Game of Queens (39 page)

32

‘not one year of rest'

Scotland, the Netherlands, 1554–58

As Mary Tudor came to the throne, two other women – Marie de Guise and Mary of Hungary – occupied positions of power in western Europe. Neither, however, was finding her position easy.

Inevitably, the effects of Mary Tudor's accession and marriage were felt north of England's border. Marie de Guise wrote politely to the new English queen, expressing the hope for a continued peace, and Mary Tudor answered in kind. But that was far from the whole story. They shared a Christian name and a faith but in terms of the great power struggle of Europe, their allegiances were very different: Marie's to France and Mary's to the Spanish Habsburg family.

While Marie de Guise tried to steal support away from the governor of Scotland, Arran, and sought to recruit a powerful Scottish noble – the Earl of Lennox – to her side, Mary Tudor's government was urging Lennox to double-cross her: to ‘secretly enter into communication with the Regent [Arran] against the Dowager, with a view not only to driving her from the country, but to making himself King if possible and throwing Scottish affairs into confusion'. So much for the sisterhood of queens.

Marie was to be the winner. In December 1553 she sent an envoy to the French court to discuss the Scottish situation. France needed to ensure that Scotland was ruled by an ally more secure than the ever-uncertain Arran. The result was that increasing pressure was placed on Arran to resign and cede the regency to Marie and on 19 February 1554 he signed an agreement to do so.

There were questions, also, as to the precise status and household of Mary, Queen of Scots in France, as she entered her teenage years. Marie's brother, Cardinal de Guise, proposed that at just eleven (considerably younger than the usual age) she should be declared of age and ‘take up her rights', including the right to appoint her own deputy; her mother, naturally.

On 12 April 1554 Marie de Guise proceeded up from the palace of Holyrood to the Tolbooth, there to be solemnly invested with the Honours of Scotland: the sword, the sceptre, and the crown. In France, the young Mary, Queen of Scots wrote a neat showpiece letter to Queen Mary of England: ‘May it please God, there shall be a perpetual memory that there were two Queens in this Isle at the same time, as united in inviolate amity as they are in blood and near lineage'. In Scotland, Marie de Guise, now officially her daughter's alter ego and Queen Regent of Scotland, rode back to Holyrood accompanied by all the accoutrements of male authority.

Significantly, the French ambassador, the Sieur d'Oysel, King Henri's representative, performed the ceremony. One of Marie's first acts – replacing Arran's choices with her own, mostly French, appointments – was to make d'Oysel lieutenant-governor. Once again a royal wife had to juggle the demands of her natal and her marital country; once again she saw them as identical. Once again, her Scots subjects would disagree.

Marie's concerns were to restore royal authority to a faction-ridden country, centralise government and improve the administration of justice (though she complained that Scotsmen, convinced the old ways were best, ‘would not endure it'). As Marie would later write to her brother, Cardinal de Guise in France:

It is no small thing to bring a young nation to a state of perfection and to an unwonted subservience to those who wish to see justice reign . . . I can safely say that for twenty years past I have not had one year of rest, and I think that if I should say one month I should not be far wrong for a troubled spirit is the greatest trial of all . . .

 

In 1555, on much the same note, another woman resigned her post. Recent years had been hard for Mary of Hungary, the regent of the Netherlands, forced increasingly to act as amanuensis to her depressed and ailing brother Charles V, who was planning to set aside his titles and responsibilities and retire to a religious life. Mary had to assist him in his struggles to determine how best to bequeath his immense lands and to attempt to heal the breach this issue was making within the Habsburg family.
¹

Knowing that their widowed sister Eleanor, the dowager Queen of France, would join Charles in his retirement, Mary of Hungary was determined to make a third. Once, familial duty (to which she and Eleanor both subscribed) had seen them placed on opposite sides of Europe's great political divide. But now sisterhood trumped politics at last. Mary had asked to resign her position before but now she argued her case in an extraordinary letter:

. . . it is impossible for a woman in peacetime, and even more in time of war, to do her duty as regent towards God, her sovereign, and her own sense of honour. For in peacetime it is unavoidable, in addition to all the meetings and cares of daily affairs which any government brings with it, that whoever guides the government of these provinces must mix with as many people as possible, in order to win the sympathy of both nobility and middle classes . . . For a woman, especially if she is a widow, it is not feasible to mix thus freely with people. Of necessity I myself have had to do more in this respect than I really wanted. Moreover, a woman is never so much respected and feared as a man, whatever her position.

If one is conducting the government of these countries in time of war, and one cannot in person enter the battle, one is faced with an insoluble problem. One receives all the blows and is blamed for all mistakes made by others . . .

It was a theme to which she would return: that ‘as a woman I was compelled to leave the conduct of war to others'. It was one other female rulers knew.
²

Mary of Hungary: ‘a woman of fifty who has served for at least twenty-four years', she wrote, and served, moreover, ‘one God and one master', was finally allowed to have her way. Her brother was retiring and to serve his son, Philip, would be to find herself ‘learning my ABC all over again'. Philip of Spain had been slow to visit his Netherlands territories and Mary had already written to him tartly: ‘Anything is better than to wait until your lands are lost to you, one by one . . .'

The ceremony by which, on 25 October, Mary quit her post and Philip took possession of the Netherlands, was emotive. Mary told the Estates General, with which she had so often been at odds that:

if my capacities, my knowledge, and my powers had been equal to the good will, the love and the devotion with which I have given myself to this office, I know for certain that no ruler could have been better served and no land better governed than you.

Preparing to leave the country she had governed for almost a quarter of a century, Mary of Hungary made her will. She concluded by requesting, with unexpected softness, that a certain gold heart that she wore, which had been left her by her long-dead husband, should be melted down and the proceeds given to the poor. It had been worn by two people who ‘though parted for a long time in body have never been so in love and affection', so it was fitting that on her death ‘it should be consumed and change its nature as the bodies of these lovers have done'.

The following autumn Mary travelled to Castile with her siblings (not without qualms, since Spain was foreign territory to her), but only eighteen months later, in February 1558, Eleanor died, leaving her lonely. Bereft, and despite her conflicted feelings about the responsibilities of public life, Mary sought to find herself another role as advisor to her niece Juana, Philip's sister, who was acting as regent of Spain while he was in the north. But Juana rejected Mary's offer with some coldness, saying, probably with truth, that Mary's character would make it impossible for her to take the back seat.
³

Charles V and Philip sought to persuade Mary of Hungary to resume the regency of the Netherlands. ‘Explain to her what a support her presence will mean', Philip wrote to an intermediary. ‘Finally, offer her a large income and great authority, and give her hope there will be peace, and that this will last a long time, as the rulers are all exhausted.' Mary's reluctant agreement was rendered irrelevant by her own death, eight months after her sister's.

33

Sisters and rivals

England, 1555–1558

Mary of Hungary died on 18 October 1558. By that time, in England, another and far from reluctant woman was preparing to assume power. The second half of Mary Tudor’s reign was in some sense a battle between Mary and her sister Elizabeth – between Catholic and Protestant – and it was far from clear who would win.

In the spring of 1555 Elizabeth Tudor was summoned from her imprisonment at Woodstock to Hampton Court, where her sister Mary triumphantly awaited the child who would sweep Elizabeth from the succession. There were rumours at the end of April that the queen had been delivered of a son, The bells rang out in joy. But it was a miscarriage – or worse, a mistake, a phantom pregnancy. Early in May the French ambassador heard that all the thirty-nine-year-old queen’s symptoms had been the result of ‘some woeful malady’.

Mary Tudor’s mistake has been used to the detriment of her reputation; a sign of her obsessive personality, even a cause of comedy. But it would be fairer to blame the medical knowledge of the sixteenth century. Mary herself had only slowly been convinced by her doctors that she was pregnant – just as her mother Katherine had been convinced, on the occasion of her first miscarriage, that she was still carrying another baby.

Through May, June and July Mary waited in her birthing suite, quietly emerging in August to hear that her husband Philip of Spain was going away. The Habsburg Empire was once again at war with France, and Philip was to assume his father’s duties. As emperor Charles V resigned to Philip first the lordship of the Netherlands and then the two Spanish crowns of Castile and Aragon, he sent a message of congratulation to Mary on ‘being able for the future to style herself the Queen of many and great crowns, and on her being no less their mistress than of her own crown of England’. But this was to make no distinction between the role of a queen regnant and of a consort.

It was beginning to look likely that Mary Tudor would die childless, which left the succession in jeopardy. Ironically Elizabeth (heretic though she may be) was, from Spain’s viewpoint, a better candidate than the French-dominated Mary, Queen of Scots. A female could, after all – her brother Edward’s point – be safely married to a Catholic prince and converted that way.

In November 1556 Elizabeth Tudor was invited to the court for Christmas but by the first week of December she was on her way back to Hatfield. She had almost certainly been instructed to marry a suitor of her brother-in-law Philip’s choosing: the titular Duke of Savoy, cousin-by-marriage to Philip of Spain, whose dukedom, however, had been seized by the French in 1536.

Elizabeth seems swiftly to have refused. She never met the two Habsburg relatives (his cousin Christina of Denmark and his illegitimate half-sister Margaret, the Duchess of Parma), whom Philip sent over to persuade her. Christina, after her refusal to marry Henry VIII, and despite being in love with another man, had in 1541 been married off by her uncle Charles V to the heir to the duchy of Lorraine. Her husband had died early, however, and though Christina was regent for their young son, in 1552 the French had invaded Lorraine, taking the boy back to be brought up at the French court and causing Christina to flee back to the Netherlands and her aunt Mary of Hungary’s protection.

Philip saw Elizabeth as a valuable pawn in Habsburg policy and his protection would shield Elizabeth for the rest of her sister’s reign. That protection was increasingly needed. Whether or not Mary believed the failure of her pregnancy was a sign of God’s displeasure, a sign that her country had to be cleansed, the fires of Smithfield, where heretics were burnt at the stake, have nevertheless defined ‘Bloody’ Mary’s posthumous reputation.

It was the Protestants who had the chance to write the history but the facts cannot be denied. The reigns of the Protestant Edward and Elizabeth each saw two heretics burnt (although others died for other religion-related crimes, including some two hundred Catholic priests or sympathisers under Elizabeth). Mary burnt almost three hundred. Mary’s initial instruction had been that the penalty should be exacted ‘without rashness’, but that obdurate heretics who refused to recant should die was an all but universal tenet. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Cranmer, who himself famously died in Mary’s fire, had prepared measures, at the end of Edward’s reign, to punish obstinate Catholics in the same way.

The first man died in the fires on 1 February 1555. Some fifty women perished too, including the nightmare of the pregnant woman in the Channel Isles who gave birth at the stake only to have her baby flung back into the flames.

The crunch for Mary (as for Elizabeth) may have been the question of conformity to the law. Unfortunately Calvin was at this moment urging true believers to declare their beliefs openly. There was also a political element to the story: some who claimed to act for the Protestant cause had found an unlikely ally in Catholic France.

At the start of her reign Mary refused to accept that the interests of France and of the Habsburg Empire could never agree for long. Like the ladies of an earlier generation she had, within weeks of her accession, offered herself as a mediator. The French responded derisively but a year later, in 1554, Mary had by no means abandoned the idea; early in 1555 the French ambassador de Noailles believed her health had even been improved by hopes of a European peace. But when France and the Habsburgs finally agreed a short-lived truce in February 1556, Mary had played no role in the discussions, and now France was active in support of rebellion against Mary.