She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (61 page)

These provisions protected English interests – and the independence of Mary’s sovereignty – so effectively that Philip privately vowed that he held himself bound by none of them. Isabella of Castile’s example was less welcome, it seemed, to her Spanish great-grandson than it was to her English granddaughter. But while private dissent might salve Philip’s pride, it did nothing to prevent the terms of the treaty from passing into English law in parliament in April 1554, along with explicit confirmation that Mary, as ‘sole queen’, should ‘have and enjoy the crown and sovereignty’ in ‘as large and ample manner and form’ after she was married to Philip as she had before. Nor did his objections do anything to compromise the carefully designed ceremonial that attended this momentous royal wedding after his rain-sodden arrival at Southampton on 20 July.

Five days later, the weather had not improved when the wedding party assembled at Winchester’s ancient cathedral, but the absence of sun was offset by the shining cloth of gold in which bride, groom and the church’s vast interior were all lavishly decked. Philip, at twenty-seven, was a languidly inscrutable figure, large of jaw and elegant of dress, who had resigned himself to his father’s plans for this English marriage despite his own profound reservations,
both political and personal. His graceful manners betrayed no hint of ungallant thoughts, however, as his bride was escorted to his side, a short, spare woman eleven years his senior, who had once been ‘more than middling fair’, in the Venetian ambassador’s forensic assessment, but whose pale face was now lined ‘more by anxieties than by age’. On the eve of the ceremony, the emperor had made his son a king by giving him the kingdom of Naples, to ensure the parity of the eclectically mingled titles by which the couple were proclaimed once their vows had been made: ‘Philip and Mary, by the grace of God King and Queen of England, France, Naples, Jerusalem and Ireland, Defenders of the Faith, Princes of Spain and Sicily, Archdukes of Austria, Dukes of Milan, Burgundy and Brabant, Counts of Habsburg, Flanders and Tyrol’. Their marriage had therefore bestowed on Mary the title of prince of Spain, just as her husband was king of England; but on English soil, as on their great seal, Philip’s place was on her left, not her right, in subtle ceremonial demonstration that he was her consort, not her sovereign lord.

Mary showed every sign of satisfaction in the marriage she had made. Privately, she was delighted with the courteously attentive husband who would make it possible for her to give her country an heir. Publicly, she had found a spouse whose status outside England was worthy of her own, but whose authority within her realm had been circumscribed almost to nothing. But even as she took her vows, it had already become unsettlingly clear quite how many of her subjects did not share this happy view of her position as a married queen.

For all the uncompromising drafting of her marriage treaty and the legislation that ratified it, for all Mary’s careful distinction between her private duty as a wife and her public responsibility as a monarch, everything that her subjects knew about the relative authority of husband and wife served to fuel fears that her marriage to Philip would subject England to Spanish rule. He was now king of England, and kings, they knew, ruled. Queens, in general, did not. Had that been the only issue, had Mary had time to demonstrate that her own sovereignty was English sovereignty,
perhaps those anxieties could have been allayed. But from the moment the Spanish match was first publicly broached, it was conflated in the minds of her subjects with another issue that, for Mary, was a matter not of policy but of divinely ordained truth: the restoration of Catholicism in England.

For the last twenty years, successive waves of religious reform had swept over England, leaving in their wake unpredictable, eddying currents of change in the faith of the English people. England was not straightforwardly a Protestant country; the collapse of Edward VI’s design for a Protestant succession attested to that, and many of Mary’s subjects welcomed her commitment to traditional forms of religious practice. Altars were restored, images were retrieved from their hiding-places, and the notes of the Latin mass once more hung on incense-scented air. Conservative bishops were released from custody, swapping places with the evangelical prelates who had helped to imprison them, and the statutes that had established the reformed Edwardian Church were rolled back one by one in parliament. However, the deepest roots of the English reformation lay not in doctrinal controversy, but in Henry VIII’s insistence that the English Church should have an English head – a matter of jurisdiction that was given extra political ballast by the determination of the great landowners to maintain their property rights under English law over the rich estates they had acquired when England’s monasteries were dissolved. And now the queen’s intention to restore the authority of Rome and her decision to take a Spanish husband were too easily elided into a double-headed spectre of foreign domination.

As early as the winter of 1553, when news of the queen’s proposed marriage to Philip of Spain began to spread among her subjects, a conspiracy was under way – encouraged with partisan enthusiasm by the French ambassador – to defend England’s autonomy by removing Mary from the throne. Beyond that, its aims were sketchy. She might be replaced by Jane Grey, still a prisoner in the Tower, or perhaps by the queen’s rejected suitor Edward Courtenay, better yet if he were to be married to Mary’s sister Elizabeth.
Jane Grey’s father, the duke of Suffolk, and Courtenay himself were both involved in the plot, but it was entirely characteristic of both men that lack of competence and loss of nerve rendered them liabilities rather than leaders of resistance. That left Sir Thomas Wyatt, a gentleman of Kent, who, alone among the conspirators, had succeeded in raising three thousand men in his home county. And at the end of January 1554, the scale of the threat that Wyatt’s men represented became unnervingly clear when a London militia sent to confront them at Rochester was routed, with many troops deserting the militia’s ranks to join the rebels.

Suddenly, the capital itself was in danger. Once again, Mary was required to show that a queen could lead her people in time of crisis, and once again she demonstrated her mastery of her role. She would not leave London (unlike the imperial ambassadors, who wrote with an unmistakable note of panic to ask the emperor if ‘there is anything to be gained by our staying here longer’), and she would not ask Charles V to send soldiers onto English soil, provocatively counter-productive as that would be. Instead, she rode with her councillors to the Guildhall in the heart of the city to speak to London’s citizens.

Six months earlier, she had rallied her supporters against Queen Jane with an address, one eulogising eyewitness said, ‘of Herculean rather than of womanly daring’. Now she combined Tudor charisma with the surest of political touches to denounce Wyatt and to declare her dedication to her realm, playing as she did so on her double identity as a sovereign and a woman. She showed the people her coronation ring, the ‘spousal ring’ signifying her marriage to her kingdom, which never, she told them, left her finger. And she was not only a sovereign wife: ‘On the word of a prince,’ she went on,

When Wyatt’s assault finally came, in the night of 6 February, the queen stood firm as arrows rattled the windows of the palace of Westminster. By morning, the revolt had collapsed.

The conspiracy sealed the fate of those who posed a direct threat to Mary’s regime. On 12 February, Jane Grey was led to the scaffold within the precincts of the Tower, the fortress from which she had not emerged after her proclamation as queen seven months earlier. With extraordinary composure, she admitted her fault in accepting the crown, but ‘touching the procurement and desire thereof by me or on my behalf,’ she said, ‘I do wash my hands in innocency’. Her women tied a blindfold over her eyes to shield her from the sight of the axe, and in a moment of terrible pathos she groped for the block, crying, ‘Where is it? What shall I do?’ They guided her gently forward, and, with one final prayer, she knelt to meet her death. It caused little stir among the people who had so briefly – and unexpectedly, on both sides – been her subjects. Edward Courtenay re-entered the Tower on the same day that Jane Grey died. He remained a prisoner for a year, before being sent into an exile from which he was never allowed to return. Princess Elizabeth had had the characteristic wit to do nothing other than wait and watch when she learned of Wyatt’s plans, but that suspicious inactivity was enough to persuade her sister that she too should now be accommodated, temporarily at least, within the Tower’s walls.

The events of February 1554 were an emphatic demonstration of both the vulnerabilities and the strengths of Mary’s authority. Wyatt himself insisted before he lost his head that he had acted to prevent the queen’s marriage from delivering England into ‘bondage and servitude by aliens and strangers’. But the queen herself – plausibly enough, given the identity of the plotters and Wyatt’s previous service to her brother’s regime – interpreted the rebellion as the work of traitorous Protestants, thereby reinforcing the identification between religious and political anxieties about her government. How complex those anxieties were was indicated by a further statute enacted by the parliament of April 1554, to accompany
those concerning the queen’s forthcoming marriage: ‘An act’, the rolls of parliament recorded, ‘declaring that the regal power of this realm is in the queen’s majesty as fully and absolutely as ever it was in any her most noble progenitors, kings of this realm’. The perceived need for a law to spell out the fact that a female monarch ruled by the same authority as a male might appear to suggest weakness in Mary’s position; but there are indications that the act was framed in response to efforts by some of her more fervent Catholic supporters to argue over-zealously for the strength of her powers. She was not bound, they said, by any of England’s laws made since the Conquest – and could therefore choose to sweep away the entire apparatus of the reformation at will – because all previous statutes had been made in the name of England’s king, while its queen was nowhere mentioned.

Her marriage to Philip therefore exposed her rule to persistent charges that she was handing England into the control of Rome and Spain. Philip’s Spanish entourage, who complained of the ceremonial ‘slights’ that indicated his subordinate status as her consort, were presumably unconvinced of the latter, but Mary’s concern to honour her husband by associating his name with hers in all her public pronouncements fed sinister suspicions among her English subjects about the extent of his control over their queen. For the Spanish, the lack of a coronation for King Philip was a cause of bitter resentment; for the English, rumours that his coronation was imminent, along with the enhanced authority it was assumed to confer, became a mainstay of propaganda disseminated by those who opposed Mary’s policies – and their number was increasing, once the reinstatement of the old heresy laws meant that obdurate Protestants began to die in Catholic flames.

Meanwhile, the queen’s decision that she could marry only a man of an equivalent dignity to her own inevitably meant that the husband whom her subjects feared was dominating her government could not be constantly at her side. Philip had royal responsibilities outside England, not least his father’s wars against France, and although he stayed at Mary’s court for thirteen months after
their sumptuous wedding, it was another nineteen months after that before he returned. For all the talk of female incapacity, the overriding compulsion behind Mary’s marriage had not been the deficiencies of her sex but her need for an heir. Time was already against her, and Philip’s absence did nothing to improve her chances of bearing a child.

There was still hope, however, despite the toll taken on her health as well as her looks by the strain under which she had lived for so long. Contemporaries were quick to ascribe the apparent delicacy of her constitution to classically ‘hysterical’ causes: she suffered from ‘menstruous retention and suffocation of the womb’, Ambassador Michieli reported, a condition for which she was regularly bled – resulting, he said, in her characteristic pallor and thinness – and which rendered her vulnerable to bouts of melancholy and weeping. But it is clear that this, like other aspects of her feminine ‘weakness’, could be useful to Mary when she chose. The queen ‘had pretended to be ill for the last two days’, she told Renard in the autumn of 1553, ‘but her illness was really the travail that this decision’ – her resolution to marry Philip – ‘had cost her’. And she was robust enough to enjoy dancing and hunting, and to stand strong against her enemies when her rights were challenged (‘She is brave and valiant’, observed Michieli generously, ‘unlike other timid and spiritless women…’).

Within four months of her wedding, it seemed as though her prayers had been answered. It was not easy to be confident of the early symptoms of pregnancy, and the difficulty was compounded many times over for a woman who had experienced menstrual problems, but by 28 November 1554 the queen had allowed herself to be convinced by her doctors’ diagnosis that God had blessed her marriage and her realm. That was the day when papal authority was restored at last in England (her subjects having insisted on prior confirmation that the pope would not disturb their possession of formerly monastic estates) – and, to Mary’s joy, it was proclaimed in providential conjunction with the future of the Catholic succession. The queen was ‘quick with child’, the royal letters said, while bells were rung and
Te Deums
sung. Meanwhile, hastily arranged negotiations produced a fraught parliamentary agreement that, in the grudgingly acknowledged interests of stability, Philip would become regent on behalf of the infant heir should Mary not survive the birth of their baby.