Tudor Queens of England (2 page)

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Because Elizabeth of York had her own claim to the kingdom, a claim that had to be subsumed in that of her husband, her marriage to Henry VII in 1486

was choreographed with especial care and medallions were struck. It was a rite of passage for the kingdom, as well as for Elizabeth. She was crowned on St Katherine’s day and William Capgrave’s life of St Katherine was not slow to make the same point, that ‘government by a woman is unfeasible’ and that consequently it was the King’s position that mattered.

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Of course a foreign queen could also serve a quite different purpose if circumstances demanded it. She could be a lightening conductor for hostility and frustration. When the expected peace with France failed to follow the marriage of Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou in 1445, the unfortunate young woman found

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herself blamed. Margaret was to be particularly vulnerable in this respect because circumstances forced her into a role of political leadership that was supposed to be alien to her nature. In 1462, when she found herself struggling to maintain the cause of her increasingly defi cient husband, she was fi ercely denounced by Yorkist propagandists for bringing in Frenchmen and Scots ‘to destroy utterly the name, the tongue and all the bloude Englyshe of this oure saide R

ealme …’8

Margaret was caught in a trap, because she was forced to appear as Henry’s agent at a time when he was virtually incapable of helping himself – and there was no way in which her image could conform to the political reality. A queen was supposed to be chaste because only by such means could the integrity of the royal line be protected, but the most important of all her functions was to bear her husband children. If she was defi cient in other ways, skilful image brokers could conceal the fact, but no amount of spin could disguise her failure to produce an heir. Hence the ceremony that attended a royal lying in. This was the classic opportunity to display successful queenship, and churchings and Christenings were public and splendid events. Childbirth was the ultimate female mystery and even comparatively humble gentlewomen would retire from view, accompanied by a midwife and one or two female servants. Queens did the same on a grander scale. However in their cases the stakes were much higher and the possibilities of fraud or substitution proportionately greater. Consequently, although no man (unless he were a physician) could be present at the birth itself, visits from royal offi cials during the period of confi nement were common. In 1555

Mary’s phantom pregnancy gave rise to all sorts of scandalous rumours and her condition was clearly as much of a mystery to contemporaries as it has remained ever since – but no one had the temerity to accuse their sovereign of adultery. When Anne Boleyn had a miscarriage in February 1536, her enemies were quick to attribute it to sexual misconduct but it would have been high treason to have levelled similar accusations against Mary – and not even John Foxe attempted to do so. The unfortunate Margaret of Anjou was so accused, although not at the time of Prince Edward’s birth. As evidence of Henry’s mental incapacity began to mount after 1453 it began to be doubted whether he could ever have fathered a son and as young Edward’s place in the scheme of Lancastrian monarchy became more evident and immediate their Yorkist rivals had every incentive to impugn his legitimacy. That was unusual; the careful observance of all the correct rituals of motherhood was normally suffi cient to protect the Queen from such slanders and to guarantee the subsequent enhancement of her status.

The queen who was also the mother of a male heir was doubly fortunate. Not only had she fulfi lled her highest duty – she had enhanced her husband’s authority to an immeasurable extent and demonstrated that God looked favourably upon 6

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his government. The political role of the Queen Consort thus depended to some extent upon her womanhood but it also varied with circumstances and with her own personality. A queen who was the mother of a royal prince could not expect the same control over his upbringing that an ordinary gentlewoman had. Despite the Holy Family imagery she did not breastfeed him – that being the responsibility of a specially appointed wet nurse. Very often a separate household was established for him almost from the time of his birth. The queen was consulted but all appointments were made by the King, even when the child was

‘among the women’ in accordance with the custom of the time. Anne Boleyn does not even seem to have been consulted when her daughter Elizabeth was weaned and contact between them seems to have been confi ned to regular visits. When Margaret’s son, Prince Edward, was created Prince of Wales in March 1454 he was less than a year old and, although his Council was a political and administrative institution rather than a domestic one, Queen Margaret was infl uential in its creation. Edward IV’s son, also Edward, was promoted at about the same age in 1471 and his mother was, very unusually, formally admitted as a councillor and is alleged to have dominated that body, which was one of the reasons why the Duke of Gloucester viewed her with suspicion in 1483. Arthur was slightly older when he was promoted in 1489, and the then Queen, Elizabeth of York, is not known to have played any part. By the time that Henry became Prince, in 1504, she was dead and there were no more princes of Wales within the period, the next being the eldest son of James I in 1610. The only Queen Consort to bear a son during the sixteenth century was Jane Seymour and she did not live to play any part in his upbringing. Elizabeth of York was protective of her elder daughter, Margaret, and is alleged to have persuaded her husband not to marry her for diplomatic reasons before the canonical age of co-habitation, which was 12. Margaret was actually 13 when she married James IV of Scotland in a purely political match and Elizabeth seems to have supported that – or at least she did not oppose it. A queen also continued, to some extent, to be defi ned by her own family. Catherine de Valois made little of her royal blood after her marriage and took as her second husband a mere household servant, while Margaret of Anjou was alternately bedevilled and rescued by hers. No one was allowed to forget that she was of the Ducal House of Anjou. Catherine of Aragon actually served as her father’s accredited ambassador in England between her marriages to Arthur and Henry and was the symbol of an alliance by which the King set great store in the early years of his reign. When he was trying to get rid of her in 1527, it was her family, in the person of the Emperor, Charles V, who stood in his way and forced him into one of the defi ning actions of his reign. However, paradoxically the two most important consort families were not

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foreign but domestic. The Greys and the Woodvilles owed their spectacular rise entirely to the marriage of Elizabeth to Edward IV. The familiar picture of the antagonism between the Queen’s kindred and Richard of Gloucester in 1483 is almost entirely the creation of Tudor propaganda but the elevation of Elizabeth’s father as Earl Rivers in 1466 and of her son Thomas Grey as Earl of Huntingdon in 1471 and Marquis of Dorset in 1475 were suffi ciently factual and refl ect a deliberate attempt on Edward’s part to build up his wife’s family into a signifi cant political force. Her successor, Elizabeth of York, had no need of such patronage. Had it not been for her gender, she would have had a better claim to the Crown than her husband; on the other hand, if she had been born male she might have gone the same way as her brothers. Her marriage to Henry VII was celebrated for years as the reconciliation of the great rivalry of Lancaster and York and she continued to use the white rose as her badge for the rest of her life. In her son and daughters ran the blood of both royal families, and through her elder daughter, Margaret, it was conveyed to the Scottish royal house of Stuart.

Edward IV’s patronage of the Woodvilles was refl ected in a paler way in the manner with which Henry VIII dealt with the kindred of his second, third, fi fth and sixth wives. Sir Thomas Boleyn became Earl of Wiltshire in 1529, Edward Seymour Earl of Hertford in 1537 and William Parr Earl of Essex in 1543 as a result of his marriages to Anne, Jane and Catherine. The Duke of Norfolk, who was Catherine Howard’s uncle, did not gain any further promotion when she shared the royal bed, but for about two years his ascendancy at court and in the council was unchallenged. Unfortunately what went up could also come down. The Boleyns were ruined by Anne’s alleged infi delities and the Howards by Catherine’s real ones. William Parr was never a fi gure of much signifi cance but Edward Seymour, as the uncle of Prince Edward, the cherished heir to the throne, was an important national fi gure in the last years of Henry’s life and more particularly during the minority of his son. Henry VIII’s marital adventures confused the image of queenship. No one could claim that Anne Boleyn was either meek or patient. Unlike Margaret of Anjou, she was not forced into a political role by the incapacity of her husband. She chose it, and created a formidable clientage over which the King had only imperfect control – which was one of the main reasons for her downfall. Nor could anyone plausibly describe Catherine Howard as chaste and not even the most fl attering courtier could apply the image of the Virgin Mary to her without arousing unseemly mirth. Catherine Parr was a queen in a more traditional mould. Although neither virgin nor mother, she recreated the King’s shattered family and by her wisdom and discretion helped to temper the unpredictability of his increasingly uncertain temper. She was as 8

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chaste, wise and well mannered as even Jacobus de Cassalis could have wished and she was the last of her kind for over half a century.

A ruling queen was a completely different creature and with the accession of Mary in 1553 we enter a new world. The situation was not unprecedented in Europe. Isabella of Castile offered a recent and obvious example but that was in a different legal system and few Englishmen would have known much about her. A woman had never governed England and there were uncertainties both of image and of expectation. In the case of a Queen Consort, who exercised temporary power, her husband defi ned the position. When Edward IV went to France in 1475, he left Elizabeth as governor in his place and when Henry VIII did the same in 1513 he left the government in the hands of Queen Catherine. The same applied in 1544, with a different Catherine but the same process. However that was at the King’s discretion and if he was incapacitated, or died leaving his heir a minor, the same conditions did not apply. When Henry VI collapsed in 1453, the Duke of York became Protector and when Edward died in 1483, leaving his sons under age, he named his brother the Duke of Gloucester as Protector. After Henry VIII’s death in 1547 the council named the Duke of Somerset as Protector and no one suggested that the position should have gone to the Queen Dowager. John Knox was not alone in believing that the rule of women over men was unnatural and contrary to the Law of God, but that was not the prevailing view.

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It is impossible to say what might have happened in 1553 if Mary had been challenged by a man with a plausible claim but, in the event, her only rival was another woman whose claim was by general consent inferior. Unfortunately there was no consensus about the nature of Mary’s claim. The Queen herself believed that her right lay in the fact that she was Henry’s only legitimate child and that was a view shared by her Habsburg kindred and by most of Catholic Europe. Her subjects, however, believed for the most part that her entitlement lay in the dispositions that Henry had made by statute in 1543 and in his last will and testament. This hardly mattered for the purpose of seeing off Jane Grey in July 1553 but it was important thereafter, as we shall see. Mary was crowned as though she had been a king, convened parliament, established her Council and acted in every respect as her father or grandfather would have done. For the time being she even acted as Supreme Head of the Church, although it soon became apparent that the title offended her conscience. As a
femme seul
, she was in command of her own private lordship and her lawyers, at least, were comfortable with that thought. The imagery that was developed on her behalf, most of it admittedly in Europe rather than in England, made the best of her unexpected emergence from affl iction to power. She was the helpless virgin triumphing over the strong man armed – the woman clothed with the sun, and so on.
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This successfully blended

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femininity with success, but was hardly imagery for the exercise of power. That no one ventured to produce, and Mary herself clearly had no idea what form it should take. Unlike Edward, she could not even attempt to strike her father’s pose. She then compounded her problems by deciding to marry. There were good reasons for this, the most compelling being her need for an heir, but she also sought to use marriage to provide for the security of her realm, and to reinforce the religious policy upon which she was determined. She set about this in the same way that a King would have done – she took advice where she pleased (in this case mainly from Simon Renard, the Imperial ambassador) made up her own mind, and then announced her decision. This took her councillors aback, but only because they were expecting her to be ‘shamfast’ and to take her lead from them. In choosing her mate, Mary had acted like a man, but there the similarities came to an end. By converting herself from a

femme seul
into a
femme couvert
she was muddying the waters horribly.

If the realm was a

dominium
, or lordship, as most believed, would it pass to her husband in full ownership for the duration of his life, as would be the case with a private lordship? She had made it clear almost from the beginning that her intended husband was Prince Philip of Spain, the only son of her cousin the Emperor Charles V. This was not well received in England and the problems that would have arisen in any case in respect of a King Consort were redoubled by the unpopularity of her choice. If there were no children, and she predeceased him, did he remain king for the remainder of his natural life? If there were children, and Mary died while they were underage, did he automatically become regent?