Tudor Queens of England (34 page)

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8. Jane Seymour by Hans Holbein the Younger

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9. Catherine Parr by Unknown artist (National Portrait Gallery, London)

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10. Unknown woman, formerly known as Catherine Howard after Hans Holbein the Younger (National Portrait Gallery, London)

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11. Lady Jane Dudley (née Grey) by Unknown artist (National Portrait Gallery, London)

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12. Mary Queen of Scots by Unknown artist

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13. Queen Mary I by Hans Eworth (National Portrait Gallery, London)

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14. Queen Elizabeth I attributed to George Gower (National Portrait Gallery, London)

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9

The Married Sovereign: Queen Mary I

In July 1553 Henry VIII’s earth-moving efforts to prevent a female succession were fi nally brought to nothing. When his only surviving son died without achieving his majority there was no man with a respectable claim in sight.

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Henry had provided against such an eventuality both in his last succession Act and in his will, decreeing that in the event of both himself and his son dying without further heirs the Crown was to pass to his elder daughter, Mary. It was, of course, hoped that this would not arise. As we have seen, Edward tried to divert the succession away from Mary but since his chosen candidate was also female and with an inferior claim the attempt made on his behalf after his death was unsuccessful. On 19 July Mary was proclaimed and, as her reign was offi cially dated from the time of Edward’s death, Jane was erased from the record. Mary, although passionately convinced of her right to succeed, was only too aware of the problems that she faced. As the Church taught, custom decreed, and everyone believed, women were naturally inferior to men and it was their destiny to be ruled and not to rule. In her youth, a girl was controlled by her father, or by some male surrogate; when she married, she passed under the authority of her husband and as a widow she was ‘protected’ by her sons. Of course many women did not fi t into these tidy categories. There were unmarried heiresses whose fathers had died; spinsters who were not heiresses; and widows without offspring. It was among such unattached women, as well as among those families where the number of daughters outran the parental capacity to provide dowries, that the religious houses had carried out their main recruitment. Mary, however, even at the time of her deepest affl iction, had been no more inclined than her mother to take the veil. Both were far too keenly aware of their royal credentials to wish to exchange them, even for the kingdom of heaven.

Mary had enjoyed a happy childhood and had seen a great deal more of both her parents than was normal with royal offspring of the period. Her education was carefully planned in the Renaissance mode, with much emphasis upon biblical and classical reading but it had been a girl’s education, designed to make her a fi t companion for a great king and a mother to his children. It was not designed to make her a ruler of men. For Henry to have brought up his 188

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daughter for that purpose would have been an admission of defeat that he was not prepared to countenance. Catherine needed to look no further for a model than her own upbringing, which had likewise been learned, and feminine. Juan Vives, to whom her mother had turned for advice, and who was an advocate of women’s education, designed his scheme for a girl’s supposedly inferior capacity and conscientiously steered clear of both lechery and politics.

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ow much Mary knew of her parents’ marital problems while she was in Wales we do not know but it is reasonable to suppose that the Countess of Salisbury protected her against the salacious gossip that focused on Anne Boleyn before 1529. When she came back from the Marches in the latter year and walked into the storm she was already 13 and no longer a child by the standards of the time. She had been twice betrothed and twice abandoned but it is unlikely that these essentially political games had had much impact on her personally. The independent household that she had enjoyed in Wales continued and, although she spent quite a lot of time with her mother, the Countess of Salisbury continued in post, and Mary was, in theory at least, very much her own mistress. However, during the sensitive adolescent years between 13 and 16, she became a very partisan spectator of the ‘sex war’ going on between her father and her mother and when the whole situation exploded in 1533 she was very much in the fi ring line. When she furiously declined to be termed ‘The Lady Mary’ her whole establishment was closed down and she found herself under virtual arrest in the household set up for her supplanter, Elizabeth. Her formal education had in any case ceased by that time and she was left to draw what consolation she could from the piety and classical learning that she had absorbed

Her mother’s death in January 1536 dealt her a severe blow and worse was to follow in May, when she discovered that the shameful ways in which she had been treated sprang not from the infl uence of Anne Boleyn but from her father’s own political and ecclesiastical convictions. Undermined by this discovery, she surrendered to his will in July 1536, and was immediately restored to favour becoming ‘the second lady of the court’ after Queen Jane Seymour.

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Over the next 11 years, as queens came and went, she ran her own household, living partly at court and partly in one or other of the royal residences in the Home Counties. Marriage proposals were mooted from time to time and she even met one of her suitors but despite her diminished offi cial status, her marriage was primarily a political issue over which she had (and could expect to have) very little control. She is said to have lamented at one point that as long as her father was alive she would never be wed, but would remain ‘only the Lady Mary, and the most unhappy lady in Christendom’
.4
What Mary really thought, either about this or about anything else, during these years is extremely hard

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to reconstruct. Her subsequent conduct suggests that she was dissembling and remained secretly a committed papist – but no contemporary evidence shows this. It would, of course, have been a very dangerous line to have taken, but even her warmest admirer, Eustace Chapuys, does not give any hint that that was what was happening. Indeed he seems to have been totally puzzled by her attitude. She quarrelled with Catherine Howard – a girls’ spat over jewels and precedence – but was warm friends with both Jane Seymour and Catherine Parr. She remained devoted to the liturgies and practices of the old faith – but then so did her father so there was no basis for disagreement there.

She must have realized that her views were seriously at odds with those of Henry’s last queen and her circle but that does not seem to have impaired their friendship and indeed there is at this stage no sign of her later reputation for intolerance and bigotry. She was living in Catherine’s household with every sign of contentment when Henry died.

As we have seen, she made no bid for the succession at that point, being apparently quite satisfi ed with her lawful position of ‘second person’. However, in other ways the King’s death transformed her circumstances. Henry was hardly buried before Lord Thomas Seymour resumed his attentions to Catherine, who obviously found them welcome. Feeling ill at ease in this love nest, Mary moved out. Her father had bequeathed her lands to the value of some £4,000 a year and several houses including two of her favourites, Hunsdon and Beaulieu or New Hall. This made her for the fi rst time, not only fully independent, but a magnate in her own right, and the Council made haste to confi rm the arrangements and formalize the gr

ants.5 M
ary now needed not only household offi cers but Stewards and Receivers for her manors and a council of lawyers and advisors. She was 31 years old and her unmarried state was an anomaly but at least it gave her invaluable experience in management. For about four years, until her half sister Elizabeth was similarly endowed in 1551, she was the only woman who could be classed as a major peer in her own right. She held no title or public offi ce and did not sit in the House of Lords, but in other respects she was a Prince of the Blood. She denied any intention of meddling in the politics of her brother’s reign and declined any role in the conspiracy that overthrew Protector Somerset in October 1549 but in one critical respect she made a highly political statement. On the ground that it offended her conscience she absolutely refused to use or countenance the use of the Book of Common Prayer.
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Furious quarrels and ruthless pressure from the Council, both under Somerset and under his successor, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, could not budge her. Her father’s settlement, she declared, was absolute and fi nal, and could not be touched – least of all while the King was a minor.

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Not only was this defi ance highly embarrassing to the Council – it also put relations with the Emperor into the freezer. Charles had been mystifi ed by Mary’s apparent quiescence in the latter years of her father’s reign but this stand he understood, and supported to the hilt, threatening war if the law was enforced upon his cousin.

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Whether he would (or could) have gone so far is uncertain, but the minority Council could not afford to take the risk. Stalemate ensued. By 1553 Mary was thus not only an experienced manager in terms of her estates, and the patronage which went with wealth and status, but she was also in this particular respect a political leader. All those (and they were very numerous) who found Edward’s religious settlement unappealing, and who hankered after

‘religion as king Henry left it’, looked to her as their standard bearer and leader. In spite of her almost hysterical exchanges with the council, she had proved extraordinarily tough and shrewd in her campaign against the Prayer Book, and had used her status quite ruthlessly to expose the weaknesses and limitations of Edward’s government. In the light of this, and of her quarrel with the King that had resulted, it is not surprising, that as his death approached in the summer of 1553, the young Edward should have become fully convinced that her succession to the Crown would be a disaster.

As we have seen, he tried to will the throne to his young cousin, Jane Dudley, and for a few days everyone thought that the ‘King’s party’ would prevail. However, within about a fortnight it had turned out to be no contest. In the fi rst place, Mary was ready for a fi ght because she knew about the conspiracy against her, and believed passionately in the rightness of her cause. Her servants had written out numerous copies of her proclamation of accession and the gentlemen of her retinue had mobilized their friends and put their own retainers on standby. When the moment came and she was fully convinced that her brother was dead, the machinery immediately went into action. Within days her proclamations were being read all over the country, and a sizeable military force began to assemble at Kenninghall in Norfolk, in the heart of her own estates.

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By contrast, the Duke of Northumberland was not prepared. His theoretical command of resources depended upon men whose primary allegiance was elsewhere. Some were the King’s men, and their loyalty in such a crisis was uncertain. Some were dependent upon his fellow councillors, and would remain loyal only as long as their masters did. His own
manred
, when it came to the point, was pitifully small. He was a great man, with commensurate wealth, but his estates were in constant fl ux, producing no large body of committed tenants and followers. Consequently, he could not count on nearly as many loyal supporters as Mary could. Added to which, his action was of dubious legality, whereas Mary was supported both by statute and the old King’s will. Even the Protestants, who with the benefi t of hindsight can

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be seen to have had the most to lose, on the whole declared for her. When the majority of the Council deserted him, between 16 and 19 July 1553, taking their men with them, Northumberland was left with a rump retinue, which was no match for Mary’s large and increasing forces, and he gave up. Robert Wingfi eld recorded the whole of Mary’s triumph and although his account is replete with hagiography and special pleading, the outline of the story that he tells is accurate enough.

9 M
ary moved her base from Kenninghall to Framlingham on 12 July, was proclaimed in London on 19 July and then advanced steadily on the capital, sweeping up further peers and former councillors as she advanced. She entered London in triumph, to universal acclamation, on 3 August.

Five years later she died, if not quite unlamented, certainly much less popular than at the time of her triumph. So what went wrong and to what extent can her failure be blamed on the fact that she was England’s fi rst ruling Queen? Neither Mary nor her subjects had any doubt of her right to the throne. To some she was the old King’s only legitimate child but to most she was his heir by law established and her known commitment to the old faith was no handicap at all. Edward’s Protestant government had been remarkably effective but it had never been popular except in parts of London and the Home Counties. What most expected their new Queen to do was to restore her father’s settlement. That, after all, had been the slogan under which she had campaigned against the Prayer Book. However, Mary’s particular brand of piety led her to ascribe her success against the Duke of Northumberland to direct Divine intervention. Those Englishmen, nobles, gentlemen and others, who had been the effective cause of that success, had been merely acting as the agents of the Will of God. This meant that she believed herself to have a Divine mandate to right all the wrongs of the previous 20 years and that she had been deliberately preserved by God in all her troubles for precisely that pur