined, successive English governments were reluctant to commit the necessary funds. By 1540, the rising price of raw wool and instability in the international markets meant that there were only 150 Merchants of the Staple still operating in Calais. The town had never been totally anglicised and was, in the 1550s, home to a considerable population of French religious dissenters who did not like Mary any more than they liked Henry II. Their numbers, and their disaffection, were swelled by English Protestant exiles. After Boulogne was returned to the French by Edward VI, the restoration of Calais became a priority for Henry II. The defeat at St Quentin in 1557, far from securing the town’s future, meant that its survival as an English possession was actually to be counted in mere months.The French king committed himself tirelessly in the autumn of that year to planning his campaign of recapture. General rumour and more specific information from spies warned the council in London and the garrison in Calais that it was only a matter of time before the French moved against them. Philip was also well aware of these intentions. But nobody did anything. Instead, there was a collective reliance on the impossibility of a serious campaign in winter.This proved to be a disastrous miscalculation.

  Part of the blame must attach to Lord Wentworth, at 33 comparatively young and untried for what turned out to be such a demanding role as the last lord deputy of Calais. His undoubted Protestant leanings made him a dubious choice for the job and it is impossible to say how much they may have influenced his behaviour. Probably, though, he was simply lulled, like everyone else, into a false sense of security. Wishful thinking convinced him that though there were reports of large numbers of French forces in the area, Calais was not the target. It was more comforting to believe that Guise would attack the imperial enclave at Hesdin, just to the south of Boulogne. Back in London, a relieved group of privy councillors, who probably saw the Scottish campaign as a priority, rather naively accepted this view. Not till the last day of 1557 does Wentworth really seem to have embraced the threat he faced. Even then he did not use his most potent weapon, which was to open the sluice gates and flood the marshes around Calais completely. He explained his reluctance to do this in a letter to Mary on 2 January: ‘I would also take in the salt water about the town, but I cannot do it, by reason I should infect our own water, wherewith we brew; and notwithstanding all I can do, our brewers be so behindhand in grinding and otherwise, as we shall find that one of our greatest lacks.’14 Nor, despite his subsequent claims, does he seem to have requested help from Philip until the French were besieging him.