Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (7 page)

II

PRECEDENTS AND TRADITIONS

CHAPTER 2

EXAMPLES AND ADMONITIONS: WHAT MARY DEMONSTRATED FOR ELIZABETH

Judith Richards

I

For many years Mary Tudor, England’s first queen regnant, has been perhaps the most reviled monarch in English history. She was the penultimate openly Catholic monarch to come to the English throne and has regularly been dismissed as having very little if any positive influence on the course of English history. Her negative impact on her realm, however, has been endlessly reiterated, although never quite to universal agreement. Nevertheless, her widespread reputation for bigotry, for her imputed “Spanish” and “bloody” characteristics, has been such that it might even be argued that J. E. Neale meant well enough when he distinguished between the Tudor sisters by describing Mary as representing the “old world” of Catholic and medieval values, and Elizabeth the “new” England.
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Many historians have shared much the same view, and until recently there has been little interest in Mary’s reign, let alone in any positive influence the first Tudor queen regnant might have had on the second.

One consequence of such persistent dismissal of any positive interest in Mary’s reign is that Elizabeth is almost universally treated as the first “real” queen regnant of England. On those rare occasions when Mary has been recognized as her precursor and compared with her younger sister, she has still been treated as being of little interest. At best, the more usual assessment is that Mary was an imperfect monarch. David Starkey, for example, has suggested that, because Mary usually delegated the royal function of dubbing knights, the effect was to “declare a central part of monarchy out of bounds to a woman.”
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Elsewhere, that Mary had a very “female and weak public persona” has also ostensibly been established by the “fact” that she never made an official public address. Consequently, the general argument goes, it was left to Elizabeth to fashion for herself “an identity which blurred the distinctions between male and female, king and queen.”
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To begin with that last specific charge before moving to the more general point, it is difficult to identify just what would be an “official” public address in Tudor England but, even setting aside the address Mary delivered when rallying her troops at Framlingham against Queen Jane Grey in July 1553 (a speech received with considerable acclaim), those to whom Mary spoke publicly and forcibly on various occasions included a parliamentary delegation that dared (uninvited) to address her on the matter of her marriage, and the assembled Londoners whom she rallied with a much more widely reported Guildhall speech against Sir Thomas Wyatt’s attack on the city in February 1554. John Foxe, never an admirer of Mary I, recorded that speech in full; few who have read it have doubted its eloquence. The most cursory reading suggests it was indeed a speech of which Elizabeth might well have been proud, and Mary has always received due credit for its positive impact.
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That still so little attention has been paid to England’s first crowned queen regnant might be seen as the more remarkable, given how long feminist and gender studies have been fashionable. Amongst the matters long glossed over is the question of how far Mary, as first queen regnant, modeled and made familiar female monarchy in forms and terms that made the accession of Elizabeth more acceptable to her subjects. That is the main focus of the following discussion.

II

Despite an enduring tradition of always-strained relations between them, it is more likely that before 1547 exchanges between Elizabeth and Mary were amicable enough. Because of their seventeen-year age difference they were not often together, but after Anne Boleyn was dead and Mary was restored to her father’s favor, Mary wrote to Henry warmly praising his younger daughter. Mary’s expense accounts show she gave various presents to Elizabeth as she grew up, and gifts of money for when she played at cards, a pastime that Mary also always enjoyed.
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But until their father died, Elizabeth was more usually away from court and at her studies; at one stage, for reasons still unknown, her father exiled her from court for almost a year shortly after his marriage to Katherine Parr. However, from 1538 Mary was a regular presence at Henry’s court and was particularly close to Henry’s sixth wife, with whom she shared many interests. These included not just matters of dress and jewelry—although both women delighted in those—but also a shared interest in classical and humanist studies. Katherine Parr’s kindness to Elizabeth has long been well documented, but less attention has been paid to her close relations with Mary in the final years of Henry’s reign. It was, for example, at Katherine’s urging that Mary undertook her translation to English of the 
Gospel according to St
John
 as one section of Erasmus’ 
Paraphrases,
 and it was in Katherine’s circle that Mary established new friendships that continued until her death. Both Tudor sisters had been soundly educated in the classical humanism of their day and works first prepared for Mary’s education, such as Vives’
Satellitium,
 as a future ruler or royal consort were used also for Elizabeth.
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But it was always Mary who had more familiarity with the Henrician royal court—and with its politics.

Royal favor toward the two sisters was gradu ally reversed du ring Edward’s reign. In those years, as Mary resisted the Edwardian religious changes, she grew more reluctant to be at court, but neither of the king’s sisters was often there. Little evidence survives of relations between the half-sisters in those years, but what has survived indicates that Mary more frequently wrote letters to Elizabeth than she received replies from her.
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As the long-standing tradition has it, Elizabeth may have developed a closer relationship with their half-brother, but at his death no such closeness helped her. Instead, when the dying Edward VI reaffirmed the illegitimacy of both sisters by letters patent in June 1553, excluding them both from inheriting his crown, the younger sister was in no position to challenge the putative Queen Jane Grey. In mid-1553, Elizabeth had little public profile and rather less public influence. Not yet twenty, she was seen as the daughter of Henry VIII’s most reviled wife, with little identifiable support beyond her own household. Her reputation was still sullied by the once widely discussed scandal of her relations with Sir Thomas Seymour when she lived in the Parr/Seymour household until she finally moved from it, probably at the initiative of his wife Katherine Parr.
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Moreover, Elizabeth had always accepted the Edwardian religious innovations and was, therefore, believed to have rejected the traditional Catholic religion. As Alec Ryrie has recently concluded, despite the Henrician attacks on aspects of that traditional religion and the marked extension of those changes under Edward VI, by the end of the latter’s reign at best still only a “significant minority” favored the “novel” religious views.
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Elizabeth not only lacked significant legal or popular standing as Edward’s successor during the confused days of July 1553; she had also not received the training to prepare her for such a role. She, therefore, had little choice but to wait upon Mary’s success in seizing away the throne from their cousin and back to the direct Tudor line. Mary was always better equipped for such a contest, precisely because she was more mature, of an impeccably virtuous reputation, explicitly reared to be a queen, and resolutely an adherent of the old and still majority religion. Moreover, she was the popular daughter of a widely respected mother. In the 1520s she had been England’s de facto Princess of Wales, and she had the important advantage of being seen legally as Edward’s next heir. That, after all, was what both Henry’s final Act of Succession and his will had established.

Once Mary triumphed over the duke of Northumberland’s efforts to maintain Lady Jane Grey (who was also his daughter-in-law) as queen, Elizabeth wrote to her sister, seeking advice on whether she should join her new monarch dressed in mourning for Edward or in the magnificence suitable for celebrating Mary’s accession. That need for advice about how to present herself could seem rather surprising, given the customary practice on such occasion that the “now” monarch took precedence over the “late,” but 
just possibly
 it could have been an issue since Edward’s funeral had not yet taken place. Whatever the reasons for Elizabeth’s hesitations, she had thereafter many opportunities to see how Mary modeled a female monarchical presence—a matter without obvious English precedent but one about which Mary’s mother (Catherine of Aragon was the daughter of a queen regnant, Isabel of Castile) had been in a position to offer some guidelines. It was an age when public image was all-important and above all, as Sydney Anglo has written, “princely magnificence...served as the external sign of intrinsic power.”
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There was a range of familiar modes for representing ultimate masculine authority, but most frequently they referenced military leadership. For a female monarch to represent her “intrinsic power” was a complex new exercise, even when, like Mary, she could invoke both statute and lineal descent as manifestly endorsing her right to the crown.

Whatever her initial doubts about the most appropriate dress in which to accompany Mary’s royal entry to her new capital, Elizabeth chose the more conventional course and joined Mary with her own display of magnificence in dress and entourage. According to contemporary accounts, however, she (very properly) offered no competition to Mary’s strikingly rich accoutrements. Charles Wriothesley has left a uniquely detailed account of Mary’s appearance on her first entry to London, which had until so recently seemed to support the now deposed “Queen Jane.” Surrounded by a huge entourage, Mary I was dressed in purple velvet and purple satin, all richly adorned with gold and pearls, and wore a gold neckpiece closely worked with pearls and precious stones. Even her horse had a purple caparison worked with gold, which reached to the ground.
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This was perhaps the first manifestation of the female equivalent to that visual majesty recently made familiar by posture and rich dress in Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII and echoed in the stance of Edward VI in several portraits that followed.
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A properly demure Tudor woman could hardly imitate that masculine stance with legs apart and arms akimbo, but there were, as Mary now demonstrated, other ways to communicate visible 
female
 royal power, circumventing masculine stance and military symbols.

In the public rituals for establishing the new monarch, Elizabeth, now heir apparent, had an appropriately prominent place of honor. Throughout Mary’s pre-coronation procession through London, she went immediately after the queen and beside Anne of Cleves, their father’s one-time wife and then “sister.” There were curiously contradictory accounts of how Mary was dressed that day, as England’s first queen regnant. In those circumstances, the reports that she went “according to the precedents,” presumably intended to be reassuring, were not informative. (The twelfth-century Matilda, like the recent Queen Jane, could not maintain her power long enough to have a coronation.) Official records indicate that for the customary progress through London, Mary went dressed like the queen’s consort, in white cloth of gold, and with her hair loose around her shoulders. That was a precedent that Elizabeth followed when it was her turn to be crowned. But on the first occasion neither observers nor subsequent commentators could agree on how the central figure was dressed. What Mary wore on her head was also variously described; the bizarre report that her headdress was so heavy that she had to hold up her head with her hands was started by a person who could not have seen the occasion at all. It was, however, a report enthusiastically perpetuated by Elizabethan chroniclers.
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Some observers of Mary’s progress commented on how many women there were in her company, others that the crowds, “out of all parts of the realm,” were reportedly more numerous than had ever previously been seen, but the general impression is that observers had little idea of what to expect from the central figure.
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When Elizabeth made her coronation procession through London, she followed her sister’s precedents for the occasion meticulously and there was no confusion in the reports of how the second queen regnant was dressed—that may be another indicator of how female monarchy had become more familiar.

Nor was there any need for legislation to clarify the status of a queen regnant when Elizabeth came to the throne, for any possible ambiguities about such a phenomenon had all been addressed in Mary’s reign. In April 1554, Mary’s parliament—with, of course, her prior sanction—passed two pieces of legislation defining fully the status of a queen regnant. One act clarified that a queen had exactly the same regal power as the kings of the English realm had always exercised. The other addressed the status of a queen regnant as wife, reiterating the provisions of the marriage treaties (themselves already approved by parliament and widely promulgated) that Mary remained “solye and sole quene” after her marriage.
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Mary was indeed both “king and queen” of the realm, legally and, it will be argued, in practice.

However publicly amiable the relations between the Tudor sisters at the beginning of Mary’s reign, before the end of 1553 they were becoming strained enough for observers to comment on it. Various explanations have been offered for the increasing tension. One is that after her own legitimacy had been confirmed by parliament Mary increasingly snubbed her sister, now restored, at least by implication, as being illegitimate; another possible reason is that Elizabeth (understandably enough) resented those times when their Catholic cousin Margaret Douglas (daughter from the second marriage of Henry VIII’s elder sister, and long Mary’s companion) took precedence over her at court; yet another reason is that in Mary’s eyes (as in the eyes of many others) Elizabeth’s religious preferences remained suspect. None of those explanations are entirely satisfactory but together they do indicate the range of possible differences between the sisters. Increasingly uneasy at court, Elizabeth sought permission to retire to Ashridge—one of her country houses.