Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (34 page)

III

The reality and representation of Mary’s queenship and assessments of it became more complicated following her marriage in July 1554. Philip provided the masculine element in government, for “matters impertinent to women,” as the Spanish described it, and efforts were quickly made to associate Philip alone with “the royal insignia of war.”

Figure 11.1 The Great Seal of Mary and Philip (1554), The National Archives

From 1556, as Redworth has observed, official portraits and plea rolls of the king and queen evolved to depict only the king bearing a sword.
²⁷
Whilst both the king and queen appear on horseback, Philip wears a cuirass and plate armor on his arms and legs and carries a long sword. Mary rides ahead but turning her head completely toward him and holding the reins in her right hand and the scepter in her left. It was a more conventional queenly pose indicative of the return of a more traditional male and militarized monarchy. Philip now took an active part in the jousts and tournaments at court that Mary had not been able to participate in. Henry Machyn records in his diary for December 1554, “the great triumph at the court gate by the King and divers lords both Englishmen and Spaniards...they ran as fast with spears and swords at the tournay.”28

Although the marriage treaty had precluded England from being drawn into Philip’s foreign wars, a year later Philip rode at the head of an English army of war-hungry nobles in France. As Suriano, the Venetian ambassador, reported, “a great part of the nobility of the kingdom are preparing, some from a longing for novelty...some from rivalry and desire for glory, some to obtain grace and favour with his Majesty and the queen.”
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Philip remarked to his father that, with the prospect of war, he found “such goodwill among everyone in this kingdom” and opportunity for nobles to gain honor and service abroad.
³⁰
The invasion of Thomas Stafford on Scarborough Castle in April 1557 proved to be the catalyst but it was a declaration long petitioned for by Philip and insisted upon by Mary who isolated herself from her English counselors who urged nonintervention. It was a situation that would be reversed in Elizabeth’s reign when she persistently desisted from conflict in the face of hawkish counsel. Mary, in contrast, albeit in the service of her husband’s Habsburg ambitions, was determined to go to war. On April 13, before the court removed to Greenwich for the Easter holidays, Mary summoned the councilors privately to her room and threatened, “some with death, others with the loss of their goods and estates, if they did not consent to the will of her husband.”
³¹
Finally, in July a force of 1,200 horses, 4,000 foot soldiers, 1,500 pioneers, and 200 minors finally crossed the Channel.

Within weeks the city of St. Quentin was taken by the English. Some 3,000 French troops were killed and 7,000 captured, including their commander Anne de Montmorency, the constable of France. The news was greeted in England with widespread celebrations.
³²
London chroniclers heralded the success of “the king, our master,” the earl of Bedford reported that “God prospereth the king’s majesty in all proceedings.”33 The political community was motivated for the national war effort in the king’s service. Yet this English victory is generally overlooked in accounts of the reign. As Redworth has written, “it is almost as if to acknowledge the successes of a foreign king would be to undermine the uniqueness of our insular history.”
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Given its Habsburg overtones, it was a military triumph for which Mary has not been given due credit.

Weeks later, however, the English experienced a humiliating defeat that would stamp a decisive imprint on Mary’s reign. On New Year’s Day 1558, 27,000 French troops attacked Calais, the last English outpost in France to remain from the Plantagenet empire. The garrison was ill-prepared and undermanned. French forces led by the duke of Guise had been able to take it by surprise by launching their attack in mid-winter.. The garrisons of Guisnes and Hammes held out until January 21, when forces under Lord Grey, short of ammunition and food, also surrendered. The London chronicler Henry Machyn reported that it was “the hevest tydy[ngs to London] and to England that ever was h[e]ard of.”
³⁵
Yet here again it is important to place this campaign and responses to it in a broader contemporary context. There was, in fact, neither widespread support nor concerted attempt to reclaim Calais. This was undoubtedly in part due to the impact of the influenza epidemic and the inability to raise sufficient forces. As Philip’s minister Granvelle commented, “one would like to see more spirit, more resentment about Calais, and more memory of the ancient virtues of their forebears.”36

As in other aspects of her queenship, assessment of Mary’s reign has been made by drawing on the work of Protestant and anti-Spanish propagandists. The Marian exile Bartholomew Traheron’s 
Warning to England
attacked the “despiteful, cruel, bloody, willful, furious” queen who, seeking to “betray her native country,” “began a war with a mighty king whose peace was sought and desired, only to satisfy her willful head, to increase the force of the Spaniard, & to maim...thy best captains & soldiers.” She had “studied these 4.yeres to betraie the o’Englande into the handes of a straunger, and of a nation most defamed in all the world for pride and crueltie.”
³⁷
The full title of the tract reveals his agenda, 
A Warning to
England to repente, and to turn to god from idolatrie and poperie by the terrible
exemple of Calece given the 7 of March Ann. D 1558
. The loss of Calais was grist to the Protestant mill.

IV

Irrespective of Calais, the reality and representation of Mary’s martial queenship provided important precedents for her sister. From the beginning of her reign Elizabeth was fashioned as a militant Protestant queen through the appropriation of Marian iconography and association with the figures of Judith, Deborah, and Daniel.
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At the Tower of London before her coronation procession she gave thanks to God for sparing her as he had “thy true and faithful servant Daniel thy prophet, whom thou delivered out of the den from the cruelty of the greedy and raging lions.”
³⁹
The final tableau in the coronation procession heralded Deborah:

In war she, through God’s aid, did put her foes to flight

And with the dint of sword the bande of bondage brast.

In peace she, through God’s aid, did always maintain right

And judged Israel till forty years were past
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Pageants as well as court and civic entertainments that staged battles and mustered troops came to reflect the militant Protestant queen that some of her noblemen sought and which Elizabeth resisted. At Norwich in 1578 Judith and Deborah again appeared appealing to Elizabeth to “hold for aie a noble victor’s part.”
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It was a mode of dramatic counsel, an attempt to create a warrior queen: Elizabeth “was being used to mime (and so to legitimate) the ambitions of certain of her male courtiers.”
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As Robert Naunton described in his 
Fragmenta Regalia
:

And it will be a true note of Magnanimity that she loved a soldier and had a propension in her nature to regard, and always to grace them, which falling into the courtiers’ consideration, they took as an invitation to win honour together with their mistress’ favour by exposing themselves in the wars...For we have many instances of the sallies of the nobility and gentry, yea, and of the court, and of her prime favourites that they had touch or tincture of Mars in their inclinations and to steal away without license and the Queen’s privity, which had like to have cost them dear, so predominant were their thoughts and hopes of honour grown in them...whose absence and their many eruptions were very distasteful unto her.43

Elizabeth, however, attempted to fashion herself as a queen of peace and concord. In the painting known as 
An Allegory of the Tudor Succession
(
c
. 1572)—which, according to the inscription at the bottom, Elizabeth sent to Sir Francis Walsingham—Philip and Mary stand with the armored figure of War while Elizabeth Mary brought England to war, Elizabeth was and remained inclined to peace.

Figure11.2 An Allegory of the Tudor Succession, attr. to Lucas de Heere (c. 1572), National Museum Wales

Yet in practice the queen’s ability to preserve her peaceful ambitions was limited and her success in the military adventures she was forced to take was much more sporadic than is generally acknowledged.

V

Four years after her accession Elizabeth was presiding over military disaster after she sent an expeditionary force of 3,000 men to Le Havre (Newhaven) in support of the prince of Condé, leader of French Huguenots. The intention was to use Le Havre as a bargaining counter by which to recover Calais. In both objectives it failed. Condé was captured. The English were forced to surrender and make an ignominious retreat. As Susan Doran has observed, “English military intervention in France proved an expensive and humiliating failure.” It resulted in the loss of 2,000 men and cost some £250,000.
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By the Treaty of Troyes eight months later, Elizabeth abandoned her hopes of regaining Calais. It was a significant failure; the marquess of Winchester had written to Elizabeth urging her to recover Calais given its importance for commerce and as a bulwark against continental enemies and the honor that would be reflected upon the queen by its return.
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As Mary had lost Calais, Elizabeth had failed to regain it. For the next twenty-two years Elizabeth would avoid direct military intervention and preserve her ambitions for peace.

This was all to change in the 1580s as England and Spain drifted toward war. “At the end of her sixth decade,” as Wallace MacCaffrey writes, “the Queen reluctantly found herself cast in the Amazonian role that she had for so long sought to avoid.”
⁴⁷
Following the Treaty of Nonsuch of August 1585, Elizabeth sent the earl of Leicester with 7,000 English troops to the Low Countries in defense of the Protestant cause. These new conditions of war necessarily weakened the queen’s position. Elizabeth hesitated, prevaricated, and changed her mind as the men to whom she was forced to cede control failed to follow royal command. Elizabeth was a reluctant warrior queen who lacked the gung-ho spirit of her father, Henry VIII, as her instructions to Leicester make clear: “We do require you that you rather bend your cause to make a defensive than offensive war, and that you seek by all means to avoid the hazard of a battle.”48

Her actions were not intended to provoke war and Elizabeth merely sought to force Philip to reopen negotiations with the states general. Leicester’s appropriation of the post of governor-general of the Low Countries exemplified a failure of command that typified Elizabeth’s relations with her generals. Although she had expressly forbidden Leicester from accepting any offers of sovereignty on her behalf, seeking his own glory he ignored Elizabeth’s instructions.
⁴⁹
The lack of a traditional martial presence was more keenly felt in Elizabeth’s reign than in Mary’s because of the lack of a king.

The Portugal expedition of 1589 again illustrated Elizabeth’s fundamental weakness as a wartime leader. The operation, under the command of Drake and Norris, was intended to destroy the remnants of the Armada that had made their way back to Spain; to seize Lisbon, thereby encouraging a popular rebellion against Spain; and finally to capture a base in the Azores from which to intercept Spanish treasure en route from the Americas. Elizabeth’s instructions were ignored. The main fleet sailed direct to Corunna rather than first sailing to the ports to destroy the Spanish ships, and the mission turned out to be a disaster. By the time Norris’ army arrived at Lisbon weeks later, the threat could be easily met. Drake’s mission to the Azores ended in equal ignominy as his fleet was beaten back by adverse winds. The expedition had failed in all of its objectives.

Such failure of control at sea was demonstrated again in 1596 and 1597. Whilst the 1596 expedition succeeded in capturing the port of Cadiz, the attraction of looting took precedence over strategy and a number of Spanish ships were not sunk and eluded capture. Rather than following the queen’s orders to withdraw after attacking the fleet, Essex sought to achieve his own, ultimately unsuccessful plan of establishing a permanent English garrison at Cadiz from which to attack Spanish ships to the Indies. Through indiscipline among the commanders—and an attempt by Essex to take the initiative from the impotent warrior queen—the mission had again proved to be a squandered opportunity to blunt the Spanish threat; months later Philip sent another fleet against England.