Game of Queens (37 page)

More probably, it was because, still unmarried, she could yet be married to a Catholic prince, and (such was the perception) thus find her country returned to Catholicism. If Edward's sisters married abroad, their ‘stranger' husband would, as Edward put it, work to have the laws and customs of his own native country ‘practised and put in use within this our realm . . . which would then tend to the utter subversion of the commonwealth of this our realm, which God forbid'. Better the princesses should be ‘taken by God' than that they should so imperil the true religion, thundered one of Edward's bishops supportively.

Instead it was Edward's intention ‘to appoint as our heir our most dear cousin Jane'. The eldest daughter of Frances Brandon, eldest daughter of Henry VIII's younger sister Mary, Jane Grey was not only herself ardently Protestant but had recently been married to Guildford Dudley, John Dudley's son.

Not that Edward wanted to leave his throne even to Jane, a safely Protestant and safely married woman. The irony is that, because of the efforts his father and grandfather made to clear the Tudor path of any potential rivals, he had little choice. With Edward's death imminent, questions of whether a woman could succeed were irrelevant. The only question was which woman would?

A paper in Edward VI's handwriting, entitled ‘My device for the succession', followed his father's will in excluding the Scottish line descended from Henry VIII's elder sister Margaret Tudor; a line which was now represented by the Catholic Mary Stuart. The line of Henry's younger sister Mary had likewise so far produced only females, since Frances Brandon had no sons. Edward's original ‘device' had been that the throne should pass not to Lady Jane herself but to her ‘heirs male'. Events, however, overtook him. In May, with the king's health visibly worsening, he altered ‘the heirs male of the Lady Jane' to ‘Lady Jane or the heirs of her body'.

The so-called gynocracy debate had not been silent in these years, as witness Sir Thomas Elyot's
Defence of Good Women
, written in the 1530s and published in 1540, which defended Katherine of Aragon and her daughter's right of succession. And witness too the English publication, in 1542, of the volume Thomas Agrippa had dedicated to Margaret of Austria. With the birth of Edward, the pamphlet debate had seemed an intellectual game, rather than a real consideration of political possibilities.

What had been a game was, however, about to become reality.

PART V

1553–1560

A Queen ought to be chosen when she shall be wedded of the most honest kindred and people. For oftentimes the daughters follow the teachings and manners of them that they be descended from . . . A Queen ought to keep her daughters in all chastity. For we read of many maidens that for their virginity have been made queens.

The Game and Play of the Chess,
William Caxton's translation of Jacobus de Cessolis, ?1474

31

‘Herculean daring'

England, 1553 – 1554

Mary Tudor's half-brother Edward VI had died on 6 July 1553, having survived their father Henry VIII by only six years and now another girl had been proclaimed queen. Lady Jane Grey, the granddaughter of Henry VIII's younger sister, had been nominated to the crown by Edward's will. But Mary Tudor, Henry's eldest daughter, was determined she should never be crowned.

The move that followed, wrote Robert Wingfield in his
Vita Mariae Angliae Reginae
(Life of Queen Mary of England) ‘should have been judged and considered one of Herculean rather than womanly daring, since to claim and secure her hereditary right, the princess was being bold as to tackle a powerful and well-prepared enemy . . .'

For too many of her thirty-seven years, Mary Tudor had been able to mount only a passive, if stubborn, resistance to the blows life had dealt her. But in 1553 she had a chance to act. To act as her mother Katherine had wanted; and act as her grandmother Isabella had done. Most of her contemporaries thought she was mad when she unfurled her standard at the castle of Framlingham in Suffolk and had herself proclaimed queen. But everything in Mary Tudor's heritage told her the crown was a prize worth fighting for.

Mary set up her rival banner on the very day after the royal council proclaimed Jane queen. Many flocked to what they saw as the true Tudor monarchy. As the Genoese merchant Baptista Spinola reported: ‘the hearts of the people are with Mary, the Spanish Queen's daughter'. To cooler observers the thing seemed impossible. The Habsburg ambassadors reported that all the country's forces were in the hands of the men who had proclaimed Jane Grey. But as Mary rode hard across country, those hostile forces close behind her, the people rallied to her standard.

As it became clear King Henry's daughter would not passively accept what many saw as a perversion of the natural order, the magnates of East Anglia – Sir Richard Southwell and the Earl of Sussex, the nobles and the knights – came to join her, mustering their local forces. On 12 July she reached Framlingham, a castle she had only recently acquired and a great fortress that might have been designed for just such an eventuality. As the imperial ambassador triumphantly reported: ‘A great concourse of people were moved by their love for her to come and promise to support her to the end.' Local justices came; ordinary people brought cattle instead of money. In Orwell harbour, a squadron of five ships went over to her when the common sailors mutinied against their officers. Mary Tudor issued a proclamation, ‘not doubting that all our true and faithful subjects will so accept us, take us, and obey us as their natural and liege sovereign lady and Queen'.

In London meanwhile, even the members of the royal council who had pressed Lady Jane Grey to the throne were beginning to suffer ‘a kind of remorse'. On 18 July the councillors holding the Tower, where Jane was lodged for safety, turned it over to the supporters of Queen Mary, only too relieved to abandon a policy of which they had never really approved. The next day, in London, Mary Tudor was proclaimed queen, and on the 21st, John Dudley – Jane Grey's father-in-law and the man behind her elevation to the throne – himself threw his cap into the air and hailed Mary's sovereignty. In the Tower, the trappings of sovereignty were stripped from Lady Jane

Enclosed at Hatfield, Mary's half-sister Elizabeth Tudor had taken no part in the affray. Instead, she wrote to Mary, offering her congratulations. To have staked a claim of her own to the throne would have been neither a practical nor, for her, ethical possibility. While many supported Mary from civil loyalty rather than Catholic faith, many of the Protestant party might have followed Jane rather than Elizabeth. More importantly, by the dynastic rules to which Elizabeth herself subscribed, the throne, for the moment, belonged to Mary; their father had willed it so. Although Elizabeth may already have hoped that the much older Mary would not hold it indefinitely.

Mary Tudor made her royal entry into London on 3 August, resplendent in purple velvet and satin, as a contemporary chronicle reported, ‘all thick set with goldsmith's work and great pearls'. Elizabeth and her entourage rode directly behind her. There were also ‘a great number of other ladies', a sign that under a female ruler the women directly around the monarch's person would come more to the fore.

Even at that moment Queen Mary's sex caused controversy. Some of Edward VI's councillors suggested the coronation should be postponed until parliament had confirmed Mary's legitimacy. England had not had a ruling queen since Saxon days. In 1135, when William the Conqueror's granddaughter Matilda had attempted to succeed her father, it sparked a long civil war with her cousin, Stephen. Matilda was never crowned, having in the end to be content with the title ‘Lady of the English' and an agreement that after Stephen's death the crown would pass to her son, not his. The idea that women could thus transmit their claim to the throne, as Margaret Beaufort had transmitted hers to her son Henry VII, was much less controversial than the idea they might take it themselves.

Other powerful women in first half of the sixteenth century had been regents rather than queens regnant and the idea that a woman might deputise for (or exercise influence on) a man was more acceptable than the idea that she might rule in her own right. Even then, only a century earlier, the attempts of Margaret of Anjou to govern on behalf of her incapable husband had been met with chauvinistic horror.

Isabella of Castile represented a precedent that must have been ever-present in her granddaughter Mary's mind, but four centuries after Matilda, the Aristotelian concept of society as a family, ruled over by a father, still held sway in most Western societies. There wasn't even the language: a queen was a king's wife.
¹
Both Mary and Elizabeth Tudor would describe themselves as ‘princes', while a successful woman was often described as being no longer wholly belonging to her sex.

In these puzzling first days of Queen Mary's rule, care would be taken to declare she had the same authority as a male ruler. But, reported Simon Renard, the new imperial ambassador, when Mary summoned her council before embarking on the extensive coronation festivities, she sank to her knees before them. ‘She had entrusted her affairs and person, she said, to them . . .' They were taken aback by this ‘humble and lowly discourse, so unlike anything ever heard before'. Unlike anything they would have heard from her father Great Harry, or even from his son.

How to crown the queen; with what rituals and festivities? With those of a king – nearly. The ceremonial was taken from the usual manual for such ceremonies, the
Liber Regalis
, but with a curious admixture of messages. Where a king would ride through the streets on the day before his coronation, Mary Tudor was carried in a litter. Tudor women habitually kept their hair bound but hers was loose, as a consort queen's would be, in token of her fertility. Mary wanted to invoke the idea that she was married to her country.

A peer deputised for her at the ceremony to create fifteen new Knights of the Bath; it was obviously inappropriate for a woman to partake in the bathing and robing rituals that marked an important stepping stone of masculine chivalry. But the next day, 1 October, Mary proceeded to Westminster Abbey, with the Earl of Arundel carrying the sword of state before her; the same military symbol that had caused such controversy at the coronation of Mary's grandmother, Isabella, some seventy years before.
²

Mary's garments were not notably different from a king's ceremonial robes. Like any male king, she prostrated herself on the floor of Westminster Abbey, was anointed ‘on the shoulders, on the breast, on the forehead and on the temples', crowned and presented with all the ceremonial regalia. But she merely touched the spurs, instead of attaching them to her heels, and while she was given the king's sceptre to hold in her right hand she also held in her left ‘a sceptre wont to be given to queens, which is surmounted by doves'. A queen consort, rather than regnant, traditionally had a pacific and intercessory role.

This coronation was always going to be something of a mish-mash and not only because of the sovereign's sex. In religious terms, Mary Tudor was determined to put the clock back to where it had been before her father's break from Rome but it would take time for her changes to come into effect.

An evangelical sermon preached one week outside St Paul's Cathedral was followed by a strongly Catholic one the next; the Catholic preacher had, amid some difficulty, to be rescued from the furious crowd. On 18 August Mary issued a proclamation that while she herself would always practise the religion ‘which God and the world knoweth she hath ever professed from her infancy', because ‘of her gracious disposition and clemency her highness mindeth not to compel any her said subject thereunto unto such time as further order by common consent'.

No one can have thought it was going to rest there. Indeed, Mary told one foreigner she wished to restore papal authority but that, as yet, such matters should not be spoken of publicly. In August she wrote to the pope, professing that ‘his Holiness had no more loving daughter than herself'.

Elizabeth Tudor later described the relationship between queen and country as a marriage. In Mary's case the honeymoon was over almost immediately, as too was the brief community of interest between the sisters. The imperial ambassador Renard was soon reporting that Mary wanted to disbar Elizabeth from the succession because of her ‘heretical opinion and illegitimacy, and characteristics in which she resembled her mother'. Anne Boleyn ‘had caused great trouble in the kingdom' and Mary was all too sure Anne's daughter would do the same ‘and particularly that she might imitate her mother in being a French partisan'. Queen Mary, Renard noted, ‘still resents the injuries inflicted on Queen Katherine, her lady mother, by the machinations of Anne Boleyn'.

As early as September 1553, Elizabeth felt it necessary to make the first move. Begging an interview with her sister, she pleaded mere ignorance of, rather than hostility to, the Catholic faith, ‘having been brought up in the creed which she professed'. She requested instructors. A few days later she attended Mary's Chapel Royal, but made sure observers noted her ostentatiously ‘suffering air'. Very soon, the Venetian ambassador noted that Mary was treating her sister with fresh hostility. When Mary Tudor had parliament declare her parents' marriage valid, old wounds reopened. As for the succession, Mary must have hoped that the problem would resolve itself naturally. When Elizabeth left court in December, her absence must have been the more welcome for the fact that her sister Mary was about to marry.