The Tudors (61 page)

Of course she had an agenda of her own and her own priorities. She wanted a regime, a religious settlement especially, that accorded with her view of what was true and false, what right and wrong. To accomplish this she was going to have to decide who were her friends and who her enemies, who could be trusted and who could not. She had had almost no training in government, had in no way been prepared to rule. And, being a thirty-seven-year-old virgin whose heir was both the daughter of her mother’s great enemy and obviously on the evangelical side of the religious divide, she had good reason to want to produce a child. But she had little time in which to do so—her biological clock was approaching sunset.

When she arrived at the Tower, which in keeping with tradition was
to be her residence until her coronation, Mary was welcomed by a rather pathetic little collection of eager well-wishers. One was the old Duke of Norfolk, an octogenarian now, who had remained a prisoner since narrowly escaping execution at the end of Henry VIII’s reign. Another was Stephen Gardiner, who had risen high in Henry’s service only to lose his seat on the council, then the Bishopric of Winchester, and finally his freedom. Still another was young Edward Courtenay; like his cousin Mary he was a great-grandchild of King Edward IV, and he had literally grown up in the Tower after being locked away at the time of his father’s execution fifteen years before. For them and for others, Mary’s arrival meant deliverance from what otherwise might have been confinement until death. And for all of them, release meant more than liberty. The bishops deposed during Edward’s reign were soon restored to their sees. Gardiner was not only restored but became chancellor. Norfolk was given back much of the Howard family patrimony and his place on the council. Courtenay was made Earl of Devon and, because of his royal blood and his family’s conservative credentials, found himself put forward as a possible husband for the queen. If they were not all her friends, strictly speaking, at worst they were the enemies of her enemies. That was not nothing.

Mary was generous even with those who obviously were her enemies—at least with most of them. The whole sprawling Dudley connection—John, Duke of Northumberland, his brother Andrew, all five of his sons, his daughter-in-law Jane Grey and Jane’s father the Duke of Suffolk—were in custody along with various of their supporters and allies. Most were put on trial for treason, convicted (the guilt of the accused being, for once, certain beyond possibility of doubt), and attainted. But only the duke and two obscure henchmen were executed. Jane and her husband Guildford Dudley, though under sentence of death, were kept in the Tower in comfortable circumstances, as were Guildford’s brothers John, Earl of Warwick, Ambrose, Robert, and Henry. Suffolk was, somehow, released without being charged. Thomas Cranmer, who after initial hesitation had thrown himself fully behind Dudley’s attempted coup, was merely confined to Lambeth Palace, the archbishop of Canterbury’s London residence. He was permitted to preside at King Edward’s funeral ceremony and to use the reformed rites in doing so. Mary declared that she “wished to constrain no man to go to mass” or to
“compel or constrain other men’s consciences.” A proclamation informed her subjects that nothing would be done to alter the Edwardian settlement until a Parliament was assembled to address the question. When that old champion of reform John Dudley faced the crowd that had gathered to witness his execution, he professed himself to be a Catholic who prayed for England’s return to the old faith. (He could hardly have meant the
Roman
Catholic faith, but possibly he was hoping to win favor for all the members of his family whom Mary had in custody.) The conservatives must have thought that a reversion to the traditional ways was going to be accomplished without great pain: Dudley’s conduct would have encouraged them to believe that the evangelical movement was made up entirely of self-seeking opportunists prepared to abandon their heresies as soon as pressure was applied.

The evangelicals for their part, having had things almost entirely their way since the last months of Henry VIII, remained fiercely committed to expunging every trace of Catholicism from English life. This was true of no one more than of Cranmer, who seemed to grow more radical by the month. By 1553 he had had ready for Parliament’s attention his Code of Ecclesiastical Constitutions, a revision of canon law that, if enacted, would have made it heresy to believe not just in papal supremacy but in transubstantiation (described as “repugnant to the plain words of scripture”) and
not
to believe in justification by faith alone. Anyone accused of such offenses was to be tried in the church courts, excommunicated upon conviction, and given sixteen days in which to recant or be turned over to the civil authorities for execution. John Dudley, who blamed Cranmer for the frequency with which evangelical preachers were offending the rich and powerful by criticizing their ongoing seizures of church property, had taken his revenge by blocking action on Cranmer’s code in the House of Lords. He then discredited the proposal—cleverly gave Parliament a reason to reject it—by allowing it to be published under a demonstrably false claim that it had the approval of the Canterbury Convocation.

In all likelihood Dudley was able to thwart Cranmer only because by this point the young king was on the brink of death. Almost certainly the code would have become law—Dudley might not have dared even to raise objections—if Edward had remained strong enough to give it vigorous support. It accorded perfectly with his revulsion against
Catholic doctrine and his belief that it was his responsibility to transform England into Christ’s kingdom on earth. Cranmer’s attempt to revise canon law shows that he was no less willing than the most radical reformers on the continent to use the state’s power over life and death to stamp out error and spread the gospel. It is impossible to doubt that Edward would have gone along with him.

Cranmer was understandably bitter after Mary became queen. Not only had everything that he still wanted to achieve suddenly become impossible, but the stupendous gains of the past half-dozen years were in imminent danger of being undone. News reached him of one setback after another. Even Elizabeth, in whom the evangelicals had invested so much hope, was reported to be attending mass with her sister the queen, establishing a chapel in her home, even ordering from the continent a chalice, a cross, and other things useful only for engaging in the ceremonies of the papists. Cranmer exploded in rage when informed that a mass had been celebrated in his cathedral church at Canterbury and, worse, that it was said to have been done with his approval. His printed denial dripped with invective, condemning the mass as a concoction of the pope, that arch-persecutor of Christ and true religion. He asked for an opportunity to demonstrate to the queen herself that the mass was blasphemy and that the church as purified during her brother’s reign expressed the authentic spirit of Christianity. This got him a summons to appear before the council, followed by commitment to the Tower. Neither he nor anyone else can possibly have been surprised. Cranmer had not only been conspicuous among those proclaiming Jane Grey queen, he had contributed part of his personal security force to the army with which Dudley had set forth from London to confront and capture Mary. Now he was accused also of “spreading abroad seditious bills, and moving tumults to the disquietness of the present state,” and his guilt was again obvious.

From the start of Mary’s reign, however, the attention of council, Parliament, court, and even the kingdom at large was focused at least as much on the question of the queen’s marriage as on religious issues. Mary appears to have had little if any personal interest in taking a husband. There was nothing in her past to suggest that she had ever had strong romantic inclinations, or that she was a particularly sexual creature. In the 1530s, at the nadir of her fortunes, she had expressed the
hope of entering the religious life, possibly in Spain. By 1553 she seemed a settled, satisfied, and distinctly middle-aged spinster, an amiable creature who enjoyed music and dance and gambling for small stakes and shared her father’s and brother’s taste for jewelry and costly dress, but was no more inclined than she had been in youth to engage in flirtations or dalliances. It was a long time since she had had great value on the international marriage market, an equally long time since she had given evidence of wishing for a spouse or children.

But she had been raised and educated to be not a ruler but a consort to some male monarch. And now, contrary to everyone’s expectations including her own, she found herself an unmarried female monarch in a world that scarcely knew what to make of such an anomaly. Her situation seemed unnatural to almost everyone—certainly to Mary herself. It seemed contrary to nature that any woman, even a queen, should not be subordinate to some man. The universal question, virtually from the first day of her reign, was not
whether
she should marry but
whom
.

It is understandable if Mary herself, so alone and vulnerable for much of her life, welcomed the thought of a partner with whom to share the unfamiliar burdens of rule. It is no less understandable if she wanted a child—and not for sentimental reasons, but as the one sure way of ensuring that England would not fall back into the hands of the evangelicals after her death. If she could find a partner capable of compensating for her lack of political experience and skill, so much the better. But what was truly essential was that her husband be a religious conservative—certainly a Catholic, preferably a Roman Catholic. That narrowed the field of candidates. One obvious possibility was Mary’s cousin Reginald Pole, who as a young man had broken with Henry over the divorce, observed from abroad as the king destroyed one of his brothers and executed another and finally had his mother killed as well, and now was a cardinal of the church (though not an ordained priest and therefore not under a binding vow of celibacy). Pole was so well respected as a person, a scholar, and a reformer-from-within that in 1549, while doing nothing to advance his own candidacy, he had come within two votes of being elected pope. He had only one disadvantage, but it was a decisive one: seventeen years older than Mary, Pole had no intention of marrying her or anyone else. In fact he was opposed to Mary’s taking a husband, seeing
more clearly than most that whoever she chose, whether English or foreign, was going to present her with serious political problems.

Another possibility was another of the queen’s cousins, that same Edward Courtenay, now the Earl of Devon and endowed with estates consistent with his new rank, who had come to manhood as a prisoner in the Tower. Among Courtenay’s advantages was the fact that his mother, the widow Gertrude, Marchioness of Exeter (Henry VIII had had her husband killed), happened to be one of Mary’s oldest, closest, and most faithful friends. Courtenay was a quarter of a century younger than Pole, a decade younger than the queen. His mother, not surprisingly, thought he would make a splendid consort, and the fact of his royal blood won him the support of most of the experienced politicians on the council, Chancellor Gardiner among them. These men believed, as did virtually everyone in those days, that no woman should attempt to rule without a husband. They believed also that popular opinion would be far more accepting of an English husband than of any foreigner. Gardiner had another, more personal reason for supporting Courtenay. During their years as fellow prisoners they had formed a close relationship, one that apparently caused the bishop to regard the youth as a kind of surrogate son and blinded him to the defects in Courtenay’s character.

The list of possible foreign husbands was extensive and included the king of Denmark and the heir to the throne of Portugal. When Mary sought the advice of her cousin the emperor Charles—she had been taught by her mother to trust her Hapsburg kin, and all her life looked to them for guidance and support—he briefly considered offering to marry her himself. Mary made it clear that she would welcome such an offer (the two had, after all, been engaged when Mary was a small child); Charles was a widower (not for the first time), and though she had not seen him in decades he had, at long distance, come to seem not only a protector but a kind of father. But he was Pole’s age, and thoroughly world-weary after a lifetime of struggling to hold together his vast but ramshackle and perpetually threatened empire. He had the good sense to rule himself out. But rather than forgo the advantages of a firm and lasting alliance with England, even perhaps of adding England to a Hapsburg patrimony that already included Spain and the Netherlands and much of Germany and Italy and the New World, he offered his son Philip.

Immediately Philip became, with Courtenay, one of the two leading candidates. He also became a bone of contention inside the English court. Favored by most of Mary’s female intimates and the men who had been officers of her household in the bad old days before her brother’s death (several of those men now sat on the Privy Council despite being political innocents), Philip was opposed by Gardiner and most of the council’s other old hands. These seasoned professionals, several of whom had sat on Edward VI’s council and been followers of John Dudley right up to the point where the effort to enthrone Jane Grey collapsed, understood the impact of the anti-Spanish propaganda that had begun with Henry VIII and grown steadily more intense as the Reformation proceeded under his son. Many of the people alive in England in 1553 had been taught from childhood that Spain was the handmaiden of the Antichrist. Philip, though a Hapsburg, was a
Spanish
Hapsburg, and many of Mary’s subjects were certain to find him hard if not impossible to accept.

Mary was unpersuaded, perhaps in part because she had little confidence in some of the men who warned her of danger. A number of her advisers remained on the council only because they were too influential, too dangerous, to be put aside. Everything in her experience disposed her to want an alliance with the Hapsburgs. When she was shown a portrait of the blond and blue-eyed Philip—no doubt one of the portraits that showed off the legs of which he was so proud—this inclination turned into infatuation.