Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (13 page)

CHAPTER 4

THE REFORMATION OF TRADITION: THE CORONATIONS OF MARY AND ELIZABETH

Alice Hunt

I

In 1838, amid preparations for Victoria’s coronation, Earl Fitzwilliam complained that “coronations were fit only for barbarous, or semi-barbarous, ages; for periods when crowns were won and lost by unruly violence and ferocious contests.”
¹
In other words, before the theory of divine right established and safeguarded a successor, the act of coronation was needed to legitimize the new monarch. The purpose of a coronation ceremony in sixteenth-century England was complex: technically, of course, the heir became monarch at the moment of the reigning king’s, or queen’s, death, by virtue of divine right. But the long-standing tradition and the sacramental logic of the inauguration ritual held fast and the coronation remained for the Tudor monarchs one of the most important ceremonies of their reign. Parliament could resume (with the monarch wearing their specially made crimson coronation robes) only after the heir had been anointed and crowned, and a monarch’s effigy would bear a set of his coronation regalia. Only French monarchs equaled the English in their claims for the sacred body of the king; all the Tudors, apart from possibly Edward VI, continued to touch for scrofula—their miraculous, priestly healing powers attributed to the gift of grace bestowed at the moment of their anointing in Westminster Abbey.
²

This essay looks in detail at the coronations of England’s first queens: Mary and Elizabeth. The traditional form of the English coronation ceremony was enshrined in the fourteenth-century 
Liber Regalis
 and the Lancastrian book of ceremonies, Henry VI’s “Ryalle Book.” But both texts cover the crowning of a 
male
 monarch and his female consort only.
³
There was, then, no precedent for the coronation of a queen regnant. With Mary and Elizabeth, the councilors and advisers involved with organizing their coronations had to confront and navigate not only new religious laws and the issue of supremacy but also, for the first time, gender. This essay considers the ways in which Mary and Elizabeth’s coronations were adapted to suit both the specific, shifting religious and political contexts, and the queens’ personal preferences and conscience. Religious change necessarily impacted on sacramental interpretations of the coronation, as did the establishment of the supremacy, but this essay takes issue with claims that the coronation was thus rendered “an empty form” and sidelined in favor of the more public, theatrical part of the ceremonies—the pre-coronation procession through London.
⁴
What took place in the Abbey during Mary’s and Elizabeth’s actual ceremonies mattered hugely, and both were scrutinized carefully by home commentators and foreign reporters for clues about the temper of the reign to come.

II

In July 1553, Mary Tudor won the crown back from Lady Jane Grey in a swift coup—the only Tudor rebellion to have succeeded. She was Henry VIII’s first daughter and was named as his successor in the 1544 succession act and in his will, but Mary’s bastard status following the births of Elizabeth and Edward had never been formally revoked by Parliament. For some then, her legitimacy was questionable. The same was true for Elizabeth in 1558. She too had been proclaimed a bastard but was arguably in an even more precarious position than Mary due to her mother’s usurpation of the country’s rightful queen (Catherine) and Henry’s legitimate heir back in 1532. On her accession in 1558, Elizabeth is reported to have consulted Sir Nicholas Bacon on whether or not she needed Parliament to undo her mark of illegitimacy. The reply was, according to William Camden’s 
Annales
, “No,” since “the Crowne once worne, quite taketh away all defects whatsoever.”
⁵
The magic indelibility of the ceremony—fit for a “barbarous age” perhaps—is appealed to here. In 1553, however, some of Mary’s councilors seemed not to agree with such an interpretation. In September, shortly before Mary was due to be crowned, the imperial ambassadors wrote to Charles V with their latest news from England:

[S]ince our last letters to your Majesty were written, the Queen has sent us word through Scheyfve’s secretary that certain Councillors now opine it would be better to hold the Parliament before the coronation, the better to establish and confirm the reign; to discover the intentions of the estates in general and the tendencies of individuals; to discover if there be opposition; to annul the declaration of bastardy made by the Parliament during the life-time of the late King Henry in the year 1535, and declare the late King Edward’s testament null and void. We were informed also that there was a good deal of plotting going on against the Queen in this town of London; arquebuses, arrows and other weapons were being collected in various houses, giving cause to fear that during the ceremony of the coronation, as the Queen must proceed to Westminster through the streets of the town for a distance of an English mile or more, some attempt might be made against her person. The Council were now of opinion that Parliament should be held before the coronation to avoid the likelihood of trouble; the Queen was distressed to hear of this alteration…She asked our advice on the matter.
⁶
In this report the ambassadors refer to an unprecedented constitutional overhaul in the form of a scheme drawn up by Mary’s newly formed council.
⁷
Certain members of the council suggested to Mary that the traditional order of coronation and Parliament be reversed—that her coronation should be delayed until her legitimacy and position (and probably her religious intentions too) could be confirmed by a parliamentary session. But if Mary’s legitimacy was a potential problem, so too was the legitimacy of an acephalous parliament. Who would “head” this interregnal parliament, since this was constitutionally the monarch’s role? It also opened up the possibility that Mary would owe her position to Parliament—that it was primarily “the estates” who ratified her queenship, and not God—and that her authority would be defined and could be limited by such a Parliament. The ambassadors advised against Mary accepting the proposal, arguing that such a reversal of the established order would render her “more dependent on Council and Parliament than she should be; bridle her so that she cannot marry a foreigner, and bring about her marriage to Courtenay according to the Bishop of Winchester’s design; prevent the establishment of religion, and generally, put their intrigues into execution.”
⁸
In short, the ambassadors imply, Mary would be unable—as an unanointed queen—to resist certain decisions that that Parliament might make and that would become law. On the advice of the ambassadors, principally Simon Renard, Mary rejected the newfangled proposal, thereby asserting her independence from and defiance of certain members of her council. She would press ahead with her coronation, and on October 1, 1553 she was anointed and crowned in full glory in Westminster Abbey.

On the morning of her coronation, Mary appeared in Westminster Hall dressed in crimson robes, the color traditionally worn by both male monarchs and queen consorts at their coronations.
⁹
Catherine of Aragon wore crimson robes when she was crowned alongside Henry in 1509, as did Anne Boleyn for her coronation in June 1533. These crimson robes would, as was also customary, become the monarch’s parliamentary robes—authorized, as it were, by their first outing at the coronation and thus a symbolic reminder of the correct relationship between monarch, God, and Parliament. Mary and her peers and clergy gathered in the Hall before they processed to the Abbey along the traditional blue ray cloth. Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester and just released from the Tower, anointed and crowned Mary, and George Day, reinstated as the Bishop of Chichester, gave the address. The “ceremonies and solemnities” proceeded according to, as Holinshed reports, “the old custome,” and thus as a full Roman mass, rather than as communion.
¹⁰
Simon Renard reported that the service adhered to “the rites of the old religion,” despite the 1552 Second Act of Uniformity and the publication of the second 
Book of
Common Prayer
 that had replaced “mass” with “communion” and erased the word “sacrament.”
¹¹
Consequently, the Bishops of Lincoln and Hereford withdrew from the service when the mass began. That the ceremony adhered to the “old custome” is, of course, a loaded remark in the context of 1553. Holinshed’s account goes on to caustically say that the ceremonies lasted “from ten in the morning till five o’clock in the afternoon.” Another eyewitness account relates how Mary was ledde iiii or v tymes on the alter, with so many and sondery ceremonyes in anoynting, crowning, and other olde customes, that it was past iii almost iiii of the clocke at night or ever she came from the church agayn…She was ledd likewise between the old bushope of Dyrom…having in hir hande a cepter of golde, and in hir other hande a ball of golde, which she twirled and tourned in hir hande.
¹²

For this observer, the “sondery [read Catholic] ceremonyes” seem antiquated and tedious, and the orb a mere prop to be “twirled” in Mary’s hand, but to which Mary seemed superstitiously attached. Mary’s coronation, then, was an occasion to be scrutinized for its confessional clues and construed as being reassuringly (for this observer, at least) indicative of her “old” and unreformed attitudes.

On closer examination, though, Mary seems to have been craftier than this, and plans for her coronation seem marked by a tension and an attempt to make the ceremony, to a certain extent, compatible with both established law and her conscience. Anxious that the holy oils consecrated by Edwardian ministers “may not be such as they ought because of the ecclesiastical censures upon the country,” Mary asked the imperial ambassadors to write to the Bishop of Arras in Brussels to prepare three special oils for her anointing.
¹³
The bishop duly responded by sending, secretly, three oils usually used for Catholic consecrations. In the letter to the ambassadors that accompanied his enclosures he wrote, I am sending you the three holy oils the Queen asked for, which are those that I usually carry about with me for the consecrations it is sometimes my duty to perform. I beg you to ask the Queen’s pardon because the vessel is not more ornate; for I did my best to have a new one made, suitable to be placed in her hands, but I failed to find a master who would promise to finish it in less than three weeks, which would have been too late. I consequently preferred to obey her orders literally, rather than to risk failure by attempting too much.
¹⁴

Mary knew that her coronation, whether it followed a Roman mass or Edwardian communion, was still in breach of Rome. She asked Henry Penning, Cardinal Pole’s secretary, to request that Cardinal Pole absolve her and her bishops so that “they might be able to say mass and administer the sacraments without sin, until able to have the general absolution.”
¹⁵
The matter of the oils and the absolution were not simply a matter of petty confessional politics, but of personal conscience and salvation. Edward VI was, of course, buried according to Protestant rites, but Mary, for example, chose to hold a private mass for her brother in the Tower, conducted by Stephen Gardiner.

Mary clearly confessionalized her coronation, but what exactly was meant by what could mean different things to different people. The provenance of the oils with which she was anointed was secret: for many at Mary’s coronation, then, she was anointed by “legitimate” oils that had been consecrated according to Edwardian laws. Mary’s coronation oath was also left open to variable interpretations. The council attempted to bind Mary to a revised oath, just as Edward VI’s had been rewritten in 1547. A copy of the oath that Mary swore is not extant, but the ambassadors (whose advice Mary consulted and who urged her to “follow the old and accustomed” form of the oath) report that Mary “told us afterwards that she had seen the old form of oath wherein no mention was made of the new religion, but it was said that she should observe the laws of England; and in order to remove every uncertainty she would have the words 
just and
licit laws
 added.”
¹⁶
A letter by Henry Penning also refers to the oath that Mary amended, and in such a way that preserved her royal prerogative: Her Majesty gave me the copy of the oath taken by her at the coronation, which she had thoroughly considered beforehand, and added a few words having for object to maintain her Majesty’s integrity and good-will; as may be seen by the identical copy.
¹⁷

The oath that the Council wished Mary to swear did not seek to tie Mary to certain religious promises, but it did seek to make her comply with the established laws of England, that is, those passed in Edward VI’s reign. Mary seems to have got round this by adding “just and licit,” but “just and licit” according to whom?

The oath, mass, and provenance of the oils aside, it seems certain that Mary was anointed, invested with the regalia, and crowned according to the protocol for a male monarch—thus following the precedents of her father’s and brother’s coronations. Interestingly, however, accounts of Mary’s coronation are inconsistent and contradictory, particularly those relating to certain ceremonial procedures and the matter of Mary’s dress. Such muddled reports possibly reflect the confusion of the reporters (perhaps they didn’t even witness the ceremony), but it is striking that it is the presentation of Mary as a sovereign queen, or as a type of queen consort, that is unclear. A manuscript plan for the coronation, drawn up before the coronation since blanks are left for the names of certain key participants, clearly anticipates that Mary will be anointed, as a male monarch would be, in six places— shoulders, back, elbows, hands, and twice on the head—and bestowed with all the regalia, from scepter to spurs.
¹⁸
Like Edward (i.e., a male monarch albeit a minor), Mary was crowned three times (echoing papal crownings): with St Edward’s crown, the imperial crown “of the realme,” and a third crown “to be purposlie made for her grace.”
¹⁹
The ambassadors, however, report that Mary was anointed only twice—which is how queen consorts were anointed, once on the forehead and once on the breast.
²⁰
It is most likely that the ambassadors meant that she was anointed on the head “twice”—which is the correct form—and that they chose to emphasize this since it would press home her sacredness and her position but we cannot be entirely certain of this. The papal envoy Giovanni Francesco Commendone reports that Mary was anointed “on the shoulders, on the breast, on the forehead and on the temples,” but he also provides a striking but confusing image of Mary at the end of her coronation.
²¹
According to him, Mary was seated in her throne, holding “in her hands two Sceptres; the one of the King, the other bearing a dove which, by custom, is given to the Queen.”
²²
It would seem, then, that Mary had been bestowed with all the traditional and consecrated regalia—the scepter, orb, spurs, ring—but that she was also given an item of the regalia that was usually given to a queen consort. Was Commendone mistaken, or was Mary presented in two ways: on the one hand as a sovereign (genderless), and on the other hand as a woman? If this is correct, it does not necessarily follow that the two versions of Mary were in conflict—simply that, perhaps, a female monarch required a new or different type of representation.