Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (14 page)

For the coronation procession through London on September 30, a manuscript device anticipates Mary as being “richly apparelled with mantle and kirtle of cloth of gold” wearing “upon her head a circlet of gold set with rich stones and pearls, in her Grace’s litter richly garnished with white cloth of gold…and all things thereunto appertaining, according to the precedents.”
²³
This is close to the precedent for a queen consort.
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The accounts in 
The Chronicle of Queen Jane
, however, and in Holinshed’s
Chronicles
 report that Mary “sat in a gown of blew velvet, furred with powdered armeyn, hangyng on hir head a call of clothe of tynsell besett with perle and ston, and about the same apon her head a rond circlet of gold.” Moreover, it goes on to describe how “the said call and circle” were “so massy and ponderous that she was fayn to beare uppe hir hedd with hir handes.”
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Where Commendone describes a simple headdress, this barbed account draws attention to a cumbersome and, by implication, ostentatious and unprecedented crown.
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A male monarch would have ridden bareheaded and a queen consort would have worn a “circlet of gold.” On the day of the coronation, it seems certain that Mary wore crimson parliamentary robes. Again, though, the English account differs and describes a “gown of blew velvett,” which follows no precedent whatsoever. As mentioned above, even queen consorts wore crimson.
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Mary’s coronation adhered to the terms of her faith and her belief in her divine appointment and in God’s grace. She may have rejected the proposal that sought to secure her legitimacy by an act of Parliament first, but she was also aware that her position depended not just on having been anointed Queen of England. An account of her Guildhall speech of February 1554, in the face of the Wyatt uprising against her forthcoming marriage to Philip, records the following powerful words:

If I had been established and consecrated as your Queen by the Grace of God only, as it happened to David, when he was called from the herd he was leading, you would be obliged to show me respect and due obedience solely on account of the holy unction. How much more entitled as I am now to expect all these from you, and it becomes you to tender your obedience to me, your Queen, who by the grace of God, by rightful law of succession, confirmed by your unanimous acclamations and votes, have taken charge of the supreme authority and administration of the Realm of my forefathers, and was proclaimed your Queen.
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Mary here is both David, and more than David. She represents herself—or is represented—as ordained by God but she also emerges as an English warrior queen, as a woman who secured her throne via a significant military triumph, and as a parliamentary queen who owes her position to the “unanimous acclamations and votes” of her people.

III

Five years later, Mary lay dead and the twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth brushed down her sister’s cloth of gold coronation robe, had a new bodice made, and donned it for her own coronation in the Abbey on January 15.
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Her dress was not the only hand-me-down. As Paulina Kewes argues in her essay in this volume, the pageantry created for Elizabeth’s coronation procession through London on January 14, 1559 borrowed heavily from Mary’s. Elizabeth also faced anxiety surrounding both her own legitimacy and the legitimacy of female rule. As with Mary, Elizabeth’s mark of bastardy from the 1536 Act had never been legally repealed. Mary had also attempted to bar Elizabeth from the succession, although Elizabeth had ridden behind Mary in her coronation procession in 1553—a visual statement of legitimate female succession apparently restored. But John Knox’s excoriating 
First Blast
 had just been published, in which he had equated female rule with idolatry and tyranny. To emphasize the monstrosity of a (Catholic) woman in power, Knox invokes the coronation regalia:

What, I pray you, shulde this godlie father have saide, if he had sene all the men of a realme or nation fall downe before a woman? If he had sene the crowne, sceptre, and sworde, whiche are the ensignes of the royall dignitie, geven to her, and a woman cursed of God, and made subjecte to man, placed in the throne of justice, to sit as Goddes lieutenant?
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Knox’s blast occasioned John Aylmer’s more measured response to the anomaly of a queen regnant, a response that appealed to God’s “secret purpose.”
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But the problem persisted: how should a godly queen be crowned and how should she rule? How could Elizabeth, a godly queen, replace a Catholic idol? In words that recall but reinvent the language of miracle that marked Mary’s accession, commentators assimilated Elizabeth’s accession into a providential scheme: it was God’s will. Aylmer writes of how, when God (a Protestant God) “chuseth himselfe by sending to a king, whose succession is ruled by enheritaunce and lyneall discent, no heires male,” it is “plain argument, that for some secret purpose he myndeth the female should reigne”; John Hales in his coronation oration describes how “it hath pleased his divine providence to constitute your hyghnesse to be our Debora, to be the governesse and head of the body of this Realme.”
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In another echo of anxieties from 1553 regarding a queen’s relationship with Parliament, Aylmer explains in his text how it is “not she that ruleth but the lawes” since England is not “a mere Monarchie…but a rule mixte.”
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A godly queen, a deliverer sent from God, then would also be a parliamentary queen and she would heed good counsel.

In addition to ongoing anxieties about female rule, the exact temper of Elizabeth’s Protestantism, we need to remember, was and remained to be the source of some anxiety for those intent on implementing a particularly radical program of religious reform under her governance. At her coronation, Elizabeth seemed to respond to this by deftly obscuring the matter of her own conscience at a key moment through a powerful ceremonial gesture. Her coronation trod carefully along the lines of established or never formally revoked laws, but certain aspects were more inscrutable than Mary’s, and, in this regard, Elizabeth was perhaps more politically prudent than Mary.

Since the early twentieth century, Elizabeth’s coronation has been interpreted variously by historians. The debate centers principally on what has become the supposed scandal of the coronation mass and the implications of this for England’s religion. Opinion remains divided on whether or not the consecrated host was elevated and, if it was, whether Elizabeth shunned this gesture by getting up and withdrawing into a hidden “traverse,” thereby rejecting Marian and Catholic ceremony and demonstrating her commitment to the “new” religion.
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The controversy stems from the fact that ambassadors’ letters, eyewitness reports, and court records, like in 1553, offer contradictory accounts of the ceremony. Furthermore, unlike previous coronations, including Mary’s, there is no extant “Device” for Elizabeth’s coronation that anticipates the order of the ceremony. It is not completely certain who celebrated the mass—Bishop Oglethorpe or Dean Carew, the newly instated dean of the Chapel Royal—whether the consecrated host was elevated or not, how the host was consecrated, and whether or how Elizabeth took communion.
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The Venetian ambassador Paulo Tiepolo writes in one of his letters about the coronation, at which he was not present, that “of the many particulars heard by me in illustration of this fact I am now able to mention one which very well illustrates the Queen’s mind, viz., that at the mass which she heard on the day of her coronation she did not wish the host to be elevated.”
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The Spanish ambassador, the Count de Feria, has to retract his original report to Philip II. He writes, “By the last post I wrote your majesty that I had been told that the Queen took the holy sacrament ‘sub utraque specie’ [in both kinds] on the day of the coronation, but it was all nonsense. She did not take it at all.”
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While it is never going to be possible to ascertain the exact details of Elizabeth’s ceremony, it seems most likely that the consecrated host was not elevated 
and
 that Elizabeth was hidden from sight at this point in the service in a curtained “traverse” or “closet.”
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Whether or how she communicated was thus kept secret. The Mantuan envoy Il Schifanoya reports of the ceremony that “the choristers commenced the mass, which was sung by the dean of her chapel, her chaplain, the bishops not having chosen to say mass without elevating the host or consecrating it.”
³⁹
That Elizabeth did not agree with the gesture of elevation is known from changes made to the mass in her chapel prior to the coronation. In the Chapel Royal on Christmas Day 1558, Elizabeth had ordered the Bishop of Carlisle, Owen Oglethorpe, not to elevate the host. Oglethorpe, however, replied that he could not act contrary to his beliefs and elevated the host as usual.

Accordingly, Elizabeth rose and departed after the Gospel had been read. Il Schifanoya, reports that, ever since, mass in the Chapel Royal “has been so done by her chaplains,” and hence without the elevation of the host.
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The death of Cardinal Pole, the Archbishop of Canterbury, on the day of Mary’s death, and the refusal of the Archbishop of York, Nicholas Heath, to crown Elizabeth meant that the office fell to his suffragen, Owen Oglethorpe. But it was the new dean of her Chapel Royal—George Carew—who seems to have led the coronation mass and there was no reason for him not to omit the elevation of the elements.
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So Oglethorpe, a Catholic bishop, anointed and crowned Elizabeth but Carew celebrated mass. Il Schifanoya does not, however, mention Elizabeth withdrawing. An anonymous English eyewitness account is more suggestive: “And then her Grace retorned into her Clossett hearing the Consecration of the Mass.”
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A fragmentary herald’s account is vague but also reports certain movement: “Then the masse began by the Deane she siting still till the offer ing she went and kissed the patent and had a Collect said over her and went to her traverse and the masse proceeds.”
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A memorandum drawn up prior to the ceremony records that “her Matie in her closett may use the Masse without lyfting up above the Host according to the Ancient customs.”
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This memorandum seems to be conclusive evidence that the host was not elevated and that Elizabeth withdrew, although, of cour se, the use of the word “may” is noncommittal.

Of Elizabeth’s withdrawal, Richard McCoy has concluded that “something potentially scandalous” happened at Elizabeth’s coronation, something that “subverted the rite’s sacrosanctity and symbolic hierarchy.”
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This fits in with McCoy’s analysis that Elizabeth’s coronation was, in fact, an “obscure side-show” compared to the pre-coronation procession, and that, as a ceremony, the coronation could no longer legitimize power. But Elizabeth’s withdrawal is more subtle and more ambiguous than this and, conversely, is suggestive of a continued commitment to the ceremony and its form. It was not unusual for a monarch to hear mass and communicate in private, even at the coronation. Henry VIII’s coronation “Device” records that the king and queen would take the sacrament kneeling at the altar but that “two of the grettest estates” would hold before them a “longe towell of Silke.”
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The difference in 1509 is that there was no doubt that Henry and Catherine communicated in one kind behind that silk.

However, in the political and religious climate of January 1559, the mystery of the mass and Elizabeth’s relationship to it and to the entire ceremony becomes one of the most contested mysteries of all. The point is not that Elizabeth did not observe mass, but that she herself could not be observed, so her attitude to the non-elevation of the host and whether she communicated or not behind the curtain have to remain a matter of her private conscience and our speculation.
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In the pressurized context of such religious uncertainty, removing herself from sight at such a central moment was a way for Elizabeth to retain autonomy and control over her coronation and its meaning. By exploiting a familiar and acceptable ceremonial gesture, Elizabeth both respects the form of the ceremony and protects her private beliefs from scrutiny.

Other evidence suggests that Elizabeth’s coronation was openly Protestant in a few crucial respects. Il Schifanoya reports that the consecration prayers were read in English, and the Epistle and Gospel sung in Latin and then said in English.
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In departing from the traditional Roman mass through the use of the vernacular and the omission of the elevation of the consecrated elements, Elizabeth’s coronation contravened the established practice of the time. But, as Roger Bowers has shown, the coronation also proceeded carefully given the flexibility of ecclesiastical law. The license to read the Epistle and Gospel in English recalled injunctions that had been made in the early years of Edward VI but which had never been rescinded by Mary. A royal proclamation of December 27, 1558 promoted the use of the vernacular in the celebration of high mass but did not make it mandatory. In omitting the elevation of the elements, the mass followed the 1548 Order of Communion that had never been legally abrogated either later in Edward VI’s reign or in Mary’s reign.
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It was not until June 1559 and the Settlement of Religion that the Protestant communion (the term mass being abolished) would be established, and this or der of service departed from the prayer books of both 1549 and 1552. The extent of Elizabethan Protestantism at the time of the coronation was uncertain. Neither can it be assumed that Elizabeth’s personal beliefs were in harmony with those of her council or of the country.
⁵⁰
Elizabeth’s coronation rejected Marian ceremony, but whether it forecast a return to late Henrician policy or late Edwardian policy, or something else altogether, remained unknown.

There is further intrigue surrounding Elizabeth’s coronation oath. William Cecil’s coronation “Articles” specify that “A Copie of the othe that her maiestie shall take to be sene perused by her highnes” and that these relevant “Bokes remayne with the abbott of Westminster,” referring perhaps to the 
Liber Regalis
 in the possession of the Abbey.
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The English eyewitness offers a very muddled account of Elizabeth’s oath-taking: And the Bishop gave her a Book which she had taking her oath. And after that the Bishop kneeling before the Aulter read in two Bookes; and her Grace gave a little book to a Lord to deliver unto the Bishop. The Bishop returned the book to the Lord, and red other Bookes. And immediately the Bishop took the Queenes booke and read it before the Quene hir grace. And after that hir Grace kneeled before the Aulter and the Bishop red a booke before her Grace. And immediately her Grace went to shift her apparrel.