Tudor Queens of England

by David Loades

  T H E M A R R I E D S O V E R E I G N

  189

  to reconstruct. Her subsequent conduct suggests that she was dissembling and remained secretly a committed papist – but no contemporary evidence shows this. It would, of course, have been a very dangerous line to have taken, but even her warmest admirer, Eustace Chapuys, does not give any hint that that was what was happening. Indeed he seems to have been totally puzzled by her attitude. She quarrelled with Catherine Howard – a girls’ spat over jewels and precedence – but was warm friends with both Jane Seymour and Catherine Parr. She remained devoted to the liturgies and practices of the old faith – but then so did her father so there was no basis for disagreement there.

  She must have realized that her views were seriously at odds with those of Henry’s last queen and her circle but that does not seem to have impaired their friendship and indeed there is at this stage no sign of her later reputation for intolerance and bigotry. She was living in Catherine’s household with every sign of contentment when Henry died.

  As we have seen, she made no bid for the succession at that point, being apparently quite satisfi ed with her lawful position of ‘second person’. However, in other ways the King’s death transformed her circumstances. Henry was hardly buried before Lord Thomas Seymour resumed his attentions to Catherine, who obviously found them welcome. Feeling ill at ease in this love nest, Mary moved out. Her father had bequeathed her lands to the value of some £4,000 a year and several houses including two of her favourites, Hunsdon and Beaulieu or New Hall. This made her for the fi rst time, not only fully independent, but a magnate in her own right, and the Council made haste to confi rm the arrangements and formalize the gr

  ants.5 Mary now needed not only household offi cers but Stewards and Receivers for her manors and a council of lawyers and advisors. She was 31 years old and her unmarried state was an anomaly but at least it gave her invaluable experience in management. For about four years, until her half sister Elizabeth was similarly endowed in 1551, she was the only woman who could be classed as a major peer in her own right. She held no title or public offi ce and did not sit in the House of Lords, but in other respects she was a Prince of the Blood. She denied any intention of meddling in the politics of her brother’s reign and declined any role in the conspiracy that overthrew Protector Somerset in October 1549 but in one critical respect she made a highly political statement. On the ground that it offended her conscience she absolutely refused to use or countenance the use of the Book of Common Prayer. 6 Furious quarrels and ruthless pressure from the Council, both under Somerset and under his successor, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, could not budge her. Her father’s settlement, she declared, was absolute and fi nal, and could not be touched – least of all while the King was a minor. 190

  T U D O R Q U E E N S O F E N G L A N D

  Not only was this defi ance highly embarrassing to the Council – it also put relations with the Emperor into the freezer. Charles had been mystifi ed by Mary’s apparent quiescence in the latter years of her father’s reign but this stand he understood, and supported to the hilt, threatening war if the law was enforced upon his cousin.

  7 Whether he would (or could) have gone so far is uncertain, but the minority Council could not afford to take the risk. Stalemate ensued. By 1553 Mary was thus not only an experienced manager in terms of her estates, and the patronage which went with wealth and status, but she was also in this particular respect a political leader. All those (and they were very numerous) who found Edward’s religious settlement unappealing, and who hankered after ‘religion as king Henry left it’, looked to her as their standard bearer and leader. In spite of her almost hysterical exchanges with the council, she had proved extraordinarily tough and shrewd in her campaign against the Prayer Book, and had used her status quite ruthlessly to expose the weaknesses and limitations of Edward’s government. In the light of this, and of her quarrel with the King that had resulted, it is not surprising, that as his death approached in the summer of 1553, the young Edward should have become fully convinced that her succession to the Crown would be a disaster.

  As we have seen, he tried to will the throne to his young cousin, Jane Dudley, and for a few days everyone thought that the ‘King’s party’ would prevail. However, within about a fortnight it had turned out to be no contest. In the fi rst place, Mary was ready for a fi ght because she knew about the conspiracy against her, and believed passionately in the rightness of her cause. Her servants had written out numerous copies of her proclamation of accession and the gentlemen of her retinue had mobilized their friends and put their own retainers on standby. When the moment came and she was fully convinced that her brother was dead, the machinery immediately went into action. Within days her proclamations were being read all over the country, and a sizeable military force began to assemble at Kenninghall in Norfolk, in the heart of her own estates.

  8 By contrast, the Duke of Northumberland was not prepared. His theoretical command of resources depended upon men whose primary allegiance was elsewhere. Some were the King’s men, and their loyalty in such a crisis was uncertain. Some were dependent upon his fellow councillors, and would remain loyal only as long as their masters did. His own manred, when it came to the point, was pitifully small. He was a great man, with commensurate wealth, but his estates were in constant fl ux, producing no large body of committed tenants and followers. Consequently, he could not count on nearly as many loyal supporters as Mary could. Added to which, his action was of dubious legality, whereas Mary was supported both by statute and the old King’s will. Even the Protestants, who with the benefi t of hindsight can

  T H E M A R R I E D S O V E R E I G N

  191

  be seen to have had the most to lose, on the whole declared for her. When the majority of the Council deserted him, between 16 and 19 July 1553, taking their men with them, Northumberland was left with a rump retinue, which was no match for Mary’s large and increasing forces, and he gave up. Robert Wingfi eld recorded the whole of Mary’s triumph and although his account is replete with hagiography and special pleading, the outline of the story that he tells is accurate enough.

  9 Mary moved her base from Kenninghall to Framlingham on 12 July, was proclaimed in London on 19 July and then advanced steadily on the capital, sweeping up further peers and former councillors as she advanced. She entered London in triumph, to universal acclamation, on 3 August. Five years later she died, if not quite unlamented, certainly much less popular than at the time of her triumph. So what went wrong and to what extent can her failure be blamed on the fact that she was England’s fi rst ruling Queen? Neither Mary nor her subjects had any doubt of her right to the throne. To some she was the old King’s only legitimate child but to most she was his heir by law established and her known commitment to the old faith was no handicap at all. Edward’s Protestant government had been remarkably effective but it had never been popular except in parts of London and the Home Counties. What most expected their new Queen to do was to restore her father’s settlement. That, after all, had been the slogan under which she had campaigned against the Prayer Book. However, Mary’s particular brand of piety led her to ascribe her success against the Duke of Northumberland to direct Divine intervention. Those Englishmen, nobles, gentlemen and others, who had been the effective cause of that success, had been merely acting as the agents of the Will of God. This meant that she believed herself to have a Divine mandate to right all the wrongs of the previous 20 years and that she had been deliberately preserved by God in all her troubles for precisely that pur

  pose.10 So God had intended her to succeed to the Crown, but God had also created her as a woman with all that it implied in contemporary perceptions. On the one hand, executive responsibility was now hers – given directly by God – but on the other hand she was naturally created to be ruled by men. There is no evidence that Mary pondered these matters deeply but her instincts did sometimes lead her in contradictory directions. On the one hand she
told her council and the Imperial ambassadors that she intended to restore the Pope’s authority; on the other hand she issued a conciliatory proclamation, indicating her intention to make a religious settlement in Parliament, as both her father and her brother had done. 11 When her much admired kinsman, Reginald, Cardinal Pole, wrote to warn her against repealing statutes that had been ultra vires in their creation, she paid no attention. At fi rst, this worked well enough, and corresponded with the general expectation. Her fi rst parliament repealed 192

  T U D O R Q U E E N S O F E N G L A N D

  Edward’s ecclesiastical statutes, and returned the Church to the situation that King Henry had left, with the mass and all the traditional ceremonies back in place but still subject to the Royal Supremacy. ‘The Queen’s Godly proceedings’, as they were known in conservative circles, were widely popular

  .12 Leading Protestants were either arrested or fl ed into exile and the Queen clearly won this round by a large points margin. With her council she was less successful, largely because her experience of affairs was confi ned to running a private estate. Despite having been close to the politics of her brother’s reign, she had no executive training whatsoever, both because of her gender and because of her religious stand. Her fi rst and most natural instinct was to cling to those whom she knew and trusted – men like her controller, Robert Rochester, or Sir Francis Englefi eld, and they formed her initial Privy Council, which met for the fi rst time on 8 July. Unfortunately, although the loyalty and Catholicism of these men was exemplary, they had no more experience of high politics than their mistress. In short, they were quite unsuited to be a monarch’s council. To her credit, Mary realized this quite well and knew that she would have to recruit from among the experienced councillors who had only recently signed a letter urging obedience to Queen Jane. She did this pragmatically, and roughly in accordance with the speed with which they had abandoned Northumberland when the tide turned against him. By the time that she reached London, therefore, she already had a large and heterogeneous council, to which she then added three victims of the previous regime, Stephen Gardiner, the Duke of Norfolk and Cuthbert Tunstall. Gardiner was a valuable acquisition, who rapidly became Lord Chancellor, but the other two were very elderly, and were recruited largely for nostalgic reasons. By the end of August, her Council numbered nearly 50 and she had in effect gone back to the older, more amorphous type of council that had preceded the reforms of 1540. This was a retrograde step in every sense of that word. What she should have done at this stage was to drop most (if not all) of the ‘Framlingham’ council – and never appoint Tunstall and Norfolk. However her affection for councillors such as Rochester and Englefi eld was out of proportion to their usefulness and what happened was that the council broke up into ‘factions’, with the old councillors accusing the new of disloyalty, and the new accusing the old of being out of touch.

  Added to this problem was the fact that the Queen never really trusted her new councillors, who were without exception compromised by their support for the regimes of either Edward or the later Henry. Even Stephen Gardiner, despite his exalted position and his opposition to Edward, was contaminated by his earlier support for the royal supremacy. Whether this lack of trust was in

  T H E M A R R I E D S O V E R E I G N

  193

  any way connected with her gender is uncertain – a man might have behaved similarly – but it was seen at the time as female indecision and emotionalism. This lack of confi dence was immediately accentuated by the debate over the Queen’s marriage. Had Mary been a king this would have been an important but essentially secondary issue, mainly inspired by considerations of the foreign policy implications of any such match. However, because she was a woman, it became an intense debate over who was fi t to wear the Crown Matrimonial and share the government with her. The Queen was 37 and if there was to be a child of the marriage it would have to happen very soon. That was the purpose that was in the front of everyone’s mind (including Mary’s) but it was not the only concern. England had never had a King Consort before, and there was great uncertainly over what the role would entail. The Queen was not only concerned to fi nd an agreeable companion (and one who would get her pregnant) but also to have ‘a man about the realm’. So much of the traditional imagery of monarchy was male and military, she felt that she needed someone to discharge that function. There was also the question of protection, not just of her person but also of her kingdom. She needed a prince with power and connections of his own. Unfortunately that ran directly counter to her very keen sense that God had entrusted the realm of England to her – and to her alone. All these problems were to become apparent in due course. First it was necessary to look at the possibilities, and it was in this connection that Mary made her fi rst serious mistake. Many years before, when she had been under severe pressure from her father, the Emperor Charles V (who was also her cousin) had been her champion. At that time she had declared that he was her true father and that she would never marry without his advice. This insult to Henry VIII had been overtaken by events and in any case he was no longer around to dictate. So she remembered her promise and consulted Charles through his ambassador, Simon Renard. Charles in turn remembered that they had once been betrothed but he was now, he declared, too old for such an adventure. His son Philip, on the other hand, was by happy chance a widower

  .13 By comparison, the other candidates were non-starters. There was Dom Luis, the brother of the King of Portugal (who had been considered before) but the Emperor successfully blocked his candidature. There was Edward Courtenay, now Earl of Devon. Courtenay was the domestic candidate, and attracted much infl uential backing, but he was a foolish and irresponsible young man who had spent most of his youth in the Tower. That was no fault of his, but it had left him seriously inexperienced in life and there is no evidence that Mary ever seriously considered marrying him. That left Philip and, of course, Simon Renard. Renard was an ingratiating fellow with an agenda of his own, and because of the sensitive nature of the issue that he was 194

  T U D O R Q U E E N S O F E N G L A N D

  discussing, soon won an exclusive place in Mary’s confi dence. He dominated the negotiations, to the virtual exclusion of the Council, and that caused considerable resentment. His confi dential relationship with the Queen was unprecedented and should never have been allowed to arise. Mary should never have committed her choice of husband to the arbitrament of any outside party and should never have admitted Renard to the confi dences that he enjoyed.

  When the matter came into the open there were protests. Parliament petitioned her in November to marry within the realm and was brusquely told to mind its own business. In January 1554 there was a briefl y dangerous rebellion in Kent, led by Sir Thomas Wyatt, which demanded that she change her mind. It was suppressed but the sentiment lingered on. In the event, the Emperor’s keenness on the match worked very much in England’s favour. Charles was not much interested in England but marrying its Queen would give Philip an ideal power base from which to fi ght off rival claims to the Low Countries when Charles himself either retired or died. He was planning retirement and was mindful of the fact that he had gerrymandered the Imperial constitution in order to settle the succession of the Netherlands on Philip, who would in addition receive Spain – but not the Holy Roman Empire.

  14 In other words there were issues about the Low Countries that the English marriage would resolve. He was therefore inclined to be generous with concessions when it came to defi ning the role of the King Consort. The draft articles, drawn up on 7 December, ran: Prince Philip shall so long as the matrimony endures, enjoy jointly with the Queen her style and kingly name, and shall aid her in her administration. The prince shall leave to the Queen the disposition of all offi ces, lands and revenues of their dominions; they shall be disposed to those born there. All matters shall be treated in English … There may be made another contract, wherein the prince shall swear he will not promote to any offi ce in England any foreigne
r … If no children are left, and the Queen dies before him, he shall not challenge any right in the kingdom, but permit the succession to come to them to whom it shall belong by right and law … England shall not be entangled in the war between the Emperor and the French King …15 There was a lot more in the same vein, making provision for dower and for any children of the marriage but these are the essential limitations that Charles was willing to accept on his son’s behalf in order to secure the title of King. When he found out about them, Philip was not amused. This was not at all the kind of kingship that he had envisaged – in fact it was downright dishonourable. He considered abandoning the whole project, but then refl ected that once he was established in England there might be ways around the various obstacles in his path – a suspicion that had also occurred to some of the English – so he accepted

  T H E M A R R I E D S O V E R E I G N

  195

  the treaty with an apparently good grace. At the same time he entered a secret reservation, declaring that he had only signed the terms to enable his marriage to take place – and that he had no intention of observing them! Fortunately the English did not fi nd out about that.