by David Loades
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foreign but domestic. The Greys and the Woodvilles owed their spectacular rise entirely to the marriage of Elizabeth to Edward IV. The familiar picture of the antagonism between the Queen’s kindred and Richard of Gloucester in 1483 is almost entirely the creation of Tudor propaganda but the elevation of Elizabeth’s father as Earl Rivers in 1466 and of her son Thomas Grey as Earl of Huntingdon in 1471 and Marquis of Dorset in 1475 were suffi ciently factual and refl ect a deliberate attempt on Edward’s part to build up his wife’s family into a signifi cant political force. Her successor, Elizabeth of York, had no need of such patronage. Had it not been for her gender, she would have had a better claim to the Crown than her husband; on the other hand, if she had been born male she might have gone the same way as her brothers. Her marriage to Henry VII was celebrated for years as the reconciliation of the great rivalry of Lancaster and York and she continued to use the white rose as her badge for the rest of her life. In her son and daughters ran the blood of both royal families, and through her elder daughter, Margaret, it was conveyed to the Scottish royal house of Stuart.
Edward IV’s patronage of the Woodvilles was refl ected in a paler way in the manner with which Henry VIII dealt with the kindred of his second, third, fi fth and sixth wives. Sir Thomas Boleyn became Earl of Wiltshire in 1529, Edward Seymour Earl of Hertford in 1537 and William Parr Earl of Essex in 1543 as a result of his marriages to Anne, Jane and Catherine. The Duke of Norfolk, who was Catherine Howard’s uncle, did not gain any further promotion when she shared the royal bed, but for about two years his ascendancy at court and in the council was unchallenged. Unfortunately what went up could also come down. The Boleyns were ruined by Anne’s alleged infi delities and the Howards by Catherine’s real ones. William Parr was never a fi gure of much signifi cance but Edward Seymour, as the uncle of Prince Edward, the cherished heir to the throne, was an important national fi gure in the last years of Henry’s life and more particularly during the minority of his son. Henry VIII’s marital adventures confused the image of queenship. No one could claim that Anne Boleyn was either meek or patient. Unlike Margaret of Anjou, she was not forced into a political role by the incapacity of her husband. She chose it, and created a formidable clientage over which the King had only imperfect control – which was one of the main reasons for her downfall. Nor could anyone plausibly describe Catherine Howard as chaste and not even the most fl attering courtier could apply the image of the Virgin Mary to her without arousing unseemly mirth. Catherine Parr was a queen in a more traditional mould. Although neither virgin nor mother, she recreated the King’s shattered family and by her wisdom and discretion helped to temper the unpredictability of his increasingly uncertain temper. She was as 8
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chaste, wise and well mannered as even Jacobus de Cassalis could have wished and she was the last of her kind for over half a century.
A ruling queen was a completely different creature and with the accession of Mary in 1553 we enter a new world. The situation was not unprecedented in Europe. Isabella of Castile offered a recent and obvious example but that was in a different legal system and few Englishmen would have known much about her. A woman had never governed England and there were uncertainties both of image and of expectation. In the case of a Queen Consort, who exercised temporary power, her husband defi ned the position. When Edward IV went to France in 1475, he left Elizabeth as governor in his place and when Henry VIII did the same in 1513 he left the government in the hands of Queen Catherine. The same applied in 1544, with a different Catherine but the same process. However that was at the King’s discretion and if he was incapacitated, or died leaving his heir a minor, the same conditions did not apply. When Henry VI collapsed in 1453, the Duke of York became Protector and when Edward died in 1483, leaving his sons under age, he named his brother the Duke of Gloucester as Protector. After Henry VIII’s death in 1547 the council named the Duke of Somerset as Protector and no one suggested that the position should have gone to the Queen Dowager. John Knox was not alone in believing that the rule of women over men was unnatural and contrary to the Law of God, but that was not the prevailing view.
9 It is impossible to say what might have happened in 1553 if Mary had been challenged by a man with a plausible claim but, in the event, her only rival was another woman whose claim was by general consent inferior. Unfortunately there was no consensus about the nature of Mary’s claim. The Queen herself believed that her right lay in the fact that she was Henry’s only legitimate child and that was a view shared by her Habsburg kindred and by most of Catholic Europe. Her subjects, however, believed for the most part that her entitlement lay in the dispositions that Henry had made by statute in 1543 and in his last will and testament. This hardly mattered for the purpose of seeing off Jane Grey in July 1553 but it was important thereafter, as we shall see. Mary was crowned as though she had been a king, convened parliament, established her Council and acted in every respect as her father or grandfather would have done. For the time being she even acted as Supreme Head of the Church, although it soon became apparent that the title offended her conscience. As a femme seul, she was in command of her own private lordship and her lawyers, at least, were comfortable with that thought. The imagery that was developed on her behalf, most of it admittedly in Europe rather than in England, made the best of her unexpected emergence from affl iction to power. She was the helpless virgin triumphing over the strong man armed – the woman clothed with the sun, and so on. 10 This successfully blended
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femininity with success, but was hardly imagery for the exercise of power. That no one ventured to produce, and Mary herself clearly had no idea what form it should take. Unlike Edward, she could not even attempt to strike her father’s pose. She then compounded her problems by deciding to marry. There were good reasons for this, the most compelling being her need for an heir, but she also sought to use marriage to provide for the security of her realm, and to reinforce the religious policy upon which she was determined. She set about this in the same way that a King would have done – she took advice where she pleased (in this case mainly from Simon Renard, the Imperial ambassador) made up her own mind, and then announced her decision. This took her councillors aback, but only because they were expecting her to be ‘shamfast’ and to take her lead from them. In choosing her mate, Mary had acted like a man, but there the similarities came to an end. By converting herself from a
femme seul into a femme couvert she was muddying the waters horribly. If the realm was a
dominium, or lordship, as most believed, would it pass to her husband in full ownership for the duration of his life, as would be the case with a private lordship? She had made it clear almost from the beginning that her intended husband was Prince Philip of Spain, the only son of her cousin the Emperor Charles V. This was not well received in England and the problems that would have arisen in any case in respect of a King Consort were redoubled by the unpopularity of her choice. If there were no children, and she predeceased him, did he remain king for the remainder of his natural life? If there were children, and Mary died while they were underage, did he automatically become regent? During their marriage, what control would he exercise over her person and the resources of the kingdom? A conventional marriage suggested pessimistic answers to all these questions. The trouble was that the roles of a wife and of a sovereign were not really compatible. A queen could hardly be a petitioner and intercessor in her own country, let alone a humble and dutiful helpmate. She could be chaste and discreet, but hardly silent – and what if her duty compelled her to fall out with her royal spouse? Some of these problems were resolved by the treaty that accompanied the marriage agreement, which was negotiated by Charles rather than Philip, and gave him very little independent authority in Eng
land.11 If there was an heir, he would be regent in the event of the Queen’s death b
ut only until the normal age of majority and if she died childless his interest in the realm would cease. Philip was not pleased and many Englishmen believed that such conditions would be unenforceable, but in theory the treaty completed an acceptable relationship. The more limited legal problem was resolved by a statute in Mary’s second parliament that ‘ungendered’ the Crown and declared that a queen’s authority was identical with that of a king.12 10
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Despite all these precautions, Mary never really came to terms with her predicament, as we shall see. Nor could she ever fi nd an image with which she was comfortable. If she had ever become a mother she might have used the Virgin as a role model but that was not to be. Neither a virgin nor a mother, she was also a wife who, for most of her married life, was left to cope on her own. Philip was at her side for only about 15 months of their four-year marriage. While he was present they appeared together in studied equilibrium, but while he was absent she was rather at a loss to express her status. Praise for her religious policies, particularly from the clergy, was strong but unfocused. Her portraits show her magnifi cently dressed but otherwise nondescript – neither regal nor iconic. The only image that survives of her after her marriage is the one she would least have wanted and in many ways the unfairest – that of Bloody Mary, the arch persecutor and religious bigot. Mary was a woman of puritanical conscience and no imagination or sense of humour. She had also spent so much of the formative part of her life acting out the role of a suffering servant that she was unable to adjust to power when she found herself possessing it. Her failure to bear a child was probably critical in this as in other ways and left her after 1555 with a role that she could live (as she had to) but could not express.
Her half-sister and successor Elizabeth was a total contrast in every respect save one – she was also a woman thrust into a role normally played by men. The sad example of Mary’s failed marriage – and even more the problems that it had created – may have deterred her from following the same route or it may not, we do not know. What we do know is that her whole attitude, both to the exercise of power and to its imagery, was quite different. Mary had been hesitant, traditional in her conception of a woman’s place in the scheme of things, and uncertain of her image, but Elizabeth relished the challenge and took politics by the scruff of the neck. She was probably both more intelligent and better educated than her sister and was well aware that intellectually she had the edge of almost everyone around her. That was why she was able to fi ll her court and administration with men of such extraordinary ability. While recognizing that she was operating in a man’s world, she had no time at all for the traditional notion that some matters were beyond a woman’s competence. Whereas Mary had regarded her sex as a liability, and potentially a crippling one, Elizabeth used hers as weapon. Quite aware that she was strikingly good looking, she set out to fascinate and tease the men with whom she had to deal in a way that her sister would have regarded with incredulous horror. Women were supposed to be unstable and procrastinating – very well, she would delay and change her mind until they were all dancing with frustrated rage – knowing perfectly well that only she could make the necessary decisions. Let them wait! Whether her famous courtships
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were genuine or simply political ploys we do not know and it is quite likely that she was not sure herself. Only in her dealings with Robert Dudley did the fundamental confl ict between the woman and the Queen become apparent, and then the Queen won, at considerable c
ost.13 Like Mary, her religious conscience was highly developed, but whereas God told Mary that she must restore the old faith and eliminate heresy, He told Elizabeth that He had entrusted a realm and a church to her and that she would be answerable to Him for both. Let no one presume to usurp her authority. If Elizabeth had ever married – as every man at her court (and most women) expected her to – she might well have become mired in the same conceptual and political bog but by not sharing her bed she avoided sharing her power. By not being a wife she was free to act as a king – and even donned armour at the time of the Armada to address her troops assembled at Tilbury. No man could have governed in her inimitable style – certainly not her successor James I – because even in her old age (when it had become somewhat grotesque) she never ceased to play the game of courtly love. Politics eventually came to wear the masque of charade but woe betide anyone who presumed upon the old lady’s indulgence, as the Earl of Essex found to his cost. In some respects Elizabeth’s imagery was frozen in time, because it was always depicting the idea rather than the real woman. Her portraits, and there are hundreds of them, are iconic, stylized. Whether they bear any relation to the real woman is almost irrelevant. She was Deborah, Astrea, Belphoebe and many other biblical or mythical fi gures. Above all, she was a fi gure of mystery and power – mysterious as only a woman could be in a world of men. As the prospects of marriage receded, even in the eyes of the most optimistic, virginity became her trade mark. She never exploited the Blessed Mary to provide a role model – that would not have suited her Protestant conscience; rather, she became an iconic virgin herself – a woman whose physical integrity became a symbol for the inviolability of her country. By remaining a
femme seul, Elizabeth was able to develop a female style of monarchy that was quite distinct from the traditional male style to which all Queen Consorts were subjected, but just as effective. It would be easy in this post-feminist world to contrast the triumphant reign of Elizabeth with the downtrodden consorts of Edward IV or Henry VIII and to conclude that the latter were poor specimens of womanhood. That would be a serious mistake because their circumstances were quite different and the tasks that they performed quite distinct. Consorts were always seen as aspects of their husbands and contributors to his
maiestas, never as people in their own right. They might, as was the way with women of all social classes, have great infl uence over their husbands, but any action that resulted was always his responsibility, 12
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not hers An intelligent woman with ideas of her own thus faced a dilemma, as was the case with both Margaret of Anjou and Anne Boleyn. Margaret paid with her reputation and Anne with her life. It was in motherhood and in intercession that a Queen Consort found her fulfi lment, and both were distinctively female accomplishments. No king could bear his own child and a consort who failed in this respect, like Catherine of Aragon, was liable to pay a high price. The idea of marriage as a free and equal partnership was alien to the medieval mind. It was a state that men entered into with their own interests in mind and within which the woman had a defi ned and subordinate role. She was judged by the skill with which she discharged that role. In principle a ruling queen was a man, discharging a male function, which was why combining rule with marriage was so schizophrenic and why Elizabeth’s balancing act was so uniquely successful. No female ruler actually became a mother until the time of Queen Anne, over a century after Elizabeth’s death – and by then the world had changed so much that her consort did not have to be recognized as king. Anne’s frequent and futile pregnancies were an affl iction but did not affect the way in which she was regarded, which was more as a fi gurehead than as an effective head of state. Elizabeth would have been horrifi ed by the transformation. Victoria was also born into a culture of marital subordination and although her infl uence upon her ministers was considerable she was more an imperial symbol and icon than an effective governor. Her constitutional position was by then so clearly defi ned that her husband, in a neat role reversal, was consigned to the supportive role previously occupied by female consorts. Outside the bedroom, the customs of marriage did not apply to the Crown. Victoria’s daughters helped to defi ne the royal houses of Europe and her long widowhood left a symbolic trail that long outlived her. The present Queen and her consort have been totally defi ned by constitutional propriety and since Victoria’s death the British monarchy
has been constrained to reinvent itself not once but several times. The gulf that separates Elizabeth II from Elizabeth I is as great as that which separated the fi rst Elizabeth from Catherine de Valois.