Mary Tudor (45 page)

Mary’s reign was a failure in terms of her own aims and priorities. Not all this was the queen’s fault. She could not be blamed for harvest failures, bad weather, influenza or her own childlessness and early death. However, she did make mistakes, some of which were serious, and the idea that she was simply a victim of misfortune at the time, and of a malign Protestant historiography after her death, is no more satisfactory than the legend of Bloody Mary.
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In the first place Mary did not deal wisely with her council. Once she was settled in power she should have dropped most, if not all, of the ‘Framlingham council’. They were loyal to her, and she liked them, but they were not of adequate experience and ability to run the country. She should also have made up her mind sooner and more steadfastly about whom she was going to trust. Dithering about this not only sent out uncertain signals, but also opened the way for the plausible and selfserving Simon Renard to establish a confidential influence that should never have been tolerated. She should also have been more willing to knock heads together when her councillors fell out, as they were bound to do. As it was she left that to Philip, and the divisions reappeared as soon as he had left. These weaknesses were partly the result of inexperience, and partly of a lack of self-confidence. She expected her council to give consensual, if not unanimous, advice on all important issues – and of course it did not do so. This left her vulnerable to suggestions from people like Renard that her council was not competent, or even that some of its members were disloyal, when in fact it was simply behaving like a normal Tudor council. The privy council (unlike a modern cabinet) had no collective responsibility. Each member was sworn individually to give advice in accordance with his own conscience and judgement, so of course there were differences of opinion on most issues. Elizabeth (who had no more experience than Mary when she came to the throne) understood that perfectly well, and she preferred divided counsels because they increased her freedom of action.
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Mary, like any monarch, relied more on some councillors than others, and when the ‘inner ring’ was formalised into the select council, this seems to have worked reasonably well at a political level – but that was Philip’s initiative rather than the queen’s. The Marian council worked best at an administrative level, when its members sat on sub-committees and special commissions. This was a system that emerged when Paget took over as lord privy seal at the beginning of 1556, and how much Mary herself was involved in its planning we do not know. One of the few occasions upon which the council did give the queen consensual advice on a political issue was over the declaration of war in 1557, and she ended by rejecting it.

Mary’s second mistake was her marriage. This error arose very largely from the weakness of her independent judgement, because she virtually referred the most crucial decision of her life to her cousin, the Emperor Charles V, who had not the slightest right to interfere. Because it suited his own agenda, he advanced the suit of his own son Philip, conveniently a widower. There were sound arguments in favour of such a match: he was of the most royal blood in Europe, a good Catholic and of great resources. Also, because of the circumstances, his father was prepared to concede generous terms, limiting Philip’s authority in England and guaranteeing the country’s autonomy. At the same time there were sound arguments against, which were brushed aside. Philip was heir to his father’s Spanish empire, and would soon have little enough time to be King of England. He was also purely Spanish in upbringing, outlook and language; he could be expected to have no knowledge of England or its ways. The English were deeply distrustful of any foreign king, and Philip was not the right person to allay those fears. They did not trust him to observe the marriage treaty willingly – and they were right. Also, because of the way in which her decision was reached, Mary did not consult her own council until after it had been made – an omission that, in the eyes of some hostile commentators, invalidated the whole marriage.
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In the event Philip did observe the marriage treaty, although not willingly, and did not do much lasting harm – or good – in England. At a personal level the marriage failed, but that was hardly Mary’s fault. She gained no children and very little emotional support, in return for a high level of investment and commitment on her own part. Philip’s Spanishness not only offended his English subjects, it caused them to remember that Mary was herself half Spanish, and that was not good for the images of either of them.

Mary’s third mistake, although perhaps an unavoidable one, was to allow Philip to push through the reconciliation with Rome. Most Englishmen regarded the papacy with indifference, but Philip’s role in ending the schism gave the Church a foreign face that it could have done without. Furthermore, it was the restoration of Roman jurisdiction that opened the way for a persecution of quite unprecedented severity. As a policy, this also turned out to be a mistake, although it probably did not deserve the prominence that it later achieved. If Mary had been prepared to wait, to put through the reconciliation on her own authority and in her own time, and if she had been less militantly coercive, the whole future of the Catholic Church might have been different. In taking the course that she did, Mary not only misjudged the climate of opinion in England, she put her own conscience ahead of the political needs of the realm. She was perfectly entitled to do that, but it was not wise. Mary’s conscience was a curse. It worked positively in impelling her to claim the throne in July 1553, but it deceived her into believing that God had given her the crown with a divine mission to restore the True Faith in all particulars. It also blinded her to the consciences of others, and made her quite unable to see that men and women might have genuine convictions that differed from her own.
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Heretics were in her eyes simply criminals who had broken the laws of God, and upon whom the infliction of punishment was a religious duty.

When Mary’s conscience spoke to her clearly, it made her strong and implacable, but it seriously impaired her judgement. When her conscience was not engaged, Mary was a gentle, humane creature, much loved by those who knew her well. She was also inclined to be indecisive, and was sometimes blandly disregarded, both by her husband and her council. She complained on one occasion that she spent all her time shouting at her councillors, to no effect. When Elizabeth threw a tantrum, everyone within earshot quaked.

Another weakness, although it was hardly a mistake, was her lack of image consciousness. Mary was absolutely convinced of her own royalty, but at a loss to know how to express it. As far as she was concerned, royalty was a masculine thing, expressed through war games and military prowess. The only images open to a woman were those of virgin or of wife, and both (particularly the latter) were images of dependence rather than authority.
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She could dress magnificently, and carefully choreograph her appearances with Philip to emphasise her independence, but none of this was satisfactory. She hardly understood the concept of Englishness, and, unlike her dazzling sister, she kept her sexuality private and regarded her femininity as a crippling disadvantage in a ruler. So Mary never worked out how to present herself, and her surviving portraits reflect that. In these she is a grim, once handsome woman, magnificently but rather indiscriminately clad. There is no mystery and no power. When the need arose, she could speak powerfully and persuasively in public, as she demonstrated at the Guildhall in January 1554 when threatened by Wyatt’s rebellion, but the kind of interaction with the crowd at which Elizabeth excelled was quite outside her repertoire. Mary knew how to be pious in public, but exploited it very little, never processing to shrines in the manner of her mother, nor making public offerings in the manner of her father. By contrast, Philip was very image conscious, but in the most conventional manner. His war games have to be seen in that context, because his image of a king was as a warrior. His imagery was heraldic and very Habsburg,
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so that he took little trouble to present himself as an English king, even if he had known how to do so – which manifestly he did not. The contrast with the intense theatricality of Elizabeth is startling. Where Mary hid her sexuality (as it were) under a bushel, Elizabeth set hers upon a hill. Elizabeth was equally royal, but also beautiful, mysterious and manipulative. She had all the armoury for controlling men that her sister so conspicuously lacked, and it did not need a forty-five-year reign to demonstrate the difference. Even if she had lived a lot longer, and been more successful than she was, Mary would never have made the impact upon history that Elizabeth did – she was just a very different kind of woman.

In emphasising Mary’s weaknesses and mistakes, however, we must remember that there was another side to her reign. In some respects it was a period of very positive development, although not, probably, in the way that Mary would have wanted. Most importantly, she was forced to confront the gender of the crown. There had never been a ruling queen in England. The much-discussed Matilda in the 1140s had claimed the throne, and fought a civil war to obtain it, but she had never been generally accepted, much less crowned. Consequently, although there was no Salic law
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to prevent it, such a succession was not an issue that had ever been seriously discussed. Kings were soldiers, lawgivers, defenders of the realm and righters of wrongs. Queens were consorts, sealers of alliances, fertile (if you were lucky), pious and (again if you were lucky) submissive. Sometimes in practice queens were termagents or courtesans, but that was never their image. Now for the first time England had a sovereign lady. As long as she was unmarried this did not present too much of a problem. The common law was familiar with the idea of the
femme seule
– the virgin or widow who controlled her own property and ran her life as she thought best. But suppose she married? By the common law the property of the
femme couvert
(i.e. married woman) passed to her husband in full ownership for the duration of his life. Did this apply to the crown? As we have seen, the issue was resolved by statute. No gender limitations applied to the royal authority, and the queen, married or unmarried, was also the king.
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This created terrible problems of conscience for Mary, as she struggled to be both a dutiful wife and a queen, but it laid down a principle for the future from which several ruling queens benefited – not the least of whom was Elizabeth I. And without benefiting from so many of Mary’s unintentional lessons, good and bad, concerning the exercise of queenly power in a male world, would Elizabeth’s reign and image then have taken the shapes they did? Might one of the virgin queen’s marriage negotiations have actually been realised, had the spectre of Mary’s unpopular Spanish marriage not always been lurking? These are psychological speculations, of course, but ones justified by the context.

The other beneficiary was Parliament, whose right to legislate on all such issues was confirmed. Parliament gained in many ways from Mary’s reign. In the beginning, her successful bid for the crown established the validity of Henry’s 1544 succession act, which had been challenged by Edward’s ‘Device’. The queen herself scarcely perceived this, because she thought of herself as the heir by inviolable hereditary right, but both her council and her Parliament thought of her as the heir by law. Even more significantly, she repealed both her brother’s and her father’s ecclesiastical laws. Logically, she should have regarded all such statutes as concerning matters beyond the scope of mere laws and simply ignored them. Pole advised her to do just that, but in this case her conscience did not speak unequivocally, and she allowed the advice of her council to prevail. By this means it became accepted on both sides of the religious divide that the lawful way to make a religious settlement for England was in Parliament. Consequently no challenge of principle was mounted against the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity in 1559. As we have seen, Mary fought a long and hard rearguard action against accepting Elizabeth as her successor, but in the end she faced reality: if she wanted to insist on some other successor, the country would be faced with civil war. Rather than run that risk, she yielded and acknowledged her half-sister, thereby again confirming the order laid down in 1544. By the time that the next succession crisis occurred in the 1590s events had made the Act of Succession obsolete, and it was ignored without any danger to the authority of Parliament, but that would not have been the case in 1558.

In many respects, Mary governed well. The early Elizabethan myth that Mary’s successor had inherited a kingdom feeble, rudderless and in chaos was far from the truth. In spite of the harvest failures caused by bad weather, and the resulting hardship, there was no repetition of the outbursts of 1549. Nor, in spite of the constant alarms and frequent plots, were there any significant rebellions, apart from that of Sir Thomas Wyatt. The country was religiously divided, but in spite of some claims to the contrary the Protestant minority (perhaps 10 per cent of the population, very unevenly spread) had as yet mounted no political challenge. That may not have continued, given the radical ideas that were becoming current, but it had not happened when Mary died. The courts all functioned normally, and apart from one misguided attempt to impose martial law on hostile pamphleteers, no special measures were deemed to be necessary.
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The memorandum addressed to Elizabeth that described the King of France as ‘bestriding the realm, with one foot in Scotland and the other in Calais; was alarmist exaggeration. There were French forces in Scotland, but they were scarcely a threat, being tied down by domestic rebellion. The garrison of Berwick, warned by the example of Calais, was at full strength and the borders were effectively organised for defence.
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Militarily, England looked weak, because mobilisation had been sporadic and half hearted, but the system of lieutenancies, creating regional military commanders, was potentially strong, and the navy was fully deployed. The idea that Mary neglected the navy until activated by Philip is mistaken. Philip was sufficiently interested in the English navy to keep copies of ship lists in his archive at Simancas, but Mary had never neglected it, as the treasurer’s accounts demonstrate conclusively.
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London was discontented because Philip sided consistently with its competitors, and Mary did nothing to redress the balance, but it was during this period (in 1555) that the north-eastern voyages of the previous reign bore fruit in the form of the Muscovy Company, and the newly discovered enterprise of the City was scarcely checked by the king’s hostility. That might have happened in due course, but Philip’s attitude made little difference in the short term.