Mary Tudor
This edition first published in Great Britain 2011 Copyright © David Loades 2011, 2012
This electronic edition published 2012 by Amberley Publishing
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CONTENTS
13. The England of the Two Queens
All the kings and queens of England deserve to be revisited every few years. This is not only because new research reveals further information about their lives and careers, but also because our own perceptions and agendas change. Sir Geoffrey Elton wrote many years ago that to write history backwards – that is, to select historical evidence to suit a contemporary purpose – is the sin against the Holy Ghost. Protestants, Catholics, Whigs, Marxists, feminists, and no doubt others, have all been guilty of this sin in varying degrees, and such ‘schools’ of historical writing are now rightly regarded with suspicion. I like to think of myself as a neo-pragmatist, but I am also conscious of changing my mind over the years. Sometimes this is because of other people’s research, sometimes because of my own, and sometimes simply the result of rethinking the meaning of familiar evidence.
It is now nearly twenty years since I wrote
Mary Tudor: A Life
, and although I have not changed my mind about her in striking ways, I have rethought aspects of her life and reign. I have also learned more about Mary’s husband, Philip of Spain, at this crucial early stage of his career. Since I first addressed the subject over forty years ago, I have learned a lot from Michael Graves, the late Jennifer Loach, Glyn Redworth, Mia Rodriguez Salgado, Judith Richards and a number of others. Most particularly, I have benefited recently from collaborations with Charles Knighton and Eamon Duffy, both of whom have – in different ways – applied correctives to my established views.
I should also like to thank those who aided this book to completion: Mark Hawkins-Dady, who commissioned and oversaw the first edition; Jonathan Reeve, who took on the second, and Patricia Hymans, the indexer.
David Loades, October 2010
In terms of her own ideas and purposes, Mary Tudor was a failure, and nothing can conceal that fact. Like Richard III or Edward II she has consequently had a loser’s press. For about four hundred years the predominant tenor of English historical writing was Protestant, and to the historians in that tradition she was ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary’, flying in the face of what John O’Sullivan would later call (in a different context) ‘manifest destiny’. This was a perception magnificently summed up in
1066 and All That
in the words ‘since England was bound to be C. of E. anyway, all the burnings were wasted’. It was also Messrs Sellers and Yeatman who called her (with sharp insight) ‘Broody Mary’.
It is easy now to mock such a blinkered view, but anyone who was at school in England before about 1980 is likely to have been taught something very like it – unless the period was omitted altogether. More importantly, books written as late as the 1960s (and some more recently still) glossed over the reign as being of small importance. Henry VIII was important because of the break with Rome and the rise of Parliament. Edward VI was important because he was the first Protestant monarch, and because his reign saw much social upheaval. Elizabeth was important because she presided over the English Renaissance and defeated the Armada. But Mary was not important because her reign was a dead end and the only thing she did (apart from burning Protestants, hence ‘Bloody Mary’) was to lose England’s last French possession, Calais.
The early Protestant writers John Foxe and John Strype never made the mistake of thinking that Mary did not matter; but to them (and particularly to Foxe) she was a dire warning of what could happen when a lawful ruler was seduced by the Devil. Foxe’s legacy lay less in learned history and more in popular prejudice. Mary herself was not his target, but the Catholic Church was, and centuries of popular anti-Catholicism sprang from Foxe’s
Acts and Monuments
. Because of her marriage to the Spanish Habsburg Philip, Mary also became the godmother of the association between popery and arbitrary (foreign) power. For about three hundred years she was a hate figure for liberal Anglicans and evangelicals alike, and when those storms had died down, she found herself dismissed as insignificant. More recently, a tendency towards broadly based social and economic history, and a rejection of ‘reign-based’ history, have also tended to undervalue the period.
Only historians of religion have not followed that trend, and important new work has been done on the Church of Mary by Tom Mayer, Eamon Duffy, Bill Wizeman, Lucy Wooding and John Edwards. This has been a very welcome development, not least because Catholic historical writing has traditionally been almost as blinkered as Protestant. To near contemporaries such as Nicholas Harpesfield and Robert Persons, Mary’s failure in so noble a cause was an inexplicable tragedy. Later historians in the same tradition, such as John Lingard and Philip Hughes, shook their heads sadly, and blamed her bad health or her mistaken marriage. Eamon Duffy is no less saddened by Mary’s failure, but his interpretation is both more sophisticated and more open, particularly showing the strength of the continuities that bound the restored Catholic Church to its pre-Reformation roots. The fact that these recent historians of religion in Mary’s reign do not agree with one another has created a fruitful discussion.
While contributing somewhat to this discussion, the main concern of this book is with the queen herself. In an era of personal monarchy, the character and personality of the occupant of the throne was necessarily of great importance. No one knew how to deal with a sovereign lady. The world of high politics (or even low politics) was a masculine preserve. No public office above the level of churchwarden was open to a woman – except the crown itself. How did a councillor react to having a creature by custom regarded as weak, vacillating and gullible on the throne? How did a courtier react to having to deal with a privy chamber that was now also a boudoir? The fact that these problems were not openly discussed did not make them any less real. There were examples abroad, but none very close, either in time or circumstances. Isabella of Castile had been a similar sovereign, but it is very unlikely that any of Mary’s councillors knew how she had conducted business. Mary of Hungary (regent of the Netherlands) was much closer and more familiar, but she was an agent, not a sovereign; and the queen of Scotland was an adolescent living in France.
At Mary’s accession the country was at peace, so there were no military priorities to confuse matters, and her councillors seem to have set out to advise her in the same way they would have done a king. However, they were deceived, for one of the first things that she did was to put her marriage into the hands of her cousin, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, because of an emotional dependency going back over many years. Thus the councillors found that the queen had excluded them from the marital decision-making process – something that no king would ever have done. However, they then proceeded to negotiate a treaty that was explicitly designed to protect the realm from the weakness that might result from having a (female) ruler who was also the subordinate partner in a marriage. That process they carried further by legally ‘un-gendering’ the crown; but in truth nobody knew how the husband/wife partnership would affect the royal prerogative. It is not surprising that some of them sought to return to firm conceptual ground by accepting Philip as a real king rather than a consort. Both Mary and her subjects were confused by an unprecedented constitutional situation. It was easier to resolve the gender problems of the crown in law than it was in practice or perception.
Abroad, in Continental Europe the power relations were reversed. Although in theory Mary shared all her husband’s titles, outside of England she had no role. Even in the Low Countries, which any child of the marriage stood to inherit along with England, she was presented simply as a consort, as is made plain by the complex iconography of several windows in Dutch churches.
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