Mary Tudor (43 page)
Authors: Linda Porter
PART FOUR
The Queen Without a King
1553-1554
1553-1554
Chapter Eight
Mary’s England
‘So, for good England’s sake, this present hour and day
In hope of her restoring from her late decay
We children, to you old folk, both with heart and voice,
May join altogether to thank God and rejoice
That he hath sent Mary, our sovereign queen,
To reform the abuses which hitherto hath been.’
Respublica-a drama of Real Life in the early days of
Queen Mary
W
hen Mary was proclaimed in London on the afternoon of 19 July it was more than a vindication of her courageous and principled fight for the throne. Her victory underscored the legitimacy of statute law as laid out in the Act of Succession of 1543 and conformed to the wishes of Henry VIII that the succession should pass to his own children before others were considered.The new queen’s titles demonstrated the extent of her power and responsibilities, in matters temporal and spiritual. She was ‘Mary by the grace of God Queen of England, France and Ireland, defender of the faith, and in the earth supreme head of the Church of England and Ireland’. This impressive statement of regal might contained elements that spoke to both the past and the present and was what the majority of Mary’s ‘true and faithful’ subjects expected to hear.Yet it posed several important questions about how the queen would rule that would demand answers sooner rather than later.
hen Mary was proclaimed in London on the afternoon of 19 July it was more than a vindication of her courageous and principled fight for the throne. Her victory underscored the legitimacy of statute law as laid out in the Act of Succession of 1543 and conformed to the wishes of Henry VIII that the succession should pass to his own children before others were considered.The new queen’s titles demonstrated the extent of her power and responsibilities, in matters temporal and spiritual. She was ‘Mary by the grace of God Queen of England, France and Ireland, defender of the faith, and in the earth supreme head of the Church of England and Ireland’. This impressive statement of regal might contained elements that spoke to both the past and the present and was what the majority of Mary’s ‘true and faithful’ subjects expected to hear.Yet it posed several important questions about how the queen would rule that would demand answers sooner rather than later.
One part, of course, was little more than wishful thinking. The English lands in France had dwindled to Calais and its surrounding area, but the claim remained, a survivor of centuries of enmity that would be reignited during Mary’s reign. Ireland, on the other hand, was a newcomer to the titular display of the English monarchs.There had been a presence there, often uneasy and fragmented, since the Norman conquest, but only in 1541 did Mary’s father, unwilling to settle for just being its Lord, add the title of King of Ireland to his style. The principality of Wales, in which the queen’s dynasty originated, no longer merited a separate mention; it, too, was only recently united by statute law with England.
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Geographically, Mary’s kingdom was small. Scotland was, quite literally, another country, a natural ally of France and a constant thorn in the side of its southern neighbour. The marriage of Mary’s aunt, Margaret Tudor, to James IV of Scotland as long ago as 1503 had not succeeded in bringing about a warmer relationship between the courts of Edinburgh and London, and both regarded each other with suspicion when not involved in outright hostilities.The creation of a Great Britain lay in the future.
The realm in 1553 was a hybrid of the Gaelic Irish, the Welsh and the English, but it was the voices of the English which were most often heard, and England was the centre of the monarch’s power. It was home to just under three million people, a population that actually declined in the 1550s as the result of famine and deadly epidemics, though numbers recovered strongly by the end of Elizabeth’s reign.
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London, its largest city, had 60,000 inhabitants, but this was unimpressive by European standards; the population of Paris was three times greater. Nowhere else in Mary’s kingdom came near to London in size - even at the end of the 16th century, Dublin was a small town of only 6,000 people.
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London, its largest city, had 60,000 inhabitants, but this was unimpressive by European standards; the population of Paris was three times greater. Nowhere else in Mary’s kingdom came near to London in size - even at the end of the 16th century, Dublin was a small town of only 6,000 people.
Perhaps because it was small in both area and population, England had a long tradition of unified central government, and in this centrality lay the key to its identity. The country was defined by the things it had in common: its language, its laws and its coinage. In the provinces, local men might have the power to exercise the law, but the commands they enacted came from Westminster, where an assiduous civil service made sure that the justices of the peace and lords lieutenant of the shires knew what was expected of them. Only rarely, as with the East Anglian and Thames Valley risings in support of Mary, did the centre find itself challenged.
It was a strongly administered country, but one that had seen enormous change in the 20 years before Mary’s accession. She herself had direct, uncomfortable experience of the impact of the religious upheaval and she now found herself head of a Church whose beliefs she did not share and whose leaders she despised.The Edwardian regime had moved much faster and much further than the majority of the population wanted. In reforming the liturgy it had removed a great deal that was familiar and deprived the congregation of what many of them saw as the mystery and beauty of the experience of worship. Cranmer and others believed passionately that the immediacy of God’s word, rendered into English that all could understand, was far more beautiful than the ornaments, altarpieces and carvings that Edward’s commissioners stripped from the churches. The religious processions, observance of saints’ days, strict adherence to Lenten dieting and, above all, the inaccessibility of holy communion on a regular basis, all these things were viewed as detrimental to a godly society by the supporters of the new learning.
The changes had begun under Henry VIII but their acceleration between 1547 and 1553 was the result of legislation imposed from on high. It could not, in the space of just six years, banish the beliefs or customs of centuries. People were reluctant to break the law, but they resented what had been taken from them. Many still thought as Mary did. They did not view her, as so many historians have done, as going backwards, but as someone who could pick up again the interrupted pattern of religion in their daily lives.The transition for such people was easily achieved. As Lord Rich wrote, in respect of a kinsman who believed that he was not in favour with the queen: ‘He is as willing as any man to hear mass.’And so were countless others.
If people’s consciences were mobile, so was the society in which they lived. Mid-Tudor England saw much more movement, both up and down the social ladder, than has generally been realised. People did not stay in one place all their lives. They might not go any great distance, perhaps no more than five or ten miles from where they were born, but most moved at least once. Only the very rich or very poor migrated long distances. Those who did tended to leave the north and west for the more prosperous south and east of England, a trend that has not changed in 450 years. The cosy image of close-knit villages dotted over a rural landscape, where generations of the same family lived and died together, is a myth. Extended families were most unusual. Households generally consisted of a husband and wife, their children and their servants. To ensure that they were in a position to establish themselves independently, both men and women often waited until they were in their late twenties to marry. Given that life expectancy was only in the high thirties, death often parted couples before they had much time together.
England was an agrarian society but it was not a subsistence economy with a fixed peasantry. In the countryside as well as the towns, people made things that they could trade.Yet life was far from easy.Wide-scale enclosures, depriving the common people of their rights to forage and graze animals, had led to social unrest, as in the risings of 1549. Prices rose sharply during the reign of Henry VIII and the coinage had been several times debased, a combination that only increased hardship. Both of Mary’s predecessors died in debt, mostly as a result of the expensive and inconclusive wars of the 1540s. All the wealth from the religious establishments that Thomas Cromwell had worked so hard to put in the Crown’s coffers had been dissipated.
Beyond these man-made difficulties were other disasters that only God, it was believed, could influence. The vagaries of the weather were a constant concern, since failed harvests could cause starvation that decimated large areas of the country. Prolonged periods of torrential rain were a feature of Mary’s reign, especially in the years 1554-6. Her future husband, Philip, arrived from the warm climate of Spain in July 1554 to be greeted when he landed at Southampton by pelting rain.The downpours did not let up for their wedding day, either. But the worse was yet to come. At the end of September 1555 the country experienced ‘the greatest rains and floods that ever were seen in England.The low countries in divers places were drowned, and both men and cattle. All the marshes near London … and all the cellars with beers and wine and other wares and merchandise in them drowned also.The rains … continued to March 18 [1556]: not ten days together fair.’
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Those spared by the weather might equally succumb to disease. Epidemics did not always follow bad harvests but their effects were just as devastating. In 1558, the year of Mary’s own demise, a virus probably related to influenza caused one of the greatest losses of life in England in a single year since the Black Death.
Outsiders viewed Mary’s England as an unattractive place to live. Physically, its countryside was pleasing enough and London, with its skyline of churches, impressive, but there were few other positive aspects. Visitors saw a land fractured by religious dissension, very much prey to its treacherous nobility and unstable climate. It was not, as one Spaniard discovered in 1554, a healthy environment.‘I am’, reported Juan de Barahona, ‘full of furuncles and of the itch, the doctors tell me it is due to the water, because I do not drink beer and now I drink water boiled with cinnamon, because the water of this country is very bad and becomes putrid in the stomach.’
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This was the reason why Englishmen consumed so much alcohol and spent far too long in taverns, a lifestyle that foreigners thought contributed to disorder and moral degeneracy. Scheyfve, the imperial ambassador, spoke for many observers when he noted that ‘the subjects of this realm are wont to live in pleasure-seeking and intemperance, haunt taverns and become wholly idle and disorderly’.
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Nicolaus Mameranus, an imperial commentator on his first visit to England, was shocked by the intemperance he witnessed. He proposed a sweeping remedy for this ‘nuisance of public drinking, (introduced by Satan) by both sexes in public taverns’. The solution amounted to a prohibitive levy on anyone who drank just for the sake of drinking, by requiring them to pay the equivalent of what they spent on drink directly into the national coffers. ‘This would be beneficial to the commonwealth and public salvation. Such ruinous disgrace exists nowhere else in Christendom and ought to be permitted in no Christian state.’
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Nicolaus Mameranus, an imperial commentator on his first visit to England, was shocked by the intemperance he witnessed. He proposed a sweeping remedy for this ‘nuisance of public drinking, (introduced by Satan) by both sexes in public taverns’. The solution amounted to a prohibitive levy on anyone who drank just for the sake of drinking, by requiring them to pay the equivalent of what they spent on drink directly into the national coffers. ‘This would be beneficial to the commonwealth and public salvation. Such ruinous disgrace exists nowhere else in Christendom and ought to be permitted in no Christian state.’
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Incorrigible as the lower orders were, the nobility were hardly any better. They were all ‘ambitious, revengeful, seekers after novelties, inconstant, given to conspiracies, only held in check by fear of the sword’.
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Not one of the new men raised up by her father spoke out in defence of Mary’s claim or came to her aid. The old families, who supported the princess and her mother in the 1530s, had suffered, sometimes with their lives, and seen their power and influence eroded. They disliked the upstarts as much as she did but, until now, were unable to raise their voices without fear of recrimination. Henry, Lord Stafford, the son-in-law of Margaret Pole, tried repeatedly to obtain some restitution from Northumberland that would help him pay off his debts, but got nowhere. He hoped for better things under Mary, and in his heartfelt letter to her of October 1553 he reminded her of all that his family had endured over two decades: ‘I am bold to declare my state, remembering that my wife’s friends chose death rather than consent to your disinheritance in your tender years. I desire neither high authority nor dukedom, but the inheritance I was born to if malice had not defeated me … why should I despair, having so merciful a mistress, who daily restores rightful heirs? Pardon me troubling you; consider the old saying, need and necessity have no laws.’
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His petition resulted in his being granted one of the two offices of chamberlain of the exchequer four months later.
7
Not one of the new men raised up by her father spoke out in defence of Mary’s claim or came to her aid. The old families, who supported the princess and her mother in the 1530s, had suffered, sometimes with their lives, and seen their power and influence eroded. They disliked the upstarts as much as she did but, until now, were unable to raise their voices without fear of recrimination. Henry, Lord Stafford, the son-in-law of Margaret Pole, tried repeatedly to obtain some restitution from Northumberland that would help him pay off his debts, but got nowhere. He hoped for better things under Mary, and in his heartfelt letter to her of October 1553 he reminded her of all that his family had endured over two decades: ‘I am bold to declare my state, remembering that my wife’s friends chose death rather than consent to your disinheritance in your tender years. I desire neither high authority nor dukedom, but the inheritance I was born to if malice had not defeated me … why should I despair, having so merciful a mistress, who daily restores rightful heirs? Pardon me troubling you; consider the old saying, need and necessity have no laws.’
8
His petition resulted in his being granted one of the two offices of chamberlain of the exchequer four months later.
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