Mary Tudor Read online

  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

  Preface

  Introduction

  1. The Child

  2. Disruption

  3. Trauma

  4. Restitution

  5. The King’s Sister

  6. Mary the Queen

  7. Marriage

  8. A Woman’s Problems

  9. Mary Alone

  10. Philip & Mary at War

  11. Mary & Elizabeth

  12. Elizabeth the Heir

  13. The England of the Two Queens

  Picture Section

  Notes

  Bibliography

  List of Illustrations

  PREFACE

  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

  INTRODUCTION

  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 cond
ucted 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.[1]

  In terms of personal qualities, Mary was nobody’s fool and nobody’s puppet. She was intelligent, hard working and in many respects both tough and obstinate. Her hatred of heresy was a consuming passion, and in her strength of will she ignored everyone, including Philip, who tried to persuade her to take a more dispassionate approach. She was, however, extremely conventional in her perception of a woman’s limitations. She knew that she was expected to be both indecisive and emotionally dependent, and up to a point she was both. The main reason why she married was certainly to get an heir, but another was to have a partner who could handle those matters that were not by custom deemed ‘pertinent to women’. Repeatedly she besought Philip to return to her because the country needed his ‘strong hand’. Whether or not she really wanted to marry, we do not know; but marriage, like so many other things, was a duty imposed on her by her status. A less conventional or more independent woman might have found ways of coping with these problems – as Elizabeth subsequently did. Mary’s mother had brought her up to be a good Catholic and a good wife, but not a ruler, and many of Mary’s problems stemmed from the fact that she found the roles incompatible. Hence, perhaps, that ‘sourness of temper’ which Gilbert Burnet found in her, and to which he attributed her willingness to follow the edicts of her ‘popish clergy’.

  These same problems put Philip in an impossible position. It was not unprecedented, however. His great-grandfather, Ferdinand of Aragon, had been in a rather similar situation in respect of Castile, but Ferdinand’s wife, Isabella, had been (except in her piety) a very different sort of woman from Mary. Philip must have found Mary a very frustrating consort. Most of the time that he was in England she was convinced that she was pregnant, and consequently was unavailable to him. Once he had left, she was simultaneously begging him to return and refusing to give him either a realistic share in the government, or a coronation, or any reasonable financial support. As the Duke of Alba rightly observed, Philip, although the King of England in name, had no sovereignty in his own realm. He could manage, advise and cajole, but he could not command. However, he could still do business with the English council, and also with at least some of the English nobility, not – as the Count of Feria believed – because he was able to bribe them, but because he was a man and (in spite of language difficulties) they could understand him on that basis.

  Philip’s attitude towards England is an interesting subject in itself. When the possibility of marriage to Mary was raised, he seems to have been torn between ambition for a prestigious ‘crown matrimonial’ and a reluctance to link himself to a kinswoman who was significantly older than himself, by eleven years. The country itself was the home of myth. On the one hand it was the mysterious land of Albion, home to the mist-girt castles of Arthur and of romantic chivalry, and on the other hand it was a nest of villainous heretics and schismatics – the land of Anne Boleyn and of the murderers of the papal loyalists John Fisher and Thomas More. Once Philip had allowed his ambition to be a king to overcome his reluctance to accept so limiting a treaty, his own attitude seems to have become pragmatic. He even learned a few words of English: Mary carefully taught him to say ‘Good night my lords and ladies’, though this was perhaps the limit of his proficiency in the tongue. With Latin-speaking clerics and nobles of lineage he was at home, and he exerted himself seriously to bring the English Church back into the papal fold. What he really thought of his new subjects and their peculiar ways, we do not know. Most of our knowledge of the ‘Spanish mission’ comes from his courtiers and followers, who came with a full baggage of prejudices that they had no intention of relinquishing.

  To a much greater extent than Mary, Philip was image conscious. He knew what magnificence was, and what part it played in royalty. Unfortunately the imagery that he understood was mainly Imperial and religious. He was very good at presenting himself, in paint or stained glass, as Solomon or the son of David. He could also present himself as a Spanish conquistador. But he had not the faintest idea how to be a king of England, and his inability (or unwillingness) to go native, even to a limited degree, meant that there was no lessening of the hostility felt against him. The resulting propaganda concentrated upon his sexual adventures, because it was realised that such tales would cause maximum distress to Mary. Whether he was really as promiscuous as alleged, we do not know, but it is unlikely in view of his rigid piety. On the other hand a man who very seldom saw his wife could well keep a mistress – or a succession of mistresses – without ever feeling called upon to acknowledge the fact.

  There is one other contemporary figure in Mary’s orbit who has substantially affected what Mary means to us today: her half-sister, successor and nemesis, Elizabeth. Both as a person and as a queen, Mary has always suffered by comparison with Elizabeth – largely because Elizabeth made sure that she would. Recently there has been a tendency to point out that Mary reigned for only five years, where her half-sister reigned for forty-five, so any comparison is invalid. In terms of the achievements of their respective reigns that is probably so, but both were mature women and their personalities can be legitimately contrasted. Mary had something of her father’s intelligence, the obstinacy of both her parents, and her mother’s compulsive piety. Elizabeth had her father’s political instincts, and her mother’s wit and feisty sexuality. Mary regarded her sex as a liability; Elizabeth used hers as a weapon. Elizabeth was moody (even violent), indecisive, procrastinating, and always an actress. Nobody really knows to what extent her notorious tendency to change her mind was the result of genuine indecision, or a ploy to keep her councillors on their toes and demonstrate who was in charge. Similarly, we do not really know whether (or when) she decided not to marry, or to what extent her various negotiations were diplomatic devices. What we do know is that her virginity became a symbol of the inviolability of the realm, in total contrast to the popular perception that Mary’s Spanish marriage and Catholicism had surrendered national authority to Spanish and Italian priorities. Elizabeth is alleged to have claimed that if she was turned out of the realm in her petticoat, she would ‘fare for herself’ – and that is a measure of the selfconfidence that was her defining characteristic.

  By contrast Mary is painfully transparent. Duty to God was her lodestar: it determined her bid for the throne in 1553, her decision to marry P
hilip, and her ruthless persecution of heretics. There was nothing of the actress in her make-up, and her idea of presenting herself to her subjects was confined to dressing magnificently and surrounding herself with pomp. To Elizabeth there were no ‘matters impertinent to women’ – in 1588 she even donned armour and proposed to lead her army. To Mary the perceived distinctions of gender formed an intangible but very real barrier that partly determined her relationship with her husband. Altogether Elizabeth was far better equipped by nature to deal with the situation in which she found herself. Both women had passed through difficult and traumatic times as adolescents, but whereas the experience had left Mary in poor health and uncertain of herself, it had left Elizabeth crafty and wary.

  Mary’s real tragedy is that she was born to be a royal consort, the pious and dutiful wife of a powerful king. Instead she found that God had given her the duty of ruling a realm. What Elizabeth was born to be is anyone’s guess, but she coped very successfully with what God threw at her. Considering all these limitations, and the shortness of her time, Mary’s reign was, nevertheless, in many respects successful, not least because she set precedents and also made some of the mistakes that Elizabeth was thereby able to avoid. As a person Mary was (as even John Foxe recognised) a tragic figure, but as a queen she was important. In fact there is a lot to be said for looking at England from 1553 to 1603 as the realm of the queens – the time when England came to terms with the challenging fact of a woman on the throne. This is the story of the first of those powerful women.

  1

  THE CHILD

  Mary’s story begins nearly thirty years before her birth, when the three-yearold Catherine of Aragon was first proposed as the future wife of Arthur, the eldest son of King Henry VII of England. Catherine was the youngest child of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, known as the Catholic Kings, who had united the crowns of Spain by their marriage over twenty years before.[2] The Trastamaras were one of the oldest and best established ruling families of Europe, and the Tudors were parvenus, whose dubious claim to the throne of England had been established on the battlefield in the year of Catherine’s birth. Henry VII’s approach was therefore strictly practical. He was beset by pretenders to the crown, and he needed all the support and recognition that he could get. The pope had already obliged, and if he could persuade the Trastamaras to follow suit, his position would be greatly strengthened.