The Tudors (62 page)

In fact Philip had much to recommend him, and not just his family connections. At twenty-six he was already a significant figure on the world stage, intelligent and serious-minded and an experienced junior partner in the management of his father’s immense (and at times unmanageable) domains. Like his father a widower (his first wife had been a Portuguese cousin), he had a young son and so was obviously fertile. If he was known to dally with women to whom he was not married, he never did so as recklessly as young Courtenay, who had begun to run wild almost as soon as he was released from prison. In any case, such dalliance was neither unexpected in royalty nor easily condemned in a healthy young man whose wife had been dead for eight years and whose chances for remarriage were circumscribed by the political schemes of his father the emperor. The Hapsburgs had for centuries been masters
of the advantageous marriage; it was how they had extended their empire into the Netherlands, Spain, and elsewhere. It would hardly have been reasonable to expect the men of the family to be entirely satisfied with wives chosen for reasons of territorial expansion. As for Mary, no daughter of Henry VIII could have been deeply shocked by the thought of discreet sexual adventuring on the part of royal males.

Courtenay, whose good looks and aristocratic bearing had made a favorable initial impression in the days just after his release, was soon showing that fifteen years in prison had left him desperately eager for the pleasures of the flesh. Arrogance and dissolute behavior soon cost him all but his most indulgent supporters, mainly his mother and Gardiner. The queen, who had little difficulty in taking Courtenay’s measure, appears never to have seriously considered marrying him. English and Spanish diplomats were put to work on constructing the terms of a Hapsburg marriage, while Mary turned her attention to other concerns. Arrangements got under way for the first Parliament of the new reign, and for a coronation ceremony to be conducted beforehand, so as to avoid any suggestion that Mary’s possession of the crown was dependent on parliamentary approval. The coronation, a lavish affair, took place on October 1 with Gardiner presiding in place of Archbishop Cranmer. Mary took an oath that avoided any mention of the reforms of the preceding reign and omitted all the words with which the boy Edward, at his coronation, had laid claim to supremacy over the church. Two days before, in an even more forceful demonstration of her determination to break with the recent past, Mary had gathered the members of her council in the Tower. Lowering herself to her knees, she had spoken earnestly, almost tearfully of the
duties
rather than the powers of monarchs, and of her wish to fulfill those duties to the limits of her strength. The episode suggests the depth of Mary’s wish to rule well and wisely, and her lack of confidence in her own abilities. It is impossible to imagine her father, or her brother even at age nine, assuming such a posture or uttering such words.

Philip, meanwhile, was coming to terms with the prospect of taking as his wife a woman eleven years his senior, a woman he was accustomed to calling his aunt. He had been exploring a marriage to yet another Portuguese princess (his mother as well as his first wife had come from the royal house of Portugal, the Hapsburgs being almost suicidally
insensitive to the dangers of inbreeding) when Europe was surprised to learn that Mary Tudor had emerged from the turmoil following her brother’s death in firm possession of the English throne. It seems improbable that the emperor Charles, in offering his son to Mary, was motivated primarily by the hope of adding England permanently to the family business. He was aware of Mary’s age and the chronically troublesome state of her health; the likelihood of her producing healthy children would have seemed less than impressive. Beyond that he already possessed more of Europe and the Americas than he and his son together could properly manage even with the help of various kin, and the England of the 1550s seemed to Charles and Philip alike (not entirely without reason) a poor, half-civilized island of distinctly secondary importance perched off one of Europe’s less attractive coasts. But the marriage offered important advantages all the same. It could eliminate the danger of England’s entering into an alliance with Spain’s archenemy, the king of France. The south coast of England formed the northern edge of the English Channel, the nautical highway that connected Spain to the Hapsburgs’ Low Countries possessions and was bounded to the south by France. Charles, after decades of fending off ambitious rivals, after recurrent wars that had cost him much and gained him nothing, after the failure of all his attempts to stamp out the Reformation in Germany, was worn down and heartsick. He was beginning to dream of passing his burdens to his son, of devoting whatever remained of his life to a preparation for death. The English marriage could help to make this possible. In all of Europe there were few economic relationships more important than that between England and the Netherlands, and Hapsburg—meaning Spanish—rule of the Netherlands was far from popular. But if Philip married the queen of England, if he himself became England’s king, he could at a single stroke be transformed from an alien oppressor to an asset valuable to the Dutch. The delicate process of passing the crown of Spain (and with it possession of the Netherlands) from Charles to Philip might be vastly simplified. That alone was enough to make the marriage appealing.

Ten days after Mary’s coronation Philip’s formal proposal of marriage arrived at her court. Within the month, with Parliament in session, Mary informed the council of her decision to accept. The news proved to be as unpopular as Pole and Gardiner had feared: England did not
want a foreign king, least of all a Spanish one. Parliament sent a delegation to the queen, expressing its unhappiness with her plans and begging her to reconsider. Her peremptory refusal—her anger at Parliament’s presuming to intrude into a matter as personal as matrimony, its effrontery in supposing that she might subordinate the interests of her subjects to the promptings of her heart—soon persuaded an assortment of disaffected and unstable hotheads that only desperate measures could save England from becoming an appendage of the Hapsburg empire. Mary had made the first great mistake, indeed the seminal blunder, of her reign. She had put herself at odds not only with some portion of England’s ruling elite but with many of her people.

A marriage treaty still needed to be hammered out, one that would settle the specific terms of the union. Mary had sufficient acumen to assign the negotiations to Stephen Gardiner, who, as the highest-placed opponent of the match, could be depended upon not only to drive a hard bargain but, once he had satisfied himself, to have maximum credibility in bringing other skeptics around. Parliament meanwhile, perhaps chastened by the queen’s anger, proved cooperative in other matters. By repealing Henry VIII’s Succession Act of 1534 it restored the validity of the marriage of Mary’s parents, thereby making her once again legitimate. The most recent and aggressive definitions of treason were likewise repealed, so that treason became once again what it had been in the fifteenth century: an overt action, not just something
said
. All nine Edwardian reform statutes, Cranmer’s acts of uniformity and the legalization of clerical marriage included, were swept away. Essentially the church was returned to what it had been at the time of Henry VIII’s death, and in some respects to what it had been under Henry VII. Praemunire crimes were abolished, along with felonies that had not been violations of the law until Henry VIII made them so.

Ambitious as all this was, Mary and Gardiner were proceeding with caution. They had separated the question of Mary’s legitimacy from the religious issues, specifically from the issue of supremacy. Nothing had been done to bring the supremacy under discussion and thereby to alarm at least the more moderate reformers. (About the radicals nothing could be done. They of course had been alarmed and offended since it first became plain that Mary had won the throne.)

Nor was anything done or said to indicate that the new regime was so
much as thinking about the one subject even more explosive than the marriage: the church land that had been seized by Henry and his cohorts in the 1530s, had since then been given to favorites or sold and broken up and sold again, and now was in the hands of noble and gentry families in every corner of the kingdom. Gardiner had warned Mary not only that there was no possibility of returning this property to the church, but that any move in that direction would spark a reaction so violent as to wreck any possibility of progress on other fronts. The emperor Charles and his son, who had come to regard it as one of their purposes in life to heal the schism in England if they could not do so in Germany, agreed so completely that they successfully pressured Pope Julius II to assent as well. They were opposed, however, by Cardinal Pole, whom the pope had ordered to England as his legate and was now in the Low Countries awaiting permission to cross the Channel. Pole, after decades of exile from his home country, had no understanding of how alien the notion of papal supremacy now was to many Englishmen, or of how the dispersion of the church lands had given rise to a whole new class that would go to war before surrendering the foundation of its wealth and influence. He found himself stalled just a short voyage from home. The Hapsburgs wanted him kept away until Philip was safely married to the queen—Charles wrongly feared that if given the opportunity Pole might claim the bride for himself—and Gardiner wanted no trouble over the land question. Parliament, both of its houses dominated by exactly the kinds of men who had prospered mightily from the dispersion of the church land, was relieved to find that Mary was doing nothing about the subject. It remained distrustful, however, and would continue to be so.

Before year-end Gardiner was able to disclose the contents of a completed marriage treaty. It was, from the English perspective, a thoroughly favorable arrangement: Gardiner had been able to use the Spanish ambassadors’ understanding of English public opinion to extract extraordinary concessions. If Mary and Philip had a son, the treaty stated, he would be heir not only to England but to Philip’s possessions in Germany, Burgundy, and the Netherlands. Philip’s son Charles, then eight years old, was acknowledged as heir to Spain and the Hapsburg holdings in Italy and the New World, but if he died without issue that entire empire would go to the English heir as well. If on the other hand
Mary died without issue, Philip was to have no claim to the English crown or, for that matter, to anything in England. Mary and any children that she might bear were not to leave England without permission of Parliament, thereby ensuring that the children would be English in their upbringing. Though Philip was to be styled king of England he was to assist Mary in ruling, not rule himself. Nothing was to be done to alter the laws or customs of England, and England was not to be involved in the Hapsburgs’ wars.

Opponents of the marriage could hardly have hoped for more, but nevertheless news of the agreement was received without enthusiasm. People grumbled that words on paper meant nothing, because the Spanish could not be trusted, and that if Mary did have a son he would grow up to rule not England but a far-flung assortment of domains of which England would be only a part. There was grumbling on the continent, understandably, where some thought too high a price was being paid for a union of little real value to anyone except the English and perhaps the Dutch. Philip himself, when he learned the details of what his father’s representatives had promised, was aghast. To him the agreement seemed insulting. He secretly signed a document repudiating the treaty on grounds that he had not been consulted about its terms and therefore could not be bound by them. Thus what should have been seen as a diplomatic victory for England became instead a shaky foundation upon which to erect a lasting understanding.

Disclosure of the treaty’s terms, which remained subject to approval by Parliament, did nothing to stop secret plans for simultaneous rebellions in several parts of England. These plans—it is not clear where they originated—had been in preparation since shortly after the queen’s refusal to be deflected from the marriage. The aim of the plotters also remains unclear and was probably a confused mixture. They certainly wanted to stop the wedding, probably hoped to depose Mary (though a proposal that she should be assassinated had been rejected), and possibly intended to replace her by marrying Elizabeth to Courtenay and crowning them together. The risings were scheduled for March 1554 and were to take place simultaneously in four places: Devon in the west, Hereford and Leicestershire to the north, and Kent near London. The hope, evidently, was that a government that had no standing army would find it impossible to deal with so many irruptions at the same time. But by January
Gardiner had learned that trouble of some kind was brewing. He had his protégé and onetime prison-mate Courtenay brought in for questioning. Whatever Courtenay knew he quickly revealed, and when the plotters saw that their secret had been disclosed they decided to act without further delay. Everywhere but in Kent the results were disastrous—or pathetic. In Devon the ringleaders ran for their lives as soon as they saw that no one was willing to rise with them, and the attempt in Hereford fizzled almost as quickly. In Leicester Jane Grey’s father the Duke of Suffolk, the only nobleman among the plotters, foolishly put himself at the head of a rebellion that likewise came to nothing. On the run, he tried to hide in a hollow tree but was found out by a sharp-nosed dog and taken to the Tower in chains.

In Kent, however, it was a different story. There the rising was led by a cabal of disaffected country gentlemen with substantial military experience, a history of association with King Edward’s regime, and hopes of gaining much if Mary’s government could be overturned. Prominent among these men was Sir Thomas Wyatt, son of a famous poet and courtier of the same name. He had been involved in the plotting as early as November and was able, when the rising went off prematurely, to quickly assemble several thousand fighting men. That was a force quite big enough to challenge the queen—it soon swelled to fifteen or even twenty thousand—and with it Wyatt began advancing on London. He was met at Rochester by troops mustered in London and commanded by the aged Duke of Norfolk, who found himself first outnumbered and then neutralized by the defection of a substantial portion of his army.