Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (9 page)

V

After Mary died on November 17, 1558, very few (if any) of the many precedents provided by the first queen regnant for the second were ever acknowledged, even though the first queen had established the necessary legal, ceremonial, and political adjustments for female monarchy. But although the transition from one monarch to the next was always potentially fraught with dispute, this one began decorously enough. The proclamation announcing Elizabeth’s accession was impeccable, setting out a conventional formula that she was now monarch because “it hath pleased Almighty God by calling to his mercy out of this mortal life, to our great grief, our dearest sister of noble memory, Mary, late Queen of England, France, and Ireland.”
²⁶
There were, however, to be no further occasions when Mary was described as Elizabeth’s “dearest sister.” That Mary’s funeral was a royal one, but only just, may be concluded on the surviving evidence that is rather sparse compared with the much fuller record of Henry VIII’s funeral. Despite recurrent rumors to the contrary, however, the despoliation of the furnishings in the nave of the Abbey that frequently followed royal occasions, both coronations and funerals, did not touch either Mary’s effigy or the hearse it lay on.

And once Mary was safely interred in Henry VII’s chapel dedicated to the glory of the Tudors, positive references to her disappeared from official contemporary history. In January 1559, Elizabeth entered upon the rounds of her coronation ceremonial. After five years of observing her half-sister establish many precedents for female monarchy, Elizabeth had the full range of Marian practices, both exemplary and admonitory, from which to borrow. Although she followed many of those examples, there were few occasions on which Elizabeth positively acknowledged that debt, and tacit denials of it, already clearly set out in her pre-coronation procession, had begun even earlier in her reign. One of the striking features of the published reports of Elizabeth’s coronation procession through London is the extent to which Mary’s reign was excluded from Elizabeth’s first great public occasion; where the previous monarch was mentioned, it was to offer implied repudiations of specific aspects of her reign.
²⁷
In that carefully constructed account, the reported aspersions cast on Mary were not accidental.

The late Queen Mary, like Edward VI, was absent from the pageant depicting Elizabeth’s genealogy, but siblings were always much less significant for legitimating a claim to reign than were the parents. It followed that Elizabeth’s mother was necessarily represented in that pageant, the first public celebration of her since Anne Boleyn’s shameful death, but it was to the new queen’s father that all subsequent references were made. Mary was entirely absent from any iconography and, unlike Edward, was mentioned only tangentially in the printed text. Instead, Elizabeth of York, wife of Henry VII and grandmother to the new Queen Elizabeth, was shown as coequal with her husband, as if co-ruler. Du ring his life, Henry VII had taken considerable pains to deny that he owed his throne in any way whatsoever to his marriage to the surviving heir of Edward IV, and he always kept his wife as far from political prominence as possible. In January 1559 she was, however, transformed into an available admirable precedent to the new Queen Elizabeth, as the appropriate exemplum should female monarchy again be raised as a problematic issue.

But the memory of Mary’s just-ended reign was invoked to shape the account of Elizabeth’s pre-coronation proceedings in significant ways. That can be seen in devices perhaps not contrived by Elizabeth but presumably made—and above all reported in the printed account—with her approval. Provided they had memories that could reach back more than two months, the audience for either the occasion or the text could hardly have been unaware of what was taking place. The first example was offered in the fourth pageant of the day, comparing the characteristics of a ruined commonwealth with those of a flourishing one. The tableau included a venerable ancient called “Tyme” and his daughter, identified as “Temporis filia.” The printed account continues: “And on her brest was written her propre name, which was Veritas, Trueth.” The opening verse of that pageant began as follows:

This olde man with the sythe, olde Father Tyme they call,

And her his daughter Truth, which holdeth yonder boke;

Whom he out of his rocke hath brought forth to us all,

From whence for many yeres she durst not once out loke.

The book, of course, was “Verbum Veritas the Woorde of Trueth.”
²⁸
There might be some surprise at this pageant in the implication that the vernacular Bible had been completely hidden and “for many years” at that. The Henrician Bible in English had not been banned by the Marian regime although some bishops did take it upon themselves to ban it within their own dioceses.
²⁹
But more surprising, not to say breathtaking, is the Elizabethan appropriation of Mary’s most familiar motto in reportedly declaring 
herself
 to be the daughter of time. The text 
Veritas Temporis Filia
had appeared variously in Mary’s reign, including on her Great Seal of 1553. This multivalent iconic motto had earlier become a marker of the mid-sixteenth century struggle for religious legitimacy, but the difference here is one between the almost private use of it by Henry VIII and the possibly most public appropriation of one queen’s motto by the next queen in 1559.

Perhaps as remarkable is the final pageant of the day that showed the biblical Deborah, “richelie apparelled in parliament robes, with a sceptre in her hand, as a Quene” and with representatives of the three estates on either side. The printed account explains that this was to remind Elizabeth that she should consult about the government of her people, “considering God oftimes sent women nobly to rule among men; as Debora.”
³⁰
Well, yes, and more recently? In 1572, Grafton helpfully removed any doubt about the meaning of that pageant when he explained that it had been designed “to encourage the Quene not to feare though she were a woman; for women by the spirit or power of Almightye God, have ruled both honourably and pollitiquely.”
³¹
So Mary was no model at all, presumably being incapable of either honorable or politic government. The sanctioned public attitude to Mary had moved a long way from being Elizabeth’s “dearest sister of noble memory” of Elizabeth’s accession proclamation. That hostile view of the Catholic Mary, which became both a religious necessity and a historical truth for many subsequent commentaries, was reinforced in that first account by the attention given to Elizabeth’s thankfulness as she set out from the Tower that, like Daniel in the lion’s den, she had been miraculously preserved from great danger in her previous sojourn in the Tower. There was no reminder that actually she was held there while being investigated for her possible (even probable) prior knowledge of the Wyatt rebellion.

Nevertheless, despite the extent to which she was to be repudiated and/or reviled by the new regime, Mary’s legacy was frequently an active presence in Elizabeth’s reign. It is not just that Elizabeth never modified Mary’s initiatives to establish the legality and practice of female monarchy. The similarity between some of the exempla used to praise Mary and those (re)deployed to praise the insistently different Elizabeth has recently been reexamined, and the debts owed by Elizabethan polemicists to their Marian precursors much more carefully demonstrated. What has now been demonstrated in admirable detail is the extent to which Elizabeth selectively but “deliberately cultivated and adopted” the “panoply of classical, biblical, and historical epithets [previously] lavished on her royal sister.”
³²
The appropriation of Mary’s motto 
Veritas Temporis Filia
 by Elizabeth was to be only the first of many such borrowings.

Elizabeth always claimed that she had learned during Mary’s reign the dangers of having a known next heir. In fact, it has been argued here, she learned and was instructed in many other matters besides the learning that—as Mary had repeatedly asserted and demonstrated—a female was as much monarch as a male. Mary’s sharp and decisive responses to the efforts by various of her parliamentarian advisers to intervene in her marriage plans prefigure Elizabeth’s equal hostility to similar approaches. But Elizabeth was not likely to acknowledge any debts to Mary, then or subsequently in her long reign. Rather, by 1563, Foxe opened discussion of Mary’s reign by defining it as “the horrible and bloudye tyme of Queene Marye” and concluded that “our history hasteth a pase (the Lorde be praysed) to the happy death of Quene Mary.”
³³
That was, it would seem, also the official line, almost uniformly followed by Protestant historians for centuries. This essay has been an exercise in demonstrating that, despite the assertions, quoted in the opening discussion, that Elizabeth had been left to fashion for herself an identity that “blurred the distinctions between male and female, king and queen,” it was in precisely those matters that her own occupation of the throne had been so comprehensively eased by Mary, England’s first queen regnant.

Notes

1. J. E. Neale, 
   Queen Elizabeth I
    (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960), 34.
   
2. David Starkey, 
   Elizabeth: Apprenticeship
    (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), 124.
   
3. Billie Melman, 
   The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past 1800–1953
   (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 178.
   
4. Even David Starkey, seldom an admirer of Mary, noted “not even Elizabeth herself could have given it better.” Starkey, 
   Elizabeth
   , 131.
   
5. Privy Purse Expenses of the Princess Mary, Daughter of King Henry the Eighth, Afterwards Queen Mary,
    ed. F. Madden (London: William Pickering, 1831).
   
6. See Aysha Pollnitz, “Christian Women or Sovereign Queens?: The Schooling of Mary and Elizabeth” in this volume.
   
7. See the letter Elizabeth wrote to Mary probably in 1552, in which she apologises for being a less frequent correspondent than her sister. 
   Elizabeth I: Collected Works,
    ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 37–8.
   
8. Sheila Cavanaugh, “The Bad Seed: Princess Elizabeth and the Seymour Incident,” in 
   Dissing Elizabeth Negative Representations of Gloriana
    ed. Julia M. Walker (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 13–29.
   
9. Alec Ryrie, “Counting Sheep, Counting Shepherds: The Problem of Allegiance in the English Reformation” in 
   The Beginnings of English Protestantism,
    ed. Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 84–110, esp. 98
   
10. Sydney Anglo, 
    Images of Tudor Kingship
     (London: Seaby, 1992), 6.
    
11. Charles Wriothesley, 
    A chronicle of England during the reigns of the Tudors from A. D. 1485 to 1559
    , 2 vols. (London: Camden Society, 1875–77), I: 93.
    
12. One Edwardian example is reproduced as no. 13 in 
    Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530–1630
    , ed. Karen Hearn (London: Tate Publishing, 1995).
    
13. For confused and confusing reports of Mary’s coronation, see Judith Richards, “Mary Tudor as ‘Sole Quene’? Gendering Tudor Monarchy,” 
    HJ,
    40 (1997): esp. 899–902.
    
14. J. Mychel, 
    A breviat cronicle
     (London, 1554), Oii.
    
15. HLRO Original Acts, 1 Mary 3, 1, 1 Mary 3, 2.
    
16. CSPSp
    , XI: 288 Renard to the Emperor, October 12, 1553.
    
17. Giovanni Michiel, “Report of England,” May 13, 1557, 
    CSPVen
    , V: no. 884, 1043 ff., 1056.
    
18. Ralph E. Giesey, “Rulership in French Royal Ceremonial” in 
    Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual and Politics since the Middle Ages,
     ed. Sean Wilentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985).
    
19. Jean Golein, “Treatise on Consecration” appended in Marc Bloch, 
    The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France
     (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973).
    
20. William Tooker, 
    Charisma sive donum sanationis
     (London, 1597).
    
21. Such clashes of opinion are well exemplified in the correspondence between Mary and Pole about his insistence that the church lands lost in Henry’s reign should be restored to the church. Much of that correspondence is to be found in 
    CSPF
    , 1553–8.
    
22. For two discussions for Elizabeth’s preferred versions, see Norman L. Jones,
    Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion,1559
     (London: Royal Historical Society, 1982), 134–7; Eamon Duffy, 
    The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580
     (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 566–8.
    
23. J. E. Neale, 
    Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1584–1601
     (London: Jonathan Cape, 1957), 128.
    
24. For a more detailed discussion of this issue, see Richards, 
    Mary Tudor
    , ch. 10.
    
25. For one example, see the proclamation “Explaining Execution of Two Seminary Priests,” 
    TRP,
     II: 518–21.
    
26. “Announcing the Accession of Queen Elizabeth I,” 
    TRP
    , II: 99–100.
    
27. The Passage of our most drad Sovereigne Lady Quene Elizabeth Through the Citie of London to Westminster The Daye Before Her Coronacion
     (London, 1558–9).
    
28. The Passage
    , Civ.
    
29. David Loades, “The Marian Episcopate,” in 
    The Church of Mary Tudor,
     ed. Eamon Duffy and David Loades (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 52.
    
30. The Passage
    , Diiii.
    
31. Richard Grafton, 
    Abridgement of
     
    the Chronicles of England
     (London, 1572), 194.
    
32. Paulina Kewes, “Two Queens, One Inventory: The Lives of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor” in 
    Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England
    , ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 204.
    See also Kewes, “Godly Queens: The Royal Iconographies of Mary and Elizabeth” in this volume.
    
33. John Foxe, 
    Acts and Monumentes of these latter and perilous dayes
     (London, 1563), 889, 1684.