Mary Tudor (2 page)
In terms of personal qualities, Mary was nobody’s fool and nobody’s puppet. She was intelligent, hard working and in many respects both tough and obstinate. Her hatred of heresy was a consuming passion, and in her strength of will she ignored everyone, including Philip, who tried to persuade her to take a more dispassionate approach. She was, however, extremely conventional in her perception of a woman’s limitations. She knew that she was expected to be both indecisive and emotionally dependent, and up to a point she was both. The main reason why she married was certainly to get an heir, but another was to have a partner who could handle those matters that were not by custom deemed ‘pertinent to women’. Repeatedly she besought Philip to return to her because the country needed his ‘strong hand’. Whether or not she really wanted to marry, we do not know; but marriage, like so many other things, was a duty imposed on her by her status. A less conventional or more independent woman might have found ways of coping with these problems – as Elizabeth subsequently did. Mary’s mother had brought her up to be a good Catholic and a good wife, but not a ruler, and many of Mary’s problems stemmed from the fact that she found the roles incompatible. Hence, perhaps, that ‘sourness of temper’ which Gilbert Burnet found in her, and to which he attributed her willingness to follow the edicts of her ‘popish clergy’.
These same problems put Philip in an impossible position. It was not unprecedented, however. His great-grandfather, Ferdinand of Aragon, had been in a rather similar situation in respect of Castile, but Ferdinand’s wife, Isabella, had been (except in her piety) a very different sort of woman from Mary. Philip must have found Mary a very frustrating consort. Most of the time that he was in England she was convinced that she was pregnant, and consequently was unavailable to him. Once he had left, she was simultaneously begging him to return and refusing to give him either a realistic share in the government, or a coronation, or any reasonable financial support. As the Duke of Alba rightly observed, Philip, although the King of England in name, had no sovereignty in his own realm. He could manage, advise and cajole, but he could not command. However, he could still do business with the English council, and also with at least some of the English nobility, not – as the Count of Feria believed – because he was able to bribe them, but because he was a man and (in spite of language difficulties) they could understand him on that basis.
Philip’s attitude towards England is an interesting subject in itself. When the possibility of marriage to Mary was raised, he seems to have been torn between ambition for a prestigious ‘crown matrimonial’ and a reluctance to link himself to a kinswoman who was significantly older than himself, by eleven years. The country itself was the home of myth. On the one hand it was the mysterious land of Albion, home to the mist-girt castles of Arthur and of romantic chivalry, and on the other hand it was a nest of villainous heretics and schismatics – the land of Anne Boleyn and of the murderers of the papal loyalists John Fisher and Thomas More. Once Philip had allowed his ambition to be a king to overcome his reluctance to accept so limiting a treaty, his own attitude seems to have become pragmatic. He even learned a few words of English: Mary carefully taught him to say ‘Good night my lords and ladies’, though this was perhaps the limit of his proficiency in the tongue. With Latin-speaking clerics and nobles of lineage he was at home, and he exerted himself seriously to bring the English Church back into the papal fold. What he really thought of his new subjects and their peculiar ways, we do not know. Most of our knowledge of the ‘Spanish mission’ comes from his courtiers and followers, who came with a full baggage of prejudices that they had no intention of relinquishing.
To a much greater extent than Mary, Philip was image conscious. He knew what magnificence was, and what part it played in royalty. Unfortunately the imagery that he understood was mainly Imperial and religious. He was very good at presenting himself, in paint or stained glass, as Solomon or the son of David. He could also present himself as a Spanish conquistador. But he had not the faintest idea how to be a king of England, and his inability (or unwillingness) to go native, even to a limited degree, meant that there was no lessening of the hostility felt against him. The resulting propaganda concentrated upon his sexual adventures, because it was realised that such tales would cause maximum distress to Mary. Whether he was really as promiscuous as alleged, we do not know, but it is unlikely in view of his rigid piety. On the other hand a man who very seldom saw his wife could well keep a mistress – or a succession of mistresses – without ever feeling called upon to acknowledge the fact.
There is one other contemporary figure in Mary’s orbit who has substantially affected what Mary means to us today: her half-sister, successor and nemesis, Elizabeth. Both as a person and as a queen, Mary has always suffered by comparison with Elizabeth – largely because Elizabeth made sure that she would. Recently there has been a tendency to point out that Mary reigned for only five years, where her half-sister reigned for forty-five, so any comparison is invalid. In terms of the achievements of their respective reigns that is probably so, but both were mature women and their personalities can be legitimately contrasted. Mary had something of her father’s intelligence, the obstinacy of both her parents, and her mother’s compulsive piety. Elizabeth had her father’s political instincts, and her mother’s wit and feisty sexuality. Mary regarded her sex as a liability; Elizabeth used hers as a weapon. Elizabeth was moody (even violent), indecisive, procrastinating, and always an actress. Nobody really knows to what extent her notorious tendency to change her mind was the result of genuine indecision, or a ploy to keep her councillors on their toes and demonstrate who was in charge. Similarly, we do not really know whether (or when) she decided not to marry, or to what extent her various negotiations were diplomatic devices. What we do know is that her virginity became a symbol of the inviolability of the realm, in total contrast to the popular perception that Mary’s Spanish marriage and Catholicism had surrendered national authority to Spanish and Italian priorities. Elizabeth is alleged to have claimed that if she was turned out of the realm in her petticoat, she would ‘fare for herself’ – and that is a measure of the selfconfidence that was her defining characteristic.
By contrast Mary is painfully transparent. Duty to God was her lodestar: it determined her bid for the throne in 1553, her decision to marry Philip, and her ruthless persecution of heretics. There was nothing of the actress in her make-up, and her idea of presenting herself to her subjects was confined to dressing magnificently and surrounding herself with pomp. To Elizabeth there were no ‘matters impertinent to women’ – in 1588 she even donned armour and proposed to lead her army. To Mary the perceived distinctions of gender formed an intangible but very real barrier that partly determined her relationship with her husband. Altogether Elizabeth was far better equipped by nature to deal with the situation in which she found herself. Both women had passed through difficult and traumatic times as adolescents, but whereas the experience had left Mary in poor health and uncertain of herself, it had left Elizabeth crafty and wary.
Mary’s real tragedy is that she was born to be a royal consort, the pious and dutiful wife of a powerful king. Instead she found that God had given her the duty of ruling a realm. What Elizabeth was born to be is anyone’s guess, but she coped very successfully with what God threw at her. Considering all these limitations, and the shortness of her time, Mary’s reign was, nevertheless, in many respects successful, not least because she set precedents and also made some of the mistakes that Elizabeth was thereby able to avoid. As a person Mary was (as even John Foxe recognised) a tragic figure, but as a queen she was important. In fact there is a lot to be said for looking at England from 1553 to 1603 as the realm of the queens – the time when England came to terms with the challenging fact of a woman on the throne. This is the story of the first of those powerful women.
Mary’s story begins nearly thirty years before her birth, when the three-yearold Catherine of Aragon was first proposed as the future wife of Arthur, the eldest son of King Henry VII of England. Catherine was the youngest child of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, known as the Catholic Kings, who had united the crowns of Spain by their marriage over twenty years before.
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The Trastamaras were one of the oldest and best established ruling families of Europe, and the Tudors were parvenus, whose dubious claim to the throne of England had been established on the battlefield in the year of Catherine’s birth. Henry VII’s approach was therefore strictly practical. He was beset by pretenders to the crown, and he needed all the support and recognition that he could get. The pope had already obliged, and if he could persuade the Trastamaras to follow suit, his position would be greatly strengthened.
Young Catherine was a small player in her father’s dynastic schemes, and the English alliance seemed attractive enough, so an agreement in principle was reached, and the child grew up to think of herself as the Princess of Wales, the betrothed of Arthur, heir to the crown of England. In fact, the situation was not quite so straightforward. The deaths of Catherine’s elder sister Isabella in childbed in 1493, and of her brother the Infante Juan in 1497, threw her father’s plans into disarray, and it seemed for a while as though she might have to be married off elsewhere. However, when her sister Juanna bore a healthy son to Philip, the son of the Emperor Maximilian, in 1500, and survived the experience, it seemed safe to allow Catherine to come to England. In 1501, at the age of seventeen, she reached London, to be greeted with the most lavish celebrations of which England was capable, and was wedded to the fifteenyear- old Arthur.
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That marriage, which lasted barely six months, was to be the source of the crisis that was later to destroy Catherine’s life, and to inflict terrible damage upon her daughter Mary.
Arthur died at Ludlow on 2 April 1502. It was said of him, as it had been said of the Infante Juan five years earlier, that premature and excessive sexual activity had proved fatal, but his death is more likely to have been caused by pneumonia. It later became a significant question whether the marriage had ever been consummated at all. Catherine had denied it, but by then she had good reason to claim that she had gone to her second husband as
virgo intacta
. Arthur apparently made adolescent boasts about the subject, but no certainty is possible. At the age of eighteen, Catherine had thus become a widow with uncertain prospects. Neither Henry VII nor Ferdinand wanted to end the connection that the marriage had established, and Henry had no desire to refund a substantial dowry, so there was immediate talk of her remarriage to Arthur’s younger brother, Henry. However, Henry was only eleven years old, and the propriety of such a marriage under canon law was uncertain. As a precaution, a dispensation was obtained from Pope Julius II, which, again as a precaution, assumed that the marriage had been consummated, since that would have constituted the greater impediment.
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This was to cause a great deal of trouble in the future. Catherine’s mother, Isabella, was in favour of the marriage, but she died in November 1504, before young Henry had reached the minimum age of co-habitation, and that seriously altered the situation in Spain.
Ferdinand was King of Aragon and had no title to the larger kingdom of Castile. Nor did Isabella give him one. At her death her heir was her elder daughter Juana (known as Joanna to the English), married to Philip of Burgundy and the mother of two sons. However, there were those in Castile who did not want the foreigner Philip as king, and the next heir was the currently unmarried Catherine. Since Ferdinand was also hoping to capitalise upon the anti-Burgundian feeling to secure some title for himself, the last thing he wanted was Catherine back in Spain. Meanwhile, Henry VII had gone off the whole idea of a second marriage, and caused his son to repudiate the agreement when he reached the age of fourteen in 1505. Catherine was left in limbo by these developments, and she consoled herself, with her few remaining Spanish servants, by multiplying her religious devotions. She was twenty-one, lonely and short of money.
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In Spain, Philip and Juana secured their title, and Ferdinand was forced to retreat to Aragon, but in 1506 Philip died and Juana became (at least temporarily) deranged. This enabled Ferdinand to re-establish himself, and made him more reluctant than ever to welcome Catherine home. By this time she had convinced herself that it was the will of God that she should marry Prince Henry, and this gave her an adequate incentive to wait quietly while the king’s health deteriorated. On 21 April 1509 Henry VII died.
Henry VIII was two months short of his eighteenth birthday, but a regency was never suggested. He became king, and one of his first acts was to marry his sister-in-law. Whether he had fancied her for some time, or heeded his father’s dying wish (as he claimed), his councillors were astounded and Catherine triumphantly vindicated. All the hypothetical objections – the question of consummation with Arthur (‘consanguinity’), his own repudiation of the marriage agreement – were simply swept aside. Ferdinand’s assent was taken for granted. They were married in a low-key ceremony at the house of the Franciscan Observant monks at Greenwich in early June, and crowned together on Midsummer’s Day. Catherine was twenty-four and, if her portraits are anything to go by, remarkably attractive. It was a time of great joy for her, and for the whole court, and within a few weeks she was pregnant. Henry, meanwhile, was intent on flexing his muscles in a different direction by picking a quarrel with Louis XII of France. The older councillors whom he had inherited from his father were appalled, but there was no gainsaying this magnificent young man, and his wife busied herself resurrecting the old alliance with her father. Not even Henry believed that he could fight the French on his own and Catherine became for a while his chief foreign-policy adviser.