Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors (34 page)

It is not until the 20th century that attempts were made to draw a more balanced portrait of Mary. Last year saw the publication of
Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives
, a collection of scholars’ essays co-edited by Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman. On the first page, the editors say, the purpose of the book is to reveal an “
educated, resourceful and pragmatic queen.”
One of the essays (bravely) takes on the issue of the martyrs:

The burning of 284 religious dissidents is morally unjustifiable from a twenty-first-century perspective. It is important to remember, however, that the values of the 21st century are not the values of the 16th century, and that in the 16th century the execution of obstinate heretics was almost universally regarded as a necessary duty of a Christian ruler.

Will the real Mary Tudor finally emerge from the shadows, thanks to books like this one? I look forward to new perspectives on the oldest daughter of Henry VIII. The screams of the dying martyrs of the 1550s can never be silenced. But the time may have come for Mary’s name to stand alone—and for “Bloody” to be no more.

Elizabeth Tudor’s First Crisis: Enter Mary Queen o
f Scots

by Barbara Kyle

W
hen Elizabeth Tudor, at the age of twenty-five, inherited the English throne from her half-sister Mary in November of 1558, the country was on the brink of ruin. Mary had bankrupted the treasury through her disastrous war with France, which she had lost, leaving Elizabeth burdened with massive loans taken out in Europe’s financial capital of Antwerp and a grossly debased coinage that was strangling English trade.

Danger threatened Elizabeth on every side. Spain, having ruthlessly established dominion over the Netherlands, eyed England as a possible addition to its empire that already spanned half the globe.

French power, too, was dangerously close in Scotland, a virtual French province under Marie de Guise who ruled in the name of her daughter, Mary Stuart, whose kingdom it was; Mary had married the heir to the French throne and by 1558 was Queen of France and, as Elizabeth’s cousin, a claimant to Elizabeth’s throne. Scotland’s government was dominated by French overlords, and its capital was garrisoned with French troops, providing an ideal bridgehead for the French to launch an attack on England.

Meanwhile, at home Elizabeth faced seething discontent from a large portion of her people, the Catholics, who loathed her act of Parliament that had made the country officially Protestant. France and Spain sympathized with, and supported, the English Catholics.

If overtly threatened by either of those great powers, England would be vastly outmatched. The English people knew it and were frightened. Officials in the vulnerable coastal towns of Southampton, Portsmouth, and the Cinque Ports barraged Elizabeth’s council with letters entreating aid in strengthening their fortifications against possible attack.

Unlike the European powers, England had never had a standing army. Her monarchs had always relied on a system of feudal levies by which local lords, when required, raised companies of their tenants and retainers to fight for the king, who then augmented the levies with foreign mercenaries. England was backward in armaments, too; while a revolution in warfare was happening in Europe with the development of artillery and small firearms, English soldiers still relied on pikes and bows. Even Elizabeth’s navy was weak, consisting of just thirty-four ships, only eleven of them ships of war.

Ten months after Elizabeth’s coronation, people throughout Europe were laying bets that her reign would not survive a second year. One crisis could destroy her.

That crisis came in the winter of 1559. In Scotland.

John Knox’s Protestant rebel army, backed by several leading nobles including Lord James, the late king’s illegitimate son, went on a country-wide rampage to oust Marie de Guise, the Queen Regent, and they won much of Scotland to their cause. The Queen Regent’s response was to bring in thousands of French troops.

This huge French military build-up on Elizabeth’s border deeply alarmed her and her council (prompting the Spanish ambassador in London to write to his king, “
It is incredible the fear these people are in of the French on the Scottish border
”).

Elizabeth sent clandestine financial support to Knox’s rebels. She also sent Admiral Winter’s small fleet into the December gales to intercept French ships bringing more troops. Knox captured Edinburgh. The momentum was with the rebels.

But the Queen Regent successfully counterattacked, forcing Knox’s army to retreat to Stirling. Word reached Elizabeth that Philip of Spain had ordered thousands of Spanish troops in the Netherlands (a Spanish possession at the time) onto ships to sail to Scotland to help France put down Knox’s “heretic” rebels.

Had the Spanish arrived, the fate of Scotland, and of England, could have been very different, but just then Philip’s army in the Mediterranean battling the Turks suffered a devastating setback that made him halt his northern troops about to sail to Scotland and re-route them to fight the Turks. On such surprising hinges history often swings.

Elizabeth finally sent an English army into Scotland. Results were disastrous at first when they attacked the French at Leith, but eventually they laid a long siege that resulted in the surrender of the French and total victory for the English. John Knox, having secured the Scottish Reformation, had changed the course of Scotland.

Elizabeth’s victory over the French in Scotland was a turning point in her fledgling reign, and its significance cannot be overemphasized. Her decision to defy the great powers of France and Spain, and to gamble on intervention, destroyed French domination in Scotland and made English influence there permanently predominant. Furthermore, it elevated Elizabeth’s status at home and in the eyes of all Europe, whose leaders had to acknowledge her as a formidable ruler. She did this at the age of twenty-six, in just the second year of her reign.

Marie de Guise, unwell throughout the war with Knox’s rebels, did not survive her troops’ surrender; she died in Scotland in June 1560. Her daughter, Mary Stuart, Queen of France at the time, refused to sign the Treaty of Edinburgh, one article of which was her relinquishing her claim to the English throne. Her refusal infuriated Elizabeth, and thus began their nineteen-year feud.

Eleven months after the French surrender in Scotland, Mary Stuart, after less than two years as Queen of France, was widowed at age eighteen when her young husband, King Francis, died. With little status in the new court of her brother-in-law King Charles, Mary left France for her birthplace, Scotland, arriving at Leith by sea in August 1561, and took up her birthright, the Scottish throne.

Elizabeth’s problems with Mary, her cousin and fellow queen, had just begun.

Elizabeth & Mary, Rival Queens: Leadership Lost and Won

by Barbara Kyle

S
hould we act from the head or from the heart? Deliberation or passion? In fiction, the Dashwood sisters in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility personify this choice in matters of love. Elinor carefully considers her desires, weighing them against her responsibilities, holding her deepest feelings in check. Marianne scoffs at such reserve and acts boldly on her passions.

When it comes to ruling a country, with stakes infinitely higher, two queens have immortalized this crucial choice. Elizabeth Tudor of England planned her moves with Machiavellian care, keeping her ambitious nobles in line and her kingdom safe from foreign attack. Her peaceful reign spanned over forty years. Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, followed her desires, making impetuous decisions that enraged her nobles. She ruled for less than seven years, created turmoil and civil war, boldly gambled her kingdom by hazarding all on the battlefield, and lost.

The two women were cousins. Yet they never met.

When Mary fled to England to escape the Protestant lords who had deposed her, she begged Elizabeth for protection and an army to fight her enemies. Elizabeth, however, needed Protestant Scotland as a bulwark against possible invasion by Catholic France or Spain, and so decided it was prudent to keep Mary in England under house arrest. Mary’s captivity continued for nineteen years—a comfortable captivity befitting her status as a queen—during which she plotted ceaselessly to overthrow Elizabeth with the help of Spain and take her crown. Elizabeth waited out those nineteen years and finally, after the last plot almost succeeded, executed Mary.

It’s a story that has enthralled the world for over four hundred years, sparking plays, operas, an endless stream of biographies, novels (including my own), and several movies. In 1895, one of the first movies ever made was an 18-second film of Mary’s execution produced by Thomas Edison.

In Edison’s brief film, the actress playing Mary lays her head across the executioner’s block. He raises his axe. An edit occurs during which the actress is replaced by a mannequin. The mannequin’s head is chopped off and the executioner holds it high in the air. It was filmdom’s first special effect.

What is it about these two queens that so perennially fascinates us? I think it’s that primal divide of head vs. heart, of sense vs. sensibility. Elizabeth, though passionate, acted with forethought. Mary, though intelligent, acted on her desires.

Partly, it stemmed from their upbringing. Mary became queen of Scotland just days after her birth. Her French mother, Mary of Guise, ruled in her daughter’s name and sent Mary at the age of five to France to join the French king’s family in preparation for marriage to his son and heir, Francis.

Growing up in the most glittering court in Europe, Mary was pampered and petted and loved by the French royal family. She married Francis when they were both in their teens, and when his father died a year later the young couple became king and queen of France. At age sixteen Mary had reached the pinnacle.

Elizabeth’s upbringing could not have been more different. Hers was a childhood of uncertainty and fear.

Her father, Henry VIII, beheaded her mother, Anne Boleyn, for adultery when Elizabeth was three. He disinherited Elizabeth. Her half-sister Mary came to the throne when Elizabeth was twenty-one and sent her to the Tower where Elizabeth, terrified, fully expected to be executed. But Mary died, and Elizabeth, who had never thought she would rule, became queen at the age of twenty-five. In those perilous years she had learned to watch and wait, and never to act rashly.

It was a lesson Mary never learned.

These two queens, raised so differently, had very divergent outlooks on three aspects of monarchy. The first is what we today might call patriotism.

Mary, formed by France, was not much interested in Scotland, which she considered an unsophisticated backwater. In 1560, her husband, the young King Francis, died and so did her mother, who had ruled Scotland in Mary’s name. Mary was therefore free to return to her homeland and take up her birthright as its reigning queen. Instead, she chose to stay in France where life was pleasant and spent many months casting about for a new European husband. Finding none to her liking, she grudgingly returned to Scotland.

Elizabeth, on the other hand, loved her country and its people with a sincerity in her words and actions that rings to us down the centuries. She was proud of being “mere English” (“mere” in those days meaning “purely”). She enjoyed meeting common people on her journeys through the shires and bantering with them with a familiarity that shocked the European aristocracy. She said often that her people were her family. Her people loved her in return.

Second, nowhere was the head-or-heart divide more apparent than in the choices these women made about marriage. For a queen, marriage was a crucial matter of state. After four years on the Scottish throne, Mary fell passionately in love with an English nobleman, Lord Darnley, and despite the vociferous disapproval of her nobles she hastily married him. She even used her power as monarch to name him king.

This splintered her court into factions—for and against Darnley—a situation that diminished much of Mary’s power and led to a simmering civil war. Mary bore a son, James. But the marriage quickly soured when Darnley proved to be an arrogant, charmless wastrel.

Mary turned to a tough military man on her council, the Earl of Bothwell, and there was gossip that they were lovers. Seventeen months after marrying the queen, Darnley was murdered. (The house he was sleeping in was blown up.) Bothwell was accused of the murder, tried, and acquitted. Three months later, Mary took him as her third husband. The people suspected her of having colluded with him to murder Darnley. When she rode back into Edinburgh, the townsfolk hissed at her and called her “whore.”

Elizabeth, famously, never married. She knew the danger if she did: her husband would be considered king, creating warring factions in her realm and eclipsing her power. For two decades foreign princes vied for her hand in marriage, and Elizabeth used them to negotiate alliances and to disrupt foreign alliances that endangered England. She frustrated her councilors, who constantly urged her to marry to produce an heir.

Elizabeth was acutely aware of the succession problem: a monarch who left no heir consigned her realm to likely civil war. And, with no heir of her body, her throne would pass to none other than Mary, her cousin. Elizabeth’s decision to stay single was a hard one that brought her considerable personal anguish. She was heard to say, when Mary’s son was born, that she envied Mary the baby “
while I am barren stock
.” But she knew her decision was wise.

Third, the head-or-heart divide had its greatest impact in how the two women ruled. The business of governance did not interest Mary. She rarely attended the meetings of her council, and when she did, she sat and sewed. She enraged Darnley and her nobles by ignoring them and spending her time with her young Italian secretary, Rizzio.

Elizabeth was what we would call a “hands-on” leader, involving herself in every aspect of governance. Furthermore, on the eve of a possible invasion by the terrifying Spanish Armada she rode out to her troops assembled at Tilbury and inspired them to face the foe, giving an address so stirring that in World War II Winston Churchill quoted it in the House of Commons to steel England’s people to face a possible invasion by the Nazis.

Let tyrants fear…I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good-will of my subjects. And therefore I am come amongst you...being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all.

—Elizabeth I at Tilbury

Mary Stuart is to be pitied. She spent nineteen years under house arrest and died a gruesome death, beheaded at Elizabeth’s order. But before she reached England it was her incompetence as a ruler in Scotland, her disastrous decisions in leadership, that led to her downfall there.

If peace, prosperity, religious tolerance, and increased international respect are the fruits of successful leadership, Elizabeth Tudor remains one of England’s greatest rulers.