Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (2 page)

Alexander Samson
 lectures in the literature, culture, and history of early modern Spain and Latin America at University College London. He is the editor of 
The Spanish Match: Prince Charles’s Journey to Madrid, 1623 
(2006) and, with Jonathan Thacker, 
A Companion to Lope de Vega
 (2008). He has published articles on the marriage of Philip II and Mary Tudor, historiography and royal chroniclers in sixteenth-century Spain, firearms, Cervantes and Anglo-Spanish cultural relations. His book 
Mary Tudor and the Habsburg Marriage: England and Spain 1553–1557
 is due to be published in 2010.

Corinna Streckfuss
 is a DPhil student in Modern History at Christ Church, University of Oxford after studying at the Universities of Heidelberg, Oxford, and Munich. She is currently completing her thesis, “The Reign of Mary Tudor in Contemporary European News and Propaganda (1553–60),” under the supervision of Dr. Christopher Haigh and Professor Dr. Judith Pollmann. Her first article, “England’s Reconciliation with Rome: A News Event in Early Modern Europe,” was published in 
Historical Research
.

Anna Whitelock
 is a lecturer in early modern history at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of 
Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen 
(2009). Her articles on Tudor queenship have appeared in 
The Historical Journal, Women’s History Review,
and in the edited volume
The Ritual and Rhetoric of Queenship
 (2009). She is currently working on the court of Elizabeth I and on developing a project on Renaissance Folly.

ABBREVIATIONS

APC - Acts of the Privy Council of England

BL - British Library, London

Bodl. - Bodleian Library, Oxford

CP - The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain, and the United Kingdom

CSPD - Calendar of State Papers: Domestic

CSPF - Calendar of State Papers: Foreign

CSPRome - Calendar of State Papers: Rome

CSPScot - Calendar of State Papers: Scotland

CSPSp - Calendar of State Papers: Spain

CSPVen - Calendar of State Papers: Venice

EETS - Early English Texts Society

EHR - English Historical Review

ELR - English Literary Renaissance

HJ - The Historical Journal

HLRO - House of Lords Records Office

HMC Salisbury - Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Salisbury

HoP Commons - The House of Commons 1509–1558

LP - Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII

ODNB - Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

RQ - Renaissance Quarterly

SCJ - Sixteenth Century Journal

TNA - The National Archives, London

TRHS - Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

TRP - Tudor Royal Proclamations

INTRODUCTION: “PARTNERS BOTH IN THRONE AND GRAVE”

Alice Hunt and Anna Whitelock

Mary and Elizabeth, England’s first crowned queens, share the same tomb in Westminster Abbey. In 1606, James I dug up Elizabeth’s body from its place in the tomb of Henry VII and his queen, Elizabeth of York, moved it to the left-hand side of Henry VII’s chapel where Mary was buried, and commissioned a monument heralding the reign of his predecessor. But the plaque on the tomb (see Figure 1.1) also acknowledges the presence of Elizabeth’s half-sister, Mary. It reads: Partners both in throne and grave, here rest we two sisters Elizabeth and Mary, in the hope of one resurrection.

This volume of essays on the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth takes this seventeenth-century inscription as its starting point. Although the queens lie in one tomb, history has not often considered Mary and Elizabeth alongside one another or appreciated them as having anything in common beyond paternal blood. Instead, scholarship has tended to focus either on the reigns in isolation or has pitted one queen against the other, in, as is well known, Elizabeth’s favor. Whilst Mary has been presented as the barren Catholic bigot who married an unpopular Spanish prince— 
à la
 John Foxe— Elizabeth is the Virgin Queen and a beacon of Protestant nationalism. Mary is remembered as a religious persecutor, but Elizabeth, we are told, famously did not like making windows into men’s souls. Modern historians have condemned Mary as a “profoundly conventional woman,” fatally crippled by her sterility (and femininity), and have hailed Elizabeth as having triumphed by being “more masculine than any queen in English history.”
¹
In short, Marian failure—“positive achievements there were none”—has been set against Elizabethan success, from her religious settlement to the defeat of the Armada.
²
The fact that the two queens experienced reigns of such radically different lengths—Mary’s five years against Elizabeth’s forty-five—has only contributed to the polarization of opinions, despite the Jacobean attempt to commemorate the two as “partners.”

More recently, however, Elizabeth’s golden reputation has been substantially and successfully questioned and revised. Julia Walker’s edited volume 
Dissing Elizabeth
 and Susan Doran and Thomas Freeman’s 
The
Myth of Elizabeth
 expose how much the popular image of Queen Elizabeth owes to biased, Protestant historiography and English myth-making.
³
Elizabeth has come to be viewed, as Patrick Collinson notes in his 
ODNB
entry, less as a “great achiever” than as a “consummate survivor,” and attention has been paid to divisions at court, the queen’s lack of decisiveness, and England’s complex, multilayered political system.
⁴
Elizabeth is now understood to have had less control over politics and policymaking than has been usually acknowledged. She was unable to impose her will on her forthright council or suppress criticisms of her policies, and her tactics in Ireland were met with great resistance. Although traditionally hailed as the Virgin Queen, such an epithet has been qualified by the argument that Elizabeth’s failure to marry and provide an heir jeopardized a smooth succession for her country. As John Guy’s edited collection 
The
Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade
 emphasized, the end of Elizabeth’s reign was dogged by factionalism at court, poverty of the crown, resistance to fiscal and military demands, bad harvests, plague and influenza. Less politically adept in her “second reign,” Elizabeth “persistently dithered” and was met with much dissatisfaction.
⁵
Consequently, Elizabeth is now a rather more tarnished icon than traditional scholarship, and Hollywood, have maintained.

As a more aged and less politically accomplished Elizabeth has been laid bare, Mary has enjoyed something of a makeover. Less “Bloody” than before, Mary, as the first Queen of England, has been moved closer to the center stage.
⁶
Once seen as “weak willed” and lacking in leadership qualities, she is now heralded as courageous and warlike, educated for rule and politically determined, and as a woman who, lest we forget, secured her throne in a dramatic coup d’état against the odds.
⁷
Despite the brevity of her reign, Mary extended royal authority in the localities, managed her parliament, rebuilt the navy, and reformed the coinage.
⁸
She was also the first sovereign to model female monarchy, demonstrating that a “female king” might rule in a deeply patriarchal society where no queen had ruled before. Most recently, Eamon Duffy’s 
Fires of Faith
 has reexamined the religious program of Mary’s reign, arguing that much of the Catholic restoration can be deemed positive and that even the most notorious aspect of Mary’s regime, the burnings, was not only effective but also broadly accepted.
⁹
So the myths of Bloody Mary and Gloriana have been somewhat debunked. In practice, thinking about the queenship of Mary and Elizabeth as to be less about binaries than continuities. In his conception of the “strange variety of reigns” (from which developed the now defunct thesis of the mid-Tudor crisis), Francis Bacon did at least place the two queens alongside each other on a continuum of Tudor monarchs: The strangest variety that in a like number of accessions of any hereditary monarchy hath ever been known: the reign of a child, the offer of a usurpation, the reign of a lady married to a foreign prince and the reign of a lady solitary and unmarried.
¹⁰

Bacon’s labeling of Mary and Elizabeth as “ladies” defined by their marital status, or lack thereof, is clearly inadequate, but he nonetheless sees both Mary and Elizabeth’s reigns as sharing one problem: a problem, in a sense, of anomaly. By also addressing
both
 queens, this collection of essays looks to take the successful revisionism of recent years further.

It builds on the altered images of the queens but places these new perceptions alongside each other in order to reveal possible continuities, similarities, and reasonable points of comparison, and to offer further correctives. Apart from both facing sixteenth-century anxieties about female rule, Mary and Elizabeth shared much more than history has chosen to consider. At the same time, of course, the essays grouped together here do not seek to collapse the obvious differences between the two sisters; to do so would be counterproductive. Neither does the volume seek to “compare” Mary and Elizabeth on what would be distinctly unequal terms. While some essays do consider Mary and Elizabeth in the same space, others choose to discuss one or the other of the two. But, taken together, because the essays focus on a diverse range of issues, from politics and personnel to ceremony and costume, and from a range of perspectives, this volume demonstrates that thinking about both queens at the same time can be highly suggestive and propels us to revise, develop, and contextualize those traditional interpretations that much further. Many of the essays, for instance, highlight how much Elizabeth learnt from Mary, from the examples (and mistakes) of her reign, and how both queens exhibited considerable political acumen, often beyond the limitations of their sex. Some of the essays also point to the various ways in which both queens successfully exploited their femininity, turning it to their advantage, and how their often pragmatic practice of rule asks for a more subtle understanding of the part that their confessional differences may have played. At the heart of this volume, too, is a commitment to understanding both Mary and Elizabeth as Renaissance monarchs, to viewing them on a European stage. Many studies of Tudor monarchy are underpinned by an Anglo-centric approach that implicitly sidelines the importance of cross-cultural exchanges, alliances, and influences and the impact that England’s shifting political scene had on mainland Europe. Some of the essays in this volume turn outwards, to think about how England and her queens were viewed from elsewhere. What all the essays share is a methodology that involves careful analysis and a reexamination of the pertinent primary sources in order to reveal, as far as possible, how a particular event or aspect of the queens’ reigns—from the outcome of a battle to the announcement of a marriage—appeared or was perceived at its time, prior to later myth-making and historiography.

The monumental maneuverings played out in West minster Abbey at the beginning of the seventeenth century form the subject of the volume’s opening essay. Anne McLaren’s investigation of memory and legitimacy argues that James VI and I partnered Mary and Elizabeth in the same tomb as part of a wider campaign to legitimize his own kingship. As such, James attempted to play down the differences between their reigns that had been emphasized by Elizabethan propagandists. But the attempt failed, and the narrative of Mary’s failure versus Elizabeth’s success, or Mary’s unfortunate barrenness versus Elizabeth’s chosen chastity, became entrenched in new ways during James’ reign. As McLaren shows, this is a tenacious narrative that continued to influence perceptions of this period through the centuries. Judith Richards’ essay in this volume is indicative of the new wave of scholarship that has rescued Mary I from this narrative. It was Mary, Richards argues, who established the precedents for female rule and made it “familiar,” and Elizabeth owes much to her sister. Paulina Kewes, in her essay on the pageantry for Mary and Elizabeth’s coronation processions through London in 1553 and 1559 respectively, shows how, right at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, the memory of Mary was forefront and needed to be confronted. Those devising Elizabeth’s pageantry picked up on and appropriated the examples and precedents already in place and, in shaping Elizabeth’s image, had to borrow from Mary. The image of the godly queen, for example, was wrested back and made to fit Elizabeth, along with Mary’s hand-me-down coronation robes. In her essay on the queens’ coronations, Alice Hunt reminds us that, in 1553, there was no precedent for the anointing of an English queen regnant. Her essay shows how both Mary and Elizabeth attempted to stage-manage their ceremonies in ways that promoted their legitimacy, authority, and religious beliefs, but which also took into account the fragility of their political situations.

This volume argues for the need to acknowledge how much Mary and Elizabeth shared as young princesses—how, for example, both were groomed for rule despite falling in and out of favor. Jeri McIntosh’s essay on Mary’s short spell as the de facto Princess of Wales from 1525 to 1528 shows how Mary, presiding over her own court culture, was being presented as a future sovereign well before her actual accession and, consequently, how she was perceived as a significant political figure. It was this experience, McIntosh argues, that would prove crucial to Mary’s success in 1553. Aysha Pollnitz points out that 
both
 princesses benefited from a humanist education, even though this was later appropriated as the pride of the reformed religion and thus represented as being something only Elizabeth was granted. Again, Mary’s precedent was key when it came to educating the king’s second daughter. Both McIntosh’s and Pollnitz’s essays reveal the ambiguities and contradictions surrounding gender and rule in this period, and in histories of the period. On the one hand, Mary and Elizabeth were being represented to the public as having been educated as ideal Christian women; on the other, Mary was the powerful head of a household, and Elizabeth as always been argued to have received an education worthy of an English male sovereign. It is still relevant to think about queenship as opposed to kingship—the horror that was voiced about a woman enthroned and bearing a sword is well known—but we also need to beware of under-acknowledging the period’s own contradictions and subtlety of thought about female rule. Susan Doran’s essay shows how Elizabeth was deliberately fashioned in male and female terms. Although the Virgin Queen has proved to be the enduring image, male writers’ identification of Elizabeth with Old Testament kings, notably David and Solomon, was equally ubiquitous. Turning to consider how Mary and Elizabeth chose to fashion themselves, Maria Hayward tells us how both women were well aware of the relationship between power and image, and how both, as princesses, learnt from their father how to “dress to impress.” Both liked clothes and jewels—Mary a bit more than Elizabeth, it seems— and both used clothes to project their sovereign authority and, sometimes, in particular circumstances, their womanhood.