Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (33 page)

CHAPTER 11

“WOMAN, WARRIOR, QUEEN?” RETHINKING MARY AND ELIZABETH*

Anna Whitelock

I

“Early modern culture was deeply imbued with warrior values.”
¹
Monarchs were ordained to protect their people with strength and justice and this was seen to be dependent on military might. The great seal of England depicted these basic facets of monarchy. On the one side there was an image of the monarch enthroned as the dispenser of justice, on the other the monarch was armed and on horseback, depicted as a military leader and defender of the country.
²
The coronation regalia—the spurs and the sword—similarly reflected the knightly origins of monarchy and the monarch’s status as the country’s leader in war, a role premised on masculinity. Writing in the fifteenth century, John Fortescue had argued against a woman’s right to inherit the English crown as “queens could not bear the sword.”
³
Fighting was believed to be immodest and unsuited to female virtue. In his 
De
Institutione,
 written as a guide for Mary’s education, the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives opposed women bearing arms or jousting:

A young woman cannot easily be of chaste mind if her thoughts are occupied with the sword and sinewy muscles and virile strength. What place is here for defenceless, unwarlike and weak chastity? A woman who contemplates these things drinks poison into her breast.
⁴

Yet alongside stereotypical images of women as weak and subordinate, early modern society was permeated with tales of the amazons, warrior women of ancient myth such as Penthesilea who defended Troy in the Trojan war before being struck down by Achilles.
⁵
Whilst such “viragoes” could be praised for their military prowess, they were at the same time feared for their fierce emotion and unbridled lust. As John Knox declared in his 
First Blast of the Trumpet
against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
, the ancients, could they see Mary Tudor enthroned, would think the world transformed to “monstrous Amazona”:

He that judgeth it a monstre in nature, that a woman shall exercise weapons, Must judge it to be a monstre of monstres, that a woman shal be exalted above a hole realme and nation.
⁶

Yet Knox’s diatribe specifically targeted a Catholic monarch, thus causing damage that John Aylmer attempted to repair at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign. In his 
An harborowe for faithfull and trewe subjectes, against
the late blowne blaste, concerning the government of women
 he acknowledged that one of the reasons that people did not want a female ruler was that “she is not mete to go to the wars” but added that “some women have gonne and sped well.”
⁷
Edmund Spenser went as far as to claim that men’s opposition to women taking up arms was masculine envy that had stifled women’s fame.
⁸
Yet although Spenser presents an acceptable warrior woman in the figure of Britomart in 
The Faerie Queene,
 he also portrays a more threatening Amazon embodied by the lascivious Radigund.
⁹
Later Ben Jonson celebrated female heroic virtue in his 
Masque of Queens
and paraded warrior queens from history and legend to entice James I to war.
¹⁰
Early modern attitudes to warrior women were not as clear cut as traditional accounts suggest.

The accession of Mary I as queen regnant in England challenged convention as to the martial identity of the monarch. It was an anomaly that was depicted on the Great Seal (see Figure 11.1). Whilst on one side Mary was pictured with the orb and scepter, the traditional symbols of royal power, on the other, rather than being pictured mounted in battle array, Mary, as Elizabeth later, was portrayed riding side-saddle with flowers in the background. It pointed to the emasculation of the monarch’s rule with the accession of a queen regnant. As Glyn Redworth has observed, “war for a female ruler entailed a diminution of her authority...in an aggressive war she would nearly always be obliged to surrender command in the field.”
¹¹
Indeed, it is important to note that there is no evidence of a suit of armor ever being made for Mary or for Elizabeth, a point that enduring representations of Elizabeth, most recently in the Hollywood blockbuster
Elizabeth: The Golden Age,
 choose to overlook.
¹²

Although queen regnants were extremely limited in the military roles they could take, there remained an imperative that they demonstrate their position as courageous and worthy defenders of the realm—albeit in a female mode. And so we see similarities in the language that Mary and Elizabeth use and the image that they invoke, or that is evoked on their behalves, when faced with a military challenge. In reality both queens have to depend on men—“captains”—to do the military business for them although they will still be held responsible for what happens. In some ways this is easier for Mary as she has Philip but, as this essay will explore, this is problematic because of the anti-Spanish xenophobia that is never far beneath the surface, even among “orthodox” supporters of the reign. And so we see how both queens try to exercise indirect control and how difficult that is.

Traditional assessments of Mary’s queenship have focused heavily on the apparent military failures of her reign as epitomized by the loss of Calais in the Anglo-French war of 1557–59. Such a failure contrasts Elizabeth’s victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588. Whilst Elizabeth is popularly remembered as a triumphant warrior queen, Mary is pilloried as a military figure who achieved only national humiliation. Yet the reality of Mary and Elizabeth as warrior figures in contemporary depictions and subsequent representation is much more nuanced than traditional accounts allow. This essay looks to reevaluate the “warrior” credentials of Mary and Elizabeth, while emphasizing the common ground they inhabit as women attempting to function in a warrior society, and explores how that fundamental incongruity shapes the dichotomy that continued to position Elizabeth as the successful warrior queen and Mary as the impotent tyrannical one. Elizabeth emerges as the victorious warrior queen in the seventeenth century not least because by that point her alleged militancy carries an anti-Stuart charge and Mary is heralded as the antithesis of the “defender of the realm” recast at best as the cat’s paw of Habsburg imperial ambitions if not as a figure at war with her subjects.

II

Mary decisively demonstrated her qualities as a military leader on two occasions during her short reign: the first in order to gain the throne, a dramatic testament of her abilities as a military commander. Mary’s resolute and courageous action and ability to mobilize support in the localities proved decisive:

On this day [that is July 20, 1553] all ranks of soldiers were ordered to go down to the appointed place, the standards were unfurled and the military colours set up; every one armed themselves fully as if about to meet the enemy. The infantry made ready their pikes, the cavalry brandished lances, the archer bent his bow, and girded on his quiver; the harquebusier filled his weapon with powder, inserted its leaden ball and set his match burning...when the battle line seemed fully drawn up, sacred Mary rode out from Framlingham castle about four o’clock...to muster and inspect this most splendid and loyal army. While her majesty was approaching, the white horse which she was riding became rather more frisky at the unaccustomed sight of such an army drawn up in formation...she ordered her foot soldiers...to lift up their hands to help their sovereign until she got ready to get down...they brought the queen down to the ground...her majesty now on foot, went round both divisions of the army speaking to them with exceptional kindness...she completely won everyone’s affections
¹³

Determined, courageous, and inspiring, Mary acted out the traditionally masculine role of a military commander mustering her troops and rallying her forces ready for battle. Such was Mary’s success in winning the support of gentlemen and commons in East Anglia and the Thames Valley that the Privy Council in London defected from John Dudley’s coup, abandoned the cause of Lady Jane Grey, and declared their loyalty for Mary. It was a victory against the odds and the only successful revolt against central government in sixteenth-century England. As Robert Wingfield continues in his 
Vita Mariae Reginae,
 written in celebration of her triumph,

...this attempt should have been judged and considered one of Herculean rather than of womanly daring, since to claim and secure her hereditary right, the princess was being so bold as to tackle a powerful and well-prepared enemy, thoroughly provisioned with everything necessary to end or to prolong a war, while she was entirely unprepared for warfare and had insignificant forces.14

Wingfield celebrates the fact that Mary had overcome the limitations of her gender. The scale of her triumph in 1553 is oft-overlooked. She secured the throne as the first queen of England and defended the line of legitimate Tudor succession. And, as is frequently ignored, whilst Dudley’s coup was sponsored by the French, Mary’s was an entirely English victory.

Once she won the throne, Mary was celebrated in poems, sermons, ballads, letters, and pamphlets as a warrior figure whose accession represented the triumph of divine providence. In his poem 
The Assault of the Sacrament
(1554), Miles Huggarde presented Mary “Geuing to our lorde harty laudes and prayse/ whiche had geuen to hir so great a victory/Against hir enemies in so fewe days without bloude shede most miraculously.”
¹⁵
Reginald Pole, appointed papal legate to England, heralded Mary as “a Virgin, helpless, naked and unarmed, [who] preuailed & had the victorye ouer tyrauntes.”
¹⁶
As Kevin Sharpe has observed, Mary’s image now “fused national with Catholic images, to represent her as protectoress of her people, martial Christian prince, and successor of the holy virgin.”
¹⁷
It was a potent combination of religiosity and militarism.

Such themes were picked up in Mary’s coronation procession in which she was heralded as a female warrior and deliverer. The Latin inscription on the Genoese arch in Fenchurch Street evoked Mary as a triumphant restorer; the Florentine’s pageant represented her as classical and biblical female warriors Judith, Pallas Athene, and Tomyris.
¹⁸
Judith had murdered Holofernes thereby releasing the Hebrews from threat of bondage, and Tomyris had led her people to victory against the Persian Emperor Cyrus the Great. Both had decapitated their enemy as Mary had the Duke of Northumberland for his role in the attempted July coup. The same parallel was drawn between Mary and Judith in a pamphlet issued the following year: 
Oratio Leonhardi Goretti Eqvitis Poloni de matrimonio...Regis ac Reginae
Angliae, Hispaniae, &c. Ad populum principesque Angliae
 (London, 1554).
¹⁹
And Leonard Stopes made a similar comparison in his 
An Ave Maria in
Commendation of our most Vertuous Queen
.20

On the first plea roll of King’s Bench of the reign, Mary is shown victorious over the rebels over whom she had triumphed to win the throne, surrounded by angels and holding a sword in her right hand. Her victory was divinely ordained and she sits enthroned. On the right are weapons laid down by four horsemen and in the background is an army ready for battle (see Figure 4.2).
²¹
This was one of the first representations of any English queen regnant and it was unambiguously militaristic. Similarly, in the miniature contained within the book of prayers to be used “by the queen’s highness in the consecration of the cramp rings,” Mary is depicted reading a book before the altar whilst in the border are pictured a woman holding a severed head and a sword, doubtless symbolizing Judith, and St. George riding on horseback.22

The summer of 1553 was not Mary’s only outing as a military figure. A year later she rallied Londoners as Thomas Wyatt and an army of rebels threatened the capital in opposition to her intended marriage to Philip of Spain. Having offered to Wyatt terms that he rebuffed, Mary, as Wingfield continues,

applied herself wholly to war, and to prevent the enemy striking while she was unprepared, she placed in control of the city of London, then wavering in its loyalty, William Howard, brother to the duke of Norfolk...the queen left the palace and came to the City Guildhall, riding through the streets.

There she delivered a rousing speech, proving to be “an incomparable oratrix,” in the words of Wingfield, “so like her ancestors, more to be feared than fearful herself.”
²³
Again Mary secured popular support in a moment of challenge and crisis. She refused to leave London despite the urgings of her councilors and, according to Malfatti, “she even asked to go and fight herself; that however was not permitted to her.”
²⁴
Then, in her Guildhall speech, she attacked Thomas Wyatt as a wicked traitor, defended her religion and choice of husband, and called on Londoners to stand firm in support. Moreover, Mary was confident to use the language of her gender to win support. She stressed her defiance and courage—not by claiming to have the qualities of a man but rather by asserting that she had these qualities as a woman:

And this I say to you in the woorde of a Prince, I cannot tel[l] how naturally the mother loveth the childe, for I was never the mother of anye, but certainely, if a Prince and governour maye as naturally and earnestly love her subiectes as the Mother doeth the Childe, then assure your selves, that I being your Ladie and Maistres, doe as earnestly and as tenderly love and favour you. And I thus loving you, cannot but thinke that yee as heartely and faithfully love me, and then I doubt not, but we shall give these rebelles a short & speedy overthrow.25

It was a conspicuous display of courage. Her rousing words mobilized the people of London and when Thomas Wyatt approached the Tower of London he found Ludgate barred against him. The rebels were compelled to lay down their arms and to sue for mercy. Again Mary’s victory was heralded as an act of divine providence. As John Elder wrote in his letter to Scotland, it “hath pleased God to defende hir, ayde hir and save hir from the handes, power and might of her enemies, and giving her the victorye over them in twinkelunge of an eye, which as roaring lions would have devoured her.”
²⁶
Mary’s spectacular defeat of the rebels was akin to Daniel’s miraculous escape from the lion’s den.