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Mary the Queen

ON 3 AUGUST 1553 Queen Mary I entered London in triumph. There is little evidence that she was imbued with a sense of destiny prior to her coming to the throne, but now she must have felt that God had preserved her for this moment. She was thirty-seven, not in the best of health, and had known very little happiness over the last twenty years. As queen she could undo all the wrongs of the past: she could bring England back to Rome, restore the true Church, and rescue her people from the tide of heresy that was imperilling their immortal souls.

Now she was Queen, Mary could indulge her passion for rich, elaborate clothing and jewels, but such ostentation did little to compliment a middle-aged woman whose prettiness had been marred by years of suffering. Her small figure was painfully thin. She was still described as being ‘fresh coloured’, but the lovely reddish-gold hair had long since faded. Typically, for the time, many of Mary’s teeth were either missing or black. With her high forehead, large myopic grey eyes and pale eyebrows, and long, low nose flaring widely at the end, her face had a plain, naked look. Little artifice was applied either in real life or in her portraits to make her look more regal: what you saw was what you got with Mary. As the Venetian ambassador so diplomatically put it: ‘she is a seemly woman, and never to be loathed for ugliness, even at her present age, without considering her degree of queen.’

Mary’s wardrobe accounts show a preference for crimson, followed by black and purple. For her entry into London her diminutive figure was swathed in royal purple and weighed down by jewels: ‘a gowne of purple velvet, hir kirtel purple satten all thicke sett with gouldsmithes work and great pearle, with her foresleves of the same sett with rich stones … a riche bowdricke of gould, pearl, and stones about her necke, and a riche billement of stones and great pearle on her hoode, her pallfray that she rode on richly trapped with gould embroidered to her horse feet.’

It was important on ceremonial entries into London for the monarch to appear powerful. What Mary lacked in personal presence she made up for in the size and splendour of the retinue that accompanied her. Apart from the royal trumpeters, heralds and sergeants at arms, she was preceded by more than 700 nobles, knights and gentlemen in velvet coats on horseback. One hundred and eighty ladies and gentlemen followed her, along with the foreign ambassadors – with the exception of the French ambassador, Antoine de Noailles, who was keeping a low profile – and their large companies. The Earl of Arundel rode before Mary bearing the Sword of State and Sir Anthony Browne followed, holding the long train of her gown over his shoulder. The Lady Elizabeth, who emerged perfectly fit and well just in time to join Mary in her triumphant entry into the capital, rode immediately after the Queen, presenting a striking contrast in age and looks. Fresh from their deliverance from Northumberland, the Tudor sisters were putting on a public display of unity and mutual affection. Thousands of horsemen brought up the rear.

All the splendour could not make up for the fact that Mary lacked charisma. She did not possess the sense of showmanship that her father and sister shared, nor her sister’s quick wit and readiness with the right words of appreciation. For instance, before her entry into the City, Wriothesley recorded that ‘The queen’s grace stayed [stopped] at Allgate-Street before the stage where the poor children stood, and hard [heard] an oration that one of them made, but she sayd nothinge to them.’ These were the children of Christ’s Hospital, a post-Reformation charitable foundation formed after the dissolution of the monasteries. It was an example of Mary’s failure, which she would repeat over and over again, to exploit a propaganda opportunity. Essentially passive, she seemed to have no idea that the monarch had to work the crowd. The love of the people had to be earned.

For the moment, however, they gave it willingly. A royal entry into the capital was more than an assertion of power and status. The notion persisted that monarchs ought to rule with their people’s unforced obedience; their show of approval during the royal entry reinforced the aura of legitimacy. It was an opportunity for the two to bond. On such an occasion the crowd treated the monarch less as an awesome symbol of authority than as a popular hero. The obvious way in which it could do this was by making an enormous amount of noise; with the sounds of artillery and the pealing of all the parish church bells, the impression was one of pandemonium. The crowd’s cheers were actually a blessing, expressed with great emotional intensity. Wriothesley noted that the streets were ‘full of people shoutinge and cryinge Jesus save her Grace, with weepinge teares for joy’. The expression ‘Jesus save her Grace’, or ‘God save the Queen’, possessed a far deeper resonance in Tudor England than it does today.

The noise was indescribable, particularly as from the moment Mary entered the City the Tower guns had been firing off salvos ‘which was like great thunder, so that yt had bene lyke to an earthquake’. In the Tower, Lady Jane must have been listening to the celebrations marking Mary’s arrival with foreboding, but for other prisoners they signalled their imminent release. The elderly Duke of Norfolk and Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, had been prisoners since the end of Henry VIII’s reign, casualties of the factional strife that had seen these religious conservatives eclipsed by the rising reformists. Young Edward Courtenay, victim of Henry VIII’s purge of the House of York, had grown to manhood in the Tower. After greeting the Queen, they were freed. Gardiner, one of Henry VIII’s most prominent counsellors, was to be made Lord Chancellor, while Courtenay’s hereditary title of Earl of Devonshire was restored to him.

Northumberland was already lodged in the Beauchamp Tower with three of his sons. Taken prisoner by Arundel at Cambridge on 20 July, he had had filth and insults hurled at him when he was brought back through the streets of London. He was to be tried and condemned for high treason, giving the new regime a propaganda boost when he asked to be reconciled with the Catholic Church before he went to the block. Other conspirators, including Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, had been rounded up, imprisoned and tried. Mary had a personal axe to grind against Cranmer, who had declared her mother’s marriage invalid, making Mary a bastard; he would languish in prison until she could exact her full pound of flesh.

Mary treated most of the other conspirators with clemency. Knowing Lady Jane had been the victim of the adults’ manipulation, she refused to agree to her death, even after she had been condemned at trial. She was to be kept in close custody in the Tower, as was Guildford Dudley. Husband and wife were lodged in separate quarters. Probably Jane experienced a freedom she had seldom enjoyed in her sixteen years. The Queen’s mercy extended to the Duke of Suffolk, quite undeservedly, after his wife Frances – a favourite cousin of Mary’s – had personally pleaded for his life. He walked free.

Several weeks after Mary’s entry into London, on 27 September 1553, she arrived by water at the Tower, accompanied by Elizabeth, to take up residence in preparation for the coronation three days later. On the 29th the coronation procession set out from the Tower to wind through the City and on to the Palace of Westminster. In spite of its splendour, it was an oddly missed propaganda opportunity. Little effort had been made in the pageantry to define the nature and claims of the new regime, and nor was an account of it published afterwards. Mary was too complacent in relying on her own persona. She made little effort to create an image of herself with which the people could identify.

Adopting as her personal motto, ‘Truth, the Daughter of Time’, Mary thought it was enough that she was a known conservative after years of disturbing innovation. She assumed that the welcome she had received in August indicated that her people were of the same mind as herself. In reality, their enthusiasm reflected their relief that Henry’s daughter, the rightful heir of the Tudor dynasty, had wrested back the crown from the usurper Northumberland and his greedy, unscrupulous gang. The rule of law and the legitimate line of succession had prevailed. The people were less sure about the Queen’s evident drift back to Rome. Mary knew that the majority of her subjects outside London were still Catholic and that the Edwardian reforms had been too radical for them, but, having spent so many years in the country, she totally failed to appreciate how firmly rooted Protestantism had become in London.

Never a political animal, Mary was guided by her own moral compass, which was usually at odds with political pragmatism. Almost her first act on becoming Queen had been to write to Pope Julius III seeking absolution and inviting reconciliation with Rome. She apparently did this without reference to either Emperor Charles or the Council, neither of whom would have condoned such a rash move. Through his envoy, Simon Renard, Charles was anxious to convey to his cousin the importance of restraint in her religious policy. She was to tread carefully, to ‘take great care, at the outset, not to be led by her zeal to be too hasty in reforming matters’. Mary must be guided by Parliament, when it met, and meanwhile restrict herself to observance of her religion privately in her chamber. ‘Let her dissemble for the present, not to seek to order matters in a manner different from that now observed in England.’

The first sticking point came when Mary wished to bury her brother with full Catholic rites. It would ‘violate her conscience’ to do otherwise. Charles advised against it, telling her in no uncertain terms that ‘if she inaugurates her reign in this fashion she will render herself odious and suspect’. Let the little heretic be buried as he had lived. Mary had to settle for a private Requiem Mass in the Tower and even this drew criticism.

Mary’s first proclamation on religion took its inspiration from her father’s last speech to Parliament. It forbade ‘her subjects of all degrees, at their perils, to move seditions or stir unquietness in her people, by interrupting the laws of this realm after their brains and fancies’. It asked ‘all her said good loving subjects to live together in quiet sort and Christian charity, leaving those new-found devilish terms of papist or heretic and such like’ until a new religious settlement could be made. Mary’s professed intention was to restore the Henrician settlement, although there must have been a suspicion that she would never be content with this alone. She had already put pressure on her sister to attend Mass and Elizabeth had thought it wise to concede.

It was a long time since Henry VIII’s break with Rome; a whole generation had grown up in those years, and it was unrealistic to suppose that there could be revival of the Catholic England Mary fondly remembered – or thought she remembered – from her childhood. The royal supremacy was well established. The English liked the idea that the realm was an empire, owing allegiance to none but the monarch, and there was no particular desire to return to the papal fold. This independence was bolstered by growing nationalism. Pilgrimages, shrines, relics and indulgences were things of the past, and Mary showed no interest in restoring them. The focus of her personal worship had always been the Mass, which, despite its still being illegal, she immediately attended publicly, with the full panoply of Catholic ritual and the choir of the Chapel Royal. Soon it was being celebrated quite spontaneously in some of the London parishes, triggering disquiet among the diehard Protestants.

The relative coolness of the Londoners’ response during the pre-coronation procession, compared with the wild frenzy that had greeted her arrival only a few weeks previously, should have given Mary pause for thought, but as ever she saw only what she wanted to see. God had protected her for His own purpose and she must not let Him down. ‘If God be with us, who can be against us?’ she was fond of saying.

The customary ritual of the pre-coronation procession was designed to display a male monarch who was a fighting leader. This was considered inappropriate for a queen regnant, even though Mary possessed manly courage and had successfully led an armed force in the recent rebellion. The solution was to draw on the iconography of a queen consort, as stipulated in the Liber Regalis, but to re-situate her in the procession as a ruler. Even though Mary was a fine horsewoman, she travelled in ‘a litter decked by a canopy of gold, carried by two mules arrayed as well with gold’, rather than on horseback. Significantly, she wore white cloth of gold and went ‘in her hair’ – the symbols of purity and fertility traditionally adopted by a queen consort – with a golden circlet studded with precious stones. Her long hair was reassurance that she intended to marry and hoped to prove fruitful. Of course, there was no precedent for a queen regnant to follow, but it is interesting that Mary readily accepted her presentation as a mere consort. After all, with marriage talks already under way, she did not intend to remain ‘sole queen’ for long.

Ideally, Mary would have liked Parliament to meet immediately after her accession to settle the religious question, but traditionally the coronation came first. This meant that her coronation would follow the pattern laid down by Archbishop Cranmer for Edward’s in 1547, reflecting the monarch’s new post-Reformation imperial status as Supreme Head of the Church. In no way did Mary want to be seen condoning the new religion and she wrote to her cousin, Cardinal Reginald Pole, to ask for absolution for herself and for all true Catholics taking part in the ceremony. Baulking at the idea of using the ‘heretical’ oil used by Cranmer for Edward’s anointing, Mary had secretly sent to the Bishop of Arras in Brussels for some newly consecrated oil, which arrived in a silver gilt casket.

Shortly after ten in the morning, she entered Westminster Abbey, flanked by one spiritual peer, the Bishop of Durham, and one temporal peer, the Earl of Shrewsbury, according to the new rites of 1547. She was wearing a crimson velvet cape with a very long train carried by her chamberlain and the Duchess of Norfolk. Elizabeth followed close behind, her tall, regal figure with its stately glide in marked contrast to her elder sister with her low stature and indifferent gait. Anne of Cleves, the sole survivor of their father’s six wives, preceded the peeresses, all wearing their coronets and cloaks and robes of crimson velvet lined with ermine. The peers carried their coronets and would not put them on until the Queen was crowned.

As Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Robert Holgate, Archbishop of York, were obviously unwelcome and unavailable, Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, did the honours. At the coronation, the approval of God had to be sought through prayer, but so too was the consent of the people. Mary stood on a dais under the lantern at the crossing of the transept of the abbey, while Gardiner turned her to the north, to the south, to the east and to the west, presenting her to the people as their rightful sovereign and asking them to do homage and service to her.

Like her predecessors, Mary almost certainly took the oath to preserve peace in the Church and among Christian people, to govern wisely and mercifully and to uphold the rightful customs of the land. The choir sang Veni Creator Spiritus. Mary withdrew to a private room to disrobe for the most solemn act of the ceremony, the anointing with holy oil, which was believed to give her sanctity and jurisdiction in spiritual matters. She emerged wearing ‘a simple petticoat of purple velvet’ and took her seat in front of the high altar. Dipping his fingers in the oil, Gardiner anointed her on the crown of the head, the breast, the shoulders and the palms of both hands, in the form of the cross.

Changing again into a white taffeta robe, Mary then underwent the same triple crowning as Edward, but with the crucial difference that the spiritual representative, Gardiner, alone placed them in turn upon her head, being handed them from the altar by the Duke of Norfolk. Lifting high the crown of St Edward the Confessor – its circular shape representing the eternity that would be the Queen’s if she was virtuous – Gardiner placed it on Mary’s head as the choir sang Te Deum Laudamus. Gardiner led the bishops and the Duke of Norfolk the lay peers in doing homage, each touching the crown and kissing the Queen on the left cheek.

The coronation ring was placed on the Queen’s finger by Gardiner. As in 1547, the ornaments were presented by the great lay magnates, the Marquess of Winchester the orb, the Earl of Arundel the sceptre, the Earl of Bath St Edward’s staff and the Earl of Pembroke the spurs. The French ambassador noted that during the sung Mass, ‘the Queen kept kneeling, holding in her hands the two sceptres – the one of the King, the other bearing a dove which, by custom, is given to the Queen.’ The sceptre with the cross symbolized kingly power and justice, and the sceptre with the dove, the prerogative of mercy. She appeared carrying only the orb, representing Christ’s dominion over the whole world, as she left the abbey.

Meanwhile, another foreign observer described Mary as being, literally, elevated, as she took her place on the coronation chair: ‘Her Majesty ascended upon a great platform, so high that it was mounted by twenty steps, and upon this another smaller one with ten steps to the chair, where she seated herself.’ The Queen must have appeared like some floating deity, halfway between heaven and the groundlings below.

It was nearly five o’clock by the time Mary arrived at Westminster Hall for the coronation banquet. She sat in solitary state on ‘a stone chair covered with brocade’ and ‘rested her feet upon two of her ladies, which is also part of the prescribed ceremonial, and ate thus’, served by her nobles. Elizabeth and Anne of Cleves sat at the same central table, but ‘very far away’. The Knights of the Bath brought in the meats. The Imperial envoys had asked the Emperor’s sister – Mary, the Regent of the Netherlands – to send wild boar from Bruges, which the Queen loved and could not obtain in England. More than 7,000 dishes were offered, of which nearly 5,000 were declared ‘waste’ and presumably given to the crowd outside.

Four days later Mary opened her first Parliament, after hearing the traditional Mass of the Holy Ghost. No time was wasted in passing an Act declaring the marriage of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon valid and the Queen legitimate. She was Queen anyway, by Act of Parliament and her father’s will, but, ever anxious to eradicate the unhappy past, it was important to Mary to restore her mother’s honour and her own status. She adopted her mother’s badge of the pomegranate, redolent of Katherine’s native Granada, as her own. Nothing was to be said in this Parliament about reconciliation with Rome, and she had to be content with the repeal of all Edward’s religious legislation, including the Act of Uniformity and the use of the Prayer Book. Protestant services would cease to be legal on 20 December 1553.

A queen regnant was an anomaly, unprecedented in England. The Act Concerning Regal Power attempted to address the issue, but legislation worked only as far as the character concerned allowed it to. For instance, the sovereign was the fount of all honour, but there were certain roles that Mary, ever conscious of the deficiencies of her sex, was reluctant to fulfil. At the Knights of the Bath ceremony prior to her coronation, she sent Lord Arundel, the Great Master of the Household, to represent her. It was not a ceremony she could undergo herself, since the knights plunged naked into the bath and kissed the monarch’s shoulder. But Mary also abrogated her sovereign right two days later, when she allowed Arundel to dub a larger group of knights who were fully dressed. It seems that Mary felt precluded by her sex from participating in these traditional displays of male chivalry or in any way trying to emulate a king who was de facto leader in the military field. She showed no interest in tournaments or in encouraging the nobles and gentlemen of her court in feats of chivalry – a pity, because they could so easily have been turned to her advantage, as Elizabeth was later to do with the Accession Day tilts.

The one indisputable duty of a queen was to marry and produce an heir. Mary had already made up her mind. If the people were worried about her religious intentions, they would like her choice of husband even less.