Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (5 page)

In a 1559 “Report concerning King Philip of Spain” for the Signory, the Venetian ambassador Michele Suriano declared that the

only hope [the Spanish king] has of remaining friendly with [Elizabeth]...is her distrust of the French, who have pretensions to her kingdom through the Queen of Scotland, as a descendant from a sister of King Henry, and the nearest to him in legitimate succession, should [Elizabeth] be adjudged ineligible by reason of having been born while the legitimate wife of her father was still alive.

He concluded, erroneously, that England would likely always remain in alliance with Spain because it represented the lesser of two evils compared to France—“which already possesses Calais and Boulogne this side of England, and the kingdom of Scotland on the other,” through Mary’s marriage to Francis II.
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He was not to know that this expectation would be confounded by Francis II’s death in 1560 and the political implosion that resulted from the French religious wars, endemic from 1560 onward. The first returned Mary Stuart to her Scottish kingdom as sole ruler and, at least, reduced the extent of French influence there; the long-term effect of the second was to make Spain once again appear, as it had in the days of Wyatt’s rebellion, as England’s more determined and powerful enemy.

Thus, at Elizabeth’s accession, from the point of view of what Patrick Collinson has memorably dubbed the “Protestant ascendancy,” England confronted a Catholic hydra whose chief heads were the pope, and his sons the French and Spanish kings.
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To mobilize support for Protestantism and English national autonomy, as well as Elizabeth’s queenship, English polemicists and councilors of state began to depict Elizabeth as Mary Tudor’s antithesis, personally and politically, in order to instantiate a “good queen, bad queen” opposition. In pursuing this strategy they could draw on anti-Marian polemic written during Mary Tudor’s reign by Marian exiles, especially the “resistance theorists” Christopher Goodman and John Knox. In 
How Superior Powers Oght to be Obeyd of their Subjects
 Goodman attacked Mary’s legitimacy as a means of denying that she was or could ever be a lawful queen. She was “bastard by birth,” begotten by Henry’s VIII’s “adulterous incest” with Catherine of Aragon—bastard by birth, bastard by nature. What surprise then that once exalted to the throne Mary “joined herself to adulterous Philip, the Spanish king: to whom she hath, and doth continually labour to betray the whole kingdom”? Men who regarded God’s strictures should have known that, once in power, the “ungodly serpent” would turn against Christ, the law, and the nation. (Elizabeth, by contrast—the “lawful begotten daughter” of Henry VIII and the supremely virtuous Anne Boleyn—appears as “that godly lady, and meek lamb, void of all Spanish pride, and strange blood.”)
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There was, however, one major drawback to this anti-Marian critique. Protestants of Goodman’s and Knox’s ilk set their faces against female rule 
tout court
, regardless of the religious conviction or personal credentials of the queen in question. For Goodman, Englishmen’s pusillanimous willingness to promote Mary Tudor to the throne defrauded the country of a “lawful king”—but in a kingdom conducted in accordance with God’s revealed will that title would not have devolved to Elizabeth in any event. Even if the next blood right heir had been, as he claimed that Elizabeth was, impeccably born and bred, at Edward VI’s death the task of godly men should have been to seek out the man “from amongst your brethren,” who was “meetest...to have had the government over you,” not under any circumstances to have looked among the women.
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In his 
First Blast
of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
, published at the same time, Knox made a slightly more measured case. His would allow women who had been directly chosen by God to “bear rule”—but as governors, not kings. In the 
Blast
 he excoriated female rule by identifying and aligning three “mischievous Maries”: Mary Tudor, Mary Queen of Scots, and Mary’s mother Mary of Guise, regent in Scotland whilst her daughter lived in France. These latter day Athalias reveled in “cruelty, falsehood, pride, covetousness, deceit, and oppression.” He exempted Elizabeth from his strictures, however. She was instead “Debora,” one of the godly women whom God occasionally advanced to power to confound the expectations of worldly men. But Knox insisted that none, not even the biblical Deborah herself, might claim the authority to rule over men on the basis of inherent entitlement and worried lest Elizabeth’s example fatally undermine this crucial distinction. In a letter to William Cecil written after Elizabeth’s accession, he reminded him of the danger. At Mary’s death, he admitted, godly Englishmen had had no alternative but to allow Elizabeth to gain power. But Cecil and his fellows must now beware lest, “in establishing one who is indeed godly and profitable to her country,...[you] give interest, and title, to many who would bring their country into bondage and slavery.”
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In 1559, the issue had political as well as theological immediacy. With two of the three Maries dead, the woman both men clearly had in mind was Mary Stuart: Queen of Scots and, to contemporaries, “the French queen” through her marriage to the French king Francis II.
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How then to legitimate Elizabeth as a female ruler, without giving title to her fellow queen, cousin, and presumptive heir? Once Francis II’s death sent Mary back to Scotland, the problem changed form, without losing any of its urgency. It became even more urgent once she gave birth to a son, the future James I of England, in 1566.
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One way forward was to personalize the anti-Marian critique by concentrating the attack on Mary Tudor’s monarchical legitimacy. This had the twofold advantage of allowing Elizabeth’s personal strengths to be highlighted, in what we might call bipartisan terms, while downplaying the vexatious issue of legitimate birth. Depicting Mary as Catholic and “foreign,” voluntarily ceding control of the English nation to her masterful husband, underscored Elizabeth’s status as a true “mere English ” queen, ordained by God to preserve the imperial crown.
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At the same time, drawing attention to traits shared by the two Maries worked to disallow Mary Stuart’s claim to the English throne. For committed Protestants, this was particularly important during the period, which lasted until the 1580s, when Elizabeth did not allow hostility to that claim or to Mary’s person to be overtly expressed.
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The message conveyed by this play of oppositions was a simple one: only God’s favor preserved the English nation. His favor was signified by His manifest approval of Elizabeth’s rule. Only her queenship prevented the restoration of the tyranny and cruelty of Mary I’s reign, at the hands of a woman who would stop at nothing to succeed her as Mary II.

John Aylmer’s 
Harborowe for Faithful and True Subjects,
 written in 1558 to respond to Knox’s 
Blast
, announced this new direction. In Mary I’s reign the realm was put to a “sore plunge through her wilfulness,” because “she would show herself a loving worm and an obedient wife [to Philip], rather than a careful governess.” Elizabeth, in contrast, “walketh wisely in the steps of Him that hath called her...represent[ing] a lively image in her mortality of his incomparable and infinite majesty.”
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Englishmen must commit themselves absolutely to Elizabeth, “God’s chosen instrument,” if the English race and Protestantism itself were to survive.

For Aylmer, Knox erred in writing his 
Blast
 because, appalled by the enormities of Mary’s reign, he condemned women’s government 
in toto
as “unnatural, unreasonable, unjust, and unlawful.” Had he restricted his attention to Mary’s regime (which was all of those things), Aylmer hastened to assure both Knox and his readers, “he could have said nothing too much, nor in such wise, as could have offended any indifferent man.”
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In terms that would resonate for later Anglo-Scottish union, he acknowledged Knox’s exceptionality, in terms of both his commanding spiritual credentials and his care for the English kingdom, but maintained that his Scottish identity meant that he could never be, fully, one of the English brethren. In the text, as in the following passage, references to Philip of Spain and Francis II position them as nodal points of the same virulent threat to the English, the two united also because they exercise dominion over and through their queen wives, Mary Tudor and Mary Queen of Scots:

Tully saith, 
ne sis curiosus in aliena rep.
 The voice of a stranger, is to be heard in the pulpit, so long as he speaketh God’s word: But a stranger’s voice is not allowed 
in foro
, in the parliament about policy, because he is not a citizen. This I say not to Philip you, as though you meant evil to us (for I am persuaded that you love England as well as your own country) but I mean to admonish you, that being a stranger you disturb not our state...It is a great enterprise (and as they say no ball play) to pull a queen’s crown off his [
sic
] head:..I would not be wounded in conscience, with any attempts against [Elizabeth], if I might be lord of all that Philip, and the French king have.
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In the peroration, “England,” personified as a mother, exhorts her natural English children to drive home the racial message:

Oh, remember, remember my dear children in what case you stand; your enemies be round about you, like unsatiable ravenors to pluck me from you...I delight and rejoice in you, above all other peoples. In declaration whereof I have always spewed out and cast from me Danes, French, Norwegians, and Scots...Oh God grant that I never see the day that the bastardly brood of ambitious French men, eat and enjoy the fruits which I prepare for you, my dear children. Let me rather satisfy my thirst with their effeminate blood, than they should pluck from you my motherly breasts.
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In the 
Harborowe
, the “Mary” who is explicitly attacked is Philip’s Mary, Mary Tudor. When Aylmer wrote, the threat that Mary Stuart posed was deemed to reside primarily in her husband, the French king—in “France.” By the time of the Northern Rebellion of 1569, that was no longer the case. With Elizabeth still unmarried and Mary Queen of Scots (now deposed from the Scottish throne and imprisoned in England) very much a player in the succession stakes, Mary Stuart constituted a danger in her own right, and Spain, not France, seemed to present the more immediate threat to English national autonomy. Yet Aylmer’s model proved capacious enough to serve in these changed circumstances—again by drawing the two Maries into alignment to impugn the monarchical legitimacy of each.

We see this very clearly in Thomas Norton’s 
To the Quenes Majesties
poore deceyued subjectes of the north country, drawen into rebellion by the Earls of
Northumberland and Westmerland
; Norton, like Aylmer, acted as a “conciliar man of business” to the Elizabethan regime.
^]
By rebelling against their lawful queen, the leaders (or, as Norton calls them, the “misleaders”) of the “poor deceived subjects” serve the turn of England’s foreign enemies.
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They and their foreign paymasters intend to destroy England by advancing a “feigned and false title,” that of Mary Queen of Scots. Why would any true Englishman follow their lead? Who could “reject [God’s] most inestimable benefit, a most gracious Queen our most dear mother, nurse and protectrice,” when the alternative would “pull down upon [English] heads...most miserable calamity and slavery”—and that by “God’s just plague”? If Mary Stuart were to wear the English crown, she would “bring upon us 
Mariana tempora
, the miserablest days that ever...England felt.” He contemptuously dismissed the earls’ justification that they sought only to avoid the calamity of an unsettled succession by clarifying Mary’s right to inherit after Elizabeth’s death. This was simply the “outward show and colour” of the matter. Men who accepted that rationale cannot fully appreciate the dire consequences of allowing this Mary— 
magna spes
altera Romae
—even the shadow of legitimacy. Moreover, even if the earls’ intention was simply to establish Mary’s right in succession to, and not in place of, Elizabeth, and even if the question of religion were momentarily set aside, the plan was “full ill favoured.” To remind Englishmen of God’s blessings and to forecast what would await them under the reign of the Scottish queen, Norton employed heavy-handed “irony” (as he notes in a marginal comment) to contrast Elizabeth’s reign with Mary Tudor’s:

Your great Captains (a likely matter) pitying the foul disorder of the realm of England, so impoverished and decayed from the marvellous wealthy state wherein Queen Marie left it, so far indebted beyond the expenses of infinite treasure that King Philip brought and left in this land,...so troubled with foreign wars and invasions as we have been in the. xj. years and more of the Queen’s noble government, so defrauded of due execution of justice, that no subject can have his right by law...[wish to “amend” matters by recognizing the legitimacy of this Mary’s claim].

Of itself Norton’s use of irony on an occasion of such peril to the regime gives rich evidence of how effective the strategy of conflating the two Maries had become—and how generally accepted was the zealous Protestant view of 
Mariana tempora
. Further evidence appears in a most interesting source: John Dixon’s marginal annotations to his copy of Book I of Spenser’s 
Faerie
Queene
 (first published 1590). Graham Hough, the editor, deduces from internal evidence that the annotations date from 1597 and that Dixon was Protestant, patriotic, and educated, although not notably literary. He was particularly interested in Book I, which he read (through the lens of the Book of Revelation) almost entirely as an allegory of the English reformation, understood in Foxean terms. At points in Book I his marginal identifications point securely to Mary Tudor, at others to Mary Queen of Scots. On one occasion, however, a telling ambiguity arises. Dixon interprets Redcross Knight’s fight with the Dragon—“that serpent of old, who is the devil and Satan”—as signifying less the eternal conflict between Christ and Satan than the specific struggle between English Protestantism and Rome. Is the “Dragon” that Dixon confidently identifies as the “Queen’s ma” Mary Tudor or Mary Stuart? Hough concludes that for Dixon (and I think probably for Spenser as well) it made little difference. As demonic enemies of the True Church, they are interchangeable.
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