Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (35 page)

The following year a third naval offensive—the Islands voyage—was attempted and Essex was given command of an expedition to attack Spanish shipping in the port at Ferrol and then to establish a base in the Azores from which to intercept the American treasure fleet. But again disaster ensued and after having set sail much of the English fleet was beaten back by storms. Those ships that did reach the Iberian Peninsula were crippled by disease and contradictory command. Moreover in the absence of an English fleet in the Atlantic another “Armada” sailed toward Cornwall before being scattered by storms. In regard to the war with Spain “almost every independent military initiative had been a failure.”
⁵⁰
And such a failure of royal command can also be seen in Ireland following the outbreak of rebellion in 1598 under the leadership of Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone.

In August at Yellow Ford, O’Neill inflicted a catastrophic defeat on the English army: by the autumn practically all of Ireland was lost to the queen. In response Elizabeth was obliged to dispatch the largest army sent there by the Tudors. The following year, Essex was sent to Ireland to command an army of 16,000 foot soldiers and 1,300 cavalrymen with firm instructions to attack Tyrone in Ulster. But again Elizabeth had been unable to control her generals once they were in the field; moreover, having spread his forces by garrisoning towns in Leinster and Munster, Essex was left with too weak an army to engage Tyrone. When Essex did meet his enemy it was for a secret parley that led to what Elizabeth considered to be a dishonorable truce. After Essex abandoned his post Tyrone proclaimed an almost independent Irish nation. It was not until the eve of Elizabeth’s death that Ireland would be reconquered.

In sum, Elizabeth’s military leaders had little confidence in her ability to command and very often ignored her instructions and questioned her judgment. As Ralegh said,

If the late queen would have believed her men of war as she did her scribes, we had in her time beaten that great empire in pieces and made their kings kings of figs and oranges as in old times. But her Majesty did all by halves, and by petty invasions taught the Spaniard how to defend himself, and to see his own weakness.51

VI

Successive military failures and royal indecision do not largely feature in the representation of Elizabeth of succeeding centuries and all pale into insignificance given the success of 1588 and the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Her iconic status as a warrior queen was assured and famously depicted in the Armada portrait in which she observes victory from a command position with the Armada fleet in the background. It might be said to have echoes of the early plea roll from Mary’s reign in which the vanquished rebels were pictured behind an image of Mary enthroned: both heralded the victory of the English over a foreign or foreign-backed challenge. Moreover much of the same imagery and providential rhetoric representing Mary’s victories was commandeered for Elizabeth—for example, the medal struck on Elizabeth’s victory read “God breathed and they were scattered.” It is interesting to note, as Patrick Collinson has observed, that this “sounded a note of protestant providentialism rather than triumphalism.”
⁵²
The victory was less due to Elizabeth’s agency than to divine providence. Elizabeth was rather a willing and obedient conduit than an aggressive warrior queen.

The image of Elizabeth at Tilbury continued as a vehicle of English nationalism in subsequent centuries. As Calais was Mary’s nadir that condemned her to national opprobrium, Tilbury was Elizabeth’s climactic moment that sealed her position as an exemplar of English nationalism. But the extent of the victory needs to be qualified: it was neither as spectacular nor as decisive as popular history maintains. It was storms rather than English war strategy that sent a third of the Spanish ships onto rocks and killed some 20,000 men, together with senior naval officers. The war with Spain continued; the threat remained in the Netherlands; in France the Spanish were supporting the French Catholics against the Huguenots and there remained the threat of further Spanish invasion against England.

Yet during the 1590s and beyond representations of her queenship became “ever more fantastic.”
⁵³
The Dutch print, 
Elizabeth as Europa
(c. 1598), features the queen brandishing a sword, with the Armada in the background as the triple-headed pope flees.
⁵⁴
Upon Elizabeth’s death, one epitaph lamented the loss of a queen whose rule had echoes of biblical heroines:

The reverent Lady, Nurse of all our Land

That swayed a Sword like Judith’s, in her hand.

The Deborah that judged Israel:

Whose blessed actions God did prosper well...
⁵⁵

In John Taylor’s 
Memorial of All the English Monarchs,
 first published in 1622 and expanded in 1630, Elizabeth was heralded as “A Deborah, A Judith, A Susanna, A Virgin, A Virago, A Diana.”
⁵⁶
It would continue to be so. Elizabeth’s military reputation is as much the work of seventeenth-century propagandists as of her own success in the face of battle. It is hard to resist the conclusion that 1588 was a victory “of the pen rather than the sword.”57

VII

Traditional assessments of Elizabeth’s military success and Mary’s reputation of failure owe more to perception based on nationalist sentiment and gender expectations than historical fact. Whilst in her stance against the Armada Elizabeth can be seen to have been acting in defense of England against Spanish attack, Mary was perceived as being a tool of the Spanish. A pamphlet from 1555 entitled 
Certayne Questions Demaunded and asked by the
Noble Realme of England of her true naturall children and Subiectes of the same
reproached Mary as a traitor who had led the country into Spanish captivity and, of course, was born of a Spanish mother. In contrast Elizabeth could be praised as English. 
A Special Grace, appointed to haue been said after
a banket at Yorke, vpo the good nues and Proclamation thear, of the (accession) of
Elizabeth, in Nouember 1558
 described her as

A Prince (as ye wot all) of no mingled blood of Spaniard or straunger, but borne mere Englishe here amongst vs, and therefore most naturall unto us...
⁵⁸

Elizabeth’s success can be understood, as with so many other aspects of the reign, only relative to Mary’s: Mary’s Spanishness made the scale of Elizabeth’s celebrated victory possible. Mary was seen as betray ing her country and so calls were made to depose her. She was

A moste wicked & idolatrous Quene. A very Jezebel, that is, a frinde to Baal & his priests, & an utter enemie to god and his people. Yea another Athalia, that is, an vtter distroier of hir owne kinerede, kyngdome & countrie, a hater of hir owne subiectes, a lover of strangers & an unnatural stepdame both vnto them & to thy mother Englande.59

In contrast, Elizabeth and England were united, “Renowned Queen of this renowned land.” England and Elizabeth against “vanquishers, which come to execute His holy will, and diuellish purposes.”
⁶⁰

With the loss of Calais and her subsequent reputation as a military failure, Mary appeared to merely confirm gender expectations: women were not expected to be great military leaders. Whereas Elizabeth’s Armada victory exceeded the traditional expectations of her gender and was thus perceived as unnatural and somewhat masculine. According to eyewitness James Aske, Elizabeth marched “King-like” as she surveyed her soldiers.
⁶¹
Similarly early biographers such as William Camden heralded her appearance before the troops at Tilbury as demonstrating her “manly courage.”
⁶²
Her military success was truly unprecedented whilst Mary’s apparent “failure,” as represented by the loss of Calais, was much easier to explain and so her failure was accepted unquestioningly. Yet such was the power of Mary’s words at Whitehall it might be suggested that, though different in the imagery they adopted, they inspired Elizabeth’s at Tilbury when she like her sister faced a military challenge:

Wherefore I am come among you at this time but for my recreation and pleasure, being resolved in the midst and heat of the battle to live and die amongst you all, to lay down for my God and for my kingdom and for my people mine honour and my blood even in the dust. I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king and of a king of England too...
⁶³

Both Mary and Elizabeth’s speeches emphasize the reciprocal fidelity and love between a queen and her people, and both speeches produced the desired effect: defeat of a rebel army. Yet it is Elizabeth’s Armada oration that is remembered, whilst Mary’s Guildhall address and her rallying of supporters at Framlingham Castle during the succession crisis are barely acknowledged.

Mary’s reign, notwithstanding its relative brevity, was more consistently militaristic in style and policy than Elizabeth’s. Mary’s reign was marked by significant military triumphs and Philip’s headship of an English army as well as by notable military failure in the loss of Calais. In Elizabeth’s own self-fashioning she was the bringer of peace rather than war as had been depicted in the Allegory of the Tudor Succession. In this as in the military initiatives she was forced to pursue, she was largely unsuccessful and conformed exactly to the gender limitations that Mary of Hungary had expressed:

A woman is never feared and respected as a man is, whatever her rank...[i]n times of war...it is entirely impossible for a woman to govern satisfactorily. All she can do is shoulder responsibility for mistakes committed by others.
⁶⁴

The Armada victory was an anomaly and a triumph more by luck than judgment. The reality of Mary and Elizabeth’s warrior queenship is far more complicated than popular stereotypes allow.

Notes

* I thank Anne McLaren for reading a draft of this essay and making valuable comments.

1. Anne McLaren, “Queenship in Early Modern England and Scotland” (review article) 
   HJ
   , 49, 3 (2006): 935–52, p. 940.
   
2. For discussion of seals see Allan Wyon, 
   The Great Seals of England: From the Earliest Period to the Present Time, Arranged and Illustrated with Descriptive and Historical Notes
    (London: Chiswick Press, 1887).
   
3. S. B. Chrimes, 
   English Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth Century
    (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 63.
   
4. J. L. Vives, 
   De institutione feminae Christiana
    e, ed. C. Fantazzi and C. Matheeussen (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 43.
   
5. See Celeste Turner Wright, “The Amazons in Elizabethan literature,”
   Studies in Philology
   , 37: 433–56.
   
6. John Knox, 
   The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
    (Geneva: J. Poullain and A. Rebul, 1558), C3.
   
7. John Aylmer, 
   An harborovve for faithfull and trevve subiectes
    (London: John Day, 1559), H2.
   
8. Edmund Spenser, 
   The Fairie Queene
    (London: John Wolfe, 1590), III, ii, 411.
   
9. See Elizabeth J. Bellamy, “Androgyny and the Epic Quest: The Female Warrior in Ariosto and Spenser,” 
   Postscript
    2 (1985): 29–37.
   
10. Ben Jonson, 
    The Masque of Queens
     (reproduced from MSS in BL King’s Library London) (London: King’s Printers, 1930), 30–32.
    
11. Glyn Redworth, “‘Matters Impertinent to Women:’ Male and Female Monarchy under Philip and Mary,” 
    EHR
    , 112 (1997): 611.
    
12. I am grateful to Maria Hayward for this point.
    
13. Robert Wingfield of Brantham, “The 
    Vita Mariae Angliae Reginae
     of Robert Wingfield of Brantham,” ed. Diarmaid MacCulloch, 
    Camden
    Miscellany,
     28; Camden Society, 4th series, 29 (London, 1984) 264–5.
    
14. Wingfield, “
    Vita Mariae
    ,” 252.
    
15. Miles Huggarde, 
    The Assault of the Sacrame[n]t of the Altar
     (London, 1554), Eiiir.
    
16. John Elder, 
    The
     
    Copie of a Letter Sent into Scotland
     (London, 1555), E6r–v.
    
17. Kevin Sharpe, 
    Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-century England
     (London: Yale University Press, 2009), 273.
    
18. Commendone, “Events of the Kingdom of England,” in 
    The Accession,
    Coronation and Marriage of Mary Tudor as Related in Four Manuscripts at the
    Escorial
    , ed. and trans. C. V. Malfatti (Barcelona, 1956), 32.
    
19. Oratio Leonhardi Goretti Eqvitis Poloni de matrimonio...Regis ac Reginae Angliae, Hispaniae, &c. Ad populum principesque Angliae
     (London: W. Powell, 1554), A 3r.
    
20. L. Stopes, 
    An Ave Maria In Commendation of Our most Vertuous Queen
    (?1553) in 
    Old English Ballads 1553–1625
    , ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 14.
    
21. TNA KB 27/1168.
    
22. Westminster Cathedral MS, “Certain prayers to be used by the quenes heignes in the consecration of the crampe rynges,” cited in John N. King,
    Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis
    (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 185.
    
23. Wingfield, 
    “Vita Mariae,”
     281.
    
24. Malfatti (ed.), 
    Mary Tudor
    , 43.
    
25. Foxe, 
    Acts and Monumentes of These Latter and Perillous Dayes...
    (London, 1583), 1418.
    
26. Elder, 
    A Copie
    , F3r–v.
    
27. A[rchivo] g[eneral de] S[imancas] Estado 1498, fol. 6–7 as cited in Redworth, “Matters impertinent to women,” 598, 609; TNA KB 27/1185/2.
    
28. J. G. Nichols (ed.), “The Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen and Merchant Taylor of London, from 1550–1563,” 
    Camden Miscellany
    , Camden Society, 1st series, 42 (London, 1849), 79.
    
29. CSPVen
     VI. ii: 1085–1086
    
30. Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, MS Salazar y Castro 52, fol. 53v, as cited in Glyn Redworth, “Matters impertinent to women,” 611.
    
31. E. Harris Harbison, 
    Rival Ambassadors at the Court of Queen Mary
     (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940), 326.
    
32. “The Diary of Henry Machyn,” 147.
    
33. Charles Wriothesley, 
    A Chronicle during the Reigns of the Tudors from 1485 to 1559
    , by Charles Wriothesley, Windsor Herald, ed. W. D. Hamilton, 2 vols. (Camden Society, new series 11, London 1875–7), II: 148; “The Diary of Henry Machyn,” 147.
    
34. Glyn Redworth, “Matters impertinent to women,” 612.
    
35. “The diary of Henry Machyn,” 163.
    
36. CSPSp
     XII: 423, 377.
    
37. Bartholomew Traheron, 
    A Warning to England to Repente, and to Turne to
    god from idolatrie and poperie by the terrible exemple of Calece given the 7 March
    Anno. D. 1558
     (Wesel? P. A. de Zuttere? 1558), A4r.
    
38. See Paulina Kewes’ essay in this volume.
    
39. The Queen’s Majesty’s Passage and Related Documents
    , ed. G. Warkentin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 98.
    
40. The Queen’s Majesty’s Passage and Related Documents
    , 92.
    
41. David Moore Bergeron, 
    English Civic Pageantry, 1558–1642
     (London: Edward Arnold, 1971), 40. For discussion of the recycling of Marian tropes on Elizabeth’s accession see Paulina Kewes.
    
42. Philippa Berry, 
    Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen
     (London, 1994), 86–7.
    
43. R. Naunton, 
    Fragmenta Regalia,
     ed. John S. Cerovski (London: Routledge, 1985), 56.
    
44. See Kevin Sharpe, 
    Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-century England
     (London: Yale University Press, 2009) 369.
    
45. Susan Doran, 
    Elizabeth I and Foreign Policy, 1558–1603
     (London: Routledge, 2000), 23.
    
46. TNA SP 12/46/84–5.
    
47. Wallace MacCaffrey, 
    Elizabeth I: War and Politics 1588–1603
     (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 5.
    
48. As cited in S. L. Adams, “The Protestant Cause: Religious Alliance with the West European Calvinist Communities as a Political Issue in England, 1585–1630” (Oxford University DPhil thesis, 1973), 53–4.
    
49. Christopher Haigh, 
    Elizabeth I
     (Harlow: Longman, 2001), 156.
    
50. Wallace T. MacCaffrey, 
    Elizabeth I. War and Politics 1588–1603
     (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 11.
    
51. E. Edwards, 
    The Life of Sir Walter Raleigh
     2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1868), I: 245.
    
52. Patrick Collinson, 
    Elizabeth I
     (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 88.
    
53. Alexander Walsham, “‘A Very Deborah?’ The Myth of Elizabeth I as a Providential Monarch,” in 
    The Myth of Elizabeth
    , ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 155.
    
54. See Roy C. Strong, 
    Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I
     (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 114–15.
    
55. Samuel Rowlands, 
    Ave Caesar...With an epitaph upon the death of her Majestie our late Queene
     (London: W. White, 1603).
    
56. John Taylor, 
    A memorial of all the English Monarchs
     (London: John Beale, 1630), 53.
    
57. Bertrand T. Whitehead, 
    Brags and Boasts: Propaganda in the Year of the Armada
    (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1994), 208.
    
58. A Special Grace, appointed to haue been said after a banket at Yorke, vpo the good nues and Proclamation thear, of the (accession) of Elizabeth, in Nouember 1558
    (London: John Kyngston, 1558), A iii v.
    
59. Robert Pownall, 
    An admonition to the towne of Callays
     (Wesel? P. A. de Zuttere? 1557), A5v.
    
60. James Aske, 
    Elizabetha Triumphans: Conteyning the Damned Pracizes, that the Diuelish Popes of Rome Have Used Ever Sithence Her Highnesse First Coming to the Crowne, by Mouing her Wicke and Traiterous Subiects to Rebellion and Conspiracies, Thereby to Bereaue Her Maiestie Both of her Lawfull State and Happy Life
     (London: Thomas Orwin, 1588), 14.
    
61. James Aske, 
    Elizabetha Triumphans,
     19.
    
62. William Camden, 
    Annals, or, The historie of the most renowned and victorious princesse Elizabeth, late Queen of England
     (London: Thomas Harper, 1635), 371.
    
63. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (eds.), 
    Elizabeth I: Collected Works
     (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 325–6.
    
64. CSPSp
     XIII: 248.