She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (60 page)

With her council in harness and the search for a husband in train, the queen’s rule had begun – and despite her imperial cousin’s advice, the substance, rather than the decorously feminine style, of her decision-making revealed Mary’s determination that she would indeed ‘act on her own authority’. The first step was her coronation, the moment when God’s vindication of her sovereignty was given sacramental form. It was a matter for regret that the parliamentary statute by which her father had declared Mary illegitimate could not be repealed before this sacred ritual took place, but she could allow no suggestion that her title to the throne depended on parliamentary sanction. Kings, after all, called parliaments, rather than the other way around. Two days before the opening of her first parliament, therefore, Mary was crowned amid the splendour of Westminster Abbey.

For those fluent in the language of royal iconography, the procession in which she made her way from the Tower to the palace of Westminster on the eve of the ceremony reflected the complex novelty of political circumstance in October 1553. Through streets filled with painstakingly rehearsed pageants, fluttering streamers and crowds cheering until they were hoarse, the queen was attended by the great and the good, servants, nobles and diplomats, just as a king would be. But Mary herself adopted the visual
style of queens past, all of whom had acquired their crowns not by right but by marriage. Her slight figure was carried in an open litter lined with the same dazzling white cloth of gold of which her gown was made, her auburn hair hanging loose around her shoulders like that of a bride on her wedding day, in token of the purity and fertility that were the chief attributes of a royal consort.

Purity and fertility mattered to Mary too, as a virtuous woman who hoped for an heir. But for her, unlike the kings’ wives who had set the ceremonial precedents for queenly coronations, those qualities were just two among many she was required to embody as a female sovereign. And it was a very different example that she followed the next day in the hush of the abbey. Then, she was robed in crimson like her male predecessors as she received the orb, sceptre, ring, spurs and sword that represented the powers of a king. She was anointed, like a king, on the shoulders, breast, forehead and temples (with holy oil specially sent from the continent, to avoid any possible contamination from the Protestant practices of her brother’s reign). Finally, the imperial crown of England, not a consort’s coronet, was placed upon her head.

Now that she was a monarch by every measure and every ceremony that her forefathers had enjoyed, Mary could turn her attention to the question of her marriage. But while the queen, her subjects and her allies were agreed that she needed a husband, it was not so easy to arrive at an acceptable consensus about which particular husband she should take. In retrospect, it was becoming increasingly apparent that being a woman alone had helped her cause in the crisis of the summer: it had been possible for her supporters to unite in hope that she would make the right (as yet unspecified) choice of spouse, rather than finding themselves divided by differences of opinion about one she already had. But now the nettle had to be grasped – and at the heart of the problem was the unresolved question of the balance of authority between husband and wife when the wife wore a crown. If Mary took a husband, would England acquire a king?

That unsettling possibility persuaded many of her subjects that
their queen should marry an Englishman, for fear, as the late duke of Northumberland had warned and the emperor himself now ruminated, that ‘foreigners, whom the English more than any other nation abhor, would interfere with the government’. The leading candidate was Edward Courtenay, earl of Devon, one of the last remaining representatives of the Plantagenet line through his grandmother, a daughter of Edward IV. The threatening combination of his dangerously royal blood and his parents’ closeness to Katherine of Aragon had persuaded Henry VIII to incarcerate Courtenay in the Tower from the age of twelve, but now, at twenty-seven, he re-emerged from confinement into the political limelight, hailed as ‘the flower of the English nobility’ and the great white hope of those who hoped that Mary would marry within the realm.

The extensive support for Courtenay’s suit among the queen’s household and council was given public voice on 16 November by an extraordinary parliamentary delegation including many of her greatest nobles and churchmen. On their behalf, the Speaker of the Commons lectured Mary at length on ‘all the disadvantages, dangers and difficulties that could be imagined or dreamt of in the case of her choosing a foreign husband’, Ambassador Renard reported. These ranged from the weighty to the relatively superficial (‘the foreigners would wish to lord it over the English; the kingdom would be put to expense in entertaining them’), but in essence boiled down to the threat that England might lose its independence if its queen were subjected to ‘husbandly tyranny’ from abroad.

Mary’s response was immediate and unequivocal. Convention had it that the Lord Chancellor should respond to parliament on the sovereign’s behalf, but Mary’s Lord Chancellor was Bishop Gardiner of Winchester, who was not only her most loyal prelate but Courtenay’s most committed advocate. The queen – who had been profoundly irritated by both tone and content of a homily ‘so confused, so longwinded and prolific of irrelevant arguments that she was obliged to sit down’, she complained to Renard – therefore chose to speak for herself. ‘Parliament was not accustomed to use such language to the kings of England,’ she told the unfortunate Speaker
trenchantly, ‘nor was it suitable or respectful that it should do so.’

What had roused her anger more than anything in his ill-judged address was the proposition that she should marry one of her own subjects. Mary’s views on the sacrament of marriage were as traditional and conservative as the rest of her faith: ‘she would wholly love and obey him to whom she had given herself, following the divine commandment, and would do nothing against his will’, she had told Renard a month earlier. But her views on the majesty of her own sovereign authority were equally traditional and conservative. How could she love and obey a man who was already bound in obedience to her? Only outside her realm would she find a husband whose status was commensurate with her own. And in that case, too, her private duties as a wife could be distinguished clearly from her public responsibilities as England’s queen. She would wholly love and obey her husband, she had informed Renard; ‘but if he wished to encroach in the government of the kingdom she would be unable to permit it’.

For twenty years, ever since she had been declared a bastard at the age of seventeen, it had been impossible, in practice, for Mary to marry because of the toxic combination of her potential political significance and her profoundly uncertain status. Now, she found herself suddenly transformed into the most eligible woman in Europe, albeit one whose exalted rank meant that few suitors were qualified to seek her hand. Faced with this disconcerting reversal of fortune, her first thought was to look to the cousin who had done so much to sustain her during her long years of internal exile: the widowed Emperor Charles V himself, who had first been proposed as her husband when he was a young man of twenty-two and she a child of six. But at fifty-three, Charles was exhausted and ailing, immobilised by gout, catarrh and haemorrhoids, and he had no appetite for another marriage. In his place, however, he proposed his son and heir Philip, who was already ruling Spain on his father’s behalf. And by the time Mary responded so angrily to her subjects’ representations in favour of an English husband, she had already committed herself to this Spanish match.

Her decision has been seen, by English contemporaries and many historians since, as the defining mistake of her reign. By this account she was, in Ambassador Renard’s words, ‘easily influenced, inexpert in worldly matters and a novice all round’, a queen who, in relying too heavily on the support of the emperor and his envoys, badly underestimated the depth of her subjects’ objections to a marriage alliance in which she was emotionally over-involved. Evidence to support this analysis is not difficult to find: Renard’s encrypted despatches repeatedly emphasised how much the queen was ‘inexperienced in the conduct of public affairs’, and Mary herself maintained in her dealings with the emperor the tone of submissive gratitude that she had adopted in the difficult years before her accession to the throne.

In hindsight, certainly, it is clear that her determination to marry Philip had profound and destructive drawbacks. But a similarly retrospective look at the spectacularly disastrous marriages later made by her royal cousin Mary, queen of Scots, to her lords Darnley and Bothwell might also suggest that, in refusing to marry one of her own subjects, Mary Tudor was prescient rather than myopic. In fact, given the urgency of her need in the autumn of 1553 to find someone who would pass muster as a royal husband, there were compelling reasons for Mary to look favourably on Philip as a suitor. Not least of these was the traditional convergence of geopolitical and economic interests between England on the one hand and, on the other, Spain and the Netherlands (both of which territories, thanks to the marriage of Charles V’s parents, now formed part of his sprawling empire) – a long-standing alignment disturbed in recent years by religious upheaval in England, but given renewed significance by the imminent union between the queen of Scotland and the heir to France.

Mary herself was the incarnation of an earlier Anglo-Spanish alliance – and the dynastic heritage she shared with Philip also suggested the possibility of a shared understanding about how the marriage of two monarchs might work. While the history of France had excluded women from the royal succession completely,
and that of England had left the issue undecided until that very summer, in the Spanish kingdom of Castile a precedent in favour of female rule had been set by the twelfth-century Queen Urraca, who had succeeded to her father’s throne two decades before Matilda attempted to do the same in England. Four centuries later, that precedent had helped to enable Mary’s maternal grandmother (and Philip’s great-grandmother) Isabella to wear the crown of Castile in her own right, and to maintain her independent sovereignty throughout her marriage to Ferdinand, the king of neighbouring Aragon. Could Mary and Philip not emulate their illustrious forebears, to the benefit of both their realms?

The queen’s resolution that Philip should be her husband need not, therefore, be seen as the emotional choice of a naïve and inexperienced woman in thrall to the land of her mother’s birth, nor even simply as a mistake. There were good grounds for thinking that he was the best of the limited choices available to her, all of which were problematic in one way or another. That was not the assessment of her councillors, but they had agendas of their own, many of them mutually incompatible, and concerns too about the prospect that the queen might take too independent a view of her own authority. (As the imperial envoys had remarked of the convoluted state of the English court in 1553, Mary had ‘found matters in such a condition when she came to the throne that she cannot possibly put everything straight, or punish all who have been guilty of something, otherwise she would be left without any vassals at all’.)

Meanwhile, Ambassador Renard had every reason to accentuate the queen’s dependence on his own judicious advice when he reported events in England to his master in Brussels. And if Mary was happy at times to present herself as a vulnerably innocent woman, there was often advantage in doing so. Her chaste insistence that she had no personal taste for marriage (‘she had never felt that which was called love, nor harboured thoughts of voluptuousness’) fulfilled valuable political purposes within England. She was married to her kingdom, she was wont to observe with a gesture to her coronation ring, and the accession to the throne of a virgin
named Mary had not gone publicly unremarked. Emphasis on her lack of worldly experience also served to justify her resolve that she would only consider a suitor who was personally acceptable to herself. (Courtenay, she maintained, was not – and although she sustained the purity of that verdict by refusing to spend any time with him, she was also proved right very rapidly as his new-found freedom went to his head, revealing alarming deficiencies in his character and judgement.) When, after extensive backstage diplomacy, Philip’s proposal was eventually presented at court in November, Mary acted as though the question were new to her, and consulted her council with ‘becoming modesty, a timid countenance and trembling gestures’. But, however convincing her performance, it was her own plan she put to them, and her own plan that prevailed.

It was noticeable too that the general insistence on her need for a husband to carry out ‘the offices which do not properly belong to woman’s estate’ (‘
la profession des dames
’, in Renard’s elegant cipher) did not include any further specification of what those offices actually were. Ambassador Michieli, for example, in suggesting that her sex required her ‘to refer many matters to her councillors and ministers’, noted without apparent irony that this was also ‘the custom of other sovereigns’. Outside the council chamber, leadership in war was one obvious example of a role that a queen could not easily fulfil; and this division of labour was vividly depicted in the great seal that was cast in 1554 showing the royal couple on horseback, Mary ahead holding the sceptre and looking back at Philip who rode on her left, the traditional position for a consort, with a great sword unsheathed in his hand. But even this apparently straightforward distinction of function between Mary as a sovereign wife and Philip as her royal husband was fraught with political difficulty, given that the potential benefits of imperial assistance against France and Scotland had to be weighed against the disturbing possibility that England might be drawn into Spain’s military quarrels or made subject to its forces.

In fact, the treaty hammered out to give effect to a marriage that was supposedly made necessary by the limitations of the queen’s
sex went to great lengths to prevent her husband from intervening in the government of her kingdom at all. Here the advantages to Mary of a foreign match were once again apparent: if her councillors believed that she could not govern without a husband’s help, it was a principle they were eager to waive if the husband in question were Spanish. Philip would have the title of king in England, but none of the authority. He could assist his wife in the administration of her realm, but only so far as established ‘laws, privileges and customs’ allowed, and he could appoint no officers there. England would take no part in his wars; his wife would not leave her kingdom; and he would have no claim on the throne after her death. Meanwhile, although Philip already had a son by his first, short-lived wife, who would inherit Spain after him, the rich territories of the Netherlands would pass to his future offspring with Mary along with the English crown.