Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (8 page)

At Elizabeth’s departure Mary presented her with a sumptuous sable stole, a royal gift indeed. In return, Elizabeth begged Mary to believe no damaging reports she might hear of her until she had a chance to respond, a request that indicates her consciousness of just how suspect her reputation already was. Before her departure, she was also visited by two Marian councilors to warn her against contact with either heretics or the French. The sisters were not to meet again until Elizabeth finally obeyed repeated commands to return to London in February 1554, doing so only after the Wyatt rebellion had collapsed. Then she was examined about the extent of her prior knowledge of that rebellion. After a period of relative isolation in the palace, she was confined to the Tower for six weeks, albeit not in the prison but in the royal quarters. The uprising headed by Sir Thomas Wyatt and joined by the duke of Suffolk, father of the dethroned Jane Grey, was ostensibly directed against Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain. But there were many reports that the real purpose was to replace Mary by Elizabeth, with the Plantagenet descendant Edward Courtenay—earl of Devon, the man who had previously been the English preferred suitor for Mary—as Elizabeth’s husband.

Just how much Elizabeth knew of the plot is now unknowable, but she admitted Wyatt had been in contact with her and that she had not reported that to the authorities. Mary’s advisers were even more alarmed that a copy of a letter from Elizabeth to Mary was found in the French ambassador’s postbag to his king. The ambassador had demonstrably known a great deal from an early stage about the Wyatt plot, and that copied letter suggested complicity with the plot from the very heart of Elizabeth’s household, if not from Elizabeth herself. There were also strong indications that, as the Wyatt conspiracy took shape, Elizabeth’s household had made preparations to fortify Donnington Castle as a more defensible position than her usual residences. Her experience of several plots, particularly the Wyatt episode, was one reason that once on the throne herself Elizabeth always refused to name her successor. As she said, she had more reason than most to know just what opportunities for conspiracy the position of heir apparent offered.

III

Relations between the two sisters never recovered from Mary’s suspicions and Elizabeth’s resentment of her time in the Tower, but the extent to which Mary’s reign paved the way and helped shape the form of that of Elizabeth was always historically more significant than relations between them. As already discussed, it was necessarily Mary who addressed the need to persuade her male subjects that her office as monarch took precedence over her gender as female. Moreover, Mary married and yet—remarkably—remained legally and effectively sole monarch of her realm. Mary herself had been insistent from the earliest mention of marriage that when she married she would, of course, love and obey her husband, as any wife should, “but if he wished to encroach in the government of the kingdom, she would be unable to permit it.”
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Indeed, when he 
was
 in England, Philip was indeed essentially an influential adviser and Mary’s close companion—but usually little more. The problems faced by her subjects in comprehending this unusual but not unique situation arose from widespread assumptions about the nature of women, and the fact that from the moment of their marriage Philip’s name took precedence in all official pronouncements. That, combined with his title of king, at a time when “queen” was more usually a descriptor of that much lesser being, a king’s wife, was always confusing for her subjects. Although the inclusion of the regnal year in their titles always made Mary the senior partner (e.g., Philip I and Mary II), that nuance was apparently lost on many of her subjects. Nevertheless—and despite his remarkable verbal flourishes on occasion—Philip did understand that his formal exclusion from kingly authority was set out in the marriage treaties and subsequent legislation. The problem was that, whatever Mary’s immediate political circle understood of the status of Mary as both queen and wife, the law that set out that she remained “sole queen” after her marriage was not enough to settle the issue for all of her subjects. After all, Mary was a wife and, therefore, to be ruled; moreover, as males knew, political life was a masculine sphere of activity. When in 1557 the Venetian ambassador wrote that Mary was “of a sex which cannot becomingly take more than a moderate part” in government, he was only repeating a widely held belief.
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It was, however, a belief to which Mary did not subscribe.

There is no way of knowing the extent to which Elizabeth viewed Mary’s always problematic marriage as a warning against entering into that relationship herself. But she certainly found other, more positive models in Mary’s reign. Just as the first queen regnant resolutely held Philip to the status of royal consort and adviser, in ceremony and public appearance as in politics—even in images not so easily controlled by her, Philip was usually on Mary’s left side—elsewhere she enacted the extent to which her office took precedence over her sex. Perhaps the most striking example of Mary’s modeling female full monarchy was her exercising the capacity to heal sufferers of the scrofula and associated conditions by the royal touch and, in Mary’s case, by blessing cramp rings. It had been, in earlier times, precisely that exercise of monarchical quasi-sacral power that had enabled French polemicists in the fourteenth century, at a time when there were several plausible female candidates, to argue against placing a woman on the throne.
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That royal healing capacity was effectively sacred, the argument went, being derived from the coronation consecration. Since that healing touch was a semi-priestly power, women were obviously disqualified from exercising it—and, therefore, it was concluded that women were excluded from wearing the crown.
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Mary, however, was not persuaded by any part of that argument and, by exercising her power in that capacity, demonstrated that the office of crowned monarch fully outweighed whatever frailties might conventionally be attached to females. It was a power that, exercised by French and English monarchs for centuries, was still in much demand among their subjects. In this matter also, Elizabeth followed Mary’s example in exercising the royal touch—though not in blessing cramp rings, a practice that Edward also had previously abandoned. Indeed, for Elizabeth the royal touch was such a significant power that late in her reign, one of her chaplains set out to refute Catholic arguments that she was not a legitimate monarch by pointing to her effectiveness in just that healing touch—a God-given sanction for a monarch, if ever there was one, he argued, and, therefore, irrefutable proof of Elizabeth’s legitimate rule.
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IV

The traditional contrast between the two female Tudor monarchs has been most clearly defined by their religious differences. But even in this area, it is arguable that Mary set a number of significant precedents for Elizabeth to adopt or modify. In matters of religious practice, for example, Mary indeed restored the mass, many older church rituals, and papal authority to England. The papacy, of course, Elizabeth repudiated entirely. Mary had also restored and promoted the older traditions of church music. Given that both daughters were accomplished musicians, it is hardly surprising that this was a feature of Mary’s changes that Elizabeth retained. The first queen regnant encouraged church musicians whom Elizabeth also later retained, patronising such “inherited” musicians as Thomas Tallis and John Sheppard. Nevertheless, whatever interests they shared, given the histories of their respective mothers as wives to Henry VIII, and the part played by Anne Boleyn in the break with Rome, it was hardly surprising that Henry VIII’s two daughters ultimately represented different religious positions. As the daughter of Catherine of Aragon, Mary’s religion, most easily demonstrated by her consistent devotion to the mass, was Catholic. If later in Henry’s reign she came to accept her father’s exclusion of papal authority from the realm—and it is possible that she did—it was the successive doctrinal innovations of the Edwardian era that led her into defiance of the new doctrines and, as queen, to decide to restore papal authority as ultimate guardian of religious orthodoxy. She was by no means alone in those particular shifts of attitude to the papacy; several eminent Henrician churchmen, among them Stephen Gardiner, followed that same path.

But before she had restored papal authority and despite her strong distaste for her inherited title of “Supreme Head of the Church,” Mary issued a number of instructions on her own authority for restoring the English church to her preferred practice and for encouraging more preaching. Since she was a monarch, that she was a woman did not constrain her from expressing—and enforcing—her views on church reform nor from resisting the advice of such church leaders as Reginald Pole when she found the advice unreasonable.
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She always resisted the papal demands for the comprehensive restoration of monastic lands to the church; indeed finally her submission to the papacy proved to be as conditional as her other submissions to church authority, and in the final stages of her reign she excluded all papal communications from her realm. The ultimate counter to later analyses of Mary’s imputed devoutly conservative Catholicism may well be the report that Pope Paul IV rejoiced when the news of Mary’s death reached him, apparently believing that Elizabeth would prove a more satisfactory monarch for his own (profoundly anti-Hapsburg) purposes.

The main point to this comparison of the religious policies followed by the two queens, however, is that just as Mary may have disliked her early status as head of the church of England, she was still prepared to use the authority that title gave her to begin reshaping religious practice very much as did Elizabeth from the beginning of 
her
 reign. Given the confused state of religion and the knowledge that a majority of her subjects were conforming Catholics when the second queen succeeded to the throne, it is not surprising that Elizabeth enforced some ambiguous religious positions for 
her
 English Church. Her pursuit of doctrinal accommodation, most easily exemplified by the remarkable conjunction of sentences for the administration of communion from the two Edwardian Books of Common Prayer, was pushed through parliament on her authority and against the wishes of many Protestants. The result was that the new communion service could be understood either as enacting the doctrine of the Real Presence or as a commemorative celebration.
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It was hardly surprising that the “hotter sort” of Protestants saw the 1559 Prayer Book as popish and ungodly, but that minority was not Elizabeth’s primary concern.

It might be argued that, given her own religious history, Elizabeth, although exercising much the same authority as her sister had done, could more easily do so in pursuit of the widest possible acceptance of her religious changes. Elizabeth herself, after all, was always vulnerable to the charge of being evasive about her religious past, and historians still debate the precise nature of her beliefs. In 1586 she claimed she had always observed that religion “as both I was born in, bred in, and I trust shall die in.”
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In reality, for the first fourteen years of her life, as daughter of Henry VIII she had observed a relatively orthodox Catholicism (albeit without the pope) before she conformed, apparently easily, to successive Edwardian changes, then perhaps less easily with Marian Catholic practice—but she did still conform. That history may make it easier to see why she is more commonly presented as a queen who—as Bacon reportedly put it—did not open windows into men’s souls.

Mary’s religious stance, however, has regularly been attacked as bigoted, that bigotry being conventionally demonstrated by so many Protestants going into exile in her reign and by the some three hundred who remained in England and preferred to die the traditional death of heretics for their religious faith rather than renounce it. Much less attention has been paid to the fortunes of those who, despite following the religious changes in Edward’s reign, stayed and often prospered during Mary’s reign, and who prospered again under Elizabeth. They might even be seen as demonstrations that Mary also looked less into men’s souls, more required that they should obey the laws of the land, including those regulating church attendance and, on occasion, presence at the mass. Those who conformed in the Marian regime include members of such eminent “Protestant” families as Dudley, Sidney, and Bacon, and other erstwhile Protestants were members of her household. The case of Lady Anne Bacon, frequently cited as a woman of particularly strong reformist convictions, is one striking example of such a friendship with Mary. It appears to have begun in the mutually congenial humanist circle round Queen Katherine Parr and ended only with Mary’s death. Elizabeth’s future leading adviser, William Cecil, had undertaken a range of public responsibilities under Mary—including being part of the escort for Cardinal Reginald Pole when he finally entered England—before he was disgraced for his parliamentary opposition to her wishes. The surviving Dudley sons—including Robert—were closely identified with their father’s attempt to supplant Mary by Lady Jane Grey, but by the end of 1554 they were taking part in jousts at court and later fought under Philip in France. Such evidence strongly suggests that Mary, like her younger sister, required that those who served her should obey her laws about religious observance—as presumably Anne Bacon and certainly William Cecil did—rather than peering into their souls to seek out their innermost thoughts.

The most potent charge against Mary has always been that she headed a regime that burned nearly three hundred victims. Much less attention has been paid to the contemporary conventionality of that punishment of heretics. In those doctrinally divided times, Mary shared the view of most Christian groupings that, alongside careful teaching and preaching of Catholic doctrine, heresy should be suppressed and that for obdurate heretics (“soul killers” they were called by their opponents) the traditional punishment of burning should be applied. It is perhaps a tragic irony that her view of the proper punishment for heresy was shared by so many of her most eminent victims (including Thomas Cranmer, erstwhile Archbishop of Canterbury) who died for their faith during her reign.
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It was, indeed, less the punishment and more the definition of heresy that was the disputed issue in those times of intensifying religious division. John Foxe was an extraordinarily powerful advocate for the decidedly minority view that even obdurate heretics should not be burned, and it may have been in part because of the powerful impact of his 
Actes and Monumentes
 (first published 1563) that when Elizabeth began to punish 
her
 Catholic religious activists who refused to obey 
her
 laws, more than one hundred were hanged as traitors rather than burned as heretics. A few too-radical reformists were burned in subsequent years—the last died that way in 1612—but death by hanging became the more common punishment for Catholics. Historians have usually found this a much more acceptable response, but the victims were dying for the same principle of religious difference and legal disobedience in both cases. Moreover, given that death by hanging (effectively by strangulation in the sixteenth century) could take up to twenty-five minutes, it is not self-evident that it was an easier way to die, even when the victim was spared the rest of a traitor’s traditional punishment, drawing and quartering. But one advantage of hanging was presumably that having the offenders die a traitor’s death helped entrench the belief that Catholics generically were, by definition, at least unpatriotic if not actual traitors. The nexus between Catholicism and treason was a message made more explicit, on occasion, by proclamation.
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