Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (3 page)

Love and war are two areas in which the realities of the queens’ gender were keenly felt. In the case of Mary, anti-Spanish sentiment has much to account for. Elizabeth has been presented as wholly English as opposed to Mary’s Spanishness, exacerbated by her choice of a power-grabbing Spanish husband. But, as Alexander Samson’s essay points out, reactions to Philip of Spain on his marriage to Mary suggest that a slightly more nuanced view of Spain was held by the majority of the English. Indeed, Samson argues, contrary to much historiography, Philip and Mary’s marriage was in many ways a great success. His essay stresses—along with many others here—t he need to think about how power could be and was disseminated in informal ways, particularly within a co-monarchy. Samson’s Philip emerges as a likeable, pragmatic, and flexible figure; his Mary, as independent and politically astute. Corinna Streckfuss also reassesses Philip and Mary’s marriage. Drawing on the many published accounts of the wedding festivities, her essay shows how widely publicized Mary and Philip’s union was throughout Europe. Her essay is a salutary reminder of the need to reframe England in its European setting in 1554 and in its very recent Catholic past. For many Europeans looking at England, Philip and Mary’s marriage was looked to as the great beacon of Catholic hope.

Considering the traditionally male domain of war, Anna Whitelock argues that, whereas Elizabeth is often invoked as the triumphant warrior queen who led the navy’s ships to victory against the Armada in 1588, Mary’s reign is mostly seen as a military disaster. She lost Calais, after all and—as fate would have it—right at the end of her reign. But the immediate reaction of contemporary commentators suggests that the loss of Calais was not so disastrous as later historians have claimed and prompts us to remember Mary’s significant military triumphs—and then Elizabeth’s failures. Elizabeth may have won in 1588, but there were other Armadas and many losses for England. Furthermore, it was Mary who seemed to deliberately fashion herself as a type of warrior queen. Elizabeth, perhaps as a response to Mary, chose to present herself as a patron of peace and it is only in relation to Mary’s failure—as with so much else—that Elizabeth’s 1588 victory over the Spanish has been exaggerated. Glenn Richardson in his essay on Elizabeth’s relations with the French kings also reminds us of Elizabeth’s limitations as a warrior queen. He points out how much Elizabeth borrowed from her father in terms of a chivalric diplomacy. Elizabeth, Richardson argues, deployed recognizable chivalric modes and gestures in order to publicize her worth as an ally, but she cleverly gendered this role to create her own version of a “warrior queen.” As such, Elizabeth made sure that she asserted herself as a vigorous female prince, and as a key player in international affairs.

History—since the seventeenth century—that has chosen to focus on the queens’ confessional differences has obscured some revealing continuities between the two reigns, which remind us not to categorize key political players too readily or to underestimate how much tradition and experience were valued. In their essays, Ralph Houlbrooke and Robert Braddock look at personal loyalties, pragmatic staffing choices, and matters of conscience. Houlbrooke’s essay traces the fortunes of Mary’s councilors after her death in 1558. Ten members of Elizabeth’s newly formed council of 20 were “hold-overs” from Mary’s council: they were men whose substantial military, administrative, or diplomatic experience Elizabeth could not afford to shun even though many of them were and remained “Catholic” in belief, and some in practice. Indeed, it is possible that retaining religious conservatives in the council was a shrewd, political move by Elizabeth. Robert Braddock’s essay moves us from the council chamber to “below stairs,” to the royal wardrobes and kitchens. His analysis argues for a continuity between Mary’s and Elizabeth’s households that borders on stagnation, economic madness, and inefficiency: servants seemed to own their offices like property and the appointment of a brand new “below stairs” staff that might be expected to accompany a regime change did not happen. Along with Jeri McIntosh’s essay on Mary’s pre-accession household, Braddock’s essay points to the royal household as a counterintuitive locus of power and politics. Charlotte Merton also tackles the issue of personnel, but she focuses on Mary’s and Elizabeth’s female body servants, those who served the queens in their privy chamber and bedchamber—and who were also the queens’ “friends.” Of course, since Mary and Elizabeth were women, their privy chamber and bedchamber staff needed to be female. In Elizabeth’s case, Merton argues, she did not learn from Mary’s pragmatism, and she recruited friends whereas she would have done better to recruit allies. We are reminded again of understanding power in terms of people. “It was the queens’ memories,” writes Merton, “in the shape of friendship and trust, which determined how the court was constituted and functioned.”

James I’s inscription on Mary and Elizabeth’s joint tomb, with which we began, hoped for “one resurrect ion” for the two queens, framed as “partners”. It is an interesting, and odd, choice of phrase. While this volume certainly seeks to recuperate Mary and Elizabeth’s respective reputations, it does not seek to elide their differences. Instead, it reconsiders the women on their own terms as England’s first sovereign queens who were also sisters. As such, all of the essays in this volume, from their varying perspectives, contribute to a new understanding of Tudor monarchy—and of early modern queenship—and challenge some traditional interpretations of the period.

Notes

1. D. Loades, 
   Mary Tudor: A Life
    (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 8; A. F. Pollard concluded that “sterility was the conclusive note of her reign”: A. F. Pollard,
   The History of England from the Accession of Edward VI to the Death of Elizabeth (1547–1603)
    (London, 1910, repr. New York: AMS Press, 1969), 172.
   
2. G. R. Elton, 
   England under the Tudors
    (London: Methuen & Co., 1962), 214.
   
3. Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana
   , ed. J. M. Walker (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998); 
   The Myth of Elizabeth
   , ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
   
4. Patrick Collinson, “Elizabeth,” 
   ODNB
   . See also Patrick Collinson, “The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I” in Pat rick Collinson, 
   Elizabethan Essays
    (London and Rio Grande: Hambledon Press, 1994), 31–57; Anne McLaren, 
   Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth, 1558–1585
    (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Natalie Mears, 
   Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms
    (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
   
5. John Guy, 
   The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade
   (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4.
   
6. See the recent biographies by Anna Whitelock, 
   Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen
    (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), Linda Porter, 
   Mary Tudor: The First Queen
    (London: Portrait, 2007) and Judith Richards
   , Mary Tudor
    (London: Routledge, 2008). See also the forthcoming volume, 
   Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives
    ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).
   
7. For a discussion of the succession crisis see A. Whitelock and D. MacCulloch, “Princess Mary’s Household and the Succession Crisis,” 
   HJ
    50 (2007): 265–87 and Eric Ives, 
   Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery
    (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
   
8. See, for example, Robert Tittler, 
   The Reign of Mary I
    (London and New York: Longman, 1983) Jennifer Loach, 
   Parliament and the Crown in the Reign of Mary Tudor
    (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) and Judith Richards, “Mary Tudor as ‘Sole Quene’? Gendering the Tudor Monarchy,” 
   HJ
    40 (1997): 895–924.
   
9. Eamon Duffy, 
   Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor
    (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009).
   
10. Francis Bacon, 
    The Works of Francis Bacon
    , ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols. (London: Longmans and Co., 1857–74), X:249–50.
    

I

REPUTATIONS

CHAPTER 1

MEMORIALIZING MARY AND ELIZABETH

Anne McLaren

I

Some time ago I came across the following entry posted on the Questions and Answers section of a popular Tudor History website:

I visited Westminster Abbey several years ago and was absolutely astounded at the placement of the tomb of Elizabeth I...compared to where and how the tomb of Mary Stuart was placed!! [I]t seems that James gave his mother’s tomb more precedence than Elizabeth’s, who placed him on the throne. And why were Elizabeth and Mary [Tudor] placed in the same tomb when they disliked each other? It seems like a joke played on them by James. The docet at the Abbey couldn’t give me an answer...
¹

These questions are naively phrased, but they are legitimate and useful. They reveal how the set-up at Westminster Abbey looks to someone who is interested in Tudor history and has a reasonable grasp of the political dynamics of the period. This person’s perceptions—about the relative placing and grandeur of the memorials to Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots, especially the question as to why they ended up in the same tomb—might well have occurred to any number of the early modern men and women, of high and low degree, who visited the Abbey after 1612, when James I had completed his building work in Henry VII’s Lady Chapel. In this chapter I want to use James’s commemorative project as the starting point from which to answer these questions. I want to investigate how and why Mary was marginalized in the reigns of her immediate successors, Elizabeth I and James I. Both were problematical in the role of English king: Elizabeth an unmarried female of disputable legitimacy and the last of her line; James a Scottish king and son of the notorious Mary Queen of Scots, executed for treason by the English state in 1587. In both reigns, negating Mary I’s regal status helped buttress Elizabeth’s and James’s right to rule. Naturally the terms of the negation differed. There was, however, sufficient common ground between the two operations to ensure that the real Queen Mary virtually disappeared from view—just as she has done in Westminster Abbey. In this chapter I will consider how and why Mary Tudor’s queenship was negatively mythologized in Elizabeth’s reign after setting the scene by discussing the Westminster Abbey memorials. The conclusion proposes an answer to the question of why James consigned the two Tudor sisters to the same tomb.

II

Elizabeth and Mary lie buried together in one vault in the North Aisle of Henry VII’s Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey. They rest under a monument to Elizabeth that was erected by James I in 1606, shortly after he ascended the English throne (Figure 1.1). A commemorative plaque at the head of the monument reads
“Regno consortes et urna, hic obdormimus Elizabetha et Maria sorores, in spe resurrectionis”
(Partners both in throne and grave, here rest we two sisters Elizabeth and Mary, in the hope of one resurrection) Thanks to Julia Walker’s work, we now know that Elizabeth did not choose to be buried in this way.
²

Figure 1.1 Mary and Elizabeth's tomb, Westminster Abbey

She wished instead to await the resurrection in the company of the progenitor of the Tudor dynasty, Henry VII, and his wife, Elizabeth of York. Thus she was originally buried in their vault, beneath the magnificent Pietro Torrigiano monument and surrounding chantry. Completed according to Henry VII’s wishes by his son and successor Henry VIII, this was “a chapel within a chapel,” specifically designed to aggrandize the divine right of a race of Tudor kings.
³
It was James himself, the first of the Stuart line of English kings, who decided to disinter the body of his illustrious predecessor and pair the two Tudor sisters in the newly completed monument to Elizabeth. Presumably he moved her to free up space for himself. When, in 1869, Dean Stanley conducted a thorough search among the royal tombs for James’s remains, that was where they were found.
⁴

During the early years of his reign, James built another splendid funeral monument in the Henry VII chapel to memorialize his mother, Mary Queen of Scots. Four months after her execution in 1587, her son, the then king of Scotland, inquired whether her body had been buried.
⁵
Thus galvanized, English privy councilors at last tackled the problem of what to do with Mary’s remains. It was agreed that she should be transported from Fotheringhay Castle to Peterborough Cathedral under cover of night to be buried there in company with another problematical queen— Catherine of Aragon, Mary Tudor’s mother. The interment was followed the next day by a low-key state funeral, carefully stage-managed to give due honor to the deceased without explicitly recognizing her regal status. Over the following decade, as the political landscape changed, accounts of Mary’s Peterborough funeral were manipulated to depict it as having been “more royal than it actually was.”
⁶
As the late Elizabethan succession crisis heated up, this embellishment served a twofold purpose. First, it shored up monarchical authority, which had been profoundly challenged by Mary’s execution. At the same time it constituted an important goodwill gesture to Mary’s son James, the anticipated heir to the English crown. By retrospectively (if still obliquely) drawing attention to his mother’s regal status and impeccable lineage, rather than her checkered career, it strengthened his claim.